Studio Profile
How a small group of friends brought beautiful nightmares to life with their blood, sweat and tears
With titles such as Blasphemous, Spanish developer The Game Kitchen can handle the heat
Back in March, an unusual unboxing video was uploaded to YouTube. It showed developers from The Game Kitchen rooting through mysterious packages that had arrived at their various homes. Inside, they discovered framed plaques congratulating them on Blasphemous, the Seville-based studio’s second game, selling its millionth copy. With some emotional reactions, the video is a touching celebration of an impressive milestone – but the journey to that million was anything but easy.
CEO and producer Mauricio García started programming aged six. He remembers using a microcomputer his parents bought him. After school, García joined a consultancy company as a developer, where he met Enrique Cabeza. They both hated it. “I did a lot of website development, application development… basically a lot of boring shit,” García laughs. The pair really wanted to make videogames, but it was hard to picture game development as a realistic job in southern Spain at the time. However, García started making games under the banner Nivel21 Entertainment in 2005 alongside Cabeza and a small, fluctuating group of developers. “It was very, very hardcore programming back then, so we advanced very slowly, little by little,” García says. “Even though we had a lot of cancelled projects and failures, we just kept doing it.”
Game designer Enrique Colinet was involved back in the group’s demoscene days. However, he was kicked out after replicating a football game, which Nivel21 was creating using XNA, in Valve’s Source engine; suffice it to say, their relationship didn’t end well. However, when Colinet joined Madrid’s Pyro Studios, the now-defunct studio known for the Commandos series, he saw an opportunity to make it up to García and recommended him for an interview. García joined and spent a year and a half working on Cops, an unreleased triple-A title for PS3. “I was suddenly in a working studio, learning a lot from a lot of very experienced programmers,” he remembers. “I was able to ramp up my game massively.”
When Cops was cancelled, both García and Colinet were out of a job. Colinet joined Yager Development, while García returned to Seville to work with Nivel21 on Rotor’scope, a puzzle game based on a prototype created by designer Emilio Joyera. “This project was about doing a game that was small and well-balanced in every aspect – basically, finishing it and shipping it,” García says. Rotor’scope was developed using XNA and came third in Microsoft’s indie game development competition Dream.Build.Play in 2009. The team were encouraged by this, envisioning strong sales for the game, and founded The Game Kitchen the following year. However, Rotor’scope was published under the low-profile Xbox Live Indie Games banner, and didn’t sell well. Afterwards, the team focused on work-for-hire gigs, creating advertisement games and porting other studios’ projects to keep their heads above water.
“We just tried to bring some cash flow into the company to try to have salaries for everyone – which wasn’t the case every month. Sometimes we didn’t have the money for everyone and one of us would have to say ‘OK, this month I will be the one [without] a salary’,” García says. “Nobody actually cared enough to figure out how to properly run a business and which funding options were there to actually make things more stable for everyone. We didn’t have any idea what we were doing.” This, combined with the Spanish financial crisis, meant that many of the team were reliant on their families. García remembers this as the studio’s darkest time. “We always knew that it was a matter of time: keep trying, eventually we will learn how to do things, and the next time will be better… but obviously that wasn’t the case for all of us. It was a pity not to have had better understanding of how a business worked back then.”
After a steady decline in work-for-hire contracts, the studio decided to work on its own project and arrived at The Last Door, Cabeza’s idea for an episodic point-and-click horror game illustrated in a low-resolution pixel-art style. The idea was both compelling and pragmatic for the small team. “We needed a sign, something that could illuminate our
“WE NEED TO MAKE A GAME. IF THE COMPANY HAS TO DIE, IT WILL DIE WITH SOMETHING THAT WE CAN BE PROUD OF”
spirit in some way,” Cabeza says. He remembers thinking, “We need to make a game… If the company has to die, it will die with something that we can be proud of.”
Cabeza has a background in graphic design and grew up a big fan of adventure games and classic horror literature. He handled the game’s design, graphics and writing, despite having no prior experience with game design or pixel-art animation. The first episode was funded through Kickstarter, raising £4,690, and was released for free as a Flash game in 2013. The studio’s model for attracting further funds – offering all episodes but the most recent for free – created an increasingly long conversion tunnel. For instance, if you didn’t reach the end of episode three by the time episode four was released, you weren’t prompted to donate.
Financial stability was a problem. While reviews were positive, The Last Door wasn’t reaching a large enough audience, something García now attributes to poor marketing and also the art style, which looked great in motion but was a harder sell in static shots. For Cabeza, working on the game was difficult, particularly since he had quit a safe and comfortable job to do so.
“I started to feel that the game was going to fail somehow, or the company was about to close,” he says. “I started to suffer from very severe anxiety, and I couldn’t be involved in business decisions... I just totally focused on creating a good game. I left everything else to Mauricio.” Cabeza took his fears and poured them into the game. The Last Door is the product of a personally dark time – “I remember feeling really isolated for years in this game, with this super-high level of uncertainty” – but he is proud of the final result: “I have a place for this game in my heart.”
After a collector’s edition of The Last Door’s first season was released on Steam in 2014, the team were gearing up to release a second season, from a team of eight developers. Upon nearing completion, the company ran into financial problems, and had to take measures. After layoffs and departures, The Game Kitchen shrunk down to a core group of three. Determined to prevent the same thing happening again, García shifted roles, from programming into production. “I finally understood that what was required of me was to start learning, against the clock, to be a good producer and a good company,” he says.
After the release of season two, Cabeza designed a mockup for the studio’s next project: a 2D pixel-art depiction of a vampire hunter in a cemetery. Although he thought it was a cliché, the team were excited. This concept would become Blasphemous, the 2D Metroidvania which would result in all those mystery packages five years later. Its lavish pixel art drew on elements of Spanish culture, imagery and folklore, particularly from Seville, as well as religious imagery, such as from Spain’s annual Holy Week celebrations. Despite the gory imagery mixed in with these influences, Cabeza did not intend the game to be offensive. Rather, his goal was to “revindicate a lot of our [culture] that was not known in foreign countries and use it to create a setting”.
Cabeza also based the game’s narrative and worldbuilding on the Dark Souls series. It was the final part of what García calls “the magic formula: using very good pixel art, using our folklore, and having elements from the Souls saga, Castlevania
and other 2D Metroidvanias.” This formula paid off. The Kickstarter campaign for Blasphemous
eventually raised over $333,000 – or, as García notes, 666 per cent of its initial $50,000 goal.
Colinet, who hadn’t been involved with the team since the Nivel21 days but had returned to Spain to teach at a game development school, was heavily invested in the success of this Kickstarter campaign. And for good reason: his hiring was one of the stretch goals. He remembers celebrating when the goal was hit: “I was back to my city with my friends, with my family – it was just perfect.”
Even with Colinet’s crowdfunded return, the team numbered fewer than ten when production began. The studio quickly realised it had underestimated the scope of the project. Colinet was the sole designer, trying to work out the systems, combat and level structure by himself. He was a huge Metroidvania fan but had little experience making 2D games. “I was ready for the level design part, but I wasn’t ready for the rest – I came to that realisation after the third prototype,” he says. The game lacked a clear vision for its action, Colinet says, something he credits game designer Maikel Ortega with rectifying when he joined in 2018.
García was forced to expand the team, which meant reaching a “complicated compromise” between the budget, the number of staff needed, and the scope of the game. Colinet says that almost half of the planned game world had to be cut, alongside bosses and NPCs, to get the game out of the door. García describes this balancing act as a nightmare, particularly during the last six months of development.
Cabeza was creative and artistic director on Blasphemous, as well as the writer and quest designer, and felt similarly overwhelmed. He was emotionally invested in its development, so much so that he describes it as “a bit self-destructive”. Cabeza values his work with the studio and feared not being able to continue creating games if the company failed. That worry has subsided today, with the studio in secure shape financially.
The team don’t shy away from acknowledging the dark times they’ve experienced along the way, and they’ve taken steps to avoid more in the future. Today, The Game Kitchen advertises a daily work ratio of “six hours of productive work, plus two hours of personal growth” – something which Colinet says is true now but was not during parts of Blasphemous’ development, when extra hours had to be put in to hit development milestones.
“[Crunch] was definitely there,” García says. “We were making a game way bigger than [The Last Door], and we were clearly unprepared for that amount of complexity. We had to crunch for four or five months before release.” The studio has subsequently implemented measures to try to avoid crunch in the future, such as hiring more staff, shying away from “overly ambitious projects”, mostly forbidding overtime, and critically analysing its processes and tools. Colinet describes the current work-life balance as “really healthy”.
It’s a balance The Game Kitchen can hopefully maintain as it grows. A second team is being established, with one group working on a VR game while the pixel-art team works on Blasphemous DLC and a new 2D game. This is all possible thanks to the success of Blasphemous but, García says, “Whatever we do next, it’s not going to be about selling the most possible copies. It’s going to be [about] doing something that is cool, something that has to do with ourselves, our creative message – and trying to do that in a way that at least sells enough to continue to make a living.”
IT ADVERTISES A DAILY WORK RATIO OF “SIX HOURS OF PRODUCTIVE WORK, PLUS TWO HOURS OF PERSONAL GROWTH”