Continuing our ongoing coverage of Yellow Brick Games’ debut action game, Eternal Strands, we sat down with some of the indie studios’ leadership team to discuss the origins of their scrappy studio, and learn more about the indie world they’re using their AAA backgrounds to create. First, we chatted with CEO Thomas Giroux and COO Jeff Skalski about the studio’s origins, then we spoke to Chief Creative Officer Mike Laidlaw and Lead Writer Kate MacMullin about their journey to the indie scene, and the characters and story in Eternal Strands.
IGN: Can you guys talk about where you and the founders of the company came from and what made you guys want to open the studio?
Giroux: The studio was actually founded in 2020 […] just before the pandemic actually hit. All of us were actually from AAA Studios. We had a chance to work on some amazing franchises in the past, but we had a chance to meet and talk about what we wanted to build for a new company.
The idea behind Yellow Brick Games was to have a studio that would actually be small by choice. We wanted to scope a project that would fit with a smaller team, but with big ambitions. Early in the process, we started making some pillars not for only the game, but actually for the company. Those pillars would actually translate well to the games. The first one was emergent gameplay. That allows us as a small team to actually build interesting systems, so the player can actually interact with those systems and will have more play time.
Skalski: Another pillar that we had was making sure we built a world that was worth watching, and tied to that pillar was also wonder and intrigue. We really wanted to build, identify, and discover beautiful colors in dark places. We felt there was an opportunity to build worlds where players actually wanted to escape to, not to escape from.
IGN: How did you decide on Eternal Strands as the studio’s first game? Was this an idea you guys had even before you had a company?
Skalski: I would say, for us, one of the things that really drove us to build our first game, Eternal Strands, here at Yellow Brick Games, was this passion to build fantastic worlds. We wanted to build a game that had a lot of sense of action and adventure in it. Even though we were a smaller team, we still had very ambitious ideas. Being a team that has a lot of experience building third-person games, we knew that was very important from the beginning as well, but we wanted to go into this action and adventure space really re-evaluating the ruleset, really challenging ourselves on the world logic. Understanding how does fire propagate, what does coal do to different types of materials like metal versus wood, and how can we embrace these things to be gameplay ingredients for the players to creatively play with and discover along their adventure through the game?
Giroux: Let’s not forget: we were just a bunch of people who were in a garage having a conversation about how it would be cool to actually interact with those big creatures in a different way that other games don’t do. Yeah, I think we said, “You know what? That’s the game we want to make.”
IGN: Were there any major inspirations from other games that you really liked that you drew from when you were coming up with Eternal Strands?
Skalski: Absolutely. For sure, all of us, first and foremost are big gamers. We play everything and consume everything, but for sure games like Shadows of Colossus, the Legend of Zelda where it went with from Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom. We played a lot of, Mike and I especially and Tom, played a lot of Dragon’s Dogma and it’s something we wanted to see come back. We’re so happy now that Dragon’s Dogma II is out, so it’s great to see what Capcom is doing with that franchise. Monster Hunter is another fan favorite in the office as well, so all of these inspired us. Hopefully, we can inspire back in every way we can.
IGN: Can I ask about the lady holding the ax in your team’s logo?
Giroux: Yeah. The little girl in the logo, her name is Dorothy. She is actually my daughter who sadly passed away from cancer a couple of years ago, so we’ve decided to actually bring her into the adventure. This is why we called the studio Yellow Brick Games. For us, there’s two reasons. The first one is, as we make those games, we wanted to make sure that the path to make the game would be as fun as actually shipping the game for everybody in the studio, so all the values of the company are built around that. The second one is, we wanted Dorothy to become the symbol of courage and passion for everybody, so she’s integrated in the company.
Skalski: She’s our warrior princess.
Giroux: Exactly.
IGN: Yellow Brick Games seems to be comprised of a ton of former AAA developers who decided they want to work on smaller games. Tell me a little about your background before Yellow Brick.
MacMullin: I’ve been in games for almost 10 years now. I started out in QA, working in Montreal doing all kinds of different little projects. Then I transitioned to being a writer at Ubisoft Quebec for about five years. I worked on titles like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Immortals Fenyx Rising, and a ton of DLCs for the Assassin’s Creed brand, which was super fun.
Laidlaw: My background specifically is, I mean, a Bioware guy is probably a good way to look at it. I started with Jade Empire and was the lead writer on that project back 2003 to 2006. Worked on Mass Effect 1 for a while. I wrote a huge swath of the Citadel that eventually got cut, so no one ever saw it or learned the great history of the haggis that was on sale there. But from that, I moved on to the Dragon Ages and ended up basically lead design and creative director for Dragon Age Inquisition, Origins, Dragon Age 2, and all the DLC up until whatever Dread Wolf turns out to be, which I’m excited, because I won’t be spoiled.
IGN: What made you want to leave the AAA space and work at an indie studio on a new IP?
MacMullin: I ultimately wanted to join an independent studio because I was really interested in what small teams can accomplish, the agility that kind of comes with that, as well as just the different sort of constraints that come with indie development, I think are super interesting and can breed a lot of unique games. So that’s why I decided to join Yellow Brick Games.
Laidlaw: I decided to, I guess, be involved in starting Yellow Brick Games, because I’ve been in the industry almost 24 years now. So at this point, for me it was an opportunity to get back to being able to do instead of always managing, always leading teams, kind of having to direct by proxy. A smaller team, a smaller project, and a chance to get directly involved again, felt like what I needed to shake things up and not feel like I was stagnating.
The other big draw for me with the smaller team is I see it as a real chance to work on, I guess, the best habits of leadership, the ways that you can give direction, be transparent, share with people where things are going, and more importantly why they are going there, the purpose behind the decisions being made. And I wanted to step out of the context I was comfortable with where there was sort of this, I guess, known history, known knowledge, this is just how we do things, but instead to create a new context in which it was going to be required to explain the why now. And to me, a new studio was the right place to practice those skills to try and build something that I hope will be very healthy.
IGN: Do you feel like there’s an advantage to all of the AAA experience you have on the team?
MacMullin: Yeah, for sure. I think that there’s tons of advantages to starting out in AAA. With such big productions, you gain so much experience so quickly that I think it just naturally becomes very applicable once you do dive into a smaller independent production. There’s just all kinds of skills that I think you’ve developed, especially in terms of communication, I think is something that’s really strong within our team. Departments communicate with one another really well, and I think avoid silos happening between art and programming and stuff like that. I think we’re all very interconnected and that communication experience comes from having to communicate with an even larger number of people a lot of the time. So it becomes really easy and just a lot simpler to keep the vision clear across a smaller group of people.
Laidlaw: I think as well, when you think about an indie kind of situation coming out of AAA, a larger team, a AAA size team will always have people that have been there before. There’s sort of this wealth of knowledge that anyone can learn from. And I think to your point, it accelerates how quickly you ramp up. And when you’re in indie, you might be the only person in your discipline or one of two people in your discipline. So if neither of you have run into problem X, problem X is going to be something you have to come with an all new solution. So to me, having dealt with these larger productions, you do come away with sort of a, “Wait a minute, I’ve been here before,” kind of mentality that helps you, I think, anticipate problems before they become one.
IGN: Let’s talk about the protagonist in Eternal Strands. Who is Brynn? What should players know about her as a character?
MacMullin: Yeah, so Brynn is really this super cool, badass treasure hunter, essentially. She takes on the role of point within her cast of traveling companions. So basically that means she’s the one that’s in charge of diving headfirst into danger, jumping into bottomless pits, checking out what’s going on down there, and coming back with lost artifacts and treasure and just really valuable objects.
So in a lot of ways, I think she’s very defined by her physicality. She’s a total adrenaline junkie. And I know a lot of games, maybe their protagonist is a bit more of a blank slate, but I think when it comes to Brynn, she’s a more defined character with a prescribed personality that the player is going to get to know and watch develop as they play through the story.
When it comes to her psychology, I think the part that I love the most about her is just that I think she really embodies this idea that it’s cool to care, it’s cool to be just unabashedly into whatever it is you’re into. She really doesn’t need to mask her passion with snark or sarcasm – that kind of thing. She’s just so excited to be doing the job she’s doing, and I feel like that comes through in so many different scenes in the game. You can see it kind of in the trailer with the big smile on her face when she’s about to face down this crazy huge construct. So yeah, that’s kind of really just I think who she is as a person, and I think she embodies that and brings that out in other characters as well.
IGN: Brynn is a Weaver, right? What is a Weaver?
MacMullin: Weavers are the few people that are still willing to use magic and practice magic and work with it after the surge, where it becomes sort of shunned across the known world essentially. So Weavers travel in caravans, they can’t really stay in one place for too long because they tend to make people a little uncomfortable. And yeah, everyone in the band kind of has a different function so obviously the player sort of takes on this role of the iconic action hero that’s going to dive into danger, but she has this really competent, talented team around her that helps her sort of plan and prepare all of her expeditions and as well as just make sense of all the different artifacts and treasure that she’s finding and bringing back to her team, essentially.
IGN: It seems a lot of focus is put on Brynn’s Weaverband and their relationships with one another. Why did the team think that was important to focus on in an action-adventure game?
Laidlaw: I have a long history of working at BioWare and that sort of leaves an imprint on you, but I like the idea of characters and I think for me, one of my core philosophies in game design is that people care about characters first and then by extension care about the larger world that those characters care about.
The nice part is then if you can create a cast of people that the player can sort of develop empathy with, get to know over time, it allows you to, especially in developing a new IP and a new world for people to learn, they sort of can start small and get little tidbits from the individual and then they understand that the individual exists in a larger context. By doing that, you create a scenario where in an action adventure kind of context, you get to be Indiana Jones, but you recognize that there’s also a John Rhys-Davies and he’s going to bring you the camels. That you have these people that you have a relationship with, that that relationship can evolve and change and that in doing that, in learning about them, in finding empathy for them and understanding what they care about, you start to get a sense of the larger world.
IGN: Tell me about some of the other Weavers in Brynn’s Weaverband.
MacMullin: In Brynn’s weaver band, she’s relatively new to the group. But the rest of the characters that you encounter at the very start of the game that you find yourself traveling with have been together for quite some time. Varying lengths of time, depending on which character. But you’ve got your enchanter, who’s in charge of helping you with your mantle, and your powers and things like that.
Laidlaw: He’s very extra.
MacMullin: He’s, yes, very fabulous. Then you’ve got his wife, who’s the band’s smith. She’s very grounded. You’ve got the lore keeper, who is also your alchemist, so handling the consumable potions and things like that that are on your belt. Then you’ve got the smith’s apprentice, who’s also fairly new to the band, and probably still finding his place within the group a little bit. Then lastly, you’ve got your mentor who, at the start of the game, essentially is the leader and the point of the band.
IGN: Tell me about the enemy factions in Eternal Strands.
MacMullin: The enemies in our game do fall into a little bit of different factions. They’re ultimately all trying to kill you, so they share that as a goal. But when it comes to the creatures that you see that are more like the wild acalas, which are these hyena type things, those are just wild animals that you’re going to find more maybe in the outskirts of the enclave and stuff like that. They’re great to hunt when it comes to getting more materials and resources for your gear.
But when it comes to the arcs, which are these constructs as we’ve said, I think what’s fun about writing around these particular constructs is that on the one hand, they’re enemies. But they’re also remnants of this lost culture of the enclave that Brynn and her team want to pull apart so they can try to figure out how to maybe put them back together. It’s this lost technology that they’re just basically trying to make sense of, and trying to use as a means to figure out not only how did the enclave have all this wild enchanting prowess so to speak? But also, what has happened to them since the surge essentially? I think it’s a big question that comes up as you’re fighting them.
IGN: Can I get one of those little hyenas as a pet?
Laidlaw: It’s an acala. We don’t have an acala available as a pet. But what we do have is the known for years as the Beast of Burden, and eventually named Arva. Arva does hang out at camp after bringing the caravan and everything in, and can be pet.
For more, check out the first footage of one of Eternal Strands’ boss fights or our interview with Yellow Brick Games on how they’re bending Unreal Engine 5 to their will, and keep an eye out for more exclusive coverage all month long as part of IGN First.