Disparate characters, each from a different background and with their own personal aims, banding together for a common cause. This is the premise of Arco's story, but it could just as well be a description of how this indie RPG/western came to be. Set within a reimagined Latin America, each chapter follows a new protagonist from another regional tribe, seeking revenge against murderous colonials, until plotlines converge and the survivors decide to combine their skills. Meanwhile, the making of this game brought together a group of four strangers, all hailing from different lands.
Our tale begins some years ago, in Poland, with Franek Nowotniak. "I had a shitty restaurant job that I hated, and I was desperate to do something else, so I started doing pixel art after work," Nowotniak tells us. That art drew attention on social media, leading to small commissions and then, after about two years, a contract with publisher Raw Fury, to work on the Norse Lands expansion for strategy game Kingdom Two Crowns. "It was a very big jump from spending 12 hours in the kitchen," Nowotniak says, "to being able to sit at home and look at your screen, and they pay you." Having broken into game development, making one of his own was the inevitable next stepso he began to dream up ideas and seek out like-minded individuals.
Today, Nowotniak lives in Australia, which is also where we find programmer Max Cahill. Older than his colleague, Arco was far from Cahill's first game development rodeo. After starting out making games as a pixel artist, he went on to get a computer science degree; in 2011, he worked for Transhuman Design on a multiplayer game called King Arthur's Gold.
"That was my first non-Flash game," he recalls.
"I was like, 'This is a real game - it's got an executable and everything'." It was also the thing that brought Cahill and Nowotniak together. The latter first played King Arthur's Gold when he was 14 and became a presence on the game's community forums. "He was very vocal about being very good at the game," Cahill recalls. He also made some mods, featuring his own pixel art. Years later, Nowotniak got back in touch, hoping that the developer's multiplayer experience would fit the game he wanted to make.
But wait. Multiplayer experience? If this sounds like an odd choice for a singleplayer RPG, that's because Arco was not an RPG to begin with. "The original idea was a PvP arena fighting game with bows," Nowotniak explains. The only feature in it that resembled the final game was its style of combat, shifting between realtime action and a paused planning phase. This idea came in part from watching professional CS:GO games, Nowotniak explains, where some players seem to have superhuman reflexes, but it's still possible to override their skills with tactical ingenuity. "The idea is that you're not stronger or faster than all the enemies," he says, "but you have this ability to plan everything. That's how you win."
A third member of the posse also signed up early: José Ramón García, alias Bibiki. "I don't even remember where I got him from," Nowotniak smiles, "but it was a good investment." Fortunately, Ramón García is on hand to fill in the blanks.
Working as a musician, his most high-profile soundtrack project before Arco had been Alex Kidd In Miracle World DX, released in June 2021. Later that year, Nowotniak messaged him, the two having crossed paths on a Discord server for solo developers. "I was there because I also made a couple of games on my own," Ramón García says. "Then suddenly I got a message from Franek that he wanted some of my music. I already knew of him because of his pixel art." The two got talking about their projects, and Nowotniak shared his plan for Arco. "It was different," Ramón García says.
"He told me the idea and I was in." Ramón García would also pitch in with game design, including the combat, but he began writing music for the game right from the start. "I wanted to create an identity for Arco," he says. "I wanted the soundtrack to sound like Arco, not like a western soundtrack." He dabbled with various instruments and genres, from orchestral compositions to nu-metal and solo guitar tracks, mixing them into a unique blend.
Throughout, he drew on the game's evolving locations and scenarios to shape the sound.
"I don't make the music for people to listen to [on its own]," he says. "It's intended to be understood in the game." He would thus make changes to tracks as the game itself changed, resulting in a lot of music. "He just kept making songs," Cahill adds. "I don't know if you've seen the soundtrack, but it's enormous." While Ramón García had been easily convinced to put his weight behind the project, however, publishers didn't prove quite so enthusiastic. "Really quickly they were like, 'Multiplayer is absolutely not something we would trust a three-person team with," Cahill explains. The catch with a multiplayer-focused game, he continues, is that all the systems have to be in good working order to give an impression of the final product, which means a lot more work upfront.
And so the concept began to morph. For a while it became a kind of Roguelike survival game, Cahill says, in which you wandered through an endless desert, managing food and water supplies. "I don't know why we didn't do that," Nowotniak laughs. "That seems like a great idea." Cahill responds with a simple explanation: "It wasn't fun to die of thirst." Still, the notion of a singleplayer journey attracted the attention of Oregon's Panic Inc, which gave no guarantees about funding the whole project, but at least offered to pay for a prototype. "I think they saw there was something there," Cahill says. "Like, 'Yes, it sucks a bit, but can you make it better if we give you some money? Can you make this not suck?" As they tried to do just that, Arco changed shape again, retaining the procedural generation but ditching the rest of its Roguelike concept, a change Nowotniak attributes to "trying to give Panic a prototype that seemed somehow complete".
One way in which it certainly wasn't complete, he adds, was the use of placeholder dialogue. "We figured we'd make the writing good later. Our publisher didn't see it that way.
It was like, 'You can't just make it bad now and fix it later." But Panic approved the prototype and agreed to fund full production, which allowed the team to grow once more. "We needed a narrative consultant," Ramón García says, "because we were talking about sensitive things.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1739974811/articles/7xd_Q5EE11740045092867/6JHBV3Z1V1740045244363.jpg]
I [also] thought that we needed another game designer and support programmer, because Max was the only one making the systems." Ramón García turned to Antonio 'Fayer' Uribe, a Mexican developer he knew from another Discord group. Like Cahill, Uribe was already making games professionally, having started a mobile gaming brand called HyperBeard Games with an artist friend in 2014. When one of its games, KleptoCats, found success, HyperBeard was bought by an American company and turned into a studio which Uribe ran until 2019.
"I like making games," Uribe says of his decision to leave. "The more it grew, the more my role was to manage people. It wasn't fun." He continued working on smaller projects, but by the time Ramón García got in touch, in January 2022, he was anxious to get stuck into something more substantial. Uribe scrolls back through his phone messages to find that first contact: "He was like, 'We're working on this. We have a prototype. We talked to a publisher. They're going to fund it. It's inspired by many cultures, amongst them Mexican, Central American. It would be cool if you can give it a check'." Uribe was impressed by the prototype, but thought it was lacking direction and coherence.
"It didn't have a narrative hook," he says. "The world felt alive, but it wasn't telling any story." He also wasn't convinced that a procedurally generated adventure could do this world justice.
Q&A Franek Nowotniak
Creator and artist What is it about westerns that inspired Arco's scenario?
I think the level of technology they had then was intriguing. It's very human still, but humans have these insanely powerful weapons that can kill someone in an instant, and there's nothing around to control it. It's also the combination of technology and physical [ability], like in the quickdraw duels.
How does the combat reflect that?
I feel like it merges [the lead up to] the quickdraw moment with frantic game playing. You always have those tense moments in westerns where everyone's waiting to see what's going to happen. One thing about that is who's going to [react] faster, but another thing is that one character always thinks two steps ahead and wins that way.
Why the anti-colonialist narrative?
That wasn't a big focus, it just kind of emerged. The story was mainly about the world and the different characters and factions. Who they were fighting wasn't that important to me. But then it came from [thinking about] what makes most logical sense to fight in this colonial world, and obviously it's the colonials. But we didn't want to make it black and white, so it's not like 'those people are bad and you're ...
Our tale begins some years ago, in Poland, with Franek Nowotniak. "I had a shitty restaurant job that I hated, and I was desperate to do something else, so I started doing pixel art after work," Nowotniak tells us. That art drew attention on social media, leading to small commissions and then, after about two years, a contract with publisher Raw Fury, to work on the Norse Lands expansion for strategy game Kingdom Two Crowns. "It was a very big jump from spending 12 hours in the kitchen," Nowotniak says, "to being able to sit at home and look at your screen, and they pay you." Having broken into game development, making one of his own was the inevitable next stepso he began to dream up ideas and seek out like-minded individuals.
Today, Nowotniak lives in Australia, which is also where we find programmer Max Cahill. Older than his colleague, Arco was far from Cahill's first game development rodeo. After starting out making games as a pixel artist, he went on to get a computer science degree; in 2011, he worked for Transhuman Design on a multiplayer game called King Arthur's Gold.
"That was my first non-Flash game," he recalls.
"I was like, 'This is a real game - it's got an executable and everything'." It was also the thing that brought Cahill and Nowotniak together. The latter first played King Arthur's Gold when he was 14 and became a presence on the game's community forums. "He was very vocal about being very good at the game," Cahill recalls. He also made some mods, featuring his own pixel art. Years later, Nowotniak got back in touch, hoping that the developer's multiplayer experience would fit the game he wanted to make.
But wait. Multiplayer experience? If this sounds like an odd choice for a singleplayer RPG, that's because Arco was not an RPG to begin with. "The original idea was a PvP arena fighting game with bows," Nowotniak explains. The only feature in it that resembled the final game was its style of combat, shifting between realtime action and a paused planning phase. This idea came in part from watching professional CS:GO games, Nowotniak explains, where some players seem to have superhuman reflexes, but it's still possible to override their skills with tactical ingenuity. "The idea is that you're not stronger or faster than all the enemies," he says, "but you have this ability to plan everything. That's how you win."
A third member of the posse also signed up early: José Ramón García, alias Bibiki. "I don't even remember where I got him from," Nowotniak smiles, "but it was a good investment." Fortunately, Ramón García is on hand to fill in the blanks.
Working as a musician, his most high-profile soundtrack project before Arco had been Alex Kidd In Miracle World DX, released in June 2021. Later that year, Nowotniak messaged him, the two having crossed paths on a Discord server for solo developers. "I was there because I also made a couple of games on my own," Ramón García says. "Then suddenly I got a message from Franek that he wanted some of my music. I already knew of him because of his pixel art." The two got talking about their projects, and Nowotniak shared his plan for Arco. "It was different," Ramón García says.
"He told me the idea and I was in." Ramón García would also pitch in with game design, including the combat, but he began writing music for the game right from the start. "I wanted to create an identity for Arco," he says. "I wanted the soundtrack to sound like Arco, not like a western soundtrack." He dabbled with various instruments and genres, from orchestral compositions to nu-metal and solo guitar tracks, mixing them into a unique blend.
Throughout, he drew on the game's evolving locations and scenarios to shape the sound.
"I don't make the music for people to listen to [on its own]," he says. "It's intended to be understood in the game." He would thus make changes to tracks as the game itself changed, resulting in a lot of music. "He just kept making songs," Cahill adds. "I don't know if you've seen the soundtrack, but it's enormous." While Ramón García had been easily convinced to put his weight behind the project, however, publishers didn't prove quite so enthusiastic. "Really quickly they were like, 'Multiplayer is absolutely not something we would trust a three-person team with," Cahill explains. The catch with a multiplayer-focused game, he continues, is that all the systems have to be in good working order to give an impression of the final product, which means a lot more work upfront.
And so the concept began to morph. For a while it became a kind of Roguelike survival game, Cahill says, in which you wandered through an endless desert, managing food and water supplies. "I don't know why we didn't do that," Nowotniak laughs. "That seems like a great idea." Cahill responds with a simple explanation: "It wasn't fun to die of thirst." Still, the notion of a singleplayer journey attracted the attention of Oregon's Panic Inc, which gave no guarantees about funding the whole project, but at least offered to pay for a prototype. "I think they saw there was something there," Cahill says. "Like, 'Yes, it sucks a bit, but can you make it better if we give you some money? Can you make this not suck?" As they tried to do just that, Arco changed shape again, retaining the procedural generation but ditching the rest of its Roguelike concept, a change Nowotniak attributes to "trying to give Panic a prototype that seemed somehow complete".
One way in which it certainly wasn't complete, he adds, was the use of placeholder dialogue. "We figured we'd make the writing good later. Our publisher didn't see it that way.
It was like, 'You can't just make it bad now and fix it later." But Panic approved the prototype and agreed to fund full production, which allowed the team to grow once more. "We needed a narrative consultant," Ramón García says, "because we were talking about sensitive things.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1739974811/articles/7xd_Q5EE11740045092867/6JHBV3Z1V1740045244363.jpg]
I [also] thought that we needed another game designer and support programmer, because Max was the only one making the systems." Ramón García turned to Antonio 'Fayer' Uribe, a Mexican developer he knew from another Discord group. Like Cahill, Uribe was already making games professionally, having started a mobile gaming brand called HyperBeard Games with an artist friend in 2014. When one of its games, KleptoCats, found success, HyperBeard was bought by an American company and turned into a studio which Uribe ran until 2019.
"I like making games," Uribe says of his decision to leave. "The more it grew, the more my role was to manage people. It wasn't fun." He continued working on smaller projects, but by the time Ramón García got in touch, in January 2022, he was anxious to get stuck into something more substantial. Uribe scrolls back through his phone messages to find that first contact: "He was like, 'We're working on this. We have a prototype. We talked to a publisher. They're going to fund it. It's inspired by many cultures, amongst them Mexican, Central American. It would be cool if you can give it a check'." Uribe was impressed by the prototype, but thought it was lacking direction and coherence.
"It didn't have a narrative hook," he says. "The world felt alive, but it wasn't telling any story." He also wasn't convinced that a procedurally generated adventure could do this world justice.
Q&A Franek Nowotniak
Creator and artist What is it about westerns that inspired Arco's scenario?
I think the level of technology they had then was intriguing. It's very human still, but humans have these insanely powerful weapons that can kill someone in an instant, and there's nothing around to control it. It's also the combination of technology and physical [ability], like in the quickdraw duels.
How does the combat reflect that?
I feel like it merges [the lead up to] the quickdraw moment with frantic game playing. You always have those tense moments in westerns where everyone's waiting to see what's going to happen. One thing about that is who's going to [react] faster, but another thing is that one character always thinks two steps ahead and wins that way.
Why the anti-colonialist narrative?
That wasn't a big focus, it just kind of emerged. The story was mainly about the world and the different characters and factions. Who they were fighting wasn't that important to me. But then it came from [thinking about] what makes most logical sense to fight in this colonial world, and obviously it's the colonials. But we didn't want to make it black and white, so it's not like 'those people are bad and you're ...
You're reading a preview of
Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025