A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Crashlands, a mash-up of Diablo, Pokemon, and Don’t Starve lobbed at Steam’s collective face along with unfettered glee. It’s ambitious, funny, and fun. Turns out, it was conceived as quickly as its creator found out he had cancer.
Sam Coster is the founder of Butterscotch Shenanigans, a small game development studio where he’s now the principle (likewise only) artist. For a while, it was simply your man and his brother Seth, and they made small, silly mobile games together. They weren’t terrible, However they were ultimately forgettable. Then Sam got diagnosed along with cancer in late 2013, and he decided it was time to do or, well, die.
Kotaku: You got diagnosed along with cancer and decided to make a video game while fighting it. Why, and why this particular video game?
Sam Coster: At the time of my diagnosis, we were about four months out from launching our very first free-to-play game, which was called Quadropus Rampage, and it’d seen enough victory that we believed we could simply go down the free-to-play route and make one more one of these sort of smaller sized mobile titles and make enough money to survive. That was always the goal of the studio: survival.
We started working on one more mobile game that was sort of an endless runner. You know those Mario levels where you’re riding a horizontal platform and crazy shit’s happening all the time? It’s basically a long form of that. It was coming along well, However then I got my diagnosis. The very first couple weeks of that were nuts. It was this whirlwind of biopsies and bone marrow examinations and all sorts of stab wounds and stuff. Every time they delivered a piece of news about just what would certainly be happening, points looked much more and much more dire. So very first it was like, “You have actually cancer.” Then it was like, “It’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is worse compared to normal.” Then it was like, “Oh, it’s stage 4B. It’s a super rare one that you’re not supposed to get hold of until you’re, like, 70!”
Video courtesy of Dev Diary.
I was along with my family at the time, and I started the very first treatment. We went out to an Indian restaurant afterward and had a sort of celebratory meal. The treatment’s really weird because it’s so casual. It’s like you’re in a bus stop. You’re in a crowded room and there are all these individuals sitting in chairs.
And then you get hold of this poison pumped in to you. You don’t feel the effects of it for between six and 12 hours. So I was still great that night, However then the next morning I woke up and felt like I got hit by a ton of bricks.
“I don’t want this to be the last game I make prior to I die.”
Then my brother Seth came over so we could start working on our game again. We both like working, and not being able to job for a whole month as quickly as our studio joined such an early and fragile state was a scary idea. We sat down to work, and he started going over the code and asking just what I wanted to do about particular issues and all this various other stuff. I simply looked at your man and said, “I don’t want this to be the last game I make prior to I die.”
“No offense, However it’s a mobile endless runner,” I said. “Everyone’s gonna forget about this in 6 minutes. It might make a dime for the studio, However that gives a fuck?” I wanted to do something that at least had a little much more cultural memory for someone, or even to make something that could guidance a person in a similar situation to my own. I prototyped the equivalent of a Roomba. It chosen up leaves. That was the auspicious beginning of Crashlands.
Kotaku: just what was the very first seed underlying that idea? just what was the goal of the game in your mind?
Sam Coster: The very first seed was to build a place I could escape to while undergoing treatments. An easy example of that is, I started this drug called Methotrexate, which is an really powerful chemotherapy drug. You have actually to get hold of a really higher dose of it to have actually it act as a prophylactic versus the lymphoma getting in to your brain. I joined the hospital for the very first time for it, and it was a little much more brutal compared to the various other drug I’d been on. Seth sent me a note, and he was like, “Hey, you want me to come over tonight? We can easily hang out and play some games in the hospital or something.” And I was like, “No, However I do want you to complete programming the gardening so I can easily build a damn garden in Crashlands tonight.” He’s laughing like “Alright, alright.”
So the goal was to actively build a sanctuary I could go to while I joined one of these really shitty situations.
Kotaku: And the dev group was simply you and your brothers?
Sam Coster: Seth and my various other brother Adam, that joined on the project about 6 months later—that was their method of being able to help. In most cancer situations, your friends and family simply have actually to look on while you try not to die. It can easily be really upsetting. For my brothers, I believe helping along with the game gave them a nice mode of control.
Crashlands was ambitious and, frankly, we had no pointer how to do any of the stuff I’d declared that we were gonna do to build this huge world. The very first time Seth got the globe generation working, it took seven minutes to generate the globe and only four minutes to run across it. We had no pointer just what we were doing and no pointer how to do just what we were doing.
It was simply one of those points where, once you know that you’re gonna die in a sense, you really modification your approach to just what you’re doing. You wanna be doing stuff that actually matters on the daily. along with the timeline they’d given me for stuff, treatment was gonna be 6 months, and then they’d know if it worked or not. There was about a 60/40 possibility that it would certainly work. I figured by the time the treatment was done, we’d be close to wrapping the game up and the cancer would certainly likewise be gone hopefully. That turned out to rather much not be the case.
Image courtesy of St Louis Magazine.
Kotaku: Oh fuck. just what do you mean by that, exactly? In just what sense or senses did that not turn out to be the case?
Sam Coster: A wonderful many, I’d say. Crashlands today is a even more polished execution of a big jumble of ideas. I wanted to take every little thing I loved about games and shove them all together. So Diablo-style stuff, plus some Pokemon-esque taming, plus some world-building, boss fights—all that stuff. The very first version of this simply didn’t gel at all. We were basically using the modes Terraria, Minecraft, and Pokemon worked with. Like, there used to be an actual capture minigame where you’d have actually to down a creature and hit it along with a special item. We were pulling from all these sources too hard and not letting the game come to fruition in its own way.
It was only after Adam joined on in the summer of 2014 that we finessed a lot of it. That was actually as quickly as we simply ripped out the inventory management system. There was no much more inventory after that. Then we added much more and much more and much more because it was so annoying to deal with, and then Adam came in and he was like, “Why don’t we just… not do that?” Once we did that, all the various other stuff started to fall in to place. Definitely they’re still inspired by those various other games, However they started to come in to their own around that time.
But yeah, there were times where it was all a little upsetting. I was going through treatments, and then it was likewise like, “Oh, I’m building a piece of crap” [laughs]. However I had trust in my brothers to provide good feedback and being able to pull it spine from whatever brink it was on.
Kotaku: How were the treatments going during that time period? How were you doing physically?
Sam Coster: So my treatments ended around GDC in March 2014. After that, I got a PET scan, and they could still see three glowing nodes in my left chest wall, which is where the whole thing started. The doctors kinda freaked out about that. One was like, “I want you spine in treatment tomorrow, spine to chemotherapy.” just what was gonna follow from that was what’s called salvage chemo. If your cancer recurs in such a short time period, that spells a really bad prognosis. That was a rather dark month or so, while we were figuring out just what was actually happening.
As it turns out, all that glowing was actually caused by an inflammation in my system. So they did a surgical biopsy, took out some lymph nodes, and checked it out. They could not discover any cancer cells whatsoever. It was this insane thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen the episode of Archer where he gets cancer, However the doctor calls him, and he’s like, “You have actually cancer!” And Archer’s like, “Oh god!” And then ten minutes later the doctor calls your man back, and he’s like, “Oops, sorry. Our examinations were wrong.” They literally did that to me for, like, a month. Calls every various other day for a week. It sort of bounced spine and forth. examinations were showing that I conclusively did not have actually cancer on this rather great level, However the doctors were still terrified.
In that time, I was like, “Fuck this, I’m gonna propose to my girlfriend now because she’s stuck along with me the whole time, and she’s been wonderful. So let’s pull the trigger on this prior to I die.” So we got engaged that summer. After that, I got cleared again, and suddenly I simply had all this time to work. It was odd. That was as quickly as we finished a lot of the art content for the game. I do all the art. I finished most of my job in that stretch.
In December 2014, my fiancee and I went to visit her family, and they took us on a trip to Florida including Disney World. I’d been feeling great. spine to working out and stuff. I hopped in to the shower the very first night we were there at the hotel, and from nervous habit I started feeling my left chest wall where I had the kidney-sized tumor. I felt this marble in there. I was like, “FUCK.” I had a breakdown at that point, and then I went to Disney globe because Disney World’s fucking cool.
I called my doctor and asked just what to do. They were like, “Go take pleasure in your vacation, and as quickly as you get hold of spine we’ll start treatment again.” For some reason it was much less terrifying that time, I believe because it was gonna be the same treatment we’d been told about spine as quickly as that sort of false alarm happened in the summer. So we started the chemo again, plus bone marrow transplants.
“I felt this marble in there. I was like, ‘FUCK.’ I had a breakdown at that point, and then I went to Disney globe because Disney World’s fucking cool.”
Salvage chemo is method much more unfriendly. I did three rounds of that and then began prep for a stem cell treatment. It was a transplant of my own cells first. Now, all of the chemo stuff I tolerated fairly well. I was still able to be up and about. There was various amounts of throwing up, exhaustion, and pain, However I was able to job for a large section of it. I would certainly simply sit in my little chair along with a mouse, so I only really need about three inches of space to do work.
The stem cell transplant involved giving my own cells to myself. That’s actually not the curative part. The reason they do it that method is actually a rescue. The chemo they provide you is so powerful that it literally kills all of your bone marrow. Your ability to create blood or an immune system goes away. The reason they provide you this chemo is along with the single goal of killing the fuck from the cancer in your system. It’s rather much a last ditch resort. The craziest drug of all of them is called Melphalan, and it goes in your system for simply an hour—simply 60 minutes on the clock. It’s actually a cousin of mustard gas. You have actually to consume ice for an hour before, the hour during, and then the hour afterward. Constantly. This drug is so fucking toxic that it will certainly basically dissolve the inside of your mouth and digestive tract. If you don’t do this therapy by consuming ice constantly, your mouth will certainly simply turn in to a tube of sores.
That was as quickly as I went in to a four-day really higher fever. I don’t remember any of it. It was fairly dark. However for the various other three weeks in the hospital, I was still able to work!
Kotaku: Goddamn. You decided to job in the hospital immediately after that crazy intense treatment?
Sam Coster: Yeah. I don’t really know how to put it in to words, However having something that appears like it’s important—that you can easily always make progress on—I believe was so key to me having a positive attitude the whole time. I always felt useful. I had something to do. I always had this big list of assets I called for to make. It was like, “Oh, we simply got in to the tundra biome, and we need 6 brand-new creatures. So make your 6 creatures and fully animate them.”
That was likewise the very first time in a year-and-a-half that I got to sit down and play through a whole game, so I played Dragon Age: Inquisition. That was super fun. Joining the hospital can easily be like a weird studio vacation if you can easily get hold of your head out of, you know, being totally poisoned the whole time. I was rather thankful that I had something to job on the whole time.
Kotaku: Despite all this real life darkness, Crashlands is a really funny, upbeat sort of game. Did the positive attitude that working on it inspired mold the tone of the game? Was cancer partially responsible for producing… happiness?
Sam Coster: Yeah, I mean I believe it’s basically embedded in there. The whole project is supposed to deliver that sense of joy, awe, and a feeling of being lost in time that would certainly enable a person in my placement to literally not be there for a while. simply be in a really happy place. Granted, a lot of the games we’ve made are goofy. We like goofy things. We like making individuals happy. For us, that’s the point of making games. To have the ability to build a 60-hour experience where individuals are chuckle-snorting at themselves the whole time as quickly as they read the dialogue or even tool tips, it’s such a enjoyable thing to deliver.
Kotaku: It’s such a different approach compared to various other games produced along with cancer looming over them or lurking in the background of developers’ lives. The most prominent example that comes to mind is That Dragon, Cancer. It’s much more about conveying the experience of losing a loved one to cancer, of coping along with a disease deserving of total obliteration by a hundred billion probing middle fingers. It’s about empathy. Your game, conversely, strikes me as escapism. Not in the dismissive method a lot of individuals use the term, However as a literal means to escape from a shitty situation. A respite.
Sam Coster: We talked to the That Dragon, Cancer guys at GDC last year. It’s one more sort of damn cancer story. It was interesting chatting along with [developer Ryan Green] because we all go for our own ways of dealing along with it. His was this autobiographical experience of going through it, which is really powerful.
What I wanted to deliver was, if you didn’t know the game came from a cancer diagnosis, then you wouldn’t know by playing it. Granted, there’s a boss in the bog called Toomah, that literally is cancer. You literally get hold of to go kill cancer in this game. However rather few individuals are gonna play through the game and go, “I bet this guy had cancer while he was making this.” The design of the game is all about making individuals have actually a really good time and shed themselves. That’s just what I wanted and called for to have actually happen.
Kotaku: Right. And I feel like some individuals would certainly consider the experience you produced and claim it’s not as crucial as That Dragon, Cancer, or that it lacks artistic merit because it’s escapism. However that’s clearly not the case, nor is it a particularly useful line to draw.
Sam Coster: Yeah. And the craziest thing is, so we did a beta in November 2015. We started right prior to Thanksgiving, and we had about 150 individuals in it. We had three messages from individuals in that group, one of whom was going through a depressive, anxiety-ridden episode. He was a PHD student. one more had been dealing along with PTSD from coming spine from war. And then one more guy was from the UK, and he was undergoing cancer treatment. Each one of those individuals separately—without us saying, “This is the point of the game”—sent us private messages saying, “Hey, I haven’t felt this method from playing a game in ten years.” Stuff like, “The quantity I was able to shed myself in this game made me feel like a child again.” That level of being carefree, running around harvesting stuff and punching Womp-Its in Crashlands.
We completed the beta, and some of our friends were like, “just what are you guys’ criteria for victory along with this thing?” I believe they were expecting us to provide financial variables. And granted we had them. It cost money to make the thing. However at that moment, we simply said, “It’s already successful. It’s good. We know it’s good because we gave it to individuals that we didn’t know called for it, and they responded literally in the exact method we’d designed the experience to have actually them respond.” It let them escape temporarily.
Kotaku: How did you sustain above the, like, morass of bubbling shit that was rising all around you? I know you talked about feeling useful as a result of working on the game earlier, However even then, it sounds like points found ways to go from bad, to worse, to impossibly goddamn abysmal. I’ve had days where I felt like I couldn’t job because I simply got sad for no apparent reason. Dumb little points like that. You were facing down something impossibly huge. How did you rewire your very own brain to not fall in to those traps?
Sam Coster: I did a lot of writing during the whole thing. section of the thing I wanted to do was take the time after the brand-new treatments to convert whatever the event was in to a hilarious story. By which I mean one of those hilarious stories where you’re like, “Damn, I sure chance that never happens to me!” However it’s still funny at the end of the day.
One of them was as quickly as I was getting all set for that very first stem cell treatment. They have actually to do radiation on you, and section of that is that you have actually to sit in the exact same spot as quickly as they shoot you every day. They don’t want to hit you in the lungs and stuff. So you come in, and they make this thing called an Alpha Cradle, which sounds so high-tech. So they told me about that, and I was like, “Oh sweet, this is gonna be some high-tech shit!” I went in, and it was literally a trash bag sitting on a board. You lay on that, and then they pore, like, insulation foam in the bag. The insulation foam rises up around your body, and that’s the mold they use. They sealed it up along with scotch tape. I shit you not. I was like, “just what is this nonsense?”
The finest section is, then a female nurse shows up, and she’s like, “OK, I need you to take your goods…” And I was like, “My goods?” And she was like, “Yeah, I need you to put your goods in to this cannon ball.” It’s called a clam shell, and it looks like a cannon ball. You have actually to put your junk in it so that it doesn’t get hold of irradiated. I’m cracking up about this, and the nurse is like, “Do you need any help?” And I’m like, “Nah, I’ll take care of it. You can easily go.” So she leaves, and I struggle for two minutes because this thing is colder compared to hell. It felt like they put it in a freezer beforehand. On top of that, as opposed to having an intelligent closing mechanism, it’s literally simply two halves, and they’re made of lead. Each one weighs around eight pounds, and you can easily pinch the shit from yourself along with this thing. I was like, “just what is this? that designed this process?” I’m a game developer, so I was thinking about how much much better it could be.
“It’s called a clam shell, and it looks like a cannon ball. You have actually to put your junk in it so that it doesn’t get hold of irradiated.”
Finally, I yelled over, “Hey, I believe I got it!” She comes in, and she had to inspect it. I lifted up my gown, and she looked at me and went, “You don’t actually have actually to put your penis in it—simply your testicles.” At that point we both lost it and simply started cracking up. It was simply such amazing nonsense.
So just what really helped me was taking the time to share those stories along with people. For whatever reason, it helps take the teeth from it. Like, the very first couple individuals I called and told that I had cancer, I was bawling the whole time. By the time I got to the 15th person on my list, I’d simply call and be like, “Hey! I got cancer!” And they’re like, “Are you OK? You sound OK.” And I’m like, “I’m doing about as you’d expect, However I told a lot of individuals today, so I’m fine.” And they’re like, “Huh. OK then!”
But honestly, I believe the telling of the stories helped me actively convert the experience from this terrible thing I spent time on to actually a source of entertainment and, weirdly enough, some joy for the individuals I was telling stories to.
The naked truth is, there were plenty of dark minutes the whole time. You don’t know if you’re going to live. Fuck, I still don’t know. I finished my second stem cell transplant in September, and that was a donor one. My PET scan was clear in December, so I believe I’m all good. However they don’t think of you cleared until 5 years pass. If you make it through one year, your potential rate of getting it again goes down a ton. However you know, I didn’t make it through a year last time. So every once in a while, I’m still like, “Oh fuck.” And then I need to go play some Diablo or something.
I believe that escapism is super valuable for people. I know it gets knocked on a lot, However the fact is, most of us have actually stuff that sometimes we need much more time to deal along with compared to we’re given. much more mental space. Games’ inherent quality of drawing individuals in and sticking them is the thing that helps you get hold of from your very own head a little bit, get hold of some distance. Enough to deal along with it.
Kotaku: You mentioned that Crashlands does make one reference to your cancer, though, through the boss Toomah. Why you’d decide to make that part?
Sam Coster: So originally a few of the augments for your in-game weapons had a sort of cancer-killing connotation to them. For a while, as opposed to the antibodies one, there was, like, a Chestplate Of Destroy Lymphoma. It was so direct [laughs]. We replaced that. However I still wanted something where users could—maybe without even knowing it for 90 percent of them—go and kill cancer. The easiest method to do that was to turn your man in to a boss.
[Warning: Crashlands spoilers ahead.]
So through the storyline, you learn about how this thing is probably gonna fuck up the entire second biome in the game. This isn’t simply a threat to a people; it’s a threat to an entire continent. You don’t even know if it’s gonna job as quickly as you go to destroy it. You have actually to prove it after you kill the damn thing. It’s meant to be goofy, However if you dwell on it for a moment, it’s a really terrifying and anxious thing. However at the end of the day, you get hold of to kill it, which is great.
Toomah is a stationary boss. He’s a huge pile of mush along with a face. The thing you learn about the bog itself—the entire second zone in the game—is that it’s a living entity. It spawns creatures, the race that lives there, and various mechanisms to sustain itself alive and healthy. You learn about just what appears to be a competing intelligence that has actually risen in the bog. It’s attempting to slowly take over.
You end up finding out where the core of it is. You bring out Toomah, and he doesn’t directly attack you. He simply won’t stop spawning minions, which of course is basically just what cancer does. It simply won’t quit growing. He has actually three different minion types, and no matter just what you do, he simply keeps on spawning. If you don’t hit your man for a second or two, he starts regenerating his health. So it’s a fight where you have actually to put on a lot of pressure, and there’s this mounting infested growth situation. There’s tons of adds building up over time. You’ve got to take care of those too.
It was actually one of the hardest boss fights on accident during the beta, and we had to tone it down very a bit.
Kotaku: Art imitates life.
Sam Coster: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.
Kotaku: How are you doing these days? Now that Crashlands is out, what’s next for you?
Sam Coster: The game launched a couple weeks ago. We made spine the dev costs, so that’s good. We got to pay ourselves. Adam and Seth didn’t really take any paychecks until March of last year, and all of us were being paid I guess just what you’d call “below the poverty line” for the last three years, so it’s good to finally have the ability to backpay ourselves at a reasonable rate.
It’s been weird. For a while, the course of the studio was, “Make games fast enough that the studio can easily survive.” Then the next two years was, “Make games fast enough that Sam’s not gonna be dead prior to they come out—and likewise he survives” [laughs]. My most recent PET scan came spine clear, and that was as several months out from my last chemo as the time where it turned out I had cancer again. That one feels real to me. That feels good. I’ve had some complications from having someone else’s blood system now, However they’re trivial points like being itchy and sometimes having my liver be attacked. It’s whatever.
We did not expect the response we’ve gotten along with Crashlands. We’ve had so several individuals write in and be so happy about how the game makes them feel and how they’re able to spend so much time in it. The reality that we were able to successfully convert just what was a rather sort of doom-y situation in to this 60-hour marathon of joy for thousands of individuals across the planet… it’s simply rather surreal. Being a game dev is strange in that you make a bunch of stuff, However the most exciting it gets is clicking a damn button to launch it. You simply click. It’s not crossing the complete line along with individuals cheering. It’s a fairly casual thing.
Even now, looking at the numbers of individuals playing and the revenue coming in—those are great, However it’s all numbers on a screen. So the only real connection we have actually is as quickly as individuals send us notes and say points like, “I haven’t connected along with a game like this since the very first time I played The Legend of Zelda.” Getting stuff like that is simply wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. It shows us that we did it, and that we get hold of to survive and continue doing it. It wasn’t the case that we simply survived as a studio or that I simply survived the cancer treatment. We somehow managed to thrive in both of those dimensions at the same time. I’m incredibly proud.
Kotaku: Thank you for your time.
To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or discover your man on Twitter @vahn16.
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