'My kids weren't born yet, and now they're in primary school learning how to make their own games': Game Dev Tycoon studio head talks taking 10 years to make his upcoming inn sim, Tavern Keeper
Game Dev Tycoon, a fun little management game about running a development studio that went viral in the early 2010s, turns 11 years old in August—an age it'll reach around the time its creators, Greenheart Games, are ready to send their next title into early access.
That's a long old time, even by game development standards. I recently had a chance to sit down at a roundtable with the studio's director and manager Patrick Klug to get an early peek into Tavern Keeper.
Tavern Keeper, even though it's only headed into Early Access later this year, is a game rife with little details. In it, you maintain a series of fix-'er-uppers throughout a fantasy setting inspired by Discworld—designating rooms, hiring and managing staff, and buying questionable barrels of booze from swamp ogres. It's a management sim in the vein of Two Point Hospital, only you're dolling out pints instead of prescription pills.
It also has an obscenely detailed furniture customisation option under the hood that lets you tear apart furnishings plank by plank, rotating and scaling them to your heart's content. If you're at all familiar with what people do with MMO housing, it's easily on that kind of level. Klug showed me that there's even a map dedicated to letting players build their own furnishings (which they can share via code) without restrictions—with literal hundreds of pieces pre-loaded.
It's overall a huge step up from Game Dev Tycoon, but that's still a long time to spend fine-tuning a game. When I asked about the how and why of that, Klug responded: «It's emotional to talk about this, because it's easy to say on paper 'we took ten years'—but ten years is a long time. Like, my kids weren't born yet, and now they're in primary school learning how to make their own games.»
Tavern Keeper's long journey, however, clearly wasn't intentional: «I don't want to say that we set out to work 10 years in a game, I don't think anyone in their right mind would do that … In a way, though, we're super
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