We spoke with Nathan Wooten, founder of Wooshido Studio and the maker of Toaster Defense. Let’s hear his opinion about his action-strategy game Toaster Defense and the video game industry.
Azfar Rayan: Hello Nathan! How about sharing a bit about yourself?
Nathan Wooten: Sure! I’m the solo indie developer of Toaster Defense. I’ve wanted to make games since I was a child, and it only took a few decades to make that dream come to fruition. I went to college for Video Game Art & Animation, and after not being able to find a job in the game development industry, I taught myself C# so I could code in Unity. With some hard work and determination, I was able to release my first commercial video game on Steam!
Azfar Rayan: When did you start playing games, and how did you get involved with making one?
Nathan Wooten: I was 4 years old when I played my first video game. I still vividly remember my parents getting my siblings and me the Super Mario World and SNES bundle at Christmas in 1994. I immediately fell in love with video games and knew that I wanted to create something as awesome as I was playing.
Throughout my childhood, I tried to use free programs, such as GameMaker and RPG Maker, to create games. I made some fan Mario and Pokémon games for fun, but they never were completed and released. I was just some ten year old kid making fan games for fun. I dabbled in those programs periodically throughout high school as well, then pursued a degree for game development after I graduated. Then I dropped out of college — twice.
I had a lot of things going on in my life and I just kind of gave up and got a desk job. After four years at that job, the CFO of the company and my director pulled me into an office and told me that I had hit the ceiling on my salary. At that moment I “woke up” and remembered that I wanted to pursue game development, and I enrolled back in the college I dropped out of to continue my degree. Once my workplace found out that I was going back to school, they forced me to resign one month shy of my fifth anniversary with the company for pursuing a career that was not company related.
I kind of went off topic there, but I think it is important to share the whole story. After it all, game development still found a while back in my life.
Azfar Rayan: Why Toaster Defense? What motivated you to come up with such a unique theme?
Nathan Wooten: After graduating college and not finding a job as an artist at a studio, I started to teach myself programming. I started working on a genre that seemingly everyone starts with; platforming. It was just so convenient to make something in the platforming genre since there are so many resources to learn how to make one on YouTube.
When I had decent platforming mechanics in the game, I actually spent a lot of time creating a story based level. I wanted to create a narrative game and spent a lot of time working on things like dialogue and level transitions when you hit the end of the screen, like in Celeste. I pretty much had the whole tutorial level blocked out, but then I took a step back to look at the scope of what I was intending to work on. As a newbie game developer, would I actually be able to finish this? How long would it take? What is unique about this platformer? I determined that what I was trying to make was too much for a single developer that was still learning C#. I pivoted the game to become a single-screen tower defense game with platforming mechanics.
This was something I thought could be really unique! There aren’t very many games like mine, which I’ve come to find out is a blessing and a curse. I actually got the idea from seeing a picture of the Mario Bros Arcade game. I thought it would be cool for enemies to funnel down from the top, but unlike the arcade game where they go through a pipe and return to the top of the stage, I wanted the enemies to have an objective at the bottom. The objective ended up being to destroy a cute toaster. What a cruel task I gave them!
As for the theme of the game, I’ve always been a fan of movies like Brave Little Toaster and Toy Story. I knew that I wanted the characters to be inanimate objects. There were a couple of reasons for that. The first reason was that, again, I enjoy movies where characters are inanimate objects brought to life, and I wanted to do the same. The second reason is that modeling inanimate objects, like a toaster, is much easier to model, rig, and animate than a humanoid character. I guess you could say I took the easy path.
Azfar Rayan: Did you find it challenging when you formed Wooshido? How did you cope with them?
Nathan Wooten: There wasn’t anything particularly challenging about forming the Wooshido. Mostly just a lot of paperwork. Right now, it’s just me working as a solo developer. I would imagine things would have been a bit more challenging if I had a full team of developers working with me.
Azfar Rayan: Did you develop the game all by yourself or find individuals to join your team when you had the idea of making Toaster Defense?
Nathan Wooten: I developed the game 98% alone while holding down a job to pay the bills. I had a couple people help me with a few things in the game. My brother created the music, and a friend of mine from college made the 2D character art. I also did purchase a few Unity Assets of the Asset Store such as sound effects and particle effects. Other than that, I did all the art and coding for the game. I am also lucky enough to have a small following and I had a select number of members from my Discord server playtest the game.
Azfar Rayan: Do you have any prior experience in making games with other developers?
Nathan Wooten: None. Zilch. Zero. Unless you want to count developing games with classmates in college. When it comes to the professional side of game development, I do not have any experience working with anyone in the field.
Azfar Rayan: Do you have any mentors or people from your past that helped inspire you to get involved in this project?
Nathan Wooten: The closest thing I have to a mentor is my professor from college, Henry Bawden. He has been a professional in the video game industry since 2006, working on titles such as “Alvin and the Chipmunks”, “Tale of Despereaux”, and “Knock ‘Em Downs: World’s Fair”. I enjoyed my time learning under him, and learned a lot of the core foundation that led me to continue to work as a solo game developer. I do still keep in contact with him a few times throughout the year. During one of my playtesting phases, I sent the game to him to play, and he gave me really good feedback that helped pivot the game to become what it is today. Honestly, without that feedback, there probably wouldn’t even be a story mode in the game!
Azfar Rayan: Besides the Steam launch, do you plan to publish the game on consoles or mobile platforms?
Nathan Wooten: My goal is to get the game on the Nintendo Switch. With Toaster Defense being the kind of arcade-y game that it is, I think it would do really well on the Switch.
Azfar Rayan: Toaster Defense was nominated as the Most Innovative Game at GDEX 2021. Did this recognition motivate you to make more unique games in the future?
Nathan Wooten: First of all, it was really cool to get nominated! I’ve never been nominated for anything prior to that. Maybe one of these days I’ll be lucky enough to win something too! However, I don’t think it will motivate me to try to push for something really unique. I feel that games can sometimes organically form, which was the case with Toaster Defense. From the start, I didn’t plan for the game to be a tower defense mixed with platforming, it just kind of happened. For my next game, whatever it ends up being, if it is something really unique, that’s awesome! If not, that’s also awesome! I’m not going to think too hard about forcing something to be unique, and would rather focus on making fun gameplay that players will enjoy.
Azfar Rayan: What are your favorite games?
Nathan Wooten: My favorite games consist of Ocarina of Time, Super Mario RPG, FF7R, Breath of the Wild and obviously Super Mario World will always be special to me for being the first game I played. I also enjoy games that I get to play with others, with two of the games I play quite often with other people being Smash Bros and Overwatch. Oh, and also Minecraft, mostly because when I’m having a creative block development wise but still have an itch to create, I go to Minecraft to build something that randomly inspires me as an outlet.
Honestly, there are so many games that I didn’t mention that I really like, but it’s so hard to list them all!
Azfar Rayan: What else are you up to when you are not making or playing gaming? What are your hobbies and interests?
Nathan Wooten: I do have a YouTube channel that I like to create videos for. I’ve enjoyed filming and editing videos since high school. On my current channel, where I go by the moniker “Woots”, I’m focusing on creating game development videos as a way to combine two things I enjoy. Feel free to check out the channel if you are interested! Since I’ve been developing Toaster Defense, I haven’t gotten to upload as much as I used to, but now that the game is out, I am trying to focus on creating more videos for the channel.
Azfar Rayan: So, what does the future hold for Nathan Wooten, and where can we expect to find you?
Nathan Wooten: As for my foreseeable future, I am currently continuing to work on a few additional features for Toaster Defense, with the biggest one being local co-op. Since I was teaching myself how to program during the game’s development, I focused a lot on the single player experience. I always had multiplayer in mind, but since I was a newbie coder, I was too afraid to hop into coding for multiple players. Now that the game has come out, and I’m more experienced than when I started, I have been getting a lot of requests for co-op. I’m currently reworking the coding in my game to work with a second player. After that, I would like to make a push to publish the game on Nintendo Switch! Since that would be my first experience publishing on console, I’m sure that will come with its own hurdles, but I’m excited to take them on!
After that, we’ll see what happens. I can create anything I want!
Azfar Rayan: Anything for your fans at GamesCreed?
Nathan Wooten: Thank you for taking the time to read this! Hopefully, you found this enjoyable or even inspirational if you want to create games of your own! Please go check out Toaster Defense on Steam. I’ve worked really hard on it, and am always open to constructive criticism!
Many thanks to Nathan for taking his time to answer my questions and doing the interview with us. We wish him the best with his game Toaster Defense and his future projects. Keep up with Nathan Wooten’s works by following him on Twitter.
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