Every game on Steam has a store page, a trailer, a release date. What it usually doesn't have is the story of the people who spent years arguing over game mechanics, sprite sizes, missed deadlines, and the philosophy behind their company name.
That's what this series is for. In "Before Credits," YellowHearts sits down with the developers behind the games we publish and asks them to talk, really talk, about how they got here.
TBA Studio didn't start as eight people. It started as seven, all founders, all classmates in Apple Developer Academy program. Five of the seven were actively building games together when they discovered a talented illustrator during the program and pulled her in too, bringing the count to eight.
Today the roles look like this: Alfred is project manager and also handles game design, level design, and sound design. Vincent, Tessy, and Dixon are coders. Carlos and Jess started as illustrators, later joined by Limina as an additional illustrator. Nabil is the animator.
For most of that early period, the studio didn't have a name at all. "We're pretty perfectionist about this kind of thing," Vincent said. "We wanted a name that actually meant something, so we just kept putting it off and focused on finishing the project instead."
TBA stands for what you'd guess: to be announced. But the team has since built a fuller meaning around it. As Nabil put it, "where good ideas are waiting to be announced."
Vincent adds the fuller version: games with the best ideas and the best mechanics, all still waiting to be found, and TBA Studio as the group meant to find them.
The Early Years…
TypeCaster existed before TBA Studio did, in a way. During the academy program, an earlier version of the team built a first prototype in 2D pixel art, closer in style to something like Undertale than the 2.5D action RPG it is now.
Nabil wasn't part of that early build. He remembers watching from a distance, recognizing a few faces, mostly Jess, and slowly getting to know the rest of the group as the program moved toward its final project phase.
"We started talking, and it turned out they played a lot of the same games I did," Nabil said. "The way we nerded out about mechanics and art, it just clicked."
He started sitting near their group during class. Then, right as the final project period opened up, Jess asked if he wanted to join the team.
While TBA was still forming, Nabil was working on a separate project with another group, and got to know the team informally during the same run-up period. When the final project began, both sides had been quietly hoping to work together. Nabil had helped build an early trailer for them, which sealed it.
"It's funny," Nabil said. "We were checking each other out the whole time and neither side said anything until it mattered."
Learning Along the Way
Finishing a school project and running a studio turned out to be very different problems. None of the founders had prior experience with budgeting, publisher outreach, or the general business side of running an indie studio, and there was no shortcut around it.
"We really learned it as we went," Vincent said. Between the end of the academy program and the start of real development, most of the team also had to take on other jobs to cover basic expenses. One member, Jess, went abroad to continue studies in the UK, working with the rest of the team long-distance ever since.
The team’s biggest early struggle was technical. Nabil as example. He came from a motion graphics background with no prior experience animating for a game engine, and Unity wasn't forgiving about it.
"I'd build a character animation and suddenly Unity's telling me the sprite has too many frames," he said. "The file size would balloon to hundreds of megabytes for one animation. I had to go back and relearn how to animate directly inside Unity to get it under control."
Project management evolved too. Alfred's sprint planning was solid from the start, according to Nabil, but the team's ability to manage a growing backlog improved a lot over time, especially once an angel investor came on board and opened the door to continuing development well past the original school project.
Finding Their Niche
"We used to think, let's make rage games," Vincent said. "But we realized pretty quickly that approach limits your audience. So we moved toward familiar genres, like RPGs, and instead put the unique twist into the mechanics themselves."
TypeCaster's typing-based combat is the clearest result of that shift. In another one of the team's projects, a sandbox game, the twist is a built-in bug the player has to exploit to progress.
The visual direction of TypeCaster went through its own evolution. What started as chibi pixel art was refined into the current 2.5D look, with Nabil citing Cult of the Lambs as a reference point for camera angle and animation style, and the broader visual language pulling from Don't Starve Together's cardboard, Victorian-era textures.
Early on, the palette was kept close to black and white on purpose, to keep the player's focus on typing and mechanics rather than competing with a busy background. "The genre stays approachable, we just try to give it a fun twist," Nabil added.
If TBA Studio Were a Band...
Every interview needs one question nobody prepares for, so at YellowHearts, we saved ours for last. We asked TBA Studio what genre of band they'd be, and the room took a minute to land on an answer.
"Math rock," Carlos decided.
It's a fitting comparison. Math rock bands are known for irregular time signatures, technical playing, and melodies that don't resolve the way you expect them to, all traits that map surprisingly well onto a studio built by self-described perfectionists who spent a year debating a name before settling on one.
The genre also tends to reward patient listeners over casual ones, much like a typing-combat souls-like asks a bit more of its players than the genre norm.
"If you're the kind of person who puts on math rock as your life soundtrack," one of the team joked, "TypeCaster's probably for you too."
We didn't ask them about the game itself much in this conversation, on purpose. That's next. In Part 2 of Before the Credits, Yellow Hearts will go inside the design decisions behind TypeCaster, why this game have typing mechanics, and what small things that didn't make it into the final game.
Here's a teaser for the second part of this interview:
