Featured Designers: Brainfruit Studio
Today I am excited to welcome Rob and Garrett from Brainfruit Studio to the blog. As usual we'll begin with some quick background info on the designers and then I'll ask 3 questions. Let's begin!
Rob Dubbin has been into making games since they were a kid in the late nineties (shoutout to the ZZT forums on AOL). As an adult they've had an Emmy-winning career in television, writing and producing for Stephen Colbert, first at The Colbert Report and then for his Late Show. Rob took a detour into tech when they and Stephen co-created Scripto, a collaborative creative tool, and Rob ran that for several years before moving back into games. In addition to brainfruit Rob is a cohost of the Eggplant game design podcast, where they just wrapped a yearlong "book club" playing through every game in UFO 50 collection. It's been a long and exciting journey back to where they started!
Garrett Miller has spent his life making things — art, games, software, and websites. He grew up on a farm in Maryland, studied at Oberlin College, and went on to spend two decades as a designer, engineer, and product head through the unicorn eras of Opower, Mapbox, Slack, and Figma. Garrett has created several notable collaborative art projects like The Envelope Collective, which engaged artists from over 30 countries, and Doodle or Die, a viral online drawing game with over 3 million players.
Together as Brainfruit, Rob and Garrett have created two games together: Tide Breakers, a 6-player city council simulator set in a futuristic coastal city, and Starfriends, a social-deduction party game that fits in a deck of cards.
How did you two meet and what inspired the creation of Brainfruit Studio?
We had been internet friends for years, through a group that initially met at an XOXO festival in Portland. As we got deeper into our tech careers, we realized we had similar visions for a return to creative work, and thought our skill sets might complement each other. When Rob received a commission to make a game for the 2024 No Quarter Exhibition, they thought it would be a great chance to try out a collaboration – and the result was the award-nominated, world-touring six-player city council simulator Tide Breakers, so we've been at it ever since!
It seems like you both have varied background experience, what are the areas where you connect most? What do you suppose led your collaboration to center on game design as opposed to something else?
There are a couple things that have really especially worked about this collaboration. We're both people who work hard but also require time to wander and ponder in order to access our best stuff while we're working hard. Having figured that out, we've been able to meet ambitious deadlines while trusting and supporting each other's life-balancing needs. We also just share a sense of zaniness, and we're both drawn to delight and surprise. Games emerged naturally both as a place where our skill sets converged (Garrett's visual, Rob's a writer, we're both into code) and a medium where you as a creator have so much control over the levers of delight for your player.
Tell us about your upcoming game Starfriends. What is the origin story? What makes you most excited about it?
Rob had gotten into a habit of carrying around blank playing cards and sharpies, aka the best prototyping tools in the world. Earlier this year we were at the Game Developers Conference, more accurately at a bar hang that week, and some friends were talking about Letterboxd and debating what they thought each other would rate certain films, without looking at their pages. Rob realized that there's a lot of wiggle room to the "standard" star ratings we see everywhere. They're so subjective but we live at an absurd time that has us rating everything. Rob was drawn to the idea of seeing different ratings in front of different people, and trying to think of one film, animal, food, etc that would satisfy all those ratings, kind of triangulating between your mental models of your friends.
So, Rob sketched out the game onto those blank cards and we played it throughout the week of GDC. It worked right away, with both friends and strangers. The game’s immediate resonance and built-in simplicity gave us confidence to take it to production as our first commercial game. As we developed the topic list and started to think about a visual identity, we turned to some characters Garrett had drawn for a previous Bluesky project. There’s a timeless charm to goofy grinning faces, one of those classic forms it's always a joy to reapproach. Garrett expanded our cast of characters, and we discovered what to call them in the name of the game itself -- Starfriends had arrived! We're stoked to have Starfriends on Kickstarter now and we've had a blast adapting it further into a digital version, a bluesky bot, and a discord bot... and we love getting to talk about the game, thanks for having us!
Check out the Starfriends Kickstarter