Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?
Cutout Village is a game that takes you back to your childhood by letting you make paper crafts and build an entire village. We do use the city-builder label in the game's description, but I think it's really more of a very relaxing crafting game
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
When I was a kid, I really loved making paper crafts. One day, while looking for this kind of activity for my young children, I realized that paper cutouts weren't really popular anymore, and that it was surprisingly difficult to find good-quality templates for little paper houses.
That made me think it could be interesting to create a game based on that kind of craft, but add some game mechanics to make it more appealing to a modern audience. So we added things like collecting fruit to earn money to buy new templates, trading with the villagers, a small story about rural depopulation, the ability to upgrade your scissors and skills, and so on.
Our intention is that people who enjoy playing the game will also become curious about doing this kind of craft in real life. That's why we've added the option to download every template you unlock in the game as a PDF, so you can print them out and actually build them yourself.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?
When we make independent games, we never try to follow market trends or take inspiration from other video games. We always try to make something very personal, so the result is probably quite different from most other games.
All of the mechanics, especially the cutting, folding and gluing, were created from scratch. We went through a lot of trial and error until we found something that conveyed exactly what we wanted.
We've also put a huge amount of care into the art. We've spent several years designing the houses and characters entirely by hand, printing them out and actually testing them as physical paper crafts. I think you can feel that love and attention when you play the game.
We weren't trying to create a contemporary visual style. Instead, we took inspiration from the paper cutouts we made as children, which were often hand-painted with watercolors, as well as animated series like Maple Town and Around the World in 80 Days with Willy Fog, which we used to watch when we were kids making these kinds of crafts.
I think that gives the game quite a unique personality.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?
Well, since we launched the game in Early Access, there are still quite a few things that haven't made it into the game yet.
One of the things we really want to add, and are already working on, is a free-build mode where you can build your village without any restrictions. The story mode, which takes around seven or eight hours to complete, has some limitations when it comes to designing and building your village. We'd love to give players a mode where they have complete freedom.
There are also other things we'd like to consider depending on how well the game does in Early Access, such as the possibility of letting players color their own paper templates.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?
There are a lot of things that took an absurd amount of work, because almost everything was made by hand and physically tested on paper.
But I think the biggest one was the final castle in the game. It's a paper craft that takes around an hour to build and has close to a thousand individual steps between cutting, folding and gluing. It took us several months of development. But I think it was worth it. We wanted the game to have something that felt almost like a "final boss," and the castle ended up being that.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?
We've had plenty of bugs to fix, but honestly, I don't think we've had any that we actually wanted to keep. 😂
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
We'd like players to feel relaxed while they're playing, but we also want them to finish the game wanting to do some crafts in real life. If people print out the PDFs or even buy the paper-craft books from the game that we've published on Amazon, that would make us really happy.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
Well, we've been making independent games for 28 years, so when we started working on something as unusual as this, we already knew it was going to be complicated and involve a huge amount of work.
If anything, I wish we'd known from the beginning that we were going to launch in Early Access. That was actually a decision we made after releasing the demo and seeing that there was a community interested in continuing to play the game and helping us improve it.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
I hope some people are still making paper crafts in real life because they rediscovered that hobby thanks to this game.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
I think if you're looking for something different and charming, you should give it a try. We've tried to make a really beautiful game, and honestly, I think we've succeeded.
Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everything you’ve told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game? Why should we believe you?
Well, even though the question sounds like a joke, we actually do make games in a rather unusual way, and people often tell us that our projects aren't really games. For example, there's Minabo – A walk through life, where we created a life simulator that encouraged players to reflect on the passage of time and their relationships with other people. Another example is Cloudgazer: A Game About Watching Clouds, where you simply look at clouds and try to find hidden shapes.
We've done something similar with Cutout Village. It's designed to connect real life with life on a screen. But I think it's genuinely fun, and mechanics like collecting fruit, trading, and even the narrative make it more than just a paper-craft simulator. So yes, I think we can officially confirm that it is, in fact, probably a game. 😄
Rose: How has previous experience in making games in a large scale setting prepared you for a solo or small indie team game making?
We started making games under the DevilishGames name back in 1998, when we were just a group of friends still in high school.
At first, we made games for free, simply because we wanted to learn. Then, little by little, we started turning it into a professional career.
We've gone through many different stages over the years, from J2ME games to Flash, then mobile, and now we're mainly focused on PC and consoles. But we've always kept the same spirit and the same desire to keep learning, improving, and creating games that are completely different from one another.
That said, independent games aren't the only thing we do. We also have another brand called Spherical Pixel, where we develop educational and advertising games for clients. So we have quite a lot of experience working on different kinds of projects as well.
Rose: What’s a common mistake you see across all size developers you would warn new or current devs about?
Perhaps the most common mistake is starting with a project that's simply too big and not being realistic about your limitations, whether they're technical, artistic, or financial.
We see game development as a marathon. We're not trying to make one hugely successful game and then stop. What we're really trying to achieve is long-term stability as a company and to keep making games for many years.
Rose: This industry is known to be unforgiving, what are some event tips you have for indie devs?
I don't really like giving advice. I think everyone has to find their own path and their own formula.
In our case, our formula is to take on client work through Spherical Pixel and use the money we make from that to fund the independent projects we genuinely want to make with DevilishGames, without worrying too much about whether they'll be successful or not.
Although, of course, we'd absolutely love for them to be successful! 😂