"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission," modeler Ryan Yan said, recounting his team's mantra going into GDC 2024. Yan and creative director Liam Cribbs were in San Francisco to pitch publishers on a school project they'd been plugging away at for nine months with a handful of friends at NYU.
Mycopunk, which released in early access this month under the Devolver Digital umbrella, is a fast-paced co-op FPS about underpaid robot exterminators cleansing a planet of its fungal infection. "A lot of us are big fans of co-op shooters, so we wanted to make our dream version of a Deep Rock, Helldivers, and Risk of Rain-type game," Cribbs said in a recent interview with PC Gamer.
It's pretty darn fun, and earned enough buzz to bag a "Very Positive" Steam rating with over 1,400 reviews. Impressive for what started as homework, but the student team—now graduated and united under the studio name Pigeons at Play—feels lucky to have gotten this far.
Cribbs and Yan had gone mostly out of pocket to attend GDC (the school covered one ticket, but not travel or board) armed with nothing but a laptop and a pitch deck their professors helped them with.
"It was a bit of a gamble," Cribbs recounted, "because when we got to GDC, we didn't actually have any meetings set up. We were just sort of talking to people trying to get something set up."
"It was pretty important that we get people to play the game and that we make this experience worth it, because we were paying to fly to San Francisco for this, it'd be a waste if not," Yan added.
If you build it…
The pair walked around the show floor every day and attended industry parties every night, setting up improvised demo stations and showing Mycopunk to anyone and everyone.
"We just found areas to set the game up wherever we could, or just have people play it while they're sitting or waiting in line for other things," Yan said.
"We set up next to people who had paid for booths. That might have upset some people," Yan added with a guilty smile, "but I think that the people at the venue appreciated that we were this little indie game going out of our way to set their stuff up. Nobody told us to leave."
"We'd go to these post-GDC parties every night and just find a counter to set up the game, which was kind of fun. There weren't any publishers walking by, but a lot of our longtime players and playtesters we met there," Cribbs said.
Yan added that at one Day of the Devs event, an impromptu Mycopunk demo pulled enough of a crowd that other devs started setting up next to them.
"I think for us there was a lot of luck involved. But also, you pick your luck, right? You put yourself in a situation to be lucky. And I think we absolutely did that."
That luck manifested in a meeting with Devolver Digital. The publisher kept in touch after GDC, but Pigeons at Play wouldn't ink a deal until September 2024, four months after they'd already turned Mycopunk in and gotten an A.
"Actually no, we didn't get an A because [the class] was pass/fail. So we passed," Yan clarified. "If we'd gotten an A, that would've been much better for my GPA."
While the traditional "make a prototype, find a publisher" route is just one way to go about game development—others just make a great game and then publish it themselves—Pigeons at Play believes there are lots of great games that never make it out of the classroom because students don't consider it a real possibility.
"We hope that students at NYU and other schools will take this as an example that you can pitch games so long as you have a concrete plan," Yan said, "and most importantly, that your demo is fun. It doesn't happen enough."
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