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Written and edited by Ruby Lee Schembari

A small game development team based in Santa Cruz, California, known as Project Stardozing, has announced it is developing a game to present at the Seattle-based gaming convention PAX West in Sept. 

On the phone, I have Gameplay Programmer, 3D artist & current UC Santa Cruz student, Sophie DeGeorge, to tell me about her team’s upcoming project, Stardozing, a four-player “friend-slop” game where you play as little bears who dive into a procedurally generated cave with the goal of taking a nap. 

RLS: Hey Sophie, how’s your summer going?

SD: 
It’s been great. I have been, like, crazy busy with dev stuff, but I’m learning rapidly. 


RLS: When are you supposed to graduate from UCSC?  

SD: I’m set to graduate this fall. I only have two classes left. 

RLS: Has it been difficult to balance summer classes with working on your upcoming game stardozing? 

SD: Oh, for sure, I had to drop my 10-week summer class. I did, however, complete my 5-week class last week, but I had to miss some Game Grove meetings as a result.  

RLS: How are you funding your project? 

SD: Game Grove is giving us about $500 for the first couple of months, which we plan on spending on 2D art commissions for our Steam page; other than that, we have almost nothing. EBT is our publisher at the moment. 

RLS: When is your game set to release? 

SD: We’re looking to release the game next summer, but we aren’t sure what month yet.

RLS: What can players expect when they boot up your game? 

SD: I think players will find that this friend-slop game has a surprising amount of depth that’ll let them have a lot of fun.

RLS: What sets your game apart from other games like it? 

SD: I think our mechanical depth, definitely. I feel like there are a lot of other friend-slop games that focus on one really strong point that makes them feel like,” okay, this is, this is a loop, like we can turn this into a game.”

But with our game, I think, it’s all about how well you can express yourself as a player because we’re trying to make it so that anything you could really think to do with your friends, you can physically do in-game. I want to have a bunch of different player-to-player interactions and just give players options. Our focus is on depth and player options. 

RLS: What are some of the inspirations behind this game? 

SD: A big inspiration was Aggro Crab’s game, Peak. We got to go to Game Development Con in San Francisco last year, and while there, we attended a talk from their lead dev, Nick Kaman. After that, we immediately knew that we needed to create a friend-slop game.  That talk was just so inspiring and so much fun.

RLS: How many people besides yourself are working on the project? 

SD: Currently, there are four of us. There’s me, Aegis Micheal, Julia Manou, Samuel Spivey, and Sofia Aminifard. 

RLS: Are all of your UCSC students or alumni? 

SD: Yes, our technical designer and artist, Aegis Michael, just graduated this spring, and I’ll be graduating this fall. Everyone else will be either graduating this year or next.

RLS: I heard you’re going to present your game at PAX West. Is this true? 

SD: It’s true, and I’m very excited. 

RLS: What about the event are you most excited for? 

SD: Well, one reason I’m excited is that I heard the dev team, Aggro Crab, will be there, and I’m really hoping to talk with them again and tell them about our game, stardozing.    

RLS: What can you tell us about the event, if anything?  

SD: 
I’m not exactly sure. I guess I haven’t been before, so I don’t know. too much, but I’m excited.

RLS: Are you gonna have a booth for people to come up to? Or are you gonna take the big stage to present your game? 

SD:  I’m not sure about the stage part, but we should have a booth there. 
I don’t know too many specifics about where it’ll be or what day it’ll be on, you know, but we should have one. 

RLS: Are you guys gonna have, like, any promotional items, like swag or stickers?

SD:  It is very likely that we will have our demo to showcase. Were trying to make that happen right now. We’ve talked about making merch, but nothing concrete.   

RLS: How did you get into the event? 

SD: We got in through the Game Grove incubator at UCSC, which we are a part of. Thank you, Tyler Coleman. But I don’t know the specifics of how all that works. 

RLS: Do you guys, as a team, have any plans to keep working together after the game’s release next summer? 

SD: We’re hoping to make at least a few more games together, but hopefully many, many more if we can make it work. 

RLS: Do you guys have any plans once you guys graduate to establish a physical location or find a home base in a city somewhere in the US?

SD: 
Well, nothing concrete yet. We wanna stay somewhere on the West Coast. Northwest, perhaps. Potentially Vancouver, B.C.  

RLS: How far are you in terms of completing your game? 

SD: 
Good question. We’re about 5 months in, with around a year left. Well, I’d say we’re just getting past the vertical-flight space. I feel like prototyping came 1st, and then we’ve been in vertical splice for maybe the last month and a half or so. And we’re finally starting to move towards being ready for a demo. 


RLS: What is a vertical flight space? 

SD: If you took a piece of the game, like the whole idea of the game, um, and that was what you had in, like every, all of the… 
All of the main stuff is there. It might just not all be put together the right way. Um, like we have more stuff to add. 
But the core idea of the game is there. 

RLS: Given this is a “friend slop” game, can players expect stardozing to have an overarching story or message? 

SD: There is a bit of a narrative that we’re hoping to add more to our promo soon. At the moment, the main story is that players will play as space-faring star bears who are searching for a place to hibernate within a cave system on an alien planet. 

RLS: Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up? 

SD: I would definitely like to say thank you to our mentor, Tyler Coleman, and the Game Grove and incubator, because without them, I don’t know what development would have looked like. It’s been so helpful, and I’m learning so much from it, and we’re doing all these fun things. 
It’s really an amazing opportunity.

PAX West will take place at the Seattle Convention Center from Friday, Sept. 4, to Monday, Sept. 7. Project Stardozing has yet to announce when and where they’ll be showcasing their game at the event. If you’d like to learn more about stardozing, please click here to visit its Steam page. 

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