Jack and Al sit down with Matt, creative director at Saigon Dragon Studios, to discuss Space Tales, an RTS inspired by Starcraft with a distinctive retro-futuristic art style hiding surprisingly dark cosmic horror themes, and what it takes to build a strategy game from an emerging development scene in Vietnam.
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This interview episode features Matt, creative director at Saigon Dragon Studios, discussing the development of Space Tales, a Starcraft-inspired RTS currently in early access. The conversation covers the studio’s origin as a Vietnamese outsourcing art house that pivoted into original game development, the unexpected tonal contrast between the game’s Jetsons-style retro art and its Lovecraftian cosmic horror themes, lessons learned from an underwhelming 2023 Kickstarter campaign, and the difficult creative decisions involved in balancing world-building against character-driven storytelling. The hosts also explore the broader challenges facing RTS as a genre and what success looks like for an indie studio operating in a country with a still-developing game industry.
Critical Moves Podcast – Space Tales Developer Interview Show Notes
Episode Title: Space Tales Developer Interview with Saigon Dragon Studios
Hosts: Jack, Al
Guest: Matt, Creative Director at Saigon Dragon Studios
Episode Length: ~64 minutes
Episode Summary
This episode features an extended conversation with Matt, creative director at Saigon Dragon Studios, a Vietnamese game development company behind Space Tales, an RTS currently in early access. The discussion traces the studio’s evolution from a small outsourcing art house into original game development, examines the surprising creative choices behind Space Tales’s retro-futuristic art style paired with dark cosmic horror themes, and covers hard lessons learned from a failed Kickstarter campaign. Matt discusses the difficulty of balancing character-driven storytelling against world-building, unpacks the game’s unique monster-capture mechanic and faction-based gameplay variety, and reflects candidly on the risks facing RTS as a genre and what sustainable success looks like for an indie studio.
Video Game Development in Vietnam
Matt explains that outside of VNG, a dominant industry player, dedicated game development studios have only meaningfully emerged in Vietnam over the past five to six years, with the country’s game industry historically built around outsourcing work rather than original titles.
Saigon Dragon Studios’ Origin Story
Matt traces the studio’s history back 11 years to a three-person outsourcing operation doing 2D and 3D art work, which grew to roughly 70 artists during the pandemic-era gaming boom. After a failed attempt at hyper-casual mobile game development, the small development team pivoted to RTS, a genre they understood from prior outsourcing work on other RTS titles including They Are Billions.
What Makes Space Tales Unique
Matt describes Space Tales as an RTS heavily inspired by Starcraft, featuring single-player story and survival modes. He highlights the game’s central design conceit: each enemy faction plays like an entirely different game rather than simply offering reskinned units, forcing players to rebuild their strategic approach with each new planet. The game also features a monster-capture mechanic allowing players to recruit and redeploy captured creatures in battle, with plans to expand this system beyond its current two options.
First Impressions: Story, Art, and Tutorial Design
Jack describes his surprise at the game’s narrative depth, opening on a funeral scene before easing players into RTS mechanics through room exploration and tutorial-style objectives. Matt explains this intro sequence resulted directly from bringing on a professional screenwriter, who identified that dropping players immediately onto the first planet made tutorializing and world-building far more difficult than intended.
Production Value and Background Animation
Jack praises the game’s unexpected production value, particularly detailed background animations that play out during exploration sequences, including tentacled creatures dragging soldiers from wrecked ships. Matt explains these sequences originated partly from repurposed boss-fight animations and were specifically designed to reinforce the sense that the game’s antagonist, the Nexera, watches players constantly, adding narrative weight that the game’s lighter art style might otherwise undercut.
Jetsons Meets Cosmic Horror: An Accidental Tonal Contrast
Al describes the game’s aesthetic as “Jetsons meets worms,” noting the disconnect between its bright, retro-cartoonish art style and its genuinely dark Lovecraftian themes. Matt reveals this contrast was entirely unintentional, rooted in his personal passion for Warhammer 40K-style army painting rather than any deliberate design strategy, and that the mismatch only became apparent once players began commenting on it publicly.
The 2023 Kickstarter and What Went Wrong
Matt candidly discusses the studio’s underwhelming November 2023 Kickstarter campaign, attributing its failure to launching far too early with an incomplete demo lacking story content, a functioning progression system, or the monster-capture mechanic. He describes a formative moment at a Singapore gaming convention where the team realized, presenting with only a laptop and printed posters, that they had fundamentally misjudged how much content was needed to generate interest, and that Kickstarter’s effectiveness as a marketing tool had diminished significantly compared to its earlier years.
Publisher Conversations and Choosing Creative Independence
Following the Kickstarter’s underperformance, Matt describes spending six to seven months pursuing publisher interest before concluding the constant rework required for pitch demos was consuming development time better spent finishing the actual game. The studio ultimately chose to self-publish, retaining full creative control.
Imperialism and Colonial Themes: An Unintentional Connection
Al raises the game’s prominent imperialism and colonial expansion themes, noting the interesting resonance with Vietnam’s own colonial history. Matt states plainly that this connection was not deliberate, crediting his personal influences—Dune, Warhammer 40K, and European graphic novels—for the game’s tone, while acknowledging the studio deliberately avoids anything resembling direct political commentary, viewing it as too difficult to execute well without breaking immersion.
Character-Driven Story Versus World-Building
Matt describes a pivotal moment when bringing on a professional screenwriter, who asked directly whether the story should be world-building-driven or character-driven. The team chose character-driven storytelling, which Matt argues allows for shorter, more emotionally resonant dialogue without requiring extensive explanation of setting logistics, even though the underlying world details remain fully worked out internally for consistency.
The Discipline of Cutting Content
Matt describes the difficult editorial process of deciding what worldbuilding details make it into dialogue, citing an early draft where a single conversation attempted to explain the Nexera’s origins, behaviour, and consequences all at once, resulting in dialogue running five minutes long. Working with a professional writer taught the team to distribute exposition across multiple missions rather than front-loading it, trusting shorter, more digestible dialogue paired with optional lore items players can choose to read.
The Rule of Cool
Both hosts and Matt discuss the value of embracing stylistic flourishes, like a laser weapon being cocked like a shotgun despite using battery power, without over-explaining the mechanical logic behind them. Matt cites a favourite Noclip documentary about Doom 2016’s creative director, who included an iconic shotgun-cocking scene simply because it felt cool, as a direct inspiration for similar moments in Space Tales.
Franchise Potential and Space Tales 2
Jack raises the possibility that a sequel could narrow its scope to explore a single faction more deeply, following a pattern common in game franchises. Matt confirms the studio has extensive unused lore, including a fully developed explanation for the game’s core resource that ties directly into a planned narrative thread for a hypothetical Space Tales 2, though he stresses future development depends heavily on the first game’s success.
Life and Development Inside a Vietnamese Studio
Matt describes day-to-day studio life as largely free of cultural friction, crediting a shared passion for game development among the international and Vietnamese team members. He notes RTS remains a niche genre within Vietnam’s gaming market, which skews heavily toward mobile games and League of Legends, and that Space Tales’ Vietnamese localization has seen limited local traction so far.
Measuring Success
Matt defines the studio’s baseline success metric as generating enough sales to sustain the current development team for future DLC or a potential sequel, noting the game currently holds a 100% positive review rating on Steam. He states the studio has no plans to pivot toward genres more popular with the local Vietnamese market, viewing continued investment in traditional RTS as both a creative commitment and a strong signal to attract skilled local talent who see the project as a genuine passion effort.
The State of the RTS Market
Asked whether Space Tales could meaningfully shift the broader RTS market, Matt is candid that the genre remains inherently risky for publishers and investors, citing the divergent fates of recent RTS releases like Tempest Rising and Stormgate as evidence that no amount of individual talent guarantees commercial safety in the genre.
Early Access Timeline and Roadmap
Matt confirms the studio’s original two-to-three-month early access window has been extended, with full 1.0 release now targeted for late July rather than the initially projected timeline. He attributes the delay to prioritizing community-requested features, particularly a keybinding menu, along with earlier-than-planned localization work necessary for proper Steam visibility in non-English-speaking regions. The final campaign chapter and remaining faction balance work are reportedly complete, with polish remaining on cutscenes.
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Episode Verdict
This interview stands out for Matt’s consistent candour throughout, particularly his willingness to describe the Kickstarter failure, the accidental nature of the game’s tonal contrast, and the genuine uncertainty facing RTS as a commercial genre without any defensive spin. The discussion benefits from Jack’s detailed first-hand experience with the game, grounding abstract design conversations in specific concrete moments like background animations and voice acting choices. The segment on character-driven versus world-building storytelling offers genuinely useful insight into game writing constraints that extends well beyond Space Tales itself. Overall, this episode succeeds both as a spotlight on an under-covered developing game industry and as a broader meditation on the creative and commercial challenges facing anyone brave enough to build an RTS today.
Next Episode: Firaxis in Crisis: Is Civ 7 a Disaster, a Success, or Both?
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