Neo Cab

You might remember me as a programmer on titles like Firewatch (2016) and Twitter (2009-2014), or as an actor in Space Jam (1995). Welcome to the Neo Cab dev log. 

Here we’ll be sharing concept art, code, music, visual inspiration and all sorts of ephemera produced when making an indie game.

I’ve been trying to tell stories with games since I first laid my hands on code. It was in the first grade—we were writing commands to make the LOGO Turtle walk around the screen. As soon as I got him to walk, I asked my teacher about making the turtle talk, and giving him a house, or maybe a whole turtle village and… well, my ambitions to make the next Sierra or LucasArts game were far beyond the abilities of a six-year-old on a Commodore 64.

Games were always like this, for me— just within reach, but not quite attainable. I kept coding, though, which eventually led me to Twitter, and then to Campo Santo.

Being part of the Firewatch team was the chance of a lifetime— the atmosphere in the studio was open, collaborative, and interdisciplinary. I started building out our dialog recording pipeline, and by the end of the project I was coding gameplay logic, hand-drawing maps, writing filler dialog, and localizing the game in five languages. It was insanely fun, and unbelievably hard. Even in all my years of launching updates to Twitter.com, I’d never felt an honest-to-god panic attack until the day before we threw the switch and Firewatch went live.

The response to the game was unbelievable— two years after launch and people are still reaching out with deeply personal stories about how Firewatch touched their lives. People dealing with loss, people looking to make a change in their lives— a 14 year old kid saved a lookout tower, for crying out loud.

That itch I’d had since I first made that turtle move across the screen— to build a world that players felt they could live inside? That only intensified.

So a little over a year ago, we started assembling our amazing team, Chance Agency, and we’re so excited to start sharing some of our work for the first time. Neo Cab will invite you to explore the busy streets and back alleys of a vibrant border city, interact with a large and diverse cast of characters, and figure out how to stay human in a society disrupted by automation.

However you found your way to this {mailing list | blog}, please fix yourself a drink, grab a seat, and SMASH that subscribe button, friend. We’ve got stories to share— tales of worldbuilder wishes and developer dreams. These will be told for the kids in the back row who’ve wanted to make games since before they can remember. We hope our posts about the way our art, code, stories, and music were made and pieced into a whole will end up slotting into your own personal gamedev inventory in some small way. At the very least, we hope sharing with you will keep us inspired to make this the best possible version of Neo Cab we can, and that some of that inspirado will be contagious.