Dustbusters Interview: Indie Devs Discuss Development of the Card Game
Many creations can be found in the broad category of board games.DustbitersIt is quite unusual in many ways. Card games come with no additional peripherals and are also quick and easy to use as an alternative to traditional tabletop games that require extensive set-up and reading. The experience is centred around cars, with each car having its own art and abilities which adds a lot to the gameplay.
Game Rant spoke with the Dustbiters Team, which is comprised of three indie developers: Terri Vollmann, Jan Willem Nijman, and Robbie Fraser. They have all made several games that were successful in the past including Minit and Broforce, Disc Room and Heavy Bullets. This interview has been edited to be more concise and clear.
Q: How did you get started on Dustbiters together?
Nijman: I was in Mozambique on a road trip in 2016 with Robbie. It was a wonderful trip. It was two weeks of cruising along the coast. However, it was very stressful crossing the border from South Africa. This was a wonderful trip. We were game designers and we played card games in the evenings. After about a week, we decided to just start making new things because that’s what our hobby is. Dustbusters was just that, and it was the result of being on a road trip, playing these at night.
It was a simple idea: “Why not we take this Mad Max-inspired game and make it about cars. Then we remove everything else.” It’s only cars. There is no landscape, no tiles or dice. We had only paper and pen and that was all we used to make the game. This was how the prototype was created. Terri and I had actually talked about card games a bit before that. Terri had created a game called Puller Kings and said, “Hey, if ever you want to make card games together, hit me up.” This was also in 2016. Robbie agreed and I told Robbie. Let’s see if Terri will join us. Terri said, “Yeah! This game is great!” This was the beginning story. We then played the game, and our friends liked it, even though they had to use all those thorny, scratched-up paper cards.
Later, Terri’s artwork was used to help us do the print-it-yourself session with many people. This was a good idea, but we had to refine it. We also needed to remove any parts that were not fun. years that were not great is, too. Because we’re all busy with other things, we took our time and basically said, “We’re not stressed about this.” When you have the time, get to work. We just finished the game over the past five years and tried to make it a reality as stress-freely as possible. This is a quick summary of our entire journey.
Vollmann: It was a feeling of “No stress”, just do it when it is convenient for you, and take it slow. We will talk once in a while. We didn’t put it above all else. It was always a fun thing we would do on the side, right up until the Kickstarter campaign.
Q: What was your first idea for a tabletop game?
Nijman: We tried making a game before that was not very successful. A box of Rummikub was ours, it’s a classic tabletop game. It was a favourite of my grandma. It involves matching numbers and colours and you must match them. It’s a cool game, and we tried to make a single-player solitaire dungeon-crawler out of that. We played Rummikub. I don’t understand why. It was a lot of fun to make something, and the next night Dustbiters was the first idea.
We didn’t think, “Oh, let’s make this a videogame,” and it wasn’t something that was about cars or this theme. These were the ideal circumstances and combinations of inspiration. It was clear from the beginning that we wanted to do this. We were lucky that it worked. Sometimes your idea is great and sometimes it’s not. This one felt right.
Q: How did the Dustbiters world come about?
Nijman: We talked about the inspiration for this piece being Mad Max. Terri then received it and we said, “We completely trust you.” Is it possible to create art for this? That was a big part of the setting, I believe.
Vollmann, Yes, but the cards also had names. They had mechanics and names. A lot of it was really just kinda wild, crazy, and fun, not like super-aggressive or serious, even though the world has a post-apocalyptic vibe to it. This was the inspiration for the entire art style. It was at the end of our discussion that we decided it would be fun to have a subculture within this world. They do it because it’s fun. We chose to make the theme ‘outskirts’ of civilization, rather than the whole world. We wanted it to be entertaining, fun, and interesting. Each car would have a personality surfing through this huge sandstorm.
Nijman: With everything that has happened in the past two years, including the pandemic and climate change, we realized that it was not a good idea to create a post-apocalyptic video game even though it is influenced by post-apocalyptic media. We wanted it to be fun and not depressing.
