Match & Mastery, developed by Four Fox Interactive, is an upcoming turn-based tactics game with a match-3 twist and roguelike elements. Match & Mastery recently attended PAX AUS as part of the CODE team and have an upcoming conference at WePlay Expo in China!
We talked with FourFox Interactive founder Joe about Match & Mastery, Joe’s journey from audio production to game development, and his recent experiences at PAX!
Hey Joe, Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. How was PAX?
Yeah, it was awesome. I really love PAX. It’s one of the most positive environments I’ve ever been in. Especially being there with all the New Zealand teams, it’s such a collaborative environment where everyone’s helping each other. There’s literally no negativity. I come from an audio career, so I’ve done a lot of live gigs in big venues, and there’s always a bit of angst in those environments. But PAX is just so different. It’s a positive vibe. I’m always impressed by how they maintain that positive atmosphere.
This isn’t your first PAX for FourFox Interactive, is that right?
No, we’ve gone twice now. Our first one was very different. We went as a mobile game. We were the only mobile games on the floor. It’s changed a lot since then. We took it to GDC, talked to a bunch of people, and tried to sell it to publishers. The mobile environment is tough. You can’t sell premium games anymore; you need to go free-to-play, which is a horrible place to be, so we pivoted to Steam and Switch. This year, we had them on the floor in ROG Ally’s, which CODE organised, helping us a lot. Not many people have seen a ROG Ally in real life, especially in Australia. It was a different environment for us this year, targeting Steam and Switch.
Can you tell us about your journey leading up to Match & Mastery?
I started as an audio engineer at the Southern Institute of Technology in Invercargill, where I got a bachelor’s degree in audio production. I travelled a bit, worked in Australia and the US, then ended up back in Invercargill for family reasons, working as a studio technician. I was very hands-on, looking after five studios in a big live environment, working with all the gear. So I ended up there and started teaching game audio and IT. I needed resources, so I started building my own in Unity and making games to teach game audio. I also taught art students programming in the screen arts department at SIT.
After about 10 years of that, I had enough of teaching. I like teaching but not the academic side. They were pushing more formal stuff on me, so I quit and went to Australia. After a while, I ended up back in Invercargill and felt a little lost. I applied for a CODE grant but failed that. They asked me to pivot, and we got a bit of money for the first vertical slice. I applied for the next funding stage and failed that, but they wanted me to come to PAX with it. My career was kind of failing upwards.
So you didn’t get CODE funding, but they wanted you to come to PAX?
Yeah, I applied, but the application failed. They wanted to take a part of it and build that out. That turned into what was called Colour Crawler, which was a little dungeon game. They gave us funding to build a vertical slice. I then applied for the start-up funding and failed that, but they still wanted me to come to PAX. Then the mobile stuff started failing, so we pivoted again. In March this year, we went to GDC with CODE and applied for the start-up funding again, which we were successful in and are now building towards the Steam and Switch version.
Can you tell us about Match & Mastery?
Match & Mastery is a turn-based tactics game with a match-three twist. It uses the match-three board for all your stats on the tactics side. When you make a match, the falling pieces create another match, adding to your movement. The score from that is your attack damage. The whole premise is meant to be super simple to understand: make a match, things happen, and you get a movement score and an attack score. You can see all the move tiles, and as you pick different tiles, you see the damage you’ll do to the enemy and the damage they’ll do to you. There’s a lot of synergy between the board and the room; if you get poisoned in the room, your board can get poisoned too. You have to make strategic choices about whether to clear poison tiles or make big matches.
The combination of rogue-like, turn-based, and match-three elements. Can you explain why you chose these?
We’ve always tried to keep it as simple as possible. On mobile, it was literally just make a match, and things would happen. It was very color-based. The direction you wanted to move depended on the colour you matched. We wanted to keep it simple, but it felt too basic, so we added more options on the tactics side. We were inspired by games like Peglin and Into the Breach, which I love playing.
The premise is that the player tries to pass exams to escape school. What made you choose that setting for Match & Mastery?
The rogue-like setting fits well with the concept of taking tests that are difficult to pass. It aligns with the theme of failing and trying again. We sat down with our narrative designer, Kura Carpenter, an award-winning author from Dunedin; she built out the narrative around the colours and the school setting.
In roguelikes, sometimes the gameplay loop can continue forever. Does the gameplay in Match & Mastery have a theoretical end?
There is technically an end. We’re looking to release the final version of the game next year with five areas and five bosses. If you finish that, you technically finish the game, but you’ll end up back at the hub, and you can go again. We’re considering different levels or something similar to a new game plus mode, like starting with a certificate or diploma, and things get harder each time. You could finish the game in one run, but there is an emergent narrative to it, so you’d miss the story; a lot of the story gets revealed as you play through it. We do plan to incorporate two characters in the story; for example, with the first character, you’d get about 70% of the story, then we bring in a second character, which fills in the story holes, and you see things from a different angle.
Visually, it looks unique. Could you explain that art style and the direction?
We had a massive change. The original mobile version was very different. The art style is cartoony but family-friendly. No gore or anything like that; when things go splat in the game, it’s a bright orange, and the animations are all very cartoony and light. When we got extra funding, we looked for additional artists, and our new artist, Ged from Wicked Art, who is working on another game, Shyfters, came up with incredible concepts, which we have pivoted to. So we’re targeting a family-friendly audience, and since moving away from mobile free-to-play, we can really appeal to that age range. Even just being at PAX, the kids loved it. The look on their faces when they’re playing and having fun—it’s an amazing feeling.
Can you explain the development process in achieving that roguelike, one more run gameplay?
The hardest part is when you finish one run, feel powerful, and then die, starting over at the basics. Getting players past that first level after they die is tough. Once they’re upgraded, the escalation happens naturally, but getting them back is something we haven’t figured out yet. In games like Hades or Peglin, the fundamental gameplay has to be fun on its own. Match & Mastery isn’t doing anything majorly innovative when it comes to the matching aspect; the innovation comes from the tactical side and it’s depth, creating a deeper gameplay experience. We want players to think about their decisions and feel that tension of uncertainty. We’re working on connecting everything—health, damage, and how everything scales up for more interesting tactics. Players should feel empowered with their choices and see the results of their actions.
We were going to have a corruption meter, where every time you ran into something, the meter filled up. But then we thought, do we really want a health meter and a corruption meter? We’ve been doing a lot of work with a guy called Dan Vogt, one of the original founders of Halfbrick Studios. Working with him, we made sure everything’s connected to health—the enemies, plants, and animals are all connected as one. We’re trying not to be super heavy-handed, but this aspect plays on conservation. It’s you as an individual against massive corruption, which we play on businesses versus corporate pollution and individual pollution, stuff like that.
You mentioned trying to appeal to the younger audience and keep it family-friendly. Why did you decide to focus on that audience?
It wasn’t really a decision. It was always about keeping it simple from the original demo, like a year and a half ago. We wanted to make sure there weren’t any crazy sub-menus you had to navigate. You make a match, make a decision, and everything plays out for you—simple decisions that can have deep results. It’s always been about appealing to a general audience.
We wanted to appeal to everybody. One of the best things about our first PAX was finding our audience. You can send it to friends and family for feedback, but until you get it in front of a random audience, you don’t know your true audience. From our first PAX, we found kids responded really well, especially with the touch-screen on the iPad. They were very quick to understand things, even on the ROG Ally. They would say, No, I got it, and try it. You just let them go and watch the smiles on their faces.
I have a three and a half-year-old, and whether it subconsciously influenced me, I’m not sure. I definitely used her as a test case for a bunch of things. Watching her play Puzzle Breakers, I noticed she’d make random decisions and still do everything perfectly fine. I realised none of it mattered; even if you made the best decision, the outcome felt predetermined. So we wanted decision-making to actually matter. When you fail, I wanted you to feel, Oh no, that was my fault. Let’s do it again.
You mentioned a mid-year release next year, looking at Steam and Switch. Is mobile something in the pipeline?
Not mobile just yet; it’s not a great market. We have full control through touch screens, mouse and keyboard, and controllers. On the Switch, you can match and do everything with the touch screen. It’s also full controller support, so you can put it on a TV as well. Things like Steam Decks and ROG Ally’s provide a better experience. It’s not necessarily a game you’re going to put on a big-screen TV, but you can for sure. It’s meant to be a quick pick-up-and-play experience.
For someone like me, when you’re putting your kid to bed at seven and only have a few hours, it’s hard to jump into something like Star Wars Outlaws. I want to pick it up, play for an hour, and put it down. You get halfway through a run and save it to come back. So it does lend itself to mobile, and we would look to port it to tablets eventually. I don’t know about phones because there’s a lot of information to show, which complicates things, so probably more towards tablets.
With development, you don’t want to push too far with target platforms. Right now, it’s just Switch and Steam. Switch is our main target. Steam comes along pretty easily with the Switch release. If I can get in conversation with Netflix or Apple Arcade, we’ll definitely try to push it at a later time.
Going back to your journey into game development, you studied audio engineering before getting into game development. Could you give insight into how the game development industry was back then?
I’ve been playing video games since I was a kid. I remember watching someone play Crash Bandicoot on a PlayStation and thinking, What is this? I played Mario and Alex Kidd, but then I saw a PS1 demo of Crash Bandicoot and thought, wow, this is crazy.
I’ve always had computers and games, but I pushed towards audio, which was kind of a family thing. It was something I was always good at, so I always thought about it. I’ve done audio for film as well, which is very close to game development. I’ve always known that the gaming industry has been bigger than film and music combined worldwide.
I followed people like Dean Hall and RocketWerkz, Grinding Gear Games. It wasn’t until a few years ago when things like CODE started doing more, especially in Dunedin, and people like Tim Ponting would visit. SIT had a big influence, and we did little game jams with those guys. It was never really commercial, though, which is how it should be—it starts as a passion project.
With the help of CODE, it’s turned into something commercial, and now it’s crazy. Last year, there were 20 New Zealand teams at events like Dredge. Even this year, teams like Balancing Monkey are showing insane games. It’d be impossible to be here without CODE. I don’t know what I’d be doing; I think I’d still be doing some game stuff, but it’d be very small, and I’d probably be working somewhere else part-time. They’ve accelerated our company’s growth, for sure.
The biggest thing is, as I said before, I do a lot of failing upwards. I throw myself into things and think I can figure them out, but I usually stumble. Then someone like Vee Pendergrast, our Dunedin CODE mentor, steps in and says, “No, actually, here’s how it works,” and I learn from it. They keep helping with pitching and stuff like that. You pitch to them; they tell you what’s bad, and here’s how you fix it. The best part about CODE is that they’re the money and the facilitation, but they’re not the decision-makers. Their job is to teach you how to present your best self, and then they send your application to a panel of people who make the decisions. They’re just there to support you, which is great.
You mentioned talking to publishers about mobile and moving away from that space. Have you looked into publishing options for Match & Mastery?
We’re definitely talking to as many publishers as we can. We had a big pivot recently—if you saw the game before, you’d think it’s two different games now. We went to GCAT, which is Australia’s GDC, and talked to a few publishers like Halfbrick, Xbox, and a few mobile ones. We have a lot of emails to send and demos to share. We’re definitely looking for publishers, but you don’t necessarily need them these days. You can self-publish, which is cool and not as risky as it used to be. With social media, if you put yourself out there enough, you can build an audience before launch. Whether we have a publisher for the next game, I don’t know, but for this first one, we definitely need some support, especially since we’re brand new to the industry—it’s been about a year and a half. There are a lot of unknowns in this process.
Is there anything you’d like to add about how the audience can keep up with Match & Mastery and your journey?
At the moment, we’re preparing for our big push. We’re getting the demo ready; probably in about two or three weeks, we’ll release a public demo via Steam. If you check out Match & Mastery on Steam, wishlist it, and once the demo’s out, you’ll get updates through Steam’s news system. You can also follow us on Twitter, which is the best way to keep up with us.
Check out more GamesNight interviews with New Zealand developers including Burger Bois, Rose & Locket and Denari!
