PAX West 2024 Conversation with Cameron Smith-Randick, the Creator of Away from Home
Away from Home is a rhythm-based pixel RPG. We have high-detail cutscenes and high-detail quick time events that are also played to the beat similar to Rhythm Heaven. For a reference of what the game’s like, think of Undertale, Final Fantasy, or Earthbound, but imagine it’s to a beat.
Long story short, the elevator pitch with the story would be you, the player, enter their world and control the main character against their will. It’s meant to be fourth-wall breaking and kind of meta.
Let’s go into the story a little bit.
So, you enter their world, you’re this orb entity, I was thinking an orb is the best way to make something otherworldly because it doesn’t really have a shape or form, it’s just something weird, right? So, you’re an entity that has entered their world and in the prologue you take over Abby, but she’s not actually who you’re supposed to be controlling, it’s supposed to be Michael. What ends up happening is she ends up gaining these powers from this and you end up helping her and feeding her thoughts to her through the dialogue and questioning. A lot of conflict comes out of it, but throughout the prologue, you’re gonna meet a lot of characters that will, in our full release (which takes place years after the prologue), go on to either be villains or start new businesses or start new things with themselves. You see them later on.
Why rhythm, why this genre? Was it personal preference, background, something else?
I’ll say this honestly, I’m not even a huge guy for rhythm games, I just love particularly Warioware and Rhythm Heaven Fever, they’re like wacky games that have rhythm.
Was it a challenge to develop rhythm game without having a big background in them?
Yeah, it was a challenge because different computers have different processing speeds, so we had to program it to kind of like, detect what your RAM’s doing and if there’s lag, it has to auto-correct itself to what positions things should be in. What we did to simplify the entire music programming is we created a program that converts Reaper (which is like FL Studio) files to bars in the game using MIDI.
A bit like Audiosurf, if you remember that.
Exactly, but what we have to do is we have to put in the bars into the program, but it just converts it, it’s pretty cool. What we actually did for that is we taught our musicians how to do that, like I did the first few songs, but after we just paid them to go into Reaper and plot the points, send them back to us, and we convert it.
Tell me a little bit about the music design.
The music design – I carefully vetted the kind of people who I wanted for this. I got 3 different musicians and they each have a very strong thing that they’re particularly good at. There’s a musician that goes by Chaotrope – very good at guitars, very good at electric kind of music. There’s a musician named Nick Nuwe, who is incredibly good at EDM, and he handles all the battles, right. And then there’s a musician who goes by Zakku, he’s really good at atmospheric, emotional type music and his inspirations are like Porter Robinson and stuff. I gave each musician their own parts of the game that I feel like they fit, so a lot of the hard hitting boss battles will have Nick Nuwe’s music and a lot of emotional moments will have Zakku’s, and a lot of the traveling and atmospheric stuff or hard-core battles will have Chaotrope.
For such a music-heavy game, did you have these parts of the story already and you found the musicians to fit?
That’s such a fantastic question, because we made the music before we made the art. I’d give them a description of the characters I had in mind and I’d send them a few pictures, but how the battles play out and all the backgrounds and all the battle scenes and timing, I based it all off the music. I’d get the music first and if there’s like a pause in it, I might take that moment for a character to laugh or I’ll have them pause before doing an attack. I’ll create choreography around their music.
What’s been the biggest challenge?
Money. So expensive, I’m around $150k in for this game.
How is it being at PAX, how’s the community reception?
It has been fantastic, up until this exact moment we have not had the booth not have three people or a line. It absolutely blew up here, we got a lot of really cool offers.
And what are some next steps?
Next steps are going to be making some of the fixes that people suggested here, we’re going to make it more colorblind-friendly, we’re going to change some of the colors to match the icons better, we’re going to make the middle part transparent so people can see the bars colliding rather than assume. Those were the main things, we might make it a bit more forgiving too, like as long as it’s touching the center, it’ll work rather than having it straight in the middle.
For people like myself!
Right, those are some of the fixes we’ll make based off PAX, and afterwards, I gotta just work really hard for one of my bosses because this is not approved time!
And what are you most proud of?
Well, truth be told, I’m most proud of my team, like they are honestly – I mean this in a very serious sense – they’re exactly what I wanted them to be, they are so perfect at everything they do and how they do it. They’re so reliable, not a single time have I been let down by them.
What does the team look like?
A marketer, a programmer, me, and a few part-timers.
Sometimes that’s all you need! What about the art direction?
So, the art direction, it’s kind of hard to pinpoint what exactly inspired me because there’s a lot of different things, but I would give it to three particular things: I realized I needed better graphics after I played Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, that made me realize RPGs can have really good pixel art. And then I really like Undertale for the vibe and atmospheric emotional parts to it. I love the darkness of LISA: The Painful. So, I thought I’d wrangle all three into that art style. And the outcome is this!
What about your background in game development?
I played Undertale when I was a 5th grader and before that I was really into robots and I’d buy those little robot kits and stuff. I loved the idea that you could create life, in a sense, like you could make things move and come to life. And then I played Undertale, and luckily enough back-to-back played LISA: The Painful, which are two of, in my opinion, the best RPGs. And for the 5th grader, who doesn’t have a grasp on that stuff, it blew my mind, and on top of that, I didn’t even know that indie dev was a thing. I thought that only big companies could make games, I didn’t know that a single individual could do that. So when I found out that I could do that, I ended up loving game development for the same reason I loved robotics – now instead of making a little life in front of me, I could make an entire world on a screen. I made a lot of not-very-good RPG Maker games and stuff that I never released or anything. And I slowly got better and better, and then when I was in my freshman year of high school, I came up with Away from Home and I started working on it. I restarted it eight different times because I kept getting better at art, better at programming, and better at all that stuff, and just realized it needed to be restarted.
You’re thinking “well now I’ve improved, but I don’t want to leave this one behind.”
Yes, what I learned is – and I will say this as my biggest piece of advice to any game dev – don’t start with your biggest project first, because you’re gonna get better at programming and art and all that stuff, and because of that you’re gonna keep restarting the same game, when you could be making a ton of small games and showing your improvements in those small games until you think you’ve reached your peak.
Wishlist Away From Home on Steam (there’s also a demo available) and find them on X, Bluesky, and Instagram, just to name a few. You can find more information, relevant links, and announcements on their website and also join their Discord!
