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SA Game Creatives Spotlight: Keirron Stach of A Few Dragons
03 October 2024
In 2019, Keirron Stach and his partner Caitlyn made a video game together. Secret Squirrel was created during a Game Jam – a time-limited event where teams create their games very quickly – and released onto independent game repository itch.io. “Go up against your friends to be the squirrel with the most acorns,” the game page’s description reads. “Tasty acorns score points, but not so tasty acorns lose you points. Hopefully the game tells you the truth about which acorns are tasty and which are not.”
“It was a little multiplayer game,” Keirron recalls. “People actually didn’t find it that fun, but the vibe of the squirrels and the cuteness – that, people liked.”
An idea started brewing – this aesthetic might be better suited to a single-player adventure, like the ones Keirron and Caitlyn had played and loved as kids back in the 90s: Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Banjo-Kazooie. And with that inspiration, A Few Dragons was born. Over time, the Adelaide-based game development studio has grown to five people, plus a rotating team of contractors who help with sound, music, marketing, and a handful of other tasks.
In July 2024 the team released The Sacred Acorn, a single-player action-adventure game about a squirrel on an epic quest. The game, which brings cosy vibes to its challenging combat, is the culmination of the plans that began forming after that first game jam. The game exhibited at the SAFC’s annual SAGE: SA Game Exhibition in both 2023 and 2024, and was supported through the SAFC’s Export Market Travel Fund, which allowed Keirron to attend the 2023 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. It also received funding through Screen Australia’s Games Expansion Pack Fund in February 2023.
We caught up with Keirron to discuss the pathway towards releasing The Sacred Acorn, how the team formed, and his experience developing games in South Australia
You are quite involved in the South Australian game development scene. What do you think are some unique characteristics of the state’s video game sector?
The way that Australia is, we can’t just drive to the next city: we huddle in these little hubs near the coast of a few places across the country. In Europe and some parts of America, if there’s an event two cities over, I’ll just go for a drive, or catch a short plane or train. We don’t have that. We have to really create events in our own cities, and South Australia has had to create events for all our local developers (like SAGE). Even going to Melbourne for events like PAX, it’s quite a big endeavour for any of our teams to get stuff over there. If you need to take dev tools over for an event, it’s not just a quick drive. You really have to plan it out.
A big strength that we have in Australia is that almost every city here knows how to support their own development environment and developer events. For South Australia specifically, I think a lot of our strengths come from just the people that have really cared about the industry here. We also get support from different parts of the local government: it’s not just one spot, there’s been a few different agencies and some that even have nothing to do with games, but which really want to get interested in this space.
South Australia has a huge game development infrastructure. Do you think there’s a specific reason why we have a culture of many small developers working on their own projects?
There are people who are happy to move to Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane and get the studio jobs there. But there a lot of people who say “no, my life is here, so I’m going to stay here and see what can work.” Because of that, there’s been a few small groups of people that got together, made studios, and then said “alright, well, we need events to go to, so we’ll put something on.” Some of those events started to gain traction, and now something like Unwind happens every two or three months and everyone comes. I think we’ve formed a tight knit community out of necessity.
You exhibited at the SAFC’s SA Game Exhibition (SAGE) with The Sacred Acorn in 2023 and 2024. What were your experiences with the event, and what was the best thing about exhibiting your game there?
SAGE was a great experience for us to showcase our game with other local talent. The event felt really good and we had lots of people come through and try out our game, which is what we were there for. I hope it grows in size so we can keep showcasing things like The Sacred Acorn and our future games.
My favourite thing about the event is the pure focus on games, and the things the SAFC does to highlight local studios – with material like the SAGE trailer and the individual booths that were offered to each studio.
The Sacred Acorn came out recently. How has the launch gone for you?
The feedback has been really good. You’re always going to get someone who doesn’t like the game, because if you can make something that everyone likes, it’s probably something that no one’s really going to love because it’s just too generic.
It’s been interesting. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t do this – release a game and then see people’s actual reactions. But with streaming, I can literally watch someone open the game for the first time and see from their face whether they’re like, “this is awful” or “oh, this is so my vibe”. With our marketing and our messaging, we’ve got players coming in saying, “I wanted a game like Dark Souls or Metroid but with a much cuter vibe.” And you see those people open it and being like, “this is exactly what I’m looking for.”
On the flip side, I’ve seen people say, “this is not a Souls-like, why is this not punishing me”, and just being disgusted with the premise. And I think that’s fine. We’ve found people that really love the game. We’re always going to find people that don’t. But I think it’s important that we’ve found so many people that do.
Do you have future plans for the game in terms of updates?
We’re going to look into a console port. Every second question on our Facebook ads before release was like, “Switch? When?” We want to do our content update probably early next year or so, when we can get put all the stuff in and we’re happy with it.
Now that we’ve released the game, we can see all the parts where people say, “we would love more here”, and what parts of the world people are interested in. We can put more content in there if people like that. That’s something you don’t get unless you have thousands of people looking at your thing.
The Sacred Acorn is available now on Steam.
The SAFC supports video game development and game businesses as part of its commitment to championing the South Australian screen industry. Learn more about it at safilm.com.au/games
Story by James O’Connor