With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.
Today, a chat with @xenonfossil about cute character creators inspired by Animal Crossing and the Mii Channel!
You can find Xenon's work, including Creature Creation Station, on itch.io. You can also wishlist Creature Creation Station on Steam!
Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost! Who are you?
hi!! i'm Xenon. i took computer science in high school and almost majored in computer science in college, but then switched to arts & technology where i learned modeling and digital art, before dropping out to run my own art studio (freshhotflavors.com) and pursuing coding, 3d, and digital art autodidactically, as that ended up working better for me! i do game dev as a hobby/side thing mostly, although selling zettes of the game these past few months has allowed me to recoup all my costs and break-even for the costs i've spent over the 6 years i've been hosting my site and buying a few libraries and assets. it's also gonna allow me to more easily pay my composer to make more songs for me, so that's very exciting!
Is there a project you're working on currently?
just Creature Creation Station! i sometimes work on game jams with my game dev group, Society of Play, but i'm pretty focused on CCS at the moment
How did you find yourself first getting into game development?
i've always had ideas for video games, but it took until 2019 for me to install and start learning unity for me to really fall in love with the nitty gritty of game dev! it happened after i made a little voxel engine in unity and i realized i loved all the puzzle-solving-like elements game dev provides.

i've had a big grand dream game in mind with 1 million features, and this was me slowly chipping away on that, but it quickly became unwieldy despite my best efforts, since i was still learning. despite knowing better, i couldn't find the will to work on unrelated smaller games first to build up my skills, as the wisdom goes. that was, until i read some advice from chris zukowski of howtomarketagame, where he said something like: break up your dream game into smaller games that will help you make that big one later! so, since the first part of any good game is the character creator, and you need characters to connect with any game, that's where i started!
What's one thing that the Mii Channel is missing that you wish it had?
i actually started CCS because i wanted an Animal Crossing-esque character creator for the villagers instead of humans! and then the Mii Channel inspo fell into place as i started building it. but for Mii Channel, I wish there were more body types and proportional customizations for limbs and stuff! so that's what i'm working into CCS, though there's def still more to add on that i haven't gotten to yet
What kind of features do you hope to add to Creature Creation Station in the future?
SOOOO many, it's really hard to pick things that aren't going to get me into Scope Creep Hell (i wanna release this yearrrr ahhh). but a big one players have been asking for is ways to add custom markings, so that's def a required one before launch. i'm also going to add animal crossing babbling, more interaction between characters, and QR code sharing of characters. at a recent convention i showed at, people made SO MANY creatures, it made me want to add a gallery mode so you can easily flip through and admire all the creatures you have in your lobby! so if that ends up being easy to implement i'd love to do that as well. i don't know if i'll be able to figure it out for launch, but i'd also love to one day have a way for people to export the models for use in vtubing, assets for their own games, or whatever else!
this weekend i'm currently working on two new things: looking at the cursor, and ragdoll flinging >:3


What's your favorite critter you've made in Creature Creation Station so far?
OOOUGH DIFFICULT ONE.... they are all my children...... Gopicko and Grockurt are definitely up there though

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Any other general advice for aspiring game devs out there?
watch piratesoftware's game dev streams and youtube shorts, join a game dev community (including Society of Play if you want ;D), and keep going!!!
Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?
Dragon Creator and Tulip Mania are some good little itch ones i've played recently! and my partner is currently playing Another Crab's Treasure on stream so i'm excited to see more of it.
i'm also really looking forward to playing Snacko and Crysalis at some point!
Thanks so much for chatting with me! For everyone else, please go to Creature Creation Station and make a little critter! Then post your little critter to cohost so we can see it!