Spirit Swap is a new match-3 and narrative storytelling game that’s currently running a Kickstarter campaign. Though it’s already surpassed its goal, there are still some stretch goals that can be met for additional gameplay things like voice acting and even a fully animated intro. The game is being created by the Soft Not Weak development team, a worker co-op and friend group who have put their heads (and collective experience) together to make a game.
Though Spirit Swap isn’t due for release for at least a year, there’s a demo available that people can download and play. The lo-fi music makes it a relaxing match-3 experience for anyone interested. The Kickstarter goal was actually met in 35 hours and from there people have continued to back Spirit Swap. In an interview with Game Rant, creative director Alex A.K. discusses the inspiration behind the game, its mechanics, and the Soft Not Weak development team as a whole.
GR: What was the inspiration behind the [narrative] story of Spirit Swap?
ALEX: I just wanted a super chill, very low-stakes story because everything I see in gaming is always about how grandiose it can be. Then usually when it’s about people of color, it’s about tragedy, or when it’s about gender minorities, it’s about how tragic it can be, so really I was looking for that counterbalance of a story about people hanging out, being into fashion, and being happy. I really love K-Pop, so I figured, how about a story about this town with this person that has a job that’s spirit swapping and the backdrop of it is that there’s a concert happening in the town and [the game] just follows this person’s day-to-day, going around town and talking to their friends and at night, doing their night shift.
GR: Why did you decide to make it a match-3 game?
ALEX: I love match-3 games! Originally, the idea for Spirit Swap happened when they took Sailor Moon Drops offline and I was devastated! I was talking to my roommates and I was like, “I can’t believe they took it offline! Where am I supposed to get my match-3 with really cool fantasy world vignettes in it?” And they were like, “Well, why don’t we make it?” You know game devs, “Why don’t we make it?” and here we are. The other reason is every match-3 now is solely focused on mobile, and most of the time with exploitative gacha mechanics. I don’t know if it’s necessarily exploitative but it does have an element of gambling, and I wanted to make a game that did not have that at all. Like no hidden costs, a premium game—you buy it, you have it, you play it—just so I could sit in bed and play match-3 and vibe with good music until I fell asleep because that’s how I turn off my brain.
GR: How will the narrative story and match-3 gameplay work together?
ALEX: We’re working on a kind of system of route-based gameplay. So you start in a hub, your bedroom, which is a personalized hub you can decorate. And then when you go outside, you have an isometric map and you can visit the city. The city is where you meet your friends and for each place you meet your friends, there’s a visual narrative sequence that can start. Usually, it’s accompanied by match-3 games so you talk to each other, you swap together or against each other, depending, and then depending on how you did, you advance your story and relationship with that character they’ll tell you something different. The idea is that every time you talk to someone, just like, you know, when you talk to your friends in real life, they would have something different to build on about what you last talked about together. And as you meet more people, since this is all one friend group, they would know each other and those relationships will start showing.
But the cool thing, like how it ties back into match-3, is that the more you know someone since you’re a witch and a demon and so is everyone else, if you get really close, they give you their keepsake that you can put on your witch altar and that is a spell you can use in-game cause we have a new thing called the “spell system.” Actually, I don’t know if it’s new, I just know that I didn’t see it until Spirit Swap! But if you arrange the spirits (the tiles) into a specific pattern that reflects the spell you have equipped, you can trigger effects that wipe the board, or change the colors, or autoplay. There’s so many things we’re designing that just change up gameplay and allow you to play in the style you want. So, the closer you get to your friends, the more things you share, the more things you have, you can affect the gameplay through the hub that is your room. Because decorating your room can change the parameters of the board, whereas equipping the spell can change how you interact with the board. From that it’s basically like every time you go out of your room, it’s like a run.
GR: When the narrative story is done, can you still continue to play the match-3 aspect or would you have to start the game over?
ALEX: It’s basically a persistent save. So you can start over if you want in another save, but the world, as you know it, will just know where you are. We will reach a point when there is no more “content,” but we’re hoping, especially with how successful the Kickstarter has been, to push that line more and more so you can really get to know the characters. The real reward here, much like in Hades, that was one of the things that really changed how we thought about the game. Like seeing the narrative system in Hades we thought, “Wow, that’s a really smart, economical way of doing that, why don’t we do that?” Like this character-based, interlocking interaction that opens up the more you play the game and makes you want to get further and further.
GR: What are you most excited about players knowing about Demashq (the game’s location) and what is the inspiration behind it?
ALEX: The inspiration behind Demashq is my country and the narrative director’s country. I’m from Lebanon, born and raised, I’m an immigrant to the U.S. and I haven’t been here for very long. And some of the other people on the team are also Arab-American but from a Syrian background and Lebanese background. So we really wanted to focus a fantasy on the part of the world we’re in because you only ever see it in like, Call of Duty, which is not the experience we’ve had. We wanted to show the Arab-Levant culture and the food and the architecture, but we’re not doing a one-to-one thing, we’re doing that thing where you push it into an idealized fantasy world. And in our world specifically, it’s a world where magic was democratized right around when our world’s wireless revolution would have happened, so everything is still wired. And this magic, specifically plant-based magic, took the space that wireless has in our world today. So you charge your phone by dropping it in water and putting it in the sun and stuff like that.
There’s plants everywhere, this is where you draw your power from, this is where the FamiliarZ draw their power from… It’s kind of an homage to how I remember my country as opposed to maybe how it is now or how it was growing up. Just like this marriage of the sea and mountains and nature and this kind of chaotic human touch. But in this world, nature is holding it together and making sure that no one is getting hurt. Just all kinds of people playing in a fictional Levantine-Arab fantasy that is hopefully distant from the usual orientalist or “terrorist” depictions they see of it, that’s what I’m really excited about.
GR: When it comes to streaming, how will players be affected by DMCA? How is the music copyright going to affect if/when players stream Spirit Swap?
ALEX: The music is all being tailor-made by our composers for us, so we’re not taking music that belongs to other people, it’s all music that’s made for Spirit Swap. So, our hope and what we’re working towards, is that nobody should get DMCA’d. Just like you play any other game, you should be able to just play it and stream it and since there’s no DMCA and you’re playing the music on your stream then it’s like you’re playing any other music.
Yeah, there should be no issue with that. I understand the fear… I’m pretty sure our composers, I don’t want to speak for them but some of them [might] allow streamers to use their music, so even then [it’s] probably not that big of an issue. But, for us specifically, our wish is that people can stream the game and really have fun with it. So, we’re not going to pursue anyone for that or put it up in the libraries or have anyone get DMCA strikes. Like, we have streamers on our team and it just doesn’t make sense for us [to do that].
GR: What has it been like working with such a diverse group of people?
ALEX: They’re just my friends! It’s been cool! Yeah, if I were to be completely honest, it’s such a refreshing experience compared to my experience in the games industry before. It’s such a relaxed environment where we can just joke and be ourselves and not have this fear of coming off as aggressive, ungrateful, like all the things that as a Person of Color and a queer person you take away from yourself when you’re in a work environment around mostly cis- hetero- white people. It’s just been so freeing. Like we still have our disagreements, but it never comes down to like, a fear of losing a job.
From the very beginning, I just wanted everyone to see themselves in the game, so what we did as leads is we asked everyone “Is there a character that you really want to see in Spirit Swap?” Because it’s character-based and the core team at the time started coming up with their own characters, saying like “Oh I would love to see this,” “I never see that,” “Can we do this?”, “Can we do that?” And that’s how we got our roster. Which, people are like “Why is it so diverse?” It just looks like us! Our concept artist is very talented and she kept drawing these super-hot people, like mostly People of Color of different sizes and different amounts of horns and that’s how that happened. It’s really fun, I wish it on anyone who wants it, honestly.
It’s not like we were like “We have to make this as diverse as possible.” We were literally like, “We want to make this look like us. What do we look like? What does the team want to see?” And the team wants to see a bunch of trans and non-binary queer People of Color of different shapes and sizes, I guess. So, here we are.
GR: How fulfilling has it been to bring such an inclusive and diverse game to life?
ALEX: It’s so nice. Like, you know when you’re a creative kid and you’ve been creating worlds since you were a kid? Like characters? And when I was a kid I had this joint world that me and my friend created called Roses Bay with all these characters that wore “No Fear” t-shirts, you know, the early 2000s, and it never occurred to me that anyone else would be interested in that stuff. But as I started creating the world and the team started creating the world, I just realized how fun it is to not have to… We’re a worker co-op so ideally, we all get input. Like different leads have their specialties and get the final say, but ideally, everyone gets input and we try to treat our contractors with the same respect. A lot of their work is in the game which is why I wanted to put them in the Kickstarter.
It’s so nice to just be like, “We’re putting knafeh in the game,” which is like an Arab dessert, and we’re just gonna do it and we’re not gonna explain it. And people who get it, get it, just like you don’t explain a hamburger and that’s just fine. Like, just the way Japanese culture can just stay Japanese culture in games, and then [fans] will just get really excited and start researching everything, like… I am excited we can just [put those items in]. And I’m focusing on Arab culture because I’m Arab, but like, a big portion of the team is Black so they brought their own Black culture to the table. And it’s just such an interesting and unusual mishmash but it’s not created by committee or because someone was analyzing the market being like, “We need to hit this and we need to hit that. How do we make Black people buy this? How do we make East Asians buy this?” It’s more like this group of people came together and the more people we added, the more we were like, “What are you about? What do you wanna do? Can we fit it [without diluting the core idea]?” So it rules, it honestly rules. I have nothing interesting to say other than this is great and I can’t believe people like it. I’m so happy. I was so worried about the Kickstarter!
GR: You hit your goal in what?
ALEX: 35 hours! If you could see the amount of prep work we wasted writing, “Day 1, 2% in, thank you so much for your support!”
It’s honestly been nuts. I was like, “Alright, well we did come up with these stretch goals, how about that?” And then I was like, “Here’s two of ’em.” And now I’m like, “Clearly we need to set the bar higher!”
GR: I think part of the draw and interest in Spirit Swap is how authentically the team is trying to portray… See, I hesitate to use the word “authentic.”
ALEX: Oh, I feel you so much! You said it and I was like, “What’s authentic? They’re demons and witches.” But I think I understand, yeah.
I think I would honestly use “self-indulgent” instead of “authentic.” I like “authentic,” but I think we shouldn’t shy away from “self-indulgent.” And one of the big missions of our studio, Soft Not Weak, is just joy. Like queer, POC, Black, joy, that’s what we want to bring to the table, that’s who we want to talk to. I’ve done… trauma porn in my years as an artist, I’ve catered to the white gaze, like I’ve catered to the moneyed gaze… Now that I get to have this space with people who trust me, like within my team, where I can just kind of do what I want within certain boundaries, I don’t want to dig in on the trauma. I don’t want to talk about war, I don’t want to talk about my experience as an immigrant. I want to talk about joy—the joyfulness of being trans, of being Arab, of my friends for being Black, like the joy that exists in our communities. Like the beauty that we’re not our tragedies, you know?
That’s something you hear a lot being said, but with the current climate, that’s what comes to the front because that’s the only way to get a lot of people to pay attention. So I wanted to make a game for us, by people like us, and then the fact that it resonated means there’s a lot of people out there that were waiting for something like that, maybe? It’s just that games take so much time and money and expertise and I can tell you from my experience, like, telling people with money that I’m trying to pitch the game, saying, “Hey this is what we’re doing,” all I would hear was, “Nobody cares about a match-3,” “Visual novels don’t make money,” “This seems like a very niche thing,” so we went to Kickstarter kind of like a proof-of-concept. So yeah, it’s been so validating and I keep getting hung up on it because I did not expect this amount of support. I was ready to pull every favor, just like every last anything with my small, small radius of influence. I was ready, like, “We are going to stay on this and hopefully we will fund on the last day with that spike” and people want it, people are into it and it’s nice.
GR: How did the Soft Not Weak development team come together? You said it was just your friends, right?
ALEX: Yeah, it started with basically my very close friends. One that I met in Japan 6 years ago when I was working there and they were also working there, and it just so happened that when I moved here they were also in the area and we just kept in touch. The other is another friend I met online and honestly, I would easily call them my best friends like we’re very close and we’re roommates. In October 2019, before the pandemic, I had lost my job in January 2019 so I was just kind of doing the content creation thing full time to try to make ends meet. Just talking to my roommate, one of them’s a programmer, I was like “What if we made a game? Like, we have some time and I’ve got some freedom now that I don’t have a job.” I’m a game designer and artist and she’s a programmer so I was like, “Why don’t we just do this?”
Around October it had become enough of a recurring conversation and thing that we’d been working on prototyping. Originally it was match-3 because I wanted us to start very small as like, a new team. [I wanted us] to start with something that we know we can make and then at least we can enjoy it. So yeah, it was self-indulgent from the beginning, and then in 2019 we were like, “This is becoming a thing, let’s LLC.” And then we LLC’d and we went to Japanese BBQ, and we were very happy that day. And then we met our co-devs and it started snowballing from there. And then the pandemic hit and we were all working from home and we were like, “Y’know what? Time to kick this into gear. Time to really work on Spirit Swap.”
The other two members of Soft Not Weak were friends that we brought on to do contracting and we got along with so well and they did so well that they were like, “Hey, can I be part of Soft Not Weak?” We were like, “Cool, just FYI right now it’s all liabilities, no profit. Like, just so you know, you come in you’re a worker-owner but there’s nothin’… like you own your work but there’s no profit. Like if you’re cool with that we love working with you.”
And then the next one was Jenny, our producer, who is also amazing and also originally someone I knew through friends and she originally came on as [Community Manager.] And I was like, “Well what do you really want to do though?” She was like, “I love being Community Manager but honestly I’d love to produce.” And I was like, “Then produce.” She was like, “You can’t just produce.” And I was like, “Just show me what you mean by produce.” And then she showed me and it turns out she’s a rad producer. She’s so good at it. Long story short, that’s how the five of us met and we’re hoping to grow but first, we want, like, income. We don’t want to add any more people until we can actually pay them.
GR: Because you said right now you’re only paying contractors, you’re not even paying yourselves, right?
ALEX: Right, that’s what the Kickstarter goal is, that’s all contractor money; none of it goes to us. And that’s fine, their time is valuable and they work super hard and they should be paid handsomely. Especially when they live in the US and need to get their own health insurance as freelancers. Basically, our ethos is “Treat people the way you wish you were treated” and it’s been working out so far, I think.
GR: What does it mean to be a worker-owner?
ALEX: It means that your contribution to the company is not strictly capital, which I think is super important, especially in collaborative endeavors like games. I think worker-owner studios should be the norm for games because it takes so many people to make it happen. For us, what it means to be a worker-owned studio means that everyone owns the work they do. So when you put out a game, you own a piece of it, like you own a percentage of profits, your ideas still belong to you as long as you’re in the worker co-op. The other thing it means is that when other people do labor for us if they want to own that labor with us they have a clear path to that. A lot of people confuse worker-owned with “good faith-based,” but there’s no good faith when money’s involved under capitalism—you have to formalize all that, but we’re going from a baseline like what’s valuable is the people and they should own their labor. So the priority goes: people, their work, capital.
GR: What is the significance of the team being called Soft Not Weak?
ALEX: I think “Alex’s Worker Bees” was rejected by the team…No, we just wanted something that embodied the fact that, yeah, we’re soft but that doesn’t mean you can push us around. It’s based on a Farscape line by Zhaan, the blue alien who’s like this super soft but super strong renegade type character. You don’t tend to see like, a femme soft bald alien that is also hyper-powerful. So in one episode she gets attacked by a prisoner on their ship because he assumes she’s a weak link, and she does some sort of like, Vulcan mind thing and basically brings him to his knees and right before he attacked her he called her “soft” and she goes, “Soft, yes. Weak, no.”
And we’re like, yeah we want to be kind but we don’t want to stand for [crap.] We want to make joyful content but that doesn’t mean we’re not about what we’re about, like just strong values. I don’t want to fall into the trap of like, “Don’t be evil.” It’s more like, “No, be intentionally kind,” and situations aren’t always ideal but as long as you come from it with the perspective of like, “soft not weak,” I feel like that encapsulates everything we want to do.
GR: What is the overall goal of the Soft Not Weak team in terms of how you all hope to impact the gaming industry?
ALEX: I don’t really want to impact the gaming industry; I want to exist outside of it. I think the gaming industry has had many, many chances to redeem itself and every time one of those “big tests” came up, it has failed miserably. It has failed miserably and it has thrown gender minorities and racial minorities under the bus and intersections thereof horribly under the bus. And I just don’t want to be part of that, like I tried to get into AAA my entire life, like that was my life’s goal since I was a kid and then I kind of got in and was like, “This kind of sucks, I don’t want to be here.” Like I don’t want to take the sexual harassment, I don’t want to take the little [racist] quips… They keep going, “If you don’t like it, make your own.” Yeah, okay. And that’s the impact I want is I want to be able to find other people like us and be like, “Here are the resources,” because we’re muddling through, but there are people like us who are helping us and we want to pay it forward.
The impact I want on the game industry is decentralizing the game industry. I just want to get capital out of their hands and resources out of their hands and I just want anyone who wants to start a studio or worker-owned studio to be able to and to profit from their own labor and not get burnt out doing AAA and thrown out at the next mass layoff. Not targeting anyone in particular, but it happens. So yeah, I want to exist outside it and be able to make what we want to make compromising as little of our values as possible. I know it’s not realistic, y’know, “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” but we try to do that with everything we do. Like the studio we’re working with for merch, Dual Wield Studio, I know the owner personally and we got to know each other because she cares about a lot of the things we care about; not exploiting people in factories, [being] sustainable as much as possible… So yeah, that’s the kind of people we want to associate with, that’s the kind of people we want to build this alt-games industry with. The games industry can keep doing what it’s doing—there’s a market for it.
GR: What is the estimated release date for Spirit Swap?
ALEX: Halloween 2022! Because they’re witches, get it? Yeah, as I said it was supposed to be a quick project for us to get our team together and make our first game as a studio and get it out, so we want to get something beautiful and solid (and maybe good enough for the Tetris Attack/ Panel de Pon competitive scene to latch onto, I don’t know?) as fast as possible without crunching. So, right now, that means Halloween 2022, and if we have to push it back, we have to push it back and that’s fine.
GR: How has it felt seeing the positive reaction to the crowdfunding campaign?
ALEX: It feels like 11 years in the games industry vindicated, for me personally. I don’t know how it feels for my team… It’s unreal, it’s freakin unreal. It’s so good and I’m just so grateful. I just don’t want to [mess] it up; it feels like there’s a lot of pressure now? But I don’t even want to think about that, I just want us to be happy. Like we want to put joy out in the world, I feel like I can worry closer to launch. Right now it’s just overwhelming and nice and we didn’t set out to make a splash, we didn’t set out to represent everybody, we just set out to put out games that looked like us. And we say in one of our many taglines, “hopefully also like you;” apparently the “like you” is a lot of people.
GR: How did you determine what you wanted to offer per backing level on Kickstarter?
ALEX: Mostly it was looking at other Kickstarters and… from the get-go we had an understanding that we wanted to make something as ethically as possible and that was going to drive prices up. So we really leaned into the digital stuff which would not cost manpower to reproduce, and those were based on my previous experience with Kickstarters and looking at what other people are currently offering and stuff like that… And then when it came to merch our lowest merch level is $80, which is really steep, and I admit that. It’s just that in the current climate of Covid-19, how much shipping costs are, how much getting stuff from manufacturers abroad is, it just made no sense. Like you can see in our graph how big the merch fulfillment/ production fulfillment thing is, it made no sense for us to cut costs… Our stuff is pricey and I admit it, but it’s all Kickstarter exclusive stuff and the base physical tier with all the physical rewards gets you like, all of the rewards that aren’t the crop-top hoodie, which is surprisingly popular.
What I also did is once I had a draft of all the different prices and rewards I wanted to offer, I went to people who have already made Kickstarters and I was like, “Could you take a look? Because you have experience fulfilling it” and they were like, “Absolutely. You don’t want beta support until this tier, don’t put everyone’s name in the credits they’ll never end,” It was like these little things that you’re like “Yeah put everybody’s name in the Kickstarter!” And then your credits are like, 50 hours. It was these little things where they were like, “People don’t care about this, people care about that,” And a lot of what I heard was price up, drive the price up. From experience, shipping is always going to cost more than you know, especially because [with] Kickstarter… you have to estimate it like “Uh, shipping is $12 for the entire North American continent.” So we were honestly saved by people just being really kind and consultants being kind, our merch partners being amazing and we were able to make so much cool stuff.
So that’s how we approached it, we wanted to be fair and honest with people and I was ready to field questions like, “Hey, why is this so expensive?” And I was going to say, “This is our cost breakdown” but no one has asked! Which is really shocking to me because I’ve worked on other Kickstarters where people are like, “Why is this so expensive?” and I think that really speaks to our audience—no one has asked! Like the most I’ve been asked is if there’s a way to have add-ons, and I explained that we’re not doing specific add-ons because we got the price to go down by doing this book of all the same stuff. And if we make it more granular, that’s a person who has to go through a box and go through an order and pick every different thing and that’s more man-hours, that’s more money, that’s more labor. And we don’t want to spend our entire budget on merch and fulfillment. We want to pay the devs also, so that’s how we came up with those numbers. We had to open another cropped hoodie tier and I’m told the second one has sold out. The first one was like, “25 crop tee hoodies,” because I was like, “Who wants hoodies in this climate? Also, Covid-19 no one has money.” That was one of my big fears, and I get it no one has money… And then people were like, “Give me more hoodies!” And I’m like, “Okay, here’s 150 more of the hoodies! That should last the entire campaign, right?” They’re sold out. It’s been a week; they’re sold out. So thank you!
GR: What are you most excited for players to experience when the game is released?
ALEX: The characters! Like, I love match-3 and I think it’s great and we’ll have a lot of accessibility options so whether you love match-3 or you just want to skip it you can just change, in the room change the room and the settings to make it as easy or as hardcore as you want. But the real beauty, like the difference between Candy Crush, or straight up Tetris Attack, and Spirit Swap is the world and most importantly the characters; talking to these characters, getting to know them—like Iskandar is the big ball of meat who’s flirty and just came off of a breakup with another character, Mo. These are also your two initial romance options, like your best friend Mo, who just broke up with Iskandar, and Iskandar who’s the flirty big pile of meat.
It’s just getting to know these characters, what makes them tick, discovering their homes; because a lot of the boards, like when you go to meet them, are like in their house, like that’s where you talk to them in their most comfortable environment. Like your reward is getting to know these characters and forming those bonds and kind of interacting. Also, it’s a group of friends, like they’re all friends, so you get to know their stories with each other. You meet the Polycule and like, they finish each other’s sandwiches, they’re always together. Did they change their names to rhyme or did that just happen? It’s stuff like that… We released a relationship chart and you can see that Samar, the main character, and Dio used to date so it’s like, “What happened there?” It’s all these little, like, spicy queer People of Color world, like that just messes around with gender.
Like one of the things I got really excited about with the Samar fashion goal being unlocked… is that now you can also kind of change their presentation, and for me, that’s one of the really fun things about video games is just like, “Today Samar feels like a little more masc, today they’re feeling like disco.” I just want people to have fun with it and I want to see what people come up with! Yeah, that’s what I’m excited about—please fall in love with the characters, they’re nice.
GR: Is there anything else you’d like to say about Spirit Swap or its Kickstarter goals?
ALEX: If any of this sounds interesting, please check it out. Yeah, just check it out and more than anything, just listen to the music because like, our theme song is just really relaxing and nice and the world sucks, a lot, all the time; so if Spirit Swap can be a little pocket of joy for you, or the music can bring you a little bit of joy, please experience that.
[End.]
Spirit Swap is in development for PC.
