Kinjako Interview
Kinjako Interview
The following is a transcript of my interview with Kinja, the indie dev behind Keepers of the Keep and Gestalt: The Fifth Day!
I do NOT do well with horror, so when I played Gestalt: The Fifth Day, it was… A struggle…
I’m so scared - I don’t want to look at my screen! No, no, no…
The indie dev behind that game has recently put out a new title that is a fantasy romance inspired by games like Monster Prom and Baldur’s Gate 3, so I wanted to give it a try AND talk to them about it! I was curious about their journey as a game developer and if they had any tips for navigating problems as a solo indie dev. Here’s how that conversation went!
0:38 Alright, hello! I am glad to be here with Kinja. Kinja is a great artist and the solo dev behind the terrifying Gestalt: The Fifth Day, the upcoming Gestalt: Memoria, and the recently released Keepers of the Keep. Thank you for being here, Kinja!
Of course, thank you for having me!
1:01 First things first… congrats on the release of this new game! I have to say… It’s, from my perspective, a complete shift from the scary horror of the Gestalt series. I’m curious what inspired you to pivot this direction?
Umm. I think something that made me want to do something completely different, it’s probably a mix of two things. The first being just ardent ADHD that makes me always want to do something different. And the other is actually being inspired by other video game companies like Capcom. Um. Capcom has made a lot of different games; they’ve made Street Fighter, they’ve also made MegaMan and Dokami and… Resident Evil and, just, so many different things that it made me sort of say if I were to make a video game studio, I would really want to make a lot of different things. Always making something that I’m interested in, but I always want to sort of switch it up because I really admire having a catalogue like that and just for myself showing that I can do different things as well.
That’s really cool! Uh, I think that flexibility will be. I guess, be helpful for you as you get deeper into game development - not to say that you aren’t now! I feel like having, uh, a release of multiple games is already a feat of itself!
Well thank you!
Yeah! :D So, kind of thinking more about Gestalt… That’s the game of yours that I’ve played the most of. Umm.
2:54 Do you think that after the Memoria game, that Wicke’s story has come to a close or do you think that there is more to explore after that?
I’ve always been a little up and down. I think after Memoria, I think that’s going to be the extent of Wicke’s story. Gestalt: The Fifth Day is about, y’know, Wicke as the main character, but it is a lot about her relationship with the house and the history behind it and how she deals with stuff in her life, whereas Memoria is about Wicke and her house. And, I think after a game like that that goes so much into her, I can’t really see myself continuing the story from there. I only say it sort of “wishy washy” a little bit because I may have another Gestalt game, or project, I should say… I might have an idea, but it’s not really going to be a continuation of the story, is probably what I can say.
Ooh! That’s exciting! I thought umm, The Fifth Day was really well made, I thought it was a great analogy for depression and like youu said, dealing with life and all that. I don’t want to spoil anything for people watching, but I did- I watched another playthough of the demo for Memoria, and there are some very interesting things that happened in that one, so…
I thought that was really cool!
I’m glad!
Okay! Let’s move on to your newest game though, Keepers of the Keep. I admit I haven’t got too far into the game yet but I did get a little bit into it and I enjoy the mechanics so far. Um, but…
Earlier you mentioned Capcom as some of your inspiration for diversifying your development journey and the style of games that you are putting out, but I want to kind of dig deeper into your pivot into the fantasy genre and a little bit of that romance.
5:14 Do you have other games that directly inspired Keepers of the Keep?
Umm, in terms of other game inspirations, I think that actually the Monster Prom series was a very big inspiration! I really like the aesthetic of the game quite a bit and I like the idea of just having a like-colorful cast of characters and something a little more stylized? I guess? In terms of a cast. It was very visually inspiring and just the idea of a dating sim with stats was really appealing. But, um, I think strangely one of the most inspiring games for making Keepers of the Keep was Baldur’s Gate 3! I really enjoyed that the dice rolls in that game matter - and that game also had romance. I really liked the cast of that game as well! And so, sort of combining the aesthetics of having this cartoony stylized game but also having the challenge of making dice rolls matter and still trying to tell a non-linear story but a story that needs to have a beginning + middle + end just seemed like a very fun challenge! And outside of that it’s just my very sort-of long history with D&D, in general, and just loving the dice rolling as a mechanic.
Oh that’s awesome! I definitely see the inspiration there! The aesthetics of Monster Prom and that series and when, I think, the game introduces you to the dice roll system and gives you a few tooltips, I definitely saw Baldur’s Gate 3 in there. I also love that game as well!
Oh yeah. There’s a lot of DNA of both games as inspiration. I love both of those games immensely!
7:19 Yeah I notice your Discord, you have like, the “PROM” tag! Is that for Monster Prom’s Discord server?
Uh, yeah! I’m actually in their Discord and I’ve been a little more active lately to the point where I’ve decided to add the little thing to the end of my Discord name too.
Awesome! I hope the fans of that series can also discover Keepers of the Keep, cause I think if they like that they will love Keepers of the Keep!
I hope so! I think that there’s a lot of shared DNA, especially with the first one adding inspiration to Keepers of the Keep. So, I have been hopeful about people sort-of blending into the Keepers fanbase as well.
Yeah! Alright I want to keep diving into mechanics cause again I thought they were really well put together! So, next I want to talk about the stat system. You build a stat system that reflects the 6 different keepers, but I was wondering did the idea for the six keepers come first and you build six stats around it? Or was it the other way around where you wanted six keepers to fit the archetypes of the stats you already had in mind?
It was a little bit of doing it at the same time but actually I thought of most of the stats first. I knew I wanted dice rolling as a core mechanic when I very very very first planned the very early version of this game and I knew I wanted the stats to go up more if you hang out more with certain characters with a romance option so I had about, maybe 4 of the 6 stats planned, and then two kept changing. Then I started drafting characters and if I couldn’t find characters that fit these stats that I was trying to figure out, I would actually change the stat. I think an example is that stamina kept disappearing and reappearing in development and was actually traded with luck which was in its place. I had more ideas for a character like Mango than I did with a luck character. I end up still showing some love for a luck style character in Hishi who actually runs the arcade in the game!
Ohh!
So stats and characters kind of started becoming co-developed as the ideas got more defined, I guess.
That’s really cool that they’re developed at the same time and they inspired characters who are not Keepers but still prominent NPCs in the game. That’s really cool. I think that system, again, is integrated pretty well from what I’ve played so far.
10:15 I’m interested if you yourself have a favorite keeper?
I think a lot of people who make characters like this say that they shouldn’t have favorites and the problem is that… I don’t know if it’s because I’m a small studio, but I definitely have favorites, even of my own. (laughs) I honestly think my two favorite Keepers are… If I had to narrow it down to two ‘cause it’s hard to pick one, probably Hilda and Vanitas are my two favorites.
Ooh, interesting!
Which are very very different characters from each other.
Wow, that’s really cool. I think- I love Hilda’s design, but I think if I had to pick a favorite it would probably be Valentine!
I really like Valentine! I mean I like all six of them, which makes it easier to write them when I like them but I heard a lot from people that I try to ask which one’s their favorite: Valentine’s name does come up quite a bit! I’m hoping that you and other people that like her like what I’m going to do with her story.
I’ll definitely follow it to the end and see what happens!
11:36 The next mechanic I want to talk about is the game’s phases. There is a work phase, a free time phase, and a quest phase. Time progression seems to be an idea you expanded on from when you worked on Gestalt: The Fifth Day. Were the three phases something you planned from the beginning to implement in Keepers of the Keep?
The three phases were something that kind of came up when I started to develop this version of the game. In the really early start, the game was a lot more like Monster Prom to where you would basically… It was like a sandbox to where you could just shop whenever you wanted and go on someone’s questline and you could spam one questline and that would be the end of the game. Just that run. It was a lot more like a dating sim roguelike, but I wanted to add a main story to the game and actually expand the different Keepers quests. I realized I wanted a gameplay loop that was actually satisfying to play rather than have it be basically an 8-12 hour sandbox game. And so I tried to think about what three phases would I need for the type of story I’m trying to tell and I thought of the phases and then I started wrapping the main story around the mechanics of those phases of time passing. Working on Gestalt was actually a very good sort of practice for dealing with the passage of time in a game and how to control it.
That makes a lot of sense! To any other game devs out there, that’s good advice too! Your other projects are practice for future games!
It’s 1000% true.
I next want to go back and ask about the start of the game, for something I really liked. Here the player chooses between two characters and they also get to choose their pronouns and I think even change their name, if they like. I love that you allow the choice of pronouns so anyone can feel more in tune with the character and the world that you’re building.
13:54: So I want to ask: Did you deliberate a lot on that decision to allow the player to change their name and their pronouns, or did you feel it was a natural extension of this game and its genre?
I think even in the very first idea I had for this game, that was a feature. I think it’s very important to feel represented and represented in a way I myself want to be represented. Which is funny, because for the sake of information, I’m a nonbinary game dev. That decision to add even nonbinary pronouns to the game, actually was a decision I thought of before I had come out or realized that about myself. And so, it was nice knowing the process of working on this game, coming out, and then even more affirmed that I wanted to be a thing in the game. Even though the main character is less of a self-insert of the player and kind of their own person, but I still wanted them to have customizable things to feel close and to feel represented and to not have your appearance have your pronouns tied to it. Because there’s a lot of people who look masculine and have feminine pronouns and vice versa, and in between! And I think in terms of, definitely the fantasy genre, that was very important to me to have in this game.
That’s really great! I love how you talked about codeveloping mechanics but you also learned about yourself as a person while you developed the game, so that’s pretty beautiful, honestly.
Oh yeah, definitely.
So, going off of that… cough sorry.
16:02 Being able to pick your gender presentation in games also impacts the attraction of the keepers. Did you write them with that fluid queerness in mind?
Yes. I think that sort of comes from a lot of other games that have romance in it like Fire Emblem or the Bioware Series with Mass Effect and Dragon Age which I’m also a big fan of all of those series’, but the thing that sometimes frustrated me is that sometimes frustrated me is that sometimes I’d be picking my gender in those games to get with certain characters I wanted to get with because in a lot of those games, especially the early ones, a lot of them are straight and not a lot of bisexual options where you can pick whatever gender you want. And so, that was also something in my head of when I make a game, I want essentially the whole cast to be bi/pan. They are attracted to you, and will be with you no matter what, and they don’t have harsh restrictions so that the player gets to be whoever they want to be in the story.
I love it! I think it’s great to move away from straightness as a default.
Yes, absolutely. I definitely agree with that.
Yeah.
17:29 I’m also curious, kind of zooming out a bit, about the promotion and fundraising for the game. Do you feel like, for this game, maybe compare/contrast with Gestalt: The Fifth Day and the demo for Memoria, do you feel there was a really hard part about promotion or figuring out that aspect of game development?
Uh, yes. Absolutely. I think that the thing I am best with, making games as a solo dev, is I am very good with the creative part with art and writing, and I’m very good at managing my own schedule.
Mmm.
-The part I’m worst about is marketing. I am horrible at marketing myself and my projects. It made running a Kickstarter kind of difficult and, y’know, for many different reasons and probably reasons that even I am not fully aware of as someone not good at marketing: The very first Kickstarter for Keepers back in 2025 did not meet its funding goal, it wasn’t successful!
Aw.
And I really had to lock in and try to learn not only why wasn’t it successful but what will be different if I try to do this again. It made me go full tilt into, the Kickstarter when it was running… I don’t know if you yourself was in the Discord when I was promoting it but I was in the announcement channel constantly. Just posting update after update after update of just promoting the game as much as I can, promoting the campaign as much as I can. I ran open beta at the time. I was talking on different social media. I am one person and the hard part is that when I am doing promo I am not making the game! And so I had to tell myself that that is okay to not work on the game, to like, to where I can let people know the game actually exists.
Yeah.
Because that is very important to a game actually picking up traction. To having eventually a successful Kickstarter like Keepers had to have!
Wow, yeah! I think it’s a great mindset that you can face difficulty and kind of just double down on how to overcome it for next time, so that’s really cool.
Oh absolutely. And if I could add to it, um. Just with the first Kickstarter not working out, I was very upset. Not mad, but I was very sad about it. I was really worried if people would actually be interested or play like Keepers. I was worried that it wasn’t going to get traction. To the point where I was thinking if it’s a game I should be spending a lot of time on if people don’t want to see it. I kinda had to push that all back once I decided I want to make this game. Um. Even if I’m the only one that plays it but also I’m releasing a game for other people to play, so just, how will I make people see it? I had to overcome those feelings of like, almost wanting to pivot to a different game to actually learn from this and not just give up.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
21:22 So, being a solo dev you kind of have to face everything by yourself. Are there aspects that you enjoy more or less than others? It sounds like promotion is new to you so I assume that might not be as enjoyable?
Yeah. I think the marketing/promo is very hard for me because I have a hard time selling myself or selling something that ultimately is a product. Because… it feels… It’s hard not to feel a little gross thinking of it that way.
Yeah.
Because I feel like I’m making art! I’m making a game! I’m making an experience that I want other people to experience! But it is also a product you can buy on Steam. And… That is the reality of it. It can still be art and be a product. And so a lot of it is working through that to get to get marketing and in terms of anything else, I think that I’m good at the creative part but writing can be a little taxing sometimes if I’m doing it a lot. With the amount of writing that is in Keepers, it can burn me out sometimes! And I have to work around those periods.
22:49 Yeah, I feel it. I’ve been following you on bluesky! I kind of assumed you were an artist first and you got into game dev afterwards. Is that true? Can you kind of talk about how you got into game dev in the first place?
Oh yeah. I’ve been doing, well I’ve been an artist essentially forever. I don’t have a memory that doesn’t have creating art at some point in my life. In 2016 or so I started doing conventions and selling art and I actually stopped my degree I was doing after taking a bit of a break to go into an art degree. Previously I was actually a geologist who just happened to also be an artist and I never met anyone like that in my field. And I actually stopped doing that degree cause I didn’t think geology would make me happy as a career and after sort of not doing school for a while I thought about doing art professionally and decided to go into art school. Over 2 and a half years I got my degree in digital art and animation in 2023. Around this time I was making Keepers of the Keep, or at least the first version of this game, with someone else and it just wasn’t really working out. I had given up on that project for a little bit. And I had given up on that project for a little bit and it kind of hurt my confidence of making projects on my own. And so I had Gestalt as an idea for actually a comic and I was like: “I should make this a short game and I’m going to make it in three weeks, because I need to show myself I’m capable of making and finishing a project.” And it took about six weeks and I made the first version of Gestalt the Fifth Day that I released on Itch. That ended up getting a lot of publisher attention. Before I actually said “yes” to a publisher with my one stipulation being “I actually have more ideas for this game, I was making it very quickly, can I add these ideas and release it on Steam?” And they agreed to it, and I end up reworking a lot of the game and kind of overhauling it over the course of two more months and working with them to translate and localize the game. And after all this work I just realized I’m a game developer now, and I didn’t mean to be! But I’m also very happy now with that. It’s odd that I landed in this route after going to school for animation and primarily a storyboarder, being a geologist before that. I really like that I accidentally ended up here like that!
Yeah that’s awesome! I think a lot of indie devs and honestly even big studio game devs probably face something similar where they don’t really know and kind of stumble into game development so I’m glad that you are also here, because you got to release some awesome games!
Yeah, well thank you!
26:31 Yeah! So I want to kind of delve into the different platforms. So you sell, I believe, on Itch and on Steam. Do you feel like it was a learning curve to understand how to sell on those platforms? Can you talk a bit about that?
Uh, yeah! I think that Steam is a little more straightforward to figure out, because more people are on it and its a bigger site. The metrics are a little easier to grasp, like there’s a new and trending page, there’s so many different categories, and a lot of people just know what Steam is. Steam is really the thing that picked up Gestalt: The Fifth Day and has carried it so far. Itch I still feel like I’m trying to figure out as a website because the Fifth Day has just not actually performed nearly the amount it has on Steam. Again, Steam is a bigger platform but games and demos and just feedback on there is so much different than Steam. And I think that on Steam it’s a little more normal to pay money for games whereas Itch, a lot of people release their games and their projects for free, so some people might raise an eyebrow at a game that costs 9 dollars. Like the complete version of The Fifth Day costs on Itch. And so that difference, $9 is not a lot on Steam and kind of a high price for Itch, is one of those things to also figure out and I feel like the more I figure out Steam the more I try to also figure out about Itch every day.
Ah yeah that makes a lot of sense, from what I hear. Steam is a lot easier to promote games and sell copies of things, so that makes a lot of sense.
28:36 Keepers of the Keep, you talked about this earlier, it got funded on Kickstarter. How do you feel about that platform? Do you feel like it was also… Was it like Steam where it was a bit easier to understand?
It was both easy and difficult to understand because it’s easy to understand in the sense of like I already knew the platform, I backed a lot of Kickstarters myself. And so I’m familiar with how it works, I’m familiar with how campaigns look and everything. But I think the hard thing for me personally with Kickstarter was that Kickstarter was a 100% promotional marketing website. So it’s like you are making rewards and everything but the rewards are made to promote the campaign. So it’s like if I didn’t really like marketing or promoting myself before, I really had to get over that to try and do well on Kickstarter.
Yeah.
And luckily there was a lot of really good tools, a lot of articles, and just lots of people who have had successful and not successful Kickstarters online, who talk about their process and what they do. And I mostly learned how to have a successful Kickstarter from other people, learning what they did and just looking at successful Kickstarters and seeing kind of what they do and what version of it can I do, being a solo dev. And so Kickstarter to me is pretty straightforward but it is… It is a marathon, I guess, of marketing.
Yeah. That’s a good way to describe game development as a whole, too! It’s just a marathon that- it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Alright. So we’re kind of coming up on the half hour which is about how long I wanted it to go.
Okay!
30:47 Now that we’re towards the end, do you have anything you want to shout out or I guess leave the viewers with?
Umm. If I had to think up anything… I would say that if you have an idea for something, just make it. Even if it’s bad or not really fully complete in your head, just start doing it and make a bad version because at least you’ve made something. And if it doesn’t work out, just keep improving it! I’ve been releasing stuff online forever. I’m, in terms of internet years, old - and so I’ve been on Deviantart for a while and the days of posting your stuff. If you want to make a project, the hardest part is just starting to make them. Make your games, make your webcomic, post that art online, and do not care about the quality. Just, if you have a desire for people to see something, they will not see it if it stays on your computer.
Awesome. Art is all about the shared human experience, so that’s great!
Mhm.
Alright, thank you again Kinja for sharing your story, more info about Keepers of the Keep, and uh, a lot of really great nuggets of information for anyone about game dev as a whole.
Yeah! Thank you for having me, this has been really fun.
Yeah! Alright, thank you again. I’m going to end the recording…
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