For this second interview, I had the opportunity to speak with Joanna, AKA the “J” of TJ Hoarfrost, a married couple from Poland who are bringing us Strix and Scholar. We spoke (over Google Docs due to time differences) about what it’s like bringing a game to life with your spouse, experimenting with romance in games, a perfectly imperfect cappuccino and more.
I loved learning more about the pair, including how they’re from Poland, and English isn’t their first language. Joanna herself reads 50-70 books a year in English and watches most movies in English, but outside of that, doesn’t really utilize it outside of the written word. Tomek (the “T” in their collaborative name) has a background in Fine Arts and programming.
And honestly, it was really fun to hear about a game where you don’t have every option under the sun to romance (because that just gets complicated, at least to my brain).
Enjoy! And be sure to keep up with Strix and Scholar at the links below.
Steam / Bluesky / YouTube / TikTok / Website
Q: Thanks again for doing this! How about we kick things off with a quick introduction to you and Strix and Scholar! And I just have to say, the art and character designs are gorgeous.
A: The pleasure is mine! I love to talk, especially about my passion project.
My name is Joanna, and I’m the “J” part of the TJ Hoarfrost artistic persona my husband Tomek and I invented to sign our works.
Strix and Scholar is an interactive mystery romance we are working on together, believing we can deliver something one of a kind.
We are happy you think so, thank you! We’ve put a lot of thought and work into our characters, trying to make them feel (for better or worse) like people you could, or maybe once did, meet in real life.
Since this is The Indie Game Cafe, I do have to ask, what’s your go-to order at your favorite cafe or coffee shop?
A: We like our coffee the most when we make it at home in a moka pot. Grinding the beans myself, adding a spoonful of honey, and maybe a pinch of cinnamon if I feel spicy, and pouring myself a hefty dose of thickly frothed milk—wishing to make a barista blush at the sight of my weird, unprofessional, custom cappuccino—is the way we have our morning caffeine.
In the current climate of the industry, what brought you to game development, versus perhaps joining forces on something like a novel, especially how popular ‘romantasy’ works are on social media?
A: Well, theoretically, I could take on the endeavor of writing a novel and only ask Tomek to paint me a nice cover as his part of the job. Or we could make a webtoon, or a printed graphic novel. In all honesty, throughout the 10 years of our marriage, we were starting all kinds of after-hours projects which combined his art skills and my writing. It was always our dream to create something awesome together.
With every failed project, we were getting better and better at rendering our ideas into something worth finishing. We became more aware of what we are good at and where our weaknesses lie—how to come up with a project we both want to see finished, with the same level of motivation pushing us to make it true.
At some point we knew: it has to be a game.
The fact that you’re a married couple is very cool. I’ve seen quite a few married or dating duos join forces to make a game, so I’d love to hear more about how you decided to take this journey on and come up with a project you’d both enjoy.
A: We are both gamers, and games are all we talk about when we are not talking books. We play a bit of everything now, but for me, it wasn’t always the case. I used to play exclusively adventure/point-and-click games. I loved those games for their focus on the story, pretty graphics, and no combat. And I don’t want to be negative about them; I noticed there’s a wave of new ones coming out, and it’s great people still make them the “old-school” way. But for me, the genre lost its magic when I got sick of the fact you have to enact the script to the letter. The gameplay is to “read the game designer’s mind,” basically; to guess what absurd action you have to take in the exact sequence.
I want non-linearity, but I don’t want the game to tell me to “play my way” first, then be punished for my choices—learning the hard way that I was playing the game wrong.
I think I know how to make dialogues engaging and exciting without the loom of fail states. Conversation was always the strongest part of my writing, and creating a bunch of variations for each scene comes to me naturally.
I especially like to write the scenes with our male lead character—Ignas. In Strix and Scholar, your decisions will shape the context of your interactions with him. You will also (to an extent) control the tempo and amount of physical intimacy moments.
As an avid romance reader, I say with no shame that I lick, desperately, every scrap of romantic plot that game developers throw at me. But that’s what it is. Scraps.
Several people smarter than me have made very good video essays about the state of romance in games, so I’m not going to dive into that now. What I want to say is not that I think our game solves all this, or that it will be “so much better than those other games”. Gosh. It might be a total mess; we are experimenting with the medium after all. It may blow up in our faces.
But we love this drive to try and see what WE can do about it.
Fantasy worlds like this one always seem ripe for many stories. Obviously, Strix and Scholar is still in earlier stages, but have you looked at one of your NPCs and been like “Oh, that would be a cool story to tell in the future?”
A: There’s a couple of students: a young aristocratic lady and her beefy boyfriend, who used to be her hired escort before they went to the university. And their dynamic, when they think nobody is listening to the two of them talking, comes out so wild…
At some point, their backstory engrossed my attention so much, I was thinking about writing a light novel about it, and even wrote a few chapters. The idea was to maybe make it into an e-book bundled with an artbook and other extra content we could make DLC of later. But then I kind of snapped out of it and realized it pulls me away from writing the main story, and I should focus on finishing the game first.
But, for the purpose of this side story, I had to come up with whole new cities and nations surrounding Grimstrand, and it turned out for the best for the lore, and those two characters too. Their personalities have outgrown their initial tropes, and I love them even more now, but at the same time I made sure they are not stealing the spotlight from the actual main characters.
To be clear, we don’t intend to make our next project about them, as their story has no potential for a non-linear narrative experience. Our future games are not going to be set in the same universe, for that matter.
I write fantasy because I love worldbuilding, but I treat it as a tool to tell a specific story about specific characters, so I prefer to make a custom world with custom rules each time, instead of doing “brands” and clinging to one universe only because it’s easier to market.
I’ve been hanging out in the Weird Days Discord, and the atmosphere has been great; it’s a lot of devs supporting devs, which makes me smile. What other games would you suggest people check out from the festival? (In addition to yours, of course.)
A: I know, right?! All the Weirdos (as we lovingly call ourselves) are amazing, and we are a bunch of wholesome gremlins, when kept away from the water of course.
We recommend to check them all, you never know what struck you as exactly YOUR kind of weird, but the titles that vibe the most with us are:
Finally, what’s next for you in your game dev journey? Any in-person showcases or events you’d like to take part in?
A: We are still quite overwhelmed with the ongoing Weird Days event, so I’m not able to think about that right now. But obviously, we would love to make an appearance at any future festivals that will accept our submissions.
For the in-person events, we don’t really have a budget for that, and there’s still so much work before we can even launch a public demo, that we are simply too busy painting, coding, writing and having regular mental breakdowns.
So, yeah… publishing the DEMO is the next big goal, maybe next fall? Keep your fingers crossed!
Thanks for your time!
A: Thank you for this opportunity. It means the world!
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to help out around the Cafe, I’ve started a Ko-Fi that I’ve been reasonably ‘okay’ with updating. It’s simple. You can donate however much you feel once, or monthly. Head over to https://ko-fi.com/theindiegamecafe to check it out! (And hey, I’m always open to ideas of different ways to make it better -Amanda