Interview with the Team behind UnderMire

It’s that time of year again! The Six One Indie Showcase is in full swing and that means loads of amazing indies being shown off and, of course, we’ve got more developer interviews for you. We sent some questions over to the team behind the co-op dungeon crawling game UnderMire.

A huge thank you to Abdulrahman, Clark and Wid for being a part of our September showcase and for allowing us to show off UnderMire.

• Can you tell me a little bit about the team behind Undermire?

  (Abdulrahman Abdullah, CEO of Table Knight Games): We’re Table Knight Games, an indie studio based in Riyadh, working fully remote with Knights across Canada, France, Argentina, Sweden, and more.

  Our Game Director, Clark, has over 20 years of experience and worked on the Far Cry series. Wid is our BAFTA-winning Art Director.

  Tess handles 2D art and character design, she worked on shows like Wakfu and Miraculous Ladybug. Anastasia brings her background in cartoon animation, helping shape the personality and unique art style of UnderMire. Duarte, our Lead Programmer, previously worked on Minecraft Earth and projects at Blackbird Interactive. Adrian is developing our online systems and network gameplay.

  On the community side, Elliott has experience with big franchises like Sonic, Pokémon, and Crunchyroll.

  Some of us are industry veterans, others are making their first game, but everyone brings something unique. With different creative backgrounds and cultures across the team, we’re building a game that feels fresh and personal to all of us!

• How did the idea for the game come about? Were there any notable sources of inspiration?

  (Clark Davies, Game Director at Table Knight Games): We came together very quickly on the idea of a roguelite game, since we’re all big fans of the genre. I also come from a background of working on game systems and loops for progression, rewards, and so on. Roguelites and strong game loops pair really well together, so it felt like a natural choice.

  The real challenge was in finding a fresh take on the genre that could support 4 player co-op and narrative elements, and finding the balance between them. Narratively, having a group of kids who find themselves on a dangerous adventure is something we latched onto. There are some great stories with this basis in movies, TV, and games, like The Goonies, Stranger Things, Grounded, and so on.

  The key was to make it an adventure first and foremost, without making it a straight up action or horror game, and then find ways to incorporate these coming of age type stories of the player characters into the game, while still letting a group of real players chat to each other and be able to goof around while playing.

  (Wid Alhajjaji, Art Director at Table Night Games): From an art perspective, UnderMire was inspired by my love of expressive 2D animations growing up, with the style of shows similar to Hilda, The Owl House, and Gravity Falls shaping how I see characters and world-building. We wanted to bring that bold, exaggerated cartoony energy into our game. A huge part of our visual identity is the mix of 2D characters inside a fully 3D environment, which comes with the unique challenge of achieving it in a first-person view. Games like Void Bastards and Forgive Me Father showed us the potential of that hybrid space, but through a lot of iteration we found our own style that we like to call a “Saturday morning cartoon gone rogue.”

• What lessons have you learned from previous projects that helped make UnderMire the best it can be?

  (Clark Davies, Game Director at Table Knight Games): I’ve worked with some very big teams in the past, and there are pros and cons that come with that. The UnderMire team is in single digits, and the ability for us to be very agile is crucial for development. There’s very little bureaucracy, wasted time, or endless meetings and layers of approval - we meet, we make decisions, we move forward. I love that.

  We approach building new features with a simple design doc that offers a solution but leaves the decisions and details up to the team - there’s always room for them to go in alternative directions and be creative. It’s always about the problem we are trying to solve and not the specific solution.

  There’s also a clear high level vision we’re heading towards that’s well communicated and followed up on, so everyone can see the big picture and understand our next milestone, even if the day to day planning and work is quite flexible.

• The “SMUSH everything” seems to be a fun toolbox for players to experiment with. How did the process of creating new items come about?

  (Clark Davies, Game Director at Table Knight Games): It’s a gameplay-first approach - what kind of gameplay problem we want players to solve. If there’s a barrier blocking your progress, you want to clear it, so maybe an explosive is needed. What items could you merge to create that?

  Then we added our signature element, the Smush gel, to stick the items together. Using this gives us the freedom to magically exaggerate everyday items and enhance the outcome. So for example, you’ll be able to smush some popping candy with an old battery to make an electrical bomb.

  There will also be a lot of strange items to find in our world, whose usage may not seem so obvious at first. And usually, once you’ve smushed something, you’re stuck with the result, but some items can be smushed again, and so we encourage players to experiment and find out how deep the recipes go.

• I see there’s a cat named McClane. In addition to performing tasks for them, can you pet the cat?

  (Clark Davies, Game Director at Table Knight Games): It’s a given, right? If you have a cool animal in your game, you have to be able to pet it. It’s gonna be there for sure. We’re a very pro cat team. The real question is, is McClane going to like it? How is he going to react? There’s a lot of personality in McClane we haven’t revealed yet. He’s a very important character in UnderMire.

• What does “indie” mean to you?

  (Abdulrahman Abdullah, CEO of Table Knight Games): For me, being indie means freedom. The freedom to create the stories and characters we care about, and build the kind of game that truly resonates with us. It also means working closely as a small team where everyone has a voice and real creative input. We move fast, adapt quickly, and try ideas that might not fly in a traditional setup. I mean, we’re doing hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animations with multiple views just to support multiplayer play!

  It’s also a real challenge. With so many studio closures and layoffs, it sometimes feels like the odds are against you. But events like the Six One Indie Showcase remind us that there’s still a hunger for fresh voices and new ideas.

  One of the most rewarding parts of this journey has been building a team of veterans and rising talent, and creating a space where everyone can contribute something meaningful. That’s what indie means to me.

UnderMire does not yet have a release date but you can wishlist the game on Steam now to stay up to date on future announcements.