With the release of Sips and Sonnets: Make Tea and Write Poetry as an Old Lady just around the corner, we couldn’t wait to interview Bayan and Quillcannon from Blue Tango Street.
The title of the game, Sips and Sonnets, with its subtitle Make Tea and Write Poetry as an Old Lady, instantly made us smile. As two women in our 60s running this passion project, LadiesGamers—and with a coffee cup proudly featured in our logo—it felt like Sips and Sonnets was speaking directly to us. Reaching out for an interview truly felt like it just had to be!
So first of all, thank you, Bayan and Quillcannon, for agreeing to do this interview with us. Let’s pour ourselves some tea and get started!
Who is Bayan Mashat?
Can you tell our audience who Bayan Mashat is? From your About page that I peeked at, I can see you have many talents!
You’re too kind 🙂 In high school, I participated in a science fair where I made an educational game for kids. Ever since, I knew I wanted to make games! I graduated from the University of California in Davis with a computer science degree. After that, I worked in multiple game development studios and non-game companies, and startups. My role was initially as a game programmer, then I pivoted to game producer. I wanted to learn not only how to make games, but also how to ship them. I then started my own game studio, Blue Tango Street, and I’m still here!
Blue Tango Street’s logo shows a dancing couple, and I think one of your other passions is Ballroom Dancing. Is there a connection?
During my last year at university, I stumbled upon a ballroom dancing class. I was instantly hooked! Not only did I start taking classes and participating in showcases and competitions, but I also enrolled in a professional teaching academy and got a diploma in dance education. It’s become a nice side vocation that also helps me unwind.
Blue Tango Street
So, Blue Tango Street. How did that name come about?
When coming up with names, I always liked to cobble things together. In this instance: 1) Blue is my favorite color! 2) There are many popular dances, of course, but Tango felt right, and it’s easier to pronounce across languages. 3) I call it a “Street” rather than a studio because I wanted it to feel like a community place, one that can thrive and evolve with the people who come and go, rather than a traditional office space.
How big is the team working at Blue Tango Street?
The core team is just me and my partner, Quillcannon! He handles the writing and design, while I do programming and production. For Sips and Sonnets, we collaborated with a wide range of wonderful contractors in areas we could not do ourselves, such as art, UI, and voice acting.
The website of Blue Tango Street also mentions earlier games. Can you tell us more about them?
My first commercial game was supposed to be “Job Will Hunting”, a title intentionally inspired by the movie, “Good Will Hunting”. It was meant to be a narrative game aimed at satirizing the soul-draining state of the modern-day job market. Unrealistic and often comical expectations, interviews that border on ritual humiliation, and the asymmetry of power that results from private companies being unilaterally responsible for people’s ability to stay alive. These are some of the themes I wanted to touch on in Job Will Hunting.
I didn’t realize how ambitious and big the project was until 3 years later, still with no prototype or any sense of clear direction. I decided to put Job Will Hunting on hiatus because I want to revive it after gaining more experience as a dev and access to funds.
My actual first commercial game, Backspace Backspace Backspace, was my experimental reaction to the setback I had with Job Will Hunting. I asked myself, “Can we make a game and release it in only one week?” The answer was… Yes! The goal was to break the habit of spending too long to come up with an idea, but we also wanted to learn first-hand the entire process of getting a game up on Steam. We succeeded at both goals and learned a lot! Now, we’ve applied everything we learned so far in Sips and Sonnets, which felt like a step up in every way.
An Elderly Protagonist in Sips and Sonnets!
LadiesGamers is over 11 years old now, and Paula and I haven’t come across a lot of games with an elderly lady as a protagonist. What made you choose this approach?
We noticed that, too! Strangely, this is not the case for books and movies, where authors are historically comfortable examining an aged character. Some of our favourite characters are elderly, like Santiago from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, Carl from Pixar’s Up, and Agatha Christie’s famous Miss Marple.
Maybe we are much more likely to see younger/middle-aged protagonists because “companies” think it’s a safer route to take narratively. A young main character has their whole future ahead of them, and it feels nice to be able to participate in shaping that future. However, we believe youth alone is not sufficient to fully capture the human experience. A rich past is just as interesting a theme to explore as an uncertain future.
In Sips and Sonnets, we deliberately chose an elderly woman to be our protagonist so that we could tell a story of the lasting impact of a life well-lived. Think of life as a giant ball of Play-Doh; the more fully a person lives their life, the greater the dent they leave on its surface.
Whether our approach to storytelling in Sips and Sonnets appeals to a wider audience or not was never a question for us, because we wanted to make something we feel strongly about.
Tea is a big thing in the UK. Was it your own experience with the interactions there in tea shops that inspired you to make Sips and Sonnets about that?
My partner and I lived in many different countries, from Australia to the American West Coast. However, nowhere left an impression on us like London!
We were enamored with its culture, the kindness of its people, and the incredibly welcoming environment of the tea rooms here. So we thought, hey, when in Rome! Let’s make a game that feels quintessentially English. From its initial concept, we wanted Sips and Sonnets to be a vessel conveying London’s two greatest cultural exports to the rest of the gaming world: tea and literature.
The Gameplay of Sips and Sonnets
Can you describe to our audience what gameplay they can expect in Sips and Sonnets?
Sips and Sonnets is a visual novel at its core, so it is primarily a narrative experience. We built it using Ren’Py, a popular engine for making visual novels, which we encourage more people to use and tell their own stories!
Besides changing the course of the game’s narrative through choices, Sips and Sonnets also includes several minigames, like tea brewing, reminiscing, poetry writing, and medical treatment.
Sips and Sonnets is a fully voice-acted visual novel. That is so special and rare in games. Can you tell us why you decided on that and something about the actors?
Of course! That was one of the most exciting (and kinda random) decisions we made.
Originally, we wanted Sips and Sonnets to be a small game. Don’t get me wrong, it still is (2-4 hours) compared to the average visual novel (15-30 hours). When we started, we wanted to make something way smaller. Something we could develop in 2-4 months, sell for two dollars max, and move on.
One day, we were daydreaming, and thought to ourselves: since our scope is small anyway, voice acting would add a lot of character to the game without breaking the bank. One of my favorite small indie games I played a year earlier is called Lost Words: Beyond the Page. One of the non-player characters was an elder, and I remember her voice was powerful and soothing. I Googled her and found out she was voiced by Bethan Dixon Bate. Turns out, Quillcannon also recognized her from Baldur’s Gate 3, where she voiced Queen Vlaakith. I decided, “Let’s email her. What have we got to lose?” We didn’t seriously consider having voice acting in our game at all until she, to our utter surprise, replied back a day later!
Bethan is immeasurably nice and just as professional. Being a Londoner, it was easy to arrange to meet at a tea boutique to share with her the game. She loved the premise, and now here we are! This set us in motion to look for actors for the rest of the cast. Some of them were friends, some were budding actors who wanted to break into the game industry, and some were found at a dance class!
The one remaining casting that proved to be challenging was for our deuteragonist, a male British character in his 60s. It was so difficult to find someone who fit the role as we pictured it, even after several excellent auditions. Later, a friend told us jokingly, “I’m a big fan of Disco Elysium. What if you emailed the narrator? You guys already got an A-lister in your cast, so why not two?” Another shot in the dark, but we went ahead with it. He got back to us! We’re so glad he checked his spam folder, haha!
Lenval Brown was a great person to work with! We had a wonderful chat with him at a tea shop. Lenval is a true tea connoisseur, with a preference for 2nd flush Assam black tea. He is also musically gifted; we watched him singing live with his 40-year-old band, Maroon Town. It was an explosively charismatic performance, and we strongly encourage you to see him on stage, if you can.
Months of recording and editing later, we played our game again, this time with voice acting. It breathed life into every character and added a texture to the story that now feels indispensable to us. We can’t imagine Sips and Sonnets without voice acting.
In short, we were fortunate enough to have such stellar voice talent in Sips and Sonnets because we asked ourselves, “What have we got to lose?” Carpe diem, friends!
Challenges, Joy and Prototypes
What was the biggest challenge in making Sips and Sonnets? How did you overcome it?
Making a game with virtually no funding whatsoever.
We had to do almost everything ourselves, except the art and voice acting. For the visuals, we hired a trio of excellent artists by spending some of our savings and profits from our previous game, Backspace Backspace Backspace. To be able to afford the voice talent, I was lucky to get a contract job, so I spent all of my earnings on that.
Being unfunded doesn’t mean we can’t make a game. It just means we have to learn how and when to cut corners. How many characters can we cut and still tell the same story? What shortcuts can we get away with? If we had 50 work hours worth of art assets left to do, but we could only afford the artist for 40, which assets should take priority? And can we do the rest ourselves?
Waiting for money to magically materialize and solve our problems didn’t seem wise. Publishers took forever to get back to us, and those who did were rejections. Can a game still be made despite such limitations? Yes, absolutely. How? That is always the biggest challenge for a producer: your job is to make it happen. 🙂 Don’t give up!
What did early versions/prototypes of Sips and Sonnets look like?
It looked like something a sane person wouldn’t touch. But seriously, we strongly believe in getting a functional prototype out the door first before coming back and cleaning things up.
Here are some early screenshots/prototypes:
What part of making Sips and Sonnets sparks the most joy for you?
My partner and I have different answers for the next few questions, so I hope you don’t mind us chiming in separately!
Bayan: Implementing the credits scene. It’s great to see all these people who made it all possible in one place. A celebration party in a scrolling form!
Quillcannon: Meeting new people. Every time Sips and Sonnets helped us cross paths with someone new, I felt my horizons broaden. Each one brought with them not just a skillset, but a whole bushel of dreams, aspirations, and journeys. Every project comes with difficulties and challenges, no doubt, but if I could turn back time, I’d take the challenges if it meant I got to meet those people for the first time all over again.
Advice for Aspiring Developers
Looking back at your own journey and that of Blue Tango Street, what advice would you offer aspiring developers currently working alone or in a tiny team?
Bayan: Push through. Game development is fun but also hard, and it’s so easy to give up. To be lazy. To cancel. To change course. It’s okay because it’s never easy. Just push through and see things happen till the end. Also, take care of yourself both physically and mentally!
Quillcannon: If you’re new to making games, remember the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s easy to underestimate an area in which you lack experience and end up biting off more than you can chew. Don’t be afraid to make a dozen small games at first. This is how we learn. Meerkat mothers snap the stinger off of a live scorpion’s tail before tossing it to her children, just so they can safely practice hunting one. It’s okay if your first few games are stingerless. 🙂
And if you’re not new to making games, you should be giving me advice, haha!
Picture Yourself in a Video Game
We ask this last question in all our interviews; we all have a joint passion after all, playing video games. So, if you could be a character in a game, which one would it be and why?
Bayan: The Boss, the badass lady from Metal Gear Solid 3! I like her so much that my email address is theboss @ Blue Tango Street. Not because I run the studio!
Quillcannon: Clank, the tiny robot from the iconic duo Ratchet and Clank. Born from a momentary defect in a factory line, he had what most other robots didn’t: a moral fiber. He is logical but fragile, kind but assertive, and has the goofiest giggle.
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