Exclusive chat with the team behind upcoming food-fighter RAWMEN about the labor inside the love

Dustin Mattock gets it. When others call his independent studio’s debut work, RAWMEN, a labor of love, he knows it’s meant as a compliment to his efforts, and he takes it as such. And his friends know he and the studio’s other founding partner, Eric Keshishian, have put more than five years of their lives—and a good portion of their bank accounts—into this strange vision of an arena shooter where scantily-clad soup slingers are hurling the evening’s first course at one another.
 
RAWMEN, announced in 2019 and coming soon as a PC exclusive on the Epic Games Store, is the first work of Animal, a studio based out of Los Angeles, California, that actually began as a creative services house, serving clients like Google and other huge media and tech-sector players—but with no stated ambitions of game development.

Still, there is something no one else really knows about that term, labor of love, unless they’ve actually suffered alongside its development without being able to fully explain to friends, family, and other loved ones why this creative vision really was worth it.

“Making a game,” Mattock said, even one as seemingly silly on the surface as RAWMEN, “is tough. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“It’s definitely harder than any job or task or project, mentally, that I’ve ever worked on in my life,” Keshishian added.

RAWMEN, the good lord willing and the broth don’t boil over, looks like it will be ready by late spring or summer. Mattock, Keshishian, and their eight to ten full-time colleagues at Animal honestly aren’t trying to be coy with their game’s news. They just understand that their first work has got to be strongly polished and balanced, not just visually distinctive, if it’s going to stand apart in a very competitive space where gamers have no shortage of options for zany and colorful fun. In talking to both artists, there’s a palpable sense of being the dogs who caught the car when they talk about finally delivering RAWMEN, and therefore delivering on its promises.

RAWMEN's promise: Messy fun, but never punishing

First revealed at E3 2019, RAWMEN somewhat unexpectedly began life a few years after Animal was chartered. Mattock and Keshishian formed the studio in 2015 after meeting and becoming friends while working at a Los Angeles-area creative services agency on projects ranging from McDonald’s Happy Meals to Disney’s parks and resorts as well as several HBO series.

“Throughout our professional life, we worked a lot together, and we went to a couple of different agencies, and [Mattock] brought me in on projects,” Keshishian said. The two are graphic designers by training, both sharing a background with the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.
 
Animal started out as a partnership, still working for the same kind of clients Keshishian and Mattock served throughout their agency careers after design school in the early 2000s. But both soon realized that the heavy hitters they used to work with in their agency days, such as Google, Disney, and major gaming industry players like Ubisoft, Logitech, and Zynga, were increasingly moving that work to in-house operations, rather than contracting it out.

“We finally had the ability to turn down stuff that we didn’t really like, or that we just weren’t passionate about,” Mattock said of Animal’s early goings. “And it was really good for a while, but like I said, it was a very fast shift where we started to notice that projects were being taken in-house [by former clients], and no longer were they coming to agencies like us anymore. They were just building their own teams internally.” It was also, frankly, uncomfortable for both designers to realize their business relationships were beginning to strain when it came down to asking for work and invoicing people they considered friends.

It wasn’t necessarily a sink-or-swim reckoning, but both Mattock and Keshishian realized they wanted to come up with a project they could sell to others rather than depend on work coming through the door from previous contacts and colleagues. 

“A lot of our clients are our friends, and we felt bad for hustling,” Mattock said simply. “We built a really good relationship with Google, and they were a great client, but you’re like, ‘Hey man, y'all got anything coming up that you might need some help with?’ It just felt weird after a while.

“It just felt more interesting to us to say, ‘Hey, let’s make something where we don’t have to hustle anymore,’” and that thing became RAWMEN.

Going all-in on a strange, lunchtime idea

As the story goes, Mattock and Keshishian were dining at Tsujita Annex, an offshoot of the renowned noodle shop that started in Japan more than 20 years ago and opened its first American location in Los Angeles in 2011. Originally, RAWMEN was something altogether different, blue-skied as a kind of soup-based Tapper (remember that arcade classic from the 1980s?) where the player is trying to turn over the tables as fast as they can so their restaurant can do more business.

It didn’t last long as a concept, but Keshishian still enjoys sharing the idea because it was so goofy, and it also somewhat explained where Animal was at the time creatively. They were still doing client/agency work, but they were also bouncing a lot of things off the wall, not quite committed yet to doing their own video game.

“It was just a single-player, top-down, like isometric [game], but it was a bit more ridiculous because the concept was you’re a shamisen player [a traditional Japanese string instrument somewhat like a banjo or guitar] and the faster and faster you play, the faster people around you eat,” Keshishian said. “And you try to get them out of the restaurant and get more in. […] It was a really dumb, honestly, really dumb concept. But we were just like, ‘Yeah, this was funny, let’s try this out.’”

The original RAWMEN did not survive as a concept, but Keshishian and Mattock kept returning to it, as a muse of sorts, because they found the concept of throwing soup around to be so visually funny. “Let’s just make it about throwing soup,” Keshishian recalled. “Let’s nix the whole serving people idea. And we were like, ‘You know what? I want to do that.’”

It also speaks to a gameplay value that has been part of RAWMEN almost from the start. And that’s basically that this is a tournament-style, arena shooter like Unreal, which Mattock (38 years old) and Keshishian (41) grew up playing. But the two still want people to have fun if they fail at it, or get ambushed, or just get repeatedly mowed down by someone else who’s better at shooter fundamentals. It’s a food fight after all, and the mess that’s made, win or lose, is supposed to be part of the fun.

A few fundamentals that give everyone a puncher’s chance

The base weapon in RAWMEN is, of course, a big pot of soup, and players dip a ladle into it to backhand one another with juicy splats of noodles and broth. There are fart noises aplenty, and the customizable characters have a variety of voices, all basically Wario-esque Simlish, to express surprise, defeat, or triumph. 

Importantly, players can slide around on a trail of soup to quickly get into (or out of) a firefight. The pot itself doubles as a shield (triggered by a right bumper press if you’re using a gamepad). Keshishian and Mattock were very deliberate in that they wanted controller support on their game from the get-go, again making it approachable and accessible even for those who are bad at mouse-and-keyboard fundamentals. Not only can RAWMEN's soup saviors erect cracker-like barriers to get behind cover, but if they’re just getting bombed, they can always pull the pot over their heads to fend off an onslaught. 

That adds a shield bar to the character, preventing damage until the pot breaks. It’s a nice counter for those who resent being shot from across the map or losing out in a contest quickly reduced to who-saw-whom first.

“We had this moment where I was like, ‘Man, I hate feeling like s*** when I play a tournament game or a very competitive game,'” Mattock said, even if he really enjoyed the gameplay or visual appeal of a top-shelf multiplayer title. “I played Dota 2 with Eric, and I played Overwatch with him, and I got cussed out for not knowing how to play Mercy,” Mattock said. “We were like, ‘Man, we should make a game that is not that environment. We can make a game where you don’t have that at all.’”

“We don’t want to punish people for doing a bad job,” Keshishian added. “That’s essentially it. We want them still to have fun, and we didn’t want their teammates to feel like they were messing up their experience either. That was kind of our whole motto of what we’re putting into the mechanics and what we’re putting into the weapons and the experience of the player.”

Naturally, there’s an arsenal of specialty weapons that players won’t spawn with or carry as a loadout but may pick up around the maps. A pie, for example, functions as a close-quarters melee strike (to the face, obviously). An iced doughnut can be tossed somewhat grenade-like, not exploding but rather blimping up with area-of-effect damage that stuns and juggles opponents. A dumpling is a throwable weapon somewhat like a sticky grenade. A matzo ball at the end of a fork is both a club-like melee weapon and a homing missile attack. The Bratling Gun is a meat grinder that fires a barrage of sausages, complete with a whirring spin-up sound. And then there’s the Smackerel Mackerel, whose purpose is right there in its name—to slap someone upside the head with a dead fish.

The deadliest, and messiest, of all is a tomato, which players can hop on and roll over adversaries in a kind of explosive steamroll attack. Then pressing the right trigger or fire button sends it off for a highly effective, ranged splat attack that sends blue and yellow damage numbers popping off your surprised adversaries in the distance. Damage is more effective the closer you are in RAWMEN, which of course makes the whole contest seem sloppier and more desperate. But if nothing else, you can still stand up and trade soup-ladle haymakers with at least a puncher’s chance at knocking out the other guy.

“We didn’t really want people to be like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna build the character this way. This is exactly the best, most powerful weapon, and I’m going to maintain this the entire time,’” Mattock explained. “We kind of leaned on the Mario Kart experience; there’s a bit of randomness to Mario Kart, and you don’t really get to choose things. It’s the luck of the draw.

“We do want to create more randomness and not stuff that can be set or predetermined,” he added. “There are still things that can be done, but it’s not as overly complex as some other games where everyone has the same loadouts.”

New weapons add some flavor—but also complexity

The other reason for the special weapons is basically just the fun factor they add to the experience. Early builds of the game, though shown on E3 livestreams and gathering mainstream accolades as a one-to-watch indie project, were still very basic in terms of the characters’ combat behavior. “[During] our initial talks with earlier publishers, they liked a lot of our game, and they had fun with it, thought it was great, but they thought it was a bit rudimentary with just the soup,” Keshishian said. “They didn’t think it was complex enough to captivate people.

“So after that, we started to brainstorm all these crazy, weird, random items and weaponry, and see what makes sense and what we could put in,” he said. “From that point on, we were like let’s do fun things, but let’s also make sure we’re not just deathmatch fans. We want to appease the players that want to play supportive-type roles too.”

The latest build of the game, which had a publicly available beta in September 2022, is up to version 0.94. It has three modes: Broth Battle, which is basically a team deathmatch; Claim Chowder, a domination variant with a huge, gushing pot of seafood at the zone; and Meatball, a capture-the-flag like mode where players battle over a blob of ground beef and ride it towards their team’s goal. A snarky Bill Burr-type announcer pops in with quips and asides to keep the mood light. In one match, I actually heard him practicing his ASMR technique.
 

One mode that was in earlier builds but, regretfully, hit the cutting room floor because it was taking too long to balance was Top RAWMEN, basically a king-of-the-hill match. “It still might show up,” Mattock said. “I just think it needs more refinement.”

“We had a lot of fun playing that game mode,” Keshishian said. “It’s more that [when it comes to] players who are more casual gamers, it’s hard to teach them these kinds of ingrained mechanics that we, as an older-generation of gamers, already know. [Top RAWMEN] is essentially like rocket-jumping or a bomb-jumping platforming game mode, but a lot of newer gamers don’t really know those things. It’s not ingrained. So we failed in our first pass at teaching them something and we'd rather stick to our strengths than pushing a game mode that just doesn't feel finished.”

A silly idea that still pushed them to the brink

Over the past five years, almost every aspect of RAWMEN has evolved and changed—except for, remarkably, its name. That remained intact as Keshishian and Mattock became attached to the pun very early in the conceptualization phase, where a group of scantily-clad—you know, raw men (and women, to be fair)—are locked in ridiculous food-fight combat. (Character customization is a big part of RAWMEN, even if players can’t adopt loadouts and have to rely more on a general shooter playstyle.)

But both creators admit to feeling a kind of “why isn’t this thing done” or “what are you really working on” peer pressure from family and friends over the years, even if publisher TinyBuild, which bought their studio in 2021, has kept a respectful distance, trusting Animal to know when RAWMEN is complete.

“Games are very hard to describe to anyone how they’re made,” Mattock said. “And also…there’s still that whole taboo with them where people think, ‘Oh, it must be fun to make a game,’ but they don’t see how wild it is, really. That was a hard thing, going through a time where your bank account is getting drained and stuff like that, and your friendships are getting strained, but people are like, ‘Oh this is no big deal.’”

“Meanwhile, we’re working like 14- to 16-hour days at this point,” Keshishian added. “It’s kind of demoralizing to hear other people not get your struggle, and say, ‘Oh, you’re having fun working on your games.’ The outside perspective versus the inside struggle is so different.”

One reason that RAWMEN has taken this long to deliver is simply because Animal is a small studio. At most, Animal has had maybe 20 team members working on the game , usually averaging about 10 over RAWMEN's development lifespan. Yet the visual appeal—and naturally, as graphic designers, Keshishian and Mattock were going to give this their all—speaks of a triple-A game where a publisher can just throw more people at development to make a deadline to ship by some quarter.

“Something that we’ve had trouble with, but I think it’s good trouble to have, is the look of our game,” Mattock said. “We got really lucky with some of the character modelers [Animal hired] and people who have experience with triple-A modeling and stuff like that. So I think the game itself already looks very polished to people, and I think they can easily forget that this is an indie game. They’ll treat you as if you are a big studio, but it’s like look, there’s a guy named Lucas in South America who is sweating away making a weapon right now. It’s not the same as Call of Duty or something like that.”

Eventually, “our family and friends definitely knew that we were struggling and saw the toll that was taking on us,” Keshishian said bluntly. For about two and a half years, both developers were all in on RAWMEN, forsaking other clients, packing their days with sunup-to-sundown work on the game, and feeling like they had little to show for it. Financially, it was starting to strain both and even required them to push a kind of reset button on their friendship because, as Keshishian said, their working styles were very different even if they had been complementary in the past.

“I wouldn’t say there was a breaking point, because Dustin is my best friend, we’re such close friends,” Keshishian said. “But we came to a point where we were like ‘Damn. We are really getting on each other’s nerves, and we’re really at our mental limits. This is really taking a very negative effect on us that I never want to get to again.’”

Indie publisher TinyBuild throws a lifeline

Along with the long days dominated by RAWMEN's early development, life outside the office was still happening, also taking its own toll on Animal’s founders. Mattock’s father fell ill. He was hospitalized for more than a year, and passed away in July.

“It was an incredibly hard struggle, balancing working and getting to the hospital when I was needed, or to see my Dad,” Mattock said, about dealing with two extreme and very personal priorities both demanding drop-everything attention at a moment’s notice. 

Mattock almost sheepishly admitted to being the stereotype of a  penniless artist living with his parents in adulthood, (even if he was paying rent to them). Still, that had to be suspended for a time before his father’s passing — although it did come with some frank counseling that maybe he needed to get back into work-for-hire just to keep the lights on.

“There was a time [where] I think I had, like, $700 in my bank account at one point,” Mattock said, and he wasn’t laughing either. “I kept on getting saved by my tax refunds. When I look back…I can’t believe the ability I had to make that money stretch. It helped me realize the value of one dollar more than I did previously. Because when people know your situation, and they’re like ‘Hey, let’s go get coffee, I’ll pay,’ but you’re like, ‘Listen, it still costs money to get there.’”

TinyBuild, the publisher of 2017’s Hello Neighbor among several other indie games, threw a lifeline of sorts when it acquired Animal in 2021. But it wasn’t strictly a cash-on-the-barrelhead transaction. Though both Mattock and Keshishian are looking at a worthwhile payday if things work out. A statement from TinyBuild chief executive Alex Nichiporchik at the time called it an “acquihire” among nine other studios the publisher picked up between November 2020 and August 2022.

Still, TinyBuild’s investment in the studio and implicit faith in the pair’s ideas dissipated a lot of the pressure they had been feeling. “TinyBuild has been a fantastic partner,” Mattock said. “They let us do what we want, for the most part, in regards to how things are made. They help us where they need to, but they’re not forcing our hand. They’re just like, ‘Hey, the game is already weird enough.’ They’re not like, ‘You should add a race car mode.’”

All that said, both developers know how hard it is to set yourselves apart as a pure multiplayer game in a marketplace with no shortage of those options, however unorthodox their vision might be. 

“You definitely take notice,” Mattock said. “It’s always a worry. But we’re hoping that our character will come through. RAWMEN is definitely a different type of game where there’s a personality that I can’t quite put my finger on. But it feels very self-aware that it’s a game. A lot of other games, I think they almost take themselves too seriously, but there’s nothing wrong with them. I think it feels like everyone—including myself—has a quick appetite for games these days. It’s always a worry, you know?”

RAWMEN does not yet have a launch date, but any conversation with Animal’s co-founders leaves the impression that they’re not dawdling on the polish or letting perfect be the enemy of the good in its design. 

They do understand that a launch announcement is a hard commitment, and given all they’ve come through to this point, Mattock and Keshishian don’t want to finish off their debut development journey by jumping the gun on a launch announcement and then facing the chagrin of a delay while they take care of components not fully baked. Additionally, even though RAWMEN is a multiplayer-only game, Keshishian and Mattock have built it with a kind of lore gluing things together. It’s half the fun of making such a weird game, after all.

“With this whole project it’s very random—the game is very, very random. But we also have a lore and a story that is quite involved on the back end that’s not quite explained yet,” Mattock said. “And while I think that’s helped the game, it’s also hindered us a little bit because when something comes up as a problem, it’s very easy to be like, 'Oh, well, let’s just make this happen.’ But from a creative point of view, does that make sense for the story? Does that make sense for the lore?”

When it does arrive, RAWMEN will be an Epic Games Store exclusive for PC gamers, with versions also coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Juegos De 20 PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.