How one Canadian is shaking up video games as a multiclasser

If you’ve ever played a role-playing game, the term “multiclasser” might ring a bell. For the uninitiated, it refers to training your character in multiple classes to create more powerful and versatile builds, like a Rogue and Ranger combo in Baldur’s Gate 3. For many, it’s part of the thrill of RPG character customization.

But for Manda Farough, it’s also an idea that’s helped fuel an actual career in video games. Over the past 15 years, the Kamloops, B.C. native has done everything from blogging, games journalism and podcasting to consultancy, game development and preservation.

“Have you ever heard of ADHD?” she quips when asked about what draws her to being a “multiclasser.” She credits her younger brother, who also has ADHD, for helping her identify that within herself. “‘I need you to look at your life, I need you to look at all of the insane things that you do on a regular basis, and I need you to see the undiagnosed ADHD here,” she laughingly recalls him saying.

On the subject of family, the multi-hyphenate points to their father for getting her into games in the first place, with her first memory of the medium being Centipede on the Atari 2600. “Gaming has always been part of my life. It’s always been really social, because my dad and I have had, actually, a standing video game date for the vast majority of the last 20 years. We’ve played all these MMOs together and all that good stuff. So I think my dad’s love of games definitely pushed me in that direction,” she says.

The years that followed would include all kinds of different work, albeit not directly in the gaming industry. After obtaining a degree in computer science, she spent 10 years in Vancouver working as a programmer and web designer. During that time, she talked to companies like EA (whose local studio is behind the massively popular FIFA/EA Sports FC and NHL series) but didn’t think game development was for her. It was only after attending a PAX panel with narrative and game designer Annie Vandermeer (Guild Wars 2, Unpacking) and speaking with her afterwards that Farough realized there are other gaming-related careers.

“I don’t want whatever this is. I didn’t even want to make games. But writing about games? I could be into that!” she said of this epiphany. As she notes, this was during a time when games media were in a much healthier place. “We didn’t have what game journalism would become and then disintegrate from,” she says. “And that was my first really big introduction into potentially stepping into game development in a very sideways capacity.”

From there, she’d go on to run her own blog and, eventually, freelance for sites like Mashable and Paste and even serve as editor-in-chief at GameDaily.biz and SuperParent.com. It’s a career that ran parallel to that of her partner, Mike Futter, who was the news editor at Game Informer for a few years and also freelanced at sites like Polygon and GamesIndustry.biz. Eventually, their shared interest in the business of games led them in 2020 to start F-Squared, a gaming industry consultancy that’s worked with dozens of indie and AAA studios.

Talking about the business of games… for the rest of us

In a fitting callback to their journalism roots, Farough and Futter’s F-Squared initiative includes Virtual Economy, a now nearly 200-episode-strong podcast about unpacking the business of games. At any given time, Virtual Economy would be a uniquely insightful podcast, breaking down gaming’s complex “inside baseball” stories in a way that’s easy to understand even for those who aren’t so business savvy. But the show is especially relevant now in the current climate of mass layoffs that has sadly seen tens of thousands lose their jobs. Together, Farough and Futter dive into the roots of these problems, and it’s something both developers and gamers alike can benefit from.

“‘Where does the money come from?’” she puts forth as a question she’d like to see more consumers asking. “[It’s about] better understanding why some developers end up making choices that they make with regards to marketing, their PR, the influencers they work with, and why it feels sometimes like, ‘Why would this really awesome developer that I’ve loved for years make this choice?’ The actual answer is the money’s got to come from somewhere.”

She says that greater public knowledge of this can help foster a better connection between gamers and developers, especially when the former can often be toxic.

“Understanding where that money comes from will help players become more empathetic about the decisions that developers need to make to stay alive. There are so many studios out there that are dying because there is no money, and the money that is out there is from really questionable places sometimes,” she explains. “I’m not saying universally, but in the United States, which is where I live now [in New Jersey], there’s no grants. There’s no funding down here. We don’t have the Canada Media Fund down here. We don’t have Ontario Creates. We don’t have B.C. arts funds. You’re just going out there doing your thing. So, [it’s about] understanding where the money comes from, or doesn’t come from, depending on where you live.”

It’s a conversation that ramped up recently after Remy Siu, the co-founder of Vancouver-based Sunset Visitor and creative director and co-writer on last year’s beloved 1000xResist, talked about the importance of Canadian arts funding opportunities in a viral Bluesky post.

Here to say that we wouldn’t exist without arts funding.

Not only would 1000xRESIST not exist without arts funding, we as artists who practiced for YEARS, trying to understand ourselves and our mediums would not exist without arts funding.

Fund the arts! All of them. Including games.

[image or embed]

— remy siu | 1000xRESIST (@remysiu.com) May 12, 2025 at 10:23 PM

But while Canada has those lucrative government-related funding opportunities, Farough notes that there are no domestic publishers here. This means that Canadian game makers like Sunset Visitor or Halifax’s Tunic Team (Tunic) often have to turn to international publishers like Grand Rapids, Michigan’s Finji or Melbourne, Australia’s Fellow Traveller for additional support.

“What is our publishing landscape at home? It doesn’t really exist. It’s there, but it’s beholden to American structures, which don’t really work with Canadian developers. So, [it’s about] understanding where the money comes from, and understanding how studios do or do not get funded,” she says, citing a Virtual Economy episode with Kelly Wallick, the founder of the indie game promotional organization Indie Megabooth, about different kinds of capital.

“Funding is the big one that I really want players to take more of a notice of so that they can make informed decisions about the kinds of games that they’re purchasing, and where that money is going to go,” says Farough. “Is it going to go directly to the publisher? Is it going to go to the developer, because they’re self-publishing, making those kinds of choices? I’m very passionate about funding!”

Levelling up into game development

After all of those roles, it’s fitting, then, that Farough’s next step was to actually start making games professionally. In many ways, it’s a culmination of years of work in computer science and supporting game makers through journalism and consultancy. And before long, Farough would contribute to more than 10 games, including narrative design on WDR Studios‘ 3D horror-platformer Terrible Lizards and narrative and producing on Redstart Interactive‘s unannounced comedic adventure-platformer. That’s to say nothing of her time as a producer at Pigeon Simulator maker HakJak Studios, which was abruptly shut down in 2023 amid restructuring at publisher tinyBuild.

But much of Farough’s game development work has been spent in operations and producing at El Paso, Texas-based Strange Scaffold, one of the most fascinating and prolific indie studios in the business. Since 2020, Strange Scaffold has launched a stunningly eclectic array of games that includes a Max Payne-esque third-person shooter (El Paso Elsewhere), psychological horror narrative adventure (Clickolding), arcade-style first-person shooter (I Am Your Beast) and match-3/Metroidvania/RPG (Creepy Redneck Dinosaur 3). Impressively, those last three games were all released within 12 months. And while you might think that such a rapid release cadence would lead to a lower-quality output, all of Strange Scaffold’s games have, at minimum, a “positive” user rating on Steam.

Studio head Xalavier Nelson, Jr. has been open about the production pipelines that allow for such a portfolio, particularly when it comes to setting realistic scopes for games and leveraging rotating “constellations” of contractors. Farough, for her part, started working with Strange Scaffold on 2022’s El Paso Nightmare and has helped ship several more games since then in an operations role.

“I think what has been a real game changer for us at the studio is having more producers — having people that are on the project from start to finish that can help build out those road maps, the timelines, resource management, managing risk, managing priorities, and also making sure that our ‘constellation’ of developers are consistently taken care of,” she says. “Having that knowledge and having that camaraderie that’s been built over a number of years is one of the most powerful ways that we’ve levelled up as a studio — deepening those relationships and deepening the need for more explicit production.”

Farough’s point about maintaining that shared “knowledge” and “camaraderie” is especially notable because it touches on one of the many tragic consequences of the industry’s recent swath of layoffs. Splitting apart studios means that those developers, who had almost assuredly been growing together as a team, will no longer be able to build on their dynamics and deliver even greater experiences on their next project. It’s something that Naoki Hamaguchi, the co-director of last year’s beloved Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, has spoken about publicly. As he told Bloomberg, his team had retained “80 to 90 percent” of its staff from Final Fantasy VII Remake, allowing it to develop such a massive and acclaimed sequel in under four years, versus the six- or seven-year cycle that many other AAA games require. Of course, those are much bigger games than what indies like Strange Scaffold make, but the same idea applies.

Something Farough also wants to stress, though, is that none of this is a given. Echoing what many other developers have said, she notes that “it’s a miracle anything ever ships,” given how complicated the process is across the board. But having that close-knit team has resulted in “very small changes over a long period of time” that have had an “enormous impact,” such as identifying the best time to involve the PR and communications team. “It’s a matter of having all the right people in the right places and making sure that [we’re] sharing resources between projects. That’s how we have that measure of consistency: a good chunk of the same people are coming in and out of these projects.”

Strange Scaffold’s next game is also its first licensed one: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown.

As that title might suggest, Tactical Takedown is a turn-based beat ’em up — the first for TMNT — that’s structured around 20 “constantly-mutating” levels across separate campaigns for each turtle. As Nelson told Aftermath earlier this year, having a smaller-scale game like Tactical Takedown with a budget of less than US$300,000 (about C$419,000) meant that the team got the creative freedom to make bold choices like bringing the Turtles into a new game genre, killing off both Splinter and Shredder and creating a new Foot Clan leader for our heroes to fight.

“We focused on the emotional resonance that we wanted to bring forward with each of the brothers. Because this is a story that hasn’t really been told before,” says Farough. “We’re telling a story about the brothers being really shattered after losing Splinter and not really having a lot of focus or togetherness because Shredder’s gone.”

With this setup, Strange Scaffold is able to tell a new kind of TMNT story that emphasizes the uniqueness of each Turtle. “That was a big inspiration for us in pushing each of the individual brothers into new and uncomfortable spaces for each of them, and giving these characters the opportunity to grow both apart and then come and find their way back together again,” says Farough.

As an executive producer on the game, her job was to stay on top of deadlines and within the game’s scope and budget, as well as work with TMNT owner Paramount, who she says were “dream” partners. But Tactical Takedown also provided her with the opportunity to flex her narrative chops. For her part, she wrote all of Michelangelo’s storyline, as well as some material for Donatello’s. She says that getting to work on Mikey proved to be an especially personal experience.

“He’s my brother’s favourite turtle, and I want to do this for him. I want to write Mikey’s arc so that when my brother plays it, he knows it’s just this teeniest, tiniest, little love letter to our childhood,” she explains. “I’m the consummate cheerleader, and that’s what I was doing in my writing, as well as giving Mikey that amount of emotional depth without getting in the way, because he’s a party dude. You don’t make him too serious. But Mikey had to go through his own emotional journey, and I wanted to give that to my brother, too — to show him that I see him and how he’s really changed over the years. He was my biggest inspiration for Mikey.”

She also praises the other writers on the game, Nelson and Nathan Vokel, for penning a “beautiful” ending that brought her to tears. “It was just such a wonderful way to wrap up the brothers and their story,” she teases.

Oh, Canada

After TMNT, Farough will no doubt have several more Strange Scaffold games coming in quick succession, given the team’s breathless efficiency. She’ll also have those aforementioned titles from WDR and Redstart, as well as the usual consultancy and podcasting work. She was also recently revealed to be on the shortlist for a “Game Dev Hero” award among 1,200 submissions, a gesture that she says moved her to tears. All in a day’s work for a multiclasser, right?

But no matter how many new hats Farough ends up wearing, there’s one, in particular, that will always stand out.

“I will always be a Canadian girl at heart, forever and ever and ever,” she says. “I love where I live in the United States. I really do love it, and I’m so fond of the roots I’ve put down for my children with my partners, and that’s never going to change. But at the end of the day, I’m a Canadian girl.”

To that point, she says she comes back often to see friends and family and hit up some of her favourite places, including the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“I didn’t want to lose those roots, those pieces of myself that are so integral to who I am — that measure of togetherness that I learned by being Canadian growing up in the Rocky Mountains. I don’t ever want to lose those pieces of myself that are uniquely Canadian,” she says.

While Farough keeps that spirit alive as much as possible in her career (“I’ve taught my developers what a toque is!”), she says her ultimate goal is to return to B.C. to start her own gaming studio. She’s inspired by many Canadian-made games, including 1000xResist, Montreal-based Behaviour’s Dead by Daylight (the country’s largest independently-made game), the Dragon Age series from BioWare Edmonton and The Big Con from Toronto’s Mighty Yell.

“I want to employ fellow Canadians. I want to employ people from all over the world, if I can, but I want it to be in Canada,” she says. “It’s so, so important to me that, just like I say on Virtual Economy: the game industry has given me a lot. Gamers have given me a lot. Game developers have given me a lot. But Canada has given me everything, and I want to give that back.”

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This interview has been edited for language and clarity.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown will launch on Steam on May 22.

Header image credit: GameDaily.biz/F-Squared/Strange Scaffold

Correction: 21/05/2025 at 2:03 p.m. ET — This story previously mentioned Farough was doing both narrative design and producing on Terrible Lizards, but it’s only the former. It also listed Tactical Takedown as a “turn-based RPG” when it should have said “turn-based beat ’em up.” We’ve updated this piece accordingly.