Daily Inspiration: Meet Max Callahan

Today we’d like to introduce you to Max Callahan.

Hi Max, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
As a kid my parents refused to allow video game consoles in the house, which besides getting me to go outside (if only so I could get across the street to play Super Mario Bros at my neighbor’s) also made me all that more enticed by them. After much pestering however, they finally relented and got me a PC for my birthday. While not exactly what I was hoping for (the PS2 had just come out…), I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was by no means top of the line, more likely it was a hand-me-down from grandma’s house, and as such it was entirely incapable of running the modern games of the time. So, I spent a lot of time playing demos from Burger King kids meals and random old CDs found at church garage sales, always slamming the graphics down to the lowest possible settings just so the games would run. It was fantastic. From there my love for video games continued to grow. I loved how simple or complex they could be while still creating tension, and how they could make you feel like a real part of the story, even when experienced with all the graphical fidelity of a digital wristwatch.
Throughout high school I explored a ton of artistic mediums, and I was very fortunate to have amazing parents to encourage me and incredible teachers and theatre directors to guide that exploration. I did a lot of drawing and painting and playing music and acting in the school plays, but before long my friends and I got our hands on a camcorder and started making our own little movies. The planning and filming was a ton of fun, but I really fell in love with the post process, editing in particular. It wasn’t until I took a “computer programming” class in junior year that I discovered animation, and that really hooked me, especially when I could add a bit of code and make my characters move and dance just by pressing buttons on my keyboard. This was the moment I realized that the people making these video games that I spent so much of my time on probably weren’t so different from me, and I decided to pursue games as a career. Given my strong art background and passion for video editing, I elected to go for a degree in animation which brought me out to LA, and I’ve been here ever since.
After graduating, however, I found it very difficult to get a foot in the door at any of the big games companies that I had been admiring for 20 years. Application after application was either rejected or ignored, and I never had the patience to create a dedicated portfolio for just one potential position nor the appropriate amount of respect for authority that would allow me to work my way through the innumerable ranks of these companies to get where I actually wanted to be. So, I took a rather menial position out of college that leveraged my education and skills, but didn’t require all that much of my attention. I figured that way, I could dedicate my efforts toward improving my skills and learning more about what I actually wanted to do.
The work-from-home conditions brought upon by COVID-19 afforded me much more time to dedicate to my art, passion projects, and most importantly, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Writing storylines, designing combat mechanics, and running games two or three times a week gave me tons of practice juggling numbers and lots of immediate player feedback. And, somewhat to my surprise, my players were quite happy with my games, which gave me the courage to try making my own video games. I had the art side figured out already, so all I had to do was actually learn how to code, which I did by way of youtube tutorials and lots and lots of google. I soon decided to quit my ‘real job’ to go all in on my new career path, immediately fell on my face, regrouped and worked a couple more jobs while making my games on the side, and now we’re back in the deep end with my newest game, Breadventure.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I would say it has been a relatively smooth road, all things considered. Sure there were some bumps along the way but I consider myself very fortunate to be able to do what I’m doing and so much of it is thanks to all the wonderful people I have in my life. The main struggles I have come in the form of stiff competition and irrational self-doubt, neither of which are all that bad. The competition gives me strong examples of good work to learn from, and the self-doubt probably keeps my head the right size.
Another notable struggle on this path has been my indecisiveness. I get bored easily, and pick up new skills very often just because I think they seem fun, which has had the unfortunate effect of spreading my credentials quite thin in regards to potential employers. However there is a very shiny silver lining to this tendency in that all of the skills I’ve learned over the years have some overlap with each other, and now that I work on primarily my own projects as a one-man-band, those cross-disciplinary skills are worth their weight in gold.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
For the most part, I make food and wizard themed indie games. I tend to go for a very whimsical visual style while contrasting that lightheartedness with heavier narrative themes. I like to make my games rather small, both because if the project gets too complicated I start losing track of things, and because I enjoy the challenge of making games that run on very basic hardware (partially as a favor to my former self). This tendency has led me to opt for pixel art in my recent projects, so I suppose I’m mostly known for pixelated food creatures at this point in my career.
I’m very proud of Breadventure, the game I’m working on currently. As you may be able to tell from the title, it’s about a loaf of bread who finds himself embroiled in a deliciously dangerous adventure. It’s by far my most ambitious project. It’s a party based JRPG, and if you understand what any of that means then you’ll likely know how many different moving parts are involved in this sort of game. There are items and quests and companions and a colorful cast of enemies and NPCs in different locations and cooking recipes to discover, and all these systems have to work seamlessly together to create an enjoyable experience. I’ve run into tons of problems I didn’t expect and learned so much. I’m very happy with how it’s all coming together. Breadventure will be releasing in early access on Steam this November.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
It’s hard to say, I can see a lot of things changing while many bits stay remarkably the same. There are arguably two directions we could go from here. The first involves even more AAA centralization as companies like Epic Games and Roblox bring all sorts of different experiences together onto one big, easily monetizable platform. The second direction is an explosion of indie games from people like me as the tools to create become more and more accessible. We have already seen massive amounts of success for indie titles in the past few years and I don’t see that trend slowing down at all. Either way I do think a lot will stay the way it is: big studios will continue to put out huge titles with incredible graphical fidelity and impossible marketing budgets, and indie developers will keep doing it for the love of the game and occasionally break onto the main stage, inspiring hundreds of new developers to follow in their wake.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://breadventuregame.com
• Twitter: https://x.com/fecklessdev

Image Credits
Davide Azul