UNSTABLE SCIENTIFIC
As I browsed the Seattle Indies booth at GeekFest West this year, I ran into Masha, a lovely individual wearing a lab coat and mad scientist goggles. With a getup like that, I couldn't help but want to know more about their game. As a journalist, I come across countless 2D pixel platformers and dystopian indie games, but Unstable Scientific drew me in because it somehow combines these elements with a cozy storybook vibe. My frist impression of this game was, “cozy chaos? I’m in.”
In Unstable Scientific, you play as Dr. Lev Hoffman, a physicist hero who is building an underground lab on a mysterious island. You collect resources and rescue other scientists while investigating a strange mineral found on the island called Absurdium. There are so many secrets to discover in this game. Unstable Scientific features platform mechanics, unique physics-based interactions, and a rich story that’s inspired by the challenges faced by real-world scientists in academia.
I’ll be honest, I’m not the best when it comes to platformers, so I was a bit nervous heading into the demo of this game. I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of gameplay, however. The game features secret platforms all over each level for platformer gamers who are looking for a greater challenge, though. When enemies appear, you have a choice: utilize a variety of weapons to wreak chaos on corrupted drones or take the non-violent way out. Weapons aren’t just used for violence but can be a way to navigate obstacles and even befriend creatures on the island.
Unstable Scientific uses hi-bit pixel art to create a world full of opportunities for exploration and adventure. The detailed character designs directly reflect the developers’ thoughtful commitment to Unstable Scientific’s rich story. I was impressed with the genuine care Masha & Dustin Soodalkov have put into their game. During our interview, it was obvious that they care deeply for their community and are passionate about storytelling through video games. If you love physics-driven gameplay and rich storylines, Unstable Scientific is for you.
Unstable Scientific is available now to wishlist on Steam with plans for Early Access in December 2025.
Puppet: This is Puppet, and I'm with the developers of Unstable Scientific. How are you guys?
Masha: Doing great.
Dustin: Pretty good. This has been an awesome event so far.
Puppet: That's awesome. Yeah, we love seeing how many indies that Seattle Indies brought.
Dustin: Yeah, this is actually, besides SIX, this is like the biggest event we've done with them, and this, it's really neat how this only, not just our section of it, but this whole event has grown since last year.
Puppet: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So okay, who are you? What are you working on?
Dustin: My name is Dustin, and I'm working on a game called Unstable Scientific. We've been working on this for what, like seven or eight years. At this point, we really only started getting serious at COVID because of lockdowns. And I'm the programmer, and she's the artist, level designer, sound designer, and most of the other things, except for music.
Masha: Yeah, yeah, we have. We hired Super Marcato composers to do our music, and the Super Marcato Brothers, sorry. And I do, I do art and glass blowing for a living. And Dustin is IT. He works for a small ISP in the rural Valley, and does, like, a lot of the security and design for them.
Puppet: So tell me about your game. What is your game? What's the premise? What's going on?
Masha: Okay, so in our game, you play a physicist, and you collect all kinds of resources and rescue other scientists in order to build up a lab on a mysterious island. You're trying to work out that the island has a really strange mineral called absurdium. And you're trying to work out what the secret is behind it, and why it's there, why it hasn't been previously found out.
Puppet: We love secret islands and secrets in general. As I was playing the game, demoing it, I found all these secrets, and it was so cool. There's so much more.
Dustin: Yeah, we really like to reward people who just explore the board, even try to get places you're not supposed to. And sometimes even like, use the fact that like as a combination of platform mechanics and a physics engine, and trying to use the physics of things to try to get to areas and manipulate the level in various ways.
Puppet: Yeah, I'm a big Zelda fan, so I love having little things that you have to put in different places and find different… Yeah, and I, I'm the kind of gamer where I like to be where I'm not supposed to, so I think that's why I enjoyed it so much.
Masha: For the love of Lord, you are not supposed to be here.
Dustin: Yep!
Puppet: Yes. Okay, what originally got you guys into making games?
Masha: So back when we first met in 2000, we were both really into, like, Doom, Duke Nukem 3d, and Quake 1. And we got together. It was my first year of college and Dustin's last, and we would just spend hours building quake levels and, you know, just like figuring out, like, fun ways to fight each other, we found that we spent more time making the levels than we did actually making the game.
Dustin: It's actually play, yeah, it's, really interesting, trying to make different scenarios happen, despite the fact that it's really just, we're working with an existing game, really, and just, it's really just a level editor, but just trying to see how far we can push you to do different things. And it was just really fun creating worlds like I got to the point where, whenever I saw something like this piece of architecture, it's like, how would I best create it in that level editor?
Puppet: Wow. What a cool way to think about games through architecture and such.
Dustin: Yeah.
Masha: But back then, making, making games for for us, was just like, really, it was really inaccessible. You know, there weren't, there weren't many engines that were, like, very easy to learn. A lot of the languages I wasn't really into coding too much, and they were tricky to pick up. But then, when we moved to the Pacific Northwest, we met many people that were indie devs, and we're like, oh, this, this looks like it's so much fun. This was like a dream of ours. And finally we moved to, like a rural location, and there was just wasn't much to do except for introverting. So.
Puppet: Yeah, very cool. I was just talking to Carolyn, who is with Seattle Indies, and she said that Seattle Indies is the biggest organization of indie developers in the nation now?
Masha: I think, I think so. I wouldn't be surprised.
Dustin: It’s getting pretty sizable, it’s getting to the point where a lot of, like, we've been starting to attract people, or just from the industry, who just want to try something different, or maybe they're like, Go, or maybe just want to, like, follow the dream, or whatever. And a lot of people are joining, like, joining the community,
Puppet: Yeah.
Masha: I think it's definitely the most diverse. And there are people from all walks of life who have joined up and make games, like people that are making, you know, like, I think it's called, like, triple I, indie games that have, like, a lot more funding, and then like people that are just making. Games that are more like Zine, like in nature, and that are just made to express something deeply personal without having crazy mass appeal.
Dustin: There are other ones where they just want to try out, like, really unique game mechanics you'll see, like ways to play a game you've never seen anywhere else. And I was just talking to someone, they said that's the reason why they actually got into even, like indie gaming, why they quit the regular job is they said before they weren't, literally, were not allowed to do something in a game unless they could point to another game that was successful, that did the same thing.
Puppet: That's really interesting, yeah, and you said something that interests me too. You said, triple i, we always have the question of, What does indie mean? Ri’ Right? Because that word goes with all like huge teams, I have lots of funding for small teams. Can you tell me more about that?
Masha: I'm not really in authority on it, but I believe that the game Subnautica is a good example of a triple I game, because they were, they were an independent team, and they acquired a lot of they acquired a lot of funding in order to make a game that was like an incredibly vast, rich world with super detailed mechanics. You know, making, making a game like that would be pretty inaccessible for most of us, but they had, you know, they had, like, a good team on them for for, like, marketing and finance and stuff that could do that.
Dustin: But wasn't it like less than 20 people in the dev team?
Masha: Yeah, yeah.
Puppet: Wow.
Dustin: It looks like a triple-A game.
Masha: It's still more. 20 people on a dev team is still more than most Seattle Indies. Most of us are like five people, max,
Dustin: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes two, sometimes even one.
Puppet: Yep. Solo devs are amazing to me. They're just amazing, yeah? But we like the little Indies. We like stuff like, you guys, where it's just, you know, literally, a family business, kind of, you know, like
Dustin: It is like, kind of, everyone knows each other. And you can kind of see games develop when you go to a few different events and see how they evolve over time. Was like, hey, what new game are you working on? And they get to show up, what they're doing. And it's, like, interesting. It develops over time. From the very beginning, this is something like really polished.
Masha: Like, you end up forging really close bonds with those folks.
Puppet: Yeah, for sure. Okay, back to your game, Unstable, Scientific, with this game in particular. Can I ask you both to tell me what you're most excited about with this game?
Masha: Oh, oh, that's, that's a tricky choice. I think I'm most excited to I'm most excited to possibly release. My brain is getting fried. I can't.
Puppet: No, that’s okay! You were like, so excited you lit up, and I could see the fuses going.
Masha: I'm really excited to possibly do an early access release in late December, and just see how people react to it, and especially like, see how people react to the narrative and the story. We've had a lot of people in academia who really relate to many of the characters, and it's always like, really fun to talk to them and see, like, what you know, like what their experiences were, and like how it makes them feel.
Puppet: Yeah, I did notice about your game, there was a lot of dialogue and a lot of thought that's gone into the story of the game. I'll get to your exciting part, but I kind of want to ride this wave a little bit. What can you tell me about the background of that, and why did you choose to create a game around this? Like, why did you choose to tell this story?
Masha: So a lot of our a lot of our friends, have physics and biology backgrounds, and in the past, in the past, like 10 to 15 years, they've been experiencing, like, a lot of challenges in academia, like when, when we all went to college, going into STEM was pretty much the way to get a job and to secure funding and to also study all kinds of things that can actually, like, really help people. But when they all graduated, they found that it was actually much, much trickier, and that there was a lot of competition, and that tenure was less handed out based on merit and more handed out based on, like, a lot of other different factors. So it was incredibly disappointing. One of our friends was so close to getting tenure, and then he got fired at the last second, and that it kind of broke our hearts a lot. So our game is kind of, it's kind of, you know, it's kind of made for people like him.
Puppet: That breaks my heart, yeah, because people work so hard for something and to be so close to it, and it doesn't matter as much to other people, but to them, it's their life, you know.
Masha: And many, many people just want to make science their lives. They grew up. They grew up with people like Carl Sagan and Peter Higgs, and that's what they wanted to do. But. These days, it's science is becoming way more about business. And of course, you've heard about all the different funding cuts. So I don't want to, I don't want to go this direction too much. But you know, we wanted to make, we wanted to at least make it, make something that would make people feel more at home.
Puppet: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, what are you most excited about in this game?
Dustin: Well, she already mentioned, we have lots of friends who went into grad school, and I always was a little jealous, but also I felt like I was seeing a lot of that kind of trends happening, and I felt like I'd end up in a situation where you, well, it's a similar if you're in a major studio, where you have to. Basically, you can't do any research unless it's very similar to other research, and it's guaranteed it's like, almost to the point where they ask you what? Well, we've actually, people told us, they sometimes ask you what your results will be before you, well, you're applying to the grant. It's, and I feel like what this game does, it kind of allows me to express myself, I guess, in a way that, or I can express my creativity, really, in a way I felt like I wouldn't have been able to do if I went like, that kind of direction. And for me, it's, you know, it's kind of like a little you're building a world with all different characters and all different interactions. And also, my point of view, also, it's a combination of a like a platformer. It's also like, there's a whole physics world in there. It's like, anyway, it's a simulation of a world. And just not only like different things I figure out how to do to it, we'll incorporate that into a mechanic in it or a secret. And also, honestly, it's really interesting seeing how other people figure out how to do their own unique things within the game.
Puppet: Yeah, for sure, I I played a lot of indie games, and I have, I'm not very good at platformers, but I have played some, and what I noticed that stands out with your game is the depth of story that comes with it, along with all of the secrets and all you know, like the physical things, but it's all interconnected, and I can see the passion as you guys are talking about this game, you know, so just a treat. So thank you for sharing your game with us. All right. Next question, we kind of already covered this question, I guess. But what made you decide on this game in particular? Like, what was your very first talk about this game, and why did you go this direction?
Dustin: It’s really supposed to be something that we work on. And most of you months or a year for our first game, and then we feel like, really that direction, there's we end up could not be able to go that direction. So we're like, it was really just like a fan game, like referencing another game that we liked. And then what happened is we probably couldn't do very much with that. So we're like, hey, let's just make our own characters. And so we just start going back and forth. She come with an idea, and talk forth to me, and I give feedback, and we I mean this, the characters and the plot line with so many iterations, most of which I think serve no purpose except to flesh out the characters more. And so it sort of just evolved over time. It's what it is no.w
Masha: It was originally going to be a fan game from like, like a military base building game, and at some point, like, we just, we were just like, why would we want to do anything? Why would we want to put any of our effort into making anything related to the military? The guns aren’t fun to draw. The vehicles aren't fun to draw. The bases aren't fun to draw. What would we really want to build? We're like, we would want to build a lab and do science. So we ended up just like, going back and deciding, well, okay, so like, instead of like, instead of like, recruiting soldiers, we'd rather recruit scientists. That would be so much fun. And then, well, this is kind of, this is kind of like what I think that this is like, the kind of story that I think like one of our, one of our friends who, who was a researcher at Seattle University, would really like, and then we just kept going with it and kind of, like escalating it a little bit. Well, what if we do it this way? Okay? And yeah, and now it's instead of, like, three months, this is now an eight year game,
Puppet: Yeah.
Dustin: It's a lot more scope we've actually spent a long we went through periods of, like, weeks at a time, just being like, Okay, we have to deal with the scope creep here, and just to, like, limit it, because we realize the more we worked on it, the more stuff we're like, you know, it'll be really cool if we also did and then we realized, No, this isn't practical.
Puppet: Yeah, scope creep is something that we've heard a lot before with indie devs, and actually ties into my next question for you guys, if you could go back in time and change one thing or give yourself some advice when you first started, what would that be?
Masha: Try making something small first. Just try making a little bitty, tiny game. Familiarize yourself with the process. You know this is going to take a lot longer. It's going to totally be a 20-minute adventure, Dustin in and out.
Dustin: Yeah. It's so much more work than you can imagine if you've never made like, been in any kind of game maker, like any sort of software development, and it's different too, like a lot of software trying to make it like, we have to make it perfect. You have to make it all like, like, all these parameters. But in game dev, you just have to make it so it runs fast, and you have to make it so it works and you can it's like, sometimes you have to be like, Okay, this is the crappiest code ever, but it basically glues everything together and makes it work and it runs and it looks good, even though it's not what we imagined. And I feel embarrassed having written that. But hey, there it goes. Everyone likes it. Yeah, I
Masha: I think I do have actually like one more thing that I want to add. Back when we started making our game, there were so few, so few queer video games out, and we wanted to make our game queer, and I was, I was just really, I felt like, really nervous about it. I was like, what if there'll be people that don't like it and but we decided to keep sticking with it and doing that. And I wish I could just go back to my, you know, my old self, and say, Dude, don't worry about this.
Dustin: Yeah, yeah. It's like, at some point, you have to say, hey, this sort of target audience we want to like, not just to have it for, but also to support. And if anyone else doesn't like it, well, that's their problem.
Masha: Exactly.
Puppet: Yeah, it does take a lot of bravery to put something that you love out into the world. Thank you guys, both. Is there anything else about your game or your studio that you want us to know that you haven't mentioned yet?
Masha: We’re rural game devs, people, people like you are out there. People like you in small towns where there's no other game developers. We're out here, and we shall unite across the vast distances.
Puppet: Yay, the internet.
Dustin: It is real, like, as hard as it is, it actually is really satisfying, but it's kind of like a I remember this one thing I think is really interesting is saying that you mentioned it's, it's kind of like, almost like the most difficult parts of both arts, art and science, in the sense that it's an art, trying to get everything to work, whether in art like just an actual artist, or getting the like a level design to work, or getting the code to work. But what's interesting about it? But it's interesting because the feedback you get for your target audience is the same in some way, actually scientifically objective, because it's like, you can put all this work with these amazing graphics, and people will be like, this isn't very fun to play. And if you have, like, 10 people, it's like, I thought this was good. I guess. It's like, there's no opinions. Like, oh, I, what's good for me? It's like, no. Like, no one likes your game, and your target audience doesn't like your game. It's like, so it's like, oh, God, I failed. It's like having to accept that you have real-world objective feedback for something that there's no real objective way to actually make, like, there's no script, there's no, like, just like a procedure you can follow to make it happen. You just have to figure it out as you go along.
Puppet: Yeah, so much creativity involved. It's really video games. I've always thought of it as the most intricate art form that we have today. Yeah, so.
Dustin: It is, not just for, like, some games, it almost looks like you're really just looking at an artist. The art, the gallery, really like a virtual gallery, or like it's just a way of telling stories that you couldn't do before. It was like stories before that, even like watching a movie. It's amazing what they put together, but it's like you're scratching your third-person perspective, really. But it's really neat that you tell a story, but you get to take over the story and, like, change the story as you go, which is a thing that you can never get before. And I think that's really cool. Just like you said, the first storytelling, in a way, and the closest before, were those choose-your-own-adventure books, which always felt kind of unsatisfying to me, because there are only a few different ways you can go, but this is, like, an infinite number of ways you can go.
Masha: I think the kind of like the kind of live theater, where where people can, where the audience is interacting, I think it might be the only other way that you can really do it.
Puppet: Yeah, for real, yeah.
Dustin: Honestly, this all for the software end, it is kind of like theater. Imagine you have a theater, and. It's also from her end, because he had, like, a lot of level design, a lot of, like, dialogue, and the way it works, trying to keep everything functional, even if people choose a different direction. Yeah, it's kind of like, imagine what those really complicated sets, except you have to, you can't, you can't mess with the real time. You have to just have it all go according to procedure. And you decide, the actors decide, well, actors can do whatever they want. They can do whatever, but you have to somehow make it so that the set moves around in a way that looks like a realistic, self-consistent scene, no matter what the actors decide to do.
Puppet: And you don't know them.
Masha: And you don’t know what they’re gonna do!
Puppet: That’s wonderful.
Dustin: And a lot of them just enjoy just trying to make it, so they try to break the game. So.
Masha: Yeah, you got audience members that specifically want to go and break the sets and mess with the actors. We could talk about this for a while.
Puppet: Yeah, we sure could, well, we digress. Yeah, no. Thank you again for joining me for this interview. I hope you have a wonderful rest of Geek Fest.
Dustin: Thanks for coming to us.
Masha: Thank you for playing our game. Yeah, it's kind of an honor, actually.
Puppet: Well, it was really fun. All right, thank you.
