Origin Story

Episode Description

Neil Jones is a game artist currently working out of Detroit, MI. Jones is an artist and game designer who worked on indie titles like Clique and Aerial Knight’s Never Yield.

Neil garnered a lot of attention after his game was featured as part of Nintendo's 2021 indie world showcase.

We talk with him about creating new DLC for Never Yield through listening to fan feedback, and the trials and tribulations of indie game development today.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

Episode Notes

You can follow Neil Jones here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

We present you our new side show "Study Hall," a series of short conversations between Ben, Phil, and people they admire about a particular work or what's fueling their creative lives right now. Expect informal conversations with new and familiar names in the games, film, music, and writing world. Think of it like an audio newsletter, a taste of what we're up to off the air, now recorded.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

After years of working in the service industry, Eric Obenauf had an idea for an indie press that opened up space to publish bold, edgy, new voices he admired in the literature he loved. With the help of his wife Eliza the couple created Two Dollar Radio.

Two Dollar Radio is an indie press founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

With an aim to publish bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, provides a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

We talked to Eric and Eliza about the journey they took to making their indie press dreams a reality. And in the wake of the pandemic, how publishing books as a small press has become much more challenging, yet even more rewarding. This conversation is about the reality of living your dream, what they look for in publishing, and so much more.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can visit Two Dollar Radio’s website here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

Devin McKnight is a musician and songwriter currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Previously hes played guitar in rock projects such as Speedy Ortiz, Grass is Green, and Philadelphia Collins. At the moment, his main focus is the rock band he fronts, Maneka(Monica), which fuses elements of jazz, improvisation, math rock and shoegaze. Under this project he’s released three records Is This You, Devin, and most recently Dark Matters.

We talk to Devin about creating his new record "Dark Matters," the challenges of navigating predominately white spaces in the indie rock music industry, generational trauma, Black experience, and making something more nuanced that sad boy music.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

Episode Notes

You can visit Maneka’s website here.

You can follow Devin McKnight here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

Abhi is a Game Designer and Programmer working on his new narrative cooking game, Venba. Together with his Sam Elkana, the Art Director for the game, the two head Visai Studios, based in Toronto-based.

Venba is a narrative cooking game, where you play as an Indian immigrant mom, who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branching conversations and explore in this story about family, love, loss and more.

We talked with Abhi about the creation of the game, the importance of cooking in his life today, and how food connected his family together even during hard times. This is a conversation about what it means to follow your dreams, and forge a path for them no matter what it takes.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can visit the Venba website here.

You can follow Venba here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

Chandana Ekanayake is the Co-Founder and Studio Director at Outerloop Games and has over twenty years of experience as a video game designer and art director. Outerloop's first game Falcon Age is a sci-fi VR action adventure about raising a baby falcon and reclaiming a cultural legacy from a force of automated colonizers. Outerloop’s second game, Thirsty Suitors, is a stylish, story-driven adventure that unfolds through turn-based battles, skateboarding, and cooking and is slated for release this year. 

We talked with Chandana about what it was like building Outerloop Games, creating a more diverse studio, and how that diversity and inclusion can positively affect the games industry.

We also learn about the development of Falcon Age and Thirsty Suitors, and the importance of doing a game developers conference presentation while demonstrating how to cook his mother’s famous fritters.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can find Outerloop Games here.

You can follow Chandana here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

JES (John Elizabeth Stintz)i is a non-binary and trans writer, educator, and visual artist who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize. Their writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and many others. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. They live with their wife in the United States.

We talked with them about how they captured the feeling of doomscrolling in a novel form, and how they found ways to ground the absurd in the deeply human. 

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can follow JES here. 

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper 

Allegra Hyde is the author of Eleutheria" as well as the short story collection, Of This New World which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. 

In her debut novel, Eleutheria, is a story of idealism, activism, and systemic corruption, centered on a naïve young woman's quest for agency in a world ravaged by climate change.

We talked with Hyde about writing her debut novel, the power in utopian thinking in both fiction and real life, the promise and failures of activist groups, the struggles of being a working writer, and more.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can visit Allegra Hyde’s website here.

You can follow Allegra Hyde here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

Matthew Milia is a critically acclaimed songwriter, best known as the lead singer and guitarist for Frontier Ruckus. He is also a poet and visual artist.

He’s released three solo records as well as five records with his band Frontier Ruckus. His music explores themes of suburbia, nostalgia, mundanity , and his lyrics paint a sprawling landscape of a Michigan that is both here and elsewhere.

We talked with Milia about where he’s at creatively these days, how getting a desk job wasn’t about compromising his music, but calibrating it to a new phase of his life, and more.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can follow Matthew Milia here.

You can follow Matthew Milia here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

Podcastings most handsome duo is back to try and convince you that they're still relevant and have good things to say. But do they? Find out on this, our intermission episode.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us [email protected]

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper