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# A Behind the Scenes chat with Red Nexus Games about Peglin
- URL: https://blog.febucci.com/2026/08/a-behind-the-scenes-chat-with-legingerdev-about-all-hail-the-orb-2/
- Published: 2026-08-25T10:30:33.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-25T10:30:33.000Z
- Description: We had a wonderful chat about Peglin - another game that uses Text Animator - with Dylan of Red Nexus Games. We took a deep dive into several aspects of the game’s development, read on to learn more!
- Author: Gabriele Massimiani
- Tags: Interview

[Red Nexus Games](https://rednexus.games/?ref=blog.febucci.com) is the Canadian studio behind [Peglin](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1296610/Peglin/?ref=blog.febucci.com), a Pachinko Roguelike and a hugely successful game that sold over **400k copies** in its first year of Early Access, [according to their press kit](https://rednexus.games/press/?ref=blog.febucci.com). The game has been fully released for a while, and **version 2.0 came out in March 2026** with lots of exciting new features!

Just a little bit of context, the game studio was originally started in the summer of 2015 by [Dylan Gedig](https://twitter.com/dylangedig?ref=blog.febucci.com) to release his local-multiplayer game The Shipwreck League. Starting a business while finishing a computer science degree proved to leave little time to actually work on the game, so Dylan teamed up with [May Gardens](https://twitter.com/moltanem2000?ref=blog.febucci.com) to instead bring May's in-progress game, [Friday Night Bullet Arena](https://store.steampowered.com/app/513840?ref=blog.febucci.com), to a commercial release.

In 2022, they released Peglin in Early Access (by the way: the game was originally born from a Game Jam - you can find [Goblin Drop here](https://gedig.itch.io/goblin-drop-jam?ref=blog.febucci.com)). After some time and a lot of work, they released **version 1.0 on August 27, 2024.**

Given that the team has made a big update we thought that was a great opportunity to tell you more about one of the games that uses [Text Animator for Unity](https://www.textanimatorforgames.com/unity?ref=blog.febucci.com), through an interview with **Dylan**.

![Pegli key art](https://storage.ghost.io/c/38/36/383676a1-e894-4116-9a98-bb5a9336da39/content/images/2026/07/image.png)

Pegli key art

## The interview with Red Nexus Games

**Febucci**: Hi, thank you and we are very happy that you decided to take part. Let’s start with a simple question: we know how Red Nexus Games began, but **what is Red Nexus Games today**, after the success of Peglin, and how is the studio structured?

**Dylan**:  
**Red Nexus Games is actually back to just being myself now!** Peglin started as a pretty casual solo project that didn't really have any commercial aspirations and I handled a lot of the business-y aspects as a "necessary evil" during development, but we didn't actually have anyone on the team that wanted to run a full-on studio so we've all gone on to working on separate projects! In fact the artist of Peglin has already gone on to release the very successful [Flock Around](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3618030/Flock%5FAround/?ref=blog.febucci.com) earlier this year!

#### From Game Jam to Early Access

**Febucci**: When did you realize that Goblin Drop / Peglin deserved years of development, and **wasn’t “just” a strong game jam prototype**?

**Dylan**:  
Hoo boy that's a tough one haha... **After the demo started to attract streamers and generate wishlists, after a few months of hobby development**, we definitely made a distinct decision to expand the game from just one area (our current demo, and what we were originally planning on releasing on Steam as a very small game just to keep ourselves busy during Covid lockdowns, when we thought those would only last around 6 months) up to three (to match the scope of games like [Slay the Spire](https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay%5Fthe%5FSpire/?ref=blog.febucci.com), [Monster Train](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1102190/Monster%5FTrain/?ref=blog.febucci.com), and [Roguebook](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076200/Roguebook/?ref=blog.febucci.com)), but we still thought that could be completed in around a year and we never sat down and discussed working on the game for multiple years!

**Febucci**: **Was Early Access part of the plan from the beginning**, or did you decide at some point that it was the best path forward? What was the hardest part to manage? **Do you think this model still works today?**

**Dylan**:  
**Early Access wasn't our initial plan but we kind of happily stumbled into it.** By the time we had to make a release strategy we were already somewhat unintentionally treating the Steam demo as an Early Access game, releasing an update about once a week and using player feedback and playthrough videos to create and tune new content! I don't think it works for every game but I think it can be extremely useful in certain situations (especially if your game is built as more of a replayable "toy" instead of a linear experience). **Peglin definitely wouldn't exist in nearly the same form without Early Access**: it didn't have any publisher or funding put into it and at the time of the EA release I was the only person working on the game full-time (**I'd left my job 8 months earlier once it had been accepted to a couple of big showcases and crossed \~30K wishlists**). Sales from the EA release allowed other members of the team to begin focusing on its development full-time and then to eventually hire some additional people to help keep development rolling!

**Febucci**: When did you first start to feel that the game was doing well? Did that change your development process or your plans? **From version 1.0 to 2.0, did anything change in your approach to development**, either technically or organizationally?

**Dylan**:  
That's another difficult question since there's just been so many surreal moments throughout the development of the game, even early on! **The moment I felt confident enough to quit my day job was after we'd been accepted into the PAX Rising showcase in 2021**, that definitely made it feel like we had a "real game" on our hands... although before that there were some crazy moments where a huge streamer would start playing the demo and friends would start frantically messaging me, those really stick out because you can't plan for them and it was always such an exciting surprise!

**Nothing majorly shifted development-wise from version 1.0 to 2.0**, we just felt that by the time we were releasing the game onto consoles for the first time and with all of the major content in-place that it was fair to move it out of Early Access and call it complete to the original vision that we'd set out to build (though by that point it was already way way beyond what we initially set out to build!). **2.0 was really about revisiting all of the player content that we'd created over the years** and to try and make more orbs & relics usable and interesting, as well as to create an optional boss that provides a ramped up challenge without being mandatory. That's a feature that I've always loved in roguelike games, where you can push to see just how powerful your build is, and in retrospect now that it's complete it's something that Peglin was sorely missing!

**Febucci**: **How much content should a game have when it launches in Early Access?** Looking back, do you think you could have included more content, or would you have preferred to launch with less?

**Dylan**:  
The biggest thing is that your game already has to have a good value proposition on potential playtime vs how much it costs, which is something I think we kind of missed on with the Early Access version of Peglin. **Ideally we would've launched with more content (though we were already flying by the seat of our pants!)** but we also could have launched cheaper and then increased that later on to help keep that playtime/cost ratio more appealing. I think our biggest saving grace was that we were still able to release new updates at least once a week, so people quickly learned that even if the game was currently light on content that it wouldn't be for long!

![Peglin gameplay screenshot](https://storage.ghost.io/c/38/36/383676a1-e894-4116-9a98-bb5a9336da39/content/images/2026/07/image-1.png)

Peglin gameplay screenshot

#### Social Media, Community, Playtesting, and Mobile

**Febucci**: After the game’s success with **creators and streamers**, did you start designing certain elements with them in mind?

**Dylan**:  
Kind of, I wouldn't say that we changed the core of the game in any huge way after watching streamers play it, but **we definitely use their playthroughs as a very valuable tool for balancing content and learning what needed to be explained better**. We also created new relics named after other streamers that attempted to support their playstyles where possible, so that was a fun design challenge and hopefully fun for many of them to discover as well.

**Febucci**: **How did you handle playtesting before the game became successful?** How did you understand that the feel you were aiming for was actually working? And once the game entered Early Access and became successful, how did you turn all the chaotic feedback you were receiving into concrete tasks and priorities?

**Dylan**:  
Playtesting before and after the game became successful was largely still just "do I like this?". I somewhat selfishly just made a game that I wanted to exist for myself, and then was very lucky that other people enjoyed it as well!

As for how to handle that volume of feedback... I actually just recently gave an entire lecture just on that topic! It certainly wasn't easy, especially for someone that had no community management experience before that point, but the biggest things were:

- **controlling when and where feedback could reach me** (no push notifications except for bug reports shortly after a release! You can't have negative comments pushed to you or it will burn you out so quickly),
- **making it trivial to convert and sort feedback into when it should be addressed** (I use Trello for all of my game design documentation and project management, and its ability to paste screenshots, videos, etc was perfect for this),
- **and then quite frankly knowing what feedback to ignore is just crucial** (which is... a lot of it. At the end of the day it's your game and you need to stay true to your vision. You also can't make everyone happy and you'll often receive completely opposing requests from players, it's just an inevitability once your audience reaches a certain size)

**Febucci**: I know the **mobile version** was originally planned for after 1.0, but because of some **hackers** you ended up having to release it earlier. If you had to develop for mobile, PC, and console from the very beginning, what would you change in your pipeline?

**Dylan**:  
Yeah we kept having people decompile the demo and then upload that onto the app stores as Peglin or Peglin 2, weirdly, and dealing with take-down requests and complaints from players that had bought it were taking so much of our time that we decided to just do the ports earlier ourselves. This mostly worked okay but it never really gave us the proper time to sit down and polish up the mobile-specific UX of the game, which is actually still something that we want to loop back on now that content updates have slowed down.  
**I would love to just simultaneously release everywhere with a 1.0 release for the next game** but the concept of developing alongside players/streamers with Early Access and the ability to share updates on PC almost instantly before content makes it out to other platforms really can't be beat!

**Febucci**: Following up on that, **how difficult was it to manage the different audiences on mobile and PC?**

**Dylan**:  
**I'm thankful for Discord right now providing us with a centralized place to communicate with players** on both platforms because it certainly can be tough when you've got different versions flying to different platforms at different times, and different bugs that can affect one or the other. It is always a bit sad when updates can sometimes take a lot longer to release on other platforms after they hit PC and it would be nice if that just wasn't an issue, but thankfully our community knows that parts of that are outside of our control and is patient with us

### Text Animator

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/0:06 

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Peglin and Text Animator

**Febucci**: When did you decide to include **Text Animator**, and why? Was it the first time you had used it, or had you already worked with it before?

**Dylan**:  
I can't remember exactly when the decision was made but it was definitely the first time I'd used it! I'd been wanting to include text scenarios into the game to break up the physics-y gameplay and open up some new options for us, but without much UX expertise on the team the initial scenes were looking really rough. **Using Text Animator allowed us to keep those scenes fairly simple and clean but then still have them feel lively and less amateurish.** After integrating it it didn't take us long to hook it up to give the main menu some extra life as well!

**Febucci**: Who on the team worked directly with Text Animator?

**Dylan**:  
That would be myself! While I certainly had development help with other systems and content I can pretty safely say that all of the scenario dialogue and styling was my doing.

**Febucci**: During development, was there any feature you wished Text Animator had, or any use case that required a particular workaround?

**Dylan**:  
No, not particularly. **For us the fact that it integrated cleanly with Dialogue System for Unity was such a blessing**, I feel like I would've pulled my hair out trying to nicely animate text coming in with a typewriter effect.

### Unity, GameMaker, and… Godot!

![Fowl Damage Thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/38/36/383676a1-e894-4116-9a98-bb5a9336da39/content/images/2026/07/image-2.png)

Fowl Damage Thumbnail

**Febucci**: **How did you manage the close release timing between Peglin 1.0 and Fowl Damage (made with GameMaker)?** Was it planned that way to also give the second game a visibility boost? And how difficult was it to develop both games at the same time, considering they were built in different engines?

**Dylan**:  
Yeah that **was mostly a side-effec**t of the grouping of games events in the summer, with Peglin 1.0 being timed with the Nintendo Switch release (being a stealth drop in Indie World), and Fowl Damage being timed to release shortly after its appearance in the PAX Rising at PAX West. While Fowl Damage was pretty silo'd away as more of something that we were helping to publish, its main developer May was also working on Peglin with us so there was a couple of really difficult weeks for her and myself, though I would say most of the tight timing was from the events (inflexible) rather than the release date that we'd chosen for Fowl Damage (somewhat flexible).

**Febucci**: What is one thing **you would not do again** in the development of Peglin? And on the other hand, what is **one thing you’ve learned** over the years that you would absolutely recommend to a young developer?

**Dylan**:  
The biggest thing that comes to mind is **community localization**. It thankfully didn't end up badly for us but it definitely became quite complicated with how long the development cycle was. If you can open it up to allow players to handle their own localization via modding that's probably okay, but officially supporting it becomes quite difficult.

**The thing I always stress to newer developers is that releasing games is a skill, and it's something that should absolutely be practiced.** There are so many little things about polish, edge cases, uploading, marketing, etc that you really only learn once you've shared a few projects on a site like [itch.io](http://itch.io/?ref=blog.febucci.com), and the more that you put out there the better gauge you'll have of when a project has genuine interest. And if you're self-publishing I genuinely think you really want to have released a game on Steam that doesn't have many eyes on it before you launch any big projects, because each platform has its own quirks to learn!

**Febucci**: You told us that your next game will be developed in **Godot**. Why did you choose that engine? Can you tell us anything more about it?

**Dylan**:  
Yeah it's unfortunate because I've been **working in Unity for almost 10 years now**, and I do think there are a lot of things to like about the engine but unfortunately they've kind of proven that they're no longer a reliable partner. I'm sure open source will have its share of issues as well but **at the moment Godot is solving all of the issues we were starting to see with Unity!** Can't speak towards the next project just yet since I'm still just in the jamming and prototyping phase, but I am excited to have something to share again, hopefully sooner rather than later :)

### Team and the Future

**Febucci**: Peglin turned a side project into a sustainable studio. **What was the hardest organizational change**: hiring, delegating, managing the community, production, or deciding what not to do?

**Dylan**:  
As mentioned I didn't really take it the sustainable studio route, although it would've provided that option! We did hire a few people along the way but **as the studio grew my time spent designing and making games definitely decreased, and the stress about how to keep the lights on instead of just making silly little projects was incredibly stressful.** It was an interesting wakeup call, since running my own game studio had been my dream for ages, but I've definitely learned that it's not for everyone!

**Febucci**: You recently released **Peglin 2.0**, two years after version 1.0\. Was that planned from the beginning, or did you still feel the need to add more content? How did you manage its development while also working on your next title?

**Dylan**:  
**Calling it a 2.0 certainly wasn't planned, but the additional optional act was something that we had wanted to do ever since we expanded the game to compare to other popular roguelikes.** By the time we had built our way there though there were lots of pieces of the game that needed a refresh and the way in which we implemented the new act really grew the game much larger than we'd originally planned, which is why it got the 2.0 moniker! As far as working on a new title while still developing Peglin updates, I really wasn't able to bounce back and forth like that unfortunately! So when the 2.0 update was completed and had most of the bugs fixed, we weren't really left with much choice but to wrap the studio up and for myself, go back to the drawing board (which has been a little slower than I'd ideally like, both due to burnout from how all-encompassing Peglin became in my life and the move to a new engine). Thankfully though it does feel like the ball is starting to get rolling again though, now that the pressure has been drastically reduced.

## Thanks

That's a wrap! **Huge thanks to Dylan** for taking the time to chat with us and we wish him all the best for his future projects! We hope you enjoyed this interview and learned something new!

It's always awesome to hear the behind the scenes of so many different games. Be sure to check out [Dylan's games](https://rednexus.games/?ref=blog.febucci.com) and see you in the next post!

**Ciao** 🫶🏼