Abby Howard - Co-Owner of Black Tabby Games and Horror Cartoonist
Abby Howard (She/Her) is one half of the duo that makes up Black Tabby Games—who created Scarlett Hollow and Slay the Princess— and an Ignatz-awarded cartoonist known for her horror work such as The Last Halloween and The Crossroads at Midnight. You may also recognize Abby’s work on Tumblr from her mini slice-of-life comics which frequently guest star her cat Spoons.
Can you tell us more about your career journey and your shift from cartoons and comic/graphic novel work to doing that plus working on games? What pushed you to take a turn towards gaming?
While working in comics, I had always had something in the back of my mind that you could do a game if you wanted to. You could probably figure this out, because visual novels and comic books have a lot in common. The shift happened because I was unhappy with where I saw myself going in comics.The state of publishing for comics right now is really tricky, because a lot of comics publishers are only marketing to middle grade and some YA (young adult), and I'm just not that kind of storyteller.
I had made a pitch for a kids book series; it was still pretty dark and I wasn't super in love with it and neither were the publishers. I had gotten a few people interested, but they mostly told me, “can you lighten this up a little bit?” I was like, “Ah, I kind of want to make it worse, so I don't think this is going to work.”
Thankfully, video games came in and, here I can kind of just do whatever I want; I don't have to worry about marketing to a single demographic. Once a book is done, there's no real guarantee that you will make too terribly much money, and you have to line up the next job after that. It's quite the slog, and they want these books done like one a year, if not more often than that, which is really grueling. I was already doing the amount of work that I still do now, possibly more, like the deadline that I had at the time, The Crossroads at Midnight, was three months of 16-hour days. It's hard to remember now because so much of it was just me working, and it was really brutal.
Tony (he/him, Abby’s husband and co-owner of Black Tabby Games) did not have quite the same brutal schedule, but really wanted to spend time with me so he would wrap himself up in blankets on the floor of the studio and sit with me while I worked super late. It's so much better now working with Tony, and, even if both of us are on deadlines, it's our deadline together. We both are in the same boat, and it's nice to kind of have camaraderie there with someone who's so close to me.
Why did you decide to create Black Tabby Games with your husband, Tony? What would you say is Black Tabby Games’ core that makes it different from other studios?
I was in between graphic novels, finishing up The Crossroads at Midnight, and my husband was wrapping up a startup that he had been doing with some friends of his. We just got talking one day at New York City Comic Con with a friend of ours about demon dating simulators with really horrific demons that you can date. From there, it just evolved. Tony and I kept talking and decided on a story I had kind of in the back of my mind for a long time where it's a dating Sim, but each one of the characters that you start dating turns into a different horrible story. That is nothing like really what Scarlett Hollow is now, but that's where it started.
We definitely focus first on the story; that is our main mechanism of gameplay. We forego things like complicated mechanics just to make sure that we can really nail a good story that feels like your decisions actually matter. I know a lot of people say “we're a game whose decisions actually matter,” and then people still don't necessarily feel that way. It is very subjective. Players are multifaceted human beings who want to make decisions, so we can't possibly predict or accommodate necessarily. It's always going to have some limits on it, because we are two people writing a limited game. At the same time, we do want to make sure that, even in the context of limited narrative, you can feel like you have an actual impact on the text, and you feel like the game is paying attention to you. We do that by just writing all of these scenarios.
There is no tricky kind of mechanic really. Tony has a relationship system for a Scarlet Hollow in particular, where characters have kind of these hidden numbers where it's this complicated web of eight different characteristics that they assign to you based on your decisions. At the end of the day, they act like people because they're written by us. We definitely focus on also telling stories that we've personally found interesting. This goes the same for Slay the Princess especially, because the princess in particular changes so much depending on every little action that you make. Everything really feels impactful.
Congratulations on all your success with Slay the Princess (in particular, Best Indie RPG Award and nomination for Best Narrative with The OTK Video Game Awards as well as being in the top 100 Indie Games of 2023)! What was the initial thought that got you both started in creating Slay the Princess?
Tony came up with the initial idea of you being sent to kill a creature that is capable of being anything you imagine it to be or to perceive it to be. Any kind of information that you get about the creature would instantly become something that would make it stronger and make it harder for you to do your job. From there, it evolved very quickly and a lot of the pieces just fell right into place. I think I initially came up with the idea of Slay the Princess. It's so hard to remember what the lead up was before it was Slay the Princess. It was a really fun conversation. And then, I went home to see my family for a week or two. Tony was alone, and he just poured all of that time into making a first draft of Slay the Princess that he had me play as soon as I got home.
It was all just text and a blank screen. When I was playing, I was just thinking, “this is really good and I think people are really really going to like this.” It seemed, at the time, like a project that wasn't going to take too much away from Scarlett Hollow .
A lot of Slay the Princess came from the limitations that we had based on the amount of time we could spend on it. It had to be a smaller project art-wise, which probably is still the case. I think there's 3,600 illustrations in the final game. A lot of those are really unique assets and all of those are just drawn by me and the writing is super expansive as well. At the same time, Scarlett Hollow is an even bigger project, so it's not too beyond our scope to just cranked this out in seven months. The style developed very much from having to use just pencils on much smaller paper which was initially going to be a looser style with less consistency and backgrounds. Instead, we were like :what if the backgrounds changed too on top of the princess changing to match the princess,” so I had to do some very mind-numbing work just repeating the same background but with slight variations.
I found the trailer for the game on Twitter during its wishlisting stage and saw everybody talking about it leading up to its release. Did you have a strategy in regards to how to accumulate hype for the game? If so, what did you think worked in your favor?
Tony handles basically all of the marketing because, as somebody who worked at comics for a long time, my instinct is always throw it out there and then disappear, even though they hate it when you do that in comics. I've had to be a public figure for a long time, and I got a lot of experience out of that. We used my experience of what's effective, which is honestly putting out little teasers and saying “Here's something cool that we made. Pay attention to us,” and then hoping that pays off.
A lot of it is also Tony throwing himself at any opportunity to get us into events, contests, and projects. I try to keep myself away from the marketing as much as possible and let Tony handle it, because it's so exhausting to be a public figure. At the same time, I do think all of the work that I put into building my comics’ reputation helped a lot and getting the word out there like telling my friends who I've met through comics helped spread the word as well. This is probably not super helpful, because so much of it is putting 10 years into building an online persona as a cartoonist who makes art that people like.
How did it feel to have so much talk surrounding your game leading up to its release?
It was amazing. It's one thing to see numbers online, and it is another to meet people, see their excitement, and see them react in-person to something that you've made. Where it really hit me was PAX East earlier this year. We had the second version of the demo out, which included all 10 of the base chapter 2 princesses, because we had to expand that to really account for player choice. Seeing people play it was incredible. People were so nice, and over the course of the weekend, people kept coming up and saying that all of their friends were talking about this game. All of these press people kept coming by to say that everyone was also talking about it in press circles. It was just bonkers.
It's a visual novel, and it was set in the indie space. I just really did not expect that kind of reception. We also met Scarlett Hollow fans there for the first time in-person, because we started that game during the pandemic, so it was an equally amazing thing having these people come up and wanting to talk about our little characters that they love so much. It was so wonderful watching people react to the moments in the game that we hoped people would react to. It was so amazing knowing that it was successful, because we saw it happen in real time.
What advice do you have for underrepresented game developers who may be trying to get their game in front of more eyes?
I think my biggest piece of advice is like a piece of writing advice: write and create something that you really want to make. Not something that you think you should be making, but something that brings you an immense amount of joy to create, because people feel that. If I am working on a scene and I'm having a bad time, chances are other people are also going to have a bad time so I should then restructure it. I think to myself, “What would make this fun? What makes this a fun thing for me to do?” then kind of work from there first. Have a good time while creating, even if it is long hours. It's very difficult, and by the end of it, you're cursing the very ground that you walk on. It's still a project that you care enough about to see it to the end, and that means something to people. Just go for it. Do not hold yourself back in any capacity. That's my advice.
