Another Chat With: Maxi Molina

Hi Maxi. It has been a while since I last talked to you about making The Hayseed Knight so I think we’re overdue a catch-up. Let’s start by reminding our readers who you are and what you do.

Hey John! I’m Maxi Molina, and I’m a 28-year-old Spanish trans masc game director, art director, voice director and writer freelancing for several studios across USA and Europe in English, Spanish, Japanese and Catalan!

Some recent projects where you might have seen my work are Mars Vice (game direction, art direction, writing), Sword of the Necromancer (English and Japanese dub), Cryptmaster (Spanish dub) and Astral Ascent (Japanese dub).

Before I started taking on director roles in the gaming industry, I used to work as a comic colorist for Blizzard, DC Comics and Dark Horse among many other major companies. I have 11 years of industry experience thus far in total!

As you can see, I’m the kind of person that likes to wear every hat in the shop, so it’s no surprise that to this day I’m still better known for being the solo dev of my passion project visual novel, The Hayseed Knight!

The big news back in February was that you released the final big update for The Hayseed Knight, containing Chapter 5 and making the entire main game available to play. Exciting! How did it feel to hit this major milestone after years of development?

Right now, I’m super proud of the achievement, and I’m happy to have wrapped up such a significant part of my life! The Hayseed Knight was a labor of love, and an obsession that I could not NOT finish. But thinking back on the beginning of the year, I spent a long, looong time not feeling much of… anything. Whenever people asked me how I felt about the approaching Chapter 5 release, I’d say “oh, I’m fine. I just can’t afford to think about it, really.”

I heard that anxiety and excitement for the future are opposite emotions, and they must crash pretty hard in the middle for me. Any time there’s a new event, positive or negative, looming over in the distance, glaring at me from my calendar, I just kind of… ignore it. “Don’t look at it, it’ll be over before you know it. Just focus on what you are doing right now. One step at a time.”

I guess it’s the kind of mentality that helped me get through these 7 years with most of my sanity intact, but still, I do wish I’d had the mental space to feel that elation at reaching the goalpost. I’m moving to Japan next week for a year and I’ve been going through the exact same darn loop again!

Seven years is a long time to work on a project. How has your personal situation changed over the course of development?

In these 5 years since we last spoke, I’ve built a solid base in the games industry. I’ve made lots of friends and met really cool people. I managed to assert myself as a director in many different fields despite lacking any education, and I came out as a trans man. The pandemic led me back to my hometown, and desperation to find a new whatever-the-heck is dragging me out of it again.

And yet, 23-year-old Maxi and I are kind of in the same boat. I was really surprised at how bummed out I sensed I must have been in the original interview about my job prospects as a young artist that had just lost their stable source of income, which is kind of hilarious given that I’m unemployed again after quitting a project I’d spent 5 years directing. I’m still dealing with the burning debris of what remains of my motivation, but I’m confident that it’ll pass and I’ll find my love for creating again.

I guess (I hope) that I got better at knowing who I am and where I am in the world without the need of a job and a company name to provide me some form of extrinsic value. Seeing the industry at the moment, I really think that’s a lesson a lot of devs will eventually come to learn on their own as well.

Obviously over that length of time plans can change, sometimes dramatically. I know that last time we talked about how your art style and game development knowledge had evolved, leading to some big changes to the game. Has your attitude toward the art or story of the game continued to change over the last few years or has the vision stayed relatively locked in once you got over the initial hurdles and settled into a style?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I remade the art 7 times in 7 years. But to echo the feeling of the original interview, that’s the beauty of solo development: no one can tell you “no, that’s alright as it is. Move on to something else.”

On a more serious note, a big portion of these last few touch ups were due to me becoming increasingly aware of orientalism, and how harmful it is to MENA people. I set out to use my game to educate readers on the existence of Al-Andalus, on the story of muslim Spain as an alternative backdrop to the central European medieval fantasy we’re all accustomed to, to let them see a little bit of my country and my culture… and in the process, I regurgitated a million othering tropes from belly dancers wearing a veil while exposing most of their skin, to naked men in vests, to domes and pointy door arcs. I knew nothing of my own country and its people, so I just took all visual cues from the same tired crap I’d been fed my whole life.

I brought Isa (@evilcleverdog) on board back in 2022 as a costume consultant for The Hayseed Knight, and we worked together on figuring out ways to whittle out at least the most glaring visual components that reflected these tropes while keeping the fashion true to the world of The Hayseed Knight.

Surprisingly, I was already lamenting in the original interview that I hadn’t given serious thought to the characters’ attire early on and just had them showing skin for the sake of it. The chain reaction of realizations continued to its logical end, I feel. I’m really happy with the designs once more!

Another thing I went back and fixed was details such as improving body variation—when a character was described as plump, and she looked stick-thin in every sprite… I really didn’t think that was great—and any harmful or otherwise particularly nasty jokes and offhanded comments that may have been funny to me in 2016 but no longer reflected the person I am these days—or, at the very least, that didn’t make sense for the character making them because they didn’t feel like a big deal at the time I wrote them.

Have there been any large changes to the game mechanics or the underlying systems? Have you had to “go back to the drawing board” on anything?

Starting on Chapter 3, I began giving myself programming challenges for every chapter. Chapter 3 includes a non-linear exploration of the psyche of someone that suffers cPTSD in the form of a diary where you travel through memories and emotions; Chapter 4, a silly point and click section to remark on the observant and overthinking nature of a character; Chapter 5, a time management sim with social links a la persona to underscore the encroaching feeling of anxiety and doom as the end approaches.

I don’t believe that visual novels owe anyone gameplay beyond reading and perhaps making choices, but I wanted to have an excuse to design some portion of other games I’d like to make some day. After 7 years of coming up with stressful situations and ways to solve them for the little creatures living in my head, I’ve figured out that I like to make life harder for myself as a hobby.

Going a bit lower level, a common complication for game developers is that the tools they rely on get updated over the course of development. While this can bring new features it can also mean that existing features are changed or removed. Did you have any issues in this area?

Overall, every new Ren’py version brought me new wonderful tools, but I had to stop updating at version 7.5.3. Ren’py 8 brought a slew of great updates and optimization that I would have loved to use, but the custom tool (see: an old bit of code I found in the forums) I used to display the characters didn’t work in Python 3, so I was unable to switch versions to something that will continue to be maintained in the future.

Maybe one day I’ll find someone who is capable of porting my code to Python 3 so it can continue to be updated, but for now, it is very much what it is.

A concern you had last time we spoke was that the chapter sizes were growing, with Chapter 1 being 40 minutes, Chapter 2 being 1 hour, and Chapter 3 looking to weigh in at 2 hours. Looking at the release announcement I see that Chapter 5 has 7 hours of gameplay, so I guess that trend didn’t change! How did you manage the practicalities of creating such a large amount of content?

Chapter 3 ended up being 6 hours long, so I was waaaaaay off the mark even back then. Given how little I was making on Patreon, the first measure I took seeing just how large the scope grew was to switch the game from a free product to a paid one and putting it up on steam to increase exposure.

As I grew a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, and a little bit less concerned with financial ruin, the things I had to say grew as well. Chapters 3-5 are each over 60k words—180k words out of 215k total, which goes a long way to show that Chapters 1 and 2 barely reflect anything about the nature of the story.

Chapter 3—as the first major change in gameplay and the first time I allowed myself to be truly honest with the themes I wanted to explore—was a nightmare to write. It took 3 years to design and put together! I was programming the diary I mentioned above until just two days before the deadline I set for myself. The stress I was dealing with was such that I gave myself a lumbar hernia for my 25th birthday, aka the steam release date.

After that, everything became a little smoother. I just took game-making one step at a time. I always say I have a creative gearbox: if I’m writing, I can’t make art. If I’m making art, I can’t program. If I’m programming, I can’t write. And so on, and so forth.

I started writing Chapter 4 while I was very sedated to deal with the pain of the hernia I mentioned above (lockdown might not have been the best time to injure myself), and that taught me that first drafts worked best when you’re not overthinking them. Ever since, I’ve made sure to just make every first draft as quickly and messily as I could. Done is better than perfect, and editing and nail down every detail once the foundation is done is a lot easier!

Your most recent update to the game added full controller and keyboard support, removing the requirement for a mouse. On-going work includes additional languages and other usability improvements. Would you say that those changes would essentially be the wrap on development of The Hayseed Knight?

I feel like I truly wrapped up development on the day I released the last chapter and nothing exploded; the rest of it feels like the postgame in pokémon after you beat the league.

Development will probably truly never be over, because I’m the only person working on this game and I’m not much of a programmer so if Windows sets the game on fire in a next update, I’ll be the one who has to figure it out. I’m not going to sweat the details much beyond that, 7 years making all the art, writing, programming, GUI, casting and voice direction was enough, haha.

For localizations, it’s a bit of a different story: French and Japanese are handled by two professional translator friends of mine, Benjamin Beziat and Shion Kanda, and Spanish is handled by me and my husband, Alex García. They’re all volunteers, and I don’t have the means to ask anyone helping out of their free will to prioritize my project over anything else, but I feel like the community at large understands the situation.

Thank you for returning to chat with me again. Can you tell us about any interesting projects or activities we should look out for that you have coming up in the future?

The only one I can talk about at the moment is that I’m currently working on a sequel game to The Hayseed Knight, yet to be announced properly! Beyond that, you can follow me on twitter or bsky at MaxiMJdev to keep up with development and my time living in Japan, or follow the same handle on twitch to catch my streams.

I hope you found this chat interesting. You can find Maxi at the accounts mentioned above and if you’re interested in checking out The Hayseed Knight then you can find more information on the game’s website.

John Kemp
I am a software developer by day and dip into a range of related activities in my spare time, including working on my own software projects, writing, proof-reading, and, of course, gaming of both the digital and boardgame varieties. I am slowly starting to sink my teeth into game development.