"We were even experimenting with rogue-like mechanics" Trailmakers creative lead Christian Laumark talks about new update
Interview
Trailmakers: Pioneers is Flashbulb's brand new 2.0 update for Trailmakers. We talk to creative lead Christian Laumark about the development process and what to expect for the brand-new update, as well as his development experiences with Flashbulb's rapidly growing team.Sasha (Tristan) Mathews 👁 Published 🇵🇹 🇳🇱 ...
Flashbulb Games releases Trailmakers: Pioneers, their 2.0 update to their indie sandbox simulation game, on March 6th. Pioneers adds an entire new survival crafting game mode to Trailmakers, with enemies and missions to beat transforming the game into something entirely new.
Notebookcheck's Sasha Mathews (SM) talked to Christian Laumark, Creative Lead at Flashbulb Games, about the process behind the update, what went into it, what to expect, and the transformation both the game and the team has undergone during the time. Readers can also watch the trailer below for a peek at what to expect.
SM: Hi! Very nice to be able to have this chat. I’m very appreciative of your time, how are you doing?
Christian: Very good, nice and relaxing these days because we can't really change the game too much now so us designers are like “Yeah it's almost vacation time!”
SM: Yeah, I bet that's got to be at least some relief especially given just how much you guys are packing in this new update. How long have you and the other developers worked on this new update?
Christian: It's been a long time coming this one. It’s been in the making since I think it was May 2023, almost two years ago now.
SM: Nearly two years of development is insane for an update. That must’ve been hard work.
Christian: Yeah, a lot of it has been prototyping, I believe it was prototyping a year of it with a smaller team, and then it went into full production in summer 2025, so it's been a big one.
SM: So for those who don’t know you, what’s your role in the Flashbulb dev team?
Christian: Well, roles are a little fuzzy for us because we used to be a very small team that grew from 15 people to around 40, so official titles are a bit more recent. I started on as a game designer three years back, and then I got chosen to spearhead as creative lead this update together with Finn, our lead programmer. Early on I was sort of the one defining the vision and coming up with the concept. When it went into full production in the summer I was in charge of doing the missions, general balancing, making sure the resources amount were correct, mission XP, and all of that and just helping out with general design.
SM: That’s quite impressive! Talk to me a bit more about the whole planning process behind the missions you were talking about just a moment ago.
Christian: To start from the beginning, with the missions, we did an update earlier called Airborne which was a DLC where we had some very primitive missions. You had to talk to someone, and you just had to do one thing, kill someone and then return. We saw how well received it was with the community with the players interactions with NPCs and engagement with the story content. We actually decided pretty late in the process to make a more in-depth mission system that would support us making more chained events. So for example, you could talk to someone, transport somebody, and then do combat. With a new mission system, we had the possibility to make even more detailed missions and also going into the future to make more and more interesting missions, effectively making story and NPC's a cornerstone of Trailmakers.
SM: That is incredible, so the Airborne update was just like this catalyst for what could be in the future because of how much good feedback came from the community overall?
Christian: Yeah exactly! Combat that was also in Airborne, we got combat versus enemy NPC's working in a good way and that was also a huge part of the Pioneers update, so it was really a catalyst for this update as well.
SM: What’s the differences between like Airborne versus Pioneers? How would you describe this update to newcomers and long time players?
Christian: I feel the most important new addition to the game gameplay wise is the resource gathering and block crafting mechanic. In a lot of survival crafting games you need to gather materials to craft what you want. We tried to apply this to the vehicle building in Trailmakers. It wasn't trivial right? (laughs) We had to jump through a lot of hoops to make that work, but I think that gameplay is some of the most interesting because it's sort of feeding on the players own initiative and ideas. So if you get an idea to build a battleship or something, you might be like “Okay what do I need to build that? Oh yeah, I need to go collect a lot of aqualite, so I can get the ship going, and I need more tungsten, so I can make bigger guns” just as an example. To me that's the most appealing new gameplay, the whole player-driven “I want to build this, so I need to go do this and this and this,” and I really hope that can sort of give the game a bit more longevity with players that are not as easy to motivate with a sandbox experience. Our current community is fantastic at coming up with stuff to build and enjoy just building with no other reason than just to build it. My hope is that this update will also cater to people that want a bit more guidance towards goals and what to do in our game.
SM: That is really cool to see, and I've checked out the game I played a bit of it like way back when. I think it was right around the time Airborne was released. I remember seeing all of these exciting ideas that people were constantly building. To witness this shift from just simply being this construction sandbox where you can kind of just like build everything, to seeing the update emerge with this world where you've got a story and these missions. You've got this whole experience where you have to innovate in order to get through these missions that we're about to experience, and it’s exciting.
Christian: That was my ambition getting hired onto Trailmakers. I wanted this to become a bit more of a game that could also cater to someone like me and a lot of other people as well, so I’m happy that it's getting in that direction now.
SM: The fan reaction definitely is one of the biggest I’ve seen for an indie game of particularly this size. Especially when it was revealed that Flashbulb was collaborating with ScrapMan (one of the most popular Trailmakers YouTubers) to make music. What went into that?
Christian: It was our composer Carl that had heard the metal music that ScrapMan had made on Spotify and thought that it could be fun to have him contribute to the game. Surprisingly, he said yes, and was also quite good to work with, and had quite a bit of experience producing music. I think that's an example of a super cool collaboration and ended up with a great result as well cause the boss music is really epic. Personally, I’ve only had a bit of communication with him because I was gonna do some streams in relation to the Airborne launch when it came out. I remember me and Johannes, the community manager, were dog fighting him and Yzuei at one stream and I think I did a few of those Devs versus Creators streams which was a great experience. I sort of hope we can revive that again that was really fun. Oh, and in addition he's also coming to Copenhagen where we have our offices. Both him and Yzuei are coming for a few weeks and will attend our release party of the game so looking forward to meeting those guys in person as well.
SM: That ought to be fun and a nice break. We’ve talked a lot about the update, but what went into growing the team from the humble 15 to over double where now you've got all these talented people on your team?
Christian: We knew right from the start that we were going to be making a pretty ambitious update; it's meant to be the next big thing for Trailmakers. That's also why it's called 2.0, to try to elevate it into something a bit bigger than the sandbox experience. So the Trailmakers team was already growing, had been growing for a while, and it was the ambition from the studio heads that we were going to be having more people working on these games. So, we were sort of steadily growing. Then, around the point when Pioneers went into full production we got a batch of interns from different schools studying games who were joining us I think it was like seven or eight interns at the same time! It was a crazy period in the summer, because we had so many people that needed to be onboarded. For me personally it was also pretty tough because me and Finn and only a very few other people knew the vision of this new game mode at the time. We had to communicate it to all of our new people that had come on, the whole team that had to produce it now. It was a huge challenge because as you can see it has a lot of different aspects to it now. So in the beginning I was very, very, very busy just answering questions to a lot of people doing presentations and discussing the ideas with the stakeholders and the team to kind of hand it over a bit and say “Okay, now this is not just our small group of ideas, but it's everyone's update that we're working on now.” That was a tough process and I don't think any studio can handle that perfectly like scaling up is always brutal and hard.
SM: That makes a lot of sense, it seems you did well, as the update looks polished and ready, it’s almost like a new game.
Christian: Yeah, I do however want to emphasize that this is just the beginning of the 2.0 adventure. Going forward we will make even more content than this even the Pioneers map that we're making that's coming out as well. We're gonna work more on content in the coming months, and we are still going to polish the updates as we get player feedback. We've allocated space for changes and for more content so just wanting to make sure players know it's not just out and then forgotten you know?
SM: That’s definitely good to hear, that’s always been a hallmark of the studio, I think. I think it's like one of those things where it's like you take some of the first updates that were done, and then you move forward with that new knowledge to make something better. You can look to before that where Airborne was one of those updates where you saw the whole community's reaction around it inspiring this beginning.
Behind the Scenes and Prototyping:
Christian: This is a little side thing, but we went pretty wild in the prototyping phase of it. We didn't even know exactly what direction we wanted to go at first. We were even experimenting with rogue-like mechanics in the beginning. It wasn't until a few months in that we kind of settled on survival crafting and even then we went pretty wild with mechanics that were wildly different from what's in the game now. At some point in prototyping you had to build these power pylons that were the areas you could be inside and when you were outside you would spend fuel that's sort of how the fuel mechanic ended up. It started out as this and then ended up as the fuel mechanic we have in the game that's coming out now. It wasn't until the end of the prototyping phase when we had reigned it a bit more. Then, it actually also started to look a bit more like Airborne evolved in a way because we knew we can build on these things that we know are gonna work and make them even better. It was a wild ride that year.
SM: Yeah that's absolutely incredible to hear. It’s fascinating, prototyping is one of those things where it's like all roads are open until one is decided. Roguelikes, I played quite a few of those myself, that’s an intriguing one to think about for sure. Imagine that future.
Christian: Yeah, it was really hard to get Trailmakers to fit into that (laughs) that mold. so we chose a different direction.
SM: So this next question is a bit of two-sided coin. What would you say is your favorite addition to this new update and regarding future updates what would you potentially like to create with the team?
Christian: Hmm, I think I'm gonna circle back a little to the thing I talked about just a minute ago: block crafting. I think that's what I have personally been most excited about. That was also what I was putting the most emphasis on in the prototyping phase, because what I really wanted with Trailmakers was to kind of make open-ended gameplay. Make it so even when you played hundreds and hundreds of hours it still felt like there was stuff you could do. I think my worry now with the block crafting system that we're launching is when people have played maybe 20-30 hours in they have crafted sufficient blocks to sort of build anything they want. In that case, they may sort of run out of things to do with the game mode. I think for a lot of people on the team that's totally fine, but my ultimate ambition has always been to kind of create endless gameplay for the game. That's definitely where I would want to go in the future. I think also one of my new favorite things is absolutely the ground combat we were really struggling with that in the beginning, and then I think that turned out surprisingly well. It just feels great using a shotgun on one of those robots.
SM: Here’s one of my last questions: what's your experience been like in terms of developing overall before and after joining Flashbulb Games?
Christian: So I worked five years before in a very small game studio where we worked really fast, made games really fast. I worked on lots of different small games so it was a huge contrast coming into Flashbulb to work on Trailmakers, this sort of juggernaut of an indie game, because it's been in development for so many years. It’s also a complex game built on some really, really complex tech as well as custom-made physics and multiplayer engine that were built in-house that the game is running on. I remember a little story from when I started was that the first tasks I were assigned I think I had to do like a little fix on a particle system somewhere. It took me almost all day to do it because it took so long to find stuff in the project that I wasn't familiar with. Having to find the right people to ask about certain thing was really daunting. Especially coming from where I would never work with more than one other person on a project and I would be able to you know like do 50 tasks in a day and really feel very productive. I just felt super slow, but now it's completely different because I'm familiar with most of the game. I know who's working on what, and you to ask, it’s been a big boat to sail this Trailmakers game project.
SM: So one of the things that got shared in one of the dev diaries, I don't fully recall which of them, was the fact that this latest update’s namesake Pioneers was going to be the original name for Trailmakers. I didn't know if you wanted to add any comment to that or what the inspiration for naming this update fully was.
Christian: No definitely I think yeah it was going to be the original name of the game and actually at the time that was the title of the game. That was the time when they were developing the physics multiplayer tool that we've sort of built the whole foundation of the game on and that tool is called PioNet (after Pioneers.) Even though that title got dropped for the game it's still been kind of living in the background for all of us developing. When I was conceptualizing this update it just felt like the right name for the update because at that point the frogs were also sort of Pioneers in this world that you were helping. I think the stories changed slightly, so it feels more like they've been living there for a while but that was how it was, and I felt like it was a fitting title. It got caught on very well by the team, of course. Some of our studio heads were super happy that we were gonna call it Pioneers, so it's sort of full circle you know?
SM: So the whole framework that y'all work on this game from is called PioNet? I don't think many of us knew that. That’s really cool.
Christian: Yeah, PioNet handles our multiplayer and physics in multiplayer. We have an extremely brainy guy called Villads who's been working on this for ages, and it’s a crazy, crazy tool. It's not really anything we’ve advertised upfront, but we're coming out with an art book that's going to be part of the paid DLC for this update. It has a lot of details about behind the scenes stuff like this. Villads wrote I think a four pager about how the game actually works behind the scene, so if you or anyone want to get some in-depth information you should definitely get that art book. I also wrote a segment about the Pioneers update there. The art there is also really, really cool like there's so much stuff like things that never made it into the game. Early concepts of the different game updates we've been working on. There's even my favorite species that we were going to have in Pioneers but never made it. It's a mole-like species called ‘Moledozers’ which were these cyborg moles, half robot half mole, there’s some art for that as well I love. That’s probably about as much as I can say about it.
SM: That’s really cool, might buy that art book myself. Super appreciative of your time, it was nice having a chat about this update and everything like that.
Christian: Yeah, of course, thanks for the talk!
Trailmakers: Pioneers will be available March 6th, with a purchasable soundtrack and art book with behind the scenes details.
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