Articles
2026/10
Spotlight: Ben Mannion
Who am I?
Hello there! I'm Ben Mannion from the beautiful country of Wales (Cymru), and I've been living as an expat since 2016. After spending some years in China for work, I made the move to Japan in 2022. My game development journey started way back in 2007 when I put my fine art background aside and made the leap to game design with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Computer Game Design as a Swansea Metropolitan University graduate.
Since then, I spent a few years working in video game retail where I learned a lot about consumer trends and got to know gamers from the front lines. When I wasn't selling Microsoft Points for FIFA Ultimate Team and taking pre-orders for the next Call of Duty, I was keeping up with my game dev skills—playing around in Unreal before moving onto Unity, which has been my game engine of choice since 2015.
What got me into games?
Like many millennials, I grew up playing everything from my first console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, to PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and all systems in between. It wasn't until my high school years that I decided I wanted to get into game development through my appreciation for games that included built-in level editors.
I was a huge fan of the map editor in TimeSplitters 2 and spent many sleepless nights making my dream levels complete with bot paths and mission objectives using the in-game event tools. As a lover of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, it was the perfect gateway into more advanced tools like UnrealEd. I later stuck with UnrealEd 2004 for most of my game development studies at university, along with a splash of Unreal 3 and even Torque!
About Expat Studios
Learning game development at university was almost unheard of back in the 2000s, and a lot of our studies were spent deciphering UnrealScript and making terrible models in Maya. Our final major projects were... a sight to behold, to say the least. It was tough!
And that is why I created Expat Studios! Our mission is to provide a much easier and more accessible entry point to learning game development than I had. Since 2020, I’ve been sharing my Unity knowledge via YouTube tutorials so that we all have more awesome games to play. It was a great outlet, as I'm always talking people's ears off about the behind-the-scenes processes and intricacies of what makes games tick.
To date, the channel has surpassed 1,300 subscribers, and I appreciate all the messages we receive about how our tutorials have supported hobbyists and students across all stages of education in achieving their goals and releasing their first games. Mission complete!
Current Projects
We at Expat Studios continue to produce Unity development tutorials on our channel, with our most recent ongoing series being a Sci-Fi rail shooter inspired by the ageless Star Fox 64. We believe the best way to learn game development is to choose a classic game—like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Super Mario Bros.—and recreate it. While these may appear to be simple games on the surface, there are a lot of systems under the hood that you can expand upon and apply to your own projects when starting out. This is a core component of what we present in our tutorials; for instance, we often reference how video game mechanics used in Super Mario Bros. can apply to, say, Contra, to encourage student-led learning.
Teaching game development continues to be a rewarding passion of ours, and at the beginning of this year (at the time of writing), we began developing games ourselves, expanding beyond a one-man operation into a team. Our current title, Xenoroids, has brought friends and colleagues, Andrew Phelps and Ian Shoen, together with the goal of breaking into the industry.
What started as a palate cleanser and introductory project, Xenoroids began life as an Asteroids remaster based on the 1998 PS1 entry. Over time, the project rapidly took on an identity of its own as we threw ideas against the wall to see what stuck. The game developed its own lore, factions, and playstyles, following the rule of cool:
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“What if the shield phases enemies to the opposite side?” Cool, go for it!
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“How about custom difficulty with adjustable enemy metrics?” Absolutely!
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“We could have an upgrade system for weapons and abilities.” Awesome, let's do it!
In Xenoroids, what starts off as a routine contract to clear some space rocks becomes a fight for survival against a mysterious parasitic species: the Xenoroids. This deep-space menace can take on the forms of whatever they infect, evolving and growing stronger as you fight to uncover their origins while dealing with pirates and a cryptic ancient race with their own motives.
The game is still a work in progress and serves as its own living design document that has allowed us to test ourselves, find our groove, and define our style as the project evolves. We truly appreciate everyone who has played our demo and shared their feedback.
If you are interested in learning game development in Unity, feel free to check our channel at: youtube.com/expatstudios
We also have an evolving demo of Xenoroids at: https://play.unity.com/en/games/653170a2-d94c-44f4-9d86-2f0c626fcd0f/xenoroids-public-demov01
2026/09
Spotlight: Seb Axel
1. Who am I?
My name is Seb Axel and I’m from the UK. I have been working as a game developer for about 10 years at this point. Starting from QA at Team 17, I worked all the way from small AA teams on Still Wakes The Deep at The Chinese Room to giant AAA productions like Horizon Forbidden West at PlayStation Studios, where I served as the PC specialist overseeing all the Playstation PC ports. Generally, I was a bit of a PC player evangelist all across Europe and Japan. About a year ago, I left my position at PlayStation to found my own studio and build a team from the ground up as I missed and yearned for those small team productions. Fueled with those motivations, I decided to move to Japan at the recommendation of several of my previous coworkers and my personal love for Japanese video games specifically. So here I am, trying to live the dream—still totally unfunded, but running as the director of a 5-person team and looking for a publisher! I have run teams and been inside game dev for years, but going indie is a totally different approach. I don't regret a single thing of this journey, though. On the side, I also front a gothic rock band and have toured up and down the UK a few times. If you like fast and heavy emo sounding stuff, then give INTO THE DARK a listen—we’re still active and not stopping any time soon!
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How I got into game dev ?
I don’t know if this is a common story, but since I was around 10 years old I've always known I wanted to make games. I actually have a super specific childhood memory of the exact moment I realised I wanted to become a game developer. I was playing The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe video game on PS2 (horrible game, honestly) but they had a ‘behind the scenes’ of the development of the game that could be unlocked. In this video, a level designer showed how they designed a combat encounter by drawing the monster path. My whole brain lit up looking at this and the memory stayed with me since then. I spent a lot of my teen years messing around in level editors and building stuff in super rudimentary game engines like RPG maker, just for the fun of it. All my friends and my school knew that's what I wanted to do my whole life. I didn't do great in school, but I just about managed to get into university for game design, and got a job offer from Team 17 in my last year before I graduated. I continued and finished uni, but honestly, I don't think it made a difference.
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What I am specifically passionate about ?
My favourite games while growing up were almost exclusively Japanese games—and the ones that were not were set in Japan, including Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Total War: Shogun 2, Tekken and Dynasty Warriors. However, as I got older, I gained a specific love for fast-based action games, like Devil May Cry and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. I admit that I do also enjoy the souls-like genre, but my true passion goes to crazy, fast, and bombastic action that gets your blood pumping. Unfortunately, I have always felt that the genre is significantly lacking in innovation, which is however why souls-like games have almost entirely eclipsed the melee action landscape. I think my ultimate goal would be to build an action game that has the system-depth and world design complexity of those big scale RPG’s. I'm fully aware though that this would be a mammoth project and I am not planning to take that on any time soon.
My game? Penknife
Penknife is a survival horror RPG without guns, inspired by the story and setting of British cult-classic films like Attack the Block, Shaun of the Dead, and The World's End. You play as Alex Penton, a 16-year-old troublemaker from a rundown UK town who accidentally triggers an eldritch invasion—and now must survive the horror unfolding around him, armed with nothing but a penknife. The game features a fully seamless, interconnected world infested with terrifying monsters. As you fight to stay alive with limited resources, you'll solve environmental and mechanical puzzles to unlock doors and access new areas in your desperate bid to escape. At the heart of the combat is the Adrenaline system—the closer you are to death, the stronger you become. Being British, I knew I had to capture a unique and authentic British tone. The game includes voice acting from actors with genuine lived experience across the UK, plus an original soundtrack crafted by underground UK artists spanning multiple genres.
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2026/08
Spotlight: Oskar Strom
Oskar is an artist and designer working primarily in game UI/UX. Originally from Rochester, Minnesota in the United States, he has been based in Japan since 2020 and currently resides in Tokyo.
1. What is your relationship to games?
Though I had many experiences with PC and early console games growing up, the first console I owned myself was a dandelion yellow Game Boy Color I got in 2000 alongside Super Mario Land 2. After my parents divorced (I was three) I went through a lot of cross-country moves, so my Game Boy offered some stability in an otherwise turbulent childhood. I think it solidified how much games meant to me – I spent hundreds of hours exploring the great vastness of tiny, pixelated worlds. That feeling of adventure has never left me, no matter how games have continued to evolve and is something I endeavor to create in my own work.
Years later at summer camp, a friend told me about a fantasy RPG called Morrowind; this bizarre world would become my intro into game development and remains one of my favorites. I loved experimenting with the in-game console commands and bundled toolset used by the developers themselves and began remixing and making my own mods, learning about game design, scripting, 3D modeling, texturing and bits of other disciplines along the way.
2. How did you join the game industry?
After high school graduation and far too many university applications, I decided on the game development program at Northeastern University’s College of Arts Media and Design in Boston, where I graduated with a degree in Digital Art and Game Design. I gained a lot of experience here, participating in Global Game Jam every year, serving as treasurer and active member of the campus game development club, working with faculty and grad students on games used for education and research and starting work on a party fighting game as a class project that would later become Super Slime Arena.
After graduation I got a job with NeuroScouting, a neuroscience-based company working on sports performance games and scouting software used by professional baseball teams. I was excited about my work and continued development on Super Slime Arena with my team in our free time, when not long after I was hired, I was suddenly diagnosed with lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. This was very frightening news that changed my life in profound ways.
When I was healthy enough, I continued to work through most of my time in chemotherapy to pay rent and decided to focus full-time on Super Slime Arena after my contract with NeuroScouting finished. Though cancer is an unimaginable ordeal, I believe the game’s ongoing development as a creative outlet throughout my treatment really helped me keep fighting rather than giving in to despair. With the support of my medical staff, family, employer, and Super Slime dev team, we shipped the game, and I’m now in my ninth year of hopefully continuing remission.
3. What was your career path to Japan?
My first trip to Japan was in 2018 post-recovery. After exhibiting Super Slime Arena at PAX West and the Game Developers Conference (GDC), John Davis – one of the co-founders of BitSummit – helped us showcase at that year’s show in Kyoto through Indie MegaBooth. Over the three-week trip, I became seriously interested in Japan, falling in love with the country in general and inspired by community groups like Tokyo Indies and ichipixel. By 2019, I had started studying Japanese and went back to BitSummit as part of a longer return trip that solidified my interest in building a life in Japan.
After a potential employer last minute refused to give me the Certificate of Eligibility after already offering me a job, I decided to take my non-refundable flight anyway, which led to an interview and job offer from a foreign-run IT and game outsourcing company in Kyoto. Unfortunately, after a few years of work there, I had a bad reaction to a Covid vaccine that left me again hospitalized for several months. I also lost my company housing while hospitalized after my employer had a disagreement with their landlord, relocated to Tokyo and was shortly laid off before I even recovered. While still walking on crutches, I started applying to proper game studios before eventually landing a contract position at GREZZO who I had first discovered through playing Ever Oasis.
Known for their work with Nintendo on the Legend of Zelda series and Square heritage through staff like Koichi Ishii of Mana series and Final Fantasy fame, this was one of my dream studios. Though challenging, working there was a fantastic and unique experience that helped further improve my language and development skills. After two contracts at GREZZO, I moved to my current permanent designer position at One or Eight, a quirky Japanese game studio where I’ve worked on The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily and the upcoming Warota: I Live Next to The Demon King's Castle LOL.
4. How are you involved with Tokyo Game Bridge and the greater game developer community?
I have been a founding member of Tokyo Game Bridge since before we officially formed, having been brought in by Douglas Watt (who I met through fellow Super Slime dev Luke Berry). I help plan and run events alongside TGB’s other leadership, connecting us to the right people and locations to make things happen.
Although my job sits somewhere between indie and not-quite AAA, I still try to stay involved with smaller projects and often make pixel art, 3D models and UI designs for friends’ games. I also help run Tokyo Indies and Wholesome Indies, showcase games I’ve worked on at local events like Tokyo Game Dungeon, and still regularly participate in Global Game Jam with Let's Games! Tokyo.
One of the best parts of making games is how it brings together people of different backgrounds to create something simultaneously their own and part of a greater shared experience. This shared passion and community support is what I want to continue cultivating through Tokyo Game Bridge and elsewhere, so that we can continue building meaningful relationships across cultures, languages and identities.