Timberline Studio on the making of Beastro | Inside Unreal | Indie Games Week 2026

Welcome to Indie Games Week 2026, a series of interviews and livestreams showcasing how indie studios use Unreal Engine. Today, we're joined by Timberline Studios, who will discuss their game, Bistro. Timberline Studios was founded in 2018. Their first game, "The Red Lantern," was a narrative roguelike focused on the journey rather than the destination, featuring a team of dogs with individual story arcs and random encounters. This reflects the studio's mission to blend genres in vibrant and unexpected worlds. Their new game, Bistro, is a "crunchy cozy game" that combines town-building, farming, and cooking with deck-building and combat. Players manage a walled village, engaging in cozy activities while facing dangers outside. The core gameplay revolves around a food system that powers up card decks for "caretakers" who venture into the wilds for combat. A key innovation in Bistro is its unique "puppet theater" system for combat and storytelling. This idea emerged during a pivot in development when the team felt their initial, more traditional JRPG/card game concept lacked charm and innovation. Drawing on team members' backgrounds in theater and illustration, they decided to lean into a puppet theater aesthetic, which allowed them to manage scope, focus on charming animations, and utilize their unique skill sets. The puppet theater was initially prototyped using primitive shapes and rough animations in Unreal Engine's Sequencer to test the "feel" of the combat. This early validation confirmed the concept's potential. The team then focused on building a 3D puppet theater with rules mimicking physical construction, while also leveraging computer magic for elements like expression changes. The development of the puppet theater system prioritized fast iteration, instant feedback, and a tactile feel. They aimed for creative freedom, allowing for "out-there" ideas like cards catching fire or characters with removable swords. The system needed to be combinatorial to handle various JRPG and card game scenarios. Brian Pawlowski, the tech director, and Nathan, a co-founder specializing in tech art and animation, were instrumental in building this system. Given the small team (one and a half animators), efficiency was crucial. They sought to minimize manual clicks and streamline the animation process. The puppet theater is controlled through a master blueprint and Sequencer, utilizing both standard Unreal tracks and bespoke tracks specific to Bistro. For example, animators can easily change a character's expression with a single button click, which would otherwise require multiple manual steps involving material and animation tracks. This level of control allows for real-time previewing of animations directly in the editor, significantly speeding up the workflow. The expression-flipping mechanism, for instance, evolved from a single skeletal mesh to rendering a widget blueprint to a texture, enabling magical flips between multiple expressions for a character. This approach provides flexibility for varying content per character. A significant breakthrough came with Unreal Engine 5.5's subsequences and movie scene conditions. Subsequences allow animators to create reusable animation "nuggets," while movie scene conditions enable tracks or sections of tracks to be gated based on specific game state conditions. This means that a single sequence asset can handle numerous combat permutations (e.g., a hunter attacking different monsters with different attack types, or monsters evading attacks). This dramatically reduces the need for hundreds of individual sequences and simplifies the gameplay system's coding complexity. The team developed custom debug tools, accessible both in the editor and at runtime, to manipulate puppets and stagecraft directly. This allows artists and animators to quickly test and adjust elements without navigating through the entire game flow. For example, they can instantly change a monster's expression or a stage's lighting to see how it looks. These debug tools, while an initial investment, save immense time in the long run. Timberline Studios has also adopted an "in-engine" animation pipeline. All 3D characters in Bistro are rigged and animated 100% within Unreal Engine, largely cutting out external digital content creation (DCC) tools like Maya or Blender. This eliminates the need for exporting, importing, and re-linking assets, allowing animators to make changes and see them reflected in the game almost instantly. They leverage Control Rig for character animation, including MetaHuman controls for facial animation, and have successfully implemented complex rigging features like dynamic feather physics and parent constraints. The team emphasizes that this sophisticated system is the result of months of iteration and tweaking. They adopted a philosophy of identifying pain points and then developing bespoke tools to address them, rather than trying to implement perfect solutions from the outset. This iterative approach, coupled with a willingness to scrap and rebuild elements, has been crucial to their success. Advice for other developers includes: * **Embrace iteration:** Don't be afraid to delete and rebuild systems, as lessons learned are never wasted. * **Start simple:** For first projects, try to make a small, functional game like Pong, or focus on a single system from a game you admire, rather than an overly ambitious RPG. * **Prioritize immediate needs:** Implement only what's necessary to answer core gameplay questions, deferring extensions until later. This avoids analysis paralysis and ensures time is spent on features that validate the game's fun factor. * **Leverage existing tools:** Utilize Unreal Engine's out-of-the-box features and the Epic Developer Community (EDC), including forums and documentation. Don't feel the need to build everything from scratch. * **Celebrate small wins:** Every step forward, no matter how minor, contributes to the final product and helps maintain motivation. * **Find the "soul" of your game:** Identify what makes your project unique and lean into your team's strengths. This passion and joy in creation will shine through and resonate with players. * **Manage scope:** Be ambitious, but balance it with what's achievable for your team size and resources. A narrower, well-polished vision often leads to a more complete and impactful game. Timberline Studios encourages players to follow "Bistro the Game" on Instagram and TikTok, and "Timberline Studio" on YouTube for updates on Bistro's development and eventual 2026 release.