Interview: How the team at TOVG crafted IndieLand TOVGThe team at ThatOneVideoGamer (TOVG) has been highlighting up-and-coming indie games for five years now at their immensely popular IndieLand event. In an exclusive sit down with Dexerto, the crew gave us a behind-the-scenes look into the origins of what\u2019s become a major annual celebration. One thing fans of the team at TOVG can all agree on is that they\u2019re insanely passionate about video games. Not only do they have The Completionist run through a new game every week, but they go far beyond that with new projects and events constantly in the works too. One such project has been the long-running indie game showcase event, IndieLand. Since its inception in 2018, IndieLand has become a staple for devs and the community alike. As an ever-growing platform in which to showcase efforts on the dev side, and a place for fans to learn of new projects on the other, it\u2019s become a notable date on the calendar each passing year. Dexerto spoke to TOVG Creative Director Michael Barryte and Founder Jirard \u201cThe Completionist\u201d Khalil to understand more about the inner workings of running such a huge event each year. An Introduction to TOVG Before learning more about the event itself, we asked Jirard and Michael to give us a bit of history on the creation of TOVG and break down exactly what the team does. \u201cI started TOVG back in 2011,\u201d Jirard, more commonly known on the internet as The Completionist, said. \u201cIt was originally supposed to be a content creation hub of all my projects that I make and it quickly became The Completionist. Everything evolved from that.\u201d Now 12 years on, TOVG continues to create videos for both The Completionist and Super Beard Bros, while also functioning as a content management team to boot. \u201cWe actually team up with content creators mostly on the European or international scale that might want to work in the [United States] and want to work with certain companies but don\u2019t have all of the Visa stuff,\u201d Jirard explained. The team at TOVG also helps manufacture merchandise as a \u201cwhite label house\u201d often helping content creators under their umbrella. Meet the TOVG crew Being a small team means those at TOVG often \u201cwear many hats\u201d, but each member is still responsible for their own role. As the CEO of the company, Jirard makes all of the calls financially, and most of the calls creatively. His brother Jacque Khalil currently works as CFO or as Jirard stated \u201cthe money man\u201d. General Manager Frazier Perez-Yadon ensures that everything is fulfilled and taken care of from a business perspective. Next, we have the two creative directors with Michael Barryte and Alex Faciane who are responsible for The Completionist and Super Beard Bros respectively. Brett Bayonne also helps out with Super Beard Bros often appearing in episodes. From there, TOVG has a fair few editors and community managers, these being Megan Baldado who works on social media for The Completionist, and Beard Bros, Ted Coonradt, who edits and takes care of Patreon fulfillment, and Patrick Stenglein who edits for The Completionist. Cameron Daxon is the head of writing at the Completionist who also has two other freelancer writers Jeremy Hanna and Iszac Gaton to assist on that end. Finally, Shawn (JetPackBraggin) works on thumbnails and merchandise as an artist. Carlos Padilla creates the art for the ratings and end cards shown in The Completionist, and Josh Kotoff assists in managing the channel and acts as a SEO consultant. As you can see, it takes a village. Early Inspirations for TOVG Whilst IndieLand is presented and hosted by Jirard, he attributes the creation of the event to Michael, Frazier, and Alex who were originally inspired by Polaris\u2019 Scare to Care, working under the Maker Studios banner. Jirard would end up attending Scare to Care and even hosted the event within the TOVG offices to help out in the background. Eventually, when Michael joined Jirard he came to learn about the 501(c)(3) in honor of his mother. This was one of the catalysts for inspiration when it came to creating IndieLand. \u201cThat then sort of triggered us to go, hey, we should be putting on a charity event that is serving this cause. It was two-pronged and it actually answered two questions,\u201d Michael explained. \u201cJirard had been wanting to be more involved in the charity space first and foremost. He\u2019d done a lot of charity work, but he didn\u2019t have something that was his. \u201cThen also on YouTube, it\u2019s a sad reality, but indie games do not necessarily perform well as far as video SEO, and Jirard\u2019s very passionate about indie games.\u201d So together they decided to make what they considered a \u201cunique cross-section\u201d that spotlighted indie games while also raising money for dementia research. The very first IndieLand event This all culminated in 2018 when Frazier, Alex, and Michael got together and began spinning up the event with Jirard\u2019s blessing. The name IndieLand originated from much loftier inspirations when originally putting the event together but was deemed far too difficult to realistically achieve. \u201cOriginally the first IndieLand we designed in blocks because this was before we had developers joining us in the room. \u201cSo we went, oh, this block of games is going to be incredibly hardcore, difficult games. So that was \u2018Hardcore Harbor.\u2019 We labeled it a location because we wanted to come up with some fun theming as to why is it this block.\u201d Two years later, however, the idea of micro lands ended up being removed as scheduling developers from all over the world into a similar time block was basically impossible. However, the name IndieLand stuck. For IndieLand 2018, Jirard was able to call upon both Yacht Club Games and Way Forward to join the event, and when it was all said and done, the team was in agreeance. \u201cWhen we got to the end of that first one, at the tail end of that marathon, we went, \u2018yeah, we should do this all the time.\u2019 It went really well. And so every year since, we\u2019ve made a point to expand and elevate how we\u2019re showcasing games, who we\u2019re spotlighting, and the different that talent joins us.\u201d So that\u2019s the inside story on the foundation of IndieLand, but there\u2019s plenty more to the story. Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3 of our exclusive interview series in the coming days. We interviewed the TOVG crew over a three-part series. You can catch up on Part 2 & Part 3 here. IndieLand will return on October 20 \u2013 22 2023and can be viewed on The Completionist Twitch channel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interview: How the team at TOVG crafted IndieLand TOVGThe team at ThatOneVideoGamer (TOVG) has been highlighting up-and-coming indie games for five years now at their immensely popular IndieLand event. In an exclusive sit down with Dexerto, the crew gave us a behind-the-scenes look into the origins of what\u2019s become a major annual celebration. One thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}