The Indie Game Magazine September 2014 | Issue 41 | 页面 9

INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEW WITH

NOBLE KALE
by Bonnie Burgette

Noble Kale, the developer behind Quarries of Scred and Doktor Kale’s Creature Creator, is an Australian
dev with what’s quickly becoming a signature style. His pixelicious creations are used as avatars by fans, and
Scred has sparked some competition on Twitter among devotees (I am one of them, I admit). More than just
a name, however, Kale has shown himself to be a multi-faceted personality, and often takes to the internet to
interact with people, offering comfort if they’ve had a bad day, and sharing in triumphs when they occur. He
makes a point to donate game codes to special causes (such as charity livestreams), and makes an effort to
give everyone an opportunity to play his games by working with those who can’t afford the full price (which
is, admittedly, already inexpensive).
We set out to ask Kale about his games and
gamedev aspirations, and ended up learning quite
a bit about him – as his personality online suggests,
he’s an open book with a willingness to provide
common ground with others. Read on to learn more!
Indie Game Magazine: Let’s dive right in - who
are you and what sparked your interest in game
development?
Noble Kale: Mostly I go by Noble Kale, which
is a Ghost Rider reference, and I’m an engineer
over in Melbourne, Australia. The “who are you”
question throws me a bit, as I’ve been asking
myself that question a bit, but: Engineer, gamedev,
person with depression, and husband to a really
lovely lady. All of those are equally important.
Aside from the “grew up with gaming” part of this kind
of discussion, long ago I picked up some books from
the library that were part of a series on programming
BASIC games. They’re published by Usborne, and I
drop the covers on Twitter occasionally. They have
a bunch of little robots explaining how code works,
and have a bunch of sample games that you can type
into your computer and run. These didn’t quite work

as planned since the intended platforms are C64,
Atari ST, etc - so they had to be tweaked a bit, but
they were definitely what got things started for me.
A little while later, I did programming at school
- we had a bunch of PCs with Logo on them, and I
pretty much churned through the classwork quickly
enough and started making some really simple
games. This was a good chance to convert some of
those little games from the books into something
I could work with much easier, so it flowed from
there. Sadly, these games have been lost as I’d really
like to go back and look at them now - maybe bring
some of them up to current.
IGM: What gave you the idea for your released
games (Quarries of Scred and Doktor Kale’s Creature
Constructor)?
Kale: Ah. For Scred - I previously worked on a
game named Arnthak for a few years - right when
my depression kicked in. For the sake of my own
head, I had to put it on hold, sadly. As an exercise to
show I could actually finish a project - and bump my
own self esteem - I decided I’d try the polar opposite
of Arnthak. A really tight, small game. Something

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