Mad Herons is a new Los Angeles-based indie studio preparing its debut game, Send In The Clown. The comedy-focused title follows a clown trying to save a disastrous birthday party for a 12-year-old girl, while condensing role-playing game ideas such as character progression, party-building and meaningful choices into an experience lasting about an hour.
The studio was founded by Nick Park, Jacques Mouledoux and Karen Park. Nick Park, who leads technical development and game design, previously worked as an engineer at SpaceX and Nvidia. Mouledoux, the creative and audio lead, wrote for the Paramount+ series iCarly and contributed to the satirical site Hard Drive. Karen Park handles operations and strategy and previously worked as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, in addition to being part of Los Angeles' improv comedy community.
The founders say their approach to comedy is based on making players active participants in the joke. Mouledoux cited Portal, Untitled Goose Game, Disco Elysium and Earthbound as examples, arguing that games are especially effective when they let players create absurd situations through their own decisions. One example from Send In The Clown changes a character's dialogue depending on whether the player has previously discovered a clue about a payment made by the girl's father.
Park said the strongest comedy games integrate humour into their mechanics, level design, art, audio and characters rather than adding jokes on top of an otherwise unrelated experience. The team also sees the shorter format as a way to respect players' time and deliver a concentrated version of its ideas instead of pursuing an epic-length production.
Mad Herons is bootstrapping development and has chosen not to pursue venture capital or angel investment, prioritising sustainability and the ability to remain a small team. The studio contacted publishers mainly for marketing support and promotional budgets rather than development funding, but did not find a suitable agreement. The founders are instead using savings and other investments to finance at least the first game or two, accepting smaller budgets in exchange for independence from outside investors.
That strategy is being tested in Los Angeles, which the founders describe as an exceptionally expensive place to make games. Mouledoux and Nick Park nevertheless said they have no plans to leave the city, where they met through improv comedy and built connections with writers, musicians, designers, programmers, actors and artists. The studio also works with collaborators outside California, including contractors from several US states and the UK. Karen Park, who is based in Scotland, joked that the rest of the team should move the Los Angeles creative scene there instead.
Mouledoux moved from television writing into game development after the 2023 Writers Guild strike interrupted his television work. He taught himself programming and game development and said he chose to follow the activity he found most enjoyable. In his view, games remain difficult to enter, but they offer a lower financial barrier than television, where producing a project can require the backing of a studio with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The founders believe their experience outside the games industry gives Mad Herons a distinctive perspective. Park sees his engineering background as useful to the studio's technical work, while Mouledoux says his previous career writing jokes directly informs his work on the game's comedy. They also rely on friends with experience in both independent and major game studios for guidance as they develop Send In The Clown.
Sources: GamesIndustry.biz.