Turning Player Anger into Advocacy with Jarvs Tasker
The Community Lounge Season 3 Episode 1
(You can also watch this episode on YouTube.)
Today’s guest is Jarvs Tasker, Head of Communications at Happy Volcano. Jarvs has held several community and communications roles across the games industry, including at Raw Fury, where she worked on Dome Keeper and Blue Prince. She’s also an award-winning accessibility advocate, recently recognised at Game Dev Heroes 2025 for her work championing disabled and neurodiverse representation in games.
Her journey into the industry was anything but typical—she began her career as a drama teacher before disability forced her to step away. That experience, along with her training in behavior management, shaped her empathetic and people-first approach to community building.
We chat about how those teaching skills translate into managing online communities, why listening and understanding can turn angry players into loyal ambassadors, and how setting clear community rules helps everyone feel safe and included. Jarvs also shares her joy at seeing the Dome Keeper community come together for a hilarious black-tie modding jam—and how that moment became one of her favourite memories as a community manager.
Finally, we dive into her current work on Modulus, a colourful and creative factory automation game from Happy Volcano, and how she balances being a marketer, writer, and accessibility lead all in one.
Games mentioned in this episode:
Find Jarvs on:
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Episode transcription
Steve McLeod
Today I’m joined by Jarvs Tasker. When I was asking around for people who I should interview on the podcast, Jarvs Tasker name came up multiple times. Jarvs Tasker is currently head of communications at Happy Volcano. She has extensive experience in community roles. She’s also won awards for her advocacy for accessibility. Her path into the industry is a surprising one.
I’ve had a chance to hear the story in private and I’m sure you’re going to want to hear it today listeners. Welcome to the show Jarvs.
Jarvs Tasker
Thanks for having me, hi.
Steve McLeod
Hey, I had a friend back in university who always used to say as a sort of a greeting or a farewell, have fun, win awards. And I never quite understood why he said it, but you actually do did win awards. Do you have fun in your job as well?
Jarvs Tasker
Love my job. I like, I really genuinely love what I do. So yeah.
Steve McLeod
Well that’s a very good thing to hear. Should we start with hearing your path into community management?
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, yeah, sure. Bit of a weird one, as you said. I didn’t get into the games industry until I was 29. So I had a career before that as a drama teacher. So very, very different to working in video games and didn’t ever think I was going to do anything else, really. I only ever wanted to be a drama teacher and got to head of department by 27, which is quite an achievement. And I was really proud of that.
But unfortunately, I’m also disabled. My disability kind of progressed to a point where teaching drama wasn’t really possible to do in the way that I think you should be performing at for the kids. Like I can’t do anything if it’s not as good as it could be because the kids deserve better. So I took the rather painful decision to retire from teaching at 28, which was scary. Trying to think what I’m going to do after retraining and everything like that.
But games was the only other thing I cared about. It’s always been my hobby for as long as I can remember. My dad got me a Mega Drive when I was really little and ever since that day, that’s all I did. So yeah, I kind of investigated what I could do in video games and my degree was applied drama and creative writing. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll get into writing, but then realised very quickly that you need like a massive portfolio of work to get any job in writing in video games. So I thought what else I could use that skill in and marketing became quite obvious that I could do like copywriting and things like that. And because I’m a people person and I like talking to people and I’m a part of a lot of communities, I thought I’d try community management. So started trying to find ways in, which again, very quickly discovered was very difficult.
Steve McLeod
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking that and how did you find a way in?
Jarvs Tasker
I kind of forced my way in. I was part of, well, I watched a YouTube channel called PlayStation Access, which is the UK’s official PlayStation channel. It’s Europe’s only official PlayStation channel in on YouTube. And I’ve been watching them for at the time, I want to say around about four years, maybe a bit longer. And they hadn’t started live streaming consistently at that point. It was before the pandemic.
And they only had a community that wasn’t really a community. They had fans and they existed in the comment section on YouTube, but there was no place for them to like congregate and be a community. There was an old Twitter account that once existed that had gone dormant. So I tracked down the owner of that and asked if I could have the account and then started a Discord. And then the pandemic happened and they started streaming.
And then after the live streams, the chat all migrated over to the Discord and then it started becoming a community and basically was a full-time community manager for free for a year. Just volunteering to get that going, but it helped them reach their 2 million subscriber mark on YouTube. And they recognised that. And because of that, they gave me my first reference, which got me my first interview in a paid position, which I luckily got.
And then from that, rest is history. So yeah, I’ve kind of forced my way in.
Steve McLeod
That’s such a common story or a frequent story I’m hearing about community managers who just start doing the job before they actually have the job. And I guess if you’re passionate about it, you’d want to do it anyway. I mean, getting paid for it is of course much, much better than not getting paid for it – if only for financial reasons, but that’s a nice.
Jarvs Tasker
Yep. Yep. Yeah, I think there are lots of things you can do that show you have the skills to be a community manager, like moderating Discord servers or being sort of in charge of a guild in an MMO and managing like hundreds of players and things like that. Like all of these different things, know other community managers have done them. And I think for me at the time in Access, one of the hosts was Holly. And Holly, she’s no longer with PlayStation Access. She now works, I think, for Square on Final Fantasy Online. But she has been like the communications manager for CD Projekt Red at one point. And I think she was at Focus as well. But she was a midwife and she broke into the industry by being like in charge of guilds on Final Fantasy.
Steve McLeod
That is incredible. I thought drama teacher was probably the most unusual role, but midwife to community manager.
Discord
No, yeah. Yeah, and she told that story on Access once where they were doing like a Q&A and how she met someone from Bandai at a party once and that’s how she first got a job in the industry. And I was like, if Holly can do it, I can do it. Like, and she inspired me. So always grateful for her sort of sharing her story, which is brilliant.
Steve McLeod
I want to go back to, to your time as a drama teacher. How has that influenced the way you go about being a community manager, either in the way you do things or in the way you manage people?
Jarvs Tasker
Massively, massively. And I think it’s not just being a teacher, it’s where I trained. So I didn’t do a traditional PGCE, which is what most people do when they become a teacher. I did what’s called a SCITT, which is kind of more like an apprenticeship. You still have to do the university level, like coursework and written stuff. But instead of being in uni for like two terms and then school for one term, you are in school from day one, from Monday to Thursday, and then on Fridays you do your university study.
So you do, you are working from the beginning. But that course was very much more of a hands-on holistic view of teaching than just like theoretical and academic. And part of that was behaviour management with a gent called Rob Long. And he is probably my favourite person I’ve ever learned anything from. Because he is all about – his main thing is fighting fire with water.
And that sounds so silly to say, but like too often, people will try and fight fire with fire. And all that does, yeah, yeah, definitely. And all that does is get people’s backs up, puts them in a corner, makes them more angry. Especially with kids, it escalates rather than de-escalates. And his teaching very much taught me to look for the reason for a behaviour and treat that rather than the behaviour itself. And that I have taken through into what I do every day. Because a lot of community management is about reacting to your audience or to the developers you’re working with and how you manage their emotions and their wants and their needs.
And it can be very easy to put people in a corner and to label them as toxic and to not listen to what they’re doing, but that does you and them a disservice. And for me, I find that normally if a community member is being loud and angry about something, there’s actually usually a reason for it. And if you can get to the reason for it, you can show that you actually care. You understand where they’re coming from.
And if you can address that actual issue, you can usually turn that person into a really strong ambassador for your game because they appreciate the fact that you actually took the time to listen and address it. And even if it’s something that you can’t change, often just taking that time to understand it makes a big difference to that person. And I’ve used that so many times in so many different situations and it’s just kind of become part of who I am. And I think it served me really, really well in community work.
Steve McLeod
Fantastic. I think ultimately we all want to be listened to. We all want to feel like people AREtalking to us. And it’s part of the curse of modern life is that so much customer support or interactions with organiSations, we feel like we can’t be heard, especially when you have to go through those chatbots. Don’t get me started on that. There’ll be a tangent we’ll never get back from.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a nightmare. ⁓
Steve McLeod
So let’s talk about winning awards as I said in the introduction. One award I know you won was at Develop:Brighton 2025 where I met you. Tell me about that.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, I’m still kind of pinching myself about it. So every single year, there’s like kind of like a fringe award show at Develop. And it’s called Game Dev Heroes. And every year, even before I got into the industry, I have watched that on LinkedIn, and like looked at what the amazing people are doing in the games industry.
And it’s become a very wholesome, cherished award ceremony within the industry because it’s people, it’s nominated by your peers. So it’s other people in the industry are the ones that nominate you. It’s people who are in the industry that judge it and, give the awards out. And the actual event itself is all indie and, actually all sorts of devs. And it’s just lovely.
And I literally couldn’t believe that I got nominated. I was, I was putting a campaign together to try and get my friend nominated because Harriet Frayling is another accessibility advocate and I want to be her when I grow up. Like she’s the same age as me, but she’s incredible. And she does amazing things. So I was trying to get her nominated. She got nominated for something else. But I got nominated and I literally was just shook. Couldn’t believe it.
I was nominated for the progression award because basically, because of being disabled myself, and I’m also neurodivergent, I spend a lot of time trying to make the industry more accessible. Because I believe that you can’t really get true representation in the stories you create unless the people who are part of a group are actually making those stories or have a voice in those stories.
And I think the games industry has got a long way to go in representing disabled and neurodiverse people. And to do that, I think they need to have more of us behind the scenes. So I spend a lot of time trying to make our industry more accessible. So that’s why I got nominated. Couldn’t literally believe that, let alone winning it. I was so shocked.
Some of the people that were in, well, all of the people that were in that category are amazing, but Sally Sheppard for one is one of the most amazing advocates for women in games. And she was stood right behind me at the event and I 100 % thought she was gonna get it. And I couldn’t believe it. And she like squeezed my shoulders when I got it. And I was just like, that meant so much to me, because I really admire Sally. So yeah, it was wild and I’m still in disbelief.
Steve McLeod
So tell me, did you have to walk down some steps and up some other steps to get on the stage to get your award? Good. Actually, an accessibility award where they actually thought about accessibility.
Jarvs Tasker
No, they put a ramp. Yep. As soon as I got there as well, Alex, who’s one of the organisers, found me and he was like, is that ramp okay for you? And I was just like, yeah, it’s great. But he had obviously put thought in knowing that I was going to be there. I wasn’t actually in my wheelchair. I was using my crutches, but it still wouldn’t have been accessible if I had to try and get up the stairs on them. yeah, it was amazing. They, those guys that run Game Dev Heroes are true champions and they’re wonderful and they do so much for our industry.
Steve McLeod
Let’s come back to your work in community management. Is there a story you can think of of a particularly memorable positive moment as a community manager you can share with us?
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, you might have heard this one before, but I when I was at Raw Fury, I was a community manager there, there was five of us on the team. We all had different games that we managed. And Dome Keeper was one of mine. If you don’t know Dome Keeper, it’s genuinely one of my favourite games. I love it. I, I, that’s the reason I wanted to join Raw Fury was because I loved that game. So getting to be on it was a dream come true anyway, like I legitimately the year before I joined Raw Fury was at EGX and they had a booth for Dome Keeper in the row behind the booth that I was on and I kept running away from my booth to go play Dome Keeper because it was so good.
And René Habermann, who’s the main dev at Bippinbits, is also one of the nicest people in the whole of game dev. Like genuinely love that man to bits. And I am so lucky that I got to champion his game to people because he’s just the best and he really cares about community. Like he, as a developer, spends a lot of time in the Discord server getting to know the community and talking to them and seeing what they’re passionate about. And he’s also a developer that believes in the old way of video games in that, in, yeah, I know.
Steve McLeod
The old way? This sounds like something from Star Wars.
Jarvs Tasker
But what I mean is if you buy a video game, you buy a video game, you don’t have to then pay for every single update and things that get put into it. So for like two years after Dome Keeper came out, he just kept pumping out free content, just constantly updating the game, putting in loads of stuff, and it was all free.
And that’s a testament to how much he cares about the games that he makes and what the audience wants and the community’s values and what they care about. So working on that game alone was like the best thing ever. But when I was in my last couple of months at Raw Fury, we had just reintroduced mods to the game. And we were trying to find a way to get them like excited about mods.
And we came up with the idea of doing a mod jam. So if you don’t know what a jam is, a game jam is how Dome Keeper was made in the first place. It’s where you, it’s like a little competition. It’s not always a competition. It’s usually just an activity, but sometimes there’s prizes. And you have a short time. Sometimes it’s a week, sometimes it’s a weekend, sometimes it’s a day to make a game in a small team or on your own. If you’re a solo dev, you can do it that way too. Don’t know how you do it when you’re on your own, you’re a wizard, but…
And that’s how Dome Keeper was made. So we were like, okay, let’s do a mod jam and get people to make mods for the game. And first of all, I can’t believe I managed to do that. Like Gareth, who was the brand manager, just trusted me. He was like, you can organise it, right? And I was like, yeah, never having organised one of those before. So I’m proud that I managed to do it.
But the community were incredible, like absolutely incredible. We had loads of teams take part. We had loads of people who had never modded a game before ever join in. And those that had taught the others how to do it. And it was so wholesome and just, I was lovely watching them teach each other and help each other. Like that community is the most wonderful, sweet bunch of people and they’re huge. There’s like 25,000 people in that Discord server. And anytime anyone pops up, they’re welcoming and lovely and helpful and just, oh it’s so nice. And during that jam week, it really showed the spirit of that community.
But the best bit was the week after the jam, we did an award show and we were kind of poking fun at the game awards a little bit. But I jokingly said, we’re going to do a Black Tie event. I like greenscreened in the game award stage behind me and got all dressed up for it, expecting to be the only one doing that. And because we did it in a Discord stage, when I announced the winners, I invited them up to say something. And when they turned their cameras on, they were in Black Tie.
And like, I get goosebumps thinking about it, but it was just so like, wonderful to see them like caring as much as I did about this silly little event that we were doing, but it was just for us. But that was recorded and like, I’ve got a memory of that forever. And afterwards, René sent me a message and he was just like, I’m going to remember that for the rest of my career. Because it really did show how much that game means to that community, how much they mean to each other, how much what we did meant to them.
And it was just, I think I’m going to also remember that forever. Like it was just beautiful. Really, really nice and a good way to finish it.
Steve McLeod
I like the awards theme that connects to the fact that you won an award. And what you saw as some marketing activity or stunt or something actually obviously meant a lot to those players. If they took the effort to do the black tie, for them it wasn’t just some silly little activity. This is really important.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, and it was beautiful. It was so lovely. And I was very sad about leaving the Dome Keeper community. It’s one of the things that when you are a community manager, you can get very attached to the communities. And when you do move on to a different game or a different studio, it can be quite difficult. But that was such a beautiful way to end my time with Dome Keeper and with Raw Fury that it was it felt lovely.
It was beautiful and it was a really nice way to cap off that part of my life.
Steve McLeod
I’m going to have to make a note of this Dome Keeper and check it out. I really hope, I really hope it’s not a time sink. I don’t need another time sink.
Jarvs Tasker
It’s so good.
It is one of those games that is a roguelike. So you can pick it up and put it down. But it’s also one of those games that you play at five o’clock in the afternoon and then it’s two o’clock in the morning. Like, yeah, it’s one of those. It’s so good. I just love it.
Steve McLeod
So let’s turn a little bit negative. Negative is not the right word. What’s something that you found very challenging at some point in your time as a community manager, something that stands out in your memory.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, so this is like actually quite difficult because it comes down to managing people. And also, it also has to do with neurodiversity. So I also run communities in my spare time because that’s part of who I am. And there’s a group of wonderful people that I absolutely adore and they’re all really, really lovely. But sometimes they clash with each other. And that can be really difficult because you are looked at as the parent in that situation where it’s like, okay, you’re in charge, can you sort this out, please? And it’s not always comfortable.
When it’s in like a work capacity, when it’s like, I’m being paid to do this, I find it easier because there’s a level of authority kind of there where like what I say goes and it’s just tough. But when it’s a community you’re managing for fun, I find that more difficult because everyone is there because they want to be there and you don’t want to be like authoritarian in that situation. But sometimes you have to like, I always make sure there’s some really strict rules in place for every community, whether it’s a fun one or a work one.
And those rules are there to protect everyone and to make sure everyone has fun. And you, I believe you have to stick to those rules to keep that place fair and safe for everybody. And sometimes that means I have to have very difficult conversations with people that I would rather not have that I know is going to upset them. And that can be horrible. but I always try to think that I’m doing it for the better of the community.
It may upset this person in this time, but hopefully they understand that it’s coming from a place of caring and wanting to make sure that the community thrives. It’s not always fun.
Steve McLeod
So how do you, when you have to do one of these conversations, difficult conversations, how do you feel during or maybe after horrible? Yeah.
Jarvs Tasker
Horrible. Yeah, absolutely horrible. The particular time I’m thinking of right now is really difficult. It was not fun. I happened to think a lot of the person that I had to have that conversation with, but it had to happen. People were feeling uncomfortable and I had to make a choice to have a conversation and I hated it, but it had to be done. And that is part of being a community manager.
I know this instance I’m thinking of was in a less formal setting, but I’ve had to do it in work as well, where we’ve had to address things with community members that are really active and really engaged and obviously really care about the game. But they’re behaving in a way that is not good for the wider community. And it’s uncomfortable because you don’t want to alienate someone that has been a champion for your game up until that point.
And I am the kind of personality that is a mother type figure where I do tend to care more than I should and wear my heart on my sleeve. And so I feel it, like it hurts me when I upset people. I don’t like doing it. And part of that is being neurodiverse myself and having sort of social issues myself and, you know, feeling very deeply when I feel, right?
So it is difficult, but I think I have trained myself to a point where I know why I set these rules in place in the first place. And I always go back to that. And even if it’s going to upset one person, if it’s better for the wider community, then it’s something that has to be done.
Steve McLeod
On those rules you talked about, do you have some examples of the rules you would typically set in place at the beginning of creating a community?
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, some of the ones that I always set when it’s game related, we always have like an off topic section where people can talk about things not to do with the game that you’re talking about. But I always put in the rules that conversation shouldn’t be around things that are going to spark arguments basically. So whether that’s politics or usually it’s politics.
I always put that in the rules. I always put no hate speech. always put that any community I’m in charge of, everybody is welcome. No matter race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, I don’t care. Everyone is welcome. And if you make anybody feel that they don’t belong there, we’re gonna have a problem. And I’m very passionate about that.
And that has happened a few times where people have been funny when people have pronouns in their names. And I’ve had to address that and be like, if you don’t like it, you can leave. Like, no one’s forcing you to stay. But you have to keep those opinions to yourself. So yeah, I’m very passionate about that, because I think all communities should be safe for everybody. And I will remain very passionate about that.
And I think that’s one thing that I when I when I apply for jobs, it’s something that I look for in companies because not everywhere is as passionate about being inclusive as I am. And I will identify that if I’m going for interviews in places and know that I either don’t want to work there or I do want to work there based on that because that moral ground is really important to me as a person.
Steve McLeod
I would say based on what I’ve observed from how community managers work, it’s almost like a standard operating procedure now that community managers introduce guidelines or rules to any new community thing they’re offering, whether it’s a Discord forum, a Discord server or other tools or any environment. The first thing you see is a page of, this is what we expect of you. Code of conduct. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it goes a long, long way.
Jarvs Tasker
Code of conduct, yeah.
Steve McLeod
Just when, when there is a problem to be able to say, look, you saw the code of conduct. let’s look at point three there. Maybe in a, maybe in a more, as you called it motherly way than what I do it. But yeah, to be able to say, look, this is not something I’m coming up with out of nowhere. This is what you saw and what you’ve agreed to. Yeah.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, it’s in the rules. Yeah.
And I tend to go a step further on Discord now. And I in like the channel that has the list of rules, I always put a little thing at the bottom that you have to react to by hitting an emoji or a button to allow you access to the wider server. And if you haven’t hit that button, then you only get like the base channels. And I do that to protect everybody in the server and to make sure they have agreed to those rules, because anyone can just click okay, when you have to get into the server and not necessarily read it. And I’m aware of that, but to have to go that extra step. Then if I bring up those rules, they can’t say they didn’t look at it because they’ve checked that okay button.
Steve McLeod
Perfect.
Do you want to tell us what you’re working on now?
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, I like so I’m a gamer, massive gamer, but I’m not a factory player, right? When I first got this job at Happy Volcano, I knew them for a completely different genre. They were they they were the people that made You Suck at Parking, which was a game I found through Nico Hart, a streamer that is a good friend of mine and was playing that game. And I love that game. It’s just stupid, chaos, cozy fun.
Like, it’s just brilliant. And when I applied for that job, that’s what I had in mind. And I was like, cool, we’re gonna do like silly party games. And then I found out they’re working on a factory automation game. And I did some research and I was like, okay, this is a different kind of factory automation game. So the game we’re working on is called Modulus. And to me, when I think of factory automation games, I think of Factorio, Satisfactory. Those are the two that come to mind.
Steve McLeod
That’s exactly what was in my mind too.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah. And for me, I don’t enjoy those. I tried them and I played them for a few hours to give them a go, but I get stressed because you have to defend your factory and you have to like be okay with watching parts of it get destroyed if you can’t defend it. That pressure and that sort of fail state stresses me out. And I was like, I can’t do this. And also, I don’t know if it’s because I do have like depression sometimes, but if games are just brown, or just grey, I can’t cope with it. I’m like, no, I need colour.
Steve McLeod
That’s so interesting. So Modulus has colour.
Jarvs Tasker
Modulus is beautiful. Our art director Antoine is a wizard. I tell him this all the time. Every time he makes something, I’m like, dude, that’s so good. So Modulus is different because Modulus is a factory game where there are no fail states. There are no enemies. There are no timers. It is just creation, just Zen creation. And I dived into the demo and fell in love with it. Like, and I totally didn’t expect to.
Steve McLeod
Speaking of demo, so the game is still under development. Any idea when it’s aiming for release?
Jarvs Tasker
So right now we’ve got early access coming up in October on my birthday, end of October. We don’t know about 1.0 yet. We haven’t announced that, but we’re going into early access. The demo is already up. It’s been up since April. I believe we’re probably going to update that at some point, but right now it’s the same demo that was up in April. So that gives you kind of a peek at what the game is. And there are two different modes to the game.
So one is your standard, this is a factory and you have to meet certain objectives and deliver certain targets and build things. And the cool part about that campaign is that different to Shapes, I would say, is the other game that’s quite similar to Modulus, but with Shapes, you make things and then they just go off into the void. Whereas with Modulus, the things that you make actually make buildings in your factory and you watch it in real time. I don’t understand how our art director designs the buildings knowing they’re going to be made up out of these amount of bricks and stuff. He’s a wizard. Our game director will say to him, right, there’s 10 of these, 20 of these, and 30 of these shapes, make a building. And then he goes away and comes back with the most beautiful building. I’m just like…
Steve McLeod
That’s why an art director is an art director and you and I are not.
I wanted to ask you about your role with Modulus, given that it hasn’t yet been released. What do you do day to day?
Jarvs Tasker
What don’t I do? So we are a team of 11. And we have had a few interns over the development period and I miss you interns. They’ve gone now and we miss them very much. But because of that, we all wear lots of different hats. I am the only one in marketing at Happy Volcano. We do have a publisher. But internally, I am the only one.
So that means I do community, I do PR, I do influencer management, I do events, I do award applications, I do all the steam page and all of that side of things. Basically anything that involves someone seeing the game, that’s me. So any one day will be completely different from the next. Like today, for example, I’ve spent my entire day booking hotels and travel for an event that’s coming up.
And I hated that, if I’m honest, it’s so stressful booking travel for other people. I thought booking holidays for yourself was stressful, doing it for other people – oh my God. But then tomorrow I will be writing a dev deep dive for Steam. So completely different. But I’m also helping write the game. We will have a narrative in the game. It’s not in there at the moment, but there is going to be a narrative in there and I’m helping our game director write that.
Steve McLeod
So you have become a game writer after all.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, it took four years, five years, but yeah, I got there eventually. So yeah, I’m credited as a writer and I also do the accessibility on the game as well.
Steve McLeod
Of course, it would be something wrong if you didn’t get to be involved in it.
I just want to briefly tell everybody that Happy Volcano is the customer of my company, but that’s got nothing to do with this call today. We would have done this conversation even if they weren’t. I just feel I have to make that disclaimer.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah.
Steve McLeod
We’re running out of time, but there is one very important question I still have to ask you, Jarvs. What game have you been playing lately?
Jarvs Tasker
Okay, so I’ve just finished Death Stranding 2. I am a huge Death Stranding fan. So I have already like sunk – Last time I looked, I was at 138 hours in Death Stranding 2. And then I was working towards the Platinum. But then I saw that Hades 2 had a 1.0 release date coming up. So I’ve parked Death Stranding for a bit. And I finally dived into Hades 2. So Hades 1 is my favourite game of all time.
I’ve got, you can’t really see it, she’s squashed, but I’ve got Dusa right above my head there. I, it’s my absolute favourite game. All of my usernames are JarvDusa because that’s how obsessed I am with it. and I’ve been resisting playing the early access because I wanted to wait for 1.0, but now 1.0 is coming on the 24th. I was like, okay, now I can dive in.
Steve McLeod
The time is here.
I’m always impressed that somebody who has a full-time job and a family and has time for games. I don’t know how you do it.
Jarvs Tasker
Steam Deck, Steam Deck or PlayStation Portal is how I do it. I wait until my baby has gone to bed and then I climb into bed with my Portal or my Steam Deck and play it in bed. So those two devices are like godsends for me.
Steve McLeod
Okay. I haven’t got the Steam Deck. I’m kind of, um, scared of what it will do to me if I get one, but you know, whenever I’m coming back from a gaming event, uh, and I live here in Barcelona, there is a big games industry community here. So on the plane coming back from wherever I’m coming back from, there’s other people also coming back and you can tell the people who have just come from the event because they have the steam deck out and they’re playing a game all the way home.
Jarvs Tasker
Yeah, yeah. When I worked at Raw Fury, they do something called FuryCon every year where everybody, because most people are remote, apart from the people in Sweden, everybody goes either to Sweden or I think they’ve also been, I can’t remember, Malmo. No, that is Sweden. I can’t remember. They went somewhere else. But we went to Stockholm and it’s an eight hour delay. We got stuck in on the way home and we were stuck at Amsterdam because we had a connecting flight. So we couldn’t even leave the airport.
And if I didn’t have my Steam Deck, I would have lost my mind. So I played eight hours of Cult of the Lamb that day. Just sat in an airport, plugged into their plugs with my Steam Deck. It was the best.
Steve McLeod
And the Steam Deck battery lasts that long?
Jarvs Tasker
It was plugged in.
Steve McLeod
Gotcha. Okay, I understand now. So as we’re about to wrap up, I wanna say that it’s taken a lot of self-control once you mentioned you worked at Raw Fury, not just to ask you about Blue Prince, too, which is published by Raw Fury. And I think I’ve managed to get there – current comment accepted.
Jarvs Tasker
Honestly, Blue Prince is one of the best games I’ve ever worked on. If it doesn’t get loads of awards in the upcoming award sort of round, I’ll be shocked.
Steve McLeod
Surely it will, surely. If I had to put, I’m not a betting person, but if I had to put money on a game that’s going to clean up at the next round of awards, it would be Blue Prince.
Jarvs Tasker
It’s really difficult this year, to be honest, because Expedition 33 came out just after, which for me, I think is my game of the year so far.
But then Hades 2 is about to launch into 1.0 and that’s coming out just before the end of the sort of like awards area. So you’re going to have that in the indie category. I don’t know. I think Expedition 33 is more of a AA than an indie, but technically the studio is an independent studio.
Steve McLeod
The trying to sell it is the work of a very tiny team at an indie studio, but you know, I don’t know. I’m not going to make any judgment on that. Jarvs, that’s all we have time for today, I’m afraid. Thanks again for being on the show. The time has gone really quickly for me.
Jarvs Tasker
It has! Yeah, it really has gone fast. It was really fun.
Steve McLeod
If listeners would like to get in touch to know more about what you’re doing or what we’ve discussed today, what’s the best way to do that?
Jarvs Tasker
Two ways. So either Jarvs Tasker on LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn a lot. I like helping people with their career and stuff over there. So if you want to get into community management and you want to have a chat, hit me up on LinkedIn or else Blue Sky, JarvDusa, as I said earlier, is over there.
Steve McLeod
Okay, I’ll have both of those links in the show notes. I’m also on Blue Sky, by the way. I don’t think I found you there yet, but I will after this call. Okay, thanks, Jarvs. Bye.
Jarvs Tasker
Same. Thanks for having me.
Steve McLeod
Bye, everyone.