Tomorrow evening, another gathering of like-minded creatives will take place at the Fayetteville Public Library. OzPlay 2026 is a showcase for video games and the people creating them in Northwest Arkansas.
Earlier this week, two of the organizers of OzPlay 2026 came to the Carver Center for Public Radio. Kjartan Kennedy is studio director for Causeway Studios, and David Condolora is co-founder of Brain&Brain. They say OzPlay is designed to lift the veil to the entire community — gamers, novices and developers alike. The free, open-to-the-public event is from 7 until 9 tomorrow night in the event center at the library — a bigger space than last year's OzPlay. Kennedy says there will be 14 developers showing off their Northwest Arkansas-created games.
Kjartan Kennedy: We're going to have a really good split of repeats — where we're going to see either updates from teams, maybe a new project that they're working on, maybe the way that their project has evolved since last year. And then seven brand-new teams. Some of them are students, some of them are professionals or hobbyists. But seven brand-new games.
Kyle Kellams: That would have been a goal from last year, right?
Kennedy: Yes, absolutely. We want new stuff. And one of the really gratifying things between last year and this year is just finding developers coming out of the woodwork that we didn't even know existed in the area. Sometimes with very polished stuff, very good games and products that we're excited to put in front of people.
Kellams: Does that mean the development ecosystem here is expanding, growing, becoming healthier?
Kennedy: I think there's an element of it expanding, but I think there's also a huge element of we're just lifting the curtain on it every time. Even last year's event brought us new developers that didn't know that there was already this community of developers here. Every time we go out and speak at an event like One Million Cups, or go to a pitch competition — which I did last week — we have people coming up to us surprised and delighted that they're not the only developer, not the only person making games in Northwest Arkansas. And so we're just adding to our ranks that way. And then I do think there's an element of growth. There's people getting more inspired saying, I can make games in Northwest Arkansas.
Kellams: What's the last year been like for Brain&Brain?
David Condolora: Pretty exciting, actually. Last year at OzPlay, we had a very basic demo of the new game we're working on and it's much more developed now. We're looking to actually release the finished game later this year. For us, it's a crucial opportunity to put the latest version out there and see how players like it and just learn from watching them play. We're very excited about that.
Kellams: And at Causeway Studios?
Kennedy: It's been a tumultuous and exciting time. We are now a little over a year since releasing our first game, and we've been working on our second game. We got all the way through pre-production. We have a really exciting demo to show. And we have been talking to funding partners and starting to get commitments on development funding for our next game, where we can take a sustainable next step in scope and fidelity.
Kellams: It takes some kind of patience to develop and release a game. What's going on in those years?
Condolora: It's discovery, a lot of the time — at least the way we do it. Every developer does things differently, but the way we do it, you spend a lot of time understanding what the game itself actually is. It's an iterative process where you try something and you play it yourself, or you put it in front of somebody and then realize, wow, that's really not what I'm trying to build. And then you build something else. You're constantly discovering that until you finally do discover: this is the game I am making. And then it's bricklaying. Then it's production. Now I know where we're going, and now we can start layering all of that fidelity and making it that polished experience. But first you got to see what it is.
Kennedy: A lot of that same stuff we like to call play. In any creative process, a lot of it is play. It is experimentation. It is finding what works and what doesn't work, and what is fun. And so a lot of it goes into that. That's a lot of pre-production. And then after that, there is the massive multidisciplinary complexity of games. It is engineering, it is art, it is narrative, it is music — all of these things all wrapped up. And you have to find a way to get those puzzle pieces to fit together. And then you hand it to somebody and they can just break it by doing something you never expected.
And the other thing — a lot of games are starting to have really expanded budgets and production timelines. You're seeing games that are taking five, seven, ten years to be made. And that's actually where we think the far reaches of the industry are becoming really unsustainable, because you're getting into these production budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. You maybe spent ten years building it, and then suddenly you have a ten-year gap between two games, and that audience has lost interest and moved on to different IPs, to different creators and things that are feeding them more regularly, more sustainably. Where now we come back to smaller studios — us indies like Brain&Brain and Causeway Studios and Trinket Studios and others who are going to be there Thursday — we are making smaller games, more sustainable games where we can release games more frequently and build an audience more sustainably and regularly.
Kellams: Developers will obviously be there, but you want consumers too?
Condolora: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And one of the things we forget to put on the flyers is that it's a completely free event, completely open to everybody. We want gamers. We want people who just love this sort of thing — love video games, love board games, love storytelling. There's lots of avenues into the kinds of games that we're going to be showing. There's a little bit of something for everybody because we'll have games in all different genres. So whatever you like to play, there'll be something there.
Kennedy: A huge goal of this whole effort is to lift the veil to our entire local community — that there are games being made here, games being made inspired by your hometown, games being made inspired by your community. When we released our first game at Causeway, we got Steam reviews that literally said, I didn't realize a game was being made in the town that I live in. I bought it just because I heard about it on the local news. And in fact, I loved it. And that's the kind of grassroots support that we're trying to build and make people aware of.
Condolora: The game we're making — Raincaster — is set in a holler in the Ozarks. That's the setting. If you know the area, you'll see Mayapples and other plants that are local to the area and animals that you know. There is that aspect of something being made about the place you live in or you grew up in that you don't get from the huge studios. It is being done here, and it's something special.
Kellams: Is AI part of the conversation in gaming?
Kennedy: It's definitely part of the conversation, just like everywhere else. It is a huge part of the conversation overall in gaming. But a thing that we're actually really proud of is that we don't make games with generative AI. And in fact, it was a factor when we were choosing which games to participate. We laid out a requirement that games participating here not be using generative AI as part of their process.
Condolora: At this point, everything you see Thursday is handcrafted. The industry is certainly having a broader discussion on what's the proper place for all this stuff, and that's not a settled question by any means. But it's going to be an interesting few years for every industry.
Kjartan Kennedy is studio director for Causeway Studios and David Condolora is co-founder of Brain&Brain. OzPlay 2026 takes place at the Fayetteville Public Library's event center tomorrow night from 7 until 9. It will feature games of all genres and is free and open to the public. This conversation was recorded earlier this week in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
