Double Fine Productions and its new pottery-inspired game Kiln don’t just break the mold

Double Fine Productions and its new pottery-inspired game Kiln don’t just break the mold – they smash it to pieces

by Athima Chansanchai

There is a workplace that encourages everyone to pitch ideas, no matter how far-fetched, in a safe space with no judgement.

There is a gaming studio that elevates kindness as an essential trait for employees.

And there is a team that dreamed up a surprisingly cathartic game about sentient pottery that is equal parts creation and destruction.

That workplace, that gaming studio and that team are Double Fine Productions.

Founded in San Francisco in 2000 by industry veteran Tim Schafer, over the past quarter-century it has developed a reputation as an experimental space, earning acclaim for games like Keeper, which follows the adventures of a lighthouse and the seabird that becomes its companion, and Psychonauts, in which players assume the role of a boy with psychic abilities.

Double Fine’s quirky creativity shines through in Kiln, the first of its kind party brawler inspired by pottery. Yep, you read that right. Pottery.

The vividly colored, animated game mixes fun with fight, fantasy with reality and an often-solitary hobby with socializing and strategizing as a team.

Players create bespoke ceramic pots, jugs and vases – no presets here – that become their proxies as fighters, then team up with other players’ vessels in a brawl to extinguish opposing teams’ kilns.

A wild pitch that scored

Kiln’s project lead, Derek Brand, played Super Mario Brothers as a child – but in black and white because his parents’ old TV was the only one they allowed in his bedroom.

Brand’s father and grandfather were inventors in the toy industry, so he grew up in Santa Barbara, California with a maker’s mindset. Games captured his interest in a way that toys never did but gaming was never on his radar as a career option. “It just never clicked for me,” he says.

He studied industrial design at San Jose State, which felt familiar because it was more along the lines of what his family had done for generations. But in his first semester, he discovered the school’s animation program and switched majors.

Photo of man in glasses and beard holding a small pot

While a lot of the program’s graduates found jobs in the film industry, some, like Brand, landed in gaming. Brand’s path led to an internship at EA Games, which led to Double Fine, where he’s risen through the ranks over the past 14 years.

As a principal artist, he’s used to solo thinking, drawing and painting. But for Kiln, his role as art director and project lead required working with people, all the time.

“It’s a lot of growing pains trying to figure out how to do this,” he says. “But I really get to interact with every discipline in a way I couldn’t before.”

He came up with the idea for Kiln in 2017 as a pitch for Amnesia Fortnight, an internal game jam at Double Fine in which anyone on staff can pitch a game idea, and if selected, lead a team to turn it into a playable prototype.

As a concept artist, his mind lingered on pottery – particularly the variety of shapes that were possible. Early prototypes of the game were simple, but the team added depth and complexity as their ideas started to gel and materialize. The team’s artists – who hand draw their designs – went to town on whimsy, vibrant colors and landscapes based on history.

The game Brand envisioned would allow players to see what other people make – what Brand thinks of as a “creation party.” And then it would allow them to smash those masterpieces to pieces.

“It’s fun to make stuff. But then if it’s pottery, you can smash it too,” he says. “So early on, we thought about it as cathartic creation and cathartic destruction. Catharsis on both sides.”

When the game was in late pre-production, a team-building exercise encouraged them to channel the more playful aspects of destruction: a rage room, where they suited up in full protective gear so that they could safely smash all kinds of pottery, glass and other castoffs.

Make it before you break it

Before the team could create realistic animated pottery, they had to learn how to make real pottery.

“We all know how to break stuff. But we wanted to make sure we were doing pottery justice,” Brand says, alluding to the artform’s deep cultural history.

Half of the small studio’s staff took classes to get a feel for the clay and the techniques that convert it to durable finished pieces. “We all shared that challenge together,” says Schafer, the studio’s founder.

He realized fairly quickly how hard it was to make something even as seemingly simple as a vase, acknowledging the complexity by buying coveralls because he kept getting covered in clay.

Another Double Fine team member, artist Jeremy French, continued to develop his pottery skills after the classes, even showing off his work on Instagram.

“It was good to actually have clay under our hands at one point, to know how it should feel,” says lead designer Lauren Scott.

Like Brand, Scott grew up playing video games – one of the first being a clever take on Space Invaders that her dad programmed. He replaced the aliens with her baby picture and she would shoot at little Laurens.

Pottery, though, was a new endeavor. She found the process invaluable, as some elements of the craft were counterintuitive.

“When you think about throwing pottery, you’re thinking you have to pull the clay up and make shapes, but you actually have to press the clay to make it rise up. You start with this blob and bring it up and down a bunch of times to get the air bubbles out.

“We had to take that knowledge and use that as a foundation, but funnily enough, we had to push ourselves away from a hyper realistic version of throwing pottery to what people think pottery throwing is like.”

Dream jobs do come true

So how do you find a company like Double Fine that values creativity and encourages employees to share ideas? You make one.

Growing up in the heart of wine country in northern California, it seemed to Schafer that everyone worked in or around a vineyard – or in his family’s case, a turkey ranch, which was a rite of passage for his four older siblings. Schafer lasted a day.

He told his dad, “I hate this job, it’s terrible.” And his dad told him: That’s what a job is – getting paid to do something you don’t like.

That didn’t sit right with Schafer, who believed he could get paid for something he liked to do – even find a dream job.

It took a few years for the dream to materialize but after taking creative writing and computer science classes at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, he was flipping through a binder of job listings at a career center when he saw one that stopped him in his tracks: “We want programmers who can write.”

“I’ve been preparing for this all my life,” he thought.

He joined LucasFilm Games, which later became LucasArts, writing dialogue for graphic adventures. By 2000, he had accumulated enough experience in various roles – including running a team – that he felt it was the right time to strike out on his own.

The same year he founded Double Fine, Microsoft introduced Xbox at the Game Developers Conference (now known as the Festival of Gaming). Double Fine signed with Microsoft to publish its first console game for Xbox, and the companies worked together on and off until Microsoft acquired Double Fine in 2019.

Kindness is key

Raw clay’s journey to finished pot isn’t always smooth and Double Fine’s hasn’t always been either. Schafer says there were bumpy times when they got a little off-track, but they never derailed because they respected one another.

“One of the great things about having your own company is that you don’t have to hire mean people,” he says.

Group of people making pottery with one person looking up and showing their work

“Of course we’re looking for really smart people, talented, hard working. But there’s a certain amount of kindness that I think is necessary, because it lets you work through all your problems. If you have a very kind staff, they can work through misunderstandings and disagreements with respect. One of the core pillars of the company is the culture of mutual respect.”

There’s an open dynamic in the studio. The staff are encouraged to talk about ideas at events like Amnesia Fortnight, where Kiln was first introduced.

“If you just sit down and try and do your next game the same way you did your last game, you might just come up with your last game again. How do you prompt yourself to be inspired? You have a lot of input, and sometimes that input can be weird and challenging – and that can create the best results,” Schafer says.

During the pandemic, Double Fine remodeled their cozy San Francisco offices to include social spaces for staff to play board games, practice yoga and eat meals together. They have a handbook with values and goals. The studio mandates an “Hour of Fun” when the whole studio plays their games in development. They choose their next projects based on what excites them, versus what market research suggests is trending.

The studio is also proud of its connection to its fans and community – essential, Schafer says, to staying alive over the years. They used to answer mail directly, created forums so their fans could talk to each other, and share a bevy of behind-the-scenes videos and insights through their YouTube channel and website. Building and nurturing those communities led to successful Kickstarter campaigns while they were still an indie shop.

From solo to social

While pottery is usually a solitary practice, Double Fine wanted to make the game much more social.

They created a communal lobby that feels like a pottery studio. Players can’t chat, but they can share pots with each other to encourage collaboration and creativity.

Screenshot from Kiln showing different pots in play

Testing Kiln was also different than testing solo-play games because they needed to test it as a group to get the full experience. Every day they had eight people play and review, and it became a daily party in which they called out bugs.

“People come in and give us feedback as the game’s in development, really shining a light on areas we need to improve – things real players are seeing that, as developers, we might be too close to notice,” Scott says.

Xbox Game Studios helps build bridges

Though Double Fine regularly engaged with the gaming industry through local meetups and international events such as the Game Developers Conference, they rarely worked with other indie studios or tapped those studios’ resources.

Microsoft provided financial stability, but it also helped Double Fine build connections to other studios.

“There are always studios like us who were kind of like islands in the sea before. But now we have these bridges between us so we can talk and share stories,” Schafer says.

UK-based Rare, the makers of Sea of Thieves, is lending a hand on Kiln by sharing their experience of building a community, creating beta programs and fostering post-launch player engagement. Double Fine has also connected with Obsidian on the game and shared notes.

“They can go learn from other teams that might have expertise and best practices, all the way to hands-on help,” says Mary McGuane, a studio general manager at Xbox Game Studios who oversees five different game studios, including Double Fine. “There’s a whole collective of studios that are rooting for their success and contributing to it.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to the studios, she adds, but the through line is clear: Don’t lose what makes the company and culture unique.

For Double Fine, says lead designer Scott, that’s the studio’s focus on the experimental and weird, pushing the boundaries of the medium, both technically and artistically, and solving hard problems.

“I’m working somewhere where the main goal is to contribute to the game medium in a meaningful and interesting way.”

This story was published on April 23, 2026. All photos and screenshots courtesy of Double Fine Productions.

Kiln, Double Fine’s upcoming multiplayer online pottery party brawler, launches on April 23 – including Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, PlayStation 5, Steam, and with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It will be an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and arrive Handheld Optimized.

Shop select Windows 11 PCs and unlock the Ultimate College Bundle from Microsoft—giving eligible students everything they need for a full year of productivity, creativity and play, all in one purchase.

Offer ends June 30, 2026. Eligibility requirements apply, and students will need to verify their academic status using their college .edu email address. Redemption requires a Microsoft account and following the provided steps after purchase of a qualifying PC.