Welcome to another interview session from the developers we met back at PAX East 2025. In this interview, our very own Eddie V. has a delightful discussion with lead designer and founder of Little Buffalo Studios. Enjoy the discussion!

Ed: Hello, everybody. This is Eddie from Boss Rush Network. I’m here talking to the lead designer of Akiiwan: Survival, Jeremy Nelson, Founder of Little Buffalo Studios. Hello, Jeremy!

Jeremy Nelson: Hello!

Ed: Can you explain the theme of Akiiwan: Survival? 

Jeremy: Yeah. So, it’s a chill survival crafting game with a talking campfire.

Ed: With a what? (laughs with glee)

Jeremy: Yes, with a talking campfire. (laugh).  

Ed: I love it!

Jeremy: Thank you. The premise of the game began with a ‘what if.’ The ‘what if’ is basically that, since the dawn of time, one thing people have in common is that we’ve sat by a fire. What if the fire was listening? So, if the fire were listening to us talk forever, it would know all our survival knowledge.

It’s kind of like a grandfather or grandmother figure. It wants you to succeed, but it also wants you to kind of learn for yourself. So, it’s there to help you, but not completely hold your hand every step of the way. The whole idea is that the game is deeper, but also more chill. We’re going deeper into crafting, deeper into what it means to survive, but also wanting to make it chill and take out a lot of the “grindy stuff” that happens in survival games, which, you know, maybe was fun ten years ago, but we all know how to start a fire.

[Another example is] gathering water,[which] is kind of boring. We want to focus on what it means to survive and live off the land. Part of that comes from the fact that a lot of our team is indigenous. So I’m Red River Metis. We also have Anishinaabe and Mohawk people on our team, and we’re trying to bring in that sort of sense of what our ancestors knew to survive here for so of sense of what our ancestors knew to survive here for so very long and tell their stories.

One of the things I like to tell people is that in most survival crafting games, the first thing you do is you cut down a tree. If you’re trying to survive, that would be stupid because you’re you’d have blisters on your hands, be sweaty, exhausted, and you’d have one tree for it. The way trees were felled in the past, a lot of times, was you’d start a fire underneath it, and then you could push it over after a day, which is a lot better way to take down a tree if you’re trying to conserve your energy. So, we’re trying to look at everything that’s happened in survival crafting and go, “was that really how it was done or not?” We want to bring that into the game in a really fun way.

Ed: With the campfire talking to you, are you going to be able to hear the voices from this fire, or is it just language you’re going to be reading? 

Jeremy: Right now, it’s just text. We’ll probably add the actual voice to the fire later on.

We’ll have to figure out exactly what that is, though, because it’s such a central character getting that just right. The fire isn’t just an instructor, but it’s sharing a lot of lore in this land. Basically, the way the game starts is you’re waking up by a fire, [and] you don’t know how you got there.

A fox actually nudges you awake, and you look up and you see a fox and the fire, and you kinda pass out, and you hear the fox and the fire talking. They tell you that people have been falling from the sky onto the world of Achewan for a long time, and nobody there knows why. You’re the latest visitor in this land. [Then], we soon find out winter is coming. So, not only do you have to figure out where you are, but you have to get ready for winter. If you make it through to spring, you soon find out that the island, for reasons that’ll be explained in the game story, is starting to flood.

You have to build a canoe, gather up your wares, and make a fire carrier to keep the fire alive before it gets washed out, and go on to your next adventure.

Ed: Will you be able to build houses or anything?

Jeremy:  Yeah. There’s something similar to base building in the game. Although it’s meant to be a bit more realistic about what it’s really like to functionally survive. What would it be like in the forest?

There are a lot more details in that than I think I’ve ever seen in other games. For instance, you have different shelters that you’re building. You might have a fishing camp near the shore that you’re building. You might have an overwintering shelter that’s more inland, that might be near game, wood, and things like that. Part of it is discovering through the game how you make real survival shelters that would allow you to live through a winter based only on what you have around you.

It’s leading into this idea of how every single thing that’s around you in different seasons can be combined in different ways to allow you to live, which is something indigenous people knew and kept all of us alive for ten thousand years. It’s bringing in-depth knowledge of crafting things. After playing for a while, you’ll get a better understanding of survival.

Ed: Would you be able to design traps and capture wildlife?

Jeremy:  Absolutely. You choose your path as a player. That’s kind of why we have the idea when you come back every night and talk to the fire. If you’re a person who’s more of a crafter or more of a base builder, you can ask the fire questions about that and go in that direction.

If you’re more of a hunter, you can learn about hunting. The way it evolves is also different. For instance, at the start of the game, if you ask the fire, “I want to know how to hunt”, the fire tells you, “a great hunter must respect the animal that they want to kill. If you can sneak up on a deer and get within ten feet, I know you’re ready”. The fire is like that grandfather figure that wants you to be respectful but also wants to teach you the real way things are done.

In real bow hunting, you’re not going to shoot a deer from a football field away, and you’re certainly not going to shoot a deer cleanly from that distance. It’s about the journey you take at every step of the way, learning these skills and appreciating the animal that you’re taking for your own life. That’s why our booth here is like a birch tree, because a birch tree is one of the most important survival trees there is. It’s a sacred tree. It provides life, tools, and so many things.

It’s really about going much deeper than any survival game has done, but also in a super chill way. 

Ed: What about people who want to be a little bit destructive in the game and just want to ruin things? Players may say,” I want to see what all I can do”. Is that something that the team has thought of, or is that something that has consequences that affect your survival?

Jeremy: Right. [Thos] people will realize that they cannot survive if they’re being destructive.

So the name Akiiwan is an Ojibwe word. It means it’s the land, essentially. There’s no perfect translation, but it’s roughly that. In survival, if you work with the land, you can live. If you work against the land, you’re gonna die. So, if people want to go around chopping down every tree and all the rest, they can try, but it’s not going to do well for them.

That’s not meant to be some sort of message. That’s just the truth. If you want to waste all your energy doing that, that’s not going to help you. If you want to understand what is available in different seasons, and how to work with different things, and how to move and work with the land, then you’ll be rewarded for that. So yeah, you can try to destroy it, but I should say, too, one aspect that I didn’t touch upon that I know, you know, definitely for some players, having a little bit more of that magic, a little bit more of combat, or a real challenge is important.

Throughout the land, you’ll find these little wooden carvings. They’re of different animals and other things. And when you throw them into the fire at night, it changes your dreams, and it turns into certain mini games. Some of which, you inhabit other animals, which have I think, would be a little more, like, sort of challenge-oriented, like, combat-y sort of elements to it. But during the day, you’re kind of in this, like, tranquil place that is realistic but magical.

Ed. Was the team inspired by going out and camping to help them create this world? 

Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. Certainly, for me, I grew up every summer when we were on the water.

I was born in Winnipeg, which is not a very big city to begin with, but we would hop in the car. My dad built his kayaks, and we would have one car with two kayaks on it, or one car with two canoes on it, and we would add our tents and everything else, and we’d be off. That was a huge part of my childhood, a lot of our team members’ childhood. A lot of that was spent in this, I think, underappreciated area that’s often called, like, the Canadian Shield, or the sort of Southern Boreal Forest.

So, that’s the area all above Lake Superior and Lake Huron. It’s never really been an area that’s been featured in a game before. It’s stunning. It’s an area that was scraped clean by the glaciers as they retreated after the ice age, and they left behind pink granite slabs and white mountains, and these incredible boreal forests.

The game is also meant to be an appreciation of that. Our art director has worked at PlayStation for a number of years. He’s very much inspired by games like Firewatch and Long Dark.  Everyone who’s played the game here has just commented on how beautiful the art is. It’s just stunning, and we’re grateful that we have him on our team. 

This is the debut. What I’ve seen coming in the pipeline of the art is just incredible. We honestly want to be the best-looking forest ever made in a video game.

Ed: How long has the game been in development?

Jeremy:  Two years now. One of the reasons it’s been in development so long is that we’ve built everything out in a way that we can envision the end of this first installment. When your island starts to flood, and you load up your canoe, and you travel off with your fire, you’re going to go to another place in the world. You’re going to explore the plants and the animals there in this deep but chill way, and continue that journey and survive and craft your way around the entire world.

So we built out the back end of the game so that it could support this big vision of being able to tell the story about specific places all over the globe, starting here.

Ed: Can you befriend any of the animals in the game?

 Yes you can! The main animal is a fox. The fox is an important character in the game that you’ll learn things from and do quests with. The other major character is a raven–a trickster figure, and it will send you on certain missions that may not be in your best interest, but you’ll discover something interesting from them. We may incorporate more, but both of them have their rich storylines.

Ed: Are there any wildlife that players wouldn’t expect in a forest going to be in the game?

Jeremy: No. We’ve decided to keep it fairly representative, but there are some in those dream sequences that happen when you find, say, a tote, like a wooden carving of a deer. You can become a different animal. So that’s sort of where it’s different. It’s cool because when you’re back being human again, and you see that animal, you think about them a little bit differently, too.

Ed: What about the food sources in the game? A lot of berries might be in the game, but are there going to be other kinds of food sources? Do you have to make a pan or anything to cook the food? 

Jeremy: The game is built around moons. When you get to a new moon, different things are available to harvest in that moon. Part of the strategy is actually understanding what will be available because each phase of the day or each phase of the moon, being a game day, means you only have eight game days with the moon.

We [also] have cooking. You’re able to boil water in a wooden bowl, and it won’t catch on fire. That’s one of the cooking implements that you made. There’s also smoking meats, preserving, and catching. You’re getting ready for winter, so there’s a lot you have to do because the days are going to get shorter. And if you haven’t prepared well for winter, by the time it’s you’re in the sixth moon, you’re going to have a lot of trouble.

Part of the player’s journey is about understanding how amazing different sources of food are, because I think in a lot of survival games, it’s just meat and berries. In reality, there are so many things that are edible and could give us life in the woods if you understood them and knew where to look [such as the cattail].

They can make a waterproof mat for your shelter. That keeps up the wind as well. You can turn it into a string. You can take the roots, dry them, pound them, and use them to thicken soup and give it more nutrients. It’s a good winter source.

You can also take the inner stocks since they’re kind of like green onions and a sap.  It can also be a salve for bug bites. That’s just like one plant. You can take the pollen from it as well and make bread out of the pollen, and you can take the fluff from the seeds and use that to tell what direction the wind is, so that when you’re hunting, you know if an animal can smell you or not. That’s one example of one plant that, in another crafting survival game, maybe you’ll make rope out of it, and that’s it.

In our game, depending on what season you go back to these plants, it’s this whole journey that you go on with each plant, where you realize, like, “wow! I can’t live off of cattail alone,” but it’s incredible how much that one plant has. That’s just one plant of hundreds in the day.

Ed: What about the music? I know you’re going for a chill vibe. Are you guys thinking about chill hop, or more ambient, relaxing music?

Jeremy: Yeah. So it’s ambient, but inspired by nature. We’re working with an incredible, young artist. His name is Kerry Harper, and he lives up in a fly-in community called Saint Teresa’s Point in Northern Manitoba.

He is a great artist. He just completed a residency at the Banff Art Centre. He makes these sort of electronic and atmospheric compiled compositions with keyboard and synth. He also uses field recordings that he’s done. What’s unique about the game is that every sound you hear is not stock assets that we’re compiling together. He is going out and field recording that in the Boreal Forest and bringing it into the game and incorporating it into the music.

I mentioned how we’re making a game that’s based on different moons. Each moon will sort of have a song and a theme that fits with it. In every indigenous nation, we have different sorts of names and seasons that may be based around the four seasons or six or different moons In Anishinaabe, which is sort of the main areas in one of the main indigenous nations in the Great Lakes, there are 13 moons, each with a name–like moon of falling leaves, moon of turning leaves, moon of cracking snow, and strawberry moon. You could go on this journey through the seasons that you potentially just like to listen to and chill out to. 

Ed: We love a good soundtrack here at Boss Rush Network. 

Jeremy: We’re leaning into that because our lead composers are artists in their own right, and they’re gonna be making a soundtrack. 

Ed: So I just got two more questions for you. I’ve been writing an article about games that have earned their stripes. Is there a particular game or franchise you feel has earned its stripes? It could be board games, indie, whatever.

Jeremy: That’s interesting. I would say, Dave the Diver and Dredge. Those two games, for someone who’s getting a little bit older and maybe never thought of myself as someone who is into chill games, just went through those in a weekend.

I love them, and now, I’m like, “wow, maybe I’ve always been a chill gamer.” I didn’t even know this, because I thought chill games were just farming games or something like that. I didn’t realize that there’s a genre out there that still has a challenge.

It still has a fail state. It’s just not as punitive. It’s like an adventure story. Also, you can play for fifteen minutes, and that’s good, but you can also play for two hours. 

I love having games in my life, but our lives are so busy, and it’s nice to have these games that don’t require you to overthink. So those games inspired me, and at last GDC, I was fortunate to hang out and chat with the producer of Dredge, who’s just a wonderful person. That was inspiring to me. I just love what some developers are doing in those genres. It just changed my perspective.

Ed: It’s so funny that you’re choosing those games because a lot of people feel like those two games are popular. Look at the nominations they got.

Jeremy: I think they were at the Cannes Awards, and they were on a lot of gamers’ lists for the Game of the Year.

Anytime people get a new system and ask, “what indie games or what games should I look out for?”, those two always come up. It’s incredible. I think they recognize something about how we play games, and I think about how games have evolved and how we can enjoy them.

I was playing Dredge and Dave the Diver around the same time. Right? I don’t think people are doing that. Quite literally, it was great.

It felt like, for example, you don’t want to eat the same food every day. You need to have a mix.  Sometimes it’s fun to play something harder and huge that’s going to take you a long time, and then have something else you can just chill out with. Dave the Diver will make you laugh. Dredge might make you a little scared. It’s got this mood to it, and a great story.  A really fun story.

I think that’s the other thing, too, is that maybe it’s that there is more to play cozy, chill games outside farming games and dating games. 

Ed: You don’t have to be a hardcore player to understand or love games. You could play cozy games and call yourself a gamer. Whatever you love about video games, that’s what you love. 

Jeremy: It’s a way that you can keep that love of games going throughout your lives. Even if you’re in a part of your life that’s so busy that it’s not necessarily a time where you’re going to be able to devote something to a game with two hundred hours of gameplay. It always feels like an obligation. With cozy and chill games, there’s joy and respect for your time. I love that!

Ed: My final question for you. What is your go-to snack? Whether it’s working on the game with the team or maybe it’s the weekend, and you’re ready to relax.

Jeremy: Oh, man. That’s a good question. What I love at the end of a week, especially a hard week, and we’re from Canada, and we have a pretty long winter. It’s got to be ramen.

I love this amazing ramen place that every Friday by 4 pm, they have a special two-for-one. Often I’ll get the two-for-one of this amazing ramen. Sometimes, I tell myself I’m keeping it for tomorrow, and I’ll have both of it. Other times, I’ll have it, and I’ll get extra noodles and extra broth. It can sustain me for multiple days, and when it’s in the fridge waiting for you, and you’re looking forward to it because it’s an authentic Japanese ramen that’s just so good.

I’d say that’s my snack and my reward. It’s like I’ve earned this, and it’s the comfort of ramen coming over you after a long week when you’ve been busting it. It’s super good.

Ed: I LOVE ramen! Where can people find more information about Awiikan: Survival?

Jeremy: We are up on Steam now, and this is our premiere of game play here at Pax East. We’re starting open development right now.

We’re inspired by things like Subnautica that grew, in their case, over many years. For us, I think a year at least with the community. We have a free four-hour build that we’re distributing via Steam and Discord. So you just join our Discord and you’ll find out how you can access the beta, essentially.  We want people to play and tell us what they like.

We’ve been receiving great feedback here. The station has been packed the whole time, and it’s been wonderful for me to see people sit down and play for an hour here because that means they see how much you can do in the game. They see the vision that we have for this, and that it’s working and that people are connecting. We want to have more people play and make a game that people love. The only way you can do that is by talking with your players all the time.

So, yeah, there’s a free four-hour build. Find us on Steam. Connect with us there or connect with us on our Discord, which is linked off Steam, and we’ll get you a build. We want to know what you think. 

Ed: Thank you, Jeremy, for your time. You can wishlist the game at the time. Join them on Discord and follow them for more updates. Once again, thank you, Jeremy!

Jeremy: My pleasure. This was fun.

To learn more about Akiiwan Survival and Little Buffalo Studios, check out the Spotlight Interview with Stephanie and Jeremy below.

Featured Image: Little Buffalo Studios (via Steam)