Eddie: Hello everybody, this is Eddie V. from Boss Rush Network. I’m here at PAX East 2026 at the Games for Poland area, and I’m getting ready to play Farmbotic, and I have someone from the dev team with me. Could you introduce yourself? 

Simon: Oh yeah, sure. My name is Simon. I’m a Product Owner at Frozen Way, the developer of Farmbotic. Together with me is Kacper from the Marketing team and Alex; she’s our Director and one of the leads of the project.

Eddie: Ah, so I got to ask, how did you get into gaming, and then how did you get into game development? 

Simon: Probably the story is different for every one of us, but for me it was just a lifelong dream, and at some point I decided to switch from the TV industry, which I’ve been working in before, to game dev and just, you know, the usual, chase my dreams.

Eddie: Ah, and how was gaming for you in Poland? Were you into gaming as a young kid? 

Simon: Sure, I started with the NES, after that the SNES, my first PlayStation, playing Final Fantasy VII, Crash Bandicoot, and it just grew, and it’s automatic. After that, I got a PC. I played a lot of RPGs, Heroes of Mighty Magic, real-time strategies, and stuff. After that, MMORPGs: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, XI.

So yeah, it just went on and on, and as you can imagine, now I’m pretty old, and I still play a lot of games, have all the game passes, PlayStation Plus extras, and I just love it. 

Eddie: Did you have a history with arcade games? 

Simon: Oh yes, it was popular back when I was a little kid back in Poland, but soon it was replaced by- I don’t know if you heard it in the US, but back in Poland there were shops where you had consoles turned on, and you could pay, let’s say, 10 cents for one minute to play. And you could play every game they had in the store, but just time-limited. 

Eddie: It’s so funny that you mention that. Back in the 80s, at some of the toy stores here, we would put .25 in for three minutes of Super Mario Bros. 3. 

Simon: Oh, man. How much? 

Eddie: 25 cents. 

Simon: Oh, jeez. 

Eddie: My mom gave me the .25.

Simon: That was kind of her. Well, I switched from arcades pretty fast to this because I couldn’t afford games. It was like the only way for me to play. So I always ran from church on Sunday, took the money I got for church, and just spent it on the games. 

Eddie: So, Farmbotic, this is your debut game, I believe? 

Simon: No, no, no. As Frozen Way, we are like a sister company to Frozen District. They are the owners of the House Flipper franchise. So we’ve already made a lot of DLCs for House Flipper. That’s where we gained our experience, know-how, and skills as a team. We are already developing a different game, like a sci-fi survival game called Honeycomb. 

Farmbotic is an ambitious project, and we want to use our experience to create something unique, stand-alone, and more challenging for the team to gain more experience and build something of our own. So that’s how Farmbotic was born.

Eddie: Can you tell us the premise of Farmbotic? 

Simon: Sure. So you are a city guy who just decided that it’s time to run from the city. You bought an old farm in the countryside, and soon you meet a mad scientist in one of the parts of the forest. You decide to help him test his innovation. His innovation is the titular farm bots.

They will help to automate your farm. You will start with manual labor, but soon you will exchange that for automation: farm bots doing some of the work for you, distribution pipes, distribution network, processing machines, warehouses, so you will start to create this whole well-oiled machine that’s kind of like a factory but more on the chill side.

We also have dungeon traveling. A mild edition of it when you go into the mines to gather resources and fight enemies. All the levels are procedurally generated, so every time you go into the mines, you will know you land on a different level. If I remember correctly, there will be 80 levels total, 4 different biomes, different mutated enemies, but still we want to make it not too difficult, not too stressful, so it fits into the whole farm-building, chill and cozy aesthetics.

Eddie: And how long has the game been in development?

Simon: It’s hard to count, but probably something around 2 and a half years at this point.

Eddie: And this is the first demo for the game? 

Simon: The first public demo was last year at Tokyo Game Show. So we came here this year to PAX East with an updated version of it just to get more feedback. For us it’s like a live playtest. It’s a goldmine of feedback from players.  After that, we are thinking about doing an open demo, a public demo, in the future

If that doesn’t work for some reason, then maybe open play in August or September, end of summer. It all depends on a humongous amount of factors, also involving the budget, investment, stuff like that. So there’s also a chance we’ll just go back into the trenches and focus on doing a full release next year. 

Eddie: Have you been excited and kind of nervous for the feedback? Has the feedback been helpful? 

Simon: Oh, nervous? No, I’m like urging for it. I couldn’t wait to just watch people play and see how they play it, if they have any issues with the game, if maybe the tutorial can be polished in some ways. 

In the end, all the feedback we can gather is just so precious and helpful. For example, most of the players pointed out that a minimap would be cool. We have it in the backlog; we also think it is cool, so that’s just like validation of an idea. It’s always good to have that. So yeah, no stress, just couldn’t wait for this moment.

Eddie: Are you guys still thinking of ideas? Is the feedback helping you create ideas? Or have you been asleep and an idea popped into your mind, you’re like, “I gotta write this down for the game!”

Simon: There is a lot of it. Sometimes it’s brainstorming inside the team; sometimes one of the players will say something that is not really helpful, but it will spark another idea. So it’s just this… It kind of lives on its own and there’s a lot of ambitious and creative people on the team so for the moment I would say we have too many ideas to fit into the game so we are like trying now to be pretty strict about keeping the scope in check because there’s just too much fun that we possibly could put in the game so we’re now just trying to mark, tag everything as a post-release, important for release, okay this is nice to have so yeah. 

Eddie: Have the playtesting within the team been engaging? Has anyone on the team said, “I know I’m supposed to be working on it, but I’m having so much fun.” Have you guys been having fun with the playtesting? 

Simon: Oh yeah, sure. Our team is our company employees around 50, I think 50 to 60 people working on different projects. So if we are doing a company-wide playtest, it’s not always just people on the team playing; for example, a 15-person whole company is playing, so it’s usually a lot of members of the team are different players. So everyone has a different point of view on something we’re thinking, that, okay, we did something good with the design of our specific functionality or game piece, and there’s always someone who will come and say no no, that’s sort of bullshit. 

It shouldn’t work like this; it should be totally the other way, and it’s hard to maneuver between the preferences of all the players. So that’s probably one of the most difficult things: to try to create something not to please everyone because that’s just bad design, but to actually be able to know well what your specific target audience group is and just try to do the best version of the game for them specifically.

Eddie: I know with development there’s been ups and downs. Sometimes things work, sometimes things don’t work. Has it been an exciting experience developing this game, learning from it for your next project or something in the future as a team? 

Simon: It’s immensely hard to create something this big with a team that is still, maybe not experienced, but still young, still full of ideas and wild imagination. So I think for me, especially because, as a product owner, I’m more on the production and marketing and the business side. 

So for me, it’s a really tough lesson of how to try to keep the check in scope of future projects, how to implement into the roadmap all of them. Marketing needs we have, for example, a build for PAX and stuff like this. For me, this was the most important learning part. 

Eddie: Any funny moments during development? Have you guys all had the chance to just have a good laugh because of the game? Maybe something has been done, and it’s just made everybody laugh. Have there been funny moments?

Simon: There’s a lot of memes and bloopers we share internally, bugs, the game not working as intended, it looks… but it’s just too many to explain all of them. One of the things that happened recently last year, it was that we needed to change the name of the game; it was Pharmatic before, and now it’s Farmbotic. It turns out there’s like an IT company in Spain that creates software for pharmacies, and they have the same name, and they implied that some pharmacy could probably mistake the software for a game, so you need to change the name. 

I was like, okay! That’s a good learning thing. 

Eddie: So I just got two more questions for you, actually three more questions. I know it’s planned for Steam. Are you guys thinking of a console in the future? Maybe Nintendo Switch?

Simon: If we’re going for full release, we’re planning to make a simultaneous release for all major platforms, of course PC, Steam, Epic, and PS5, Xbox Series X and S. For Nintendo Switch, we would love to do that, but we still weren’t good enough for Nintendo to receive the Switch 2 dev kits. As soon as we get them, we plan to do ports not only for Farmbotic, but also for other games to Switch 2. It’s a platform we love. We did a lot of ports already for Switch 1, and we’re just waiting for a chance to get our hands on a dev kit for Switch 2. This will be a perfect game for Switch 2, definitely with the mouse controller and the Joy-Cons, and I could take this game on the go and play it and love it.

Eddie: Well, one of my last two questions for you is: I’m doing a project called the Beauty of Video Games, and it’s about personal interest. Games that mean something to you as a player, that you find beauty in that others don’t. I want to ask you: is there a game, or is there some form of media like film, TV, or cartoon, anything that you find just beautiful that’s been impactful for you personally that others might not get? 

Simon: I don’t think I’m unique enough to be moved by something that others don’t get, but what really got me in the last month or two was watching the “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” anime. Jesus Christ, I cry on almost every episode. It’s just, it’s such a beautiful show with the motive about the passing of time and emotions between people. So yeah, that’s one that’s stuck with me now, and I can’t wait to finish season two. 

Eddie: Okay, now I gotta start the series. My last question: what is your go-to snack for you? Maybe it’s been a hectic work week, or it’s the weekend, and you finally get to relax. What is that go-to snack for you or comfort food? Or is there a new snack that you found that we don’t know about that you wanna put us on that we should be like, oh, let’s try that. 

Simon: I try to keep healthy all the time, so my go-to food that is tasty and healthy at the same time is cottage cheese with a lot of berries in it, cinnamon, and honey, and like a big bowl of it. That’s the one, but the dish I ate the most during the week, sometimes even two times a week it’s Japanese curry and katsu curry. I do it at home. I cannot get enough of it. Probably I will eat it one, two, or three times a week. 

Eddie: That sounds delicious! Well, where can people find you, and how can people learn more about the game?

Simon: Please join our Discord. We don’t have a website, and we don’t have a Discord especially for Fambotic. We have a general Discord called FrozenWay for all of our games. So please join that and, of course, wishlist and follow on Steam. That’s where we put all of our devlogs, and you will be up to date with everything about the game. 

Eddie: Yes, everybody, please go wishlist. Go follow this team on Discord. Give them some love. Give them some support and check out their games! Thank you, Simon, for your time.

Simon: Thank you.

You can Wishlist Farmbotic right here. If your looking forward to this game, let us know in the comment or in our discord.

Featured Image: Frozen Way (via Steam)