Darcy Smith didn’t think buying a new microphone would really change his life all that much. He just wanted to record some TikToks.
And his partner, Jess Shipard, wasn’t convinced. The pair had quit their jobs to start a tiny game studio in Melbourne, known as Studio Folly, in 2020.
Expensive mics weren’t really in the business plan.
“Darcy didn’t sell me the idea very well,” she said. “His pitch wasn’t ‘I’ll make really good Tiktoks with it’.”
Mr Smith dropped $500 on the fancy microphone earlier this year and went on to record a short video detailing the pair’s quirky word game, Gubbins, which they’d been working on for the past three years.
Then he posted it to TikTok.
“It didn’t go viral,” he says. “But it did very well.”
So well, in fact, that the algorithm served it up to Hank Green — a TikTok phenomenon with over 8 million followers who has been described as a “YouTube icon”, “one of America’s most popular science teachers” and “internet guy”.
Mr Green liked the idea behind Gubbins so much that he left a comment saying “I’m excited for Gubbins.”
But it wasn’t until Mr Smith checked his TikTok account a few days later that he noticed Mr Green had sent him a direct message.
“I left Hank Green on read for a couple of days, which is insane to me,” he said.
When he finally responded, Mr Green got straight back to him. Ninety minutes later, Mr Smith had decided to send an early version of Gubbins to Mr Green, over in the US.
A month down the line, they struck a unique deal: Mr Green would provide funding to Studio Folly, helping it to finish Gubbins and get it ready for release. In exchange, he wanted 10 per cent of the revenue to go toward one of his charities.
Fast forward to November 15, 2023, and Gubbins was released worldwide. Partially funded by Victorian and federal government grants, with a little help from Brisbane studio Witch Beam, the free-to-play game has more than 50,000 downloads on the Play Store.
But the story of making Gubbins isn’t just about the serendipity of a rockstar science communicator finding a quirky little word game on TikTok.
It’s a lesson about making things you love, with someone you love — and finding creative ways to share that with the world.
I’m Gubbin’ it
Gubbins is the brainchild of both Mr Smith, who has about a decade of experience in the games industry, and Ms Shipard, who has a decade of experience in graphic design but had not shipped a game before.
