Interview with Fellow Traveller Founder Chris Wright

Fellow Traveller has turned into one of our favourite publishers thanks to their ability to find and publish original narrative games that always manage to make you think differently about the subject at hand. They also run our favourite Steam event, the yearly LudoNarraCon, that celebrates narrative games by releasing new demos, streaming panels with developers and much more.

I had the opportunity to ask Chris Wright, the managing director and founder of Fellow Traveller, about how the company was founded, how LudoNarraCon came to be and what is involved in the running of the event.

To get started, I asked Chris if he could tell us about Fellow Traveller and how it came to be.

Back in 2011 I found myself out of a job following the closure of THQ’s two Australian studios. I’d worked for THQ for seven years in various roles in the Australian and Asia Pacific publishing teams before moving into a global role embedded within the Australian studios. About six months into that role, THQ decided to shut down the projects we were working on and close both studios.

At the time, indie games were starting to become an exciting if still nascent area, mostly on the back of the arrival of the App Store as well as some opportunities on PC and console. I didn’t see many indie publishers around and I thought there was a lot of potential for small indie labels to spring up and do interesting things in the same way that indie record labels had done over many decades.

I also thought indie games were going to be a really interesting and important area in the coming years and had been interested in the concepts around the democratisation of industries for a while – particularly Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory/book. So this was much more interesting to me than trying to get another job in AAA publishing so I decided to give it a shot.

Initially I started by consulting with indie developers, helping with marketing and things like business development and funding applications as a way to get some money and also build some knowledge, and along the way I gathered some like-minded people, including my business partner, Travis, and we launched the publishing label about 18 months later, in mid-2013, under the brand of Surprise Attack Games.

It was still really early days for indie publishing, so we were making things up as we went along, to be honest, and learning a lot as we did that. Indie record labels were a massive inspiration, though, and by 2016 we’d found “our sound” in developers who were trying to explore the ways games can tell stories and the kind of stories they can tell. We rebranded in 2018 to Fellow Traveller to reflect this focus better than “Surprise Attack” and also our focus on being the travelling companion to the indie developers we work with.

We’re now nearly 14 years into the journey and have been lucky to have worked on a lot of really amazing games and with a lot of fascinating developers who are much smarter than me! We’re small (around 10 people), self-funded and fully independent. Although based in Australia, we’ve been fully remote since 2020 and have a team spread across the world.

With Fellow Travellers’ main interest being in narrative-driven games, I was curious to find out why that was.

Firstly, a foundational belief when I started the business was that there is a lot of value in small game labels having a strong identity and focus. This was heavily inspired by the indie record scene and the labels behind the music I’d grown up listening to in the 90s but also from thinking about how best to help developers when you’re a small fish in a big ocean.

I see a difference between being a publisher (doing the publishing work) and being a label (having a strong curatorial vision). We’ve always been most interested in being the latter and our goal is for people to see Fellow Traveller as meaning something when they see our logo or name attached to a game, hopefully something positive.

As to why narrative specifically, we made this choice a couple of years into the business when we sat down as a team to talk about what we wanted our “flavour” to be as a label. We talked about what we as a team were interested in as players, what we thought were the most interesting spaces to be explored in games and where you could do something really interesting on small development budgets. Narrative and storytelling were the very strong throughline in all three questions.

Moving into Fellow Travellers’ annual Steam festival, LudoNarraCon, I asked Chris what the motivation behind the event’s creation was.

By 2018 we’d spent several years doing multiple physical conventions a year and we felt that they weren’t very well suited to our kind of games (emotional storytelling is hard to achieve in 10 minutes on a noisy show floor) and they were really expensive in terms of time and money.

We were looking around for an alternative way to promote our games and realised it might be possible to create a digital festival on Steam with many of the same benefits of going to a PAX or Eurogamer Expo but reaching a global audience and not having to leave home. Once we had that idea, the motivation expanded to building something that would help promote not only our games but also the wider narrative games scene.

With the festival having so many different elements, from the panels to the demos, I was interested to find out how long it usually takes to plan an event like LudoNarraCon.

The very first one took about two months from having the initial idea to then working it up into something more fleshed out to convince Valve to let us try it and then another four months to the event happening.

These days, we typically start thinking about the following year’s event as soon as the current one ends, with the bulk of the work in the last 9 months prior to the event. It is a lot of work with our two LNC leads, Chris and Spencer, doing the heavy lifting but a lot of people are involved.

LudoNarraCon features many different games and apart from being narrative, I was keen on finding out if they had to hit any other criteria to be considered for the festival.

We get over 500 applications every year and have to narrow that down to around 50 games that we choose to be part of the Official Selection.

It’s a complex and nuanced process. There are some basic criteria, such as the game should have released in the 12 months prior to the show or expect to release in the 12 months after the show; they need to have a demo if the game isn’t released yet or be on discount during the show if the game is out. And of course the game needs to not just have a narrative but be exploring interesting things in storytelling.

Whilst there is that core common thread, we also strive for diversity within the lineup through many different lenses, such as the geographical spread of where developers are based, the makeup of the development team itself, genre, visual style and themes, and we also try to have a mix of games that are fairly well known and shine a spotlight on smaller games that aren’t getting as much attention elsewhere.

LudoNarraCon seems to be the next most popular festival from Steam Next Fest, and I was intrigued to find out what Chris’s thoughts were on what makes LudoNarraCon different when compared to other events that are held on Steam.

That’s very kind of you. I’m not sure if we are the most popular but we really strive to make LudoNarraCon a really rich event. I’d say a couple of big differences are the amount of panel content we create and then the very tight curation we apply in terms of our official selection.

The official Steam Next Fests are incredible and we’re big fans of how the festival scene on Steam has exploded with so many awesome events being organised. That said, in most events there are so, so many games included that it’s only a handful of them that really get the benefit.

We’ve always had a principle of keeping LudoNarraCon to a small official selection. For the developers, this means all of them get a decent amount of the spotlight upon them and not just the most popular games. For the players who come to the event to check out the games, it’s a more hand-crafted tasting menu kind of feel and hopefully they discover something they might otherwise have overlooked. Not every Steam event should take this approach, of course, and certainly the official fests need to be open to everyone, but for us it’s an important principle.

This year’s event has seen some amazing numbers, with over 1.8 million people taking part and, most importantly, over 200k wish lists for the unreleased titles that were included in the festival. You guys must have been thrilled seeing these kinds of numbers coming in.

Absolutely. It’s always a highlight to hear from the developers taking part about how their games are going and seeing the impact the event can bring for them.

What do these kinds of figures tell you and does it help in planning next year’s event?

These high-level numbers mostly help us understand the overall interest and scale the event can achieve but to be honest, they don’t really factor into the planning too much beyond continuing to give us confidence that the event has a lot of benefits for everyone taking part.

Story-rich games are a firm favourite at So Many Games, so I was eager to find out what Chris could tell us about the importance of LudoNarraCon for story-rich games.

I hesitate to be too bullish about this but I think it’s fair to say that LudoNarraCon has become one of the key opportunities for story-rich indie games to get some attention on Steam each year.

I hope we’re also flying the flag for the kind of games we feature – story-rich, narrative-focused games can often be overshadowed by other larger genres – so having a dedicated event with the kind of featuring that Valve provides for LudoNarraCon does feel important.

Fellow Traveller has had some amazing releases so far in 2025 with Citizen Sleeper 2, Afterlife EP, and Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo, and this was a great opportunity to find out what other upcoming releases Fellow Traveller has in store for us.

I’m really excited for the next couple of games we’re releasing, both because they’re really cool games and because they’re also venturing into some new territory for us.

Wander Stars is an indie JRPG from Venezuelan devs Paper Castle. It’s a love letter to 90’s anime but through a Venezuelan perspective – turns out that anime was the main form of cartoons there in the 80’s and 90’s and so there’s a deep and specific cultural connection there. The story, of course, is fantastic and completely wild but unusually for us, there is a lot of combat in the game. I guess it makes a bit more sense when you know that the combat is all word-based! It has this really unique system where you combine words to build your own attacks, like Super Fire Kick, that makes the combat feel like Dragon Ball whilst also giving the player an incredible number of possible combinations as they build their vocabulary.

Another upcoming title is Scrabdackle, which is a non-linear adventure game with a big open world in the vein of the old Zelda games. It’s from Canadian solo developer Jakefriend and has personality in bucket loads as well as, again, lots of combat. It’s been in development for a long time and the first act is coming soon and is about a third of the game. Incredibly, this first act is around 12-15 hours of game, which is longer than most of our full releases so there’s a lot of game out the gate, plus two more acts to follow in the next couple of years.

Many thanks to Chris for taking some of his time during this busy period to answer my questions. If you want to find out more about Fellow Traveller then why not give their website a visit or take a look at their games on Steam 

You can also follow Chris on socials over on BlueSky