I have been honoured to have many developers willing to take up an interview with me, and I am excited for you all to read them week by week! Thank you so much to all the devs and team members who have poured in time and effort to entertain my questions, please check out all our developer interviews here.
Today, we have Young Buffalo Studios! An studio of passionate individuals based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In this interview, Nhat Linh brings us through what inspires her to continue game development, and reveals some Vietnam-specific Easter eggs you may find in their upcoming game, Night Shippers! If you are a fan of comedically scary co-op games (think R.E.P.O and Lethal Company), wishlist the game before you read on!
Night Shippers also participated in the Hungry Ghost Games Festival 2025. Unfortunately, I was unable to play the game on stream, but I had a really fun time trying the playtest with some friends off-stream. My two cents will be at the end of the interview.
1. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer this interview! Could we get an introduction to you and what you do at Young Buffalo Studio?
Thank you for the opportunity. My name’s Nhat Linh and I’m the founder and studio director at Young Buffalo, a studio based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
2. What is Young Buffalo Studio’s founding story?
I’ve been in the gaming industry for 18 years, mostly on the publishing side with esports-focused genres such as MOBAs and battle royales. My team members are all relatively young and have some prior experience developing games, but mainly in mobile.
Vietnam has many studios and lots of developers, but most focus on mobile and hypercasual games. When we came together, we really wanted to contribute something to help grow the indie and PC scene in Vietnam, so I founded a studio in Ho Chi Minh City to make PC games.
3. I noticed another game, Divine Guardian, which is also upcoming for the studio alongside Night Shippers! How does Young Buffalo Studio handle development of multiple games at a time?
We almost have two separate teams making two games simultaneously, but it’s hard to handle both projects smoothly at the same time. Right now, for 2025 and 2026, our main focus is Night Shippers.
4. Night Shippers is a co-op experience, while Divine Guardian is a singleplayer experience. What sparked the concepts and desire to create games like Night Shippers and Divine Guardian?
Divine Guardian is a 2D Metroidvania with stories inspired by Vietnamese folklore and history. It was our first studio project, and we chose Metroidvania because we naively thought it would be easy to make and complete. We later learned that while technically it’s not hard to make a Metroidvania, it’s very hard to sell, and the ceiling for the genre is very high. Streamers weren’t enthusiastic about the demo even before they played it.
Night Shippers, on the other hand, is a co-op horror game. You can tell it’s inspired a lot by Lethal Company and R.E.P.O.. We had a few streamer friends recommend that we make one, and we realized that if we could make a good co-op horror game, the commercial viability would be much higher and streamers would be more willing to play it.
We chose the concept of shippers as the main characters because they’re everywhere in Southeast Asia and East Asia. During the pre-production phase, two movies about shippers came out that people liked (Upstream from China and Rider from Thailand). So we picked “bike shippers” as the main characters because it fit the game.
5. What game engine are your games designed on and why?
In my opinion, you can make any game with either Unity or Unreal. For us, it happened quite randomly. For the first title, we chose Unity because most developers in Vietnam three years ago used Unity, there wasn’t much of a choice. For Night Shippers, we chose Unreal because our game designer felt it would be better and more convenient for programming netcode/multiplayer.
6. Young Buffalo Studio seems committed to incorporating elements of your base country, Vietnam, in your games. From the divine forests of Divine Guardian to the Vietnamese neighborhoods of Night Shippers. Are there any inspirations from the country and culture that were included but may be missed by the international audience?
Thanks for asking this. First, we want to make games for Vietnamese players, but it would be great if we could spread Vietnamese cultural elements to a global audience through games.
In Night Shippers, there are some internal jokes only Vietnamese players might get, such as:
Vile healing is actually our medicated oil brand (similar to Singaporean medicated oil).
Big pipe smoking, where you might pass out if you inhale too much.
The dirty writing on city walls (“No trash,” “No pissing”).
The first map (Old Town) is a depiction of Hội An, a famous tourist town in Central Vietnam.
Some monsters come straight from our urban legends.7. What is a typical week or workday like in the studio?
We work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week. Our development cycle moves fast, there’s a patch or minor update every two weeks, so the crew works two Saturdays per month for small crunches. I don’t see any breaks in the release month for Night Shippers.
8. What keeps you inspired to continue game development?
I want to say money, but it’s actually not. For us, it’s the feeling of seeing players enjoy and have fun with our game that keeps us going. Since releasing Night Shippers, we’ve had quite a lot of negative and brutal (but necessary) feedback, but also many people saying they laughed and had fun playing. Even a small livestream with a group of friends and fewer than three viewers, bursting out laughing over a janky bug, can make our day and give us hope to finish the game..
9. What misconceptions do you think there are about being an indie game development studio?
Many people I’ve met still think this is purely a tech job, but in fact, making a game, especially an indie game, is more like creating art, like music or a movie.
Secondly, while it’s not exactly a misconception, people often underestimate how hard it is to succeed as an indie dev or studio. Your chances of making games for a living are about the same as becoming a professional singer or football star.
10. Where can we subscribe to the progress and news about Night Shippers?
We are most active on Steam and discord, please join our discord to see the latest content & update for Night Shippers. You can also follow us on X.
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Mini review
When I tried Night Shippers with my group of 3 other friends and 2 spectators, we all had good laughs throughout. During our playtest session in early August, what was meant to be a short 1 hour trial turned into about double the time easily! It was a session full of laughter and funny moments. What set Night Shippers apart from existing comedy horror co-ops was:
1) The delivery system. Instead of trying to get as much loot onto a designated ship, you are tasked to deliver goods from NPC to NPC. The NPCs can show up in hilarious places, spawning right in front of you or in the most dangerous of alleys.
2) The difficulty. Easy and medium were manageable once we got the hang of the game progression and maps. But try as we might, we failed to complete a single delivery in hard mode. The challenge of hard mode is a huge jump, which made it many times more exciting but also many times more difficult. We resigned defeated one the NPCs started dropping more items than our pockets could hold and we found no way to counter the monsters. That said, if we had spent more time, I am sure we would have discovered some workarounds. The map navigation was also much more tough, with obstacle-course like areas which required us to move skillfully.
3) Universal upgrades by default. Something very satisfying about Night Shippers was levelling up the entire team with each upgrade. Completing every level meant a mini meeting to see which available upgrade was most needed by the team, and we could enter each level with better abilities every round.
4) Teamwork in unlocking areas. Some areas are locked and you need to communicate with your team to see if anyone has found a key. There were times we could not find a way to unlock a door, but somehow another team member ended up on the other side. So we would find ways to work in our situations. In that case, we threw the goods over the fence to have our teammate deliver it before the timer ran out!
Overall, Night Shippers was an enjoyable experience for my friends and I. We found some bugs along the way but they added humour and there were none that were game-breaking for us. If given the chance, please give it a try!
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