Stewpots and Space Travel: An Interview With Takuma Okada

Takuma Okada is a tabletop game designer based in Portland, Oregon. Going by the title “No Road Home” on itch.io, Okada has been designing games about identity, isolation, and exploration since 2018. Their works include Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern, a game about retired adventurers settling down and opening up a pub, which has been nominated for the 2025 ENNIE award for “Best Family Game”. They also created the Alone series, a selection of three solo-journaling games about exploring wondrous locales in isolation, and OLDHOME: Children Chasing Giants, a game about kids, colossi, and coming of age. 

SUPERJUMP interviewed Okada to discuss their inspirations and experience working in game design. 

SUPERJUMP

So let’s kick off. What made you want to be a game designer? Tell me a bit about how you got started.

Takuma Okada

I was taking a creative writing class in college and wrote a Sci-Fi short story that I felt pretty good about. My professor said that I should consider doing more writing, and I had been doing a lot of theatre at the time, and improv. I got invited to join a DnD campaign for the first time since like sixth grade, and all of this came together.

I don’t love how DnD is going; I feel like it could be better. I want to make my own games. I want to make stuff that’s not this kind of specific fantasy. Also, around that time, one of my friends introduced me to the podcast Friends At The Table, and that really opened up what a tabletop game could be to me.

SUPERJUMP

Which edition of DnD were you playing?

Takuma Okada

3.5

SUPERJUMP

Is that short story still out there?

Takuma Okada

[Laughing] No, I never ended up submitting it anywhere.

SUPERJUMP

So you said that DnD wasn’t quite telling the stories that you wanted to tell. How did that transition into you designing your first game?

Takuma Okada

I actually started writing an SCP-inspired squad game.

SUPERJUMP

To confirm, SCP, those are those horror stories about a foundation with all of those different entities?

Takuma Okada

It’s like a community writing thing, and I started writing that a little before I found stuff that wasn’t DnD. So, I was making a similar system, lots of things to keep track of, the same kinds of stats, and all of that. Then I started listening to Friends At The Table, and immediately I was like “Oh, I’m dropping that.” I can make games that are so much smaller. Much more about emotion, and more story-focused.

Around that time, I also started thinking about game jams for tabletop games, and I think there were one or two where I just came up with some ideas. A few months after that, I wrote one based on an improv game that I really liked.

SUPERJUMP

Tell me more about that first project.

Takuma Okada

It was called Conches and Cameras. It was about finding weird stuff on the beach and coming up with stories for a weird game from them, about what had been before.

SUPERJUMP

And that’s still on your Itch.io now, from 2018, right?

Takuma Okada

Yes.

SUPERJUMP

Speaking of your itch.io, the alias that you use there is “No Road Home.” Would you be able to talk a bit about the origin of that name?

Takuma Okada

Yeah. That actually started with my music stuff from before. At the time, I was feeling a real disconnect from a lot of the stuff around me, which I think is still true, to a degree. I feel kind of out of place in a lot of situations. I’m an immigrant, I’m trans, I’m Japanese. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and the intersection of all of that means that I feel like I can connect with a group in one aspect, but they have no idea how to handle the other stuff. That’s been very present for most of my life, and that’s where that came from.

SUPERJUMP

So there’s no road home, no universal ability to connect?

Takuma Okada

Yeah, it’s about belonging. There’s not quite a place where I feel that I belong, and where I can be 100% myself.

SUPERJUMP

Would you say that the theme of belonging, or not belonging, in one space is a theme that you discuss in your work?

Takuma Okada

Yeah. The Alone games, obviously, have that in the title and are kind of lonely and have a bit of melancholy to them. Which, I don’t think I was explicitly setting out to do initially, but it felt like it fit really well because of how I made those games.

When I started making games in 2018, I had gone into a messed up college situation, and most of my friends had left town. I didn’t really know what I was doing and felt really alone. I was playing No Man’s Sky late at night while I was feeling these things. I wasn’t quite happy with how the game was feeling and what I could do. I wanted to see what a tabletop version of that could look like.

SUPERJUMP

So that’s the story of how Alone Among the Stars came into being?

Takuma Okada

Yeah.

SUPERJUMP

The compilation of your Alone games is called “Alone On A Journey”. I guess that ties into there being “No Roads Home”. Are journeys and strange places another theme that you’re looking to explore?

Takuma Okada

Yeah. I’ve always been interested in exploration, whether that’s in real life or video games. I like taking weird turns down empty streets and seeing what’s down there.

SUPERJUMP

Are there any other big themes that you would say recur in your work?

Takuma Okada

[sighing] I’ve been thinking about this a lot because Jay Dragon just posted an expressionist games manifesto.

[Pause]

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m trying to create and what I’m interested in. I think I’m really interested in the mundane aspects of settings, especially fantastical ones. There’s a lot of camping and having a meal, even in Alone Among the Stars when you’re on a completely alien planet.

SUPERJUMP

So, finding the familiar among the strange?

Takuma Okada

Yeah, and I guess that also ties into Stewpot as well. Putting a lens on stuff that you won’t usually encounter in a DnD Fantasy campaign.

SUPERJUMP

Would you say that you find the design process therapeutic?

Takuma Okada

I don’t think I would. A lot of creating doesn’t feel particularly therapeutic to me, but it is engaging.

SUPERJUMP

What sort of feelings does it draw out?

Takuma Okada

A lot of struggling with the game. But there’s also this flow state feeling that I can get into when I have all of the ideas for the game, and they coalesce, and I can put it into text.

I’ll write out a mechanic, and feel really, really good about that.

SUPERJUMP

Would you say that’s a sense of accomplishment?

Takuma Okada

I think that I often struggle to feel satisfied when I’m done with a project. Like Stewpot, after it shipped, and even after the crowdfunding was done. I felt “oh that’s weird, that’s it.”

I think that individual mechanics, when I write a really good one that I really like, that feels really good.

SUPERJUMP

What does your average day as a game designer look like?

Takuma Okada

This past year has been kind of strange. I got laid off from a contract design job, which affected a lot of my daily life stuff. I was doing work for that, and work for my own projects, and I was doing Stewpot crowdfunding stuff. So that was pretty busy, last year. Since then, I’ve been a little burnt out, and I’ve been in a waiting situation. I’ve been waiting for money from Stewpot to come in, waiting to figure out what my next project is, and recuperating from that last job and the rush of getting Stewpot ready.

I didn’t really feel like I could work on games in a significant way until a couple of months ago. Maybe even just the past month it has felt a lot easier, but before that, it was like pulling teeth. I would just sit down at the computer and would just feel like it wasn’t happening.

SUPERJUMP

So, you said that a couple of months ago, you’ve been reaching the end of that?

Takuma Okada

I’ve had a lot more energy for it recently. There was a game design meet-up that someone in town started running, and I couldn’t make it for most of the summer, but I could for the last one in August. I got a lot of work done there. It felt alright again and easier; I felt like I was ready to really seriously get back into this.

What would you say, then, as a designer, has been your proudest moment?

Takuma Okada

I think the moments that make me feel the most proud are when I hear about kids playing and having a really good time with my games. Sometimes I’ll have a parent post about it, or message me, and say, "My seven-year-old had a really great time with this."

[Laughing]

That feels really good. Like more than anything, like I’ve done something good. It feels like I’ve succeeded in the design. Even if they’re not strictly following the rules, if they’re enjoying the game and having a good time. I really, really want to make games that are easy to understand and to play. I want to remove friction from tabletop experiences. I want to give interesting prompts that make it easy and make people feel like they’re doing really cool stuff.

SUPERJUMP

You mentioned earlier that when you first tried DnD, it wasn’t what you were hoping for. Would you say you’re stripping away layers of stat blocks to get to the creative heart of it?

Takuma Okada

Yeah, with the exploration games I was talking about that felt like a thing that most games were lacking, and tabletop games especially were not good at that. What was being focused on was not stuff that I was particularly interested in.

Then the other side of that, with stuff like Stewpot, is that, despite having a pretty sizable theatre and improv background, I have always found in-character dialogue really difficult, especially in DnD, the way people do that. That’s partially the style of it, and people doing all of these characters, that’s not super fun for me. I have always struggled to have very specific, consistent character voices, particularly the farther out they get from me. I wanted a game where that would be more natural, and where there would be less pressure to do in-character dialogue despite it being very slice-of-life and character-focused setting.

SUPERJUMP

On the subject of Stewpot, was there a single crystalising moment where the idea for that came to you, or was it more gradual?

Takuma Okada

So that was actually one of the ideas that I had for that first game jam that I tried to do. What if you’re adventurers running a tavern, and you’re helping out…

[Pause]

Actually, I don’t think it was adventurers running a tavern. I think it was just a tavern for adventurers at first, but it was focused on what happens inside the tavern, as opposed to it just being a meeting place or a jumping-off place. It was just roll a six-sided die; here are six different prompts for what could happen. I never filled out those prompts, so it wasn’t really complete.

Later on, I wanted to revisit that, and I was really interested in a bunch of slice-of-life manga, books, and shows, and things like that. I was also really interested in minigame design, and it felt like a really good fit for that.

SUPERJUMP

In a piece with Rascal News, you talk about two games that inspired you: Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands and Sundered Land. What specifically did you take from those two games?

Takuma Okada

Those are both games by Meguey & Vincent Baker. They’re both minigame-based games, but different in how that’s structured. Sundered Land feels like a bunch of distinct games that are loosely connected, and you can play them in whatever order you want and they are focusing on different parts of the world. Firebrands is about your group of characters, and they’re going through various scenes at different points in time. Those games often feel less like distinct games in and of themselves.

I played Firebrands and enjoyed it a lot, but also wanted a little more structure from it, and that’s how the Stewpot games ended up the way they are.

SUPERJUMP

There’s a lot of emphasis in Stewpot on scars, both literal and psychological scars, that characters sustain after a life of adventuring. Is that something that you feel TTRPGs like DnD don’t address sufficiently?

Takuma Okada

That one’s interesting. I think that, at least some people who play DnD, do really want to engage with that, but don’t really have great systems to engage with that. I think that it’s common in a lot of more narrative-focused indie tabletop games that those ideas are around and present. There’s stuff like trauma in Forged In the Dark Games, and there are a lot of little itch games that focus on scars, trauma, and past pain.

I’m not entirely sure where that idea came from. I think a lot of it came from the stuff that I was reading having a lot of dealing with the past in it. Then, looking at other games and looking to draw inspiration from them, or seeing people try to do something but not quite having the tools.

SUPERJUMP

Is Stewpot your favourite project, or does another one hold that title?

Takuma Okada

That’s complicated. I am definitely proud of a lot of the minigames in Stewpot, but the project as a whole was really long, and I am a very different person from the person that I was when I started that project. Also, I’m not the biggest fan of the whole production process and the book-making process. That kind of wore me out.

Alone on a Journey was really fun for me, although getting the zines delivered at the end was really difficult.

The next big project that I’m working on, called A Blade Breaks, is difficult. It’s been cooking for six years, since 2019, and it’s been a difficult design because I keep trying to design it and realising that my ideas aren’t working, and then putting it aside and coming back to it in a year or two and going through that again. Last year, I finally figured out the core mechanics, and I’ve been picking away at it since then.

SUPERJUMP

Would you say then that you don’t really have a favourite?

Takuma Okada

It’s probably Alone On a Journey, although there are also Jam games that just come up. A Cold Wind and a Dark Sky was a Promptober thing where there was a list of prompts for each day of the month, and I made a game based on those prompts every day in October. That was a really exciting, frustrating, and rewarding experience as a designer. Yeah, I think that might actually be my favourite in terms of what I feel like I accomplished and the fun I had doing it.

I don’t know that I’m happy with the design of most of those. I made them all in a day.

SUPERJUMP

Was it the experience of working on a new one every day?

Takuma Okada

Yeah, that felt really good.

SUPERJUMP

One of your games that I’m particularly drawn to is Chess: Two Kingdoms. How did the idea of using chess to tell a story form?

Takuma Okada

I had an interest in using other forms of oracles that weren’t dice or cards, or specific game pieces. That’s always been a thing that I have been interested in, even if it hasn’t always made its way into the stuff that I’m more known for.

I really like aspects of real life and real situations coming into a game. I think I played Swords Without Master before writing that.

SUPERJUMP

Does that also use an unconventional medium to tell its story?

Takuma Okada

It’s a typical sword and sorcery game that has an interesting dice mechanic, but the thing that I really liked about it was that for your character, you would have a totem. An item that is important to them and anchors them. To find that you just needed to find an object in arms reach.

SUPERJUMP

So you, the player, as you start the session, grab an object, and that’s your character’s totem?

Takuma Okada

Yes, and that was really cool. There’s also an Avery Alder game called Brave Sparrow, where you pick feathers up off the ground that you find in order to turn into a bird. Things like that are really cool to me.

Even Conches and Cameras, the improv game that’s based on, involves pulling an object out from under a chair and trying to engage with it physically and discover what it is in that moment.  That drew a lot from that, but also from beach cleanup days that I would volunteer for back when I was living in California, and finding weird stuff while doing that and wanting to recreate that experience. There are a lot of real things from my life making their way into my games.

SUPERJUMP

For my last question, I was going to ask if you had any more projects that you wanted to talk about. You’ve mentioned A Blade Breaks.

Takuma Okada

I have A Blade Breaks in the works currently. I’m hoping to release an early version of that by the end of the year. It’s a narrative-forward, combat-focused game where you are trying to repel an invading kingdom that is having a civil war, which has spilled over into your island. Weapons have durability in a way that is inspired by Breath of the Wild and Monster Hunter. You’re managing your health and your durability on the battlefield and trying to overcome these foes.

SUPERJUMP

What’s the central message you’re sending there, with the vulnerability of the equipment? What are you communicating with that?

Takuma Okada

There’s a desperation that I really want to focus on. You’re peasants. You’re mountain village people, and suddenly you’re trying to fight these soldiers. A lot of you have never really been in a real battle before, and you have weapons that have been passed down for generations that aren’t in the best shape.

SUPERJUMP

Thank you very much for your time.

Takuma Okada

Thank you.