Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
One of the most compelling aspects of covering events like the XP Game Summit is discovering the incredibly diverse personal histories of the people building today’s standout indie titles. Fresh off the show floor, I had the opportunity to speak with Trang Nguyen, the Head of Operations at Soft Rains. The team has plenty of reasons to celebrate, as their emotionally resonant puzzle-adventure, Ambrosia Sky, was recognized as a finalist for Best Indie Game at this year’s Canadian Game Awards.
Nguyen’s path into game development breaks the traditional mold entirely. Long before she was overseeing production pipelines, she spent years as a licensed immigration consultant, working in corporate logistics to help Canadian construction firms navigate the complexities of hiring skilled foreign laborers.
Driven by a lifelong admiration for the gaming world, she decided to take a leap of faith and apply her organizational and compliance skills to a new arena by joining an expanding Ubisoft Toronto. Her rapid success in studio logistics caught the attention of Soft Rains’ founders, who eventually recruited her to manage their operations, overseeing everything from partner relations and human resources to recruitment and day-to-day production.
Our conversation pulled back the curtain on the patient and empathetic skills required to sustain a distributed indie team, the operational realities of remote development, and why a studio’s culture dictates the depth of its storytelling.
Ambrosia Sky: Community, Feedback, and Completing the Journey
Soft Rains’ first game, Ambrosia Sky, tells a deeply moving, layered narrative centered on a princess navigating a world fully formed by the footprints of those who came before her. It’s a game built on striking visuals, precise controls, and satisfying puzzle mechanics. Nguyen expressed profound gratitude to the player community that championed the game from its earliest phases in Act One and their excitement for the conclusion to the game coming later this year.
“We wanted to make sure we delivered a proper conclusion to that story line, because we deeply appreciate the community that invested in Act One when nobody knew who we were. We want to make sure Act Two feels rewarding and respects that initial trust.”
The studio is actively listening to its player base. The team is absorbing player feedback regarding navigation and pacing to refine their next project while protecting the artistic integrity that made Ambrosia Sky special in the first place.
Redefining Studio Culture: Diversity Beyond a Checklist
Soft Rains prides itself on maintaining a healthy work-life balance and a culture anchored in empathy. However, when discussing diversity and inclusion, Nguyen emphasized that the studio views it not as a corporate metric, but as an essential creative tool.
“We are highly focused on diversity and inclusion, but it’s not for the sake of checking a box or hitting a metric. It’s because a diverse team organically brings a massive range of viewpoints, life experiences, and cultural backgrounds to the table.”
She beautifully framed how their team’s diverse upbringings influenced the narrative themes of Ambrosia Sky, which deals with the concept of “going home.”
“When you write a story about a character ‘going home’ and discovering everything has changed, that theme resonates differently depending on who is writing it. For some people on our team, ‘home’ is a place they had to flee due to conflict. For others, ‘home’ literally doesn’t exist anymore because of urban redevelopment or displacement. Some people grew up in environments where home was something they spent their whole lives trying to escape. By bringing all of those personal, distinct histories into the writers’ room, the narrative in Ambrosia Sky became infinitely more layered and real than if we all came from the same background.”
Navigating Fully Remote and Cloud-Based Operations
Operating a fully remote studio across varying geographies presents distinct operational challenges, especially when passing massive animation and programming assets back and forth. Soft Rains overcomes these geographical barriers by using cloud-based architecture and heavy processing power rather than relying on a centralized physical server.
But the real secret to their remote workflow isn’t just the tech stack, it’s the human element.
“When you can’t look over someone’s shoulder, you have to trust them implicitly. We have to be incredibly explicit with our communication guidelines, and honestly, it requires a mountain of patience. We have to actively teach team members how to navigate asynchronous communication, respect boundaries across different time zones, and assume positive intent when reviewing written text instead of speaking face-to-face.”
While there are scattered moments when the entire squad are able to gather in one room to brainstorm for key decisions, clear communication guidelines and immense mutual patience keep the remote gears turning smoothly.
The Indie Advantage: Fingerprints on the Final Product
Transitioning from massive corporate structures to a nimble indie environment has given the Soft Rains team a unique sense of creative ownership. Nguyen pointed out that in giant AAA development, individual developers often get lost in the machine. In a tight-knit indie environment, every single worker’s impact is visible.
“And in terms of what the team is most proud of, I think it’s the fact that every single person can clearly point to their fingerprints on the game. When you work on very large productions, sometimes your individual contribution disappears into the scale of the project. But with Ambrosia Sky, everyone can directly see the impact they made.”
Looking Forward: The 5-Year Utopia
When asked about what a “utopia” looks like on the studio whiteboard for the next five years, Trang Nguyen didn’t talk about scaling into a massive corporate entity. Instead, her focus remains entirely on self-sustainability, protecting her team, and potentially paying it forward to the broader community.
“Five years from now, a utopian milestone would be achieving true operational self-sustainability, where we aren’t entirely dependent on traditional project-to-project publisher funding cycles. We’d love to establish our own internal publishing capability—not just to launch our own titles with complete freedom, but to eventually use our infrastructure to help support and publish other underrepresented indie teams who are struggling to get their voices heard in the current market.”
Soft Rains is a textbook example of what makes the Canadian indie scene so vibrant and vital. By combining professional corporate logistics with a deeply empathetic, remote-first culture that values individual human voices, they haven’t just built a great game in Ambrosia Sky, they’ve built a foundation to tell beautiful stories for years to come.
