A Game About Bad Dates Is Also About Parents and Children Trying (And Failing) to Understand Each Other

Thirsty Suitors joins a long line of video games made by older game developers incorporating their experiences being parents into their work.

Jan 11, 2024

Chandana Ekanayake has been making video games for a very long time. In 1998, he worked on cutscenes for The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. He was an artist on 2003’s Enter the Matrix, and art director for 2014’s Planetary Annihilation. It’s a lengthy list spanning more than two decades. But it wasn’t until Ekanayake started his own company, Outerloop Games, in 2017 that his games took a turn towards the personal.

Outerloop Games self-describes as a “minority led, fully distributed indie game studio that creates accessible games with depth about underrepresented cultures and themes.” Their first game, Falcon Age, had players pushing back on colonizers—yes, with a falcon!—determined to smother your culture and extract your resources.

Thirsty Suitors, released last year to great acclaim, is about a lot of things. It’s a young girl reckoning with the wreckage of her past relationships. It’s children of immigrants trying to forge an identity. It’s parents struggling to convey their past to their children’s present. It’s a touching story with terrific characters, and somehow, it’s also full of skateboarding and turn-based combat. Like I said, Thirsty Suitors is about a lot!

Recently, I had a chance to ask Ekanayake, also a parent to 16 and 18-year-old boys, a few questions about what it meant to make a game about the cycles of parenting:

“Thirsty Suitors was a way for me to not only connect with my kids as they've gotten older, but it was also to connect with my parents and try to understand how much my parents sacrificed by moving us from Sri Lanka to the US when we were little to provide more opportunities for us.”

Thirsty Suitors is available now on most platforms, including Xbox Game Pass.

Your latest game, Thirsty Suitors, is about parenting. How much of you is in there?

Chandana Ekanayake: Thirsty Suitors was a way for me to not only connect with my kids as they've gotten older, but it was also to connect with my parents and try to understand how much my parents sacrificed by moving us from Sri Lanka to the US when we were little to provide more opportunities for us.

I understand now after having kids that my parents did the best they could with what was available to them. They had to start their lives over again in a new country, learn English, and work various jobs to scrape by. Their work ethic instilled in me allowed me to make sure that I was around more while my kids were growing up, to show up for school events, to be more present in their lives.

During production of Thirsty Suitors, my mom had seizures and was hospitalized for months. This was during the strict COVID period and my sister and I spent time alternating days at the hospital taking care of my mom as only one of us was allowed to be there per day. My mom is a strong determined woman and she was not going to let her sickness keep her down. She needed around the clock assistance and that was certainly a role reversal for me.

I took care of her like I did my kids when they were little with feeding, meds, bathroom help, etc. Having kids prepared me to take care of her while she was at her worst. She bounced back after several months and our relationship is stronger now, too. I named the body building tough auntie in Thirsty Suitors after her.

Ekanayake’s mom looks on, while she watches a trailer for Thirsty Suitors.

How aware is your mom about the work you do? Has she played Thirsty Suitors at all?

Ekanayake: She doesn't quite grasp what I do but she is happy to see interviews/videos etc with me in it. I did a couple of cooking videos with her which inspired the cooking system in Thirsty, in terms of her being more open to talking about things while we're cooking together.

What was it like raising kids and making games when you were younger, when your kids were younger? How responsive (or unresponsive!) were the places you worked at, in terms of accommodating your responsibilities?

Ekanayake: I've been making games for 25 years, and my boys are now 18 and 16 years old. When my oldest was born, I didn't take much time off or felt like I could take that much time off. The expectation at that time from my job was to be at work as much as possible. There weren't a lot of folks on the team then that had kids and I felt this pressure to work as much as everyone else did for fear of losing my job and losing the ability to provide for our family. I would make it home by 6PM for dinner and bedtime with my son and sometimes go back to work afterwards.

After having our first kid, I got a lot more disciplined about time management because something had to change, and it wasn't sustainable and I still missed out on times with my son and wife. After a while, I was able to be more productive at work and still make time for family, but it certainly is a struggle to try to do both well. The industry has shifted since then for parents, but still has a ways to go for proper work/life balance.

When did your kids realize what you did for a living? Do they care? And how has that changed as they’ve gotten older and established their own identities, careers, interests?

Ekanayake: The kids understood that my job was different from other parents, but I was still just their dad and making video games wasn't something they especially cared too much about. They did enjoy playing games together with me, and they loved being introduced to new games. I think they were the most excited to be able to come [to] PAX with me and get shown around and play all the games there. We did make smaller games with them when you were little, and they appreciate the fact that I know what games they play.

I've hosted several game-themed birthday parties with both boys where we set up various stations around the house with games like Rocket League, Gang Beasts, and Smash Bros., and there would be points scored and prizes as they played different games with their friends. They appreciated that. As they've gotten older, they've been playtesting our games in development, finding bugs, taking notes and giving feedback. Most recently, my 18-year-old who's into speed running did a bunch of runs of Thirsty Suitors, and I've helped him with his streaming setup.

How have your kids influenced your time as a game developer? Have you seen your experiences with them reflected in your work, or the projects you chose to work on?

Ekanayake: I've enjoyed each age as they were growing up and it was so delightful to experience the world through their eyes and perspective. Kids gave me a new found joy for creative work and a big part of wanting to start my own studio six years ago was to be able to have flexible work time by not having to commute to a studio.

We've been fully remote since starting up Outerloop, and that's allowed me and other folks on the team to work in a more flexible schedule so we can balance our life better. I've been able to coach both boys as they were growing up in basketball, football, and flag football over the years. I loved sharing that time with both of them and their friends.

Sports are a great way to teach lessons on how to work well with others, how to deal with losing (and sometimes winning), bouncing back and trying again. In return, those kids have taught me to be more patient, to recognize growth, learn how to motivate, and empathy. All great lessons for running an indie game studio, too. I think more about family and relationships and how my relationship with my parents have changed over the years after having kids. Those themes tend to find their way into the types of games I make, like Falcon Age and Thirsty Suitors.

A Game About Bad Dates Is Also About Parents and Children Trying (And Failing) to Understand Each Other

Thirsty Suitors joins a long line of video games made by older game developers incorporating their experiences being parents into their work.

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