Interview
April 13, 2026
Timberline’s Beastro serves up a flavorful twist on a variety of genres with UE5
Timberline Studio is an independent game studio based in Los Angeles, CA and our homes. We build games that explore vibrant worlds with unexpected characters and stories. Focusing on "crunchy cozy” experiences, we blend genres to offer unique experiences.
You might want to save the world, but you can’t do it alone. That’s one of the fundamental ideas being explored in Beastro—a “crunchy cozy” game that infuses elements from a variety of genres, including deck building, while bringing vibrant visuals, quirky characters, and engaging cooking and crafting mechanics to the forefront.
In the game, you take on the role of a young chef named Panko within the walled confines of the village Palo Pori as you cook up creative meals for the visiting Caretakers with the help of a god named Flambe. Your goal? Keep the Caretakers nourished with meals they’ll love and appreciate so that they can keep battling the baddies on the outskirts of your quaint village.
It’s a unique and ambitious premise for sure, but the small team at Timberline’s distinct vision for the project has, like a good meal, aspired to unite the perfect blend of ingredients into a digestible experience that could be consumed and appreciated by all.
Drawn in by the art and animation tools of Unreal Engine 5, the team of 13 challenged itself to push the boundaries and produce the visually stunning puppet theater battles that serve as the “crunchier” side of the experience, while source code access and assistance from Epic’s community resources has helped the indie team achieve its goals.
Eager to learn more, we made a reservation with Timberline’s Game Director, Lindsey Rostal, Tech Director Bryan Pawlowski, and Technical Art Director/Animation Nathan Fulton to find out more about the flavorful exploration behind Beastro.
In the game, you take on the role of a young chef named Panko within the walled confines of the village Palo Pori as you cook up creative meals for the visiting Caretakers with the help of a god named Flambe. Your goal? Keep the Caretakers nourished with meals they’ll love and appreciate so that they can keep battling the baddies on the outskirts of your quaint village.
It’s a unique and ambitious premise for sure, but the small team at Timberline’s distinct vision for the project has, like a good meal, aspired to unite the perfect blend of ingredients into a digestible experience that could be consumed and appreciated by all.
Drawn in by the art and animation tools of Unreal Engine 5, the team of 13 challenged itself to push the boundaries and produce the visually stunning puppet theater battles that serve as the “crunchier” side of the experience, while source code access and assistance from Epic’s community resources has helped the indie team achieve its goals.
Eager to learn more, we made a reservation with Timberline’s Game Director, Lindsey Rostal, Tech Director Bryan Pawlowski, and Technical Art Director/Animation Nathan Fulton to find out more about the flavorful exploration behind Beastro.
Thanks for joining us! Described as a cozy fusion of fantasy, adventure, and delicious deckbuilding that favors spoons over swords, Beastro certainly seems to be offering a flavorful twist on a variety of genres. Could you please describe Beastro in your own words and tell us how the concept came about?
Lindsey Rostal, Game Director: Beastro is what we like to call a “crunchy cozy” game. We set out to make a game that explored the idea that you can’t save the world on your own; you always need people behind you, and in Beastro, you get to be behind the heroes, powering them up.
We wanted this to be woven into our gameplay, where our main protagonist lives a kind of quiet life: farming, fishing, gathering items, talking to townsfolk, and cooking. But the cozier tasks he’s doing power us up for the crunchier aspect of the game, which is the puppet theater battles.
Here, we learn of the heroes’ exploits over the course of their day and how they utilized the powers they unlocked from eating at your restaurant. As they battle the monsters, they earn you monster ingredients, which you then get to take back to cook with and provide greater power to the heroes.
Ultimately, it’s a cozy deckbuilder where you run a town-to-table restaurant that serves the visiting heroes who have arrived in your village in their quest to save the world. The ingredients you use and the meals you serve build the hero’s decks, which they use to battle the monsters in their nightly venture.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
What can you tell us about the peaceful village of Palo Pori and the role that the protagonist, Panko, plays in the charming town?
Rostal: Palo Pori is a small, walled village that is home to a variety of creatures that are not part of any of the flavor factions of the world. Instead, they’re all artisans and makers, basically normal folk who built a wall to keep themselves safe instead of taking to arms.
What they thought was a normal, quiet life is soon anything but when Flambe, the god of this world, crashes into their town, injured from a battle outside the walls. Panko, our young chef, finds her and takes her in, giving her a chance to heal.
But when Panko’s teacher goes missing, he is forced to take over the restaurant and turns to Flambe to help him with the flame. Soon, they find themselves feeding more than just the townsfolk. Caretakers (the heroes from the outer flavor regions) begin to descend upon the town, looking for a meal. Lucky for them, the food Panko and Flambe are cooking up unlocks the Caretaker’s flavor magic, preparing them for the battles like never before.
What type of research and experimentation went into the ingredients and recipes that will appeal to the various Caretakers who each hail from different flavor regions?
Rostal: We are lucky to be based in the incredible food city of Los Angeles, and Beastro is very much inspired by the eclectic dining scene of our home. We visited a variety of restaurants and watched an embarrassing amount of food documentaries and reality series (Chef’s Table and Top Chef were both wonderful references) and my collection of cookbooks and magazines grew extensively.
Making the game also made me a better cook. I explored new recipes, learned more about flavor balancing, and tried things I maybe would’ve avoided previously. However, I wanted to taste new things and build a greater appreciation and understanding of flavors and how they make people feel.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this project and which UE5 feature(s) stood out to you most during development (and why)?
Rostal: The art and animation tools really drew us to UE5. We knew we’d be able to build something that would elevate our own art in exciting ways and make it so we could push our own boundaries. Sequencer and the potential of Control Rig were huge draws for us, as they would allow us to be more playful in our pipeline and see and edit our work rapidly in context.
As a tool that’s not only powering so many amazing third-party titles, but also Epic’s own projects, it was easy to see incredible examples of how people were leveraging the engine. We knew it was something we could onboard the whole team onto quickly and let people get their hands dirty immediately. Unreal offers a sandbox to play in, and that instant gratification really improved our iteration time—everyone likes to see their work in game.
How did Unreal Engine 5 help you prototype, iterate on, and ultimately polish the various mini-games that go into crafting thoughtful meals?
Bryan Pawlowski, Tech Director: The clean and easy-to-understand plugin architecture allowed us to bring in some pretty nice debugging tools, such as quick-to-make ImGui debug override windows for various systems and actors throughout the game. Early minigame designs relied on this for quick in-session tuning and evaluation. Standing up minigames with coherent debug UI without waiting for an Unreal Motion Graphics implementation or reading through logs was a huge plus.
Relying on the existing actor architecture to create assets for each minigame but then selecting them through a soft object to load and run allowed us to run minigame evaluations back-to-back. This enabled us to build a wide variety of minigames and minigame variations to test and tune.
We then were able to easily modularize the elements to collaborate with the artists and dynamically hook into various assets to bring different ingredients into the games themselves.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
Could you please talk about your use of Unreal Engine’s built-in tools for animating characters and objects directly in-engine? What was your experience like using Control Rig and Sequencer and, as a small team, how has leveraging UE’s animation tools simplified your pipeline?
Nathan Fulton, Technical Art Director/Animation: I was super excited about Control Rig early on in evaluating UE5 for the project. Being able to animate directly into the game instead of setting up an arduous animation import/export pipeline has been a personal holy grail of mine for over a decade.
When we got started, Modular Control Rigs weren’t a thing yet, so I set out to use Python to automatically create and hook up Control Rig body parts rather than doing it manually, which is how I’ve done it in Maya previously. Even in its early incarnation, the flexibility of Control Rig and Sequencer was very encouraging. So we decided to take a risk and go forward with doing character animation completely in Unreal Editor instead of the traditional Maya animation pipeline.
Deep into the development of Beastro, Modular Control Rigs were released. Frankly, they were much better than the Python-based auto-rigging system I had been working on, so we switched to that mid-project. This meant we would have to port the older animations to the new modular rigs, and Unreal Editor provided all the tools needed to get this done relatively easily, thanks to tools like IK retargeting and backwards-solving Control Rig modules.
My biggest concern was that we would be missing various tools and techniques that animators have grown accustomed to in Maya, but that has largely not been the case. At this point, I feel that the Unreal Editor meets and exceeds some things Maya does in terms of animation for video games.
Pawlowski: For my job, I was spending a lot of time editing sequences and adding new features. The Scene Conditions were a game-changer for us, allowing for more dynamic Level Sequence assets, covering many cases. Adding our custom Scene Conditions was a very straightforward task.
Subsequences helped us encapsulate a lot of logically related things together to be reused by other Level Sequences. The puppet theater leveraged both Scene Conditions and Subsequences to make its magic happen.
Rostal: Sequencer allowed us to build out our puppet theater in a way that was modular and creative. It’s a full 3D model theater that leverages the Level Sequence binding tools and conditionals. This allowed us to animate modular chunks for our puppet theater so we could have a foundation for everything handled dynamically, and then we could focus on expanding the characters and vibes for each monster or caretaker.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
By doing all your animation directly in Unreal Engine, how many times faster do you estimate the team was able to work compared to the traditional method? What other benefits did this elicit?
Fulton: It’s hard to put a number on this—I’ll just say it was huge. There was definitely a learning curve to transition from Maya to UE animation early on, but it wasn’t terrible. Setting some editor preferences to make the UI a little more familiar to Maya made a big difference.
I’ll give an example of one of the major gains we got by doing it this way: Say we had a scene where the character needed to interact with the environment around them, like walking over and picking up an object off the table.
In the old way, you would have to collect the relevant geometry in the map and export it to FBX, then import it into Maya to use for reference. Then, bring in the Maya character animation rigs, make the animation, then bake it to the export skeleton and export that to FBX.(A lot of this can be sped up with scripting, but that’s still work that must be done, as well as making the Maya animation rigs in the first place.)
Then back in Editor, import the animation, set up the gameplay character in a sequence, make sure the transform offsets are correct so things line up, etc. Any time the animation needs to be updated, we have to re-export/import it across multiple applications and do a bit of file management. Now imagine that something about the level geometry changes later on: We have to go through this whole process from the beginning again, every time.
In the new way, we just place the Control Rig character into the scene, animate it in Sequencer, and then create a linked animation sequence that gets updated every time we save changes to the animation.
There’s no animation export/import and setup, no need to export level geometry, and on top of that, we see exactly how it’s going to look in the game as we animate it, with full lighting and shading and everything. If the level geometry changes later, we just update the animation in the Sequencer, click save, and we’re done. You can imagine how this has drastically cut down on iteration time.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
What were the biggest visual wins you got “out of the box” from Unreal Engine?
Rostal: We always knew we wanted a cartoon-styled look, but we also wanted something that felt a little different than other titles out there. Being able to leverage Lumen, color grading, and the lighting and rendering in general got us quite far without us having to do much of anything!
That then enabled us to solve the more nuanced problems of how we wanted our character outlines to work or how we wanted to tune some of our shadows and contrast.
Unreal Engine offers such a fantastic baseline for lighting and rendering; you get to spend your time making it your own, versus just having to make it work.
How has Unreal Engine 5’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve the game’s colorful, creative, and compelling visual art style?
Rostal: For us, it all started with the art direction of creating a vibrant world full of charmingly weird characters. We are heavily inspired by cartoons, anime, and modern-day animated films that are exploring newer rendering styles. We built up an early target in our minds and got to work.
The Materials system allowed us to create a library that built consistency across all of our assets. It was easily editable by our whole art team, so they could tweak and tune to their heart’s content.
We started with Lumen immediately, as we wanted to have soft shadows throughout the game. Even though our look was inspired by animation, we wanted things to feel both painterly and tactile and not too flat—we love that new trend in film as well. This let us then develop a softer look across the board so we could highlight textures, brushes, and color variations to create depth.
We then looked to the foliage and landscape tools to help us build a lush beach town while also not blowing up our art budget. We knew our audience might not have the most cutting-edge equipment, so we leaned on the tools that allowed us to have the vibes we wanted without sacrificing performance. The foliage tool allowed us to paint the world with the plants, grasses, and flowers that make it feel alive.
Where is Timberline Studio based and how big is the team working on Beastro?
Rostal: Timberline Studio has a home base in Los Angeles, but our team is spread up the west coast of the United States as well as in Brazil and Spain. We are a team of 13.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
Considering the team size at Timberline, which UE5 feature(s) had the largest quantifiable impact on cross-discipline workflows? How did these features help the team reduce iteration time, improve team collaboration, and/or lower production costs throughout the development process?
Fulton: Unreal Game Sync and the built-in Perforce version control features in the editor made a big impact for me. The graph-based Find References tool is amazing for investigating things that other people had worked on without me having to pester them about it.
All the action in the puppet theater is done with Sequencer and simple Control Rigs for the cards and puppets. Just like with character animation, we could animate the puppets directly in the theater scene and see exactly how it’s going to look in runtime thanks to Sequencer and the custom extensions we set up for doing stuff like flipping the puppets between expressions. Bryan can speak more to that.
Pawlowski: Utilizing Unreal Engine’s UI customization through Slate, we were able to create some editor UI that helped drive a more data-driven approach to our game design. So instead of needing to implement a bunch of related features at every request, we could create straightforward building blocks using custom Slate UI for designers to paste behaviors together to achieve the desired result. We relied heavily on this for Flume (our internal narrative system) and the card combat portion of Beastro.
Rostal: Bryan was able to build up our narrative tool in Flume and provide me with a tool that hooked into all of the other systems. I work in various story chunks, that we call cards, and I'm able to not only assign lines, speakers, sequences, logic, etc. but I can also command and kick off the game flow. We used Slate as the tool for our team to be able to link into all of our other systems.
Were you able to leverage C++ and Blueprints in tandem to streamline development across teams?
Pawlowski: Yes! It helped us to implement generic behaviors in C++ while keeping bespoke behaviors implemented on a case-by-case basis in Blueprint land.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
How important has it been for you to have access to UE’s source code throughout development?
Pawlowski: Quite. It has allowed us to quickly fix issues we are having. One particular instance was a cook time issue we were having with Subsequences. Having access to source code, paired with active support from Epic’s side, helped us solve that issue in a concise and timely manner. Thanks again for that!
How have Unreal Engine’s profiling tools assisted your team with debugging and performance optimization?
Pawlowski: It’s helped us keep a steady eye on performance throughout the development of the game. This way, we can detect issues early that we know will scale poorly and address them before the issue ever rears its head.
Rostal: Exactly. We have been looking at performance during our entire development cycle to make sure we can push things as far as we can for our audience without limiting their access to the game. Being able to keep an eye on that at all times has been incredibly valuable.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Pawlowski: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. All of the above. We wanted to always focus on our unique problems, not ones others had already solved. So whenever we could find something that could accelerate our development, we’d take advantage of it.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
Beastro is Timberline’s second title following The Red Lantern. What advice would you give to other small teams who are setting out to make their first game in Unreal Engine?
Rostal: If you’re new to Unreal Engine, jump into the example projects immediately. Lyra is a great resource, as are some of the Sequencer tutorials. Use those as your playgrounds to get familiar with the tools and break things! I know I learn by breaking things and then putting them back together.
Pawlowski: Regardless of which engine you’re jumping from, get acquainted with the different quality-of-life features that Unreal provides. Look around for an already-implemented plugin that solves an issue out of the box versus immediately digging into homebrewing a solution. Choose what you want to build yourself while still using everything else Unreal has to offer. Work your engine upgrade muscles, too.
Courtesy of Timberline Studio, Inc.
Which Unreal features would you consider “must-learn” for small teams?
Rostal: At a base level, Blueprints are absolutely key. We ended up leveraging Slate to extend our own tool sets and give our designers and writers ways to connect to the Blueprints in a way that worked best for them.
Fulton: If there’s one thing I would recommend to any small team if they aren’t already doing it: version control!
Animators should be able to learn and be proficient with Animation Blueprints. Video games have a lot of unique needs from animators in terms of looping, blending and layering between animations, matching poses, procedural/physics/cloth sim/etc. on top of the typical keyframe character animation work. Animation Blueprints are where the rubber meets the road on all of these things. This is where animators and designers can collaborate to make the game feel really good kinematically.
Pawlowski: Get acquainted with Unreal’s localization pipeline, Unreal Game Sync, and lean into continuous integration. It’ll keep the bulk of your team focused on the fun part of making games.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Beastro?
Rostal: We’ll keep folks up to date on our socials:
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@beastrothegame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beastrothegame/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/timberlinestudio.bsky.social
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/uuvpn98nar
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@timberlinestudio
Website: https://www.beastro.game/