Talberon Games proves video game development is still alive in Halifax

If you were only to look at the presence of multinational corporate video game developers in Halifax, you might consider the scene to be dead.

Earlier this year, Ubisoft shut down its Halifax-based mobile division shortly after they voted to unionize. In 2024, Microsoft shuttered Alpha Dog Studios. Two of the biggest employers in the world of video games emptied out of Nova Scotia just a couple of years apart despite lucrative tax breaks under the guise of broader restructurings that continue to this day.

However, looking beyond the surface of the Nova Scotian game dev world, it’s clear there is still a passion for video games and their creation. Halifax might not attract any multi-million dollar studios anytime soon, but there are several dozen independent developers who keep the scene alive with ingenuity, passion, and an infinitesimal budget.

Talberon Games is one of these developers.

Founded by solo developer Trevor Kendrick, Talberon Games has released several video games on the platform itch.io and its first major title, Superstar Strategy, on Steam late last year. It is set to release on the Nintendo Switch this September.

A drive to develop

Kendrick is one of many solo devs who call Halifax home. Like many, his interest in video games started early on in his childhood.

“I’ve enjoyed video games since I was an actual baby,” he tells The Coast. “I’ve always wanted to make games, since I was 7 or 8 years old. Ever since I learned you could make video games and they didn’t just come from Japan.”

Kendrick was a Nintendo kid through-and-through. He fell in love with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo. He made tactical decisions throughout Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Nintendo GameCube. He competed against others in Super Smash Bros. All in all, Kendrick was a huge fan of video games, and like many devs, that passion turned into an interest for not just playing, but creating.

“There was this game for the PlayStation One called RPG Maker,” says Kendrick. “You could make your own game in a video game. I thought that was really cool. I was a big fan of Final Fantasy and things like that at the time, so the idea of being able to make my own was super tantalizing.”

Back in the day, RPG Maker was how plenty of novice devs got their start. To this day, the program provides users with a no-coding-required method of creating their own virtual adventures, with in-engine sprite makers, tilesets, calculations, music, all within a structure that allows users to design it to their specifications with JavaScript coding and plenty of plugins available online for those wanting to go a bit deeper.

Kendrick eventually moved on to the PC versions of RPG Maker before discovering Byond, a website which allowed users to build custom multiplayer games and host them on its service.

“It was an early 2000s version of a VR Chat or a Minecraft kind of thing,” says Kendrick. “You would log on to this game that this person had made on this platform, where you could customize your sprite for your personal character, and then you could go around this open-world zone and place blocks, build your own little house. It was a social game.”

The source code was leaked for the Byond game Kendrick was playing at the time, and he took it upon himself to tinker with the code in an attempt to understand it. Admittedly, he didn’t learn much at the time—he was only 12-years-old—but it did inspire him to become a software developer, which he eventually went to college for. He’s now worked in the software dev industry for around 14 years.

During his time at the Nova Scotia Community College, he was tasked with using a Microsoft framework called XNA, which was used to make video games for the Xbox 360 and Windows computers. Several indie games from the late 2000s and early 2010s used this framework.

“At that time I had more of a social life… I goofed off and rushed that assignment at the last second,” Kendrick laughed. “But I got older and I got an actual job doing database development.”

While he ended up quitting his database job a few years in—partially because it didn’t really utilize his programming skills—he would pivot towards software development once more.

“As part of recapturing the kind of programming I wanted to do, I started experimenting with XNA again,” he says. “In its final form, it’s kind of like the game I’m releasing now, but it was an early prototype way before I had an idea of what this game was.”

The idea for that game would eventually split into several.

Sol Standard and Steelbreakers

One of the games that would spawn from this is Sol Standard, a predecessor to Superstar Strategy available on itch.io. It was a top-down tactics role-playing game in the vein of Fire Emblem, but with a focus on competitive play rather than single-player campaigns. He wanted to avoid a levelling system and the intense calculations that come with it.

Instead, he sought to make something more akin to chess, or, as a closer example, Warhammer 40K, a tabletop game where players can choose their individual, customized units and position troops against each other through a strategic point allocation system. While Kendrick didn’t use this point system for his game, he was inspired to find a balancing method that relies on synergies between individual units.

Thus, Sol Standard was born. A tactics game where two local players duke it out by setting up their customized party on the battlefield and taking turns to deal damage, defend and move, with a winner decided after one player’s units have been defeated.

Another idea that spawned from this was a game more in the breadth of The Legend of Zelda: a 2D action game called Steelbreakers, where players would be pitted against each other or team up to slay monsters on a small battlefield. This multiplayer-focused game is currently in the midst of a rework from Talberon, with a demo available on Steam.

After releasing the first version of Steelbreakers, it was hard for Kendrick not to notice some choice issues with Sol Standard.

“I had a better menu system and general architecture (in Steelbreakers) than the tactics game that was entirely driven by menus,” admits Kendrick. “My action game had better menus than my menu game.”

So, when he decided to make some updates to Sol Standard, Kendrick began to reenvision several aspects of his tactics game

Superstar Strategy

Superstar Strategy released on Steam on Nov. 28, 2025.

It is an evolved version of Kendrick’s original Sol Standard. It retains the competitive aspect of its local multiplayer while also introducing a campaign mode with characters and a story, not unlike Fire Emblem.

The menus are easy-to-understand and seamless. The visual assets, a mix of purchased and licensed spritework and alterations made by Kendrick, are reminiscent of the Super Nintendo games he grew up with. The music, all his creation, utilizes a sampler plugin to mimic the sounds of that retro video game console. Mouse and keyboard support allows the player to perform actions with just the mouse rather than a controller.

The story follows two siblings and their guardian, amongst a wider cast of interesting characters, as they fight through hordes of monsters in various locales, from a small hamlet to caves on the verge of collapse. There are several different types of units, all with their own unique actions, abilities and synergies.

At first, Kendrick intended to keep the game completely multiplayer-focused. However, that idea wouldn’t last forever.

“The more I showed this to my friends and got them to play it, the more I realized that it’s one thing to have this game exist on its own, and it’s another to get two people of a similar skill level to play this game together without an extensive existing player base.”

There’s no online matchmaking, though there are plenty of options to do local play online, such as Steam’s built-in Remote Play feature. However, to get two players in a room together for a game that wouldn’t be completely one-sided would be difficult without a way to learn it.

Kendrick says this came up several times through fellow indie devs, but it really hit home when he presented the game to an old friend, who told him how they felt.

“I like this game a lot, but I would really actually play it if there was a campaign for me to play and a story I could get invested in,” says Kendrick, repeating his friend’s words at the time.

“I took that to heart,” he continues. “A lot of people have been saying something kind of like that for a while, but I was resisting it because I didn’t want to make another turn-based tactics RPG… I landed on, you know what, you’re right. If I want people to sit down and spend money on this game instead of downloading it on itch.io and playing it for a weekend, I had to give them meat on the bone.”

This idea for a campaign mode ended up working in the game’s favour. Kendrick designed it as a meta-tutorial for the competitive mode. Players can learn all of the basics of the game, as well as some of the advanced mechanics, by playing through the story mode.

A Switch release of Superstar Strategy is also a subtle encouragement for players to learn and compete in the multiplayer mode. Since the Switch Joy-Cons attached to the system can function as two small controllers, the system is a great platform for local co-op and competitive games.

Thriving dev community

Along with being the sole developer at Talberon Games, Kendrick is also a local organizer of Halifax Indie Devs Play and Tell, a showcase for fellow indie developers in the area. It’s a good chance for devs to receive feedback, test new builds, and meet up with other members of the city’s game dev community. The next event is scheduled for July 19 at the Halifax Public Library.

“It’s very rare to do something so nerdy, so specific, so niche, and be able to talk about it with people intelligently,” says Kendrick, looking back at the first Play and Tell event he attended. “It was really awesome to go to a space where you could talk to people about that kind of stuff.

“It’s super rewarding and I always have a good time going out and talking to all the devs. There’s a ton of talent here, and it goes completely unnoticed because they’re just working at home on their own little thing.”

Kendrick also participates in organizing efforts like Game Makers 4 Co-operative Futures and just finished participating in the XP Game Collect Atlantic event in Halifax last month, which connects potential publishers with game devs, as well as devs with other devs.

“I want other people who grow up and don’t think anything is going on here to actually have the opportunity to do this thing, because I think it’s really important for Nova Scotia to have opportunities for people who want to make games, and want to make entertainment and export culture to the rest of the country and the world. There’s a ton of really talented people here,” says Kendrick.

Kendrick was saddened to hear of the closures of video game studios in Halifax and the negative impacts it’s had on creators. However, Kendrick says there is a thin silver lining in that some devs are getting involved in the indie scene with their own studios and their own projects.

There are no doubt people still feeling the impacts of those studio closures. However, to say the end of those studios necessitates the end of video games in Nova Scotia is categorically false. Indie devs like Talberon Games, who continue to develop games alongside their day jobs, are fiercely fighting to keep people’s creativity alive.