Dev Interview - Konrad Kunze, Fusion Play

One of our more exciting partnerships has been with the team at Fusion Play, the studio behind the meme turned game, Nice Day for Fishing. Built around the Epic NPC Man series created by Viva La Dirt League.

We sat down with studio CEO, Konrad Kunze, to discuss scent as an emotional tool, the value of partnerships, and discovery of innovative tech. Read the full interview below.

Alex: Give us a little background about yourself, Fusion Play and what brought you to make Nice Day for Fishing.

Konrad: Yeah, I'm myself I'm Konrad I'm CEO of Fusion Play, and I started making games when I was a child, and I remember programming, Turbo Pascal and Amiga 500.

And that's quite a long time ago. But my career traditionally started as a software developer. I studied computer science and then was a software developer.

Then I became product manager in a larger corporation. And with Fusion Play, I finally got the chance to make, the thing I really love to do, make it my job.

And I worked there at Fusion Play. First, it was a brand of a larger company called IT Sonics, and it was like a department in that company, and I was running it, and we worked on a NFC card game with built-in RFID chips, and we patented it and worked together with Disney and with Schmidt Biele, a board game publisher from Germany.

And it was all the start of Fusion Play, and then we got into VR with Konrad's Kittens and Across the Valley.

So that's what is in common for us. We always try to get our hands on new technology and try to make something creative, something new that other people don't do with this technology.

And so, yeah, this brought us here with where we are now talking about. And for Nice Day for Fishing, it started as a very small site project from René.

René is one of the really creative heads of our company. And he has a small side project called Pixel Fishing. And he pitched this to us and wanted to do this.

And we said, yeah, yeah, let's, having some time and work on it. And shortly after he started working on it, there was Baelin the Fisherman from Viva La Dirt League.

And we've seen this on YouTube and we thought, wait a minute, this story super perfectly matches the gameplay of our pixel fishing project.

I mean, it's, fishing RPG combination. And then they have an NPC that can only do fishing and just say one sentence and he saves the whole world and has an epic adventure doing so.

And so we get in contact with Viva La Dirt and we just contacted them and then took some time to get everything sorted.

And then the project got bigger and bigger and we didn't expect it to be beforehand, but then We put more time into it and more dedication and more resources and it grew and grew.

And then, like, a year before launch, or one and a half year before launch Team 17 came and as an addition.

And we wanted them as a publisher because we know Team 17 from our childhood played warms and stuff like that and Yeah, this was our most beloved publisher.

We wanted them and they said yes. And then, they really took things in their hands and make them took off. So they were a big help when it came down to production, quality assurance and all this stuff on top.

And we even asked them if we can have their warm being a bait in our game and they agreed. We were super happy with that. Yeah. And so it came to a Nice Day for Fishing.

Alex: Amazing. So what was the initial spark or idea that led you to do this crazy thing and integrate Scent into Nice Day for Fishing?

Konrad: I think the idea was emotional triggers. It's like when you're creating a game, What you want to do is you want to hook the player.

You want to make the player play the game and consistently feel immersed in the game. You want the player to experience a great adventure. And there are several ways to do this.

So like VR games obviously use the power of VR that makes you immerse in the game. 3D games at least share the same perspective that you have a 3D environment.

But for pixel art games, it's not that easy. So what you do is typically you try to trigger emotion step by step. Like when we place a boss at a specific time while the player is playing the game, at a specific time of gameplay or playthrough, then we want to trigger him excitement at this time.

It's like, whoa, what's coming now? Oh, this is the boss. This is getting hard. And we want him to finally, he can dish out all the damage he was preparing for.

He can use all his potion he was collecting. And that's the time. Now it's the chance. And So you don't place bosses every 10 minutes. It must be something special because only with that, it creates this emotion you want to have.

Or when you place a small treasure chest, you have some dead end cave and in this cave is nothing and it looks like, yeah, just a dead end, but some players will explore it and go into that cave.

And when they find in the farthest corner of the cave, a small treasure chest with something valuable, they will be happy.

And it triggers this small, oh, that was nice. That was a nice surprise. And there's a lot of things how you can create emotions with people.

And graphics is obviously a big one. Sound sometimes is a very subtle one. And gameplay is the biggest one. But scent is something we've seen, oh, what could we do with that?

That's an additional thing. It's additional layer. It's an additional tool for game designers to put in emotions just to underline something.

Like when you're going in the forest, we've designed the forest to be something like mystical, like the sun is shining through the um through the leaves of the uh of the trees and um we wanted to underline that mystical appearance by having this fresh smell when you go inside you immediately feel like, oh, that's a nice, fresh, mystical forest.

Or when you go to butcher and you know, butcher isn't maybe the person who baths a lot showers a lot and he's like the dirty grimy blacksmith.

We wanted to express this with a short burst of intense smell and the people like, oh yeah yeah yes watch out that's um or when you take a garlic it's it's the spicy smell we get um and it's very subtle, very backgroundy um but it just underlines this emotion.

And so we use this and want to use this to just create new emotions or intensify emotions that players have when playing the game.

Alex: Now, no one on your team is a scent engineer, as far as I know. So can you describe some of those first steps into integrating scent into the game?

What were some of the experiences you had? Once you tried the device, did your approach evolve? Tell me a little bit more about those first moments of getting the device and saying, how do we bring this to our game?

Konrad: Yeah, honestly, we just started trying out stuff. So we had absolutely no idea when we got the device what to do, exactly how it works, what kind of scents we can get out of it.

And our ideas were ranging from very low expectations to very over-exaggerated expectations. And so we just tried out what we can do. And René created a, we call it a scent piano.

It's like a dashboard with an empty scene where he could just trigger single sends and then we started thinking about what could we do with this send.

And then we tried it the other way around that we looked at specific parts of the game, especially the first part because it's just a demo at the moment, which supports send.

We played it the full demo time and the just thought about what of these objects, activities or areas could benefit from send and what kind of send could it be.

I still remember when I was totally off doing some accounting stuff and deeply digging down in Excel spreadsheets in the office.

And sometimes my internal alarm bell rang like, oh, that's fire, fire, fire. And I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, guys, something's burning.

And everyone looked up like, yeah, yeah. And René was starting to laugh and just looked over to us and said, what's going on?

And he said, yeah, yeah, I'm trying to give the goblin campfire a matching scent. It seems to work. It was a moment where it worked way better than we ever expected.

And it was just slowly moving through the room, the scent. And although it was so subtle, the brain immediately just identifies it.

And from that point onward, it was clear that we will use this scent for the goblin campfire and all the other ideas were added step by step.

So it was like mostly trial and error. And then it was the team from OVR that also gave us some ideas they said us yeah what you could also do is like amplify specific moments with just trigger smells, like when you get a level up or when a fish bites or whatever.

And yeah, that was, great feedback and we've edited and it also enhanced the experience a lot.

Alex: What specific features or capabilities of the Omara or even the Unity or Unreal plugins made this the ideal choice to go with for any great extent?

Konrad: I honestly like the ability to have different types of how scents are emitted. So the most basic one is like a burst. When you pick up garlic in the game, there's a short burst or two short bursts of this spicy scent like spices.

And this just underlines the short action of picking up something. Picking up something is in our game, a two frame animation. And it takes some milliseconds. I can't tell you the exact time, but it's very short.

And we wanted something that is very subtle and very short, exactly the same like the animation that Baelin does when he does it.

But then we have things like going in the forest and we don't want to shut forest scent when you reach the forest and that's it.

Instead, we wanted to constantly emit this fresh scent from a fresh forest and that's where this area scent comes in handy where you can say, okay, we have a specific intensity and we have a specific area where it's defined for where it's constantly emits a scent and it helps there.

But the most impressive for me is a range based one. I don't recall the name how it's internally called, but I know we do this with the campfire.

And when you're getting close to the campfire with the goblin, and you're playing very conscious, you will smell a slight hint of burn or of campfire before you see the campfire.

And the closer you get, the more intense it gets. And that's something that's really cool when you try it out. We're constantly looking for other ideas of where to use exactly that effect because it's so cool that it's just a small hint.

And at first you think like, it something? No, no. And then when you get this oh no no no that's definitely something. And when you're standing right next to the campfire, it's, it's, uh, so intense that you then immediately uh notice it.

And it's, yeah, it's like that. And when you go further and past the campfire, you will notice that it gets sort of more subtle and more subtle.

And that's something we really like.

Alex: Awesome. Um, now can you, talk a little bit, talk a little bit about partnering with OVR and how that has helped bring this vision to life. And also just any other comments about working with OVR directly as a developer.

Konrad: Yeah, so it started for us with OVR contacting us. I think it was about when we launched Nice Day for Fishing.

And we immediately liked this idea. And OVR was very quickly and very supportive to us. So we signed a contract and got our hands on a dev kit.

And we started working with it. And I really appreciate how quickly the guys from OVR answer to our emails, how quickly they come back with positive feedback, with very constructive feedback.

Whenever we had any issues, something not working as we expected, they quickly helped us with, oh, have you tried that and that?

And then we said, ah, that's what we did wrong. And also with ideas of how we could integrate something or how we could add another send for another thing.

Really a very, very constructive way working together with OVR. And we were super happy having the chance to meet them at Gamescom 2025.

So obviously, we are at Gamescom every year as we are based in Germany. And having OVR there, and then they took a full hour for us. And we sat together and tried out the latest version of their device, seen a demo, and said hello to everyone.

This was really, really super nice. This sounds maybe like it should be the case with every partner you have, but it isn't.

Running a company and being product manager for a company quite a long time now, it is not always the case that it's easy to work with partners.

Some are not reliable, some are never reachable because they are very helpful, but you don't get a response within days or weeks.

And some that work is bad, some is good. So having a partner you can rely on and having a partner where it's really a charm to work with is really something valuable in this industry.

Alex: Thank you. That was a great meeting. Two more questions real quick. Where do you see the future of scent enabled gameplay? And is there any more scent enabled content in the future for you or fusion play?

Konrad: That's a tough question. I think it really depends on the adoption of consumers, where the future of scent is. For us as game developers and game designers, it's a very, very cool tool to have in our hands.

It's the same like making sound and making visuals for a game to adding scent. I would love to add this as a basic tool for every game I do in the future.

It's probably not in our hands. I would also love to see more advanced versions. What we want to try in the next month is like mixing sense, how this turns out and stuff like that.

I want to go deeper into that. But I've got one project especially in mind. We are working on a game that hasn't been announced yet. It's a VR game and I would like to add um scent there because, um, it's, it's, it's a VR game.

So immersion is already very very high and then adding scent to that, I think would be even cooler.

And also it's a game where we can define our own scents. It's, I can't spoil too much about the game, but, um, it's cool to, to, re-enact something that's already there, like you have a campfire and then you create a burning scent when people walk next to the campfire.

But it's even cooler to create something new that people don't know, like from a sci-fi or fantasy game.

I still remember, I don't recall who was it, but I remember the sentence, space smells like burnt steak.

And that's something that has written deep into my mind because you think like, yeah, you've never smelled space and nobody from us will ever will.

But it feels like super interesting to define how like a plasma rifle from Halo or something like that would smell when you fire it or how a wormhole will smell when it opens next to you.

And in theory, you can argue a lot about what it theoretically could be. But in reality, it gives us the the opportunity to just define it and say, yeah, that's how it smells, at least in our game.

Alex: Amazing. One last thing. Can you tell everyone where they can get Nice Day for Fishing?

Konrad: Nice Day for Fishing is out already. You can get it on PC, on Steam. You can get it for Xbox, for Nintendo Switch, for PlayStation 5.

And as soon as the Omara device launches, we will update the game and provide Omara support as well so that it's ready from day one.

Alex: Thanks, everybody.

Konrad: Thank you. Bye. Bye.

Be sure to checkout Nice Day for Fishing on Steam, and you can pick it up today as part of our Kickstarter.