Cherie Davidson and Daniel Kidney make video games that are delightfully weird. “We want people to play our games and be like, “Well, I’ve never seen that before,” Daniel says.

And I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I have never played a game like this: grumpy old men, holding hands while feeding the pigeons, reading a newspaper on a bench, living side by side. It’s your job to meddle with and run their romantic lives. The twist? The faces of these old men are attached to the bodies of beetles, who live in a beetle retirement village.

Cherie and Daniel run Intarsia Interactive, an independent game studio in Melbourne/Naarm that has a team of six talented Australian creators across animation, graphics, illustration, 3D art, programming, sound and art direction. They describe their games as playful, strange and with plenty of zest.

The pair were obsessed with games during childhood – but their experiences were a little different. While Cherie received 64MB of RAM for Christmas and has early memories of playing Lemmings with her pa, Daniel “had very limited access to games and very strict screen time”. He got around this by going to his neighbours’ house and watching them play Nintendo for hours on end.

Despite their different childhoods, Daniel and Cherie grew up in the same leafy outer suburb of Mount Evelyn, went to the same kindergarten and the same high school, and frequented the same corner store for lollies and videos – without ever meeting. It was at university, studying games, where they finally met. They followed careers in the game industry together, bought a house together, and recently had a baby named Poppy.

Cherie and Daniel started Intarsia in 2024 after a decade working in the game industry in Australia and the United Kingdom. While the studio has been a lifelong dream for the couple, it has only become possible recently due to client work for a pet simulation game called Mushka and a grant through VicScreen.

Collaboration is so important to Cherie and Daniel that it’s on the tin – ‘Intarsia’ is a knitting and woodworking technique where you weave or fit materials together without changing their original value.

“When we bring our team together, we want everybody to bring their full selves. The type of games we make are kind of a combination of everybody on the team working together, and the things that we’re excited about,” Cherie says.

Intarsia’s current game, Beetols They Do It, out in late 2027 on Steam, is full intarsia – everyone in the team is deeply involved in putting it together.

The game concept emerged three years ago during a series of game jams, which is like a boot camp for gamers where you make a game within a weekend or week. At a game jam they saw a news article about beetles reproducing. Further research revealed that a beetle’s life consists of eating, pooing and making love. “I was like, ‘That is a great retirement. That is basically just a retirement village,’” Cherie says.

The decision to make the subjects of the game elderly man-beetles, who can date one another and create larvae-babies, is also about exploring masculinity and a world beyond heteronormativity. “The humour is in the awkwardness of an older generation of men finding ways to connect with each other,” Cherie says.

Daniel says that the exploration into male friendships also comes from his lasting platonic relationship with Rory Sampson, Intarsia’s illustrator and 3D artist. The two have a quirky friendship. They share a “wooden thing” – an acorn toy with googly eyes and scrawled with “friends forever”.

For years, Daniel and Rory have been hiding this wooden toy in each other’s houses – back and forth – without the other person knowing. Places include a pot plant, a jacket pocket, doorframes and my personal favourite: hidden as a Christmas present. The hiding spots are endless, so naturally there is no end in sight for this game.

Intarsia’s games, on the other hand, do have an end point after about three years. It starts with an idea, followed by creating a prototype with art, design code and audio. If the team think it has legs, then the rest of the game will go into production, which includes regular quality assurance testing for bugs (the non-insect kind).

The fun part is play-testing, which is when they watch players interact with the game, see whether they have trouble with any of the puzzles and find out what they enjoy about it. This happens at game events, or Cherie’s high school friends will help out and give feedback.

Cherie and Daniel have a lot of fun making games, and they hope that people who play their games will feel that fun. They also acknowledge that the world can feel dark and heavy at times, and they want Beetols to provide a moment of escape.

“Just for a couple of hours, be in a place where it’s safe, and it’s enjoyable, and live in the old man-beetle’s brain for a bit,” Daniel says.

And what does that world look like?

“Have no worries except the worries of old men, like: ‘Where am I going to find my newspaper?’, the barking dogs next door, construction starting before seven and someone littering,” he laughs.

This rad story comes straight out of issue 134. Nab a copy for yourself from the frankie shop or visit one of our lovely stockists. For future issues, subscribe here.