Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Detroit Become Human Impressions - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 167

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Andy got to play Detroit Become Human and Greg interviewed the guys behind Friday the 13th and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine! (Released first to http://www.Patreon.com/KindaFunnyGames Supporters on 04.20.18) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up guys, welcome to the first ever, episode 167 of the Kind of Funny Games cast. As always, I'm Tim Getty's joined by one of the coolest dudes of video games, Greg Miller. Whoa. Oh, man, the scared gentleman to my left, Andy Cortez. Hey, guys. Number one video game journalist. Getting all the scoops out there, you were out there scooping for us. I know everything.

What was it like going on your first event for Kind of Funny? It was confusing. I didn't really know what to do. When it was over, I was just like, I'm just like, I'm, I mean, like... They didn't help you out. They didn't tell you stuff. I mean, it just didn't know what to do.

Yeah. And then, you know, Christine from PlayStation was like, oh, feel free to get some food and sacks. All right. So what did you? You like... Munch on some grapes? We sent Andy to play Detroit,

become human to preview it. So what? You finished the demo, you put the control on there, and sat there like a lump in front of the TV? No, I walked towards the general sort of concession area. Yeah. Yeah. It was also, it also happened to be the area where people wanted...

People would talk to David, David Cage one-on-one, one V-1, shotguns. Did you talk to David Cage? No. No. She asked, like, did you have any questions for David Cage? I was like, I'll talk to him later. Yeah.

We hang out all the time. We hang out all the time. But it was in that area where all the, like, you know, they had little sliders. Oh yeah. Sliders are big time video game. Really delicious. I have a lot of questions about it. I want to get through the rigmarole so that we can ask all about your Detroit event.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the kind of of funny games cast each and every week right here on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. We get together, talk about video games, all things that we love about them, give our impressions of the latest and greatest games out there. You can get it early by going to patreon.com slash kind of funny games. You can watch it live with us or you can watch the early episodes along with the pre and post shows. Those are a lot of fun. Or you can watch it later on YouTube.com slash kind of funny on Mondays at 9am and podcast services,

including IHeartRadio soon. So that's going to be a fun thing. This episode is brought to you by Hymns and Marvel Puzzle Quest. We'll get to that in a little bit. Also worth putting out two interviews in this one. And, yeah, so what we're going to do here is we're going to get Andy's preview of Detroit, Become Human. We're going to get his review of his first game. Oh, you're going to score on it.

Yeah. Oh, your review of your event. I have a high of your restaurant. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we're going to get into an interview that Greg did one-on-one with Friday the 13th. Ronnie hops. Ronnie Hobbs

And then interview with Yoneman Nordhagen from where the water tastes like wine If you remember If you watch

Kind of Funny Games Daily A few weeks ago We had a story Where Yonaman Had put up a blog post About the commercial struggles Of where the water

tastes like wine He had said basically I don't know If you can make these kind of games As an indie And we had a long discussion about that

And then his PR Representative reached out And was like Hey like he'd love to come by So we brought him by To talk to him about that about the realities of being an indie dev now, learn a brand new term for the indie developer.

You got AAA, you got AA, you got indie. He introduced a new one to me that I like a lot that I am stealing. You have to wait and see it in the interview. But I want to know. And then yeah, Ronnie Hobbs from Friday 13th came by during GDC to talk to me about where that game's at, the successes and struggles and everything else they've had.

So pretty big show here. Yeah, a lot of cool stuff. And it's all possible thanks to Patreon producer. Tom Bach. Thank you for making the show happen. And thank you also to all the beautiful Patreon supporters whose names will be doing something at the bottom of the screen. Wow. Hashtag GSG.

Tom. What does that mean? Go Spurs, go. Go. I don't think Cool Great likes that one one bit. Nah, we're not a threat. It's okay. So Andy, this was your first games of it alone.

Right. You've done them with us. As a part of kind of funny. I've been doing them since I was 12. Number one game journalist. What did your whole experience look like? Because I feel like a lot of people at home don't know, because we're so used to it now. Yeah.

What did you do? What was the whole thing? Well, Tim, let me tell you. Let's you sit back, guys. Took an Uber to the airport. Walk up at 75. Bought a diet cherry Coke. Cherry Coke zero.

Okay. And so essentially I get to the event, walk in, and fly was the-fly was delayed a little bit. Yeah. Go all the way around. The event was in Los Angeles. Angeles. Yeah. City of Angels.

Um, and the, uh, the flight was delayed by like 30 minutes. Gotcha. Already like, I'm kind of worried about that. You sweating?

You get the big anime sweat drop? I'm already like, I feel like I'm fucking up constantly throughout my whole day anyway. And so this is like, I am late. This fucking flight has not let the, like I kind of crashed out on the plane before it took off, woke up was like,

we know, lay yet? Like, no, we're still in the fucking, like, how did you start taxing. God,

it sucked. Um, so, uh, I got to the event like, right on time. Event was at 10 a.m. got there like a 958. Nice. And

walked in there and initially they show off, well first I got some fruit guys. What fruit are you going for? So there was some pineapple, got a couple pineapple slices. Got a little bunch of grapes, maybe about six of them. Six is kind of all you need, right? Yeah. You never want to, you know... Don't

overdo the grapes. Five and a half or less, six and a half or more, too much, too little. Six grapes, Nick Scarpino, just enough. And I got some melon slices of that as well. Honeydew melon? No, no, no. Canaloupe. Cataloupe. Gotcha. Canaloupe. Orange one. Nice a little variety of fruits there.

Ate that shit with some coffee. And guess what, Tim? They had lavender lemonade. Whoa. Did you try it? Really good. Yeah? Really good. I was expecting. Tony started there for a second. There it is. I was expecting the taste of soap. Like we were talking about it, that brunch one, that one time. which by the way it was the most expensive brunch I've ever taken apart of him and I'll never go again

but it was really good yeah so they start off the presentation by showing us a little tech demo of like what goes behind the technology of this game right the sort of the dirty work that you don't really see behind the scenes

you see because you're a game developer you know Volga yeah but I've never even seen this sort of level of stuff of like nonstop Motion capture stuff. It's really cool. It's stuff that, like, I just love watching anyway. So it was super interesting to me.

They talk about all the different actors that they had, all the different lines. They'd been recording for, like, over a year, about 400 days, I believe, was a number. So many different scenes. And it shows. Yeah. Because I just can't imagine how expensive this game costs to make. Yeah. Because there's, not only is it incredibly gorgeous, but it's incredibly gorgeous.

times like six things because there's all these different scenes they have to create in case you pick this certain decision or whatever um our boy the voice of um mr crabs clancy brown oh yeah character oh nice i love clancy brown yeah lex luther he was there in the animated series he was there i would have fucking been mad i didn't go to this event if that's the case would have been real cool uh so they show off this video uh and it's super interesting and then they say okay now we're going to uh go play the game over there It's a You'll be playing the The hostage scene

Immediately I'm like I already played the hostage scene At E3 I've seen the hostage scene A million times Right Where you walk in Is the Android

Said to be the negotiator I'm Connor That's his name The other android's got The girl And he's standing there And he's mad at the cops The deviant is what they call

My apologies So we sit down With this type of game You can do whatever you want Sure Yeah sure But luckily It was two hours

Of the game I thought it was just The Hodges scene But essentially we start off with the hostage scene. The world of Detroit is beautifully realized. It is so cool. It's sort of in the distant future, right?

It's the year 2038. And they do a great job of showcasing how the city of Detroit has found its resurgence as an android manufacturer. It's sort of like the fucking mecca of where you go to get androids for all sorts of uses, like construction for home help. They do touch on sex with androids in different magazines

that you find around the world or around the different scenes that you're at. Magazines? It's essentially like the way you find little things of lore and god of war or in any game really. Oh, okay, okay.

There are digital magazines in this game. But they do, the art design and everything did an awesome job of showing like this is how the rich part of Detroit looks and probably how most rich parts look. Very futuristic. It's like this is definitely the future.

That was super clean, uh, cool looking modeled cars. And then in different scenes of the game that you get to play, uh, it looks like 2016, 2017, 2018 Detroit with,

is that because we're no longer in the rich sections? Correct. Gross housing, like it looks like the houses have been there since whenever, uh, dilapidated, old cars, you know.

and then so you'll see like really nice buses, futuristic buses, driving by with like a really shitty old little car that, you know, might be from today's model, but they kept a pair of the 20 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the hostage scene is one that's been sort of documented quite a bit, and it's really cool. And you play Connor who in the future a lot of people don't like these, these androids because they've taken a lot of jobs from people.

Sure. They show several scenes where a homeless man is on the side of the road with a sign that says, Androids took my job. You know, please don't give me money or, you know, beggars and stuff like that. And so, androids are taking jobs from a lot of people. So they are very disliked in the world. And the hostage scene starts off. I mean, you guys have seen it.

Connor walks into the room who was an android. And essentially, a woman's daughter has been kidnapped by her. helper android not kidnapped but he he's holding her hostage yeah being held hostage and you walk in and the woman sees you and she sees you're an android and she's like

you sent a fucking android you sent an android I wanted a real person you know she's pissed off that the police sent an android to do these hostage negotiation so she's already pissed off right but uh you I'm gonna love this game and I was talking about this to you guys

earlier like I loved heavy rain. Yeah. I'm absolutely going to love this game. Did you like Beyond? I didn't really play Beyond. I know what people think about it, so I just never really wanted to give it a shot. But I know and

that's not like mechanics or anything. It's just like the game story apparently wasn't very good or whatever. The game's a whole lot of time. No, stupid, bad choices. Didn't like the character. He listened to me. Don't worry. Don't worry about it. This game is going to be fucking awesome if you loved Heavy Rain. I love, I already know. that I love this game and when

the demo two hours ended I wanted to keep fucking blued. I sat there waiting for the next scenario that they drop you into and the lady walked over like oh that's the end of the demo. I'm like oh fuck you. I wanted to keep going yeah because it started getting really good and meaty. Real quick I want to point out to

you, I don't know if we have to but I want to do it of course I think you said it. PlayStation sent us there. Hey FTC hashtag game provided by PlayStation. Just putting that out there. Absolutely. Fruit provided by And as long as I say positive stuff, I get extra bonuses. You get all the fruit.

You can eat. Yeah, extra fruit. The thing I'm worried about is like, how is this is going to be received by the public? Because it is, you know, it's all QTEs. It is all walking around. It is a super incredibly high budget point and click adventure game. Sure. But that's what heavy rain was, right?

Exactly. That's what I want. That's what I expect out of this. I'm just worried that people are going to expect it to be. like this fucking third person shooter like that they might have stuff like that I don't know just the way it looks the futuristic vibe that you're getting

I remember when Nick thought that it was a first person shooter because he Googled Detroit and a call of duty map came up fucking idiot so funny this game is going to be awesome I can't wait for it how many scenarios did you play

I want to say six because you keep jumping back between the three main characters yeah you have Kara who is from the old fucking Quantic Dream demo that we saw way back when after Beyond came out. It was like last gen or whatever.

Still PlayStation 3 era. Yeah. So Kara, you play the role, you play three different Android. Kara. Connor. Connor. And fuck,

I forgot beautiful Jesse Williams' character. I forgot his name. I'll look into it. Beautiful man. Jesus. Gorgeous eyes. He's the one leading the Android rebellion or whatever. Yes.

And, uh, Again, I just don't really know. Just say what you want to say. But don't say the other things. How many different scenarios that you play? Do you feel like choices you were making had a really definitive? I'd say not until the end of this demo.

Not until this two hour end of the demo. Marcus. There you go. For the first parts of it, it is very linear. It is very like you can't really do much to change anything. But they do such a great job of world building. like you start it was the start of the game that you were playing at yes okay yes yeah uh because one of the intro scenes you are in your box in a store in a box essentially not in a box but

you're through first person lens eyes or whatever and uh people are looking at you like so so this one is the this is sir is actually the blah blah blah blah model and you can get for uh uh seven $10,99 with 48 months no interest, you know, like they're doing like their sales pitches or whatever. The, you play it in one of the scenes you play as Kara, the girl, Android, and that is where you were sent to the lower income area of Detroit. And it's such a stark difference. It's like night and day.

And I believe people, this story was talked about a long time ago dealing with, you abuse. Yeah, Paris Game Week. Paris Games Week. So was that shown off? Was that whole... Okay. So Karas seen is that.

Okay. But you do encounter really cool moments as an Android where, you know, as an Android, you are stuck to doing your own thing. But when you're told not to do a certain thing and you want to break that rule, there's a sort of a cool visualization of it of like this fake red wall is in front. front of you and like you punch the wall and you break it. Sort of like you're breaking through being commanded. Sure. You know, you're no longer like this slave or whatever. So my question is then for the Carras scene that we're talking about the abuse one, right?

From what we from the Paris Games Week demo that we saw and all that jazz. Older man, younger girl, Kara knows something's up and has the ability to interfere if she wants to or not or all that jazz. How did you feel it was handled? Because that was the big concern, right? When people went, it originally popped up in just the Paris Games Week teaser, trailer fashion. People are like, whoa, that seemed like heavy duty stuff, and are they using

it, are they using the abuse is just a plot piece? I wouldn't trust David Cage with that. These are like the op-eds. Then I know people played it after the fact at Paris Games working. We're like, okay, you know what? It plays better than, did you come away? It absolutely plays better than, I guess the Vibos putting out. It could be represented as it. Right.

And there are some really cool things where if you don't explore enough, you are unable to unlock certain things that give you different results, right? Or different conversation points as well. Because you might talk to a character and you'll see these two conversations are locked off, sort of like Paragon

sort of renegades up a mass effect, right? And unless you were able to see or do certain things, then that prevents you from saying or doing other things in the future. The cool, I think the coolest takeaway from me was there was like four there was four gaming setups at this event. And I was on the far end on the far left. And I happened to look my right at one point and I saw

that the woman next to me playing was ahead of me in the level and I thought fuck I just spoiled like god damn it why did I look now I know this and that and my scenario could not have played out more differently than hers and seeing all the different scenarios on everybody's screens because then at that point after

I got there knowing that mine was so different then I was more sort of encouraged to look around and see holy shit I didn't know you could do that wow you could enter that I didn't know that and now there's this whole narrative based around this thing. Holy shit.

Like, it is so impressive. Every time you finish the level, you see the tree of all the decisions you didn't make. It doesn't show you what the decisions were that you decided not to make, but it shows you, oh, if you would have picked this,

it would have given you four more options, and that leads into three more options. And it's so impressive. It's like, I just can't imagine how the thought process that goes into writing this sort of thing. Sure, yeah, I can't imagine.

And just that, you know, how much it cost, like technically. It's just... For stuff that people won't even see, which is the weird as far. It's ridiculous, yeah. My next question then is a fan of this and one of the concerns

I think people had looking at it. Having these three protagonists you play as, did you feel, but you're talking about, we're talking about levels, right? Did it feel like there was a hard stop between these levels, or did it feel like it transitioned you into the next one flawless?

Like, were you being told the story or is it too early to tell? Or was there, did you feel like these were just different vignettes I'm getting in people's lives that like you're too obvious? hours five hours from now are going to somehow intersect. You could definitely see where they were about to intersect, at least in my opinion.

But they are like maybe, they were like maybe 20 to 30 minute chunks of each character. Okay. And so you're doing this as this character. And it may not have a super like awesome ending, but it's just like it gets to the next story. Right. And then you jump back to that character that you just finished maybe an hour. or later, you know, like... Sure, sure.

They're just little snippets of their lives, sort of world building at the beginning, and then shit pops off towards the end of the demo, and that's where it's like, I want to keep playing it and see how this unfold and sort of tell this story the way I would want, you know?

It's so goddamn cool, man. Do you think that when you play through it, you're going to be motivated to play through it again in a different way? I did that with heavy rain. With heavy rain, I like... I got my ending, and then I wanted to get the other six endings. just to see how the cutscenes ended up.

Like, I'm so interested in that stuff. And also, and I think they do a great job with characters because Clancy Brown plays sort of this detective, who, you know, your old sort of grizzled cop friend or whatever. And as Connor, you seek him out because you need his help. Sure. He's at a bar drinking, you know. As they do, these humanoid, these meat bags.

Yeah, exactly. Meat bags, man. But they do a really cool job with the world building. I was telling Kevin this yesterday. There are these, again, these digital magazines sort of around the world. And this doesn't have to do anything with the story. It's just cool that they care this much to tell the story about the world that they're currently living in in 2038. Where one of the magazines was like talking about how this new, it's similar to Elon Musk's Hyperloop or whatever.

where they built this brand new underground travel thing or whatever. And it goes from L.A. to New York. And how that's changing how people work and live because people are choosing to work in New York and get paid a certain amount and live in L.A. where it's cheaper. And how that's like fucking with the housing market and stuff like that. They talk about how there's a football player that's trying to be an Android.

Or there's an Android that's like a quarterback. and like how that's like cheating and all this stuff it's really fucking cool and then there's another article that I didn't really I didn't get to but it was sort of reaching on the subject of like a

place where you go have sex with women like escorts sort of but they're robots and so and like it's like the reviews are in like Android sex is better than it's like the reviews are in Android sex but better than normal sex yeah it's just like it's cool

the way they sort of are building this world that you may... Actually, dealing with the problems you'd start to think about it if it's all happened. I don't know, it's just really impressive and I can't wait to play more, man. I'm really stoked about it. When's it coming out? May 28th? I thought it was... Is it 28th? I thought it was 25th? You know better than me probably not.

No, no. The Bowling Game Journalist is that. Number one game, you know, he just plays him ahead of release so he doesn't matter. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's a matter of name. That's trending three really good. Oh, wow. Death Stranding three is coming along already. That's all I see. Hold on. I got the information for you here.

May 25th. I was right. Friday, May 25th. Starting on, this was in the embargo sheet, so I assume it's fun. Starting on Tuesday, April 24th,

you can download the hostage scene and play yourself. Oh. That's a demo or whatever you want to call it. That's cool. That's a good idea. Yeah, demo is featuring the hostage scene

becomes available on the PS store starting Tuesday, May 24th. Yeah, April 24th. There are different story threads I want to talk about, but I don't want people to do. I'm glad you're not ruining it. But here, Mike,

does it feel like even though they're coming together at the end? It's telling you a cohesive story, right? And do the three and droids, do their motivations and places in the whole story so far feel different enough? Because like my read on it, right, was always that Kara was the android who, as we saw in the demo from Paris Games Week, is the one who's about to break her programming, right? Marcus is way outside already. He's leading the revolution. and then Connor, the cop, is still not where even Kara is. He's been on the job and knows what he's doing

and then I'm sure he'll start to see this but he's probably has to investigate it as an Android or something like that. Is that fair in terms of where they're placed in the story but not without spoiling, which I know sucks. Chronologically, like stuff has been shown completely out of order. Okay. So as I played it, I was like, oh, okay, I didn't know that I just assume based on all the previews we've seen

that this and this was a thing, you know? I don't want to, yeah, I don't want to say shit about it. I'm glad you are, but you liked it a lot. He came away all right with you. Acting is the acting good? Are we getting any of the origami killer crap? No, no, no. Acting's great.

My problem with it is like it does seem at some points to be like where some of the scenes seem a little too over dramatic where like they, obviously you have to create drama and you have to create tension and whatever. But there are some scenes where just like a little cheesy for me. Was there any scenes that, you played through that you're like, oh, I kind of got the Dudd version of this storyline. Oh, interesting.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, not Dudd, but like the bad part of the storyline. Oh, so you weren't bored. No, no, not that I didn't enjoy it, but like, I fucked it up. I fucked it up. I was like, God day. I was really bummed out about it.

That's good. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited, man. I can't wait. Yeah, I'm happy you liked it because this one was like a little iffy. Like, I was one of my games of the show at E3, I think the last two years. Yeah. And it looks really cool, but like there was always that worry of like, this could get fucking

fucked up at any. I think it's like it's going to be a super cool game to play with a significant other or best friend just sitting down. I'm excited about it. Gia is going to really like this. Yeah, it's going to, it's really cool because the, again, like these, the different outcomes are just so impressive. Again, my, I think it's like kind of cool in the industry to be the person who like down talks, like walking simulators or like, oh, like, why not just make a movie if you're going to go to that length of like motion capture? Like, I don't know, there's like, I like your choice of there's just like edgy

sort of like vibe that some people talk shit. Yeah, people like to talk shit about like heavy rain or David Cage like games, you know? Yeah. Even just walking similar. It's like, oh, there's no skill involved, just make a movie or whatever. I don't know. These this is

clearly crafting a story that could change moments to moment and like that's a movie can't do that. So, so fuck off. Are you going to play the whole thing, Tim? Oh yeah. I mean, I hope it's good. This is definitely on my list of it. It looks great. At E3 last year I saw

Behind closed doors demo I didn't get to play but just watching the three I got to play outside but that was the same thing We've done many times yeah But the I got to see the scene of him Starting the Revolution like being outside I think you saw as well

Saw that E3 yeah And this showed us I remember we were talking about like totally different versions of how that can go I'm like this is great Yeah it starts off super slow And But a pacing choice right Yeah, I think it's just more of a world-building choice, like, just to show... This is what a normal android life is like right now.

Show the mechanics, show how the world is to get you to concentrate. I think more on the sets and what's going around you, like, walking from point A to point B, and there are Android protesters in the street, and they throw shit at you, and they get pissed off at you, and then... You have the option that pops up is like, ignore or use your laser eyes on them. A cop it essentially intervenes, and the guy's like... this motherfucker's gonna be taking your job in a few years telling the cop. Yeah, he's like, all right, leave him, go. I'll have to find you if you damage it.

You know, like, it's more about setting the stage and giving you... That's cool. Yeah, like, letting you know what this world is about before really getting into story stuff. I really like the magazine stuff and like even just in two hours are you playing. Like, how much random cool shit of the world that you even know. Like, that sounds really dope. It's really interesting. And I don't remember a shit.

Right? Like, the Android thing I feel has been done a lot in like this kind of like, That's real. Like, do they have rights and all this? Like, we've seen those stories, but I feel like I like that this is attacking it from all angles. And they're really getting into, okay, it is the new distant future. Like, less than Blade Runner, you know? Right.

And then when we look at things like Walking Dead and Zombies, it's like zombies have been done so many times. But like, I like Walking Dead because I feel like it, especially in the earlier days and, like, comic wise, it explored a lot of the things. It's like, okay, we've seen a lot of this before, but it's all in one thing. And it's not just a zombie movie that's over. You know? Yeah. 28 days later. Awesome.

You get a sequel in a couple of years. Cool. Walking Dead could be like, we're living in this world and it's going to just keep going on. And I feel like Detroit, as a big open video game, there's a lot of opportunities for it to tackle Android issues

from a bunch of different perspectives, especially in a story-based game where things can go differently. I like that it's just, it's different to me because most Android-based games are, you know, the AI goes crazy and blah. But this one is like,

Androids are hated by a lot of people in society and like people who can't afford them hate them and people without jobs hate them even more. And because I don't think we've really seen the robots are taking our livelihoods from us. Like it's normally been like the AI just goes bad and it's tight, you know, like. Ultron shit. Yeah, we normally just see that sort of thing. Yeah, it sounds like there's two distinct threads here, right? Of yeah, our side of it or the human side of it of like robots are taking our jobs,

but then rich people really like them as servants. Yeah. But then the Android side. now of we're smart enough that we feel like we're humans and we deserve rights, I just like that. And I doubt it's, I don't know, but I doubt it's going to be laser eyes and we're like, you know, the uprising is us overthrowing and trying to eradicate even though I'm sure there'll be some that say there's the one thing he's not saying. It's like, there was a real crazy turn 30 minutes saying. They just all fucking shooting in the sky and fly out.

Yeah. Any other closing thoughts on Detroit? How was the trophy list? You get in there, you get in there, you get in some trophies. Pops a lot of trophies. Did you really? I did pop a lot of trophies. That's what I like to. see, man. Yeah, yeah, you do at the end of every, like, little scenario not only do you see, obviously, what you did, but I think you pop a show if you, like, after every scenario, it felt like. I felt like that happened a lot in heavy

rain, right? It was like you got one or the other, maybe there's multiple outcomes, but that's not how it. It's so cool, man. I'm excited, man. I can't wait. I hope it's received as well as I want it to be. Yeah. Well, I hope it holds together, right? Like two hours is right, but I hope the whole story and narrative and everything,

they nail what they're going for? Do you feel like there's a lot more game there? Do you feel like you're just scratching the surface of it. Yeah. Because like Revolution stuff didn't even really get close. Like the stuff from the E3 demo did not even like get close to that.

Does it hold up visually? Fuck yes. Oh my God. Because everything I've seen. Again, though, we were playing on giant ass Sony 4K TVs that are super top of the line. PS4 pros, I'm sure.

PS4 pros. David Cage was giving you back back while you play. Yeah, checker box. David Cage is just sitting there and he was like, do you want to interview me later? I was like, ah, we talk later, man. I'll talk to you like. Yeah, can't wait, man

Can't wait, excellent And again, visually, it's just fucking So stunning. Yeah Every time they, like, most of the close-up shots Of the humans or the android, it's like Super close up, we want you to see all these fucking pores Look at them pores, look at these pores, yeah Look at how fucking wet his, like the little thing in your eyeball

You know, the little... Yeah, that weird little... Yeah, the pink... Oh, oh, yeah, okay, yeah Yeah, the duct, yeah, look how fucking wet this looks, you know Jesus Christ I love a good wet duck Ladies and gentlemen, stay tuned for Greg Miller's interviews. Thank you very much, Andy.

No problem, guys. Number one games journalist. No problem. You know, man. I'm always here for you guys. For all the scoops following at Maxim Cortez. Yeah, guys. Let me just say,

Overwatch 4. Not bad. Oh, wow. Yeah. Promising. Yeah. What interview we're starting with? We're going to start with.

You know what? I'm going to do it the way I did on Patreon. So let's start with where the water tastes like wine. That sounds great. This episode of Kind of Funny Games cast is brought to you by HM's 66% of men lose their hair by age 35. Do you know that, Greg? I did know that. I've read this at a few times.

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When this came through that we're going to do this, like, what is this game? And I jumped in and I'm not lying to you. I jumped in. I was like, what is this puzzle quest? Oh, it's really puzzle. Oh, it's from D.3. This is the puzzle quest that I loved on PSP,

but now it has Marvel superheroes. I wrote back to Rooster Tee that in our people. I was just like, this is awesome. Thank you for bringing my attention. Every time Kovic tweeted about it, I never knew it was a legit. It was puzzle quest. It's puzzle quest.

Where's puzzle quest men? It's been hot on my phone with a Marvel skin. I unlocked Spider-Man. I was super excited. Yeah, I've really been playing. And it's free. So that's fun. More than 150 characters. Players can compete in versus tournaments. Infinity War arrives in the game, like I just said. And yeah, special offer for new players. You get a free three-star Thanos. Damn, dude, three-star Thanos. Yeah, dude, you don't want to mess with one of the three-star Thanos. No. Look at the heck he's doing his moves to Dr. Doom. Not joking. Not going to work out. That's awesome, dude. Very cool. So now, you want to check in with Yoneman? Yeah.

As I live and breathe! Yoneman, how are you, sir? I'm doing well, how are you doing? Great. This is insane that you're here. It is kind of actually, yeah, yeah. So, like, as I said in the lead-in, as I will, we have recorded that part, but as I said in the lead in on games cast, right, this spawns from Games Daily. Your story came up on Games Daily, but where the water tastes like wine, and that you

think these games can't be made, which we'll get to anymore. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. And it was one of those things. I don't know and I should reach out to him. And then there's Pat off camera, your PR dude, who is just like, oh, hey, I watch the show and do you want him to come by? He's local.

I was like, oh, yeah, I would very, very much like that. So Games Daily people, as I said earlier, you might remember this story that came through from games industry. dot biz a while back, Brendan Sinclair, and it was all about you, right? And the quote of, basically, I'm not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current climate or market, talking about the reaction, the critical success but maybe commercial struggles of where the water tastes like wine.

So I want to walk it in because sadly, not everyone watching and listening right now watches and listens to kind of funny games daily. What is where the water tastes like wine? Right. So where the water tastes like wine is a narrative game. It's about traveling and telling stories.

You sort of wander the Great Depression in the United States. You meet these different characters and you trade stories with them to learn about. their lives and one of the cool things about the game is that we got a different person to write every character right there so it's like this collection of short stories in video game form basically so that's all cool it's also got amazing art and you know this fantastic cast of voice actors dafanoi.com it's got a whole

yep exactly it's got a whole lot of things going on there and that's the thing is there's a whole lot of things and So the article is based on this blog post you put up, right? Or postmortem you put up on medium, was that right? Yep, yeah, that's right. Where you were talking about, I liked how you went back and updated it because it got, I assume this got way more attention than you expected it to. Yeah, yeah, way more.

Like I was, you know, I don't know. I was writing it. All my other team members did post mortems. And I was like, yeah, I'll do one too talking about it. And then, yeah, just blew up. I'm sure mine won't be the one that gets all the headlines and explodes and becomes exactly what you want. Yeah.

So where the water tastes like wine is one that my audience had been telling me about forever. And I think Pat and like just people in general, I'm just like, oh, Greg, you love narrative games like this. You loved gone home and you, you, you know, one of the co-founders of Fuller. Yeah, that's right, yeah. It was on my radar in that respect, let alone what gets talked about in the games industry. Dot biz article, right, the fact that makes this debut a game awards in 2015. Yep, that's right.

You know, gets all sorts of awards and first looks and IGN's talking about and all these amazing things are happening for it. How long had you worked on the game? About four years, a little less than that, but yeah, so it was a long time. Sure. And then when did it come out? It came out February, end of February of this year. Okay.

And so that's what are we, when you write this postmorph on your end, are you writing it with a month under your belt? Yeah, it was a month under. Okay, okay. And what is the take? What was the takeaway? What do you mean by basically? I'm not sure that games like this one can continue to be made in the current market. So that's definitely like I was probably being a little bit too simplistic there.

On the internet. Talking about the entire video game industry. Oh, no, really? You're soon? But basically I was looking at games, especially single player narrative heavy games, like this one, especially ones that try and maybe push some boundaries and are experimental in some ways. Sure. You know, because we were trying to do a lot of different things, different news things.

You know, we were not only trying to, you know, do a narrative of game without any, like, combat, or, you know, traditional, not a lot of traditional mechanics. We also were trying this, you know, short story approach. We, it's a different setting. We had kind of all this, all this innovative stuff, let's say, right? And innovative's cool, but it's hard to wrap your head around and get people stoked for, right? It is a hard thing to sell.

Like, I definitely, you know, as far as like what shoebox to put this in, like, when people ask me, like, oh, what genre is this game? You know, the best I can say is, oh, it's a narrative game. Like, if you like stories, if you like reading, if you like things like that, then you're probably going to love this game. It's all about stories and stuff. But I can't tell you, like, it's an RPG. It's a, you know, platform or any of that sort of stuff.

Like, Steam does not have a drop-down for categorizing this game, right? That makes it a little tricky. Sure. But, yeah, in general, like, especially lately, I feel like we've been, we've been seeing a lot of games come out like this, and they're not necessarily doing as well as we might expect commercially, you know. And that's going to be tough for people making this kind of game in the future, right? And I don't think, I think that, you know, amazing games will continue to be made at all sorts of levels,

like especially if you look at the kind of personal games, the stuff that goes up on itchio, Like the thing that's like a person making their vision, telling their personal story, that is, that's going to continue to happen. And that's amazing. Like I love that that's happening, right? Sure. And we're still going to get the AAA games out there. And we're going to get the even the triple I sort of things, you know, in the Valley of the Gods, the new one from the Firewatch folks to Campo. You know, that is being made.

It's going to be amazing, I'm sure. And I hope it'll do well. That's interesting. I haven't heard anybody say triple I yet. So that's like AAA. Is that what you're calling triple A&B? I like that a lot. I'm going to start to steal them.

I'm going to step up. Okay. Okay. Okay. But I guess what I'm worried about is trying to make this kind of game on a commercial level, right? Because like we're the water tastes like wine. I could have made this on a lot simpler of a way, like for less money and, you know, everything like that. We wouldn't, however, have, like, the voice cast that we've got.

Sure. We didn't mention this previously, but, like, Sting is in the video game, right? And, like, even Dave Fanoi, you know, can't happen at no budget. Oh, sure, yeah. You know, things like that can't really go on. So you can make a version of this game, but whether you could make this game to the level of polish that it had as a commercial prospect worries me a little bit. And, you know, I might be totally wrong, right? Like I'm looking at the success of my game, some other narrative games in the past that I, that I know about that haven't done as well as expected, stuff like that.

You know, but at the end of the day, it's anecdotal, right? Well, I mean, I don't think you're, I don't think you're wrong. And that was the thing. When we talked to, I don't know if you ever caught it with the discussion we had on our show about it. Where it wasn't that I thought you were wrong. If anything, I just wonder if you're ahead of the curve. You know what I mean? If it's one of those, like I feel everything you're saying, awesome voice cast.

you're doing something different where there's more than a dozen riders working on. There's all these awesome things on this game that make it sound rad. But are we at a point yet where indies, whether they be triple I or they be just irregular indies, are able to get that amount of reach to make that work. And that's where it is, is I think you look down as we've seen the indie movement grow and go from, all right, cool, I'm making any indie game means you're making an 8-bit platformer. To now you can make whatever it is. It's going to look like whatever it is.

That's only going to continue to go where five years from now. 10 years from now, no one's even going to think about indie that way. It's going to be like how quaint it is when I think back to 2007 or 2008, we'd be like, oh, it's good for a downloadable game. You know what I mean? I'm, it's not a different rubric because it's not a full-fledged game. I feel like once these walls break down and people understand where they can go to find games and that there are these awesome things and that even the avenues break down because you're

PC only, right? Yeah, PC MacLEC. Yeah, yeah, but not to like the consoles. Like, I'm a console plea, right? So, like, that's the reason I haven't played the game. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. I don't want to drag my PC around. I do all this different stuff like that. I feel like, because that stuff fades away. It's maybe there is a market for it. But right now you're too early to it. That could be the case. I mean, on the other hand, though, like gone home, you know, which is similarly,

narratively experimental. Sure. You know, at the time that it was made, there was almost nothing else like it. You know, it was really cutting edge. It was, in a lot of ways, lower fidelity than, you know, this game. Absolutely. When we made that, it was on a shoestring budget. We had, you know, like two voice actors and, you know, some, some licensed music. And that was like, that was it. We spent almost nothing on that game. And it did really well. And I think, you know, part of that is the reach that you're talking about, right? Sure. Back in the day when that came out, it was, there were fewer games coming out is part of it, right? I don't want to blame it all on that. But there's also,

I think the way and the places that we talk about games have changed since then. So back then, you know, it got, it had a similar path. Like we had a lot of early attention. A lot of people were excited about it. A lot of press coverage, award nominations, all that good stuff. And when it came out, that translated into financial success, right? However, these days, one of the things I talked about in the post-mortem is that, like, I feel like this game got enough attention.

It got coverage from all the major sites, you know. It got all the places that you would be, you would love to get coverage. Including places like the Washington Post, you know, we got mainstream media coverage. Which is rare for an indie game, incredibly rare. Yeah. And that didn't translate into what I would expect commercial success-wise. And like, I want to be real careful here because I'm not claiming that this game is entitled to a certain number of sales. or anything like that, right?

Like, that's silly. Like, if it's not a game that people connect with or whatever, like, they shouldn't buy it. Yeah, that's fine. But given the amount of, yeah, again, attention

and the spotlight that's on the game and the amount of conversation around it going in, no one expected the outcome that we saw, I guess, is a thing. So from your experience, as somebody who, you know,

Fulbright gone home, you're there. You see all this stuff happen. You see it start to happen in a similar vein with where the water tastes like wine in terms of coverage, people talking about it, blah. Are you sitting there getting ready to launch the game? I'm like, man, it's going to be gone home again or it has the chance to be gone home again. No, not at all. I mean, I think that actually a few years ago, like maybe 2016 or so, you know, when the Indipocalypse articles started coming out and all that stuff started happening, like I began to realize that, you know, okay, well, this is not at all.

there isn't a lot of financial security. No matter how good of a game you make, you are not, you can't rely on it doing well commercially. And honestly, that's the attitude I had going into the launch here. I wasn't really, I mean, I was definitely surprised by the actual numbers, but I was definitely prepared for, you know, the commercial realities of the industry in 2018, let's say, you know, sort of thing. So, but I think that that's a, it's a story not just of now, but of the past couple years about what has been changing in the indie market and how difficult it is as an indie to make it.

And I think that part of it isn't just the idea that, you know, your game may or may not do well. And as you were talking about, like, new avenues open up and people learn about this stuff and things like that. It's being able to survive and also being able to bet the amount of money that. that it takes to get to that point even, right? Like, if you had come to me, I mean, coming off of Gone Home, funding a game like this seemed like a really good bet, right? It was like a single-player narrative game, experimental, looking at how Gone Home did and looking at this,

I was like, yes, let's do it. But if you'd come to me in 2016 and said, hey, will you give me $100,000 to make an indie narrative single-player game that I'm going to sell on Steam? Yeah. I would be like, I'm not investing in that project. You know, no way, right? Like that's never, you know.

And so I think that it's not just the ability to succeed that needs to be there. It's also like the amount of acceptable risk that not only like people will self-fund or, you know, take the number of years it takes to finish their project, but also that publishers will be out there willing to give these projects money and the stuff they need to succeed, right? How does that work for where the water tastes like wine? Was it you come off and gone home and you're like, I'm going to do this all on my own and sell? Did you get publishers? Do you have investors? How did it all work for you guys? So yeah, coming off of Gone Home, when I actually started the studio, before I even announced what the game was going to be, this is what 2014 was like is I had three or four major publishers calling me up saying like, hey, what are you doing and can we be involved with that?

And I said, no, you know, I'd rather hold on to this game and, you know, I'm going to self-fund it and everything like that and do that. However, later on, you know, as I began to see everything and then as my own budget for supporting the game began to run down, I realized that, you know, the game would benefit from a lot of things like voice acting and, you know, just basically finishing funds, let's say. And that's when I found, I connected with the Good Shepherd and we sort of partnered up to make it what it actually turned into, which is a lot better than what it would have been. Sure. that's what you're saying too, right? Of like you could have done this game a different way. You could have not done this.

You could have ended it that way. And I mean, because that's what I'm, I was reading, I felt like more into the quote by the end of the conversation we were having, right? I don't think they can be made in this climate like this. Was the fact that, do you think it was that at some point, not that you overextend, but the game scope over extends beyond what would be profitable

or something to that effect, right? Where if Good Shepherd hadn't come along, Or even if just you were like, I don't want to do the voice acting, I don't want to do the polish, I want to put out this indie game. Would the expectation for that kind of game been met by the success it saw

rather than when you go in, you get Sting and Dave Fanoi, the two biggest names in voice acting. And you have them on this project, suddenly the budget skews or expectations skew. Yeah, I mean, I think that even for the game that this would have been, without the voice acting

and everything like that the results would have been disappointing but it certainly would have been closer to expectations I guess okay yeah what do you think then is

are you seeing you talk to Indies in such a different way than I do I see them and I play their games and I talk to them that way but like is this something everyone's bracing themselves for are they are they do they understand the market and where they are now.

Because when I go to Pax and I pop around, right? Like, it's awesome. And Pax's amazing. There's a million great indie games. I walk around and I walk around the megabooth and I don't stop until I see the game that speaks to me. Because I know that gold farm from IGN and somebody from GameSpot and somebody from just a YouTube channel, they'll walk by and the other games will connect with them. But I'm the one who's going to connect to Pig Eat Bowl or whatever. And I got to sit, you know what I mean?

I want to sit down and play it. Yeah. I feel like that's awesome. But I also feel it's a shift from how it used to be where. when I was, you know, Pax East 2008, nine, whatever the first one was when I went with IGN, you go there and it was, let's play everything. And you play everything and you come back and you report on everything because that was doable. And there was, there was a, it's similar to how in 2007, I felt like you could play every game period or big game that came out, every game of consequence

that came out. I could play at IGN and have something to say in a podcast about it. But nowadays, of course not. There's no, there's 30 games a day coming on all these different platforms and lots of them are awesome. Are Indies, and the people you're talking about, your contemporaries, peers, are they understanding of that? Do they set their expectations on that? I hope so. I mean, that's part of the reason that I wrote the post-mortem like I did. Like, it wasn't meant to be, I don't know, a screed or, you know, a rant or a cry for help or anything like that.

It was more meant to be like, hey, just so you know, even. even if everything goes well for you, it might not work out, right? Because I think that it's easy as an indie to look at the way things are in the market and say and find reasons why it won't happen to you, right? You can look at games that come out and you can be like, oh, well, you know, that's fine, but we've, you know, we've won awards. Oh, that's fine, but we're going to get covered by the press. You know, we've gotten all this all this tension already, you know, things like that.

Oh, that's, you know, that's fine, but we're making a different kind of game. You know, that sort of stuff. And you can look at the games that come out and don't do well and sort of like rationalize to yourself why yours will be different. And I mean, I'm sure that the same thing is possible with what I wrote and everything like that. But I did just want to say like, hey, look at how everything can go really well for you. And sometimes it doesn't meet expectations. And like, again, that's mainly like the audience for the post-mortem was my fellow. indie developers.

Of course. It's not, it's not meant for other people look at. But for those people, I wanted them to just look at that and take a second to think like, okay, what if everything goes our way? You know, what if we get the coin flip heads up for, you know, six months straight, but then we just don't do well after all, you know? Yeah. And I think that there's ways to prepare for that.

I mean, like I said, you know, I approached Good Shepherd looking for, for help finishing the game because I wasn't willing to like, you know, mortgage the house I don't actually have, but, you know, like, spend down the last of my savings figure out my 401K, you know, all that stuff to make this. I know this is going to be the hit. This is going to be the thing. I need to make it happen. Exactly.

And like I'm, you know, not, I'm not, you know, begging for spare change on the streets of San Francisco right now because I had a semi-realistic idea of what the commercial outcome might be from this. So I guess, and I think that this is happening in indie circles, I am definitely seeing a lot of people say this sort of thing. I don't know whether it's being heard or not, but like the takeaway that I kind of want there is like, don't do that. You know, don't bet it all. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you read about like the Cuphead folks, you know, they talk about, like, oh, mortgage our home.

Hey, we like the roulette wheel landed right and look where we're doing great now. And I just like don't don't do that. Don't go to Vegas, you know? Like don't bet at all, I guess would be one thing I'd want to say. The one thing I've noticed, and I want you to correct me, obviously, if I'm wrong, that you're not saying when you're talking about, hey, we had everything lined up the way you'd expect it to be rewards and mainstream coverage and all this. Did you have evangelists? Did you have Let's players or personalities?

And this is not me looking for a pat on the back about gone home. But like gone home, right? I was far from the first person there. but I was super vocal and I played it and I was fucking giving away the game and I didn't shut up about it for the rest of my career. Did you see that?

Did you miss that? Is that something you look back? I'm like, ooh, I wish I had something like that. You know, it's really hard to know whether that's happening or not when you're in the thick of it, right? Because like, excuse me, as we came up on the release of Gone Home,

there were definitely a lot of people mostly in the mainstream press who were like, wow, this is new, this is exciting. We are, we're super into what these folks are doing. Yeah. Like, this is going to be cool, everybody, right? Nowadays, though, like, we still had that on where the watches is going. There were a lot of people who are like, this is going to be something special.

This is something we've never seen before. This is, you know, it's so important. Like, we had a lot of people write articles about how it's like their game of the show at this place, how it's going to, you know, this important game that's going to change whatever. You know, I had like college. professors emailing me saying, can I teach your game in my literature class? Like stuff like that.

Like it's really, really great, right? Yeah. And so it's very hard to figure out, though, whether that is making a difference on the wider scope of things, right? Sure.

And you only really get to hear about how things are going with streamers and with YouTubers and, you know, like the kind of more, I don't know, of this era evangelists and things. Personality is whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, like when you're very close to release, you know, because you only give out those keys like a week or so before release. So it's really hard to gauge, like, how popular is this really? If you have one or, you know, even if you have like five, 10 people like all shouting your praises, is anyone hearing that? I guess is the question. Yeah, that's a huge struggle, right? That's a huge part. Question I have for you based on, like we said, this whole, you know, postmorp kind of blew up in a way you can expect.

have you seen an uptick in sales based on that? Not there has been a little bit definitely But not like a huge amount Not an appreciable You're not like it's all turned around Oh it's launch day again Postmore right Postmore on the post mort

Right Write a post more if things don't go well That's what happened Yeah But one thing that I have I mean I've gotten a lot of advice From people both unsolicited advice from branders Yeah the internet

They're involved They're gonna tell you how to market the game And I'm part of the problem I guess. People, and from people who know a bit better, you know, fellow developers and things like that. And one thing that gives me a little bit of heart is that a lot of people have said, you know, it used to be all about launch day on video games, right? It used to be all about launch day, launch month.

And if that didn't perform well, then, you know, too bad. That was your one chance and you're done. Yeah. Right. But these days, it seems like things are a little bit smoother, maybe. Like you don't get as much of a launch as you used to. but you can still get attention down the road. Like, that's not your one shot.

Well, I feel like that was the even the story's gone home. Where it was that I had totally missed coverage leading up to it. And it wasn't until the review started popping that I was like, oh, this game seems like it's reviewing well. I don't really know what it was. And I think it was just a, Justin McElroy who was just like, hey, if you're reading this, play gone home and don't read anything about it. I was like, oh, fuck, I got to play it.

And I did. And then, you know, on and on and then there's steam sales. And then it gets ported over to different things. and there's different platforms involved. Yeah, yeah. But still, if you look at Gone Home, I mean, I don't know, I haven't looked at the numbers in a long time,

but I know that, like, our launch was definitely still the biggest, the biggest thing. And that, like, you know, that was the spike. And if you've, a lot of people at the time were posting, like, you can't post numbers from Steam,

but you can post, like, your graph or whatever. And what it looks like is this gigantic spike at the beginning. And then, like, you know, tapers off into the line. Yeah, yeah. And I, I think that that's still large. But luckily, again, we're seeing a little bit of maybe that evening out and that games have a longer life now.

I don't know exactly why that that is, but it's a good thing, honestly, for games like this and for other games. The only problem is that, like, if you release a game like this, you still have to be prepared to survive for a while as a studio or as a game developer without necessarily that launch day payoff, right? So, like, if you work for four years on something, that's a long time. to go without getting paid for it already, right? And then if you have to like wait another six months, year or whatever for like it to turn around. Yeah. And then it's like, this is, this is getting, getting scary. Like going six years without a paycheck is a is not something ever.

I can't go two weeks. Right. I get terrified. Yeah. So, so that's part of it too is that I don't think that there's no way in which these games can ever be successful. But like when you limit. this kind of game to the people who can afford to go for four or five years without getting paid,

that's a very small group of game makers that you've got there, right? And that speaks to your quote, right? I think that definitely speaks to your quote in terms of like somebody who wants to make this caliber of game, somebody who wants to put this kind of thing in and make a more triple I game. I'm taking it, dude. Like you need that kind of buffer. You need that because that is the financial reality of everything that's happening. Yeah, exactly.

Right. So then, and I'm not trying to pin you down. I swear. No, hours. Are there, is there talk with this of then other platforms, right? Like everything that goes to this Nintendo Switch apparently turns into the golden egg and just explodes. There you go. Yeah.

I mean, I think that that's a little bit, the bias in the discussion is, you know, towards successes. Like people, you're a lot more willing to speak out if you're a developer who's like, I just made my fortune on the Nintendo Switch. Everyone should come here and dig gold with me, you know, sort of thing. And if that doesn't happen, right? And so I have heard stories of games where that doesn't turn around. But to get back to your actual question, I'm not dodging it, I swear. No, I don't know.

Yeah, we're hoping to do additional platforms and things like that, right? Yeah. The problem is, again, that requires more time and more money. And yeah, it's like, you know, it's tough, especially when you've rolled the dice and it hasn't worked out once already, it's even tougher to double down on that and say, you know, it's doing it. I can only imagine being in your shoes and going to publisher X or in your case, Good Shepherd, and be like, hey guys, all right, I know I said to do what we thought it would, but trust me on Switch on PlayStation on Xbox. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just step up and put up the money one more time. Yeah, exactly. So, but we are, you know, like, we do have plans for the future of the game. Like, platforms are part of it. We're doing, I updated the post-mortem with this. I don't know if you saw it, but we're doing a new content release in May where we're going to bring out more of the stories for the game. we're adding some additional writers, like we're doing some really cool stuff going forward.

So, like, it's not, it's absolutely not the end of the road, right? Yeah. I never meant the post to say, like, one of the things that's really made me sad about writing that post-mortem is that certain outlets picked it up and their headlines were, this game is a failure, right? And that is the farthest thing from what I feel, right? and so there is no sense in which we believe that to be true or that we are like, you know, walking away from the explosion, you know, without looking back sort of thing. It's much more of a...

Why do this? This is the reality now. Yeah. And how do we support the game in the current reality in a way that makes sense, right? And again, the postmortem is, you know, out there to let people know, like, hey, this is this is scary. Like, not just for you, if you're an indie developer,

you should think about these things, but also let's think about what the industry might look like if games like this weren't able to be made anymore. Like, if you could only make a certain narrow genre of game, or if you could make experimental games, but they had to be low-budget experimental games. Like, what is that, I don't like that reality.

I don't know if anyone else does either. No, I don't know what to do about it. I mean, hats off to you for it, because this is what I've been talking about, whether I'm talking about a AAA or a triple I or just regular. And is the fact of, I love where games are at and where the industry is at, and the fact that we can have these frank discussions out in the open. That this doesn't need to be you giving a GDC speech off the beaten path and only certain people see it.

Everyone can out there and have this conversation and talk about the reality is what it's like to make a game. Because I feel like that's what the disconnect is between you, the developer, and us, the gamer. where it is the fact that if I am just buying the game off the shelf or I'm only buying out of the bargain bin, I don't understand what the financial reality is for developer X trying to make this and get into publisher. And then when other people are looking at your game now, I'd be like, oh, it sounds awesome. And I'm, I'm chief of my name. And by the way, fuck you.

I'm going to buy it on PC and play it on a PC. But it's that thing now because you sold it. It sounds like a great game. But it is a thing of like, when I see it. And people are like, you love this game. Is it on any of the consoles I own? No, I'll wait. Well, I can't sit there and wait on the sideline.

if it's never, if your livelihood has happened, it depends on it, let alone the viability for a publisher to say, yes, we will put it out to everyone else. Right, absolutely. And I think, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't know that an appeal to gamers to say, like, hey, support the kind of thing you want to see in the world as much as you can is going to change anything because this is like a systemic thing. But that is definitely important. It's like, if you like something, like just think about how more of that gets,

made and it's and I'm not trying to like I do this too like I'm not trying to shame anything or anyone or anything like that but like buying games in bundles is not going to support developers forever like buying you know waiting for the steam sale and stuff like that oh wait for to be on PlayStation Plus or Xbox goal right yeah exactly like that stuff is totally valid and again like I do it as a consumer but like as a developer it's tough to make a money make make a living in a world where that is the way that these things happen you know and Yeah, again, I don't, I want to tell anyone, like, you have to spend the full price of the game every time you see something you like or, or anything like that. Just, it's a tough world out there.

Like, it's hard to make games. It's hard, even if everything goes well. Yeah. So then what is the next step for you? Of course, the, the, I want to say vlog, because I'm so focused on the video. The Medium article and then games industry business mentions you were thinking or considering returning to AAA. Is that still the case? Oh, really? They said that. Wow, that's weird.

The experience had Norhegan considering returning to AAA. He previously worked at 2K Marin in a Bioshock too. Or abandoning games entirely, it says. Wow, yeah. No, I think I explicitly said in the end of the postmorm that I was not going to do that. I mentioned those, I think, as, you know, hey, that that looks like a valid path. Like, if you're making indie games and it's not working out for you, like these are things that I can do, right? And I'm incredibly lucky in this, right? I'm a programmer, like, from way back.

So, like, I can go get a AAA job. I can go work at, you know, Facebook or Google or something like that, making non-fund software, you know, or whatever. But, no, I'm not planning on doing any of that stuff. Like, I still want to make games. I'm just kind of trying to feel out. And the post-mortem was part of that process is, like, trying to feel out what that means. Like, how does one do that sustainably? You know, how does one make the kind of games that I've.

want to see in the world while still... While making rent. Yeah, exactly. Feating myself. You know, like how does that happen? Yeah.

Okay. What haven't I asked you? Oh gosh. This is all about you. So I can plug right now. Plug away, please. So if you're interested in the game, you can obviously find it on Steam

where the water tastes like wine. Just search for that or maybe wine. I don't know how many wine-related games there are. But you also go to... I'd be like, oh, that Witcher expansion. Probably, yeah. You can go to Where The Water Tets Like Wine.com to find out more about it too if you're curious. There's a lot out there.

Okay, great. Dude, thank you so much for coming by, number one. My pleasure. But even more importantly, I thank you for writing the thing. And thank you for pulling the curtain back and actually explaining because I think it is a thing. Yeah, you're right. We hear about shovel night. We hear about cup head and we hear about these guys who nail it.

But what is it like to put out a game that you believe in and you love and you tried hard on and you got all these amazing pieces together. But it just doesn't work. And I know I'm being chief among them, hate writing the post. Like, hey, we do this thing. Guess what? You got 5,000 views. Nobody cares. You know what I mean?

But here's what we learned. And it's an awesome learning experience. And I'm so happy to see that. I'm glad conversations like this are coming out of it at least. So that's great. Thank you again so much for having me on here. No problem, man. Take care.

Take care. Back to your regularly scheduled Kind of Funny Programming. So that's it. See what happens. We do something on Kind of Funny Games Daily. It becomes Kind of Funny Gamescast content. A long time ago, you said you didn't want that show. Games Daily

happen. You were terrified of it coming in and usurping you but I told you we could work it together and we made it happen. You can work through this

we can make it happen. Now would you like to take a trip back to 2017? Yes. When a game called Friday the 13th rocked everybody's world.

You know what Andy? It's not your time anymore. It's not about Detroit. Just be quiet, right? Sure. I know I didn't talk about this a lot in 2017

I like a game called Friday the 13th. Played a lot of it. It had its problems though, of course. Little team making a big game all hell broke loose.

Where are they now? I thought. I'd bring in Ronnie Hobbs during GDC and talk to him. Not only that, I want to give a big shout out to the Friday of the 13th game subreddit where I went and I troll all the time. I try, I guess. What is it? I lurk.

I'm a lurk. I don't comment or post, but I'm always watching. I'm always controlling. Very different thing. I know. I stopped. I screwed up. You see that new Reddit?

I don't know how I feel about it. I have not seen new Reddit. What's new with Reddit? If you go on Reddit, there's like a big option that pops up like a pop-up ad and say, hey, you want to use the new Reddit. Oh. And they're like, if you don't like it. You can still use old Reddit.

Don't worry, but here's a new option. Well, a shout out to the Friday 13th subreddit because I went over there and asked, hey, I was like, Hey, I got Ronnie coming in. You guys, I have more bigger. You guys have more in the weeds questions than I do. It's just a cat, even though I'm like, I put, you know, whatever, how many hours in? I'm a casual fan. I would describe myself as.

Ronnie argues that, but then I bring up the fact that no, that's not the case. So I went there. They gave it questions. And here they all are answers for you, Friday 13th, Ronnie Hobbs. Let's go. Let's go. As I live and breathe. Ronnie Hobbs

How you do it? Good, how are you? When I used to do that There was an audience that clapped Because I used to do it An up at noon all the time Right? Where'd they go?

That wasn't even here That was a different place IG and had a bunch of seats No, no That wasn't part of the deal So I want to do that much anymore And I want you know That I held for applause

That's totally forgetting It's just cool I get in the room So let's try to cool guy I need you to clap After I say it Someone has to clap All right

As I live and breathe Ronnie Hobbs Yeah see that No you don't clap You shake the hand I'm trying to just make it I'm trying to get it hype. You're trying to get it hype.

Ronnie, how are you? I'm good, man. How are you? Good. You made a game crawl Friday the 13th. I did with several other people. Oh, my God. And that's what he's here for?

Yeah, he's Friday of 13th, man. Oh, really? We're all big fans. He's like some random dude here. We're big fans of Friday 13. We know you're a big fan. Yeah, have I tweeted enough about that? Have I made that clear?

You have tweeted more than your fair share. Thank you. More than the required amount. You deserve it? Thank you. No, thank you. Thank you for making the game. Thanks for everybody at Ilfanic, at Gunn for making the game, doing all these different things. Yeah, Friday 13th caught me off guard last year. In what way? I think when, you know, for me, the journey really, I remember when the Kickstarter was happening and stuff like that. But I'm when Sessler came by to talk about it. That's right. He pitched it. And it was very much like, oh, okay, that sounds like something. All right, whatever. I like Friday 13th, but I'm not a multiplayer guy. I'm not a games as a server. guy. Like, this doesn't sound like something I'll play ever. And I remember him like, no, but it's really cool. And I'm like, all right, we'll see if it actually comes together.

Sure thing, Adam. Never even heard of these days. Yeah, exactly. They paid you, Sessler. Like, I'm going to listen to you. Yeah. And then when we got our hands on it, I was enamored and floored and locked in and still play. Like, I dig your game quite a bit. That was a common theme. Yeah. You know, of course we knew the Friday 13 fans would play it. Sure, the license day would be there. But the amount of people that played the game that really don't like horror games in general. I think that's the beauty of the game. Like, you don't have to like horror. You don't have to like Friday 13th. It's just, it's fun to be with your friends and try to figure out if you can survive or not. Right. Well, you know, what was so funny that

I didn't expect, and I can't remember if Sessler tried to sell at the time, but when we started playing, and especially when, like, you know, Jen, my wife would watch me play it or whatever, how quickly you're, I'm playing this game, and I've been enjoying this game, sure, but playing it with somebody else in the room, how quickly it becomes they're watching a horror movie. And they're like, why are you running up the stairs? No, you idiot. You end up doing the same dumb shit that, like, you yell everyone, right? And there was that like meta moment of like when she did that the first time. I'm like, oh.

You're right. Like, wow, this game works on such a different level. Why did I come in this cabin? He's chasing me. Like, or why did I run outside the cabin and run into the woods? That's stupid. Yeah, exactly. Like, there's nowhere to go.

But it happens. And that's like the beauty of our game, I think. So here's what I want to know, Ronnie. Because we're going to, we're going to span the gamut, as they say. All right. You know what I mean? Because I've played a lot of the game. I don't consider myself a super expert.

For a lot of our audience. I think you might be an expert at this point. As somebody who looks at the subreddit for, I still have it. I still have it tagged as one of my favorites, so I see all the posts. It's like, trust me, those kids are experts and I want to go to their questions eventually. Yeah, sure. But I want to do basic information for a lot of people at Gamescast who are watching or listening who don't know about it or in the fan stuff and all over the place. So if you're an expert, stick with me.

We'll get there eventually. For people on the base, Gun and Illfonic. You work for Gun. Yes. What is the breakdown of work there? That was something that even confused me, I think, when they first came out. It always is. because people are like, wait, did Ophonic make this game?

Did Gun make it? Is it a combination? Is there a third party? Yeah. So Gun, what we do, we're just like a creative house, a mini publisher, if you will, but publishes really probably not the right word. Okay.

We just find cool shit and try to make it. Okay. So going back 10 years, we've been thinking about some type of tribute to Friday 13th. Before we got the license. Sure. Yeah, I want to talk about that.

Yeah, it's okay. So what we do is we design the game from start to finish and try to account for every single possible scenario. Okay. We look a thousand miles down the line and then get the money and get the funding together. Okay. And then we'll find a development studio that we think's awesome or that we know can make this game.

Okay. And we'll team up with them. Okay. And that's the partnership. So we'll do the marketing production, like producer director side. Yeah, yeah. And keep the title on track. And probably a lot more other things too.

And then we'll hire someone to build a game. Okay. So that's who Gun is and Ophonic is our developer. Gotcha. So because they worked on Evolve. Yeah. They were recommended from Turtle Rock. Yeah.

We called Turtle Rock and they said, no, you should go to guys of Ophonic. Oh, wow. That's how we met Ophonic in. That's awesome. How long? So in this 10-year timeline, how long ago did you meet them? Well, so when I say the 10-year timeline, that means in our brains, too. So that goes in the idea of like, we should make a horror video game.

Yeah. So it's like half that time is just thinking about it and trying to find a way to make it happen without telling anyone, without talking to a deaf team. So we met Ophonic. We announced summer camp in Halloween of 2014. So it was before that. Okay. Okay. And so, yeah, how long's Gunn been around? So Gun, that would take us an hour to talk about our history.

But Wes and I have been working together since probably 15 years. Okay, wow. Okay. So Gun was, before that gun, we were working in advertising. We were hooking up video game companies with product placement. So like, code masters with Ford. Okay. Things like that are Gillette and Madden. Yeah, yeah. The early years of. Integration.

Advertising inside of video games and how to do it. Okay. And then we were just started, we had our own consulting firm. We were working on other people's games like EA and Sony and Microsoft. And we had like guys like Dan Chu working for us. Hell yeah. So it was just that we were a consulting firm. They were like, wait a minute. Let's just make our own games. Yeah. So that's when we started getting funding for Breach and Clear. Okay. It was our first iOS. It was a mobile game. Yeah, yeah. Greenbo 6. And we took that money. And we got some money now. We have a little bit of money. What are we going to do? And that's kind of how that kicked off. Okay. And so what does that start? This is all, your story is so interesting. You start as, yeah, an homage to Friday 13th, correct? Yes. So shortly after breach and clear, you know, West comes in my office probably daily and says, okay, let's just think about ideas. So after breach and clear, there was probably a six or seven month period there. We didn't know what we're going to do next. Yeah. So like, do we make a secret of breaching clear? Do we start doing something unique? So if you have something, this is a time

to pitch it. So we all kind of collectively went aside in our own little worlds and for six, seven months just obsessed over every idea you've ever had. Then we pitched it. And that was kind of one of the ideas we loved was this asymmetrical horror game because we loved all the horror movies from the 80s and it was our shot we're like well no one's ever going to make a friday 13 video game it seems yeah yeah yeah yeah no interest in making one apparently because it's been 30 years so let's just be the n-as version they just not yeah right yeah this is only going to go from there right so that was kind of how that happened but and so you go public with it and that's when the license comes into play yeah so we spent a little time just internally on prototypes making sure that it was the

right idea you're going to bank your entire company on something you better because everything looks good on paper. Even if you thought about it for 10, 15 years and you think you've went down every single rabbit hole, there's always problems. Like the game that you design on paper is never the game that happens. Yeah. So we started prototyping to make sure that was good and we started having fines. We're like, okay. So that's when we hired Tom Savini and Kane Hodder and Harry Mapradini because like, hey, if we're going to make a Friday 13th tribute, let's get some of the guys. Get the real folks in. Somehow, they said yes. Yeah. We don't know, still don't know how. But Wes called him and sure don't they respond. Like, yes, do this. We're like, holy shit.

It's insane. Like, why are you agreeing to do this? But they just thought it was a cool idea. Yeah. That's when Sean Cunningham was at a horror convention and ran into Harry Manfredini to fame. The guy who did the Kiki, blah, blah, that guy. So he's the sound designer in our game. So they ran into show and he's like, hey, what are you working on?

And he's like, I'm working on this game called Summer Gap. It's kind of like Friday 13. You should check it out. And that's how Sean found out about our game. Yeah. Sean sends us some emails actually first through some other people. We thought we were getting trolled. I mean, honestly, we thought it was some guy trying to steal our idea.

Yeah. We didn't really know it was him or his people. So we ignored the email for probably three weeks. Just big time, dude. Yeah, yeah. They kept responding. And we were like, no, this can't. We would have meetings every day like an hour long.

What do we do? Should we engage this? Yeah, yeah. Are they going to sue us? Yeah, exactly. Right. What if it really is him, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Turns out it wasn't. So finally the phone rings when he's like, dude, I'm trying to get a hold of you guys. You're not responding. Yeah. He's him. So he's like, hey, this is the game exactly what I wanted Friday 13 to be for the last 10, 15 years of my life. They've been trying to make a game, but they never had a good idea. Yeah.

They were being pitched single player, be Jason, walk around and hunt counselors down. He's like, I wanted something more than that. So he's like, if you guys can turn your game into Friday 13th, you can have the license. Wow. For us, that was pretty awesome. How long did it take to turn the game into that? Well, luckily, because it was a tribute. Yeah, it was already pretty close.

We were getting pretty close to the flames, so to speak. Anyway, we were going to push it to the limit. Obviously, we didn't have Jason in our game. So it was a building about yanking our other killer out, putting in Jason. But then it was really, okay, now Jason, we have to be the ones to explain what Jason hears, what he sees. That's his mother talked to him. Yeah. Like, how does he get everywhere at once?

Yeah. Right. Those are hard things to design because in the films, they hide that. Right. They do cutaways and they're very clever. In a game, you can't hide any of that. Right. So really, it took a while for that.

Well, that is what for me, floored me and impressed me about the game months after launch. And months after me already liking it and playing it and loving it was the fact that, like, because it came out initially when, the spring, right? Yeah, right? And so then you get to October and Xbox did that sale where they're like, oh, buy 513th, 1 through 8 for like $7. And I was like, oh, yeah. And so Jen and I watched him every night. And so having played the game, I was like, all right, this feels really familiar.

Like when I'm talking about playing in the spring, this seems like, and I remember that. And then you watch the movies. And I was like, holy fuck was I underselling how much you guys had done here. Because, like, you've recreated the exact lodge and this character is this archetype of this person. And, like, you can see their clothes are influenced by that. The fact that

Tommy Jarvis is Tommy Jarvis that I didn't pick up on, like, you know, really blank. People like, who's Tom? Exactly. That's really the guy. Yeah, exactly. And so then, like, to go through it and be like, oh, wow, like, I never really filled in the blanks of yes. Like, Jason is teleporting across the map. And, like,

he's just there all of a sudden in the movie. That's how they figured out how it would look in the game and how they did this and sound effects and why this Jason uses this weapon and this because that's all he used and it's like, holy fuck. Yeah, we, as you can tell, we were fans. When we said we were lifelong fans, I mean, I had their posters on my wall as a kid. I had Tom Savini on my wall as a kid. I waited in line as a kid to get Sean Cunningham's autographed one time. Like, we were really fans that loved that franchise of that. So we seen that each film a hundred times. Yeah. But when we started creating the game, Wes and I and Randy and everyone else on the team,

it's like, okay, how do we get these? real life locations in the game because they don't exist anymore. Yeah. Those places are torn down and you have to watch the film. If you want the blueprints for those houses, they don't exist. You're calling the state department and trying to figure out, hey, do you have blueprints? No, they don't. She's just watching the film over and over and over and trying to figure out, wait a minute,

because they're really clever with cuts and they make it seem like the place is bigger than it is. They don't just walk through and do a tour of the place. So that was actually a lot of work. So when we hear people say, oh, man, you guys really nailed it. That's really awesome to hear it. Yeah, well, I mean, that was not easy thing to do. It just showed, I think, finally watching this like, wow, like there was so. much work that went into this of making it look like that.

We had to you really. I mean, we didn't know another way to do it. Yeah. We couldn't just slap together a house and go, oh, that's the Pachanac Lodge and have fans go, that's not Packingack Lodge. Are you insane? Right. Thought you guys were fans. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, we tried to get as close as we could.

Now, we had to make some gameplay decisions inside of the house, occasionally make rooms a little bigger. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little smaller. But other than that, we, I think we nailed it pretty well. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So when do you start to realize this game's going to be far bigger than you thought it was

going to be? It's funny. because I don't know if you were around during, how much you kept up with the game while we were marketing. So we had this marketing strategy where we would go to each PACs. Yeah. And we would do a panel. And we would have a panel,

but we'd have a video ready to go live that we'd send out. So whatever video we were showing the panel, we'd send out to the press. And we didn't know if that would work. Yeah. But we'd label the video, oh, Pax South, even though we weren't showing that PACS, we were doing a panel at Pax South, but we didn't have a booth.

Yeah, yeah. But the press is looking for Pax South information. Sure, of course. So we started show, the first time we showed Vanessa, there was a, we showed Higgins, It was at Higgins' house, and she was getting her head slanted in the door. Yeah. The reaction we got to that trailer, it was just one kill at the very end of that video,

and it was just like, people were so offended. I mean, it was like, I mean, he grabs her head and does the door kill on her. Yeah. That was it. And people like, oh, my God, I lost their minds. Yeah. And the trailer got tons of views, and we're like, okay, people really want to see kills. So then we started like, okay, how about a kill montage?

Yeah, yeah. It was the kill montage trailer. That trailer, the first kill montage trailer, it had 18 million views on one website alone. Like in Europe. Yeah, yeah. We stopped counting the views on that trailer combined on the internet at like 200 million. Jeez. We're like, oh my God, this is insane.

Yeah. This is. And then our E3 trailer got 10 million views. It's the first gameplay. Yeah. They're AAA studios who didn't even get a fraction of those views. And we're like, we're on to something here. Yeah.

But also we're in trouble. Yeah. Because the marketing outgrew the resources. Yeah. In a way. Like, it's a really good problem to have. Sure. But that's kind of when we knew when we started putting those videos out

and people are like, this is the best thing ever, I can't believe it. And then people are just, on the other side, they were just highly offended. Which is always a good thing, right? Yeah, for a horror thing, right? Like that. And that was, again, what I think spoke so interesting to it is the fact that it was a game based on these movies that are all about gore and making you cringe. And like, that's the horror of those, right? It was always the special effects of Tom of like, we're going to gross you out.

Yeah. And so to see that come up in the 2017 timeline of where video games are, like, it's not even so much the video. video games grossing as much as like what the source material is. Oh yeah. Yeah. And especially, and this was a mistake we made. You probably know this, but all the counselors, like four of the five male counselors in our game are paid backers. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, no one really does. So four of those are real people. That's their real names. That's their likeness. Oh my God. Really? They paid 10 grand to be in our game. Wow. Only Chad is a fake guy. I know. You should see how we. We research the snobiest names ever. Yeah.

Kincinton. Chad Kintensen. Apparently that's like Ivy League name. It's funny. But the girls, because they were made up, they were done faster than the guys. Because you have to go back to the backer and get a thousand photos and then share feedback. That was taken a long time. So only models we had were females. Sure. So the first people that were getting murdered in our game were female characters.

Gotcha. And man, it was this one brutal kill on a female after the next. Yeah, yeah. We probably should have rethought that shit. We're very sorry. That wasn't on purpose. Yeah. So we got some backlash for that, but it's okay.

You know, so. Well, I feel like that instance is kind of par for the course with you. I feel like there has been so many, as somebody looking in on you, right, but who's been in the video game history a while, so many learning lessons, so many lessons to learn from what it happened, right? Because where I'm driving at, obviously, is the fact that how big is Ilfonic, how big is gun? Well, see, that's the thing.

Like, Elphonic, at any given point, probably had 18 to 30 people working on this game, which is not a lot for a game. No, no, no, no, no. A game was trying to compete in the triple A space. A gun, there was four of us. Yeah. Ben was doing all of our social, so Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Reddit. That's a job for five people.

Sure. So he was doing that. Wes and I, Randy is dealing with Kickstarter because that dominates 75% of your time, which if you've never done a Kickstarter, you don't really realize that. Yep. You have 20,000 people that want answers and deserve answers immediately. So Randy's being drugged away to do Kickstarter stuff. So it's me and Wes trying to market the game, keep it on track, talk toophonic daily, play the game, bugs.

I mean, we had four people doing the job. of probably, if you were at a AAA publisher, it'd probably be 20, 25 people, maybe even more. Sure. So it wasn't, we were continually caught off guard because we were under, undermanned, if I will. So it was, that's really not a lot of lot of people. So is that when you're seeing these numbers on these trailers, we're like, oh, fuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're like, this is awesome, but how do we even, I mean, imagine trying to answer, you, you probably deal with this a lot, but I mean, there's not a whole lot of you guys that work here. Oh, yeah, no, no, we, we, on a very, on a smaller scale, I wish we had 200 million views on that thing.

How many messages do you probably get all the time? And you feel responsible to respond. We were talking about this earlier about the subreddit's right. Yeah. So even like I personally, and I know Randy and West have two, I mean, I've struck up conversations with thousands of people on Twitter, private messages that are fans of this game that have reached out. I'm like, oh my God, this means so much to me.

And I don't want to just go, thanks. Yeah. Like that's a shitty thing to do. So I write back and I get to know the person. And all of a sudden I'm talking to 3,000 people simultaneously. Yeah. While I'm trying to make the game and it gets out of hand at some point. So that's taking your time away too.

Right. Just a constant fan communication. But you're happy to be doing that because you're a fan too. Yeah. So, you know. And I feel like somebody who came on late, right? I mean, I had tested on earlier. But like, I'm playing it and like, I don't know if I want to like this game.

Yeah. Like, I had missed the whole Kickstarter success you guys had. You know, the Savini skin, all the jazz you guys had there. Like, you guys had a whole bunch of goodwill behind you. Like, people were behind this game. Still are. Yep. But it was that you released it.

And then it was word of mouth immediately. Yeah. And it was me and a bunch of other people. And the servers are just melting. Yeah. Stop me if you've heard that one before. A game doesn't work on day one. Oh, I know. What a surprise.

But for us, it was just, we had a memory leak issue too that we didn't catch due testing. And so the Xbox version had a memory leak. The servers were melting. We had database login errors where it was duplicating your profile on the back end and like getting caught in this gigantic pipeline, just thousands of fake logs. People trying to play. Yeah. So it was just duplicating errors.

So we had quite a few problems at Linesstead. It took us months to recover from because of phonic. Well, the thing is like, oh, just hire more people. Well, you can't, I don't know if you've ever been hired. It's an interview process. You have to move your whole family. It takes three or four months to get new people in. So there's not a button where you can just sell money at it.

But I mean, there is a button for servers. All right. Yes, hit the server button. Yeah. So all that just takes time. And even if you have, even if you sell three million copies like day one, you don't get that money. You know, like Sony and Microsoft seem don't pay you. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So you can't even fix the problem with money, which was the problem for us. Yeah. It was to step back and see these problems and we could do nothing about them except for, pray that the guy's alphonic didn't like crumble under pressure from working so many hours. They did. They were sleeping out on their desk trying to solve these problems. We couldn't even give them more help. It's a painful thing to go through for those guys.

Sure. And that was the one thing for me at launch that I was like, again, I understood what was happening thanks to Adam and thanks to just being attention in a student of the industry. But to watch people flipping out on you guys. And I was like, but these guys, they are not EA. and they weren't, they're not even like, you know. You weren't even that. Yeah, exactly. Like, double A video game.

You know what I mean? Like, you guys were trying to make it with a small team and this was an independent thing that you didn't expect to go this way and you got the license of this, and blah, blah, blah. It's like, I felt for you guys in that moment. Well, thanks. You know what I mean? Like, you know, it's funny.

I don't think we ever talked about on shows, but, uh, this part, stick with me. At, uh, indie mix the other night, I ran into, Randy. Randy, right? And he's like, oh, man, blah. And the first thing was thank me for the pizzas. Oh, I know. During when it was all going to shit And I was seeing you guys

Try to fix it and try to put it out And you were doing the Twitter convos And you were active on the subreddit And it was clear that like we're on it We're just there's not much we can do I hit up I guess one of your guys Through that who told me the address So I sent you guys or sent

Ilfonic a bunch of pizzas Because I knew they'd be working late I know how that runs And they appreciated it Yeah and that's the thing of I'm lucky And like we're lucky Kind of funny best friends folks

Because we get to have this interface And talk to you And we've seen it with other developers and we know how rough it is and how, and I know how when it's all going wrong, because it's gone wrong for Kondiff anymore before. And all you're getting is the wave after wave, like, this is such a simple fix.

Why aren't you fixing it? Just do it. Turn out, just pay for more servers. It's that simple. And I don't know thing one about how to get another server online, but I'm sure it's not easy. It's not a button. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a very convoluted. Yeah, so I knew that and I felt for you guys, and it was the thing of like, okay, and it's gotten better. And I think you apologized to me. You might have been, yeah. I did. I'm like every time we do a stream here,

I'm like, all right, it's double XP, whatever. Yeah, you jump on and something is inevitably wrong. Sometimes it's PlayStation, sometimes it's you guys. But it's still like the growing pains, I feel, of trying to make this game be what you guys envisied to be, right? Envision it too. Yeah, so there's two things that. The first one is you have a sense of loyalty to your product.

You always, there are things to get cut and things you want in the game. So after you launch your game, they create a person inside you, it's like, no, we have to go back and do those things. Because you feel, it feels incomplete to you. because you know what the things were taken out. So there's that part, too, where you want to keep adding to this game, and maybe one day it'll get to the point,

but that's not really feasible. Because you can't just take every single dollar you have and put it back in a game that it's not making money anymore. So there's a balance there. So we feel like we have a good DLC plan and we've been working on a DLC. But the big problem we're going through an era as a server upgrade.

So we've been going to the Unreal Engine upgrade. Right. Because you're updating the game engine, right? Not even the servers. Yeah, the whole engine. And we can't really do anything until that's completed. So we're kind of a holding pattern right now with all the Jason X and the Grindle map and all those things. Well, that was the thing is like, you know, I thought even in the time when servers are on fire everything, you guys are doing the right thing.

And I've talked to you off camera with this, right, that we learned the hard way as well of how to communicate. It's not about having good news. It's about having any news and telling you what's going on. And it was, I think, that you guys came out with that DLC roadmap. It was, you know, it was really well done, I thought. And you saw you checking boxes. And then we got somewhere installed. and I forget what crook of the map we saw that.

And there was the silence. And I did see the sobate of like, they promised private servers forever ago and what's going on. So it was all about the game engine? Yes, the engine is to hold up. Because we knew dedicated servers are our biggest issue,

but we couldn't do anything about it for the longest time. So like the lighting tech wouldn't work on the new Unreal. Wait away for them to catch up. But the Unreal version we were on didn't do dedicated. So no matter what we did at that point was going to cause a problem. Right.

And then we had DLC we were working on that we couldn't upgrade the engine while you're doing that because that causes problems to your DLC because it may not work. Always fun. So at that crooked part of the roadmap, it was when we hit a snag, we go, okay, we have to announce an engine upgrade, but we couldn't do it because we didn't have the time frame in mind. So that's why there was like silence there. And sometimes you feel like the more you communicate, then more people get mad. So we put this roadmap out. And if you miss one day, then just get mad at you. When you put it out, I was like, who this is a bold thing to do because they are now going to.

hold your feet to the fire. We felt we needed to give people answers. Okay, let's just tell them what we're working on. That'll make them happy, right? And they did, but then unfortunately, schedules could change. Sure. And then some people are just instantly mad. Or what's that mean? You said, you promised this. I'm like, this ain't a promise. This is a roadmap of what we're working on. So, you know, but it's okay because, I mean, I don't want to sound like the pity case up here. Oh, no, no, no, no. Like the customers, they had a right to be mad. The game doesn't work when it comes out. As a consumer, yeah. I've been there. Of course, I'm on the inside. So a lot of my friends make those games. So I don't go yell at my friends

that their games I mentioned this as of recording this he'll go up later see a thieves launched on Tuesday and it's Wednesday

now and I saw when their servers were melting West put out a thing of like I feel for you guys I understand where you're at

more than you think I might let's think about that that's Microsoft I know right yeah exactly even like when Destiny or Diablo

came out and shit the bed it's like that's Blizzard you know and like these are the problems of modern gaming of you think you know what it's up and you do a beta test

and you do all the stuff but then you get out and there's this weird memory leak you never thought of or somebody puts these two items together and that crashes everything. Yeah, exactly. So it's just trying to see the future. But if you don't have a hundred people trying to see the future, if it's just three of you trying to, you only see what you can see at that point. Unless you're trying to balance budget and get the game out on time. And if you're a small company, time is money and you're just like, what do you do? Well, I appreciate

that you have been open about it. In the fact that I do think, you know, you shut down for a little bit there and it was the dick. And I did see the sub-edaddy get really mad. But when you guys did resurface and be like, hey guys, here's the shitty answer, right? We're upgrading the engine. We can't do anything. It seemed like that calmed. The hardest of the heart and the vocal minority I always talk about, right? Yeah, exactly. And like good and bad, right? But the people who are on any subreddit are our subreddit that are super active and wanting to have a conversation, they're the most passionate so they're going to have the most, you know, feelings about anything that's happening. And I saw that that was good. And I really appreciated myself as a fan when you guys came out

and talked about, and I forget then, what's the name of the blue mode you were talking about? Paranoia. Paranoia. Where I saw that pop and you were working on it and I was like, oh, and I was watching the Jason movies. And I was like, oh, it's going to be who is the killer. Nobody knows who the killers. That's going to be great. And you put out and then it was quiet for a long time.

And then you guys finally surfed and it was like, hey, the mode isn't fun. Yeah. See, like at what point do you tell people about that mode? We wanted to tell people about it and we did. Yeah. But if you wait until it's fun or the very last minute, then you spring it on a minute and it comes out a week later. Sure. So we really wanted to tell people about it and get people excited.

But then we kept playing and kept playing. playing in it, which wasn't fun. Yeah. So what do you do? Release the game mode that sucks. Yeah, yeah. No one wants that. Right. So, but I'll say this. Like at that time, just until recently we hired Daniel Nixon, you know, he worked at Ubisoft on like Assassin's Creed and all these cool games. So he's our new community guy. Poor Ben, the previous guy, you know, he didn't work in social media for 20 years. Yeah. You know, like, so there's really no plan for every single scenario that comes your way when you're dealing with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit and Discord. So one, that's not a job for one person. Yeah. So a lot of our communication

problems weren't because we didn't want to communicate. Oh, no, no, no. It's like, how can you even get to every single message? And it's just, it's a difficult thing. So we have Daniel on board now, so he's running that front and he's being very upfront and direct with people, which is good. You know, two years ago when we were struggling to communicate, I think so like a year and a half ago ago.

It was the conversation of, we always felt like we were right about where we needed to be. So let's not communicate something we think we're going to have fixed or, you know, change in a little bit. We're going to have this working the way it should be. And when it wouldn't happen, the silence is getting, we're kicking the can on how long where the fuck kind of funny live is. Because we, you know, and it's like, well, I don't know.

Meanwhile, you want to tell people. Yeah. But at the same time, you're like, man, if we do, we're going to give them another date. Yeah, exactly. So at some point, you have to be quiet just to try to work, but then people get angry. They think you're ignoring them. Yep, exactly.

You guys are just taking the money and running. You're a bunch of thieves. You hate us or you don't like this game. You moved on to another game. I remember that. Yeah, there was some rumor that you guys had met with us. No, Phonics had been working on it. That game, the Dead Alliance game, they were working on that game before Friday of 13th.

Yeah. Like, they were just, that was a separate publishing deal. So, yeah, they didn't move on to Dead Alliance. But of course, the press writes that headline and it's true. Yeah. Oh, Fonnik moves on the new game. I'm like, did you even do any research? Did you even call anybody?

Well, no, what they did is story developing. You put that, we've reached out for a comment. Story developing. I'm like, okay, you need like a magnifying glass. Sure, yeah, yeah. They'll put the update on later. Just update it doesn't matter because the damage is done by then, though. Yeah, of course, of course.

So anyway, that's okay. But yeah. So, you know, it is what it is. So where are we now with Friday the 13th then? We are in limbo. Yeah. I mean, the game is still there. Oh, yeah, the game's going.

We have a cool DLC that came out and people are enjoying it. But our main focus is finally getting dedicated service in, but the engine upgrade is the one thing that we can't do dedicated on our current version of Unreal. Right. It just doesn't support it. Sure. So, which is always a problem with using a new engine. Yeah.

Like, Unreal is the best thing in the world. But it's not their job to hand you an all-a-collar. heart. Like, check box. What do you need? Click that box and it'll update everything. Yeah. Do you need awesome lighting?

Do you need dedicated servers? Those are things you have to build yourself. Yeah. So, yeah. So do you have a timetable for that now? Or April, maybe? Okay. Yeah.

So not too far away probably, but we still want to say, I don't want to give a date because. Again, though, I mean, like, I hear you and I know you put April on there. Now, the headline or the thing. I think we've already said that. No, no, I know that. Daniel won't kill me. Thank God. But I think it's the thing.

of you're doing it the right way again by talking and being human right because that's the thing that gets lost when it is that yeah i've bought this box game from Walmart which next to all these other guys that are just corporations and companies that don't give a flying fuck about us we feel you know what I mean you go and it doesn't work this at the other blah blah blah yeah so then once that's done are you back to your roadmap of trying to get jason x out and trying to get us yeah yeah so let's hold real quick if you are a podcast listener that siren is happening here it happens often where people are listening in their cars and start pulling over looking around.

That's us. That's us. That's a good point. Sorry. We're on a very busy connectioning street here in San Francisco. It's okay.

So we're at the point where like, then it'll be back to updating the roadmap and continue to work on the stuff that we know we wanted to do. So it says,

we have some third party companies that are working on some stuff for us too so that not all development is stopped. Yeah. Because the truth is it takes almost the entire

Elphonic staff to do these dedicated servers and upgrade because it affects every department. Yeah. When you upgrade your engine, it affects every single art. animation, everything.

So, it's not like... Video names are all variables, and I couldn't take it, man. I couldn't take it. I finally, I couldn't do what they do. Yeah. Like, the amount of pressure and the amount of work they've done on this game has been incredible, especially for a game that had like a $5 million budget, which is like EA's coffee money.

Right. Yeah. So, it seems like a lot of money, but in game dev terms, it's not. Yeah. And, you know, especially if you have to delay your game like we did, you know, that's my favorite actually thing I want to get out there. Sure. And people say, just delay your game.

just delay your game. Why do they delay it? I don't think people really know what that means. Yeah. Because as a consumer 20 years, I didn't know. Yeah. When you delay a game, if you're deaf to do, I'm going to throw a random number out there, but it costs 100 grand for them to run.

And you delay your game six months. Do you think those employees work for free? Exactly. They don't. Yeah. But there's a misconception or a misconception out there that, hey, just delay your game and it doesn't cost more. These aren't people that live in their basement.

They don't have bills. Right. People have families and rent, and there's a studio you have to pay. So if you delay your game six months, you better have 600 grand to make up for it. If you don't, you better go out and get funding. Yeah. So, you know, we did have to delay our game too.

So that was one thing we had to go through too, which was awesome. Well, that's the big, I mean, the problem with it is how do you, how do you make it all work and spin the plates and get it out? And like, you know, there's been so many conversations of, you know, I release the game incomplete, but you get the money to put back into the game. But like you're saying, that's not instantaneous. It isn't. Oh, cool. We sold this much on the first week.

So now I'm taking this money that hasn't been. Yeah. I'm pretty sure if I remember correctly from other sources, you don't have to confirm it. It's like a month before you ever get any money from something? You ever heard of like net 60 or 90? No, I know that on my contracts. You do.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Same. If you don't know what that means and when you sign, like kind of funny, I'll sign a deal and I'll go host the Dice Awards. We'll put them on net 30 or whatever,

which means from the day we invoice you, 30 days till the payment. Yeah. So, you know, in some companies, not particularly individual, but some people play corally. four times a year. No, no, I can't do that.

So it's all dependent, but you don't get the money day one. So we're like, man, we have all these awesome DLC that got cut from the game or we barely got the game out of time without running out of money. Yeah. We can take some of the money and put it back in the game, but you can't even start that process until you get paid. Yeah. So already, for the first couple months,

you still only have the money you had when you finished your game, which is why a lot of games run out of steam and you see them not update their game because they're out of money. Yeah. They spend every single dollar, especially if they're a small company like Indies. I'm surprised that indie games, don't get delayed more. Like that is the hardest thing to do is to take,

and you've seen this through Kickstarter. Sure. People run out of money. Yeah. Oh yeah. Definitely. Because they didn't plan for that last six months of feature creep where you start changing your game,

halfway through and all of a sudden you're out of money and you can't even finish your game and they can't go get funding because no one wants to loan them money. Yep. They cancel it. So it's a big problem in the indie world because developer, AAA developers, they can just take money from another project.

Right. You know, and fund the year delay or whatever. but it's costly. So this brings up an interesting question I have for you guys. When you think of Friday 13th, what do you think of outside of the roadmap in terms of support?

Right? Because as somebody who's new, this is, I think this was my first big Marvel hero share, a little bit of destiny before, but this is the one that I got invested in, right? Of like,

I'm all in and I think your trophy list sucks, but I hope one day I get close to having them. I'd love you're an updated. Just saying you know, but I'd like to play that much. I'd like to play it for years to come. But do you see it that way? Or what do you think in terms of games of service

in terms of Friday 13th longevity? So here's, there's always the problem of the longer games on the market, the less it sells. Demitian return, right? Exactly. So then you take, especially if you take four or five, $10 million and put that in the DLC,

you're not getting that money back. Sure. But as fans, we don't care because we care more about the product than we do our bank accounts. We're like, no, we're going to take a lot of money and put it back in this game, even though they're not like people buying it at this point,

or at that point a year from now. But you still do it because that's the right thing to do. Most companies, or some companies, wouldn't do that at all. They would just launch the game and put out one DLC pack and be done because they know they're not going to return. Yeah. But then you have paid for servers, which is a big deal. You pay monthly servers.

The ongoing cost of that, right? The ongoing cost of servers, but yet people aren't using those servers. You're paying more than the people are playing. Yeah. So that's why you see games, you know, EA or someone will cancel a game, you know, this three years old. And you're like, oh, well, no one's playing it. Exactly.

But there will still be some people who are playing it who are mad. So I really can't give you a good answer on that. We want to support it as long as we can. Yeah. But at some point, if you're paying $100 grand a month in servers and you're not making money, you can't just be homeless because you wanted to keep the game going.

It's a problem with multiplayer games in general. Yeah. It's an ongoing question for the last 10 years now that everything's online. Exactly. And then what happens when it does die? You know what I brought up Marvel Heroes a second ago, right? That was the thing. I know.

As a part of that community where it was like, cool it's closing and it's closing like now you're like oh my fucking god really especially with final fantasy 11 i remember when that closed and i was in there but and i didn't really know about servers and things i'm sure oh don't close my game yeah exactly exactly yeah so that's kind of what you deal with me to make a multiplayer game you want it to live on forever but the truth is it can't yeah so we're hoping our single player will help fill that void for the people that continue want to play our game yeah yeah yeah so we're doing the single player challenges and missions and they're coming soon so we're making good progress on those cool yeah you've

already added other stuff too obviously like virtual cabin offline play Yeah, the virtual cabin was one thing that actually we went back and just as ourselves. Man, we got to make this better. So we just did. We took our resources and just had another teamwork on it and they just did it. People love the virtual cabin, the new one.

So, yeah, it's cool. Okay. I want to kick it over to the experts. Let's do it. On the Friday 13th game subreddit. Again, as I posted here, I pointed out, long time lurker. Thanks for all the content.

Because I'm one of those guys. I'm subscribed to a lot of subredits, but it's rare that I chime in on them. Because it is very much like, what are you doing over here? Okay. Tell me about this Snyder cut DC Cinematic Anyways, you can join their subreddit R slash F-13 the game.

Right now, I'm refreshing. Yeah, most upvoted one here is from Garadon who says, are there plans to add new escape routes in either future currently available maps? Which is interesting. I don't want that. I like how it is. People are already figuring out their own things. I don't want that.

You would be surprised how quickly counselors can escape if you add even one more. Yeah? You would be surprised at this shift imbalance that. I can't get variables of trying to balance this stuff. Just one little new escape route. If we were to do a third or a fourth, you would be shocked at what it does the gameplay. Early on in the development,

we had these ideas and we did some things. We had multiple routes. It wasn't a particularly different one. It was just more of. And people just got out quick. So there's a lot of balance and it has to go into even something as simple as that. Sure.

So even now with like, you know, just the variable of where, you know, how the main road you have, which side the cops are going to show on it. It's one of two places. Yeah.

And it sounds like, oh, that's not that much, but like that 50-50 of being a counselor and waiting in the bushes like, where the fuck's gonna be? And then being Jason of like where the fuck I have to warp to.

Now put a third one in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, oh, it wouldn't be too much, but actually it affects a lot of things. Yeah. You know, Jason morphed to the wrong one. He's not, he's done. Like, he'll never catch you with the other two.

Exactly. So two was the right number and we experimented with a lot. So I'll say no for now. Yeah, just to be honest. No, no, Thank you for me honest. That's really good.

Don'te Mir. I'm bad if the names aren't intercapped. It's hard to do. Dante Mir says I'd like to suggest for one. Currently the game is awaiting a big patch to upgrade the game engine for Friday the 13th. Once that upgrade is done, are there plans for new game modes?

What do they consist of? You're not going to go to what they consist of, but the mode didn't go the way you wanted to, right? Yeah, I mean, we haven't officially canceled paranoia at this point. Still tinkering. It's still there. I mean, but the resources that it takes to make that game mode better currently, are being divided up against, you know, the engine upgrade and all that stuff.

And then we have single player also that we're making. So it's a matter of spreading out your resources. Do you want to put everything on paranoia? Or do you want to do the engine upgrade and dedicated servers and single player, which we promised already single player. Paranoia was never a promise thing. Sure. It was like a tease thing.

Yeah, we wanted to do, but it was never like on the roadmap and it was never a Kickstarter goal. It was just something we did just fill our time. And so I would say there's always a chance we can go back to it if it becomes fun. But beyond that, another game mode, if you're thinking of Call of Duty or Battlefield, where you're in the main menu and it's like Conquest versus DeathMatch, probably not in terms of that. If we did anything, it'd be paranoid. Okay.

I feel like that's the thing about Friday 13th is that I love the game. I think it's great at what it does. And I really don't look to it and go, man, I'd love this as well. Like even single player, I'm like, that's not really for me or the bot stuff. I'm like, no, I want to play with my friends. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think every game needs that.

Yeah. Luckily, I think we're one of the games that don't. Like Battlefield, yeah. Sure. Those games do. need a variety in. But I think these horror experiences are, it's you and surviving against a killer. You don't

want killer versus killer. Do you don't want to see seven Jason's, eight Jason's running around trying to like fight each other? Yeah. People do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not, I don't know we'd want to do that. Like that's, you know, I don't think the IEP would be comfortable with that too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's lost in this is we have to consider them too. Sure. They have, they have

rights in this, yeah. They trust us completely. This whole process, they've been incredible. In fact, they've been like, I can't believe you know more about this franchise than we do, or just as much. Yeah. They feel completely safe. But still, we have to run it by them.

I don't think that would make it. True boredom says, what's the plan for the update for retro Jason? What is the plan for buffing, part seven, Jason? And then BGF, oh, big fancy, but no, things said. Please include this one, Greg. Yeah, so I know exactly who this person is. And we appreciate your thoughts about J7. We are trying to plan something for him.

We're trying to get to him. Unfortunately, things like buffing a particular Jason are, a little lower on the totem pole when it comes to, you know, like if I was just have to stop and say, hey, producer or game play designer, stop and make J7 good and all the ramifications of that.

He's like, dude, I'm doing dedicated servers or we're doing art and animation. And like, the team is out of resources. Yeah, yeah. The team is out of resources. Like, I can't grab the intern and make him do this. It's not a thing you can do.

So he's on, it's on the list. And Retro is, retro is something that is actually a lot more complicated to make him his own Jason because each Jason has to have to have,

new kills. And in order to get new kills, you have to mocap. In order to go to a mocaf studio, you have to rent it and plan eight, six, seven months in advance and get Kane hotter and all the stuff in back. Yeah. And you have to get Tom Savini or myself or someone to design new kills. So even something is making retro his own Jason, selectable in the menus with new perks. Yeah. He has to have new kills. That is the biggest holdup of adding new jasons and things like that is. First of all it takes like four months to get the Jason in game from start to scratch, but you have to go get new kills, which isn't something we can just do. Those are all mocapped. So that's really the main holdup for retro.

That's interesting. Yeah. And see, that's what I'm talking about where it's like, I don't feel like an expert at all in this game. I'm like level 37, eight. I don't know, whatever. Yeah. And it's like,

you talk to that. I'm like, I'm totally fine with retro Jason being a skin. I don't think about it, but like the fans love it. It was something we wanted to do. Yeah. And I think we even said we were planning on doing it.

I think West may even said we're going to do it. But then we're like, fuck, man. We got new Jason's in the pipeline. Each one of those takes three to four months to make. Yeah. Then you have to go to mocap and get new kills. You have to put them in the game and get blood going at camera angles.

Well, I remember that. I remember when there was like a, you guys talked in some interview about somebody wanted a young Jason in there. Yeah. And you guys are like, hey, they still do. And sure, that's a great idea and that's awesome. But like all the kills are animated for Jason to be eight feet tall. Yeah, that was me.

I was like, sorry to disappoint you, but four foot Jason is not going to lift. Yeah. And some guy goes, that's because you're lazy. I'm like, yeah, that's it. Yeah. We're lazy, dude. Yeah. It has to do with physics.

And like, four foot Jason couldn't even. lift the counselor off the ground, their feet with still be on the ground. All of our kills come from the lifted position. And that's a gameplay back in thing. So when Jason grabs you and lifts you, then the kills are activated. And they're all designed and animated from that starting point. You can't just change that up. That's why we have grab kills.

And we have contextual kills around the map. Like those are all on purpose. I feel, you tell me, I feel it's safe to say that like what Friday the 13th the game is, and it is out now, is. This is the base. This is the toolbox, right? Like, we can't deviate that much from any of this stuff. Like, this is what it is.

And this is the toy box game we've set up. And, like, that's who these characters are. That's how it plays. Yeah, it's like building a house. You can't go back and take out the bottom foundation. Redo the foundation. Yeah, like, people give the dead by daylight guys a really hard time because they don't have kills in their game.

And like, why don't you just add kills like Friday 13th? And like, no, they can't. That's our foundation. You can't go back to the foundation. So I hear that a lot. their thing too. It's like, or someone will go to to Fortnite or battlefield and say, why don't you just do what they do? Yeah. In theory, it's a good idea,

but you're messing with the structure. Yeah, the train's out of the station. Yeah, so to have kid Jason in our game, first of all, you can't murder kids. Okay, so... I can't. You can't have a, you know, a 12-year-old Jason or whatever, running around, and then you kill him. Yeah. So that means now you can't kill Jason, because ESRB wouldn't even let us kill

a kid, Jason. Yeah. So now how do you, now the killing option is gone. Now that you can only escape in our game. So that changes our game completely. Just that one little option of having them in the game. A.S. DFX 500. Will we ever see a rebalancing of counselor stats? Is that something you guys think about in terms of going in?

Because I've seen it too where it's like, there's a whole bunch counselors I'll never fucking play as. Because like they're not again, that's who they are. Like I don't, whatever, I'm just never going to play. That's true. And we have thought about it. But so if you look at each one of those counselors on a spreadsheet and you line them all up, anytime you change one counselor,

you have to change the other counselors to. So let's say we make La Chapa really fast all of a sudden. Well, that's not going to be a good thing because he can fix stuff really good. Yeah. And he's going to be running really fast. That's a deadly combination. So just bumping him up in speed or giving him more composure or something, now you have five counters with an 8 out of 10 composure. That's a bad thing.

So it's like looking at a spreadsheet. Right. So just changing one counter actually affects other ones. Sure. And then all of a sudden, maybe he's not that guy anymore. It's an archetype, which is a real thing, right? You want him to be the stereotypical horror movie characters. really that's why we haven't.

Yeah. So just because. Yeah. For me, when I look at somebody, I'm like, oh, well, she's bad at repair.

He's bad at running or whatever. I'm like, well, he's the fat nerd like me. Yeah, he shouldn't be good. You know what I mean? Like,

I understand that I'm role playing to an extent. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of why we haven't touched it. Okay. Um,

a couple people in here are asking, like, would never hike alone content ever make it over there? Is that? Because that's the fan film, right? First of all, I love those guys.

I hang out with them. dudes. And that's a fan passion project. And I give them all those respect in the world. But the problem is it's a fan film. Yeah. Here's what happens. As soon as you put their Jason in our game, what do you think happens, Greg?

The people who are the actual owners of the license are going to be pretty pissed. What's that means if that Jason was in our game? Now, that's canon. That's canon. Guess what? We're accepting this movie is canon. There you go. Okay.

So if you think lawyers are going to let that happen, even good lawyers, like Warner Brothers, everyone's not going to let another one kind of sneak in. Yeah. It's from the outside looking in, I can see why people would want that. I would like to have him in there too. Sure. I already told Benny to his face, I would love to do it. But now then it's recognized as official canon, which, as you know, working on anything.

Yeah. With IP, it's a very hard thing to do. So I'm going to go ahead and just say no. I'm very sorry, disappoint you. That ain't never going to happen. That's a great response and makes sense, I think. Yeah. And then is Mon asked a question I should ask a long time ago.

What exactly does the engine upgrade entail? It looks better. It runs better. It's more stable. Yeah. So, you know, it allows you to do things like, ACR, it allows you to have more processing power because it's more streamlined. It, for one, gives us dedicated servers.

Yeah. So, that's the big one. That's the big one. You know, when Jason quits, or the host quits, per se, the game's not over, which is good. Which is our biggest problem. Yeah, that's, yeah, being able to push the host to somebody else. Xbox will perform better. Yeah.

So, you know. Yeah, there was a question to hear about what's going on with Xbox. Yeah, so the engine upgrade is going to help us all those. Yeah. Look better. It's going to perform better. Yeah. It's, anytime you have a new engine, it is, they make improvements.

So they streamline everything. really it's the dedicated service while we have to do it. You know, we could never get those without it. Of course. And with that comes a lot of cool other things. But it touches, like I said, every single department almost. So it's not like, oh, just hit a button and export. New engine.

Had the ship breaks. Animations don't line up anymore. Art looks weird. Like, what is that? Start rendering lighting right. So it's a lot of stuff. Makes sense. Yeah, which is why it takes so long.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'd like to think I don't take for granted how blessed I am on a daily basis, just with my life in general. And like, you know, how lucky I'm to have kind of funny. and all these best friends and stuff. But when people started complaining about the host migration and people quitting Jason, and I was just like,

oh, right, that never happens to me because I'm lucky enough to tweet out. Who doesn't play Friday of 13th? And all these kids want to play with me. And I'm just in there and I don't have to worry about anybody quitting me. I mean, we feel, I hate watching the game and then seeing that happen.

Yeah, so we troll each other. It hurts me so bad to see people get disconnected from the game. So it's not like we don't want to fix it. Believe me. The whole team's like cringing every time it happens and we're like, oh, they're so bad.

that this shit is happening. So it just takes a while to do. And unfortunately, it wasn't their launch. So, yeah. Thank you so much for making this game. I'm sure you guys don't get tough. Told that enough by the people. Let me just be clear.

We have so many people that tell us that all the time. Yeah. But you also have thousands of thousand people who hate you and want to kill you. But I feel like the hate is driven from a place of love. It is. It's the same thing I always talk about where, you know, for me, the vocal minority died.

It was always the people in the comments who want me to die. Exactly. But then you go to a PACs and it's, everybody's like, oh, so amazing, and we love you, and it's great. Oh, right. I forget that, like, it's, when you're angry about something, you're so much more motivated to post about it and talk about it. And, yeah, pop off.

I've done it about the game even when, like, it won't work and we're fucking mad here. I remember that tweet, or one was like, this shit doesn't work or something. I was like, you don't even know what that felt like on our end. I was like, no, fuck, no. He's trying to play the game. Yeah. Oh, my God, it's horrible. Yeah.

So, yeah. But, yeah, no, we have tons of fans. They're, like, love them. Because we are Friday 13 fans. Yeah. And it's good. We have handwritten letters more than you can count from people that have told us how, oh my God, my dad was dying and this was like he loved the movies and we play it every night together.

And like emotional things like that from these fans, it's incredible. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, Ron, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, dude. I appreciate you coming on. Have a great GDC. I'm considering it. Okay, good.

Thank you. Yeah, you too. And then go go finish the engine. Well, luckily, Ilphonix's doing that. Okay. See, right now there's probably someone saying, why don't you stop doing an interview? Yeah, right. and go fix the game.

He should have spent this interview time working on the game. I'm like, you don't want me fixing the game. I promise. Yeah. Yeah. So it's okay though.

The phonics on the case. Good. We got it. Cool. Put a kind of funny shirt in the game. What do you say? Huh? Dude.

Not this. This is no clue. I don't even have a kind of funny shirt. I'm just kidding. I'm just son of a bitch. You did send his shirts. Ladies and gentlemen, let's go back to the games cast.

Well, that was great, Greg. I learned a lot about Friday the 13th. I bet you didn't learn anything. Nothing? No. You know, because I've seen you play. You know that every year there's three Friday of 13th? Every year?

Every single year. Totally made up fact. Please and gentlemen, this has been the kind of funny games cast. I love you guys. Until next week. I love you. I will say on Detroit, though, no sign of Barry Sanders. I dislike you too.