NZXT PODCAST - #066 - James from Bitbull

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

This week on the podcast, we are joined by James from game studio Bitbull! James and the crew discuss ASCII art, making video games, and love. Follow James on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitbulldotcom Listen live to the NZXT 💜 CLUB CAST on our Discord server at discord.gg/nzxt every Thursday at 10AM PT and submit your questions to [e-mail]! Thanks to ButterPecaaan#9661 for the artwork! Join our giveaway: https://twitternzxt.co/jjh710

All right. Here we go. I'm not going to lie. This is kind of a bop. This kind of slaps a little bit. Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 66 of the N60 Clubcast, the official podcast of the NXT community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific's gender time of the official N6C Discord server and is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, and SoundCloud. So hop on your jetboard and fly towards a new future, everyone, because here we are. My name is Dennis.

I've been taking a break today. we have a very, very special guest. We have James from Game Studio Bitbull. How are you doing, James? I'm doing good. Thanks for asking me on. No problem. Thanks for being on.

Did I pronounce that correctly, Bitbull? Yeah, you got it right. Okay, so there's no special pronunciation or like anything, anything fancy that I missed. No, you don't have to say in a British accent or anything. I could try, but I wouldn't embarrass myself and everyone here on the podcast. So, James, what? What do you do at Bitbull?

Oh, well, it's just me, really. So I'm a solo game dev. So I do everything. The art, the coding, the audio. Yeah, I do a bit of everything. So you made all the music, all the art. Literally everything in the game is all you. Absolutely everything.

Yeah, that's why it might take so long. I was going to say, because I was looking through I was doing some snooping around and I was looking through like your website and just some some stuff in the game. It said that it took you five years to develop correct. Am I? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Five years. It's been a long slog. I mean, there's been, it hasn't been, I haven't been full time on it for five years. But that's the amount, that's the amount of elapsed time. And I've been full time on it for most of that time, I guess. That's, that's pretty crazy. Like, just all by yourself, huh?

Yeah, I know. How did you? Yeah, there's a few points I thought I was going a bit nuts. I mean, I can definitely imagine. How did you get started in game development? Well, I started at a young age. My dad brought home computers back from work. This was in sort of about 1980, so it was a long time ago.

And in those days, they were so. limited, you know, your games were just basically Aski Art. And there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of them. So all you could really kind of do with these things was learn to program them. And making games was one of the first things that kind of, I wanted to do. So I started doing that, you know, with Aski Art on the Commodore Pet. Oh, geez. Yeah, that's really, that's like super old.

Yeah. I think I started on DOS. My dad brought home. He used to work for the county here in California. And he brought home a computer that had DOS and Doom preloaded onto it. And that was like my first like, yeah, that was like my first game on the computer ever. So I, you know, I would say definitely not a bad place to start, right? Yeah, because that sounds great.

I mean, we had something a bit like Doom on the Commodore pet, but it was done with Askiy. If you imagine a 3D maze with Askiart that updates about one frame every 10 seconds. You're in the ballpark. Right. Someone in chat is asking, what was the first game you played? Do you remember that? The first game I, well, it would have been the very first game I play probably would have been some of these very basic things on the pet.

But I guess the first proper game I played would have been one of the early, arcade game. So it would have been something like space invaders or defender. I think probably space invaders. Yeah. I would say my my first game ever had to be something on arcade for sure. Like I'm thinking yeah, like similar like a like a centipede or space invaders or yeah. Yeah. Whatever games had that trackball like right in the center of the the missile missile command wasn't it that had a trackball there might have been others. Missile Command was the really well-known one that had a trackball. Yeah, I think that one might have been it or it might have been a golf game.

For some reason, golf games still have trackballs if you ever get to like an arcade. So what was the, what was the first game that you worked on? Well, again, it would have been these, you know, the very, very early things that I was producing for the pet. But I mean, the first, the first game I had actually published was, a game called Subterranean Nightmare, which was published for the spectrum in the kind of mid-80s, which was like a platformer, really, very heavily influenced by a game called Jet Set Willy,

which was really popular at the time. But it was a platformer where you control this guy who explores various underground caverns and has to defeat a race of mutants. Yeah, I'm throwing some screenshots into the chat right now for... Oh, well done. just remember folks if you do listen live you get an extra bit of visual experience if not then uh just just between that you're watching something really really cool so so from from from from from you

being a hobbyist to you uh to you being like a published game dev like how do that how that process look like well back in the day it wasn't actually it was it was it was a lot simpler to make games you know So you could churn something out fairly quickly in a matter of months, really, and then you could send it off to an publishers who were publishing for these platforms. And there was such a demand for content then that invariably, if you'd made something half decent, it would get picked up. So the stuff that I made, you know, it wasn't particularly cutting edge or anything at the time, but it was good enough to get into the budget ranges that were becoming popular.

So it really didn't take that long to get from, you know, the process of being a hobbyist to being published because everything in those days pretty much was done by single guys in their bedrooms. Yeah, I think that's what people that kind of don't realize is that like back in the day, quote unquote, right, back in the day with games like these, like they, they weren't complex from like a, from like a coding or like an art standpoint, right? especially now right now where like you have like these like million dollar you know developments with you know hundreds and hundreds of people staff i mean just look at a game like studio project right or a game like side right those they have a ridiculous amount of staff working on just that one game alone right yeah i know it's um it's unbelievable i mean then even even the kind of high profile games of the time would probably have only had team would probably have had teams of less than 10 people on i mean and a

lot of them a lot less than that most of them were probably made by individuals yeah like i remember watching i think when i got my starcraft two collectors edition there was this really nice um DVD to came with it back when we still had discs you know and everything was digital where um they were talking about like the first like iteration of a blizzard i think they were called a silicon and synapse i think and like that team i think was like me like four or five people and and they're and they were like just starting to make, you know, these like Warcraft games and, you know, like a Rock of War Racing and so on and so forth. And it's crazy to see how big they've gotten from from from from from from until now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. I mean, the amount of work that

goes into a you know, a triple A title nowadays is is nuts really. Have you, have you, have you always been working in like the indie like small dev scene or have you ever been part of a, a, uh, a bigger publisher? No, I've never been part of the, bar. a bit bigger publisher so I've always really worked on my own I mean wow yeah for a long time I did it's not very glamorous but I did

feature phone games so I spent a lot of time making games for the old kind of Nokia's and the pre-smartphone mobiles and they were simple sort of match three stuff and puzzle stuff

but that you could still produce that kind of stuff as a solo dev. I actually worked with an artist a lot of the time, but it was just the two of us doing that kind of thing. So how did you go from making games for computers to mobile?

Where was that shift? Was that a decision that you made or like something that you just kind of felt like had to be done? Well, I kind of got out. I was doing games. The original games that I did at the spectrum time was I was like a teenager then. So I saw

of got a bit distracted by things like girls and music and beer when I was in my late teens and early 20s. And I kind of got out of it then. And I actually studied graphic design at college and then went into digital marketing for a bit. But a lot of the stuff I was doing in the digital marketing field was game related. So we ended up, well, the company that I was working with, we ended up producing a lot of online games. for people like Disney, Cartoon Network. And I guess through that sort of route, I just started to realize, actually,

I want to be making games, you know, not doing digital marketing. And so I started to skew all the projects I was doing very heavily towards gaming. And in the end, I just thought, this is ridiculous. Why don't I just make games? Because this is what I want to do.

So I quit and basically started on my own making them. making the mobile games at that point, which was about 20-odd years ago. So you mentioned just a little bit ago, like you were doing stuff with Cartoon Network. Were these like these games on the browsers? Or is there something like? Yeah, they were browser-based games. So the one we did for Cartoon Network, which was ridiculously ambitious at the time, was a kind of multiplayer.

It was like a massive multiplayer board game. So it was this huge virtual board game where you'd see a number of sort of scenes, illustrated scenes, which represented a space on the board and you would move around this board. You could interact with other people and things. But if you imagine this was done in something like 1998, the internet was nothing like sophisticated as it is now. And everyone's connections were very slow. So it was really a ridiculously ambitious project to attempt at that. time. But, you know, it went live and it worked and I think it did pretty well for them at the time.

But they were that, it was that type of thing we were doing, either Browter based games based on kind of service side technology or things like Shockway, you know, which became flashed, those type of games. Okay. The reason why I asked is because when I was a kid, I used to play a lot of those like Cartoon Network games. This is like back of the Johnny Bravo, like Ed, Ed, N, many powerful girls era of Cartier Network. So I think I might have played that game you were talking about. Right. That's great.

You know, because like, you know, like I was, I was a kid. And I think, you know, like, I think it was like like a late elementary school, like junior high, early high school where, you know, I was broke and I had money to buy like, you know, the brand new video game. So, you know, I went into like, you know, whatever, whatever corporate run website was available at the time that had some kind of games for free. I think one of the games I played was called kick the can. we literally control a little character and they just kick a can across the field and that's like that blew my mind yeah there was a lot of that a lot of that kind of thing but you know it's quite it was it was it was a good time because it was quite experimental the stuff that some people were producing and it was all new you know it was all very exciting and very new the internet was

completely new and the fact that you could use this thing to communicate with lots of people at once and get them to talk to each other at once you know it's a from the perspective of someone who designs games and wants to design those sort of experiences, it was an incredibly exciting period to be part of. Yeah, and I think also for gaming in general was pretty big because I know there's like a lot of a lot of browser-based flash games. Like the one that comes in mind in particular is Alien Hominated and Castle Crasches, right?

just seeing that guy make this game on like some random website to having his own like published game on like Xbox being featured you know like the summer of arcade back when that was a thing to me was always yeah yeah yeah to see that transition and that's how um edward bookmillan started wasn't he did binding of isac and yeah he i think he yeah he started with flash games and yeah no it was it's uh it's it's really great to see like how the internet has changed gaming in general um because like i remember the only way I would ever hear about games to be through like a magazine or maybe through like an ad, right? And those are all really big AAA games from like EA's and whatnot. And like now you can literally search any games. You can go to Steam. You can go to itchio or whatever and find all these like really great small games that don't cost a whole lot of money and provide you some really, really cool experiences. So it's really great to see like just the shift in where gaming is, right? You're still going to have your call of duties like no matter what, right?

But you still have the chance for like a smaller mid studio. I mean, just look at a, I'm blanking on the name. just looking among us right like i think before before it started hitting big on like twitch and youtube we were looking at i think maybe like a couple hundred people playing at like any one time and now it's like hundreds of thousands and like the game's taking off yeah i mean it's great that there's room for you know there's always going to be room for the triple a stuff and you know i i love playing that stuff sometimes but it's also great that you can get smaller devs can get out there and do a smaller more experimental stuff or just the

the type of experiences that the AAA, the bigger publishers, are never going to churn out. Yeah, for sure. So, James, you were introduced to us by Michelle from Freedom Games. Can you tell me a little bit about that partnership? Yeah, they all came together very quickly with Freedom. I mean, they approached me because they saw something that I had posted when the game Jetball Joust was in.

was almost ready to be launched, really, was about a month off being launched. And they contacted me and said, you know, hey, we like the look of the game. Are you looking for a publisher? And I wasn't really looking for a publisher.

I'd been contacted by a couple of people, but I was aware that my marketing skills aren't particularly great. And I was doing everything as it was. So I probably getting a publisher would have been a sense, idea and you know speaking to them they just seemed really cool and they seem to be on my on my wavelength and they i really like they're obviously gamers themselves um and i just really likes their approach so yeah we we have a partnership so and the yeah no start going on going and the process of of

from doing that to launch was a bit of a roller coaster ride because it was only about a month or so imagine from really signing with freedom to the to the actual game launch so for for those who don't know um and this is something so so my background is actually in gaming i i i used to do uh like grassroots fighting game events right so like street fighter motor combat stuff like that and i started you know working in e-sports doing like production and whatnot and then i eventually landed working uh at a video game publisher uh out here in irvine before i you know eventually ended up here What for for those who don't know, what role does a publisher play in in the development of a game? Well, it can it can vary, but I mean, generally what they would do is provide a degree of finance up front to finance the development of the game and

support the developer with the type of things that the developer can't do, which is marketing is a big part of that. but it also might be putting you a contact with people who can give you technical assistance, things like getting localisations done, maybe porting to different platforms. I mean, there's a whole vast spread of input. What the best publishers will do is let the game developer get on with developing the game while they take care of all the kind of the commercial side of it really, which often for game developers. developers as myself. He's not necessarily their strongest suit. Sorry about that. I had the issue with Mike meeting. We're still working for home folks. So, yeah, when I was, so when I was working in, in, at the publisher I was at, we were the

publisher for a MMO. So the role that we took was we basically did like payment processing, marketing. We had, we, we managed the complete community team. the forums, the actual servers were run through us. And the only thing that the developer did was just, here's the game. This is their, you know, these are the patch notes. What's your feedback from the community? And they were just left alone to kind of do their thing. But I mean, just like any kind of deal, you know, whether you're in the music industry or, you know, you're a Twitch streamer or whatever,

those deals definitely like can vary in like size and scope and like just the amount of involvement can, I'm sure, change as well, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, that's why I say this is kind of the best deals, I guess, the publisher to a certain extent, lets the developer get on with it. But as a developer, you should also really listen to what the publisher has to say because they will have a commercial, an understanding from a commercial perspective on your game that you as a developer don't necessarily have. And it's very easy to get blinkered in your own project. You know, you become a bit obsessed.

turn you, you know, you can't see your product necessarily how the outside sees it. And the publisher is able to give a different perspective on that. Yeah. And you're going to touch on something that I think is really, really kind of important. And that's something that a lot of people might not realize. How do you balance the, this is the game I want to make versus this is the game that I want to sell to people so they actually buy it and enjoy it? Like, how do you balance those two?

That is a really good question. And I mean, from my perspective, with Jet Board Joust, I predominantly just made the game I wanted to make. But it really depends, I guess, on what you are in the business for. You know, if you really want to do it to make a living out of it and you have no other source of income, then making something that's going to be commercially successful has to be very high up your priority list and therefore I guess you need to think much more about the commercial aspects of your game. If you have other sources of income, for example, I was doing other contract work and things like that whilst the game was in development. So I wasn't reliant on it as my

sole source of income. Then you can afford to be a bit more indulgent in terms of making the project that you want to make. But as with any artistic project, it's always a balance because, you know, if you make the thing too commercial, you're going to lose artistic interest in it. And if you make it too much,

it's just the thing that you want to do. It's liable that no one will ever want to play it or listen to it or whatever it might be. Yeah, I feel like that's definitely something that a lot of people who, and I don't know if you consider yourself like an artist, right, but who kind of had to struggle with, right? It's like, like, how do I, how do I fund the stuff that I want to do

versus the things that I have to do? And, like, where the balance is, right, to, like, you know, make it commercially viable, quote unquote, versus this is what I want to make. I think it's really cool. Hopefully you like it as well, right? And sometimes maybe you just do what you want and that ends up being like the most amazing thing in the world. And sometimes, you know, maybe you make a couple of tweaks here and there

or you, you know, kind of change some things around to kind of help it to appeal to some other people, right? Yeah. Like a really good example that comes of mind. is I'm a really big fan of the Game Hunt Showdown, right? And people who listen to the podcast and who know me know that I talk about this game like every single day, right? But they made a really, a really funny change to me in the recent patch where the game centers around you, you're like in this like Louisiana swamp kind of thing and you walk around and you had to ultimately kill bosses for like a bounty, right?

And the bosses vary from three different kinds and one of them is a spider boss. So what they did and something I thought it was super hilarious is they, they recognize. that people were were quitting the tutorial and not finishing it and when they looked into it they realized that some people watch a lot of people are deathly afraid of spiders right so for you to get into a game right at the very beginning and have that like creepy spider like 50 arm thing be the first boss you fight a lot of people were like yeah no i'm not going to play this anymore and i'm going to leave so like so like there's always these like small little changes that like any kind of developer can make which to me is like things that people wouldn't

ever think about being a thing, but can like vastly improve the experience for a player. Well, there was stuff on Jetboard Joust where after it had launched and I started to watch a YouTube videos of people playing it. I'm not talking about. There was things that people just weren't getting, you know, and I was really surprised. I was thinking, gosh, how can, how on earth did someone miss that? But you just have to respond to that and think, okay, you know, I just didn't. I just didn't get it.

I missed it. I've got to put something in the game so people are guided more. I mean, at the end of the day, you really want people to enjoy your game. I mean, that's what I want is for people to enjoy the game. So I'm prepared to make adjustments that are necessary for people to get the most enjoyment out of it as possible. But you hope to do that in a way that's not going to destroy your artistic vision, if that doesn't sound too grand a term. No, it definitely makes sense.

And I think you know which video you're talking about, because I have been kind of chilling in your Discord here and there, just going to seem like what you guys have been talking about. And I think I know the video that you guys are referring to. Right. Which when I saw what this particular person had an issue with, I'm like, okay, you know, like, I can get why he would think that, right? Jousting, you know, maybe you got to like run into things.

But ultimately, I think I did find It's like just just like super hilarious. Yeah, I mean there's some I'm not going to pick out specifics. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's some YouTube videos where I just watch it and I think, oh my gosh, you know, why I mean there's there's one yeah, you just think why you even play this game in the first place. Okay, so tell me about jet board joust the the ultimate reason why you hear. What is this game about? How did it come to be?

Why do you want people to play it? Well, it came to be as a sequel to one of the spectrums I got, spectrum games I did like back in the 80s, which was actually a pretty poor game, but it had this central mechanic on it where the guy kind of jumps off his skateboard or jetboard and the skateboard becomes a weapon and destroys what's in the path. And even though that game was not very good,

I always thought there was something in that mechanic. and I'd never seen it really done anywhere else. So I wanted to revive that. And I also wanted to make a game that was really a kind of homage to the arcade games. I grew up playing and had brought some of that vibe to a sort of modern experience, really. I wanted to produce something that felt like it felt like for me to play an arcade game when I was 11 years old. It's funny. So the guy.

When you say that, I kind of get that exact feeling because I was, I was, I did play a little bit of it. I'm not very good at it. I'm going to be 100% honest. But the way that even like the controls work to me, and I was playing with an Xbox controller, I feel like the game would really be better served on like a joystick, right? It's like having it like left and right joystick that you would have like at a, at like any traditional arcade. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's quite heavily based on a game called Defender,

which I don't know if you know, but was one of the very early arcade games and is a game that I thought and still feel is particularly impressive. But yeah, it very much leans back to the games of those times. It's got a number of references in it to games from that kind of period. But if you think about what it was like to play those sort of games back then, you know, as I said, you'd come from playing home computer stuff

where you were just looking at Aski Art and then you would play something like Defender it was just felt like a complete kind of sonic and oral assault really it was insane so yeah thanks who's I've posted that in the channel good one

yeah that's a yeah he'll be Alan he's a resident dad in the server but yeah it was just it was it was kind of mind blowing and in a sense it felt a bit like being beaten about the head with a baseball back because it was so

fast and so loud and so full on so I was trying to create the same kind of vibe really that's that's definitely how I feel to be honest like as soon as I sort of playing it I saw nothing but giant explosions and I was like okay it's going to be one of these kind of games I really get to be on it but it definitely is super fun so so for for those listening live right now We are giving away five copies right now. So please scroll up or check the pins for the giveaway bot. And we'll be giving away five copies. So please check that out.

You guys got five minutes. Sorry, continue. Yeah. All right. So what were some of the challenges when you were when you were making Jetboard Joust? Well, I was getting to grips with a lot of new technology. As I said, I was mainly working with mobile feature phones. own games prior to this.

So they are very low spec. So swapping that to coding for desktop computers was quite a significant jump. So there was a lot of technical challenges in terms of producing a game that's going to really come across as viable for that type of platform. So I, yeah, I had to learn C-sharp and different languages. languages and learn things like Shader programming, which is where you write these little programs that run directly on the graphics card and things like that. Technically, it was a world away from some of the stuff that I'd done before. And also, I was really learning to do the art from scratch because even though I'd worked

on game art myself in the past very early on in the spectrum days, when I was doing the kind of mobile stuff, I was usually working with another artist. So I pretty much taught myself pixel art from scratch for it. How is that process? Was it, is it hard to do pixel art? Because I feel like it's like a very particular type of art. And you kind of had to follow certain guidelines now. I mean, when I'm doing it, I feel a bit like, you know, the whole phrase where they say,

if you get a million monkeys to just hit a random keyboard, eventually they'll come up with Hamlet. I feel a bit like that. I mean, you've got a limited amount of pixels when you're designing a character or whatever pixel art. So I certainly think if you can tell when something looks good, there's a certain amount of, you know, it's just turning random pixels on and off until the point where it looks good. So, yeah, there was a bit of that. And yeah, I looked at some tutorials and things like that. but I set myself quite strict limits. So the game works in very strict color palettes,

which I think really, if you're doing something like this, setting yourself quite tight technical restrictions can make it easier, really. If I've allowed myself to work with a higher resolution or even a higher amount of colors and things like that, there would be so many more possibilities that I think I would have got lost in all the options.

Yeah, that's actually something that they didn't know. notice that when I go from level to level, the color palette seems pretty restricted, right? Like, that was on purpose. Yeah, I mean, I originally started producing the game entirely in monochrome. So it had a kind of, if you look at this early kind of Twitter shots of it and stuff for a long time, I was working in basically a kind of Game Boy type palette. So I did that for a while. And then I thought, oh, well, I really should apply some color to this.

So all the graphics are still designed in monochrome, and then I apply a series of different color palette combinations to those monochrome graphics to get the colors that you see in the game. Yeah, that's great. I'm sharing some gifts right now from the game. These are actually really big. It's actually really big files. Good thing I have Nitro, folks.

We'll still be giving away Nitro as well, for those who want that Discro. Not sure. Don't worry. That's still coming. But I think if free game is a little bit cooler, than some emotes, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that one. So I'm just looking at some of these bosses here that you've designed. Can you go through just like some of the inspiration for these?

Because like that fish in particular looks really, really cool. I haven't gotten to that one. I already said, I'm not very good at the game. It's the second boss in the game, that one. So I was, I guess I was thinking about these sort of insectoid characters a lot. I mean, for influence, I was alien. The film Alien was a big influence and the writings of HP Lovecraft. Okay, okay.

I can see that. The film Starship Troopers, have you seen that? That was a- Literally one of my favorite movies of all time or films of all time. Oh, great. Yeah, great. Well, that was a big influence. So that on the, you know, the kind of bugs and things that you've got,

a lot of those came from the Starship Troopers. but it was a kind of, yeah, a mishmash of all those type of influences. I'm not really sure where the fish came from, actually, because he doesn't really fit into those. But, yeah, I just thought, I just thought it would be kind of cool. Yeah, I'm looking through more of the, shout us to Michelle, by the way, for recenting us is this media kit, because it's really, really cool. It's a lot of good stuff in here for those who, like, have no idea what the game looks like.

Yeah, so what, um, What would you say was like the easiest part about, about working on on this game in particular? I'm not sure if any of it was particularly easy. I mean, I guess, I guess, well, I guess, I guess the easiest thing is, you know, that I, it's something that I believe in doing and therefore working on it. The vast majority of the time was not mature, you know. it was it was something I wanted to do and something I you know I believed in and was enjoying doing so if you if you're if you're doing something even though there's a lot of schlep in game development there's a lot of stuff that's not enjoyable you know there's just technical stuff that you just have to do at the end of the day you're creating something that you want to create and that is a very satisfying thing to be doing with your time so that means it's it's quite easy the bulk of the time to most motivate yourself to do it. So that would be the easiest thing.

You know, it's quite easy to work on something that you want to do and that you're enjoying doing. Yeah, for sure. For someone who's come like such a long way in the gaming industry and has been working it for so long, how has the internet changed development for you? Like has it been like positive, has it been negative? Like what are some of the things that kind of the internet

has allowed you to do a little bit easier? It makes life a huge amount easier, particularly when you're dealing with these vastly complicated APIs and frameworks that you have to do now if you're for pretty much any sort of game. I mean, when you were doing spectrum games, you know, you could summarize the entire capabilities of that machine and how to program it in a 200-page book. there's absolutely no way on earth you could do that with a PC so having all that resource available in the community of other developers you know if soon as you if you run into a brick wall you can't do something Stack Overflow pretty much always has the answer yeah I mean probably a large amount of the game code is already copied and pasted from Stack Overflow

I mean there's it's it's an incredible resource you know so so from that perspective it has made life hugely easier. It's hard to think of any negatives, to be honest, really. It's harder to sell stuff now would be perhaps the only negative, is that it's positive for the consumer in that it's democratized the whole process. You know, everyone has access to it. But because there's so much stuff out there, you know, it's very, it's a lot harder to get seen and noticed than it used to be. Right.

So how has development change in in terms of working with a community? Like did you, did you ask? So first off, and this thing that I didn't get to find out, did you guys do look at beta or like an alpha for the game or any kind of early access? Yeah, I did not on Steam, but I did it through Twitter really. and a few other chat channels that I was using. So, yeah, there was an alpha that went out and a beta, and I got feedback from there. And I also had a guy that I'd got in touch with who'd worked in sort of QA at Sony

and some big game publishers, and he helped me out with a lot of feedback. So there was a beta process like that. But I don't think it was really as large as it should, have been to be honest. I think the game probably should have been in early access for a bit before I went to a full launch and I think I'd recommend to anyone else who was doing this as a solo dev to do that to put it out in early access for a bit to get feedback and things and therefore you could kind of get around the sort of issues we were talking about earlier where

people just don't understand certain things. Right. And my final question about the game is how happy are you that it's out? Extremely happy. It must be really, just to finally have it out there and people can play it and check it out. Yeah, it's great.

I mean, it's fantastic to have it out there. After working on it for five years, you know, it's been brilliant to have, have it out there and have feedback from people. And yeah, it's been great.

Yep. Just set a button and tell me how to shoot and we're good to go, right? Easy to easy. All right. Are you ready for some community questions? Because we actually got a lot of them. Yeah, sure. far away.

All right. Here we go. Here we go. So first question is, what is love? I would say, why are you asking a game development that question?

Who else did you ask? All right. Second question is, let's go back down here. As someone who's learning C++, do you have any tips when it comes to applying that to the Unreal Engine?

Also, when it comes to first projects what is a good work ethic? In terms of C plus plus I wouldn't I wouldn't have any particular tips on that it's not actually what I use in terms of what's a good work ethic I would say start on something small and finish whatever you do so it's much better to start a small project and finish it than to start a huge project and not finishing it because finishing things is difficult and you will learn an awful lot just from going through the process of finishing something. I think it's probably important for like any kind of work, right? Just kind of set small goals that kind of go into a larger goal now, like no matter what you're doing. Yeah.

And with a game, there's a lot of kind of things. There's the boring stuff, you know, in quotes, that a lot of people would ignore, but you have to, you have to do. And it's important to understand that stuff really from the off, you know, just making a thing that functions with a title screen and a menu and a system of lives or whatever, you know, a proper gameplay loop. It's very important to do that. So, yeah, much better to finish a small project than not finish a big one. All right. Next question is, how do you get out of huge dips and motivation? I experience it when designing programs and I just lose hope and sight at the end. What keeps you going? That's a good question.

Yeah, someone told me too because I'm really curious. It's really just, it's setting a kind of, if you're working for yourself, as I have done for an awful long time, it's basically setting yourself kind of a kind of work-life balance thing and making sure that you always work between certain hours and be just incredibly disciplined, say, you know, well, I'm going to work for however many hours it's going to be a day. and then I'm going to down tools and I'm going to have time off and treat it. Even if it's a hobby, you know, treat it like a job and make yourself do, you know, a certain amount of it every day or every weekend or whatever it is. That's the only way to do it. Just dogged determination and discipline and making sure you have time away from it as time focused on it. because if you spend all your time focused on it,

you will lose motivation. You have to mix it up a bit. All right. Next question would be from creepy evening. Do you consider yourself a perfectionist? Yes, definitely. Yeah, I mean, that's why it's taken five years. Benjamin B1 wants to know,

did you choose, why did you choose the spider theme? I'm not sure this is applicable to the spider theme to the game, but I guess why spiders in general? That comes back to what I was saying, I guess, about Starship Troopers and Alien and those type of... Have bugs, right? Yeah, bugs and those sort of insectoid type enemies and some of the stuff that's, you know, in HP Lifecraft and things is all very much based around those types of themes. So, yeah, it comes from that. I mean, you remember the scene in Starship Trooper where he takes down the tanker bug, you know, by throwing the shooting a hole and it's back and putting the grenade, you know, that's,

that was a key influence for me. It's probably one of the greatest scenes in film history of all time. Don't add you on that one. It's brilliant. It's so good. Any, uh, from CERIC, any tips for keeping you consistent art style, but having it be fresh at the same time? That's a good one. Yeah. It is a good one.

I guess I would say to that is follow your own path. You know, there's a lot of kind of asset flipping that goes on with games nowadays. And so my main tip from that perspective would be don't asset flip, you know, go for your own art style that's not necessarily based on anything else. And keep it, again, keep it simple. you know, do something that's within your, you know is within your remit and don't overstretch yourself. Otherwise, you will find yourself, you know, getting out of your depth and it will become demotivating. Much better to do something simple that you know is within your grasp than to overreach.

That's good advice for anybody, to be honest. Just so you know, I'm taking copious notes. Bill Cosby wants to know, or Billy Cosby wants to know, how, have you dealt with spending the stress of making a game all by yourself? He hasn't. Well, that comes back to what I said about maintaining a kind of work, life balance. So one of the reasons it's taken so long is because for a lot of that time, I wouldn't be working on it what a lot of people would consider very hard.

So I would make sure I have one day a week when I'm not working on it, you know, other than a weekend. And usually I would, I will always make sure that I do something else in the day, you know, like take some exercise or play the guitar or whatever it is. And that makes yourself de-stress because it makes you take time away from it. I mean, this year and leading towards the launch, it hasn't been like that. It's been crunch. But for the first large part of development, again, it comes back to setting yourself being disciplined about your time,

you know, not getting too obsessed with it and making yourself spend too much time on it because that does become demotivating and exhausting. Right. You mentioned guitar. How good are you at playing guitar? I'm all right. Do you have any clips anywhere that we can play? Huh?

Do you have any clips anywhere? I'm not going to give me a demo. I play a lot of actually bluegrass guitar. Oh, interesting. Okay. That's cool. Yeah, I do other stuff. Well, but I spend a lot of time playing bluegrass.

I'm actually a real big fan of bluegrass. It's like a really, yeah, it's a really great genre. Like it's super, I would say it's like relaxing, but also not relaxing. If you catch my job, right? Yeah, yeah. It has a certain twain to it. I mean, I like this. I mean, because I do a lot of stuff with electronic music as well and other things,

but I like the simplicity of it. So it's basically, you know, it's acoustic instruments. There's no firmware updates. There's no messing around with technology. You know, it's just a bit of wood and some strings. And it's the same with the same with the other people in the band. So after spending all day messing around and fighting with technology, it's very refreshing just to go to something simple like that, that you know, it's just going to work. That actually makes a lot of sense because for myself, when I want to like relax and like hop down, I literally, I literally just go outside and just get some air.

Like just the most simple thing you can do, right, is like you're saying, right, there's no firmer updates for air, right? You don't have to worry about, you know, the air glitching out and they're being like a bug, right? It's going to break something. You just breathe it in and you're good to go. Yeah, right. Yeah, go outside, go for a rod or a walk or whatever. Fantastic. Lazy Leopard wants to know.

What should you do if you cannot think of any original ideas for making a game? Well, if you can't think of any original ideas for making a game. game but yet you still want to be involved in the making of games, then you should get into some other aspect of game development. I mean, there's a, you know, you could get into the commercial side of it. There's a huge amount of things you could do. You know, the music side of it or, you know, even to be a good artist, you don't necessarily have to have good game ideas.

You know, you just, you have to be able to do good art. So there's a number of different things you can do. similarly with programming, you know, you don't necessarily have to have the ideas to do the coding. Do you also be like me and just like not do any of that and just tweet? That's a skill as well. It does aid in the making of games you could say in some sense, right? Yeah, yeah, well, certainly. I mean, there's a huge aspect of it now.

It's managing the community side of it. And, you know, that's big. It's really important. All right. Christmas Pencil wants to know, are you new to the N16. Discord server and and will you stay? Yes, I am new to it. Yeah, I might stay.

To be honest, as you probably guessed, I'm a bit of a dad. So Discord is fairly new to me. Well, I mean, you got to figure it out. You guys have your own Discord server. So I would say at the very least, you're like way above my dad for sure. I think he knows that has spelled Discord. Tip Giving once a know. How do you get started?

with a project. That's a good one. Where do you start? How does that begin? Think back five years. Yeah, well, I have to think back a while to the last time I started a project. But I guess it starts with some kind of core idea. So for this one, it was the thing about the guy jumping off the jetboard and weaponizing that. So the first thing I would do would be to code a very simple. version of that, try it out and just see if it seems fun, you know, and if it does, I will continue with it. So that's, that would be usually be my starting point, is come up with some sort of idea of a core mechanic and do a very, very simple prototype and see if I enjoy playing it and if I think there's mileage in it. Yeah, I think, um, there is a really good documentary about

portal and how they took this really kind of like fair, I mean, let's be honest, the actual concept and like mechanics of portal and not simple at all right but like but they took what was a like really simple prototype and kind of expanded it to this whole thing not just including like the actual portals themselves but also like the puzzles around them and like also like the environment around them they really built this whole this whole thing around this one simple mechanic which i think kind of speaks to what you were saying right like you find one thing that you find to be unique and fun and interesting and then build around that and like what what can do to that that can support that one mechanic right yeah exactly

Yeah, yeah. Because if you don't, if you don't have that one core thing, then, you know, you, you don't really know where your game is going and you don't actually know that it's going to be fun. So it's, there's no point starting building massive maps or something like that. If you haven't got a core idea there that you, that's definitely going to be engaging. Yeah. I mean, and this goes for any game, right? Like even if it's like, you know, for example, like a Madden, right? Like, what does the game center around football? Right. So here we go, right? Just. The whole thing is around football. That's your core mechanic, right? And then you build everything around that. Yeah, yeah. Chris wants to know, what's your honest opinion on the UK game-making base versus the U.S. and the world?

How did the publishing work? I think let's just tackle the first question. What's your opinion on the U.S. game-making community, or sorry, the U.K. versus U.S. game-making community? I mean, it's very, very strong in the U.K., because we have a very strong history of of game development again going back to the spectrum time. So there's a number of very, you know, big games companies here, AAA companies and it has a very strong history of games development.

I wouldn't want to really compare it to the US. And I don't know if I could really compare the two because I found the actual community that I deal with is international, really. I mean, there's no. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah, there's no boundaries. I never think, you know, am I dealing with someone in the US or someone in the UK?

I just think, oh, I'm dealing with another game developer. I'm just talking with another game developer. So, yeah, I never really think of it in those terms. All right, cool. Seven wants to know, what did you go to school for? And what do you recommend for people that want to be like you to go to school for? Well, I studied at college. I studied graphic design.

Yeah. And I think it depends what you want. If you're looking to get a career in development, it really depends what you want to do. If you want to aim at the more sort of indie end of the scene, I would say the best thing to do is to start making stuff yourself. But if you want to head more for the kind of AAA side, then you'll maybe better off aiming for a kind of specific course or something like that

that gears you up to that sort of side of the industry. But in my experience, from being an employer, you know, and hiring people in whatever job it might be, the thing that always impresses me the most is to see something that someone has made. So I would say if you're looking to get a career in games, the very best thing you could do is to make a game, no matter how simple it is.

You know, how if you can't do graphics, it doesn't matter, just use basic graphics. just make something because that's something that you've made yourself will be something that's unique about you and that will speak to an employer or whoever it is you want to you want to show it to

about what's unique about you. All right. Let's see here. Let me look at some. Here's a good one. Jogan wants to know tips for people who want to start making their first game.

How would I get started if I wanted to? I guess it depends on your on your kind of skill level really but I think you firstly need to decide what you want to do in the game like do you want to code or do you want to just do the art and if you only want to do one of those things you need to find someone who's going to do

the other one of those things and then the next thing you need to do is decide on a platform on which you're going to develop and distribute the game I mean, there's a lot of quite simple gaming platforms, things like PCO8, which is like a kind of virtual console, which is a very, very simple way to make and produce a game, which you can do a lot easier than getting into these kind of huge APIs, you know, things like Unity and Unreal and stuff, which are really, really massively complicated and intimidating. So I might try and find, I mean, it's a shame, really, in some sense. that Flash is

fallen out of favor. But those kind of platforms where you can get up and running very quick are probably the best way to get started with your first game. All right. Y'all hear that?

Everyone start making your own games right now. I expect at least five games with the end of the year. And NXT is now a video game publisher. We're not seeing here live. Okay, let me see here. One or two more questions because then we're almost at time.

Let me see here. How has this shipped towards arm-based laptops while remaining on X86 desktops affected your future projects? Have you had this deal with shifting between two system architectures or are your projects not impacted by that? That's a very good question. Yeah, I don't really think about that

because I let the framework deal with it. I mean, I use a framework called mono game and I just assume that my game will be, supported by whatever mono game supports. So I don't usually have to think about things in that, in those low level terms. And it's kind of the same, you know, if you're dealing with other frameworks as well. I mean, you have to think about it a bit, but it's really not a massive concern to me. That's that's really good because like I'm, I'm sure there's like a lot of questions regarding like how games work when it comes to like certain like platforms and

architectures, but like, I feel like there's, there's like enough of a community surrounding game development that someone's already figured that out for you and probably figured out how to make it super easy for anybody to make games, right? Yeah, I mean, I come from a history of when I was doing those feature phone games, you know, I was dealing with a thousand different handsets. Oh, yeah. So a huge amount of different screen sizes, et cetera, et cetera. So I tend to write in a way that I know it will port well to.

different platforms, but that's just in terms of things, things generally like screen size and input method, but when it comes to the actual lower level side of porting between platforms, you kind of leave the framework to deal with it, really. I mean, that's why you have things like Unity and Unreal and Mono Games, which is the one that I use. Yeah, I feel like that's, that makes a lot of sense. for sure okay two more questions the first one is how much workshopping this is from from beaselbub

how much workshopping do you did you do before you started the actual design software wise for the game none really is the answer because when you're doing a solo dev project like this really the kind of the workshopping is almost part of the game development process i didn't actually put it out to anyone in its very early stages and got anyone to test it or anything. I sort of trusted my own judgment on that. But yeah, really the prototyping workshopping is part of the game development process. It's quite hard for me to separate the two. All right.

And the final question is, do you own any N60 products? I'm ashamed to say I don't. and I'm even more ashamed to say I didn't actually even own a PC till about three weeks ago. Oh, really? What were you developing on? A Mac. Okay, that makes sense, I guess.

I mean, it's, you know, Macs are PCs, right? I'm sure there are some games that can run on a Mac. You heard you're first folks, go get a Mac and make your first game. Yeah, I've just always, because I come from a design background, you know, that's always what people were using and it's just, you know, what I've been using. So I did use Windows a lot, obviously, for the development, but it was always on a virtual machine running on a Mac. Right, right.

All right. Well, James, thank you very much for answering all of our community questions. I hope it wasn't too hard. That was great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, for sure. All right, guys, community roundup time before we go ahead and end this up. Real quickly, congratulations to Squeal and Cool Tech for winning our setups of the week contest.

Congratulations to Tip, aka Tipgiving for wallpaper, the week. Also, congratulations to the Pucci's professors that went out. I think we announced that like on the weekend. So congrats to everyone who's in there. If you guys have any questions regarding the program, questions regarding applications, bug B. Bug B, she'll, she'll let you know what's, what's the info. And the, I think the thing that everyone's waiting for is the giveaway for the case, right so if you want to know how to get the case here's what you got to do wait exactly one hour from right now and we'll throw away a tweet into the announcements chat uh the announcence channel where we'll have a gleam and you can enter to win this uh really really cool like really awesome

looking i i want this case actually uh uh uh professionally wrapped jetboard joust h710 case i'm pretty sure it's the 710 not the 710 I so yeah what I'm getting pained for oh rip it so yeah so we'll be we'll be providing a link in the announcements channel for your chance to win this case is it international it is global we will ship it anywhere in the world except for see where is let me see here death rage where you're from India yeah except India because you said something I'm kidding it's available everywhere So anyone can win. We'll ship it wherever it has to go.

Just don't break it because it's one of a kind. So, you know, if you do, then it's on you. And also, obviously, let me pull this up here. Please, guys, if you didn't get to win a copy, check out Jetport Jouse. It's super fun. It's actually kind of hard, too. So, you know, don't think like you're going to browse through easy. I think I died at least 20 times last night.

I think my preferred gun is either the SMG because it just go super fast or the uh the chainsaw the giant chainsaw that pops out i think was great especially if like the little dudes that like run around and like try to zip around i i cannot hit them with the regular gun to save my life so that that chainsaw is like it's a godsend thank you so much um and uh i guess since you hear james uh do you have anything that you want to that you want to talk about quickly or uh lead people to um other than the game Any special announcements you want to give here exclusively on the podcast? No, really.

If you check out the game, that would be great. Yeah, I just appreciate anyone playing it. There we go. And also, actually, here, I'll do this too, if I'm allowed to on your server. Yeah, you guys let me do it. Ha ha ha. Check out the Bitbull Discord server. They have one as well.

And bug, bug James for some, for some emotes. we need some moats in that server some exclusive jip-boy jossim notes there goes the server is blowing up now I'm sorry enjoy all right guys so again thank you for joining us James really appreciate it

thank you and yeah of course man feel free to hop on anytime you know maybe you'll be able to announce something something new and thank you to everyone who tuned in remember to tune in next week at 10 AM Pacific Standard

time on the official n60 Discord server and follow at n60 are all relevant and irrelevant social media and don't forget guys please send an email to clubcast at nxc.com if you want to ask questions off the air when I can read them at my pleasure and don't forget to listen to previous

episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud and with that folks thank you very much for joining us. Thank you again James really appreciate it. Thank you. Anytime. and we'll see you next time, folks.

Bye. Bye-bye.