Retronauts - 774: BitSummit PUNCH

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Punch Punch PUNCH: Senior Japan correspondent Diamond Feit talks to developers and reports on xer favorite sights from this year's largest-ever BitSummit indie gaming festival in Kyoto.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts. Hey, how about a nice BitSummit Punch? Sounds good. Oh, Christ. Oh, I made a terrible mistake. I should have never assumed a stranger in Kyoto, Japan would know about an old TV campaign for Hawaiian Punch. They were not amused. Ah.

The good news is, I'm here in Kyoto for BitSummit. We're going to play some mini games. We're going to talk to some of them. developers and once I catch my breath we will do it all for you the listeners oh I need some tea also if you listen to past episodes guess what you don't hear no cicadas it's spring baby those horrible creatures and those high temperatures nowhere be found of course there is someone who wants to punch me now. So, I guess it's

you know, you win some, you lose some. Hello, welcome again, BitSummit. We're apparently being back by a medieval ho-down. Very exciting. And please introduce... Please introduce... To the audience. Yeah, that's right. First of all, I love your Sega Master's system. Thank you very much.

Very cool. Yeah, Mason Smith, you can call me Airdorf. I'm the creator of Faith the Unholy Trinity, my pixel horror game that came out a few years ago. And now you can find me at New Blood being executive producer for Tenebrasomnia, our new horror game. And yeah, super happy to be here. This is my second Bit Summit. And I love Japan. I love Kyoto even more. And I love this event because it's just, it's a lot more chill than Tokyo game show. Let's just say that. Happy to be here. Absolutely. So the reason I want to talk to you is, first of all, faith is very much in line with

the Retronauts spirit in that even though it is a new game, it looks like something incredibly old. Can you maybe just offer a little bit insight as how that game sort of came together? Yeah, absolutely. So I knew I always wanted to make games. My very first game that was like all mine on the Game Boy was the 1993 Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening. Okay. And that game taught me that even little chunky dot matrix pixel screen could present a like a living game world that had consequences and characters. that you cared about and challenges.

And, you know, I started playing it when I was six. So it was, like, my formative years, like, experiencing this game. And from that moment on, I knew I wanted to make games someday. I just didn't know how. So I started making games when I was 11 or 12. Wow. It was a program called Zelda Classic. It's this cheeky little ROM hack that has, like, an editor of the original Legend of Zelda,

and you can kind of place tiles. It's all very visual. There's no coding. And I did that. And then, yeah, I, I, I've always wanted to do something kind of retro. But I wanted to do a horror game also because I watched a lot of Markiplier and Jack Septychi playing through horror games.

And I was like, man, I bet I could make a horror game that maybe I could appeal to those YouTubers and maybe get some eyes on it. Because I know I can do this. So I got on GameMaker. And the reason why I went with the idea for Faith was, well, at the time, this was around 2014 when PT came out, Zion Hills demo. Lord rest and keep it. And it had such an impact on me, not just because it was genuinely scary,

but because it was short and self-contained, and the internet couldn't stop talking about it. You know, like the internet was buzzing with theories and how to do the final puzzle and things like that. And it really brought people together online. And it reminded me of my early experience was making games in the kind of Wild West days of the internet. So I did, and then I realized I'd love to make a piece,

light game, but I lack the skill to be a graphics programmer. So I was like, what if I went the opposite direction and tried to make a horror game that was scary, but just had like Atari, Apple 2, ZX spectrum-looking graphics? And so that's what I did. I worked on

Faith, what later became known as Chapter 1, for like two years and then released it in October 2017, and then did some sequels, and then eventually got a publishing deal with New Blood Interactive in 2019. But, yeah, I've always, I'm always in pursuit of making the scariest game I can with just basic, basic graphics.

And as it turns out, Faith was actually the inspiration for Chen Ebersomnia, the new horror game that I'm working on. The director was streaming Faith while he got the idea for him. And so, yeah, I'm hoping that hopefully retro horror games are here to stay, that there'll be a nice movement. and if I have at all inspired anyone to make a pixel horror game or a retro-style horror game, then I would be really, you know, fulfilled and honored as a creator. Can you talk a little bit how faith has been accepted here in Japan? Because I, you know, I come to Bits in every year, and I know I've seen multiple faith, like, constructions and faith posters and faith giveaways.

Like, how did that all come about? Yes. So, you know, who doesn't want their game to be released in Japan and make it big in Japan? and make it big in Japan, as they say. So Ukio is the company that's been helping us with these booths, and I love their energy and how many cool ideas they have. Yeah, we're very eager to promote the game and open it up to a Japanese audience.

I learned early on about the power of localizing in a local language and how that can create an audience. Yeah, I don't... I'll say that the existing fans, of Faith that are in Japan, we're very excited to see it relaunch in Japan. I don't know if we've acquired much of a new audience, but

we're out here kind of hustling and getting the word out like anyone else would. We had some very interesting promotions. For example, we had Super Mystery Magazine Mu, give a promotion for the game for Faith.

They did a spread on some of the monsters, investigating them as if they were actual cryptids or like actual like demons and that was really cool. I'm now a subscriber of Mooh magazine. Yeah, because that's the magazine here in Japan's been done print for a long time, right? I don't know how long, but like I watch a lot of old horror movies and there's usually a Moo magazine or a Moo equivalent in like the background.

Yeah, that's right. I remember that a lot, watching a lot of J-horror. It was very, very common to see like paranormal, like, ghost caught on camera magazines. What I love about Japan is that printed material still has, like, a presence here. And I really like printed material, like magazines and books. And, yeah, so, Moo Magazine, and then there were also a few influencers. Like, there was a comedian named Gorgeous who played the game a couple of years ago at a promotional event for Happy Net, which was our Japanese publisher. So, yeah, I'm completely new to doing business with the Japanese, so it's been an interesting event.

And, but yeah, I think that Faith's popularity can only go up from here, I guess, is my positive outlook for it. I'm sorry, change subject here. We have to express that while we were recording here sort of behind the booth, we were quietly pushed aside by a giant inflatable frog because the staff member had to take a break. And a tiny little Japanese girl popped down. That's the shoes! Yeah, the whole time we were recording, there's been a pair of shoes behind the booth, and I thought that was incredibly ominous, and it was her shoes. It's fine. No horror required

Well I obviously you Probably stuff you can't talk about But do you have anything upcoming That you like that you want to hint that Or you can talk about besides So for me personally This is not a new blood thing

But just an Airdorf thing I'm hopefully announcing a new horror IP A new survival horror game It's going to be very traditionally survival horror It's a Victorian Gothic themed So if you like Edgar Allan Poe Or like reading like Nathaniel Hawthorne or some of those old Gothic Victorian classics, then I think you'll like this game.

If you like cats, you'll also really like this game. So it's going to have a more traditional art style. It's not going to be pixelated. It's going to have like full orchestral soundtrack, something like Rule of Rose, but 2D animated, or like maybe a little bit of Castlevania. But it's going to be much more traditionally survival horror than psychological horror. horror and I'm joined by one of my former students who is a 2D animator. She does really, really high quality 2D animation, hand-drawn animation.

And I'm hoping that it'll feel the gap for, like the need for nice, like, kind of Western-style 2-D animation in a horror game that has a lot of atmosphere and a lot of the Gothic Victorian themes that are from that literature. When I got the idea for it about a year and a half ago, I felt extremely strongly about it, which is very rare for me. And so I'm going to pursue it, and we're going to try to crowd fund it. So we're hoping to generate some interest and some funding for it here in the next month. Excellent.

Now, I've taken a lot of time, but I have to ask. So how many languages at this point has Faith been localized in? So officially or unofficially, because unofficially has been localized in several languages, including we've got the full. Portuguese, unofficial language, but now we're doing the official Portuguese language patch. It's got Korean, it's got Russian, it's got, I think it's got Canadian, which is, as it turns out, a completely different language. Okay.

Yeah, it's got the Texan, the Southern Drol localization. But yeah, official language patches we have are, of course, English. We're going to have Spanish and Portuguese out by the end of the year, and then, of course, Japanese. I would like to expand into an official Korean patch, but that's still in the works. But yeah, like quite a handful of languages. What's cool is that New Blood will post the unofficial patches on the Steam, you know, on the Steam community.

Like, we endorse it. You know, we fully, you know, someone's going to localize our game for free. Like, we're going to post it and let people have access to it. Right. We're not super protective. So it's been a fun, I guess, kind of pseudo-collaboration with the community to get these patches out. The reason I ask is because I'm very curious, what would a Latin translation of faith look like?

It would be very tedious and maybe 1% of the population in academia would be able to understand it. Maybe a Greek before a Latin. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time. Is there anything you want people to look for, I don't know, on the internet for either your studio or you as a person, social media, what have you? Yeah, I'm just Airdorf, A-I-R-D-O-R-F on most social media platforms. I still use Twitter. I still call it Twitter.

I haven't, I haven't, I am on Instagram and TikTok, but I think I might just be too old for those platforms at this point. Right. But yeah, like you can send me a DM whenever you want. They're always open. Yeah, everything but like LinkedIn and Facebook, I guess. I understand. Well, thank you very much.

You frighten me very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. All right, quick break, but we're still here. We're still behind the, uh, New Blood Booth with the very spooky Tenebrisomnia. Am I pronounced that right?

Yes, you are. And please introduce yourself. I'm Andres Borgi. I'm from Argentina, and I'm the creator of Tenebris Somnia. All right. So maybe you talk a little bit about this project you're making because I can't think of another game quite like it. Well, that's a cool thing.

I mean, you can say it has a little of Clock Tower, you can say it has a little of Resident Evil, Silent Hill, whatever, but the cool thing is that you cannot put it in one bag. And this is a survival horror game with resources, combat and everything, but in 2D, like it's a part of a like a Famicom game, like an NES game. But when the story advances, you get cutscenes, and that cutscenes are made in live action like a real movie,

like an award-winning film crew. So it looks really good. It's like a movie inside a game. So the contrast is so high, both ties so extremely afar one from another, that the shock is really strong. Now, I'd love to know more about this, because for me, as a layperson, that to me seems like it's incredibly difficult as opposed to just making, say, a video game cutscene. But am I wrong or am I right? And you just feel like that was the way to go? Well, actually, I'm a food maker myself.

Okay. So, and I've made another game in the past, so I know both worlds. Okay. So I knew it could be made. It wasn't scary for me. Oh, okay. And I have my own crew, and we met much more people when we were making this. And, well, very professional, the best people in Argentina to make movies.

And all the people that made horror movies, so it's all about the genre. So, yeah, it's one of the games that if you stop before you make it. To think, how long will it take all the effort, you don't make it. So you don't have to think. You just go for it. And how long has this project been in the works? Because I believe I played a Steam demo at Nextfest a few years ago. Like, what's your timeline at this point?

Well, I started, like, planning it in 2022. Okay. Like, planning it and think about it and writing it. It took one year and a half to write the story. And at the beginning of 20, 23, We started officially to make it. I think at the end of 2023, we had a demo, I think. At a trailer, it went viral, and New Blood came to us.

And we came working with them until now, and the game will be out this year, 26, around the end of the year. All right. Is that the point that Mason got involved in your project, or was there before? He got involved with New Blood, when New Blood came on board. And the funny part is that the idea for this game came. to me while playing faith. I saw that his game

had two styles. I said, oh, this two styles is so cool. I said, I want to make a Famicom game, which was why I played when I was a kid. And I'm filmmaker so I can make live action. So, yeah, that is a full circle.

Is that why you gave your game a Latin title? Is that Latin? It is Latin. Okay. The reason is when you make a game that doesn't happen in, I don't know, in the US or in English-speaking place. I mean, if I call my game

Sueniors of Kudos, which will be Dark Dreams, which is TenebriZomnia, I think the market shortens, right? I don't know if it's that way, but it's a prejudice and it's a fear every game maker has. But I didn't want to call it Dark Dreams because the game happens in Archie. is in Spanish.

Of course, it has English language, but... So I choose Latin because it's related to the lore of the game, and it's universal. Now, let me ask you, as a filmmaker, I assume you're shooting this in Argentina? Yes. So how does that... Is there a language barrier happening in that,

or are all the cutscenes like mute, or how do you handle the language of that? Because it must be difficult to localize... live action in that way? No, we made them mute. We made all the games, so the information is in-game, like text in-game. It's all construct, so characters don't have to talk to see

to understand what a bit. It was really hard. But I think it's the best option, because if they speak Spanish and you have subtitles, that takes you out. If they speak English being Argentine actors, it's off to. Right. I just, okay, they don't speak at all.

I understand. Good question. Okay. What can you tell me about the booth here today? Because you only have one station, but I would say 75% of your booth is taken up by a full-sized bed with bloody corpses in it and blood on the floor. And there's like a head sitting there with like candles coming out of it. Did you bring all this on the plane with you? No, this was made by Ukio.

Oh. Who made this stance and they made a wonderful work. They told them, do something. Whatever. And they saw the bed is on one of the cutscenes. And they say, can we make this bed? I said, yeah, of course. And they wanted to make the candle guy.

Yeah. Because they liked the design. And I didn't expect it to be so easy. But it's incredible. I expected something like the real size. Right. Head. Sure.

Big. And it's really, really detailed. It's a very large head. Yes. And it's really impressive. And that's actually me. I play the candle guy. So you can see the teeth.

Okay. And so it's really weird to see myself there. And it's really an honor. It's beautiful. I got asked, though, who's going to clean up that blood? There's a lot of blood on the floor here. Who's going to clean that up? Well, in the booth, I hope the people that clean do it.

Bad for them, but what can you do? I'm just thinking. We're here in Kyoto. Kyoto's a beautiful ancient city. I would hate to spill blood in Kyoto and have someone else clean up. I don't know. I'm concerned with people, Kyoto. They've gone through so much.

I agree and I think much blood has been spilled here too around the hundreds of years it has All right thank you for time very much but is there anything you want to tell people that maybe they want to find you or your studio online social media website anything like that Well they can follow me on Instagram it's Borgy Andres it's my last name before the first one Okay um I find the Nebris Somnia too on Twitter on X and Instagram And I hope people come to the game for the cutscenes, but stay for the story and the gameplay. Right. Actually, we've been talking right here.

The game has been on display all weekend. What have you seen from players? Well, they are really shocked by the cutscenes. I mean, we are always expecting them to get to the cutscenes to see what happens. So they are like, oh, so it's really funny. It's really cool. And I'm glad they like it. Because the game inspired by many Japanese things, you know.

Sure. Many Japanese video games. Of course. So seeing the people from this country like it, it's great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hey, I'm back. Back on the safety of my own home, where no one can get to me, regardless of how justified they may be.

Let's talk about the games I played, starting off with, I'm going to call the pixel category. I know every video game uses pixels because that's a display term, but let's just say these games have more pixel art than, anything else. And I'd like to start by talking about Route 16. Do you know what Route 16 is? I sure didn't. Route 16 was a 1981 arcade game. It was a maze-like driving game, except, get this, you could leave the maze, and then the game sort of zooms out and puts you on this world map, kind of like Exidy's venture, if you ever play that game, and then you can drive to another box, and then you enter another maze and you're going all around, you're exploring the things, you're looking for items or whatever. I guess it did okay. It's available via Hamster's arcade archives. A few years later, they make

Route 16 Turbo for the Famicom. This never came out for the NES, only Famicom. And as you might expect, a 1985 adaptation of a 1981 arcade game, they added a few bells and whistles, you know, the graphics a little bit better. There's some more options, but it's still basically the same game about driving around in the map. If you have Switch Online and you download the Japanese app, you can play Route 16 Turbo right now for the Famicom. Or if you'd like, Sunsoft is working on a version of Route 16 Turbo for Steam. Right now, it's coming soon.

But what I played was Route 16 R, which is a sequel to Route 16 and Route 16 Turbo. This is a brand new game with brand new graphics, multiplayer, vehicle customization. it's still the same basic game. You're driving around a map. You leave the map. You go to other rooms. It's still that same flow. But it all looks and sounds much nicer.

And also now the car transforms. I guess now if you collide with another car, instead of just losing a life like an arcade game, you engage in battle. I did not understand the battle system at all, but it's there. So if you love really, really old Sunsoft games that don't have a big audience outside of Japan,

please look forward to Route 16, Route 16 Turbo, Route 16 R. All these Root 16s are out there for you. Some of them are available right now. Others are coming to Steam soon. Sunsoft that had a second game, though, they were also showing off Hard Edge War Zone. Now, maybe more people remember this one. Hard Edge was a 1998 PS1 game.

In some territories, it was called Tactical Rescue Assault Group, or Tragg. As you can imagine, 1998, PS1, it was a third-person action game. Kind of looks like Resident Evil, but also kind of looks like Parasite Eve, pre-rendered backgrounds, 3D characters, sketchy voice acting, tank controls. The new game is not that. The new game, Hard Edge Warzone, is a real-time tactical card battler. So even though some of the environments look the same, in the new game, you get a deck of cards, the cards get dealt to you,

you pick which cards you want to use, and you can use them to, you know, move around the space, attack enemies, heal yourself, etc, etc., etc. There's a story mode, there's a mission mode. Not really my cup of tea personally, but I really appreciated that Sunsoft is looking back and finding all these old games that I guess they own. And they're like, hey, we own this. Let's make a new version or let's contract out a new version. Because I want more video games based on old video games.

That's kind of my whole thing. So look forward to that. Hard Edge, Warzone. Now, an original game, as far as I can tell, is magical blush from Brazilian developer Al-Kaser Game Studio. Now, they're describing this as a top-down Metroidvania, which I guess is fair because there's exploration in combat and you unlock doors and whatever. At first glance, I thought it was like Enter the Gungeon because of the perspective and the character has a dodge roll and they were breaking little boxes and all sorts of destructible scenery. But no, no, it's not random. It's not procedural generation.

It's a designed game with levels and gates to unlock. Also, it's all magic. There's no guns. You have magic powers. You have elemental attacks. I was using lightning bolts. I was using fireballs. I was moving the earth.

I also like that some doors are basically elemental, so then you use the right element to unlock the door. So it's basically like your powers are also keys to open doors. Speaking of keys, I broke the demo. I was in front of a door with a giant key, and I don't know if I pushed the wrong button or did this. something at the wrong time, but the key flew through the door, my character vanished, and the game just sort of sat there. And the staff came over like, oh, what happened? I was like,

I don't know. But hey, it's a demo. You're supposed to break demos. That's fine. Anyway, you can play this demo for yourself. It's on Steam right now. And the page says the full game is coming in Q3, 2026. Digital Exorcist by Cool Beans production. This is a visual novel adventure game. And it definitely, the setting is sort of quasi-international. Like, it's clearly inspired by Japanese locations, but a lot of the people in the game are not Japanese, or they have names that indicate there from somewhere else. The website calls it a Baja, Japan-Fornia-style world,

and also cites Snatcher and the Silvercase. Which, I don't put Snatcher, but I have played Silvercase. That is a good game. But I think both those games involve sort of a mixed cultural world where it looks like Japan, but it's not quite Japan as we know it. you know, kind of a near future situation. The dialogue is a little sweary. I'm not against profanity.

I use it sometimes, but it was a conspicuous amount of profanity. But also, I was still laughing when I was playing the demo, so it seems like a good game. I enjoyed what I saw of it. You can play an older version on itch.io, or you can play a free Case Zero on Steam, but the full game is coming at some point in the future, because it's got its own page for digital, or you can find these older versions and play them for free and get a taste of what this full game might be like. Lone Chef by Project Morium, Morayum.

So it's 2D action. Might be Metroidvania. I'm not so sure. But it's got Zelda style, like recent Zelda style cooking. As you go around and you jump and you fight, you pick up a lot of ingredients, then use the ingredients to cook stuff. I didn't really explore the cooking to its maximum. potential, but I was already, even in a short demo situation, I got a lot of ingredients,

and I could have cooked a lot of different things, and I was already cooking things for people in the world who wanted things. Like, I met some girl who wanted something sweet, so I made her something and gave it to her. I like the animations when you cook. It's not just a simple, you know, musical skiff. Like, you see your guy breaks himself out and whip his hands around, and he's chopping. It's a nice pixel art, nice animation.

Also, the guy, when you're fighting, your main weapon, is a giant spoon. That's funny. It could be anything, but he's got a giant spoon. Okay. Now, the website said they're currently crowdfunding on something called Tumblebug. No E. Tumblebug. I don't know what that is. I don't know if you want to give them money, but you can play a demo right now on Steam of Lone Chef. If you like what you see, then maybe you want to go to Tumblebug and give them some money to make more game. I don't know. But what I saw, demo-wise, pretty cool, enjoyable. A little more my speed was inkblood by Hey Bird. And yes, it includes exclamation points. So you have to say, hey bird, not just hey bird. Hey bird. It's a point and click detective game. It's got harsh European graphics. It's the only way I can describe it. There was a person with a giant back covered in tattoos and that was like the world map. That's cool. I was in a carriage looking around different settings. And then you can sort of click and point. You can point and click. and drag things onto the screen, like a lens onto the screen, and that lets you see events in different time periods, or you take pictures. You're really got to take pictures because in order to advance the story, you have to identify what's happened, and that involves filling out a flow chart, and that means putting pictures. So it's like, who committed the crime? You need to find a picture of the culprit, and then you put that in a picture there, and the game's like, oh, okay, you found the culprit. Just really ominous atmosphere for the game, and I thought that was very impressive.

So I'm on board with this one. I went on Steam and I wishlessed it because it looks really good. Inkblood by Hey Bird. Even more impressive, although I didn't get much time with it, artist's impact by Moss, Mass, MES, who seems to be a solo developer. They described this game as a lighthearted JRP, and it's set in a post-A-I-pocalypse world, like an AI apocalypse has happened in America. a society's rebuilding itself. So it's not a wasteland, but you can see the things are a mess,

and people are still kind of like trying to figure out how to get back on their feet. And at one point, I encountered a rogue AI that was like a box. I only found one fight in the whole demo, and it was basically like push the attack button twice, and I won. So I don't know how the full game works. I can tell you what I

saw of it, based on what the demo and the trailer they were showing. Some incredible pixel art, really impressive animation. This game is actually already out on Steam. So if you want to play it right now, you can play it. There's also a demo out on Steam if you want to just try it. It is coming soon to Switch, though, which of course they were hyping at the event, because more people go to BitSummit have Switch than they do Steam. That's my opinion. But it looked very cool based on what I saw of it,

and it certainly impressed the judges because they gave it the Vermilion Gate Award, which is basically the best in show kind of award for BitSummit. So they loved it. It's out now if you want to look more, try it for yourself. Pretty impressive, especially made by one person. Artists Impact. And last one for this block, debug Nephemi by Nephemi

Studio. Nephamee is N-E-P-H-E-M-E, Nephame. Right off the bat, it looks like Undertale. That's not a bad thing, but just it looks like Undertail, and you're in this fantasy world, and you talk to people, and this big screen comes up just like in Undertail when you have sort of those battle scenes.

But what happens here is you're trying to debug this world. So, like, you're in a fantasy world that's a computer world, I guess. So the game wants you to debug it. And how do you do that? You play some mini games. Now, where it's tricky is, each mini game is a different window on the sort of the battle screen, and you have to juggle multiple windows at once. So, like, the left stick moves your character around a screen and you're trying to avoid getting hit,

whereas one button will juggle, we'll switch between two different menus, and you're trying to solve a puzzle in one of them, and you're trying to catch items in another one. It's hard to explain. I think if you watch a trailer, it make more sense, or if you play the demo, again, this is a game that has a Steam demo. Now, I should say the demo they had a BitSummit was only in Japanese, but the Steam page is in English,

and the Steam page says the full game will be in English and Japanese. I don't know if they have an international demo on the Steam page. or not. But you should be able to learn more there if you look at it and figure out if that's something you'd like to do or play or what have you. I kind of liked it. I kind of liked it. It was challenging but not too challenging for me to sort of use two hands of the controller and do all the stuff at once without going crazy. I don't think I did perfect, but I didn't do anything terribly wrong like I didn't lose any fights or anything. So, debug Nephamy. So, welcome back to BitSemit.

We're here in the embossed golden... The culture room. Yeah. It was kimonos last year. I think we're going for a little more ostentation this year. It's a little gaudy, but, you know, it's tasteful. And I'm joined here by two personnel from Minmax. Please introduce yourselves.

Hello, I'm Sarah. I'm Haley. Nice to meet you both. Well, I met you once before, but this is the first time for us. So I'm guessing this is your first bit summit, perhaps? Yes. This is both of our first bit of it. Yeah, mine too.

We're obsessed. So I was really curious, Sarah, because I know you spent many years in Tokyo and you were at 8-4. So you're kind of, you've been in the biz, you've been around the biz for a while. What's your impression so far of Bit Summit? I love BitSummit. I find that, like, it seems a lot more international than maybe it was when it started back then. But I feel like the quality of games here is just a lot higher. I don't know if it's because, like, it's harder to get to BitSummit as a foreign game.

But yeah, it just feels like the quality of the indie games here is a lot higher. Yeah, well curated. There's a mix of a bunch of different things to do besides just demos, but even still the demos are well spaced out. It's not too busy. We came yesterday during the business day and we're like, oh, yeah, it's not too busy. It'll probably be swamped today.

But honestly, right now we're walking around the floor, and it's not too crazy today either. It's a good time of year. I've heard that when it was back in July, it was a little bit sufferably hot. We heard there was like a heat stroke issue. Yeah, well, it's bounced around the schedule over the, the years, but yeah, it had a run in July for a while, and as someone who lives

in Osaka, I just, I wasn't a big fan of that, so I'm very happy that it's May and it's actually breezy outside, you know, just, just pleasant. It's so nice, but yeah, I don't know, Bits Summit. It's nice, we want to come back every year. Like, I get it, I get it, and I feel like the people here too, like, I don't know, everyone here is so cool,

right? Because I think, yeah, getting to Japan's harder, so everyone's here is, like, I don't want to be, like, someone important, but, like, they all have, like, famous games, they've worked on here as projects, like, it's crazy. It's almost like GDC, but like condensed in terms of like the talent that comes out here. Yeah, it's also nice that we're in the phase of the games industry where Indies can be the big heavy hitter, like cool guys on the show floor and have a bunch of space. Like, you know, they have the PlayStation Nintendo boost, but there's also this massive like vampire

survivors sections. Oh yeah, they're huge, but they're also such a small team. It's cool to see Indies be the big guys at a show. That's also fun to see. Is there anything you've played so far that caught your eye that really you want to, you want to talk about to people on the internet? We had to remember the names of them. We've played so many games. Petal Runner. Pettle Runner looks amazing.

Dom King Cabbage, which is our friend, Kobe's Joe's game. That game is just visually. It looks incredible. The little indie section downstairs by the stage, I love, even though they get the smallest amount of space, I feel like there was one, and it was like a point-and-click game, but the person made, like, mini diaramas for all the point-and-click,

and every single item in the game was, like, handcrafted by them and photographed. And he has, by the demo, he has the diorama of the level you're playing in. Yeah. Yeah. Like you think, oh, we have, there's no more ideas. Games, there's no more ideas for video games that are new, and then you kind of poke around. And they also have a very cute little, I think it's called Games Control Japan or Make Control Japan.

It was something similar to what GDC does, which is weird games with either weird controllers or unconventional gameplay thing. So we played some of those that were really fun. We had to pour a beer with a perfect amount of foam. stick a stick in some dirt and then you're like a priest purifying the ground like fun things to do besides just that what's also cute is there's a lot of kids here as well today

which I'm not used to seeing in any kind of press, you know, open event so it was cute to see like kids having fun and playing the games and walking around with their little backpacks that's been nice too. It seems like the kids just like post up out of a game they like. Yeah.

We just played kiln with some kids and they were posted up there like long before we got there just making pots and like rolling around and like smashing stuff. Very cute. So Sarah, how's it back, how's it feels to be back in Japan for such a long absence? Everything's changed. I was so upset.

Like, I got here, and they were like, we don't only use cash anymore. And I was like, what do you mean you don't use cash anymore? And they're like, no, we take your credit card just fine. And I'm like, what? And now there's some people who are like, we only take pay pay. And I'm like, what the heck is pay pay? Like, I just got here. Like, what do you mean?

Like, what is that? And then, like, too, like everyone uses their phone for train passes. So I feel like a boomer, when I get my pass mom, out, like some kind of old head. But yeah, everything's changed. I feel like it's modernized. There's a lot more like, like, foreigner accessibility, especially in Kyoto. Like, everybody, it used to be like, oh, we don't have an English menu. Like, everything has an English menu. Everything is like a laminated instruction that they just point at. And yeah, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy how much it's changed. You know, you think that it probably didn't change that much,

but for being almost gone for like eight years, it changed a lot. And how about you? I know this is your first time. So what's your, what's your, what's your take so on your Express Japan trip. Oh my God, I'm obsessed. Well, Sarah's like the perfect person to travel with. We've been having a lot of fun. We tracked on a lot of extra days to do Tokyo and stuff before. So we did five-ish days in Tokyo, four-ish days,

and then we came here on the bullet train. God, the infrastructure is so smart and good. I come from Canada where we have like one bus. It's like, what do you mean there's a train every two minutes? And it takes you across town in under 15 minutes. Like, that's crazy. That's been really great. Not having to worry about taxis and paying extra for that.

everything's really affordable. I can't believe how cheap, like all the food is, the souvenirs, stuff like that. But Japan's been the top of my visit list my entire life. So I said I'm practicing a honeymoon with Sarah. Well, I'm here and I'll come back again soon. Yeah. Yeah, the exchange right now is very favorable to tourists. But even without the extreme difference between Da already and right now, I do think that things Japan are pretty generous, at least compared to when I go to the States and see what's happening over there. Yeah, food is cheap. Food is cheap. Hotels are not cheap.

Yeah. But the food being cheap makes up for it. Do you want to tell me about the Muscle Girl bar? How did you get this? You posted it publicly. It was so fun. I mean, we pretty much, we had another plan for a whole day set, and we changed it just so we go to Muscle Girls at the end of the day. And, yeah, I posted it online and like 10 different people were like, yes, muscle.

It's becoming so well-known. Obviously, a very forwarder place. I think it was all-forter. corner in there. But it was so fun. You just get to chill for 80 minutes. It wasn't chill at all. It wasn't chill at all. You walk in and you're like, why is the floor sticky? And then after after 10 minutes, you figure out why. Yeah, I got a grapefruit shoved into my face. I did not know that was going to be coming. Yeah, I got my face with a grapefruit. I got my face smashed. Yeah. And then I got my face smashed with boobs because we didn't know what I was purchasing.

Yes. Footage mysteriously deleted. I know. I've freaked up the footage. I lost it. It's lost a time. Sorry, you speak Japanese. What do you mean you didn't know what you were buying? Well, it was called, it was called a push-up. Yeah. Oh. It was called a push-up.

It was a muscle girl push-up. But what I didn't realize is what they were pushing was into my face with their boobs. Oh. Enjoyed every minute of it. Yeah. Enjoyed every minute of it. I think that's on the girls-only menu.

It is. It is. Because I was there a couple years ago with some funny buddies of mine, and I noticed that there were two different menus. Like, anyone can get slapped. Slaps are gender-free. But I know there was one. stuff. There was one item. I think I saw

a lady climb on a pole and just drop on the pole and just stop right above someone's head. Yeah, okay. There you go. That was mine. I got that one. Yeah. If you're a girl and you go to muscle girls, you do have twice the options. Yeah. Very nice. Meanwhile, I'm non-binary. I couldn't convince them of any of that. Like, no, it's fine.

I'm just, no, whatever. It's all right. I'm not, I'm not just laughing. It's not my bag. You didn't get slapped either. It was a little too scary. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And then Haley got to see Ike Boko. She was a little, like, confused by it. Because, you know, how there's, like, it's all the bars, but it's like the host clubs, too. And she's like, why are we in, like, the strip club area?

And I'm like, Haley, that's just what it looks like. It's giving strip club area, to be fair. And I'm like, hey, we're going to the muscle girls bar. Like, they're going to take off their shirts. Yeah, and they did. And it was great. And it was great. I mean, there definitely is strip clubs in Ike Bikuro.

I was there last year, and I just walked past one. And of all things, it was named Mikado, which is the same name as that really famous arcade. So I got some, I got some good, some good bluesy energy when I was there. I posted a picture. I was like, this is not the Mikado I expected. And everyone's like, whoa, did you go in? Like, no, I didn't go into the strip club. It's noon, dude. Yeah.

I didn't stop anyone else there, though. That's the weird thing about, like, Japan. Like, we were at Ike Bokuro. And there's also, like, the jazz fest was going on. Oh, that's great. So, like, there were people there with, like, classic instruments, and there were kids, like, going to see jazz. And then you have me and Haley, like, where's the muscle girls bar?

Where are the beefy women? Where's my large, too high or my large lemon sour? Oh, yeah. Haley's obsessed with the lemon sours. Oh, yeah. I can't go back now home. It's a good deal. It's a good deal. There's a can, too. You just get them in the can. Yeah, we got some rap beers and went to the river last night with some sours. Very nice. But no, I'm going to go home and want them crave a lot. Like that big stine of lemon sour we got at muscle girls was probably the most repression drink I've ever drank in my life. I mean, I think if you go to like Don Quixote, you can get like the concentrate. Like bring a bottle home with the concentrate and just mix it yourself. I mean, it won't last forever, but.

Don't give her. Don't give her in a day. She's got a ninja slushy, okay? Don't give her. Don't give her any ideas. Oh, my God, slushy lemon sour? That'd be insane. Ooh. Good thought.

Look, I support women's rights and women's wrong. So if you want to drink the lemon sour, I want you to drink lemon sour. That's the ally we need. Yeah. All right. I know you're very busy. Thank you very much for your time.

You're much bigger on the internet than I am, but if you want to share any kind of social information with people to find you on the internet, go right ahead. We will do that. Hi, guys. I'm Sarah from MinMax. Please follow Minx and I live stream

on Twitch at Serapods. Also please play Fields of Mysterya my game. Oh. Yeah, my name's Haley. I'm Haley Fax on all the socials.

I'm also at MinMax. It rhymes. That makes it easy. Yeah, I'm also a video game lawyer. So if you're a dev and you need help, I can help you with all stuff. That's Minmax with two ends

like Minnesota. Yeah, exactly. I don't want to say how long it took me to figure that out, but it wasn't. I've looked there for a year before I figured it out. Don't even be embarrassed.

I'm sorry. Is it a lot? Haley facts like truths or Haley Facts like the piece of paper? Like the piece of paper. Okay. That's very appropriate for Japan. We still get faxes. Oh, okay. It's because I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And it was my toddler name. Hallie. Oh, this is clever.

Haley Fax. Halifax. I mean, I'm a person who uses Fight Club because it's my last name and the Fight Club. So I understand. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much. Both of you. How about some more 3D games that I enjoyed? Like, thanks, like. There's a comma there, so I don't know how to say this without sounding sarcastic. Thanks, Light by Lighters Games, one word.

Now, this is a very portal-inspired first-person puzzle game. There are chambers, there are puzzles. It's very clearly the game is about solving the puzzles. The main tool is a flashlight. Now, the flashlight can obviously go on or off. When the flashlight is on, besides putting light in the environment, you light up objects and suddenly that gives them mass, and then they fall down out of space

and you can pick them up and move them around. If you turn off the flashlight, you basically emit a black beam that absorbs light. Take light from something and basically render it into a shadow and that removes properties from it.

So you're assigning light, you're taking away light, you're picking up objects, you're manipulating them around. You can also light up objects in a certain angle or from a certain perspective like with an obstacle in front of it

and you basically cut the object into a certain shape and then it fits in different shapes to solve different puzzles. Kind of hard to explain, but once again, there's a steam demo available. You can go up there, try it right now. The page says it's ready in September. What I saw seemed pretty polished and ready to go, but I guess they probably want to finish, you know,

going all over the puzzles and making sure the game doesn't break. Also, inside the game world, there was someone walking around with a light bulb for a head. I think they were in charge, and I think they weren't angry at me. I couldn't be sure, though. And backwards, the light bulb was not plugged into their head. The light bulb was plugged into somewhere up high via a cable, and they were walking around dragging a cable from their body. So kind of a curious sight to see in a video game.

Thanks, Light. Dreadmore by Dream Doc. I'm just going to say it. Okay, it's a dredge-like. I know dredge was a big hit, so it's basically a dredge-like. It's a spooky fishing game. However, in Dreadmore, it's first person. So you're walking around the environment.

You get into the boat. You get out of the boat. When you go fishing, you are a person in a boat. your line and trying to catch the fish. It feels very different than Dredge, even if the game world and the sort of premise sounds like Dredge. It does not play like Dredge. I met some monster NPCs that looked very good, some crab-like people, a creature that had

like two heads that was arguing with itself. Really good-looking game so far. The Steam page says Q4 of this year, so maybe by holiday season or maybe next year we'll see. Dreadmore. All right. This one's a mouthful, but the game title really tells you what's happening. The remake of the end of the greatest RPG of all time, and the primary creator is Lucas

Emmanuel, who is there at the booth. So he gave me his card, Lucas Emmanuel. When the game starts, you're in some kind of huge boss battle at the end of a game. You'll probably lose because you don't know how the game works. But then when you restore your save file, you basically go around and collect your stuff and find your party members and you get to the battle again. and this time you have a better idea of what you're doing, so you can probably win.

Also, as you play, you're going to find pages of the manual, and you're going to find directors' commentary, like nodes. Like, if you play portal with director's commentary, and you see the little spinning, like, voice balloon, that's what's in this game. And you'll hear an audio file play.

There's also video. There's, like, cutscenes with real people in them. Like, at one point, I was looked at the screen, and the developer was on the screen, the game, and the developer was sitting next to the screen, like in the same pose. So I was having a little moment of, wait, oh, that's you in your game. Okay, hello.

So a lot of creative things happening at once. Definitely got my attention. The whole game has kind of a 2.5D, 2D, 3D kind of thing, like the recent Dragon Quest remakes or the, was it, Octopath Traveler games? Like, that's how it looks. Like, it looks old-fashioned, but it's also very 3-D. But also, because it's a video game that knows it's a video game, you can, break the environments and it's okay because the game knows you're going to do that.

It sounds really weird when I explain it, but I think it makes more sense when you look at it or touch it. And by the time you hear this podcast, the game will be out. The release date is only a few days from now as I record this. So when you hear this, it's already out. So you can try it if you'd like. The remake of the end of the greatest RPG of all time. Another long title, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand by Friday Sunday. That's Sunday as in dessert.

Not Sunday as in the day of the week, Sunday, Monday, too. No, no. Friday, day of the week, Sunday, dessert. In this game, you're renovating a hotel. You've got a bunch of tools. Everything kind of looks like Power Wash Simulator. I was breaking down old furniture. I was sucking up the debris.

I was painting the walls. It wasn't as detailed as Power Wash Simulator. Like, if you spray the wall for like a few seconds, it just fills it all in. Like, the game gets what you want to do and just lets you do it. But that was the first impression I got. But then the story kicks in, and I go outside, and I'm riding on a, like a scooter, and there's a cat. Then I'm on a boat.

Then I'm on an island. And at one point, I was being chased by the giant monsters, and I'm using my tools to fight off the monsters. Also, I was in a demo setting in the middle of the show floor, and I had no headphones. So I really kept coming on the audio. But I can tell you, based on the visuals and how the game sort of felt, and also the description page on Steam, It's a musical. Characters will just start singing about what's going to happen or how they're feeling. So I couldn't hear this, but I could see it.

I'm like, are we singing? This is a singing game? So that's unusual. Anyway, if you want to play this in the comfort of your home, you can do that because there is a steam demo up. There are no ghosts at the Grand. One more for this segment, Escape from Moriarty Mansion by The Men Who Wear Many Hats. Sex is much. This is a 3D mystery set.

in a mansion, it's got lots of colorful characters inside the mansion. You are show up with your assistant. You've got some banter back and forth. There's a lot of dialogue here, a lot of choices of what you can pick. And in general, I was amused by what was happening. And the puzzles were kind of fun for me. And they weren't too hard. It was, you know, like some sliding stuff, whatever, inventory things.

But I wasn't just how funny the game sort of, the way the game carried itself. Like, for example, I picked up a toy elephant, a little, like, stuffed toy elephant. Once you pick up the elephant, you can show the elephant to every other character in the game, and that prompts a dialogue conversation with them about the elephant. And then you basically, you start to create a backstory for the elephant, and each character sort of builds upon that backstory as your character says more about the elephant. I named the elephant Professor Peanuts. And then I was telling people about Professor Peanuts and why Professor Peanuts matter to me. You know, silly stuff, but, you know, it was... I liked it.

I think it had to charm. You can look at the Steam page. It just says TBA, so we don't know what it'll be ready. But escape from Moriarty Mansion. It might be part of a series. I don't know if that's important. I just started playing, and I didn't know what the character's pre-existent relationship was, and it made perfect sense to me.

All right, we are back in the Miyako Mese basement, and I'm talking to another developer. Please introduce yourself to the audience. I'm Nolan. I'm the president at Distortion, director as well. And we're working on a game called Nightmare Operator, which we're exhibiting here at Pit Summit today. That's Distortion with 3Ds? Yeah, Distortion with 3Ds. SEO optimization.

I also wanted it to be distortion, distortion, distortion, and they told me not to do that because it would be way too long. Is that why the game is in 3Ds because, yeah? Yeah, yeah, it's a little bit of a plan. There's kind of been an evolution in the indie game world from like two days. In game, that was like all the range with India, and now it's much more in the 3D space. It's, you know, engines like Unreal and Unity have become a lot more accessible, a lot more popular and easier to dev with.

So, you know, kind of representing that transition to 3D in the indie world. We put 3Ds in the name as well. So maybe you can talk a little about Nightmare Upwriter because I know at first glance it kind of seems like a low-poly PS1 game, but of course there's a lot more happening. Yeah, so I think when people see low-poly, they see PS1, they think, okay, this is going to be tank controls, this is going to be a Resident Evil 1 send up, that type of thing.

And ours is not. I think our controls are very modern. I think a lot of people are surprised by that at first. There's a real kind of intentional blend of modern and kind of 80s, 90s, 2000s, kind of tech just kind of

smeared together in the game, both in the way that the gameplay systems work and also in the aesthetic of it too. There's kind of story elements where time kind of regresses in certain areas and stuff like that. So, yeah, we have the low-poly look, but if you're looking closely, you'll see, like, volumetric fog. You'll see very modern, like, lighting in the Unity engine,

effects and shaders that definitely the PlayStation One could not pull off. So basically the idea is, like, if it looks good, it looks good. Let's just use everything that's available to us. You know, I think the game is a horror game, obviously. So horror has a real kind of affinity for the... that analog look, that retro look. But at the same time, when you kind of break that mold and you

suddenly show something that's very modern that you wouldn't expect, it looks like kind of the reality is breaking apart a little bit. And I really like that impression. So that was something we wanted to focus on with a nightmare operator. Right. Well, you mentioned the controls. Let's talk about that because I was definitely a little surprised.

I was playing on mouse of keyboard, and I was like, how many keys do I have to press? So what's been there? the sweet spot for you as far as functionality versus how many buttons? Yeah, so I guess we should explain first. The main core system of the game is something called the clutch system, right? Which is effectively you hold on keyboard spacebar and to switch weapons, you do fighting game commands.

So Hotoken and Shorukin, Tatsamaki and those type of things. And then you release the button and it will execute the switch. The reason for that is I'm a huge fighting game fan. I love fighting games. And I want more people to love fighting games. So it's kind of a Trojan horse. I'm like, if I take a shooting game and I just put a little bit of that, you know, fighting game sauce in there, it'll create like an environment where it's easier for people

to learn those type of things. And then I think the biggest hurdle for like getting into fighting games is just like the first 10 minutes. It's like, what do I have to do this with the controller? Like, what do I do? And that people just fall off there. And as soon as you can get past that, I think it's good. but a lot of people, their first experience with a fighting game is boot it up, go online, opponent is a human player who is making intentional decisions, and you have 90 seconds,

and the controls are really weird and like nothing else. So it's a very stressful environment to learn. If we take kind of the onboarding process of learning the controls, and we put them into a different genre where it's slow, where it's kind of methodical, eliminating of enemies in a set environment and stuff, I think it's a lot easier for people to adapt. So yeah, we have the clutch system, obviously. Then we have, you know, melee attacks as well.

Melee is like, it shares an input with shooting. So if you're aiming it's shoot, if you're not aiming, it's melee. We have a cancel attack that's similar to a certain fighting game. People might recognize where you can immediately cancel what you're doing. We have a healing spell. And there are like a lot of different actions that you can take. And I think the design philosophy is like just give, you know, it'll be difficult because it's overwhelming at first how many actions you can take,

but just give players the freedom to do what they want, and they will build a play style, and they'll learn how to adapt to it, rather than kind of trying to railroad people into, like, you have one thing that does this one thing. We have three types of dodges and a parry in the game. It's like, choose what you like, choose what works for you. And depending on if you're using more melee attacks, you might want to roll more, but if you're using aim, you might want to do the side step more and stuff like that. So, yeah, that's just kind of the, the philosophy for it. I'm a huge fan of Devil McCry and Souls and stuff

as well. And so I really like player expression, player freedom and stuff, and I wanted to make a shooter that has that because I think, you know, I grew up playing shooters, but there's sort of limited expressions in a lot of them, especially single player stuff. I love Half Life too. I think it's great, the environment, the story and everything,

but there's like one way to play that game. You shoot the enemies as they come at you, right? There's not a whole lot of flexibility there. So I wanted to kind of take We've seen such a revival of melee-focused games because of, in part, from Sock, right? And I wanted to take the lessons we're learning there. Let's put those in shooters, because shooters don't have to be the same thing all the time. You know what I mean?

There's a lot of room to grow there. So, yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't say I put together the Dark Souls combination, because I don't really think the game feels like a Souls-like. No. Yeah, but in terms of what have we learned from Dark Souls, it's that enemy, like, telegraphs of their attacks are really important. It's that, like, maintaining environments where you're stuck in a certain range of the enemy and the player has to think about how they're moving through it

and how they approach the enemy and stuff is important, right? A lot of those elements, just, you know, shooter games, not to speak ill of my fellow developers, but a lot of shooter games will put you in a room with a bunch of waist-high cover, and that's especially when I was younger growing up in the 360 PlayStation 3 era, era, it was just a bunch of that. And like, we know from other genres that there's more interesting ways to design fights. So why are we doing that in shooters, right? Let's have shooting games where the environment matters, where you have to actually look at

what your enemy is doing because they're coming at you and they're in melee range. And you have to, like, react and dodge while you're still trying to shoot them. I think there's a lot of room to kind of innovate on that. And stuff like reload in other games, almost every shooter is you hit a button and you you wait for an animation to play, right? So in Nightmare Operator, we have something called the heat gauge. So as you shoot, you fill up more and more heat, but as you switch weapons, or if you repeat the input for the weapon you have,

or if you hit with melee attacks, or if you parry successfully, the heat will go down, right? So it rewards you for trying to use all of the tools at your disposal instead of just focusing on using one thing. And I think that's a lot more fun. I actually find in, like other games when I'm playing them, I kind of want some of our systems in there because it's like, oh, if this system that we had was here, then you could do all this cool stuff. And I accidentally, like, I'll play Apex and stuff with my wife, and I'll accidentally find myself, like, doing the Hot Oaken input to switch, even though it's, like, the wrong game.

I'm like, oh, no, what am I doing? So, yeah. I definitely a couple times playing the demo wanted to push a reload button. I was like, oh, no, there is no, there is no, that's not this game. Yeah, yeah. And we had, it took a while to get to a point where, because, you know, the clutch system and everything is very different from other shooters. And so we kept having, like, vestigial elements of other shooters in there. Originally, we had ammo, and you had to pick up ammo in the field and, like, collect it like you would in any other shooter.

And what we found was, like, when you do the clutch successfully and you input, like, a shore you can, but then you switch to a weapon that has no ammo, that felt really bad, right? I did it correctly, but I don't have the ammo, so I can't shoot it. because I wasn't thinking about that element. It was too much for the mental stack. So by switching to the heat system, it has a really good natural affinity. No matter what you do, if you do an input, it reduces the heat, so you always get a benefit.

And, you know, you don't have to worry too much about managing ammo. Instead, you're thinking about managing the fight. You know, am I close to overheat? Okay, I need to start doing melee attacks, that type of thing. It's a very different feeling, but we've demoed at Tokyo Game Show and Evo, Japan and stuff, and of course now Bit Summit. and we've always gotten really great feedback,

especially from people who are fighting game fans that kind of naturally they're fans of all those systems. As far as the environment thing, I was very curious, you could tell me more about the choice to place, at least the demo, I don't know how much of the game, but in Nakano Broadway, which is a very real place. Yeah, yeah, so most of the stages in the game

are based on real places. The setting is in Tokyo. Okay. I've lived in Tokyo for almost nine years now, and I love the city, and it's great. And also as a small dev team, you know, creating a totally fictional world with a completely fictional environment, there's flexibility there, but you have to do concept art and you have to create a bunch of assets and you have to find reference. And it takes a lot of effort, whereas if we're working from real material, we go there and take a picture and that's what it looks like, right?

And we just use that. I think also in terms of level design, if you pick interesting real places, the level design is, It's like you're working with the environment to create like a gameplay thing. So Nakano, Broadway, in real life, is very much like a maze. It's like a game dungeon. People often complain about getting lost in there and stuff. And so when we adapted it to the game, it just had this natural synergy where it's like easy to kind of create these routes in these hallways

where it feels like very twisty and tangly. Even though actually in reality in that demo, it's mostly a straight line. It doesn't end up feeling like it, but we do a lot of tricks to, like, prevent you from going back the wrong way and things like that. And, you know, I also think it's just kind of more interesting. There's this element of reality. And with our story and stuff in the game, it has a relatively serious tone. And we wanted to make sure that we were, you know, creating something that was believable. And so working with real-life locations kind of helped us do that. It really dumped out to me. You know, I don't live in Tokyo, but I've been there many times that I've

been to not going to borrow me any time. So it was a sort of odd feeling of, this is space I know very well. I basically go there every year to go shopping. But also it is kind of a strange, odd place where there's like, you get that one elevator that goes like street from the first floor to the third floor and you have those sort of little stairwells that go up. And then, I don't, the demo, did I, like, do you have Mandaraki logos in the demo? What's happening there? It's Mandrake, which is a completely original, completely unrelated IP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, that's perfect. Yeah, I think for the first couple years I lived in Japan, I kept calling it Mandrake because

in my head, that's what it was. And then I looked at it. I was like, oh, that's not what it's called. Okay. That's a common. I also thought that a lot of people think about it. Mandaraki in Japanese has an entirely different meeting, but it's so it's just like you mix around the consonants in the word and it becomes Mandrake, right?

So a lot of people think that. So we also have like an original character that is like a Mandrake that's like posted on some of the walls. Yeah. And like Nakano Broadway has on the fourth floor, there's like aliens and tubes, right? Yes, yes. And stuff. So that was something that we're like, we can just use that exactly as it is in the game.

We can kind of take that. So in the demo, you might have seen it in some spots. There's like an alien gray statue that's kind of a move around while you're not looking at it and stuff like that. And there's a lot of natural affinity, especially with the horror and the retro theming. There's tons of that themeing in Nakano Broadway. And it works really well for us, I think. Also, again, fighting games. There's fighting games every week in Nakano.

TRF used to be in Nakano Broadway and stuff. So there's that natural affinity there as well. So I'm very curious because I feel like I've seen images and video of the game on social media for quite some time. How long have you been working on this project? It's been about three years. Three years. So it's definitely been a while.

Obviously, I can't say anything about a release date or anything. But we would like the game to come out eventually. You know what I mean? We're ready to have it, you know, be in everyone's hands and have everyone play it. So, yeah, hopefully soon, TM, you know. So you said you live in Tokyo,

so your team is based, or is like international thing? Yeah, most of the team is based in Tokyo. We do have some international members. We're a really small team, so it's four full-time employees, and then four to five people who are on, like, part-time contracts, depending on, you know, what stage of development.

And, yeah, but even, Of that number, most of the people are still based in Tokyo. It was initially actually just me. But the other full-time members, we brought them on board and had them actually moved to Tokyo for this project. Wow. It was like, you know, again, getting that feeling of the places being real and being accurate was really important. There's an example that I'd like to give of I love Silent Hill 3. I'm a huge fan.

In Silent Hill 3, the first stage is a mall. Yes. And it's a mall in America, right? Right. But there's this bakery in the mall. Yes. And you go in there and it's things on. trays and you get a platter and there's tongs and it's a Japanese style bakery.

Yes. Through and through. And it's so funny to me because it's like, yeah, you would think this if you have only lived in Japan and like only been to Japanese bakeries. Oh, that's just what they're like in the rest of the world. But it's obviously not like that in the US. And in fact, no mall near my house ever had a bakery like that. So that's really funny and charming. But like I wanted to avoid that with this game and I wanted to have like a lot more of an accurate, you know, feeling. So, like, in Nakano, where the, where the KFC is. In our game, there's like a fake KFC there as well. We're trying to get as one-to-one as possible. Can I say, I was

recently in Chicago, and there was a bakery in my hotel. Oh, yeah? And it was actually, like, the Japanese style, like, I had the tray and the tongs. And I was so confused because I'm like, wait, I'm in America. What is this? I looked it up. The company that runs the bakery is apparently based in Korea. Oh, yeah. So it was like a Korean interpretation of the Japanese bakery, but I was in Chicago. It's really funny. Again, I've been in Tokyo for like nine years.

And for, you know, during the corona pandemic, it was not possible to leave. If you had a resident status, you would lose it upon leaving, right? Yes, I remember. So I was just, I was stuck in Japan, you know? Yeah. And so now every time I go back to America, it's really funny because more and more stuff from Japan is just making this way over. I hear they have got like Onigiri and 7-Elevens in America now and stuff.

I think so because I believe the Japanese parent company owns the American parent company now. Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, they got hollow live events at Dodgers Stadium in LA and stuff like. And part of me is like, man, when I was in high school, I had to do fan sub-anim. And I had to like, you know, games would come out like years in advance in Japan. I just had to wait. And so I learned Japanese and all this stuff because I was like, I don't want to have to wait to play, you know, Persona 5.

Street Fighter 4 or whatever. And then, like, now, everything's day and date in both countries. Anime is hugely popular, and it's just accessible on Netflix. I'm like, what did I bother for, you know? I guess the answer is to be able to have a game like this and all this stuff. But, yeah, it is funny how times have changed. Well, you mentioned language. So when you're making this game, what language are you doing?

Are you dual translate? How is that working? The team, some members of the team only, well, actually, okay, this is easier to say, I'm the only bilingual member on the team, except for our project manager who recently joined. So some members only speak Japanese, some members only speak Chinese. Sorry, some members only speak Japanese, some members only speak English. We do have one member who does speak Chinese as well. And so, like, you know, everything has to be, you know, if you look at our Slack,

it's Japanese block of text, English block of text, all over documentation, Japanese, English, and just like when we're having meetings everything anyone says I have to translate for the other side of the team whatever language it is it's tough but like it's enabled us to

utilize people who have like incredible talents from all of the world and you know people that would not otherwise be able to work together are able to work together on this project and I think that's really cool so that's great well thank you very much

for telling me about the game and what's happening you've been showing it now so what's the feedback what have you gotten so far it's been really good you know happily today we've had like a line the whole time you very rarely

get lines in the Indies booth we actually have to do 15 minute timers so that people rotate out which is it's a good problem to have so we've been really really happy with the response and of course on Steam we're over 100,000 wish lists

and you know Twitter and stuff Our last trailer that we did before BitSummit was over like 150,000 views on YouTube and stuff. So really, really happy about that. Really just blown away by the response. It's our first game, you know. People are extremely lucky to get this type of reception on first game. So fingers crossed it turns into sales. So we can keep doing it.

So, well, on that note, since you've given a lot of time, is there anything you want to direct people to as far as a website or social media to follow what's happening? Sure. Almost all of our stuff is DD Distortion Dev on Twitter or Blue Sky, Instagram, YouTube. If you just type in DD Distortion or if you type in Nightmare Operator, we tend to be the first result. So yeah, we'll check it out. There has been kind of a long period of silence while we've been working on the game, but it's about to finally be over. So keep an eye out for it. All right. It looks great. I don't want to tell you, it was definitely intimidating, but also I was able to, I think I got pretty far in the demo. So, I mean, I fought a boss.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just, it just overwhelmed me. Yeah, that boss is tough. That boss is tricky. I just did a stream and I died to it on the stream, which is embarrassing. So, yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much.

Thank you so much. Now let's talk about other games. Every year, Pitsima, there's always a huge cadre of other games that I don't know how to classify. So here they are. And let's start by talking about the weird stuff. The stuff that there's no way you can possibly play this in the future. It's only going to exist at a show, so you either see it or you don't.

But what's interesting here, this year, there was a whole section of the sort of weird controller stuff that was all sponsored by Ponkel, the vampire survivors people, and these games, some of them, used vampire survivor characters and assets. So Ponkel's really spreading the word around. basically get their game out in the world and also let people play with their toys, which I think is kind of cool. For example, there was a game called Towel Survivors. Now, this one didn't have any Vampire Survivors graphics in it, but it was called Towel Survivors, so I think it's fair to assume there was a connection. You got a little screen, and there were three towels next to the screen, different colors, sort of mounted to, like, a handle. And you have to pick up a towel and spin it around really, really fast, and then stop spinning to release an energy blast.

and depending on who's attacking you, you need to pick up the right towel, and it's all color-coded. So if the red monsters come for you, you need to spend the red towel. If the green monster's coming, spend the green towel. At one point, two different groups of monsters

came at the same time, which means I was shaking two towels, but you just shake the towel and then stop to let go and attack them. So it's kind of harder than it sounds, but it's really goofy, and that was just fun. I just really enjoyed that one.

Another game was basically like a Kotatsu, and if you don't know, know the word Kotatsu, you've probably seen it in television or anime by now. It's a little Japanese table with a blanket. It's great for wintertime because you can basically sit under the blanket and there's a heater inside. So your lower body is very warm. And even if the room around you is cold, you get enough warmth from the blanket and the table that you're kind of comfortable. It's a very nice invention. So in this game, you pretend you're at a Kotatsu and monsters are coming at you from different angles, and you're kicking at the kothatsu to kick the

monsters away from getting inside the kutatsu. And I guess there were panels or something at the bottom, because I was kicking my leg, like really kicking with my legs, and hitting something underneath the table. And that was what the computer was detecting and sending the monsters away. I didn't last very long because you got to really kick hard with your legs. And I didn't want to break anything, but also you have to kick very hard. So that was kind of funny. The strangest and the most amusing to me was imagine like a box of dirt, dirt, sand, literal dirt. And the characters in the screen are marching left or right, and they're killing the monsters automatically, as you do in vampire survivors.

But what you do is you take a popsicle stick and you jab it into the dirt. And when you jab it into the dirt, that's a signal to the character on screen to sort of bend down and put a cross in the ground and basically purify the monster corpse. So as you go along, the monsters die. and then once they reach your character, you push the stick in the dirt, and you purify their remains. So it's kind of like a rhythm game,

because you've got to push the stick at the right time. If you push too early, you get a low score. If you push the right time, you get an excellent score. I did not get an excellent score, because, as you know, I'm terrible rhythm games. But I loved jabbing the sticks into dirt. That's fun. That's a fun way to control a game.

So all this is on board for me, and as a reward for all of this, I got a Pankle-branded garlic clove. Just like a squishy garlic. It's almost like a stress ball, but it's a garlic clove. Unfortunately, it is unscented. Repeat, unsented. Which is too bad, because I'm a big garlic fan,

both in real life and in vampire survivors. And now I have a garlic desk. Desk garlic. The most fun I had at this corner of the show this year was a game called Paku Puckupakure, No More Okashidorable 4DX. And if you know 4DX, then you know that's the movie theater thing. where you see a movie and the seat shake and they spray stuff at you. It's very interactive.

It's like a ride, basically. So how do you play this game? There are two popcorn buckets in front of you. For show purposes, the popcorn buckets were full of, like, packing peanuts. But I don't see why you couldn't play this with real popcorn. Why not? You shake the boxes, and that is indication to the game character that you're eating. So you eat out of your popcorn.

You eat out of popcorn, it's gone. But then the movie starts. What do you do? Your character's still hungry. There are two people in front of you, one on your left, one in your right. they have popcorn. So you're going to shake the left box or the right box to sneak popcorn from their boxes and eat their popcorn. Now, you have to be careful if you do that and they reach for the popcorn or they look at you, you get caught.

So you have to do that without getting caught, but you have to keep going because you're very, very hungry and the movie's not very long. It's kind of like a stealth game with a timer to see how much popcorn you can get away with without getting caught. And it's just fun. Also, it's 40x movies, so sometimes you have to stop and put the popcorn down and pick up an umbrella because the movie's going to spray water at you. Again, just great ideas all around. I love this little thing. Obviously, you can't buy it or make it at home, but wonderful. And I stress just no more Okashidorable, that's basically like saying no more snack thieves, which is a play on a thing that happens here in Japan.

At the start of every movie, they show an anti-piracy ad. and it's always no more Ega Dorobo, like movie thieves, that's a long-running ad campaign here in Japan, so no more Okashi Dorobo, like, don't steal any more snacks. Although I don't think that's a problem in Japanese movie theaters. I've never stolen a snack,

and no one's ever stolen my snacks, but who knows? There's also a message every time about no kicking, which I don't know why that is. Like, how many people are kicking people in the movie theater that you have to put no kicking in your pre-roll advertisements. I don't know. Sounds like a big deal.

Speaking of umbrellas, let's talk about Nowhere umbrella by Wow. W-O-W. The website is W-Zeroww.com.j.p. So you control an umbrella, plastic umbrella, flying through space, and you get to control

the umbrella slightly. You can control basically the direction it drifts. And as the game goes on, more and more stuff comes under the screen and in the way. At first, it's just buildings, but then it's like road signs and lights, and then the building starts spinning. It's, it's very sort of trippy a little bit. It's very dazzling. I think the game looks great. You know, I'm an old school flower fan, so I like that kind of stuff where you just control something floating in the breeze. Now, wow is a visual design

studio. They're not normally into video games. So they described this as an experiment. I spoke to a man there, hang on, I have his card here, a man named Masahide Yoshida. And you Yoshidatan told me that this is something they made this experiment. They just wanted to see if they could do it. And, you know, it's not very long. It's kind of the perfect thing to show off at a trade show like this. Are they going to sell it? Are they going to release it for free as a demo? I don't know. But I think any company like this that works in the, that does kind of computer graphics and trailers and visual art, art installments, all this stuff, if they want to get video games, I say go for it. I want more artistic video games that don't have to be about stories, about sad dads. or rescuing princesses or whatever, let me be an umbrella. I'll be an umbrella. Why not? Pain, Pain, Go Away by Lorbard. They call it a therapeutic typing adventure game. So what happens here is you play a therapist or a counselor or somebody. You get patients in your office. You talk to the patient. It's, you know, it's kind of visual novel stuff. But then you start typing. Questions appear on the screen. You type out the full question, and that's how you guide the conversation.

that's how you get your patience to open up to you, to guide them towards a solution. Eventually, they start to face their demons and they're like real monsters, and so you get to have like a boss battle where you're typing really long sentences really fast. I played it on normal difficulty because I'm a pretty fast typeer, as you can imagine.

I write a lot. I found it fairly challenging. I would not want to try hard mode. It's very forgiving in that if you make a mistake, you don't have to start over. It just lets you keep going, but it records your mistakes, and it costs you some points.

However, during the final phase when you're fighting a boss, there is a sentence you have to type without mistakes, and if you screw it up, it puts you back a few steps and you have to do more sentences again, which is frustrating. But then when you get back to the end sentence, it records where you were. So even in that sense, it's not that punishing, you know? But it's telling an intriguing story. It gets pretty dark, and so it had my attention. This game just came out a few days ago, and it has a demo on Steam. so you can try it out, you can look it up, explore it to your leisure, see what you think. Pain, pain, pain, go away.

Seems to be available in multiple languages. They were showing a trailer that had Japanese and Chinese, and I played it in English, so multilanguage support for this game already. Check that out. Finally, finally today, we have Fearfa 98, Fearfa 98 by Celery Emblem and Jacob Jazz. I don't know if that's too, like, a company and a person, or if that's just his company, I'm not sure. But the person I met at Bitsumet described himself as Jacob Jazz. He said he was from Madrid. He spoke with a very heavy accent, so I didn't get audio for this.

I'm sorry. But we talked about his game. It's a very rare soccer horror hybrid. All the stages are covered in monsters and obstacles. There's blood everywhere. There's, like, barbed wire. The players are monsters. The opponents are monsters.

There are giant creatures roaming the field just kind of being a nuisance. The ball. You can pick many different types of balls. You can pick a severed head that's soaked in blood. You can pick a giant eyeball. There's lots of different things you can choose. Different fields have different dimensions.

There's like big fields that you can run around forever. There are small fields that are very cramped. This page, I think, describes it as Silent Hill meets FIFA 98, which is like, okay, but that doesn't mean anything because I've never heard of a soccer hard game before. But I guess it kind of describes it, so good on you. There's also a story mode, which I don't really understand this very well, but he said that when you're playing the soccer game, you'll pick up items. And depending on the items you find while playing soccer, it will unlock stuff and progress in the story mode.

I don't know how that works, but apparently it exists and it's important. Now, if you read the website, you might have heard this before because there was a Kickstarter for this game back in 2024. I wrote about it for the site. I love the concept then. I love the concept now. My only complaint is that it is very hard. Okay? Now, to be fair, I don't have a lot of experience playing soccer games.

I certainly haven't played soccer as a real sport in a long time, but I don't play a lot of soccer video games. So when I was playing it, I put the difficulty down all the way on a piece of cake. After 10 minutes of play, I was losing 21 to 4. Now, he explained, I picked a stage that was very small, and he said, if you pick a small stage, there's going to be a lot more scoring because you can get the ball and score very quickly. So that's true. I had a very small stage.

He picked a stage that was larger, had more space or maneuver. He did not lose 21 to 4. However, he, the developer who makes the game, was showing it off to me to show what it was like. He couldn't score either. He played for a few minutes, and he was losing 2-0. So I don't know where he's got to be at to tweak the difficulty. But he also said, like, hey, this game is more fun when you play with your friends. And, like, that's totally fair.

You know, I'm sure if you have soccer games around your house, you get them to play with your friends, not to play with the computer. So I get that. There's a Steam page right now. You can look it up. There's no demo or any kind of release schedule. But the way he spoke to me about it, I think he seems pretty confident that he's got everything he needs in the game. And he's just going to be tweaking it and make sure it will. works and then he'll release it. So if horror and soccer sound good to you, keep an eye out for

Fearfa 98. All right, welcome back. Good news. We found the kimonos. They're still here. They were just in different room. And I'm joined by, please introduce stuff to the audience. Hi, my name is Liam Berry. I'm a game developer from Canada. And what are you working on? I'm working on a game called City of Nun, which I'm developing with my brother, Noel Berry, who's a co-creator on Celeste. And yeah, very happy to do that. to have it here at BitSummit. Thank you for clearing that up, because I saw the card had two names on it with the same last name, and I assumed you were family, but I didn't know.

Yeah, that's right, yeah. So, yeah, we made games together a lot as kids, like Game Maker and Flash games, and, yeah, it's really fun to be able to work together on this new project. So what can you know about the city of Nunn? Because I heard of it before the show, and I think it looks really impressive. What can you say about it? How long have you been working on this so far? Yeah, so it's a platformer kind of action-adventure exploration game.

It probably falls into the Metroidvania camp in some ways and not in other ways. But yeah, we've been working on it. It kind of started as just a fun little hobby projects that we were doing. Noel was working very hard in a game called Earthblade at the time, which unfortunately got canceled. So it was kind of just like a fun side project we were doing just as brothers. It was like, oh, it would be fun to make a game together again like we did when we were kids. and then after I was doing a music degree at the time so it was just kind of for fun we were fudding around

every six months we would spend a day or two kind of tinkering with it and having fun just enjoying the development and then after I finished my degree we kind of said hey this is like really fun let's just like actually make this make it an actual full game and so I've been working full time for just about two years

and Noel was working on a couple days a week, and now he's full-time in it as well. Now, I noticed the character in the game kind of shaped like a mushroom. Are they a mushroom person, or are they something that's just in disguise as a mushroom? No, they're actually like,

they're kind of like a little, kind of like puppet, kind of Pinocchio type of guy. Okay. Who's kind of like made of the scrappy bits of wood and stuff like that and has a little, kind of like samurai type of hat. Okay. and kind of a big cloak.

So he's kind of like a little trash Pinocchio. All right. Yeah, because the demo started off by getting, I was thrown away. And then I had to sort of resurrect the body with some spirit energy. I don't know. It was actually, I wanted to say, it was a very impressive little scene because aside from fact that the little guy was throwing a garbage saying, I hate garbage. Like, once you actually start playing, there was no, like, collect these orbs.

It was just like, oh, I'm just playing and moving this sort of spirit thing. And it all, at least for me, flowed very, I don't know, it was obvious to me, and I really appreciated it not being told, oh, you need to collect the five warbs first. Yeah, we try to keep things very intuitive. I think we both like things not too much tutorializing, or not that there's any problem with that, but just for our personal taste. We wanted to get something that kind of just pulls people in immediately, and they can just kind of play around with and see how it works to discover it that way,

especially because you're exploring this large world. We want to really keep that sense of discovery all through it. the entire game where it's just like oh how does this work what is this um and as you play more you discover more and more and more so yeah you are in the game you are five little spirits who are kind of hucked in the trash and you collect them together and then you possess this little pinocchio body and throughout the game you travel across this large dilapidated city bringing those spirits back home oh okay and i know it's the demo you met a bunch of other characters who were just there and I thought that was very exciting because each one I met I was like okay

why are they here what's going to happen do they do they know who I am do they know who where we are I guess you're a collective it's like a Voltron yeah there's a lot of kind of characters and kind of weird little other spirits uh hanging out in the city and yeah the city's very much in decay so a lot of the spirits are kind of they're kind of lost who they are they're kind of not sure where they are or what's happening or they're just kind of um carrying on with whatever they've been doing. So they're kind of, they don't really care about you. They're kind of just doing their thing.

They're just fishing or working on something or building things. Can you talk a little about the sort of graphical style? I notice it's kind of very low, like it has some color, but it's not that colorful. What was the approach there? Yeah, so we were really inspired by like, you know, when you're playing a Pokemon Blue or something on the Game Boy color. Yeah. And you can change the palette around.

the palette changes when you go to different towns. Or like Super Game Boy Area where you can change the palettes. We thought that was a really cool thing. So we wanted to kind of explore that. So throughout the game, the game is only ever four colors. And we draw it in black and white, like a real gray scale. Right. And then as you go travel around, go to different areas in the game, the palette changes.

And then also we can do, we flash the palette sometimes. So it changes. Like when you get hurt, the screen flashes red. Right. When you heal, it flashes at different colors and things like that. So we do a lot of kind of playing with the palettes. And that also kind of came out of neither of us are like trained artists. Neither of us have a huge art background.

So keeping things just to four colors makes a lot of choices for us. You know, if we could just kind of do any kind of art that we wanted to, with any color we wanted, any color we can imagine, I think it would get very messy, very fast. So this is kind of a way, we thought it was interesting. We thought it was fun. It was also a way to kind of keep the art. cohesive and contained.

Well, everything struck me as very readable, which I thought was, I appreciated. I could tell the difference between what was in the background, what was in the foreground, and, like, when that big robot came out and then the robot was gone, like, it changed color enough, so it's like, oh, that's just gone.

That's not my way anymore. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it's a really fun, kind of problem, puzzle-solving problem, doing the art for it, because, I mean, in a lot of situations, we have to reserve the front two colors, white and kind of light gray for interactive stuff in foreground.

So then all of the backgrounds that was actually like one bit. It's like black and black and dark gray and that's it. And like, yeah, it's been a really fun learning experience just kind of discovering how to actually communicate things and have it still be readable. We spend a lot of time thinking about that and focusing on it. Right. Now you said you had a music background.

Are you going to do the music for the game or? Yeah, that's right. I'm doing all the music and all the sound effects and audio. implementation for the project. That's nice. So at this point, where do you see yourself as far as completing? Do you think you have a date in mind, or is it

too soon? We're aiming for next year. Okay. That's great. Did you see anything else at the show so far, or have you been focused on your game? It's been really busy just talking to lots of people, which has been fantastic. It's been amazing to meet so many developers and

so many enthusiasts in people who play games. It's been like, the days have been going very fast. Right. But yeah, one game I just saw recently was crab meat. It looks really cool. Oh, yeah. It's some really wacky controls.

You're kind of point and click controlling a fishing vessel around Antarctica. That's really cool. And, yeah, that kind of stuck out. So I noticed the game had, doesn't have a lot of text, but what text is there you have already localized, so it was English and Japanese. What's been the response so far? from players, either Japanese or English speakers, who have played the game at the show?

I mean, people seem to really enjoy it, which is, like, fantastic. Yeah, people have been timing of the demo really consistently, which I really appreciate people taking that time because, you know, a full 20 minutes is not, that's a lot of time at a show like this. There's so many games to see, so many games to play, so many people talk to, some people to meet.

So I feel very thankful for the generosity of people's time, yeah. Okay. Well, speaking of time, you've given me some time. You've given me some of your time. Thank you very much. Is there anything as far as social media or website that's something you want to direct the audience do to find out more about either you or the game or your studio? Yeah, we have cityofnun.com. So you can find the game and our Steam page and the soundtrack actually you can listen to you there. And then both Noel and I are on Blue Sky.

And you can also find those at Cityof Nunn.com. Okay. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Looks great so far. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you having me on. Welcome back, and we are talking with another developer, one who's made something frightening,

but also very exciting for me. Could you please introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Phil. I'm making The Florist, which is a survival horror game with flowers growing out of control and very, very dangerous. So, right off the bat, why flowers? I just really like the idea of trying to create something scary and unsettling with the colorful environment. There's a lot of great movies.

I think like Annihilation is one that everyone references a lot that created this scary and unsettling atmosphere, but it wasn't dark and it wasn't old. It was kind of fluorescent and colorful in a way. We're really just trying to achieve that, and I think flowers are a fun thing to, and fun theme for people to take notice of, and, you know, they definitely grow out of control, and enables us to, like, invent our own flowers as well. It's like, oh, we need a flower to do this. Let's just make one up, and it's a, you know, a mutated species.

Well, certainly in the survival horror history, there are plenty of tales of plants growing out of control. So certainly there's a legacy there. But speaking of Legacy, one other reason that really caught my attention for the Florist is the fact that the game is very much about fixed camera angles and tank controls. Can you explain why you went with the sort of tried and true, if less popular these days, methods? Yeah, I mean, this game is a certainly a passion project for me. I'm a fan of fixed camera and tank controls. I will say that we are working on other control options as well.

but I want to make sure that they are good and we're getting feedback from players here and, you know, getting ideas about what they like or what they might expect when they control the game. I mean, tank controls are still going to be my recommended way to play the game because I think it's good and I think they have a place in how we're designing it. But the fixed camera is a thing that is going to be a mainstay. It is the way that it is because I love being able to craft those scenes and, like, really build in the path for the process. player and sort of show them where to go, but without having to, like, create specific, like, icons or markers or, I guess, yellow paint, right, is the one that everyone refers to, because if you have a free camera, you can just, so this is a bit more of a natural feeling, and I really love fixed cameras, and it's a lot of fun to work on it.

So, yeah, so fixed cameras is the main tenant, but, and tank controls work really well with them, but I'm exploring other options, too. So, happy to, hope to try and make every horror fan as happy as possible. Well, the camera angles definitely got me because in the demo, I know I walked past a door that was closed, and then I went upstairs, and then the new camera angle showed downstairs again, and suddenly something came out of the door that was closed, and I was like, oh, oh dear. You know, that was just my feeling, because at that point, you know, I shall also stress, the demo at this point doesn't have any weapons.

It's just exploring a space, and then you leave, and the demo's over. So I was extra scared because whatever was down there, I had nothing. to handle it. I guess I had a little pair of like what, shears that I don't think would stop a mobile creature. So it worked for me. Yeah, that's great to hear. I mean, yeah, the demo is short. It's at the very start, but there are definitely weapons in the game and there's combat in the game, so, but in this particular circumstance, we just at least wanted to show off the first, you know, enemy that you encounter, as you said, and didn't want to give the player a life or death scenario immediately. But to hear that

you got scared, that's a great, great outcome. That's what we wanted. One thing also surprised me is that even though you're going for these sort of classic structures, you know, camera angles, controls, whatever, the game looks much more recent. You know, it's almost, I don't want to say it's definitely beyond, you know, because if you look back at survival horror, you've got the PlayStation 1 era, you've got a few entries in, you know, the Dreamcast and the GameCube.

but after that the kind of the whole genre moved towards newer more intense graphics and then also third person stuff so you your game right now is in this sort of odd between zone where you've got the classic controls and camera angles

but the graphics are new and I wonder if you could explain how what made that approach yeah well I definitely like the retro 3D aesthetic you know I certainly consider I'd love to make one one day as well right and that works well together.

There's a lot of games that have done that recently, and I've played them all. They're all great. But, yeah, pretty early on, we realized, okay, I mean, I think that this can work. It can be a good balance, plus, you know, pixelated flowers didn't really, you know, it's like we just got greedy and wanted to make them look as good as possible,

and then being able to use a lot of really great lighting, you know, tools and advancements. And it just became a thing. It was like, this looks too good for us. not to just go for it. But at the same time, you know, the graphics are certainly very, very crisp and new and high, I want it to run really well, I want it to be, you know, high resolution. But I also didn't, I didn't want it to feel like completely realistic, right? I didn't want it to, we can't make games that look like a Nortydell game, for example.

Sure. But, so it still, it still should feel video gamey and have that, you know, a very playable vibe. I think we're hitting that balance pretty well. And hopefully people are responding to it. They say it looks beautiful, so I'm really, really happy that it's working out. Well, certainly at present the game looks very game because there's a weird hair bug going on there. I noticed when I was playing, the main character's hair was just flying all over the place. Oh, yeah, I love that.

It's just a very specific niche bug with some graphic settings that, unfortunately, we rain into here. But the hair flies around everywhere, and I just say she's scared. Don't worry. That'll be fixed. So how many people who are working on this project? We've got about six right now. So it's a pretty small team. We're happy to, we work well together and kind of a lot of multi-skilled people. So we're able to, everyone can jump on and help out with cameras or assets or puzzle ideas and level designs as well.

I've got a couple of little level design tasks that I'm meaning to catch up with people. on and yeah everyone's really everyone's been on it for for at least a couple of years now and um we've got everyone need to take it to take it to the end we're just got to put in the hours now it's a lot of work so you said you've been working on this for a few years now do you have an idea in mind when you think it might be done uh i want it done as as soon like i am in the i want it done phase i don't have a release date for you because i don't know um but i want to tell people a release date as soon as possible. So as soon as I know, everyone else will know.

And yeah, we know what the game is. We've got all the levels. We've got the scope defined. We've got all of the content defined. But yeah, as the game looks as good as it does, we want to make sure the polish and the interactions and, you know, the controls and everything is really, really of a high standard. And in game development, that's often the thing that can take the most amount of time.

But don't want to release anything that is. has any problems or disappointing. So, yeah. So we're here, you know, we've been at the show for a few days now. What's been the reactions that you've seen from players? People just say it just looks beautiful. And I'm really happy to hear that because, you know, where they're playing in a suboptimal lighting environment.

There's a lot of lights and noise and everything going on. So I'm really appreciative that they can actually still see and, like, feel the vibe of it in this, you know, hectic event space, which is great, because I've played it in a dark room on a big TV, you know, and it's just, it's on another level of vibe, which is great. So if they're already getting it here, that's awesome. I mean, most people have no problem with the controls also, which is great, which means there is, you know, a lot of people who like their style, but others have come with great ideas and suggestions about how they would like to, so that's great too.

So a combination of everything, you know, they're commenting, they're, they praise, and also helping us find bugs. We're like, oh, this puzzle, you know, there's a lot of people have gone to, say, this location, like downstairs for a puzzle solution, and the puzzle to the puzzle is not downstairs. Okay. But because they do go downstairs, we'll put it there. Right. We'll move the puzzle solution to there, because that's fine. If that's where people's heads go and that's where they've independently thought,

That's a great bit of play testing experience. So, yeah, happy to see all of that in action. So a lot of kids kind of at summit, have you seen any kids at the booth yet? No kids. I probably wouldn't allow a child to play this game. It's a little bit too gory. But I've seen a couple of kids walking around. I think one of our friends who's on a neighboring booth, he brought his kids in to have a look around, which is cool.

Yeah. I've been playing games since I was a game. kid obviously so you can't fault them for coming and checking it out all right well thank you very much for speaking on the record if people on the internet want to find you or your game or your studio are there any

websites or social media you want to share with them? I mean we are on the best thing to do we have a Steam page and it has discussion forums as well there's a link to our YouTube channel as well and our Discord so yeah please please join us there we're growing the community and happy to get back to anybody who has any questions.

Right now there's no public demo. So when that comes out, they'll be even more people and more great bits of feedback. So happy to keep chatting on that. So the game is the florist, but is there like a studio name or what? Oh, studio is unclear games. Unclear games. Yes, because I couldn't think of a name.

So I came up with that. And that's okay. Your studio name is what it is, but we're really, you know, the whole studio is all about the florist for now. I have other game ideas, but I'm not thinking about them just yet. Sure. And here, Bitsamit, you're in a booth

that's all New Zealand developers? That's where you're from? Yes, from Wellington, New Zealand. Yes, yes, there's a lot of great game developers coming down in New Zealand. You're big, big game successes of the last few years as well. Abiotic Factor is from New Zealand in massive success.

And, you know, we're really proud to be putting in the hard work and showing everybody what we can do. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun, a lot of community out here. Thank you very much. Thank you. My pleasure.

Well, that'll do it for this special episode of Retronauts recorded at Bitsumet 2026, Bitsimut Punch. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a lot. I certainly learned a lot. And I want to give a special thanks to all my guests, Mason Smith, aka Airdorf, Andre Borgi, the creator of Tenebris Somnia, Haley McLean and Sarah Podzorsky at Minmax Nolan Joseph at DDDDDD Dissorcion

3Ds Liam Barry at extremely okay games Phil Larson at Unclear Games And I want to thank my friends Graham and Jake For helping me record the special dramatic introduction to this podcast I know everyone was hoping for rap CD skits to come back Well, they're back congratulations If you're in Osaka, why not visit Graham and Jake

at The Harth in O'Donononon It's their bar. It's a board game bar. They have food. They have drinks. They have a lot of board games. If you're listening to this episode of Retronauts and you did not pay for it, thank you very much for listening to Retronauts. However, if you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, $3 a month gets you every episode one week in advance at a higher audio quality. For $5 a month, just two dollars more, you get early episodes. You get exclusive episodes. every other Friday. You get weekly columns from me and I readrew the column. You get monthly community podcasts. You get access to our Discord. Lots of fun stuff in there. There's even higher tiers where you get to decide what we talk about or you get to be on the show. It's all there for

you at patreon.com slash retronauts. Thank you for joining us. As for me, my name is Diamond Fight. You can find me around the internet. Looking for Fight Club. F-E-I-T, that's my last name. C-L-U-B. That's a word you already know, try my website, fightclub. me, or go to social media, look for Fight Club. I'm everywhere. I'm nowhere. I'll be seeing you again real soon here in audio form. And maybe at future events, you know, I'm sure later this summer there will be a retronaut's presence in Long Island. I'd like to be there if I can make it. God willing. Good night.