Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 129: Inside Axiom Verge

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

Jeremy chats with Axiom Verge creator Tom Happ and conspirator Dan Adelman to learn more about the origins and inspirations behind one of the greatest retro-inspired games of the past decade.

This week in Retronauts, we're axiomatic. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another fine episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish hosting this week. Bob is not here, and that's because this is a Skype-based recording session, and I'm on the line with two other people. If we try to get a fourth in here, it would be chaos. So, in addition to myself this week, we also have the creator and publisher of Axiom Verge. Why don't you guys introduce yourself, Tom? Hi, I'm Tom Hap, the creator and publisher of Axiom Verge. And who else is here?

So this is me, Dan Edelman. So I've been working with Tom for about, God, has been three and a half years now or so. I don't know, three years. And we've been working together. So Tom made 100% of everything in Axiom Verge. And I just try to help him make a business out of it. Okay. So I guess it wouldn't be fair to call you the publisher.

It does say Thomas Hap Games as the copyright indicia. So it's self-published, and Dan, you're more like the midwife, I guess. Yeah, the way I think of it is I'm the business guy on the team. So if it were a two-person studio, like Tom would be in charge of development and I would be in charge of business. But the way we've got it structured in a legal sense is that we're two separate companies. But for all intents and purposes, I think we kind of work as a team. and I handle the business stuff, and Tom handles all of the game development stuff. Right. And I think, I guess my confusion there was, because of the recent news that, quote, unquote, the publisher is donating 75% of profits of Axiom Verge to Thomas' his son's needs.

So I guess that's, how does that work exactly if that's something you're okay talking about? Sure, absolutely. The physical publisher is Badland Games. So they're the publisher of the retail versions and the multiverse edition of the game. Got it. Okay. I have not had a chance to check out everything in the multiverse edition yet, but it's a nice package. It's great to get a game like this kind of – it's interesting how games have these unconventional life cycles,

days. It used to be like a game would come out at retail and then maybe it would show up on like virtual console or PSN or something later. But now we're getting a lot of games that show up as digital releases and then make their way to stores and retailers sort of after the fact. So it's it's nice to, you know, kind of have the physical token of this game's existence, I guess. Yeah, I think increasingly, you know, things are going more and more digital and, you know, And that makes a lot of sense for not only smaller indie developers, but also larger publishers. You're seeing them launching on digital day and date, which was unthinkable even like five years ago. But nowadays, just without having to worry about manufacturing costs and inventory costs and all of this stuff, it's actually much better to release first digitally.

And then once you have a good sense of like how big the fan base is, what kind of demand there is, Then there's certainly a big group of people out there who still love physical media and they are willing to pay for it. And then, you know, you can definitely satisfy that need, but it also removes a lot of the risk associated with placing that order for cartridges and discs without having any idea of people are even going to care about the game. So it actually helps give a lot more information about how much risk you're going to take on when you go physical. Right. Yeah. I had never actually heard of Badland games, Badland games until the Multiverse Edition of Axiom Verge was announced. I'm not familiar with them.

Have they been around for a while? Like, what else have they done? So probably the biggest thing that they're known for is they, I think they handled all of the, telltale physical releases. And they've also done Ali Ali 2, the sexy Brutal, and they're working on Velocity 2X. I believe that's not out yet,

but they're also publishing that at retail. Okay, so it's a bunch of games I've heard of and seen, but did not associate the name with them. So that's on me, I guess. Yeah, and I think that's fair, because I think Badlands, model, is that they're working with known IPs, I think, for the most part. I think, actually, I take that back.

If I recall correctly, they may have their own internally developed IPs or games that they are funding and doing a more traditional publishing pass on. But I think they're working on a lot of other games that have already existed in the market and maybe were self-published digitally like Axiom Verge was, and then saying, okay, how do we take this game and bring it to retail? All right. Well, Axi and Verge launched, debuted less than three years ago. So technically, it's not a retro game.

But I feel like it very much fits within the sort of sphere of retro knots as a podcast based on the fact that the game clearly embraces its roots. And those roots go back at least 30 years at this point, you know, to the original Metroid. I don't know. Maybe there's even older influences in there as well. So I'm really interested in talking to you guys, and especially Tom, about sort of the genesis of the game, the inspirations that you kind of drew from and, you know, what you tried to bring to the pretty well-established Metroidvania type mold at this point. You know, it's it's a pretty well-defined territory creatively. So kind of finding, uh, finding a way to express those ideas in a new and fresh way while still, you know, feeling true to the heritage there. That's a tricky balance to walk. And I feel like Axiom Verge pulls it off really well. And so I'm curious, you know, I just would like to talk about that whole thing. So to begin with, what was the genesis of Avaugh, what made you sit down and decide, I need to make this game?

Um, so really it was kind of, it's a little bit about trying to capture that feeling, um, of being a kid again and playing those classic games, uh, but, you know, since, you know, time has evolved and, you know, when we sit down in front of an NES, it's no longer a miracle of technology. It's no longer the latest and greatest thing. Um, we have to, um, we have. all these other associations that to like capture that same feeling of playing an old NES game for the first time, it does require a lot of finesse and a lot of changes. And so that's kind of what I was going for with seeing what I can do to have it still feel the same without having it feel dated. You know, for, you know, your rose-colored memories are always, or often anyway, much better than what the actual fact is when you sit down in front of your NES and play some game that you have such fond recollections of. And in the present day, you go back to play it and it's sort of like, you know, how did I ever like this a lot of times? Or, you know, maybe it's a lot easier or much shorter or a lot harder, you know, that kind of thing.

So I was sort of trying to bring that feeling out. And I wasn't necessarily going for Metroid in the beginning. I really wanted to take the best parts of all my favorite classic games. It's just that after developing it for a while, the more and more, the more and more there was in the game, the more I started to realize that the Metroid-esque elements were the ones that were sticking and the ones that were more, you know, away from that. I, you know, I'd actually envisioned more like melee-driven combat, kind of like RIGAR, and that kind of went away over

time. So that's why it has such a strong, like, Metroid leaning. So you said you wanted to bring back, you know, the sense of childhood wonder, but I feel like you're really speaking to our childhood, like people, you know, of a certain age, if you want to say it that way. So, so, you know, like, for people who didn't necessarily cut their teeth on the NES, who maybe came along with the Super NES, or, you know, their first game was Smash Brothers on N64, how did you, like, did you think about that audience as well? Like, did you, do you have any thoughts on what this game might offer them, like, what kind of resonance it might have with people who don't have the NES as a touchstone? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, probably the primary thing I was trying to capture was that sense of discovery in those old games. I don't know, maybe by way of comparison, in new games, exploration and finding objects is largely handled by something new pops up on the map to let you know that you should go there or, you know, something is glowing in the environment to let you know you should walk. towards the glowing thing whereas we had never you know the game industry as a whole had

never learned that kind of thing back then so it was more in the vein of you know Zelda where you have to use your bombs and every single wall to find out you know where there might be a hole or where the wall you might be able to just be walked through like it's invisible and I didn't want it to be as annoying as that is but I I still wanted to have that feeling like any block in the game world could be something. I try to design the game to where, you know, your eye will be drawn to those blocks without necessarily, you know, having it have a big crack through it to let you know that it's supposed to be bombable or, you know, not that there's bombs and Axiom verge, but that's that idea. So kind of trying to make it easier for modern players to get that same sense of exploration without it being the more characteristic of modern day where the thing you're exploring is either told to you or stands out with a glow or somewhat like an icon or something like that, which I feel kind of makes it feel less natural. in a way. Yeah, I feel like that's a really, really difficult tight rope to walk. I feel like very few people walk it effectively and try to find the right balance. You know, like you say, so many games just sort of hand everything to you and say this is where you're going. But on the other hand, like I am not eager to go back to the Metroid days, the original Metroid, where like I literally was stuck for a month when I first played the game until I figured out.

oh, if I bomb certain places of the floor that are completely innocuous and have no reason for me to bomb there, then I will find hidden passages. So, yeah, that happy medium, that seems really tough to hit. Yeah, and one thing I'll just chime in. So there are a couple of things that I think Axiom Verge does particularly well in that regard. One is that it kind of teaches players about those kinds of hidden secrets without a tutorial or without hitting them over the head. So, like, a really good early example is when you get the drill, for example, you get the drill after beating the first boss, and there are some blocks that look like, you know, you can drill them. So they look like rocks, and you drill them, sure enough, you can get through them. And then as you

progress a little bit further, right behind some blocks, some regular rocks that you, that you've already been taught can be drilled. You find some regular looking blocks, and sure enough, those two can be drilled and broken up. And so you kind of realize, like, it's not just the blocks or the rocks. It's other types of tile sets could also potentially be drilled through, and some can and some can so it kind of lets you know that that is possible. And another thing that I think it does well is that as far as I can recall, there's no place where you are blocked if you don't recognize some of the, you know, like if you don't explore and find some of these things that don't look like they should be destructible, but they turn out they are. Usually those things

will lead to different secrets and power-ups and things like that. But in terms of actually progressing through the game, I believe everything in there is something that follows kind of the more traditional rules that you've been taught in the game, if that distinction makes sense. So the experimentation isn't required to beat the game, but the more you experiment and explore, the more of the secrets and the good stuff, you can find along the way.

Yeah, that was actually a hard lesson for me. There's a story about that very thing with the drill that you're talking about. I don't remember how this happened, but somehow Jonathan Blow, the famous developer of Braid, got a hold of the game and was direct messaging me over Twitter about his experience. And he, you know, it was prior to me adding that little chamber where you you're forced to learn how to use the drill on different blocks, and he just totally did not get it. And there was, you know, there's an area before you get to Elsonova where there's at least two different pathways you can take that you use the drill, and he couldn't figure out any of them. And it kind of, I think it basically ruined the game for him.

I don't think he played beyond that point. And so I was like, oh, my God, I've got to do something about this. So it's sort of a thing that you happen across whenever you find a new ability or something. There's always a part where I try to trap you in there and force the player to learn how to use it in as many ways as I can think of so that they won't forget that they can do that again later on, which of course they do anyway, but I try. Yeah, that's something that I think sort of became part of the exploratory platformer. vocabulary with Super Metroid, where you would have to use the newly acquired power-up that Samma's just equipped in order to get out of the room that she picked it up in. But I don't think people really sort of cotton to that as a deliberate design decision by Nintendo until

later. Like many years later, I started seeing other people start to do it. So I feel like it's something that's just like they did it a long time ago and no one else really noticed. And then it's kind of become a more common element of games like this where, you know, you force players to stop and say, wait, I need to use this tool somehow to get out of where I've gotten stuck. With that said, like, the game still sort of places a lot of expectation on the player. I'm speaking specifically of Axiom Verge to kind of keep all these things in mind. And as we've seen with, you know, like, why can't Metroid crawl and that sort of thing? Like, that's, that is a lot to ask of players who are used to having everything handed to them and to have tool tips pop up and to have, you know, a voice in their ear constantly say, you know, now you need to go to the control chamber or something along those lines.

Was there a temptation to insert yourself into the game or to offer like some sort of live hint system or something, you know, to kind of hold players by the hand that they got stuck? Or did you really feel it was important to stick to your guns and say, like, this is how it's designed and this is what they need to figure out? I think it was fairly easy for me to stick to my guns. I did sort of envision originally there being more dialogue and perhaps even like something akin to that ongoing banter that you see in a lot of modern games these days where there's, you know, conversation playing as you're playing the game, but it wasn't centered around like tool-tippy type things. It was more just for story purposes, or maybe to like acknowledge, you know, how the character is feeling in this really, you know, what would be in real life a very, like, terrifying situation and not just seem, you know, like he's just standing still or running as if there's

nothing going on. But I think, I don't know, that when I showed my earlier, earliest versions of the games of players and there was a lot of dialogue. Everyone was universally like, no, like not so much dialogue. Take it out. So that's kind of how it got to be where it is. Okay. We're going to be able to do so. And so, you know, and so, you know, and to, and to,

you know, and I'm going to be a lot of, I'm going to be. Oh! Yeah, even the dialogue that remains, that seems to be the biggest complaint that I've seen people direct at the game, is that there's a lot of, you know, sort of internal monologue. And I think, you know, this game does evoke Metroid so much that they sort of want the sort of silent, just get lost in a world sort of feeling that, that Metroid brings, or at least brought, you know, before it got really chatty with Fusion and other M. Yeah, probably one of actually, I've actually heard the opposite complaint, which is that people wanted to know more about the story and kind of wish there were a little bit more story elements and, yeah, and text involved.

And so there are a few cutscenes where the story is told through and some, you know, a little bit of internal monologue. But, yeah, a lot of people have said that they wanted more of that. So I guess, you know, the, you know, the end conclusion is you'll never be able to satisfy everyone. Yeah, and my thought, my response to that was kind of like speed run mode where there's no dialogue, but I think people didn't really catch on to the fact that you can play it without any dialogue or story if you like. Or maybe they just don't like having, you know, feeling rushed because now it's quote unquote speed run mode. and even though you don't have to rush, it maybe gives that them that feeling. Yeah, like Dan said, I guess you can't really satisfy everyone and everyone sort of comes into games with their own expectations and biases, especially when a game sort of, you know,

hints at its roots and its inspirations. It kind of leads people to expect certain things. So it seems like that might be, you know, one of the big challenges is managing people's expectations or just saying, I just got to make the game, I got to make. And I think it's definitely the latter. And a lot of developers ask me for advice over the years. And one of the things that I've consistently told them is, you know, first start off with building what it is you want to build. And then, you know, then put it in front of people

and see where people get frustrated, stuck, confused. You know, those kinds of things are not positives. So the thing like with the drilling the blocks and Jonathan Blow, not understanding how to proceed through the game, that's a really good lesson to learn. But when Tom decided to design the game that he wanted to play where it was all about exploration and not holding the player's hand, you know, that is something that I think the game turned out really well because he designed it the way he had always intended. Because otherwise you get something that's kind of designed by marketing as opposed to informed by marketing, which is a very different approach. So it's much better to have a small group of people, like-minded people who absolutely love your game because they've been waiting for something exactly like this for years rather than a whole bunch of people who are like, yeah, this game's okay. It's just like a bunch of other games, but it's okay. Yeah, I guess that's one of the advantages of a game designed by one person is that it doesn't have to be a 10 million selling blockbuster in order to be a success.

I assume that at this point, Axiom Verge is definitely a success for you guys, whereas, you know, you read about like Tomb Raider games selling 5 million copies, 7 million copies, and Square Annex is like, yeah, that didn't do so great. Really, seven million wasn't great. Okay, okay. So, yeah. So I guess that's probably somewhat liberating to a degree. It is, you know, it really allows me to kind of have the mindset of I'm just trying to make something that's fun and have fun while I'm doing it, you know, not be beholden to some like external idea of, what would be fun. I've worked for big companies before and I've I've had them tell me like, no, your idea just would not be marketable. So, you know, not even having that be a factor is great.

Now, you mentioned that you started out with Axiom Verge having more like melee combat in mind and not necessarily being leaning, not necessarily leaning so much on Metroid in terms of its inspiration. I remember, you know, the very first trailer I saw, there was a really strong contra vibe to it. And that never really totally went away. But I definitely do feel like the exploratory Metroid element is kind of what dominated. Can you walk us through how it sort of evolved from, you know, something more, more melee focused, you know, the RIGAR-ish game to what it ended up being? Yeah. So initially, I, you know, my thought was, like, you know, what I will take from, from Metroid would be, like,

the overall world map design, you know, how it's, everything is interconnected and there's some backtracking and, you know, exploring to find new weapons. And then, you know, the moment-to-moment gameplay, I wanted to be more responsive. So that's a bit like, you know, how Contra fits in there. But, you know, in the very beginning, I had wanted it to be, I'd envisioned it actually, like you said, like Rigar. So I actually have drawings of, you know, trace where he has like this sort of the, instead of the bug gun, it's like a bug that's attached to his arm. I think it was actually sort of squid-like looking and, you know, could shoot out its tentacles at things. and there were some variations on that like that the tentacles that were on his back were originally uh or you know that but before i ever drew them i wanted them to be something that he could

swing out like a whip um or that could be used to like climb around and and that kind of thing um but where i got further and further away from it was that uh i basically just started like writing down ideas for for items and weapons and I had so many ideas for different kinds of guns and when I say it like that it sounds lame but I was actually thinking of if you ever played star control on the Sega Genesis and Star Control too where you have each of these spaceships has just such a completely different arsenal like there's you know there's the one that shoots out a single pellet that explodes into multiple pellets

and that same ship would be in fire fights with another guy that just has like a small ray of destruction and then each of those ships always has secondary weapons like there's one ship that can launch out little mini ships, there's another ship that can suck the crew out with their

siren calls, there's another ship that can teleport and all these different kinds of things and a lot of those differences that I really liked had to do with how the projectiles work. And I didn't want to limit myself by saying, okay, he has this thing that works a little bit like the disc armor

or like Cretus's chains because no matter what you do, those are always a thing that's attached to a tether of some kind that the player swings out. And if I change it too much, then I basically have to change the way enemies are, you know, take damage, the way the player animates when he swings,

and that kind of thing to have all the different variations I wanted. So I was like, okay, if I just have it so that he has this gun, then I can really like have each projectile or whatever be a completely different object and kind of like encapsulate its behavior separately without it being tied back to the player. and you know how the character looks in any way so that that was that was the first part of that I think the other one the other part was that when I actually started programming the game and you know having parts in there I realized that I wanted to have the destructible bricks or bricks that have different properties like some of them can come back some of them are

glitched or whatever um and i think that that also like is is better served by by projectiles you know something that's small and fits in that 16 by 16 um area and is very like well communicated like what you're that you know for example if you shoot a bullet at a wall and the bullet is stopped by the wall you see exactly where it stopped or you know which which if the wall is transparent, you know, where the wall is transparent, where it's not, that kind of thing. So those things kind of combined, you know, to where now instead of being a melee game, where maybe the environments are more continuous looking like RIGAR, it became a missile-based game, and then the environments look more block-shaped like in the original Metroid.

So that's sort of like where it gets that whole flavor from. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned guns, because I feel like one of the things that really sets Axiom Verge apart from Metroid is that there is a pretty clear division between weapons and tools, whereas in Metroid, basically, anytime Samus gets a weapon, you know, whether it's the screw attack or a missile, it doubles as a tool for helping her to navigate. It's very rare that you acquire something that's just for navigating, just for managing the environment. Whereas in this game, you have things like the glitch gun, you have things like the drone, you have the ability to pass through walls. That, you know, like those have some combat applications, but not nearly to the degree of, you know, like the standard guns that you're carrying around. Can you talk about how some of those ideas developed, especially the glitch gun, which I think is really the unique element. or one of the unique elements of Axi and Verge that kind of

it sets it apart and also it just feels like such an acknowledgement of the experience of playing these games like sticking a cartridge into the system and it was a little dirty so you get weird graphics and stuff like that it was like taking that and turning it into a game mechanic and I'm curious about sort of the inspirations for those So my separation between weapons and tools was something that came out or that I came up with before I'd ever thought about having a glitch gun.

And the reason for that was that one of the flaws that I thought I perceived in games like Super Metroid and others was where a lot of your exploration ends up being rewarded by yet another missile tank or yet. get another energy tank. And I'd always felt like Symphony of the Night, for example, had more interesting exploration because the things you found would be like completely new and unique weapons rather than it did have expansions, but it also had just a ton of weapons and armor. And so I was trying to kind of find a middle ground there. So that's where I came up with the idea, well, there will be a whole bunch of weapons in this game. And while the tools can be used as weapons sometimes, it's not all the weapons can be

used as tools. I think there's just like two weapons that could be used that way. So that's how that came about. And whether it was successful or not is kind of up for grabs. A lot of people say that there's too many weapons, you know, so that it makes the weapons not feel as special. Also, I ended up putting lore in the environment. So then a lot of people were like, well, you know, I did all this exploring and all I did was get a piece of lore, which is exactly what I said, you know, about like the missile expansions and Metroid. So I ended up falling into the same trap while doing extra work to do it.

So that's kind of how that separation came about. And then for the glitch ray, I'd say that was. really um i i don't know i can't i can't claim that i had been planning for that to be in all long i think i had been working on the game for a year and a half or something before uh that even occurred to me and and what it really was was i was trying to figure out how i can get things like the secret worlds or like you know the the justin bailey passcode um and all those various things. And I don't know, maybe I was thinking about, well, you know, there's this, this focus. Like, for a while, there was this craze. Like, everything had to have a special gun. Like,

like, a portal has the portal gun and Half-Life has the Gravity gun. And they were sort of other games coming out. There's a gun that scales things up and down. Or here's a gun that reverses gravity. And so I think maybe that, you know, kind of fed into my subconscious, like, you know, the gun is the way that you cause the glitches to happen. But I don't think there was any one, like, reason or moment that, that it came. It just sort of like was an epiphany one day, like, I could do this and it would let me have all of these different features in one. Maybe going the same place you were. I know. Tom, you've talked a lot about how

like you used to play around with game genie and things like that and you had a lot of fun finding like hidden things in the game cartridge that were never meant to be seen by end players. Was that part of your inspiration?

Or maybe the thought came to you first of using these glitches and then went from there. It all was like one thought, you know, the game genie, the password, the dirty cartridge, all of those things were really just like one thing to me and how I was going to do that. And I ended up splitting

it, you know, between the glitch ray, the password tool, and the secret worlds. But yeah, I mean, as a kid, you know, a lot of NES games were rather short. Even the original Metroid was. So the most play, you know, I spent most of my time playing that, I think, was just, you know, doing the wall jump in the original Metroid to get to the secret worlds and exploring there. And I had no idea that it was just based on, you know, how the characters was interpreting unused portions of memory. So I thought that there was like an infinite world to be found in there. And I never knew how I could capture. that feeling. So, you know, it was just one of many things, I think, to try and convey that.

Yeah, that's something that I did a lot, too. You know, I had like two games for my NES for a while, Super Mario Brothers, which I was sick of because I played it so much, and Metroid. And, you know, the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter, which showed off the secret worlds, quote unquote, made it seem like it was a deliberate design decision. Like, they presented it as if there were all these worlds that you could spulunk, like all these hidden things that developers didn't want you to know about. So I think the way Nintendo marketing and, you know, the people writing the Fun Club newsletter presented it added to that allure.

You know, they kind of pulled the wool over our eyes, not in a malicious way, but just to kind of increase the, honestly, probably just to come up with something to say about what amounts to a simple little glitch in the game, a little exploit. But yeah, that's really something that Axiom Verge captures, and you mentioned the secret worlds. And those are really fascinating because they feel so alien and hostile. Like there was that sense in NES games like Metroid and Life Force, you know, that you were someplace that you weren't supposed to be. Like these were alien scary worlds and there was no real explanation for them.

It was whatever you read in the manual or maybe like two sentences on the attract mode and that was all the context you had for these things and that's something that I really like about Axiom Verge is that even though there is a lot of lore in the game and there's narrative and dialogue it's still like you fall into these weird pulsing places in the environment and discover these things

and all of a sudden you're like, what the hell is going on? And it just, it really does capture that sense of like, you know, being a little kid and wondering, like, what have I stumbled into? It's definitely hard, like, difficult to resist the urge to have the character be like, why am I in a room with, you know, pulsating heads or, you know, explain every little thing in there. I even designing it, like, I come up with explanations for what these things are. And then I'm like, but I can't ever talk about them because it would just probably

destroy that, you know? Yeah, I don't think games need to explain everything. I think you don't need for the protagonist to say, like, what is this place? I think, you know, if it's if it's uneffectively, the player is going to say, what is this place? And that's, you know, that's sort of projection that you want into your video game protagonist. So in talking about, you know, your NES inspirations, the game visually draws very heavily on the NES, like the color palettes and the pixel art design and so forth, the size of the sprites. But obviously, it doesn't stick to, you know, it doesn't, it's not slavishly faithful to the NES style. You didn't go with like 256 by 224 resolution. The screen zooms in and out and it has a very large pixel resolution effectively. So that's, that's always something interesting to me, is sort of how you approach fidelity to source material

without compromising the game and without sort of breaking the vibe that you're going for. Yeah, that's, you know, it's definitely not being about, it's about not being slavish, I would say. I don't think that having the retro style. is what made classic games fun necessarily. There are advantages to the limitations that they had that, you know, force the player to use their imagination and in a way, like sort of create their own reality where once you suspended your disbelief,

it's very consistent and in a lot of ways more real feeling than, some very polished 3D, you know, modern games would be. And so I think what I was going for was to build in restrictions, but they didn't necessarily have to be, or limitations, but not necessarily the same limitations as an NES, you know. It might seem like the palette is limited, but it isn't really, You know, it's more like I try to make it so, you know, each little eight by eight elements only used four colors plus black or three colors plus black.

And I tried to make it look like large areas, had repetitive tiling in them, you know, for, you know, on big monsters and that kind of thing. but that's more about creating self-consistency with the world and not creating consistency with NES games. So I don't feel like the resolution is too terribly important that it has to match NES resolution or that the sound effects need to be precisely the NES, you know, two square waves and a triangle wave, as long as they have like a consistent feel like they belong in this world together.

If that makes any sense. Right. Yeah, I think the word consistency is the key there. There's a lot of, you know, sort of retro chasing games that use a mishmash of visual styles. Like, sprites will be one style and then there'll be backgrounds that are much higher resolution. And Double Dragon 4 is one of those. And, you know, I've seen a few others, classic dungeon or cladon for PSP, I think. You're just like, what are you doing here? Whereas this, it feels like it's, you know, it's unified.

Everything fits together, which I think is the most important thing. Did you consider looking or working with a different style other than NES, like doing something more advanced like super NES style or Genesis? Or were you, was your heart pretty well set on NES all the way through the project? So, you know, I had worked on Game Boy Advance games in the past, and there was even like a Metroid clone for the GBA called Orne, where it was kind of this mix between 16-bit and 8-bit styles, but I'd also certainly done 16-bit, and I've, you know, I've worked on AAA 3D games. I think the focus on the Nest style was it came about from two things like one is that this kind of environment where it's made out of the discrete blocks

and the blocks, the blocks blockiness is important to the game kind of the way it is in Minecraft, maybe not to the same extent, but you know, certainly in terms of telegraphing the players is what they can and cannot do. And, you know, the limited NES number of colors and tiles definitely fits in with that. You know, there's also just the plain, how long is it going to take me to make anything? So the more, the more, I don't know what the word is.

I don't want to say resolution, but the more. just like overall detail you have to your graphic style. Say you want to make it look like an NES game. Well, you can no longer take the same 16 by 16 tile and use that over and over again if it's going to look like an NES game because it will now, I don't know how this is, but to your eye, it now seems like a repeating pattern as opposed to more like a pixel within a grander pattern. So that's had a lot to do with it too.

So I didn't want to, say, increase the colors, the 256 and then still use 16 by 16 tiles because it would feel wrong to you. What you need, I think, is consistency. And the more detail you get, the more time you spend, you know say you go away from having everything look like blocks now you've got to make sure say it's terrain that you know there's there's a tuft of grass on the top of the block and the bottom is dirt and then you know so that it now fits in with the higher fidelity graphic style you probably

want to have slopes of different degrees and you need transition tiles to go between those and to go between where it's, you know, where the grass is vertical and there's a cliff face that's all dirt and that kind of thing. And it actually makes it take a lot longer. And has you run into issues like, okay, well, what if I want to have these blocks be drillable with the drill? Like if one of those blocks in that seamless terrain that you designed is suddenly drilled away, it just becomes this sharp edge and looks wrong because it's everything else is seamless except for where you drilled. Whereas in that NES style, it's like, oh, the terrain could have always looked this way, you know, once you've drilled out the block and made a cavity that is also

blocked shape. I hadn't really considered the sort of pragmatic applications of lower resolution graphics, but that's interesting to hear sort of the logic behind that, and it makes a lot of sense. I totally forgot about Orne, by the way. That game never actually came out, did it? No, it was just a school project, so it exists in ROM form, I believe, on the internet, and that's as much coming out as it's ever had. Yeah, I don't know if someone showed me a link to it or if someone sent me a copy of it, but I do remember playing it.

Now that I have a GBA Everdrive, I need to load that up and play it on actual hardware and kind of play it in, you know, the, the, the, the, the original intended format for it. So right before kind of the midpoint, I would like to ask one last question, and that's about the soundtrack, which you also composed yourself and performed. And that doesn't stick to NES restrictions at all.

There's nothing like about that soundtrack that would make you say, oh, yes, this was on an NES, even though it does have some of the, you know, like the square waves and triangle waves. It's definitely something, you know, kind of its own beast. Can you talk about the, I guess, the mode you were working with us for the soundtrack and kind of how you ended up going in that direction? I think kind of what, you know, going back to Orne, where the soundtrack to that game was made using mod plug a tracker and was fairly primitive. I think with Axiom Verge, just for the sake of making it more fun for me, I didn't want to have those limitations.

So that's sort of where I went with the, you know, it's electronica, but not necessarily chip tune. You know, there are some square waves in it, you know, in pretty much every song in there. But I didn't want to hold myself to it. And I was sort of like, well, you know, I don't know if this will fit with the. game's visuals, and I don't care. I'm just going to do it. And I'll find out when people play it if they think it didn't belong. And I've had a couple of people say, like, I wish he had someone else make the soundtrack because it, you know, it just didn't fit or it was too dancey or whatever. But, you know, in the end, it was all about amusing myself, too. So, you know,

that's that. I'd say like in terms of inspirations, the soundtrack is you know, it's definitely inspired by NES Metroid and Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, but also, you know, just whatever music I happen to like, which is

a lot of electronica, like orbital and there's this group called hybrid that I really like and you know, I think when I was when I was making in the game, probably a lot of the music I was listening to at the time

informed, you know, how the soundtrack came out in the end. Yeah, I think a game as big as Axiom Verge is compared to, you know, the NES Metroid, I feel like if you had gone with just straight chip tunes, it would have felt really, it would have worn after a while.

I mean, Metroid, it works because it's, it's a pretty small game, but this is like two or three times a size of Metroid or bigger. And so I feel like you need something a little more laid back and chill in terms of ambiance for most of the exploration. Yeah, I agree.

There is definitely something very raw about Chiptune. And, you know, when I do go in that direction, I find myself, like, how can I smooth this out somehow and still have it be recognizable as, you know, chippy in some regard? Just because you're listening to a video game or just because you're listening to a video game's podcast doesn't mean you have to eat like video game or stereotypes. There are many more and many healthier meal options out there than hypercaffeinated soda and junk food. Consider supplementing that all pizza diet with a subscription to HelloFresh, a meal delivery kit service that brings you fresh food prep kits to your door. HelloFresh offers great convenience. They deliver food directly to your door in compact, insulated boxes. You can choose your delivery day in order to best fit your schedule, pause your account when you won't be around.

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And, on average, they save over $3,000 off the MSRP. So when you're ready to buy that dream car, visit True Car and enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features not available in all states. Hey, humans, David Smalley here from the Dogma Debate Podcast right here on Podcasts, where we talk about all the things you're not supposed to discuss at work, religion, politics, abortion, racism, slavery, and that's only when we open the Bible. We discuss Islam.

Islamophobia. What does that even mean? We chat with vegans, animal rights activists, and even visit factory farms to see it for ourselves. I invite people from multiple backgrounds to convert me into their worldview. But as long as they're okay with being respectfully challenged, you better bring your evidence. And I never lose sight of how both the left and the right are seeming to lose their minds. So basically, we're solving all the world's problems right here on dogma debate. And you've been missing it. our 360 virtual reality videos on the podcast 1F and download dogman debate on iTunes, Stitcher, or Podcast 1.com. All right, so we're going to jump into listener mail now. We got a whole bunch of emails from people who mostly are fans of Axiom Verge. There's a few slight criticisms here, but nothing too cool. We're going to read them to you now. Yeah, we'll just, we'll start with one of those, actually.

One of the more critical ones from Zach Handlin. It took me a couple of tries to get sucked into Axiom Verge, but once I got hooked, I got hooked hard. The game is more challenging than Super Metroid, but it scratches the same itch, and the variety of weapons in bizarre enemy and location designs did a great job of creating a sustained mood of subtle wrongness that was really interesting to play through.

It's also pure joy on the switch. Unfortunately, the game's actual story told through journals and intermittent dialogue tries to do too much. I stopped playing about three-quarters of the way through, having already found most of the cool toys and beaten most of the bosses, all I had left to carry me forward was a need to resolve the plot. And since that plot was such a collection of big ideas, I had no interest in finishing it. Are there regrets about the narrative, or is this just a matter of personal taste? I think, I would say there are some regrets. you know, I think I alluded to early on how I had previewed the game, someone, I think, from GameSpot maybe did a stream back in 2012, and there was a whole thread about it in, I don't know if you remember, NeoGaf, where a lot of people were like, oh my God, like the character just keeps on talking, you know, like, why did it? he say this? Why did he say that? He doesn't need to say that. He just needs to shut up and let the

Metroid baby fly around the screen a little bit and we'll know to care for that. And I took that to heart, you know, and I really slashed the dialogue down to maybe a third of what I had planned at that point. So I always wonder, is it just that the story is not that engaging? Or is it like, I just didn't explain enough. And I've had a lot of people tell me they had no idea what was going on. And I think maybe that was a function of, you know, I tried to tell the story with as little back and forth as possible. I also took this stance that the main character, Trace, would be smarter than me or, you know, smarter. you know, he's supposed to be a brilliant scientist type of person.

So he figures out things without telling anyone that he figured them out. So many, many plot points are not really explained because I wanted you to have that feeling like the game is not treating you like a dummy, but also maybe even making you feel like maybe this character is a little bit smarter than you. in terms of like the lore the little pieces that you find I'd say almost none of them are directly related to the plot as you see it in this game they're more like flavorings you know maybe things to set up like another future game or like things that happened in the past or just to like give you an idea of what this world is like

you know, so there's, there's lots of lore in there that's in this Sumerian, like, text to kind of, you know, convey, like, how the people living in this world might have talked. And then, like, you know, dialogue between the Rusalki, you know, talking to each other, you know, sort of like, just to give you to feel like, you know, these characters are sort of plotting. They, they can't move, you know, this. And they just kind of email each other, basically, you know, through their thoughts. Without it actually being a continuous thing where if you put every piece together, now you have the whole story because that doesn't happen. Although the story does have a lot of kind of big concepts, like Trace's relationship to the actual villain of the piece. And not all of that is necessarily spelled out explicitly, but I feel like I, you know, made the connections. fairly easily and figured out pretty much what was going on. But I did also go chasing after a lot of the lore. So maybe that was the difference.

Yeah, and I think one other thing, I think you hit the nail in the head that, you know, there's a lot of big ideas in the story. And I think there was that tension, as Tom mentioned, about how much story do you want to put in? Does it get in the way of the gameplay? But I know, like Tom used to maintain a blog with all kinds of different things. thoughts about, you know, the nature of reality, what is real, what is, you know, what is, you know, what is a relationship between your mind and the physical reality. So there are a lot of deep ideas that, you know, it's tough. If you want to explore those fully, then that can pull you

away from the gameplay. But if you focus too much on, you know, just the gameplay, then you come away with less of the story and the ideas that I think Tom was trying to communicate but um so I think that might be one of the um reasons for people's complaints was there's just so much there and Tom was trying to communicate that with so few words

um but I in in answering kind of the uh what the the letter writer said I'd say um you know if the the play that person got to a point in the game where they're like, I don't care about the story anymore, and that's the only thing keeping me going. Of course, that's fine. Everyone's different. But the thing that always kept me going, and I've played it, I can't remember how many times I've played it at this point. To me, it's always about the exploration and finding like, what do I have to do next? How do I keep progressing? Where have I not explored yet? And where do I go next? And so that's, to me, more than even the story is just like, how do I uncover all of this map? How do I get all of the items?

How do I, you know, experiment with glitching all the enemies and seeing what they do? And to me, that's the thing that provides the momentum to follow through with the game all the way. So from friend of the show, D-Fight, as a dev working mostly solo, How hard was it to decide what content made the cut and what didn't? Did you commit to including all your ideas, hence the dozens of weapons and upgrades, lots of lore, a Bina-Commando arm, or were there things that just couldn't fit into the final product? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the weapons. I had originally made a list of 100 weapons that I wanted,

and I eventually pared them down because not so, so much that 100 was too much to make, which maybe it would have been, but just that it would have been too overwhelming. I would have had this, you know, have to have had a much more robust inventory management system in there. And I really wanted to, you know, be able to have you select your weapons with a weapon wheel or something like that. So I did cut down on the weapons there were some things like there was a very I think I might mention this in that in that documentary where there was like a very grotesque kind of boss where it was sort of like Athatos finds a way to use Elsa Nova's body as a weapon and I just took it out because

not only was it like a disgusting idea but I didn't really want you know even though Athatos is a villain. He's not that kind of villain. So, you know, not really the, uh, uh, it's, it was almost like a, you know, like rape, like allegory. I didn't want it to be that. So, you know, that, that got cut, um, mainly for that reason. Uh, there was, Athatos's, like, final, the final boss that you come to in the game was originally a different shape, but I realized in this end battle I wanted to be able to have Athatos and Elsinova both in the scene. So this boss I designed, which was sort of like at the end of an underground corridor, wouldn't fit that at all. So I ended up, you know, just not using that design, period, but you can still see the, actually, there's a way to glitch it so that you can find that boss, and he's, I think he's somewhere near where the actual Athatos end boss is in the game.

I'm trying to think of what else might have been in there. Like, as I said before, I wanted there to be more dialogue originally, and one of the things I had wanted was for there to be. be like a metal gear solid style. What do you call that? It's like codec or something. It's like a radio. And you have the heads on either side of the screen. And I thought like, hey, like, what if you could ring up these characters at any time and have them talk?

And I was sort of like, well, you know, I already wasn't sure about how important this is. And, you know, also like as I was developing the game, I realized. just how little the Roussalki want Trace to know about what's going on. And I felt like those conversations would just be Trace being, why don't you tell me more? Why don't you tell me what's going on? Why aren't you saying anything? And then finding more and more reasons not to reply.

So it's sort of, you know, to be silly. Like, you know, these characters really want him to know the minimum to convince him to go on. All right, so this letter is from Mike Kasek. It's not really a question, just a comment. Last week, I received my copy of the Switch Multiverse edition, and I'm currently about a fifth of the way through the first playthrough, having read much praise for Axiom Verge,

but knowing little about it, the game itself. So far, I'm blown away. Axiom Verge takes me back to my first playthrough of the original Metroid on Real Hardware, complete with pallet and sprite glitching. I was floored when I stumbled on to a secret world, almost exactly like how I select glitched a hole in the wall in Metroid 2, except Axiom Verge.

Burge didn't crash while I was exploring it. No other gaming experience in the past 25 years has elicited the same combination of anticipation, surprise, and nostalgia for the gaming experience itself. I'm completing this playthrough slowly to savor it, as I'm not sure if I'll ever have this kind of experience again. But from what I've seen so far, Axiom Verge is a meticulously crafted game that absolutely deserves the praise it receives. Thanks, Tom, for all your work on this fantastic game. Let's see. I like that one. Yeah, that was a good one.

That was a good one. Yeah. From Brian Berg. Axiom Verge is a really cool game with some incredibly frustrating design decisions. I played on the PS4 around launch, and once I completed it, I didn't feel compelled to return. Let's see. I still think it's great. It's full of great ideas that are mostly well executed, but you really have to be in a certain kind of mood to enjoy it.

I'd buy a sequel or spiritual follow-up for Mr. Hap if he promised to improve fast travel. So there's a thought for the inevitable, well, actually, is there, is it an inevitable sequel? Are you looking to build on this game or what are you thinking for your next project if you can talk about that? I don't know. What can I tell him, Dan? Just that, so we've kind of agreed that we're not going to talk about anything along these lines other than confirming that Tom is already working on his next game. but we're not talking about what it is or how it relates to Axiom Verge or even if it relates to Axiom Verge. So, yeah, we'll, I guess we'll announce something when there's something a little bit more concrete to talk about.

Sorry, I'm going to be a total buzzkill on that. That's okay. I've dealt with PR before. And, you know, because I think there's, you know, a lot of people have a lot of thoughts about what they would like. the next game to be if they're you know if it continues in the axiom verge universe and you know everyone has ideas of like they like the fast travel they they don't like it they you know they're you know they want more weapons they want fewer weapons they have you know new ideas and one thing that i think is super important is i think the reason that axiom verge turned out the way it did was because um you know we talked a lot about consistency and the fact that tom

developed Axiom Verge entirely on his own. And I think the fact that there's a single creator of the game who has a vision for what it should be is really helps a lot. And if you start talking about something too early, you start getting a lot of feedback from people, well, meaning people, but maybe people who don't know the full context of the game. And then you try to please a lot of people who don't really know what's, um, you know, what the overall final finished product is going to look like. So it's better to stay a little bit quiet for now. So like Tom can kind of solidify what it is he wants to do and then do it. And then we'll start, you know, putting some more information out there.

But kind of along those same lines, Tom and I have discussed the next project. And, you know, sometimes Tom will ask me for, feedback. And I keep telling him that I'm afraid to give him any feedback because his design intuition is way better than mine will ever be. And so I'm always afraid of like giving him a suggestion that will turn out to be a bad idea and I've somehow ruined the game. So I keep telling him like, you know, kind of let me know what's going on every now and again. But, you know, I want you to continue working on this the way, to the extent possible, the way you did Axiom Verge. Okay, so you want me to make a multiplayer deathmash? Is that why I'm hearing?

Yeah, and, yeah, make it, uh, if you can put lots of micro transactions in there, that would be great. All right, here's a maybe a tough one from Travis Lowe. I've thought a lot about the world of Axiom Verge since finishing the game. This prompts my question, what books, ideas, philosophies, or what other art or media were most influential and formative for you in your life and in the making of this game. Thank you for making Axiom Verge. I haven't enjoyed this game, a game this much for many, many years. So for sure, I would say almost anything by Alistair Reynolds would kind of like give the flavor or I don't know if it's, if it comes out in Axiom Verge, but it was, you know,

the kind of thing that I was reading while I was making it. Greg Egan has some, you know, a series of books about people living in cellular automata that could be relevant. You know, it's not my favorite writing style in terms of like the characters and story, but there's big ideas to be had in those books. I really like the old television show, Farscape, and I think... Wait, is that old now? What the hell? It is old now. Oh, God.

Yeah, it's like 15 years old or something by this point. You know, standard definition. But it had a lot of really good visuals, I think. And that's, you know, in terms of like aesthetics, you know, obviously eight-bitified, but aesthetic-wise, a lot of that, I think, found its way in Axiom Verge. and even originally the original version of Trace kind of looked a lot more like John Crichton than the current Woody Allen looking type character.

So actually kind of a follow-up to that from Jason. I have a question about the story in Axiom Verge. It has many similarities with a short story written by Robert Heinlein entitled by his bootstraps. Was that an influence at all when creating Axiom Verge? It was not. I've not heard of it. Oh, well, I guess that's something for you. to look up now. Yes. Oh, and

speaking of things that were not inspirations, uh, Bioshock Infinite, which I have never played, was not an inspiration. Someone, someone accused me of stealing something from the plot in that game and I didn't know that that was there. I'm sorry. Uh,

Bioshock Infinite Devs. I didn't mean to take anything from it. Uh, from Kevin Boyer. Uh, I'd like to thank Thomas for creating such a wonderful experience and Dan for helping get it to the masses. Uh, Two of my favorite tracks on the soundtrack are vital tide and inexorable. Can you share your influences for these tracks? Do you have any music that got left on the cutting room floor?

Cutting room floor? I think all of the tracks made it in except for that one that I think it was called primordial shores and that you can get if you buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp. And that was going to be the soundtrack for like a kind of ocean. themed area of the first level. So he said, inexorable and vital tide. I'm trying to remember which ones those are. I think a lot of it, I was listening to hybrid at the time.

Hybrid is a band They also sometimes call themselves hybrid sound system I haven't entirely figured out when they should be called what or in what context I'm looking up the album The album Disappear Here by Hybrid

Has a lot of songs that I liked And I think you can probably hear hints of formula of fear and can you hear me in those two tracks I think also like going back to Farscape there's one of those has some Indian vocals

and I was kind of trying to capture if you know the Farscape I don't if it's the beginning theme or the end theme has some vocals that are like alien wailing and it always I don't know, it seemed very evocative to me. You know, you never hear in movies what alien music would sound like.

I was trying to replicate that to some degree. Although, I don't know if that's really something you would want to, like, listen to your an iPod playlist. So another one about the music from Justin. I don't know what I can say about the stellar design of Axiom Verge that hasn't already been expressed. It recaptured a specific sense of discovery and surprise I hadn't felt since the first Metroid. I didn't think that was possible. I'd love to hear more about the soundtrack.

Did you have any experience creating music of this or any kind before? What kind of tools and software and hardware did you use? What was the most valuable thing you learned by the end of the process? That sort of thing. So I had been writing music and learning more about it drip by drip since I was in college or so. I don't really play instruments. I think I had a couple of years of piano when I was in elementary school. And I took a course on MIDI of all things back in like 1996. And everything I did after that was kind of just experimenting. I had for a time I made soundtracks to my game Orne and for demo games that we had going on at a place I worked Red Eye Studios that were never sold commercially.

So, you know, it kind of progressed from, you know, I could do just basic general MIDI. And then at one point, I moved on to XM, you know, and that's what I used for Orne. I used a tracker. And then for Axiom Verge, when it came out, virtual synths were, a thing. And so for those who don't know, they're basically a plug-in, a software plugin that mimics what actual music hardware would sound. So normally you'd have to go out and buy a big plastic keyboard filled with lots of sounds in order to get your sound. But processors started to get so fast that you could just do all of that in software. So for Axiom Verge, I purchased

Sonar, I think it was Sonar X2, and all of that soundtrack was done with virtual synths. And that, you know, I did a lot of learning, I think, just in terms of how to use those, you know, how to use, because I had previously used basically effectively samplers, whereas these were simulated, like, analog where there would be like a cutoff frequency and a resonance frequency. and you know you could use you know additive or subtractive synthesis and you know there's a lot of a lot of that was new to me and so when I think about the soundtrack to Axiom verge I think about like what it was like for me learning how to use those and that whole sort of world that that opened up comment from Andy Lennon

My main memory of the game is the wonderful music and sound design. It was deeply evocative and superbly married to the art style to form a compelling aesthetic blend. It was both deeply sinister and unsettling, whilst being simultaneously hypnotic. It engendered a real sense of isolation and insignificance. And as someone who values atmosphere in games above almost all other considerations, I thought it was one of the highlights of a fantastic experience. So you definitely have fans in the music area. Let's see.

From Zach Adams, one thing I loved about, Axiom Verge, was the pervasive feeling that you're breaking a more straightforward game. The glitch graphics associated with the address disruptor combined with the sheer weirdness of the areas that could only be accessed through its use reminded me a lot of how breakable the original Metroid felt. Decoy Crayed felt like he didn't belong in the game. The hidden glitch areas accessible by sticking yourself in a closed door and going in and out of morphball mode repeatedly clearly shouldn't have existed, and yet they added to the mystique of the game. Axiom Verge felt like it took that brokenness and turned it into part of the story, and I loved it. I never beat the last three bosses because I'm awful at

platform shooters, but I loved every second of the 20 hours it took me to get to the point where I gave up. I also found Mr. Hap's PS blog article where the Vita, when the Vita version shipped, sad and fascinating, a really good and honest description of what it is to be a one-person dev crew relying on third-party tools when those tools stop existing. I'm glad I got to play the game on Vita, but I wish it hadn't ended up being such a brutal make-good. So for those of us who haven't read the PS blog, can you talk a little bit about that, what he's referring to? I can only guess because it's been so long,

but at the time the Vita version came out, it was a year after the PlayStation 4 version. And we had initially announced that it was going to be simultaneously for PS4 and PlayStation Vita, but the issue was that I had written the game it was originally written for Xbox 360 in the very beginning for X&A

and then Microsoft of course discontinued X&A and then the only remainder was Mono game which Sony had I guess contracted with Thickhead games and mono themselves

to port mono and mono game to the PlayStation 4 And, you know, they had thought, and I had thought, too, that, you know, that it would be not too much trouble for it to be ported to Vita, because Vita already had a C-sharp programming language. I can't remember what it was called, but it was just limited by memory. And I think it worked on, like, an earlier version of C-sharp. But it turned out to be very problematic for Sickhead games to make the port of Mono game to Vita. I think one of the issues was that Zammerin, the company that makes Mono, didn't want to make a Vita port of it, or their price was too expensive. And so what Sickhead ended up having to do was make a cross-compiler between C-sharp and C-plus-plus.

And oh, my God, I'm probably making your eyes roll back in your head talking about this. But anyway, that process where he was doing, like basically porting all of C-sharp to the Vita, that took about a year for that to happen. And I think that was probably what that blog post was talking about. But the good news is that that same porting process is what allowed, you know, the Nintendo Switch and the Xbox One even to be made. Yeah, and I just looked up the blog post while you were talking. And the analogy you used was one of kind of like connecting a light bulb to electricity. so like basically sickhead games had to kind of build the power grid and do all of this stuff. And then only finally once the circuit was complete, like it went from it doesn't run at all,

it doesn't work at all, doesn't do anything to boom, the game's all done. Like, you know, it's an oversimplification. But because once it was boom all done, there was still a little bit of tweaking that had to be done. But for the most part, it went from, and I remember when we were going to, through this, it went from just, you know, Tom Spillman working on this compiler thing for a long time and there was nothing to show for it. And then all of a sudden, one day, Axiom Verge was more or less fully playable on the Vita. So it went from nothing to very close to being done. So one final question from Kor Makur-Gor-Gorarson, which actually kind of treads ground that ground that we've covered.

a little bit already, but as Mark Brown pointed out in his gamemaker's toolkit video on YouTube, Axiom Verge shares the bull trait with Super Metroid that it dares to let the player become lost, forcing them to find their own way. This is something many Metroidvania's shirk away from. How difficult was it finding that balance between exploration versus frustration? I think it was a lot of trial and error, really. You know, you develop the game with best intentions in mind, thinking players are going to understand everything, but you really have to have people playtest it and figure out what trips them up. Like I mentioned that anecdote with Jonathan Blow, which led me to making the room where I try to educate players that

drills can drill through blocks that have cracks in them and sometimes blocks that don't have cracks in them. And I think that that was largely, you know, just watching where people got tripped up informed where I did more quote-unquote handholding just in terms of designing the game to where they were forced into a certain direction as opposed to letting them be lost. All right. Well, thank you for fielding all these questions. It was interesting to hear your additional thoughts on the development process. To wrap up this podcast, because it is getting kind of late. I was wondering if both of you, or each of you, could talk about

just looking back at the entire Axiom Verge project in your respective roles in it and the time that you committed to it, what do you feel was your biggest accomplishment or the thing that you're most proud of with the game, and what do you think was the most difficult obstacle that you had

to overcome? Dan, why don't we start with you? Sure, so I think probably maybe just because it's the most recent thing, that comes to mind. But probably the biggest accomplishment was getting the retail version out by the holidays. There was just a lot of things that had to fall into place. And of course, Badland is the publisher, but there were still a lot of things that just had to happen between

us and Badland and, you know, things like shipping and exporting things from Japan and, working directly with Sony and Nintendo, and there were the packaging companies and all of these things. It's absurdly complicated. Yeah, it was it took a lot, and it was a very stressful process, especially because, you know, we made the decision out, you know, come hell or high water. We wanted to get this thing out by holiday, and, yeah, it took a lot of pushing and persuasion and kind of doing things. things that are not normally, you know, taking companies out of their normal comfort zones and getting them to compress their timelines, but we were able to get that done. So that, yeah, that was, that was a very intense experience and just seeing it physically, like when it, when we

got that video of it, you know, coming off of the line and being shrink-wrapped and put into boxes, that was just like, wow, it's really happening. It's really, it physically exists in this world now. And on the flip side, your biggest frustration or the biggest challenge you had to overcome in your part of the project? The biggest frustration and challenge probably relates to getting the game out on Switch. So it was very interesting that, you know, Nintendo was very enthusiastic about getting Axiom Verge on to the week. And I should probably preface this by saying that if anyone who's listening to this doesn't know my personal history, I actually worked at Nintendo for about nine years. And I ran the digital distribution slash indie business that entire time. So I have longstanding personal relationships with all of my former coworkers over there. And everything was great going into the WiiU version. Everyone was. really enthusiastic and excited. And when the switch was still just kind of rumored, it was

very early on. I really wanted to make sure that Axiom Verge could be either a launch title or a launch window title. And I kept feeling like I was getting stonewalled and not led on to the platform. And that was a very frustrating experience because had we gotten the dev kits a little bit earlier, you know, since the game was already, for all intents and purposes, done, we might have been able to get it out by launch or in that first half of the year, as opposed to getting it out sometime in October, as it turned out. So that was probably the biggest disappointment. I think there was a time early on when there was just not enough content and Axiom Verge could have stood out even more.

But it's, it's done very well on the switch. So don't really have too much to complain about. Okay. And Tom, uh, your respective thoughts there. Um, you know, for me, I think it's going to be a lot different from Dan. For me, like actual game development, um, I wouldn't say it's necessarily easy, but it's what comes naturally to me, you know, it's, it's what I do, you know, whereas you feel comfortable doing, you know,

Retronauts podcast and, you know, making these beautiful books, you know, on games and editorials. Like, for me, game development pretty much comes naturally and it's not, there's not a lot for me to learn there, but all of the exterior stuff to it, like trying to get the word out, like back when the game was just my hobby, you know, trying to get it noticed by publishers.

and then even like once it had been announced and they showed the game my E3 just trying to like emotionally cope with all this like attention that the game had and like this sort of being like a semi you know like a niche public figure or whatever in the indie gaming scene it was very overwhelming for me. So that, you know, I don't think there was much I could really do about it other than wait, you know, like get used to it over time. But definitely Dan helped a lot. You know, he, we got together like, I think, was it late 2014? So, you know, he helped out a lot with a lot of the things that were question marked to me. like how do I get people to know about the game? How do I get it in all of the places that it needs to be so that I can basically just work on the game

and not have all of this other PR marketing business type stuff making a big scary question mark over my head? All right. Well, I think that does it. We've had quite a lengthy conversation, actually. So thank you both for your time. If you'd like to do the usual honors, of telling us where we can find you on the internet.

I guess it's a little different because you're not media personalities, but I'm sure you know, you're welcome to pimp your Twitter accounts or Facebook feeds or whatever. So go ahead. Dan. So, yeah, so my Twitter is at Dan underscore Edelman. Last name is spelled A-D-E-L-M-A-N. And Tom.

Yeah, my Twitter is at Axiom verge. I do have a Facebook that I think is just Facebook.com slash axiom verge, all one word, no spaces. But I definitely check Twitter more often for better or worse. That's become the social media platform I'm most on. So, yeah, at Axiom verge. All right. Well, that wraps it up for this Retronauts. As usual, I'm Jeremy Parrish.

You can find me at Retronauts. on Twitter as GameSpite. And let's see, Retronauts itself, you can find at Retronauts.com on the Podcast One network, the Podcast One app, on iTunes, et cetera, et cetera. We publish weekly. So we'll be back next Monday with another full episode and on alternating Fridays with a tiny episode. Thanks again, guys. Thank you.

The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall,

becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others the cops like brian don't shy away from it it's the very foundation of who they are and what they do the robbery suspect in a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder i'm edonahue