Tech Over Tea - 3 Brothers Try Indie Game Development | Daytime Devs

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Today we sit down with the Daytime Devs who recently released there first game Super Bawk Bawk Chicken, after playing there game at AVCON 2023 I was very curious to hear there story and how we got here. ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://www.daytimedevs.com/games/super-bawk-bawk-chicken/ Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2054850/Super_BAWK_BAWK_Chicken/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaytimeDevs YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@daytimedevs/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I am as always your host, Brodie Robertson. Welcome back to the show. Today, any of the video watchers, you probably noticed there is no layout. There's a good reason for that. Things changed like last minute. It's fine. If it really bothers you, just go listen to the audio version. It'll be exactly the same. today we've got some local uh local south australian indie game devs there we go we're not going to restart that uh anyone who's seen this before knows if i try to think of anything on the fly it's just going to fall apart so welcome to the show daytime devs how about you all just introduce yourselves uh one by one we'll start with luke i guess uh g'day i'm luke i'm a programmer for daytime devs and we've been working on it for like two years or so um nice to meet you brody

nice to meet you too uh we'll go holy diver next, no, I changed my layout. Yes. Yes. Hi, I'm HolyDiver or Scott. And I am, I guess, the lead graphical designer and or 3D person on the team. Okay. And last one. Yep. Howdy. I'm Alex.

Also NodeRiver on Discord and that. And I'm also a programmer who's working on Super Book Book Chicken as part of Daytime Devs. I think you were the first one who actually mentioned the name of the project. Oh. How about that? You're also Wesley. Yes. I've got the game on the screen right now.

So how about you guys just briefly... What do you pick to briefly explain what this game is? Alex? Yeah, sure. Super Pork Pork Chicken is an infinite runner. But it's a little bit different to normal because most infinite runners have lanes. And Super Pork Pork Chicken doesn't have lanes.

But also, we've really lent into the quirky and kind of wacky vibe with Super Bork Bork Chicken um one of the things we really tried to do with it as well is make sure that people of any age and any skill level could play so you can crank the speed down all the way to slow and have like a really beginner experience or you can crank the chili meter all the way up to red and and play like a real gamer yeah from my experience playing at avcon um playing on full speed is a it's a little bit much i think the demo i think i'm looking at here i think this is like the default speed maybe um it's the the latest one you had on the on the channel so i'm not really

sure what speed it's at but i think this is around about the default speed but when i was playing at like do you have a video showing the top speed or not it might be like one of the like long streams or something we might be able to send you on this yeah yeah so we're gonna release the video soon that has the higher game speed in it we We just didn't want to scare people away. That's totally fair. That is totally fair. Because I was saying, yeah, when I played it at Avcon, it was, I feel like the top speed, I don't know, I feel like some of the game kind of, it falls apart a little bit at the

top, like the very, very top speed. Like it's a little bit too touchy to move around. I'm not really sure what you could do to address that, but someone who was there was saying play like two or three down from the top and then it's a lot more reasonable to actually control. And from my experience, that was a lot better to play. Like it was, I feel like the default speed

is way too slow for me, but at that point you can, it feels fun at that point for me. Yeah. The default speed is like set fit, like really like aimed at casual gamers. And so if you have more experience with gaming, you're probably going to want to crank it up a bit.

And I agree. Like the very tippity-top speed on the chili level is kind of nutty. If you're able to play at that speed, that's fine. Good on you. You're some superhuman. But the reaction times, you have to have really fast reaction times to deal with some of the stuff that exists in the world.

But I find the sweet spot to be that 1.8 times speed i think which is two two levels above the default so i'm gonna say that's completely like personal opinion because that's someone who plays on the top speed uh being uh quite a few high scores as big b definitely achievable just uh takes time but one thing we should note when we talk about speed is it's only the starting speed that gets changed okay because basically um the speed continually increases over time right right and you're just setting your start speed so that when the slower speed would have reached up to your speed you'll then start increasing right so if you do survive long enough you'll eventually

be at the top speed anyway exactly is and that way we can have everyone on the same high scores we didn't have this until like one patch into the release of the demo but we wanted to change that so everyone could be on the same high score so no matter what speed you play at you're versing everyone so is that the top speed that you set is that like the actual top speed or if you start at that does it get faster over time oh it's still good like the game will just keep increasing until it gets to a point where you just can't keep up i didn't survive long enough to notice that it's kind of based on like tetris where the game just continually gets faster until you can't keep up right you're able to play on the cylinder forever and the chili at the end tells you like how far you went compared to what your setting was so

that way you can adjust on the fly as you need okay that makes sense yeah um because when like you know when you're playing at a con you have you already have everything set up so it's like and you're jumping into a game with like already all the powers already unlocked as well so it's a lot of a lot of games you know you you have two two options when showing off a game you have the option of starting people off at the start which is what some of the other um some of the others were doing they're like uh i believe dark web stream was like that i don't know if you got a chance to play that while you were there. No, I didn't. And there's a couple of others, but you have the other option of doing what you guys did,

where you just throw everything at the player, which can be kind of overwhelming, but it does give you the ability to sort of show what the game is really all about. Yeah. I think it works particularly well with Bork Bork, or Super Bork bork chicken because it's not as as in depth as some of the other games like that were on show like strategy games yeah or games that have a lot like they're very heavy and you you go to the large learning

curve to like um reach the max potential or whatever but with bork bork you can kind of like even when you've been given everything you can kind of like even when you've been given everything you can kind of just jump in and experience around and go oh okay i've got the gist but yeah we are even like there's how many buttons are there it's like you got to move you got to press the jump button and then there's the the the the bork and that's yeah Am I missing one? Is that it? I think that might be it. We purposely tried to lower the buttons because we were originally thinking our best audience might be phone.

So we didn't want to have too many buttons for a phone screen. Right. It does have a very... It's clear that mobile was part of the design with how you look... Like, if you look at the UI, like you've got the balk button, the dash button down the bottom. You've got the paws in the top corner. Like, you don't need those to be there if you're playing on a controller.

But it's clear that you guys were obviously intending to eventually get onto mobile. Before we get into all of that stuff, though, let's just sort of a bit of a background on all of you. So why don't you pick who you want to start to say, like what you were doing and sort of if you've had any experience with this beforehand or you're learning everything from the start. Like what experience do you guys have at all? Alex, you can start, I reckon. I reckon we go in age order. Sure. everything from the start like i what what experience do you guys have at all alex you

can start i reckon i reckon we go in age order sure um so in terms of bork bork chicken um we'd already sort of mucked around with making a couple of games in unity before but we never launched them um if you want to go back in time a little bit, back in high school, we were making games, even primary school. Oh, wow. Especially Luke on that one. But around high school age, we had this rule in our house where we weren't allowed to play video games on weeknights. It was our parents trying to get us to do homework. But I found that if I did all my homework and then I made games, I was able to play them.

Right. So I downloaded GameMaker and then downloaded other people's projects and just played them in GameMaker pretending that I was doing work. And my parents, you know, they loved it. Then I realized that it was actually fun making games too. And I just sort of mucked around in GameMaker a couple of times. fun making games too and i just sort of mucked around in game maker a couple of times um i ended up making this game called turret tactics which i think scott's year level at our high school everyone had it on a usb and they were playing it all through it class and everything um fast forward a couple of years we tried unity and yeah we we had that experience there from just uh self self-taught basically yeah awesome um in terms of my background

for this uh for super ball for chicken i didn't really have anything in terms of making like previously when alex was saying that we had worked on like game maker and stuff like that um i had done a couple of sprites here and there, but that was just very simple stuff, like painting, 2D painting type stuff, and all pixel graphics kind of style. And so later on, I was always interested in 3D software and that kind of opportunities that you can do with that. So I kind of got into learning Blender a couple of years ago, like maybe four or five years

ago now and then kind of that just i got good at doing that and then i was like oh how can i make this into a game like game ready products that i could maybe sell and then these guys were talking about making a game that's like all three of us and i was like well i'll just do it for that then but yeah that's kind of my background alex you missed out that you have a computer science degree oh yeah i have that too oh you actually have a job yeah i i'm a developer as my day job oh nice thank you for pointing that out luke um but yeah it's a different skill set to games. Like I know programming, but programming for games is different, you know. But you fill the senior role quite well.

I do code reviews. This is bad, this is bad. So you're using your degree for something useful. I've got a software engineering honours and I make YouTube videos. Hey, whatever works well i've got a science degree and then um majoring in genetics and uh oh you're way off yeah and then now i'm making games so yeah how did you sort of get that wanted like get involved with that then so I've always been making games since, like, yeah, primary school.

I made, like, little games in Flash. And then I made, in high school, a Christmas game. Actually, we've always been making, like, quizzes and stuff at Christmas for each other. We call it Quizmas. So we just give quizzes to each other. And sometimes that's in the form of a game. But, yeah. quizmas so we just give quizzes to each other and sometimes that's in the form of a game um but uh yeah and then i uh got a job in the army reserves and then i finished my science degree wasn't really sure what i wanted to do with it just got an it job and then realized i do not

want to be uh in an it job because everyone just complains that you that things are broken so then i was like well let's have a crack at making actually making a game for production and i think like um the way super ball came to be is that we were making one of the games i had made in primary school um called uh hot potato where it was just like a platformer that goes up okay and uh when and there's a lava at the bottom and if you fall and hit the lava you turn into a potato and someone else can pick you up and then you've got to like keep them alive yeah and they like explode on you and you're like no but um we would we were gonna try and do that

in unity and i had never done any like 2d in unity so i was like oh we'll just make it 3d um because originally it was in game maker and then we were like how do we do because it had warping like pac-man warping on the side i'm like how do we do that in 3d like in multiplayer and then we just were like well why don't we just make it a cylinder that goes up so we we had a like that's how we got the cylinder that goes up but but then one weekend i wanted to make a game because i'm just i just jumped from project to project i want to make game for my partner so i just made the cylinder and chucked on its side and that's how we got the cylinder that goes forwards okay okay um and then yeah chucked a chicken in and then it

was super bork bork chicken because you know bork balls are awesome like yeah dragon ball z ish maybe um and then uh yeah and then i like we played a little bit and then alex stuck to it and then i came back to it because you know it was getting there and we're, we'll make this one our first release because it was small in scope. Compared to all my other projects that were just, yeah. Correctness of was there because it was small. Yeah, it was. I think that's the problem that a lot of people take on with, especially like their first project. It's like, I want to do this and I want to do this and I want to do this.

And it's just like the scope list keeps growing and growing. And like, obviously you guys can keep adding like more power ups and different levels and things like that. But you've got a very clear concept about what you're trying to make the game be. And I think that's what really helps. Like,

you'll, you know, okay, we want to make an infinite runner and i think that's what really helps like you're you know okay we want to make an infinite runner yeah that's like you've got your very clear guideline of this is going to be an infinite runner yeah infinite runner it's interesting you say that because we did have one of the problems um with our items when we first made the item system, which hasn't been bought up yet, but you can switch items, like there's three slots on your chicken.

So that's where there's heaps of infinite runners on the phone, but they're all like people made them for like $5 or whatever. And they, well, everyone's played something like Temple Run or they're like the good ones. But with this item system, it lets you customize your play a little bit because and they all interact uh with each other which is a bit more like dnd ish or like oh no what is it like um rpg ish rpg ish yeah yeah there's a lot of complexity there

and but although it was just way out it just did not tie in at all. So then we had to figure out how to make it tie in. And we made Rascal appear. And that's how we started getting these characters like Rascal and Wesley. And then we made it also tie in with your cosmetics as well, because people like customizing and looking pretty. Before you go too far there, explain Rascal and Wesley. I don't think i showed that on the

video i'll let scott and alex since they are okay go ahead yeah wesley first that's you that's you i forgot their names confused uh wesley is a weasel and well actually a stepped porkat which is like a type of weasel i believe sure okay um but wesley's a shopkeeper and wesley is the one that you buy items from but in order to get the items you need to unlock them by catching the rascal oh okay okay yeah because that part obviously you guys didn't show off in avcon because you just had everything just there yep okay that's how that worked so we had all the items unlocked at avcon just to give people the chance to if they wanted to go change uh items they could experience that right right um but technically uh rascal um who i'm the voice of uh he he or they

they've um stolen all the items from the shopkeeper, Wesley. And the only way you can restock the shop to be able to purchase these items is by catching the rascal. And you kind of go on this little chase. That's another thing that's really different. Because a lot of the time with endless runners, there's something chasing you. But this time we've kind of added something where you chase and you're doing the chasing yeah but basically you just have to catch the rascal and once you have uh the item will be restocked in the shop for you to purchase it from wesley yeah what's the currency you use in the game is that the eggs you collect or yes okay yeah and there's no in-game purchases

for eggs or items and we don't plan to um we just want to you buy the game you get it all and that will be the same for phone the phone the one in-app purchase will be to unlock from demo game because yeah yeah we aren't a huge fan of like the current system with everyone's like spamming microtransactions at the players and like as much as some people enjoy spending money on microtransactions to try and get a leg up but like they definitely do yes yes yeah um often um they're not just for leg ups, they're just for visual stuff. But you can get all the visual stuff in the game, no worries. You just got to play a little bit.

That's all it is. But you're not getting, yeah, no ads, nothing like that. It's just you pay for the game and you get the whole game. Because we were concerned with our audience, although we've got maybe some hardcore high score seekers, we might also like a lot of kids really liked it at Avcon. One kid just kept coming back like every hour he bought his dad and we just ended up having a chat with him. But yeah, that's why we didn't want any microtransactions because we've heard those stories where a kid's downloaded an app and then purchased like a thousand million dollars.

Yeah. Well, the problem, like the real problem with microtransactions is when there is an infinite ceiling. Like if you play, I don't know if any of you guys have played like Genshin Impact or something like that or any of these gacha games that are out there where there is no limit to how much you can spend. It's one thing if there is a game that has a cosmetic shop

and you can buy everything in the cosmetic shop, but that's the end. When there is no limit and you can just keep spending and spending and spending, that's where it becomes a really serious problem. Yeah. Especially when that spending is, like, the more money you spend, the more power you get in the game yeah or it's linked to like a gambling type yeah yeah well

yeah especially with like gacha stuff i've made it very clear before that i think that all of these gacha games should be like 18 plus like doesn't matter like if you're gonna have gambling in a game like this it should be yeah that's that's fair like i know some people don't agree with that take but you know we treat other gambling like this anyway so you know might as be might as well be consistent with it but no it is it is um cool that you guys are just trying to make a game you but not fill it I I could understand like why you'd want to fill it with microtransactions if like you I if a game I don't know it's really weird because I I can't fault someone for trying to make money off of a game like if you've put a lot of work into it you were trying like especially if that is

something you're doing as like a full-time thing. Like I cannot fault someone for doing that, but I definitely can respect someone who's just, they're clear on, we don't want to have microtransactions in this. We just want to make a game and put it out there. Yeah. That's pretty much the vibe we've got. And yeah,

you're right. Like in terms of business decisions or just in terms of making money from the effort that you've put into the game, it makes financial sense to put these kind of microtransactions in because they're more attractive to get the game for free. Yeah. Like all the functionality, except not that powerful item that you have to pay money for. But yeah, we sort of wanted to go a little bit old school, but also, as everyone said already, try to avoid those overspending. Yeah. Especially in the kids that's why we got the demo as our like smooth easy barrier to entry the demo is free and you can just yeah you don't have to pay for that and then you can buy the game if you think you like it how much is contained within the demo

eight levels eight levels okay which means you can unlock eight items then there is a trial level and you get all the missions that you get in the full game okay so that's the mission system it's like daily missions which we haven't mentioned as well but because we had the thoughts of it's going to be on mobile and also we thought what else can we do to make people want to play this game more we put in daily missions and you get eggs rewards but you can also get canon ticket rewards which we haven't explained the canon either but it's like a checkpoint system it basically lets you catch up to the the stars that you've collected and the stars are like at certain points throughout the level oh is that what that was yeah i noticed as i was

progressing like i would have like a certain number of stars i wasn't really sure what that exactly meant but that makes sense okay yeah they like three yellow stars is your goal that that means you've completed the level as far as unlocking everything goes right however it's really it happens really early in the level and if you're really good you're going to get past that and then there's not going to be anything more for you so what we ended up doing and this is because luke got past it really easily and he was like i needed i need something else to collect guys so we added six more stars after the yellow stars we have red stars there's three of them and they're further spread out than the yellow ones and then there's purple stars and they're even further along i think the last purple star is around 12 000 score which is

like if you're there you're already over the max speed chili you can get to it's impressive like just getting to that is amazing you've done really well if you can thank you as someone who's purple the first three areas so far and i'm gonna do them all um the canon only goes up to the red star because we wanted when you're setting high scores we don't want that or you just set the high score because you can't so pretty much the purple scars are going to be where the like top scores are at anyway so yeah so sort of just a convenience thing to just ignore that early section if you're trying to go for those high scores. Exactly. Right, right.

How long does it take to get up to the purple section? Oh, wow. Without canon? Yeah, without canon. Without canon, probably like 12-ish minutes, I think. Okay, yeah. Something like that. It's more like seven with canon. Seven with canon, yeah.

Because it's still quite a far away from, because the max cannon you can get to is the third red star. And so you have to have made it there previously. But once you have made it there, you can transport there. But that's like at like 7,000 or 8,000 or something. And then to get to 12, that's another 4,000 that you still got to travel at that higher speed. Right.

So if you're consistently getting there, you'll be able to afford these cannon runs to like keep uh taking them so that that you don't have to experience the first start of the game where it can be a bit slowish to start but yeah but the time it takes also depends on your starting speed if you start at the highest speed or a couple under you're going to get there faster than if you're on the slower speed oh for sure yep that makes sense we did try to balance it so that at default speed you get three stars roughly at three minutes so that it is that kind of like quick gameplay loop for when you have a short period of time but if you're good you're gonna be in the level for longer oh the demo

alex it also includes about five or six bonus levels. Yes. And that's with those yellow stars. If you get all three yellow stars in all the levels in an area, you unlock the bonus levels, and they're just whacked levels. They're like trampoline world where you're just always jumping or like giant ducklings, giant duck world. Yeah. And the giant ducklings obviously have trampolines on their back

because that's fun. Yeah. So stuff like that. So with the item system you mentioned before, like what sort of items, actually what was the first item you guys added to the game? And then how did that sort of progress from there? Oh, first item

that's a tough one yeah it's challenging i definitely want to say that i i definitely had a key part of the item system because i was like i want to be able to change items sorry because you know we all love rpgs but um until we remember the first one we got the first item that's that's really a tough one. I thought that would have been an easy one. Alex coded it mostly, like the items initially, so you would know, Alex. But the thing is, at that point, we'd already done a brainstorm,

and Scott, because he's so efficient, had already made like 10 of the models. I think the first one would have been backpack, and I think we got backpack in around the same time as we got one of the hats. I can't remember which hat. So backpack is the easiest one? Yeah. Oh, sorry.

It's boost invulnerability. So when you go through boosts, you'll be invulnerable for longer. So, yeah. So you don't just boost it to a wall. Yeah. Right, right. Sorry. We have some really cool items that we can uh talk about um for our mythic items we thought since we're going wacky and crazy that's the other thing you hadn't mentioned there's also the tiering of items as well

yeah yeah um so there's common and so basically there are what we might have not said is there's five five areas for now and we plan to add more. In those areas are those eight levels. That's why when Alex was saying you get eight levels, that's the eight levels of the first area. So you just get the first area, which is Pleasant Pastures, and it's bonus. So what were we saying? Oh, yes. The first six levels give you common items and then you get

no for it so first five give you common then two rare and then the last level gives you mythic and not only that it's harder to catch rascal to get the mythic and then like yeah and less hard for the rare and then even less hard for common so we kind of made common super easy but if you struggle that's okay because we we just made we just tried to make it that you know people would run into him so that they understand it because we didn't have it in our tutorial yet and then with rare it's a little bit harder and then with myth and he spawns after two stars instead of one star and then at mythic he spawns after three stars um and it's it's like a decent difficulty although i'll give you the uh dev secrets if you catch his when he pops up if it's not over water he'll he'll make a little dirt boost

and if you get in his little dirt boost hole you'll get the dirt boost pretty much straight to him and then it's like halfway through the dirt boost you want to jump up because you can decide when you jump out of it and then you just dash and you pretty well dash fork and you'll get it yeah so um yeah sorry i strat yeah what were we talking about i'm sorry uh so yeah yeah um so i just looked it up because you know i was curious myself the first item we got in was the bucket hat and it is okay one of my favorite hats well it was until it had the short-sighted property um if you haven't ever played with the bucket hat what the bucket hat does is it puts a overlay on

your screen so that you can't see where exactly you would be looking so that you don't hit things it is it's very annoying um but it gives you armor so if you can navigate that situation because you're clever enough or skilled enough to do so then when you do hit something you survive and the short-sightedness goes away, the bucket hat falls off, and you can continue your run. So it's pretty good. In terms of the tiers, so Luke mentioned already that there was a common, rare, and mythic.

The rares look a bit cooler, in my opinion, sometimes. But they also have slightly stronger stats. The way we kind of did it was, the commons give you one stat boost, whereas the rares can give you more than one. Right. But they might be a little bit less. But because they give you two and they're both more than what the commons give you,

it's like a side grade so that the commons don't become useless. Right. But you can decide which one suits your play style better. Or in some cases, the level. Because some levels, you really want certain items. Otherwise, it's very tricky. But the mythics, we just said, what if the game was completely different? What if we just, like, for example,

one of the mythics that's not released yet. So here's like a hot, you know, off the press, like, spoiler for future version. We're going to add this mythic item called Flappy Bat Wings. And it's going to turn Super Bok Bok Chicken into Flappy Bird. So instead of jumping and holding and gliding over those distances, you're going to be like bouncing up and down like Flappy Bird. So that kind of stuff.

But some of the mythics we have, maybe the other guys want to talk about. I want to talk about one of them, and then you can talk about the rest i know which one scott wants to talk about but um i want to talk about because i like i play played a bit of league of legends and there was an item called hearts doing that where you just get bigger and bigger and bigger so yeah okay yeah we added that as an item we We added something that gives you five armor, but the more army you have, and that's including the other items,

the bigger you get. So you can end up going from a normal size chicken to like a chicken. It's just giant. And it's just fun. You actually move slower as well. And you have to try and like dodge while you're so big. But even if you hit something, it's okay. Cause because you just you lose your armor and then eventually you get back down to your normal size but like it's just amazing just seeing this giant chicken on the

screen yeah it's quite fun uh i'm a big fan of first person shooters in general um and so when these guys were talking about like adding a first person aspect to the game, I was like, I'm all in. What are you talking about? You modeled the glasses first. I did. I did. Yeah. But I mean, I'm sure there was an idea there to do it.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have just done it. But yeah, so we got the classic Dr. Disrespect type style glasses, you know, so you can wear those. Unfortunately, you won't see yourself only in the menu where you see yourself with them on. But once you're in the game, you go first person mode and you basically we've currently updated it so that it's not quite out yet. But you kind of strafe. So you're always looking down the cylinder and you can kind of strafe left or right. And and uh yeah basically it just puts you in the eyes of the chicken and it's great it's really awkward and wonderful i think it's really like we haven't fixed it yet but when you go through a dirt boost which puts you in the ground all you can see is the middle of cylinder like which is just like

awkward texture so we may patch that in the future and i was thinking like um like we could have like you know cars have a rear view mirror we might have just a mirror at the top so you might be in darkness but then you'll be able to see what's at the top because otherwise you're just going out blind you have no idea where you're popping out honestly i'm surprised that didn't lead to some texture clipping we just see through the cylinder you might yeah you probably will but um the other thing is you can't tell what you're landing on because we haven't made it like they're all intended features right oh yeah okay so your status bars or your hud some of the huds as well So you're really flying blind.

Yeah. But if you like first-person shooters, then it's perfect. If you're after a challenge, yeah. There's certainly a fun mode to do. Alex, what about the head mythic? The cat headphones? Yeah, what's that do? So we have cat headphones.

Uh-huh. And they're really cute, but also like awesome. They turn your books into big love hearts, which are great. But as well as that, you can phase dash through objects. So Rascal, because we didn't want to worry about pathfinding around a cylinder, we got Rascal to just phase through things. So you can just walk straight through obstacles, but they turn purple. That was the initial reason why we did it. But now it's like tying in with the story because you know we thought about it a bit um but cat headphones give you that ability so when you're dashing instead of just a normal dash which would normally you'd still hit things uh you turn

them purple and you go straight through them uh however for the bigger like longer obstacles like barns for example especially closed barns if you dash through them and you don't through them. However, for the bigger, longer obstacles, like barns, for example, especially closed barns, if you dash through them and you don't make it all the way, you come out of phase dash and you're still in the barn and you end your run. That's awesome. So the mythics, we'll talk about the mythics separately, but the rares and commons,

what is the process you go through when you're trying to come up with new items we kind of um think of items that would fit on a chicken because one of the challenges we have with the shoes especially the shoes right the chicken's feet are really tiny and also the feet are always pointed away from you in the run so we're like what can we put on the shoes on the feet that you actually would notice well you could as different have any of you played um kingdom hearts uh well ages ago but it was like a friend's house do you remember sora's giant shoes yeah well you could just give the chicken giant shoes. Yeah, but then you get a lot of clipping happening.

That's fair. Between either the ground or its own body. That's fair. Okay. I mean, not saying that clipping doesn't happen in even AAA games, because it does. It's just how noticeable do you want that to be? And we're kind of aiming for a little less of that that's totally fair yeah but yeah we do definitely make them a bit bigger

otherwise you can see them right so it's gonna be realistic otherwise it doesn't get scott's approval that's it so it's like we can think of something wild and then you know it gets made more realistic in the process, which works. Define realistic in this case. I'm looking at a chicken wearing a metal helmet with a ninja skull on its back. Define realistic here. What's not realistic about that? Yeah.

Let's just go off the chicken before we even get to the items. Okay. Our chicken, we, like, the items okay our chicken we like we wanted a plump chicken right and so we got we got the bottom one and then we it took us like 10 times to be like scott i think it needs to be just a little bit more plumper just a little bit just like every time it started like a normal size and now it's actually decent-ish. It's unfortunate because the current view of the chicken being behind it and above it, it doesn't really show that plumpness off very well.

And so because of that and the field of view and stuff, it doesn't look the way it does when I'm modeling it in Blender or whatever. And so I kept making it bigger and bigger and it just barely made a difference in the game but like that's all right it doesn't need to be yeah I'm sorry I wasn't trying to like say it's bad it is funny like part of the process it's it's more making sure that it matches the proportions of the chicken. Some things work with the chicken head and or body.

Some things really don't. Clothing is very awkward because we've got the wings flapping around all the time. And I'm still new to this being the first game, I'm still new to making things work with that kind of like,

right. Uh, we on the rig on the chicken, you know what I mean? Like, so that's, that's something I'm learning and I definitely want to bring into an, a future project.

But, um, for the moment we're trying to like, I'm trying, or certainly I'm trying to, uh, avoid adding those kind of things that are like like skin suits or whatever like tight suits that like wrap around

the body of the chicken making a little bit more awkward because you get a lot of clipping and stuff like that if you're not perfectly animating it or with that being said, then, what was the hardest item to do the modeling and attaching to the chicken? I think it has to be, like, one of the body items. Because although the body is awkward because we've got a bone on the back where you equip things. Like, a backpack would sit on the back quite nice but as soon as you put like something else on that bone it might not deform with the rest of the chicken as well right but overall i think so like one of the body ones was the chest plate that was an interesting one because i had to worry about like having it big enough that it would fit the chicken but not not like clip too much right um but overall

the the the foot the shoe things for the foot bones have been the most annoying to model in general or to like set up the bones and and to get them working to bend and and uh touch the um the cylinder and not clip through it and just yeah but that makes sense yeah each has their own unique difficulties for me my extent of dealing with 3d modeling is doing a donut tutorial so oh yeah classic classic yeah yeah that's where i started so So yeah, it was fun. I enjoyed that tutorial. It was good.

But yeah, so a lot of mine was learning was more to do with 3D modeling for just renders, like fun, nice-looking renders. But then learning to make it game-ready and unwrapping the textures or the UV uh so that you can apply a texture to it and stuff like that like we don't have uh normal maps we're not using any sort of normal maps at the moment i don't think there might be one or two um but that's just because that was new to me and we will do that in another project because we got too far with this one to then start going back and adding that kind of stuff what about the world anything uh hard about that uh i'm i really

dislike the fact that it's quite a like if you think about it it's like a it is a cylinder and you know our world is round and and sphere so it makes sense but because of the scale of the the chicken to the cylinder everything has to have that curve to it and you have to really put it in otherwise it just it doesn't work if you want to have like uh um an even amount of things spread out along the like for the barns for example we started making them straight up but then you have like these triangle wedges yeah that are between the barns you could just fly through and so we had to like redo the barns uh to make them include that like uh cylindrical shape um because each one is like a wedge of an or like an arc of a cylinder cylinder it didn't

click with me that you had to do like it's really obvious with the walls like the walls are obviously curved but i didn't even notice the fact the barns were curved that obviously they're curved that sounds like a nightmare it was it was because like we were i was so happy with the barns as they looked in initially that like i really didn't want to start from scratch and have to make a new whole barn um so i i really like like it was a little bit of back and forth trying to get it to work um but in the end it's mostly mostly there i think there's a little bit of a gap at the top, but nothing that you can, like, fly through or anything. Right. There's still a few objects that are just straight.

There are, yeah. I think kind of work because they're short. But as soon as you get tall things or wide things, they have to start curving. And sometimes it can look weird. Like, we had, like, clothesline, which, I mean, isn't too bad, but it's a bit weird that weird that like we were like does the line curve because that would be like why would it be curving up but the line goes straight

but the poles kind of like go out what like on that angle yeah it did make it a bit of a challenge yeah well i'm seeing um right now you these, like, concrete pipes that are just leaning up against, like, another one. It's in, like, one of the videos you put out. Like, that part, like, you don't have to do anything special for that. Like, you can just have them sitting there because they're sort of near enough. Like, they're not directly on the ground. Like, there's a little bit that's touching the ground, so you don't really have to worry about it.

And also they're near enough to the scale of the chicken where it's not like a major disaster but like they had to be rotated instead of just moved left and right yeah yeah actually one thing i'm curious about is uh the the clouds so because because they're curved as well do you just have like a bunch of set cloud models that you just have going back over? What do you do with the clouds? Alex, do you want to go there? Yes, we have a number of cloud models.

Okay. And we randomly spawn them as they go through. So they're different all the time. But it does pick from a set number. And then it kind of also picks a set rotation and scale but this is another challenge of using a cylinder is when you have something that's baked in curved your rotation options are straight normal or 180 degrees you can't go 90 because then you have a curve along the cylinder instead of around the cylinder so and you might see the same thing

in the mud piles that are kind of like just a lip up from the grass that they're on those can only be rotated in two ways um otherwise you get very odd looking pringle shape mud which doesn't quite but that yeah that's how the clouds work there's a couple of them we also have different kind of colors and different effects for each of the worlds as well. And we do have some different models for the different worlds as well, especially if you've seen any of the lava footage. They look a lot more menacing

than the clouds in the Pleasant Pastures. The lava clouds are curved, but the other ones, I think, are just straight. Some of them are curved. Some of them are slightly. Maybe they look curved, or maybe that's just the curved. They look curved, but maybe that's just the... They certainly look curved, but maybe that's just because of the

perspective. I'm not sure. It depends on the size of them as well. One of the weird things about the clouds, and you've seen it in the videos already, you can see them when they're not above you, but they're off to your right.

Yeah, also that looks... Where they're placed is based on the part they're above, so the angle looks a little weird like that, but... Yeah, so that you get vertical clouds on the side. Yeah. It fits the world, though though when you rotate around you'll also notice the shadow kind of goes and sweeps over not for clouds but for other objects that are big you'll see that their shadow kind of sweeps over because the camera sorry the light that has the shadow is directly above the chicken all the time oh and it's always

real-time shadows yeah and so as you're turning yeah yeah we wanted it straight down so that you could know where you were landing um but that does mean that we couldn't do stuff like baked in shadows or anything like that because the shadow perspective changes based on where you are on the cylinder all the time so that's one of the performance challenges we've had here is you know we need real-time shadows to get that jump shadow but at the same time um yeah we couldn't we couldn't bake any of it which was really but you know performance been there we also really like there was a bit of a struggle with skyboxes and stuff in general because we're initially we're gonna paint on some clouds to the skybox and when we were doing that

because we have uh we're kind of like looking into the skybox and it's just like we're doing actually a sky sphere i think not not so much a box because uh we couldn't really get that to look right with the cylinder going into the horizon i suppose and so when we painted on these things uh the clouds you would end up with this big ring of clouds and it just looked really awkward and so we we were like trash that idea we'll just make you know clouds that are physical that we can um spawn in and then we'll just go past you and then despawn and spawn back here at the start but yeah like doing anything because of the cylinder nature of the world was just it was something that we hadn't really thought of being that much of an issue but like it definitely

it definitely you know gave us or me some sleepless nights because i was like oh my god how am i gonna do this and then we saw one thing we were like oh wow, they've done that really well, we didn't even know it existed until someone was like hey this is like that Sonic game, we're like what Sonic game, we're looking up we're like oh, one of the Sonics does this and we're like oh no so you're saying

I was gonna say, on the bright side it's a cylinder, okay you could have made it worse and made like, what do you call a 3d oval thing i don't know yeah yeah there whether whether the uh the curve isn't consistent that would be so much worse it would be painful yeah i i hadn't even considered like how much trouble a cylinder would have given you but neither did we

on our end from Unity it's not too bad because you just give something a height and then you just rotate it and then it rotates it in a circle so our cylinder's length 10 so we can just give stuff a height of 10 like in the game object underneath and the

object above that we just rotate that and it goes around the cylinder 10 so we can just give stuff a height of 10 like in the game object underneath and there's an object above that we just rotate that and it goes around the cylinder so but um yeah it it does certainly for modeling it's it's interesting that's for sure for distance calculations you have to yeah distance on the cylinder one little thing that's gonna that probably doesn't matter to anyone but me, uh, is do you rotate the world around the chicken or the chicken around the world? Like when you go around the world,

like when you like the cylinder, the chicken around the world. Okay. I was just curious. I just want to know. Um, but that is one of the other challenges with the skybox. Because we're rotating the chicken around the world,

that means if we wanted to have the skybox be green underneath, then at some point that green would be above you. And that didn't work. Right, right. Some of the initial skyboxes we had had kind of like a horizon line and different colors on both sides. And though there were still very like cool colors we didn't go with the green because of how obtrusive it was still because the lines uh rotating it gave people motion sickness more often than not and so we thought hang on a minute we need to go back to just like something real plain

and then we did and then we showed it to someone they said it's really boring on the sides yeah then we added the cloud back yeah like i feel like i'm sorry i was gonna say i don't i i don't really get motion sickness on a game like this but when i play like a vr game they are, there's anything like slightly off, I'm, I'm, I'm gone in like five minutes. Like there was a, I,

one of the demos that was there at Avcon, um, there was like a cycling depth, like you, you cycled and you had like a VR headset on and the demo they had, it was really cool, but it had some frame rate issues and I, I couldn't play it for more than five minutes.

It just, it really made me me really nauseated. Fair enough. You definitely don't get exercising, you know? You want to stay on there as long as you can. Yeah, yeah. We actually had a few people ask us if this is going to be a VR project,

and we were like, I don't know, man. If people are already getting motion sick sometimes, they might just hurl if they're you know they might just you know hurl if they uh play the game because like i also we just that would be uh like just crazy to do a vr version of an endless runner i think like especially down a cylinder like what we've got it'd be nutty um i think if we could like go back, I would probably make the cylinder a bit bigger because then you'd get less motion sickness because it'd look more flat.

But the problem with that is that then you'd be spawning more objects potentially unless you made all your objects bigger. And then if you made the chicken bigger, it would be like, it would neglect, like you've done nothing. You've just scaled everything up. I think that's part of the reason why the high speed

is like, is so confusing at the start because of how small the cylinder is. It's one thing to be moving side to side really quickly, but when you're rotating everything as well, it's another way of moving that you don't really interact with that often. So at least when you first play, it kind of throws you off a little bit yeah yeah definitely especially at the higher speeds it's all about practice with super bulk chicken um i i played at the the two above default chili level for a while um and then

just the other day i thought i'm gonna try i'm gonna try myself on the hardest and my score my average score went down from like 4,500 to 600. So I was not, not achieving the distance there, but I was learning and that was the main thing. And then I was able to get back up to, to the farther, further distances, but also at a faster time. So I could, you know, try to get that high score more but um i'm definitely nowhere near um luke's high scores he's gone way past the purple star i think the highest so far is like 19k which is um purple stars are at 12k so it's like 7k more than that it's pretty crazy i actually it's almost 20k and i was sad because it was like 80 off. And I was like, why did I die there?

Like, I probably still had a Bork up. Like, what am I doing? But one thing that we can say, which was also a difficulty. So it sort of ties in with our cylinder difficulty. But it was also why it's all about practice for Bork Bork is that the worlds, at least the campaign levels, are always the same when you play them. So you can find out which paths you want to take into

the distance because they'll be there next time you play. At least that's how it's meant to be. Alex did some really hard work to get that working. And yeah, we had some issues with that. Yeah, we thought, like, it's still fair if it's random, if it's random for everyone, but to make it the most fair,

everyone should get, like, the only thing that changes are the clouds, they're completely random because they don't interact with you in any way. And that's, yeah. So with the other levels, levels then they are procedurally generated oh they're all procedurally generated right some of them are using a um a random seed that's the same every time oh okay okay okay we tried to make our random number generator deterministic so that we could make sure that when the obstacles are generated and when the block uh

so that we could make sure that when the obstacles are generated and when the block, each different obstacle along the cylinder is in like a block, when you pick a block, that decision is made the same way every time. When you spawn the obstacles and the number of obstacles and the orientation of the obstacles, that's the same every time. But the clouds positions, maybe not. Because we don't, like you never, that doesn't matter. But the rest of it, like the obstacles you're interacting with,

the level you see is deterministic but it's still infinite so you could theoretically go um way further than 19k and still be generating new level that would be the same every time you got there right but there is a hard limit based on human reaction time either that or the physics in unity will give up and you fall through the floor we have not got there yet but it's gonna happen and the the trials are the ones that are random every day okay so between you and me if we load the same trial we'll have the same trial but tomorrow will be different for both of us but we'll still have the same yeah um so and there is like if we do do slight balance changes to some blocks that might screw the uh the random like the ordering of the blocks so we've talked about

it a bit and we can't we we might in the future release a patch that sort of protects us from that a little bit but there's still going to be some things where if we change like we balance an obstacle to spawn less it might still change the block order okay well one thing i was curious about is like what sort of goes obviously you have like the water patches and the there's levels have islands and there's the lava level which is the lava level what sort of goes into making sure that you don't spawn elements that are literally impossible to cross? We have an error.

We have a safety block distance. So for most levels, once you spawn a block, you'll then just spawn a safe block, which is just grass. So especially on like water blocks they will have a up to a max length so you know you can't go past the the bit where you two jumps in the dash would be too long and then it will spawn a safety block which will be water sorry sorry which will be grass so that you can land on it. And we do also have some preventions because there's some crazy blocks. Like at the start, we had a rotator and we have this gif of, I think, Scott playing.

And it's horses that run at you. But then when they run on a rotator, they get rotated. So it looks like this horse is coming at him and it's not going to hit him at all. But there's a rotator between them. And it's just a very small one, but it's very fast fast and the horse rotates directly in front of him at the very last minute and he just gets clipped by it so we're like maybe we shouldn't have horses behind rotating maybe but we did change them a bit so you might still get them um there are some blocks that it's just like no you can't like you can't have another water block if it's a long one uh long one after a water sort of thing that makes sense so yeah i thought i was going to say

something oh yeah oh okay no that that that makes sense um because like there's a lot i play a lot of roguelikes um like you know play things Cells, things like that. Hades, great game. And I'm... These are games that have done a really good job at making sure their levels are actually achievable. I've played some other games where... Actually, Minecraft's a really good example of this, especially with some of the earlier seed generation,

where things just didn't make any sense in some cases. Especially when you're dealing with something as like big as minecraft you're gonna have your seed generation completely fall apart in certain places like there are the the famous seeds like um gargamel things like that where you have like a giant ravine way before ravines were even in the game um so i'm sure that you've had i i i'm not surprised there have been certainly some issues you've had to specifically design against if you're trying to do something like this definitely well if you join our discord or if anyone wants to and scrolls up far enough in dev updates you'll see a bunch of uh basically random generation fails

because that was all the rage for a couple of weeks or maybe even months initially when we were adding a whole bunch more content um because we just couldn't get numbers right and we wouldn't get the anchors for rotations right and we ended up with um i think at one stage we had hedges that went off into the air and we had like the little hobs that are on the side of the water for bridges. Those were just floating and it looked really cool. But definitely wasn't the theme we were going for. So we had to try and fix them. But yeah, there's lots of examples of us just not getting it right until we got it right, really. I was going to say, in our current patch, I think, is it current live? We have an issue where we completely, in one level on the lava levels,

the striking snakes, yeah, there's just no safety blocks at all. So if you were to play that game, the demo, not the demo, the full game, if you were to play it on that snake level, there would be just blocks shoved up back to back. And so like, it is incredibly tricky to like deal with. But yeah, I mean, it snuck through, so it happens. Yeah, we've already hacked it.

We're just going to deploy later. We've got other issues as well. Like having very small water blocks is a no, but one of our small water blocks is reeds. So that's just, we want it small because we want a water behind it. So then you've got like this reeds before the water, but we needed to add something

so that you had to have a water block behind reeds rather than a grass, because otherwise you've got this tiny jump and then you just fall a fraction and you get thrown into the dirt and you're like, oh no, what the hell? Right, right, that makes sense. Okay.

So while we're on the topic of issues that have been happening, for all of you, what have been the... Some thing that you... Some issue you've taken, some issue you've occurred maybe yourself or issue you've helped to fix that has been like a big learning experience for you that you thought this was going to work before you initially tried it and then it just all fell apart ah there's too many examples

we don't have to pick the last one do you think what um having worked on this game for like two three years now um almost all of the systems have been rewritten and at one point in time um the worlds weren't using object pooling to generate obstacles so we ended up hitting this situation where if you're on a computer that wasn't a beast machine like what we have um it just wouldn't run it was so laggy and so slow every time it was generating obstacles and it would do that as you're going so it'd just be constant uh frame chugs which wasn't good so i kind of worked on that system and rewrote it and i did it like after work and all that kind of stuff.

So I was like tired and I come home and I just like, okay, time to do some pulled object generation. Here we go. And I think since I did that, it's now been rewritten almost again. Like not completely, but especially the bits that were challenging because they just didn't work. And I like, I thought they did. And I wrote all this code and i was like yeah here we go and then luke was like uh no um so he fixed it for me which was good no it's a tag team tag team alex fixes everything of mine so it's definitely we're all helping each

other out scott's always got an opinion yeah help us i always get a visual look the change or something looks like as i look and i'm like yeah that looks good oh no uh i've just played a lot now and i don't like it so we're changing it literally found out just a couple of days ago that if you press escape in the load screen it quits the game and we're like wait that's on live we're gonna quickly because that was way back from ages ago when we like in the prototype we wanted to be able to quit the game somehow so yeah

we're fixing that I think next patch which will be good I tend to play the game much like other players don't and I just spam stuff or just do something stupid and then I'll just break the game completely and i'll be like oh is this meant to happen like what is that that menu one scott what was that

one again you just he just spammed the keyboard he was like look at this look i'm like okay so he gets to the main screen spams the keyboard and then all of a sudden he's got the logo super bulk book chicken but it's on like level select and we're like you're not meant to have a logo on level select i was like who just smacks the keyboard like that i can definitely understand that no like when i when i play something when i was usually what i do when i go to avcon is i intentionally go to people's things just to try and break it like i couldn't break like you guys guys were simple enough that I couldn't break it. But, like, when something is, when, especially when someone has, you know, a very expensive scope, there's usually things they miss. Especially if there is, like, you know, a wall with a rock next to it and a jump button. Usually you can, like, jump up the wall and get out.

Like, when I was playing Black Mesa, like, I, i like there's a bit where it's like an elevator comes down like hmm what happens if i go under that elevator will it kill me no it soft locks the game because now i cannot move because i'm stuck in the elevator so i definitely i definitely know that feeling yeah these things can be great like for a community to find, though. Sometimes I feel like, especially first-person shooters, they like that kind of vibe where people would just go off to the side of the map and just keep going as far as they can, and they'll find these dead zones that weren't ever meant to be seen. Like Halo 1, where you can get up on top of the map

and just snipe people from like... And no one can even think about you. It's great. people love that find those kind of hidden things and you know sometimes easter eggs sometimes not sometimes just cool funky things yeah but sorry with your question of like uh things that we thought we'd gonna fix and then it didn't we could we could literally say like last night or the night before um there was one where we we're trying to get the time slow so it doesn't clip on things too much because we've got the feedback that when you're like near a pebble but you're not going to hit it like why is it giving us time slow it like distracts the

people who are trying to get to the top scores because they're just clipping on it. And they're like, oh, I know what the timing is. Don't give me extra time. And so we're like, well, why don't we make the time slow like shrink as it's slowing you down? So the slower you are, the smaller it is. So you have to be more accurate. Right. But what that led to was that it would shrink and then you wouldn't get time slowed but then it would expand and you get time slowed then it would shrink and you wouldn't get

time so that they just span so as you're going past something you're chunking and we're like oh well we thought it was a good idea but we got to remove that yeah um in particularly uh oh sorry in particular for myself uh for this question uh because I am new, well, I was at the start of this project, and it still happens, it still happens. But because I'm new to making Blender objects than be FBXs that are available for Unity to be plugged and play kind of thing. Just getting that set up to start like so that it was clean from when you brought it from blender to uh unity that was a challenge in itself for me and like still sometimes i catch myself not applying the transforms that i need to for it to then not whack out when we bring it into unity sometimes it's like you you you export it as fbx and you view it in the microsoft fbx

viewer and there's like nothing wrong when then you put it in unity and it's like who knows what it's like all backwards or upside down or the chicken's like separating from everything else you just like all right so particularly with animations that's the big one i think with those kind of things is that if you don't apply any of your scales or transforms when it comes to the animations the bones go nutty and you just end up with who like just stuff that you never thought would you're like why is it doing that yeah yeah we do yeah those are fun we had vultures that would swoop down at you and stuff. Somewhere along the line, I might have not applied the scale

or transform or something. And so they have these heads that go shrink down from tiny little things to balloon massively as they swoop. And it's great. It looks great, but it's not intentional. Right, right. Got to fix that. Although I think they're it's not intentional. Right, right. Got to fix that. Although I think they're a big feature in the bonus levels now.

Yeah, yeah. We've just put them in pretty much anything that we're like, this is great, but we just put them in the bonus so that people can see the greatness. Yeah. So even some of the problems have inspired actual content in the game. Yeah, for sure. No, I think it's a fun way to approach it, definitely.

You could just be like, you know, hey, I want it to be, like, I want it to work, but if something's fun, you might as well, like, it's a game. Just have the fun in there. Maybe you don't have it as the main thing, but like, you know, just give people something to enjoy.

Yeah, as players what we're going for yeah as players of like tons of games we we've always appreciated those kind of like goofy moments in video games uh and or just things that we were able to exploit and or you know um one of the funniest things that we used to do when we're all the way back in the Nintendo 64 days was we used to play with our dad on Goldeneye. And because we were young and we know the button controls and stuff, we would be able to crouch and hold the crouch and just move around the map crouched and just slap people's knees. and just slap people's knees. And because you have a really awkward aiming system in that game, Dad was never able to crouch and or aim at us, so we'd just, like, float towards him on our knees,

just, like, slapping him. And he loved it but hated it, and we loved it, and it was great. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. No, those moments are so fun. Like, I think one of the earliest bugs I remember, like, really enjoying was Halo 1. On the, you know, the mission, like, this thing is like a second mission where you're, like, on the island. You can just drive into the water and the game doesn't stop you. There's, like, an invisible wall, like, way later, but you can just drive into the water and the game doesn't stop you there's like an invisible

wall like way later but you can just drive like if you just jam up against you can just drive past it so you just drive under the water the game doesn't care like they couldn't stop you like surely someone had to have tested the cars don't the cars stop underwater but they just left it there and it's so much fun oh i have to go back and play that because we got like the anniversary edition but we haven't i haven't done that bug yet so oh that's that's awesome um so a couple of the things you mentioned you guys mentioned there were related to like optimization and things like that so you guys are aiming for a mobile release at when is that supposed to happen as soon as possible really um but there is a deadline and that is by the time pax rolls

around because we will be going to pax this year awesome so what okay what extra requirements does being on mobile add to the way you've designed the game? Like, obviously you're trying to make it run reasonably well on a PC, but when you're dealing with a mobile device, what sort of range of devices are you trying to aim for? Obviously you're not going to be like, have the latest iPhone, but there's going to be like a minimum spec you're going for to be able to support yeah there is um probably a couple of years old phone that's kind of where we're aiming and the reason why is because we have a couple of year old androids at the moment and we've tested on that and it works three hundred dollar phone for five years ago yeah because we've always been considering this

I have, I don't know if it'll come through on the screen, but I have I annoyed my brothers a lot by making us change the name of the game every single time so that I could have, it's not coming through no but every single one of those little icons

is Super Bork Bork Chicken. And then I got a second page of them too. So I've got probably 50 builds of Super Bork Bork Chicken on my phone, scaling back to all the time before we had Pulled World Gin. So it's like, it does not, that one does not run. But once we put Pulled World Gin in, it runs pretty well. So we're already kind of hitting the targets we wanted to, but there's some objects and there's some particle systems

and there's some interactions in the game that really make a chug to a halt. We've also found that in older versions, we haven't tested this so much on newer versions, but in older versions of the game on mobile, memory leaks were apparent and you could be playing for uh if you were played for over an hour things just slowed down for no good reason um so yeah but certainly some things we need to fix but uh definitely a

couple of year old android couple year old iphone is that is the target we're going for and tablets we want it to work on tablets too because it's it's nice having a bigger screen to be honest you can see the obstacles better that was one thing as well is that you you've got a like way bigger resolution on a tablet like but often they come with slightly lower specs than your your standard phone or like your your newish phone so like trying to get it to work on a tablet at the specs that it has is something that like we we've bought some for uh showcasing at avcon and uh when we went to put it on it was like yeah some of the levels are good but some of them that have a few more like particle systems or something in there, like they really struggle on those kind of ones. So we'd really need to, yeah, just figure that one out.

Yeah. So what is the actual like process of getting something? Obviously it's going to be different for Google's Play Store, that's what it's called, and the Apple App Store. Like what is the process of actually getting something onto that? Well, we're kind of in the process of doing that. So we can tell you about halfway. Okay, well, what you've done at least, yeah.

Yeah, so to get it on the phone for Android, it was really simple when we were able to turn our phones into dev mode because we could plug it into the computer and straight up just play on our Android phones. That was that was cool because i mean we could we could test straight away and unity makes it super easy to tick like i want to build for android and providing you've got ui that works for android which was a huge thing that we got into lots of heated discussions about but we got there um so you need the ui to actually fit and work and scale and all that kind of stuff but as well as that to get you know not too many um i think you have to use the right there. So you need the UI to actually fit and work and scale and all that kind of stuff.

But as well as that to get not too many, I think you have to use the right render pipeline for Unity and not be using too many resources. You can just get it on there. But we've currently also signed up for a Google account that will let us, a Google, I should say a Google developer account. And that lets us go through a couple of phases of testing before we get to launch. Currently, we have a buildup that is in a private beta test that hasn't been reviewed by Google, but we are able to download it from the Google Play Store and test on a number of different devices

based on email addresses. So that's kind of cool. That's kind of the process for Google. For Apple, we actually, because we signed up to be a company and we thought okay well we're going to do a company developer account for apple we've had a couple of hurdles to jump through to get to where we are today um because we needed to get a duns number yeah do you want to no you got it sorry we we needed to get a DUNS number. And when we signed up as an Australian company, we got one. But Apple didn't recognize it.

So we went to the DUNS place. It's like a company in America somewhere. And we went to the lookup to find out what our DUNS number was. And we got it and we pasted it in the Apple form. And they said, no, that doesn't exist. However, they said, if you fill out this information, you could submit it and go get one. So we're like, sure, why not?

Let's do that. So we went to go, we filled in the form and that got submitted to the DUNS people, the people who keep track of these numbers. And we got an email back from them saying, you guys already have one. So we thought, okay, no worries. But guys already have one yeah so we thought okay no worries um but it did have a little line on it that said some of the details were updated and

i thought okay maybe maybe this will help us through so we went back to apple again and we went to go sign up as a developer account again um but we had the same problem so we contacted apple support and they said okay no worries we figured it out for you so they must have had to do something maybe because we're an australian I don't know, but they had to do something on their end to let us through. And they did, which was really quick. They did it really quickly. So that was lovely. But then we were blocked because we didn't have a at daytime devs.com email address. We were just using Gmail so far. So we had to sign up for one of them as well. And now we're uh for review with apple

and pending so we're not quite sure on the rest of the process yet i from my understanding you also need to have you need to like demonstrate it works on like at least this was a couple of years ago you need to like demonstrate it works on different devices like you need to like show screenshots of it working on like an ipad on iphone things like that but that was a while ago the the last time i looked at it i don't know exactly what the process is now that that stands to reason i think at my work other people work on apps as well and they have to take screenshots of all the different uh yeah if they're going for tablet and phone they they take different screenshots for each so that it can appear on the store as the resolution that you or like the um aspect ratio you would expect on your device as well so yeah we're likely going

to have to do that but that's okay we can take screenshots we had to do that for Steam too um yeah and and definitely there's a review process involved in both apple and google when when you want to submit it live uh so we need to make sure that it runs well right and doesn't crash immediately there was a review process for steam too and they told us stuff like oh your page has too many screenshots of wesley in the in the shop you should put some more screenshots of actual gameplay and stuff like that and you know that's really helpful feedback so we just actioned it let's have a look at your steam page wait uh super walk walk steam here we go let's see if you want to click that download button on the demo so your gameplay trailer is the first one then you got the rest of the lava level here.

Yeah. There's one. We did change it around. We added them so that I think it's like your first seven to ten or something should be more gameplay focused. Yeah. Menus focused. But because we do have unique things in the menus, we were like, we still want to show off that there is like a character on the shop, you know? Yeah. And stuff like that. like we still want to show off that there is like a character on the shop you know yeah and stuff

like that and the rascal uh the in fact the equipment screen i think should also be there and so things like that a lot of players that like familiar with those things will be like oh okay they have equipments and stuff you know items that you can equip and uh stuff like that they'll see that and they'll go okay i know what that system is but yeah the first 10 need to be gameplay because that's what people are more interested in overall i don't think i've ever gone through 10 screenshots yeah apparently yeah i suppose you want to get a real good look you click spam the click button well usually if they have a good video is like the first thing

i'll watch the video that does a good enough job at least for me i don't know i guess they have their process they want to go through yeah um and hey if that if that's the process they want then they probably got stats on it that back it up to say that it's the best way to do it but you know um yeah i love these i think i love these minimum specs oh yeah rx 470 wait how does how did the minimum specs actually work are those something you guys had to like sort of estimate or like what's the deal there we just chose the the computer we had that had the lowest specs and played it on that and was like oh it's playable we'll just chuck them it wasn't that the process uh that's kind of yeah um in the in terms of the mac specs is that the mac specs i see i see the minimum here it's the

i5 6300 intel graphics 520 um 4 gigs ram windows 10 yeah yeah that's an old surface that i used to use and we just had a line around we said let's let's chuck pork pork on there and it worked so like yeah the max specs are a little bit different because we don't have a whole lot of max sitting around we had to buy one and then the current one is pretty decent so we didn't want to use those specs because it probably would play on something well we have two max one's got like four gigs of ram and one's got 16 so we can't put the 16 but the four one doesn't run at that like it's playable but it's you you probably wouldn't recommend it to someone to play on those specs it says it says recommended eight megabytes of ram on the max specs. You might want to update the specs. It says recommended 8 megabytes of RAM

on the Mac side. Yeah, we do need to update that. Yeah, okay. Yes, thank you. Also, 8 megabytes of RAM and 1 megabyte of available storage. Yeah. MB, GB, they're all the same.

I see what happened here. You just chose the wrong thing. Well, I mean, like, they're all the same i i see what happened here you just someone just chose the wrong well i mean like we're all oh well some of us not so much um luke as much he's a little bit younger but like alex and i we were making uh we used to put um computers together that had like 512 megabytes of uh ram in it you know like or even like 128 and stuff we were putting those together when we were kids um we remember those days i'm surprised they did like no one was like hey guys that's uh like i would think someone would notice that in review process like one megabyte of recommended not enough mac gamers out there clearly like the fact that your your recommended is lower than your minimum like surely that throws something off

like that seems like something you would have in like an automated system yeah i guess not i guess not um theme if you're listening there you go yeah request yeah one thing we haven't talked about but like we've sort of because you asked us what's the process of getting it on phone and uh we're actually a business and we said that but like the real reason i think we became a business to begin with was we were going for a grant and this also ties in with some of the like the struggles was um we had to put together a document like a game design to try and go for it which actually was really good because it helped us lower the scope so that we could then have

enough room to increase the scope as i felt needed like oh we need this and i just go like no no it's not it it's like oh but it makes a bit like the canon it was like last minute we need the canon because it's it takes too long to get stuff like that um but yeah so um we were going for the grant or uh for a grant uh sadly we didn't get it so that's um we're self-funded but that's why we're hoping we once we get on phone and we get some marketing we can recover the costs that it's had but um yeah that's why we chose the company route before that we were just a partnership yeah yeah yeah a lot of people don't like the grant stuff like you can't apply as a partnership because they want someone

who has to pay taxes and pay tax with or pay their um uh employees or whatever the company's employees um so it's like they want to make sure that that you're doing the right thing and like partnership doesn't like i don't think it's as enforced as, say, a company like PTY or TD or whatever, you know? Not as protective either, because if your partner does something, you're liable now. Whereas as a company, if your partner does something, the company's liable. Right, right, right. And probably them if they've done something wrong. Yeah.

There's rules around, like, if we do something wrong, then we're liable because we did it wrong. So's rules around like if we do something wrong then we're liable because we did it wrong so we're definitely not aiming to do anything wrong no but yeah it is it is all like there was a big learning curve there for um like starting a company right like not didn't all have like uh none of us really had a a big understanding of of what like you had a little bit but not not the experience of running one like yeah but yeah it was it's fun lots of things to read your own company before this yeah but that was the sole trader so it was yeah i operated as well and that's yeah there's you know it's pretty easy to do that like that's yeah it's it's a little less involved with

uh like especially if you're not employing anyone or anything like that yeah yeah especially especially if you're not employing anyone that's like really easy yeah so what if you are already here as a company like what what extra requirements do you need to worry about there? Lots. We have to hold an annual meeting, and I'm pretty sure we have to have seven years' worth of documentation. You have to hold on to that stuff but yeah it's it's uh often i think i think we have to do quarterly meetings is that correct or is that just one i'm sorry yeah

we we opted into quarterly okay we did yes we opted into quarterly so that's what we will be doing but there's a lot more reporting requirements and they're a lot more governed um you do have to submit uh various different reports to different like to the ato and stuff like that on top of what you'd normally have to do um thankfully we have a good accountant and uh he helps us out a lot yeah yeah i i couldn't even imagine trying to operate a company by myself doing the accounting like that seems like a nightmare that's a job unto itself don't even try it i don't think you'd be having a lot of fun you'd be stuck doing other stuff that you don't want to be doing yeah and that's like what the accountant has said is like focus on doing your

game stuff and uh we'll sort out some of the you know all the that stuff that they can do yeah we we do try and read up on the we do yeah make sure we're up with the lingo uh the language so well shifting topic about to something a bit more positive uh what has been like When you were at Avcon, what was the general reaction you got from the game? What have people said about the game while they got a chance to test it? I know you said that there was that kid that kept coming back,

but besides that guy, what else did you see? If you're listening, it was Ted, right? If you're listening, Ted, thank you very much for playing our game. You made our day. Yeah, he sure did uh lots of people seem to enjoy it and i think that one of the things that sort of stood out a lot is that certain groups of people were skeptical at first like especially like people who really wanted that

hardcore challenge were like i don't usually play this kind of game you know it's it's too usually too easy and especially when we we reset it to default game speed every time so that it was easier and more approachable and then we said hey why don't you give it a go and change the speed up a bit and then they started like a lot of people who started with that i don't know it's not usually my kind of thing left with that was actually fun which was kind of cool to hear it was nice to hear that people like that and a couple of other people like i don't usually play games it might be a bit hard i don't know if i can and we thought you know we'll turn the game speed down for you the controls are on the screen but we can also help you out and they also went away saying they enjoyed it or just smiling and laughing and and that

was a really positive reinforcement for us i think that's awesome. It was nice seeing people that weren't our friends and obliged to play potentially, like enjoy it and actually say good things about it. Like, um, which that wasn't the first time, like when we released the demo, cause we were part of steam,

um, next fest, we actually got a couple of people playing that were like, Oh, I'm going to play all demos and steam next fest. And it was awesome seeing just someone on youtube just streaming our game and giving us a commentary like oh it's a chicken i love chickens like yes so um like we like but i guess it is also nice seeing them in person being able to interact with them and talk to them um we did get a lot of uh switch players that just

kept going back because our a button is in like xbox controller a whereas right right yeah so we're we're gonna have to try and figure out how to do that um and also it looked like we may want a port to switch if after phone because i did notice that on your website yeah yeah that's the goal yeah we initially did um apply to um switch oh sorry to nintendo to try to be on the switch to get the dev kit that they have um and i think because when we applied it was like a very early version of the game and we didn't have it released on steam or anything like that so we're hoping that we can reapply a later date uh hopefully soon uh and get a different outcome this time uh and you know then we can start diving on on switch that'd be great so one of the guys at afcon said

we were like one of uh one of his standout games like he said there were two in the indie games room and we were one of them and we were like yes yeah that's awesome we we felt like we were always busy like there wasn't really a gap of someone not playing so like i think we succeeded there it it was yeah it was nice seeing the positive reactions um we just haven't gotten to the stage to like get those reactions to equal like downloads on the game right right did you have like any uptick in like like any at all from the uh people at avcon or was it just like people had fun there and then sort of moved on i think a lot of people like they would finish playing the game they were like this is great i enjoyed it where we're like are you on mobile or something

like that you know are you on switch and so i think a lot of that a lot of people are like that played it were probably like yeah i'll get it when it comes out on phone because yeah we did say yes it will be coming out on phone later on in the year um but currently it's on steam and so a lot of people might not like necessarily pick it up on steam and we did notice a few sales you know in in you know in particular we had ted and ted's dad thank us for you know letting him spend the time at Avcon just chilling with us. That's good. And that was great.

It was really great overall positive feedback. But yeah, I think a lot of people are hanging out to see it on mobile. It's also that we haven't marketed it all. Yeah, that too. We're waiting because we have limited... We don't want to spend too much on it. We're waiting until we have it everywhere. So people, when when we do market it they can just play it wherever they want to right right so we're thinking that you know that we've got their first impression at avcon once if they do see an ad in the future they'll be like oh i remember this this was heaps good fun so

in terms of oh sorry i was gonna say in terms of people uh knowing it was great it was a good uh exercise to show off our game and because previously it was just friends and family that have played the game so i think we had like we must have had over like 200 people like come in and just play it and try it out like uh we didn't give as many cards out as that but we definitely had people come past and give us the feedback so it we we know we're on the right track with kind of what we've got and uh yeah yeah nice there you go you get a couple that's great so i that was your first time like actually physically showing off the game then was your first time like actually physically showing off the game then like uh there was outside of your like friends and family yeah there was one night before that okay um that

we went to like the games plus they have get togethers for devs uh in the city so we went there and we uh just had it on our phones and we would just we split up and tried to show everyone we could at the venue um and we found out that we needed to make the tutorial a lot shorter from that because it was a lot longer and people were like i just want to play so that helped us a lot so that avcon we had a tutorial that actually kind of worked yeah well yeah but also it's different showing gamers compared to developers yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah the tutorial you guys had there was i don't even remember the tutorial like that's how that's how quick it sort of went like it taught you everything you need to know which isn't like a ton but it got the point across like what was your original tutorial like then if it

was too long i think it just was was like, instead of doing things twice, you had to do things three times. Everything was like spread out longer, whereas now it's all compact. And you didn't time slow as much sort of thing. So, yeah, it was. Right. Well, maybe three times as long or something. So it was just thinking about like people that that when they first download your game,

they'll play it for, I don't know, a couple minutes, and then they will just give up on it if they don't like it. And we didn't want to lose that person or that player during that experience because some people, the attention spans, they just want to get into the game and get going. And that's fine. Sometimes you don't have time. Yeah, exactly. And that's fine. That's the way it is. Yeah, exactly.

Sometimes it's just you don't have time. But yeah, we wanted to make sure that it was as painless for that kind of player as possible, but also still had all the stuff we need to for everyone else. Yeah, I certainly showed a lot of people at work gatherings and other social gatherings i went to the old tutorial and it was a lot easier to fail i know that you can still fail in the existing one but when people failed the tutorial they really got disheartened right and

you'd have to really coach them through trying again and trying again until they got it um and because it was about a minute and a half experience it it was like if you if you got 30 seconds in and you died you had to do that 30 seconds again and yet people really weren't too fond of that but then as well as that after the tutorial you would just stay in a world that was tutorial level blocks um and it would just be the tutorial land but we after uh at some point in time we decided what if it just faded into the first level so that the tutorial tutorial level almost just disappeared once you finished it and you were already playing the first level and that's kind of where it that's where it was at in avcon and that really helped people just

continue through the levels i guess they were like probably why i didn't notice it then yeah yeah no that's exactly that's a yeah that's actually a really good idea yeah i did no i think that's a really cool way to handle it um like i yeah i i just i just yeah i don't even know what to say about that i think it's just a good idea. You guys worked it out, clearly. We had people. That brings up one of the biggest issues I think we had was early on before the tutorial. Even now, we still have this issue.

Holding jump is not... You definitely do it in Mario to jump higher. Sure. But it's definitely not natural for a lot of players. They just tap it. They tap it and then they die to the water. And so we had to be like, how do we get players to hold that bad boy button?

So they actually fly in the air because everyone was tapping it and dying. And we were like, no, because like, is there an, yeah. Is there any other games that sort of like we were like, no. Because, like, is there... Yeah, is there any other games that sort of, like... I mean, there would be. But it's just not...

It just didn't seem intuitive, I guess. Because they were thinking we're more like Flappy Bird or something else. Yeah, it's... Considering that it's sort of aimed at, like, the mobile... It's a very mobile-style game where you do tend to just tap or it a lot of a lot of the like infinite runner games are just tap once and then as opposed to a more traditional platformer like i don't know uh celeste jack and daxter things like that where you do like there is a clear difference between tapping and holding um i can understand especially when you're saying that a lot of people

that sort of were asking about mobile clearly it had more of a sort of mobile kind of audience to it yeah that i i think that makes sense why it was a problem then yeah also a lot of the time we were demoing it on a mobile to people because it's what we had with us right okay so they were playing it like a mobile game and that's fine um but it is a little bit more of a platformer style experience even though it is an infinite runner and don't let us shoebox it into mobile because like the way i play it on steam i've got a beast of a computer of course i'm going to play it on that and the high scores go across or will so you'll be you'll be able to see which one you're on potentially but um yeah i definitely would play it on my pc so there's that i'm hoping there will be other speed runners that can put

their name up there so it's not just big b at the top of every level and i have a reason to replay them so if you feel like you're a great gamer get on and people because we did yeah we did have quite a few people uh give us a comment of like because they learned about like that the seeds are all the same for the the but it was procedurally generated but everyone's experiencing the same thing some people were saying oh this would be great for speed running communities and i was like i guess i didn't i wasn't looking like i didn't realize that but like yeah i was like yeah because people would just like they will learn that route and they will learn every little block that that could spawn and be like yeah i know i gotta be left on this side and be right on this

side just to maximize their distance and yeah just or just because you can unlock stuff and you can go to the next level and keep going sorry no sorry discord yeah um on that note like you could add i don't know if you have the option for this but you could add the ability to set the seed so if you want to like specifically use this seed or like especially with those those daily challenges if you want to like specifically use this seed or like, especially with those, those daily challenges, if you wanted to sort of practice that in like a outside of that, um, I think that would be at least something to mess around with. It's funny that you say that that was a feature on our list and I think it's somewhere on our list, but it did get cut from scope when we were making that business plan as to what,

what goes into the time we have versus like, especially before PAX. Like it's not going to make it in before PAX, but it's a good idea. We had that idea as well. And it would be really nice to have like a custom play mode where not only can you set the seed, but also you can pick which obstacles you like to play with. But yeah, it's a lot of work. And we thought we'll keep it on the back burner

as maybe potential future update. Sure that makes sense like obviously there are things you're going to want to do in the future that you just either can't justify now or in some case i'm sure can't work out how to do now yeah trying to do anything that like completely changes the way the game plays can be challenging like or like just adding something that's like a new feature that then just butts up against all of the other right current features that like you know so we really have to be careful with them and um like yeah how they work you know a mythic that unrolls the cylinder for example yeah that'd be crazy but then you gotta worry about how you deal with the models for that a curve it'd be interesting uh we've mentioned ones like top down like it kind of like flattens

it into like a you know pancake type thing and you experience it top down that'd be interesting but that'd be a bit of a struggle to set up makes you really really tiny and then everything's huge oh so you like you sort of zoom the camera in as well or yeah yeah but then it would just be like bland it would just look like grass mostly it'd be big gaps between things that's for sure so for that list of things you guys want to do like what sort of things are outside of scope for now but you still are interested

in adding at some point we have a big old checklist of all of them definitely there's areas like we have some coming up like we have ideas for a beach and a halloween area and uh seasonal type content um but uh we're definitely going to do those like um sorry uh halloween um but we do have other ones that we've thought of like space and stuff but like we just would just you know it's it's it's definitely on the horizon of like maybe one day it depends on you know how much time and you know

if we can afford to put into this beyond i think we're also looking at our next potential game as well like because we want to have more than just one under our belt if we can so like we want we we want to spend some time not just on board although we will dedicate the time to make sure we have bug fixes and and little content like patches so that it does keep up to date and have something for you. But I guess one thing that some people have asked for is like multiplayer, if you could both be on the cylinder. And we actually have done some multiplayer games. So it's like it's possible, but we're like probably not for bork bork we're thinking maybe bork bork together sort of thing maybe if bork bork does well otherwise yeah

because i mean that that would be fun but i would be re with uh yeah i can especially with some of the items you guys have in there that that could turn into pure chaos and i'm sure would be an optimization nightmare yeah for sure 100 so um with the oh so we're gonna say something oh i was gonna say one of the other features that we're thinking of adding, but it might be after we've hit the PAX deadlines, that is items being able to level up the more you play with them and the more stars you collect with them. Okay. So at the moment, items always have the default look and the same color for everyone.

But we thought people like to customize. And if the default hat's green, somebody might want it blue or purple or orange or whatever. So we thought, why not add variants of the items that you can only unlock by playing with that item? Right. And then it also gives you another sort of egg sink. Because one of the things about having currency that's easy to get so that you can buy all the items

is that once you've bought all the items, what do you do with that? Right. You buy canon tickets. You buy canon canon tickets and that's currently in the game which is why this is a deep like a out of scope feature for now um is that we could have it so that you pay eggs to change the color as well of your items once you've also played with them and earned the stars to unlock the colors color groups that was another idea and i think um some people that we kind of floated that idea around with, they were pretty keen for it. But it represents a significant amount of work for us.

So that's why it's like, maybe, you know, later. Maybe like a whole new menu. A whole new menu. Yeah, it would be. And I'm sure that would be me doing that. I'm the menu guy. I work on websites for work. So it like i know you i it's it's a thing so you mentioned uh the like idea of a future game do you guys have any ideas in mind

right now would you want to make something sort of akin to bork bork or something entirely different like we have many but we do we we kind of discussed this we were like what what would be our next one and a while ago i made a prototype of a roguelike card game and pretty much the the uh in thing at the moment there's lots of people that have been making them now the difference with this one is that it's co-op okay have you ever played the game inscription if you haven't it is an awesome game and you should put it on your list because i think all three of us have played it and it's amazing yeah um basically it's 40% off right now. Yeah. That's it.

It's kind of like a little bit of Yu-Gi-Oh, which we used to play a little bit. Oh, I know this one. Okay, no, I do know this one. I've just not played it. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. But we're kind of going into like a co-op version of that. Okay.

We haven't titled it or anything, but we've played a couple of rounds of it and we enjoyed it it's fun um definitely but that's still a long like probably a long way yeah so it comes first because yeah for now that's that's something that's more like a game that like we chose bork bork because likeork initially because it is something that we could... We had a prototype for it. We had a bunch of prototypes, but Super Bork Bork Chicken got the choice because

in relative scale of scope, Super Bork Bork Chicken had that smaller scope. With one of these kind of games, it is more so the game that all three of us would really get around and enjoy um and like not saying that we don't enjoy super walk we really do i'm just saying like um it's more in line with the kind of games that we would play

on steam right so it'd be nice to do a game that's more in style of what we would play as gamers and work on something that's um yeah yeah don't let us fool you we do have like i think i've got like 30 or 40 hours on super bowl book chicken yeah yeah we definitely play that we love it we do yeah definitely um yeah we we play a bunch of different genres. It'd be great to have some sort of first-person experience, either shooter or like... We love puzzles, so an escape room-type style game would be cool to have. But yeah, we've talked about a whole bunch of different ones,

but I think Deck is something that's like... Sorry, the card co-op game which is called deck is something that we were working on it has a deck in it yeah uh we're not sure where we're going but at the moment that would just just for more background is that the the cards are like animals and they each have their effect. Okay. And basically you can put one card's effect on another, so then you can have up to three effects

that synergize with each other, sort of like the items in board, the RPG elements. Okay, no, that makes sense. Yeah. I've not played that many roguelike card games. The only one I've really played a bunch of was Slay the Spire. That's a big one.

There's another Australian one that I really like called Ring of Pain. And that was funded by Victorian government. And I played it a lot. But I think my favorite one is Inscription. my favorite one is inscription i don't think that's got a um like a really deep story um that you can kind of unravel as well um what do they call those um like the back rooms type stuff with all the lore and you know it's like you can really delve deep into that rabbit hole and you know so that one is unique in that sense um i haven't seen one similar to that but yeah that was that was definitely really cool to see

well i should do i have anything else i really want to talk about for this um i think we hit on most of the main topics actually one thing i did of... I didn't want to ask you about. So, there is this sort of rise of handheld PC gaming with the release of the Steam Deck, which is still not being sold in Australia. Valve, somebody. I know some people from Valve. Watch this channel.

Somebody release it here. What do you guys think about this this sort of new way of playing PC games? I think it's great. Yeah, definitely. Personally, I work in front of a desk in front of my computer every day, all the time. It's what I like. I love doing it, right? But sometimes I just need to get away from this desk and go to a comfy chair and look at a screen that's somewhere else. And I have a Switch for exactly that reason. And I've looked up the Steam Deck multiple times to try and buy it for exactly that reason.

It's just nice getting away from this scenario. And being in a different room. Maybe next to my partner. It's just a different way of gaming. That I think is. Especially if I could play my PC games. Or my Steam library. It just unlocks gaming for me. It's great.

I'd love it. Orgbook would be heaps good on Steam Deck. Yeah. I think we've had someone that I know play it on the Asus version of that. I forgot what it's called. I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, the handheld version of that. And they said it ran fine, so it should work fine on the Steam Deck. ROG Ally, that's it. Yes, that's why. Yes. But if anyone does have a Steam Deck and wants to try it out give it a go and let us know how it goes yeah

have you had anyone attempt to play the game through Proton on Linux on the Steam Deck or anything like that it's just been you haven't had anyone try it out yet or not that we're aware of. Someone may have tried it, but they didn't tell us.

Most games now work just fine. So it should be not an issue. But occasionally you'll run into things... I pretty much play all my games on Linux at this point. The only things that are really an issue are... pretty much play all my games on linux at this point the only things that are really an issue are uh the the the basically malware that uh riot makes for valorant and league uh the the root kit level dr at uh antijet systems and it's pretty much antijet stuff that's an issue at this point most other games play perfectly fine and usually the only things that really cause issues at this

point are cut scenes in weirdly encoded formats that older games used to use um like devil may cry one two and three they use a weird cut scene format like a video format so whenever you try to play the game it just skips the cut scenes, okay. Modern games don't do that. Modern games are insensible codecs. But there are some weird older codecs used in the early 2000s. Is there something you can add to your system to play those games and include the cutscenes? For that one, no.

But there are other games. So the main version of Proton that Valve ships, there's only obviously going to be issues with shipping certain features because of licenses with certain software. But if there are issues, people will use a community version of it called Proton GE, which includes some of the extra stuff. That usually ends up dealing with a lot of problems. use a community version of it called proton ge which includes some of the extra stuff um that usually ends up dealing with a lot of problems in that particular game it doesn't though which is it's fine as i played the game i just had a video open on youtube looking at the cutscenes so

um have you tried playing super book book ticket on linux i haven't just yet um i i was meaning to before we did this but i just hadn't had any time to do so. That's fair. I'll probably check it out after this. If it works fine, I'll let you know. Yeah, well, please let us know how it goes. If there's anything issues-wise, bring them up. We definitely need to hear it.

Yeah, same with anyone who's played Bork Bork in general and maybe listening or whatever. Any sort of feedback that you have you're welcome to chuck in the discord or uh send wherever we have uh the ability to see it yeah like our steam discussions if yes yeah um feel free to tell us and let us know what doesn't work or what does work for your PC and or rig especially if you're

using I think it's important with those lower end systems yeah yeah yeah I've run a 6700 XT and a 3600X which is by no means a top end system but a game like Bork Bork it'll play just fine but if you're on like 8 megabytes

sorry? on 8 megabytes? no no 32 megabytes 32 megabytes of memory sorry that doesn't sound good but like on those lower end systems where you know it could actually be an issue and that's like especially like really important yeah we've got um i can't remember what brand it is but we've

got this tiny little computer that kind of fits into a box about this big and um it runs windows uh and so that one we're planning to test on that in the near future as well as part of this performance optimization for mobile, as well as mobiles. I mean, if we can get it running on older mobiles and that, and in the future, potentially the Switch, it's going to work everywhere.

Yeah, we have like, I think I was playing earlier versions of Bork Bork, not the current one, but earlier versions of Bork Bork on a Pixel 2, and it was playing reasonably well, like playable, I would say. Certainly towards the end of like really fast speeds, it might've been a bit struggling,

but my battery was getting a bit warm, but you know, it was playing. And I was like, wow, that's old now. When did Pixel 2 come out? Pixel 2. 2017. What is that, five? No, six.

Six, six. We're 2023 now. So six years, that's pretty good. Most people don't hold onto their phones that long. Not really anymore. It's like maybe two, three years. You reckon? Not everyone everyone i'm just saying because people often upgrade well if you're on a phone plan a lot of people just automatically upgrade every year or whatever their plan is phone plans are a

scam i've said yeah as well 100 i buy them out right for sure i buy secondhand ones because then i get them cheaper yep yep yep yeah see the nice thing about buying a phone every like three or four years you get a really big upgrade like if you're buying a phone every year like it's gonna like you know and what's the difference between an iphone what is the current iphone i don't know what is the difference between iphone the current year and iphone current year plus one not much really but if you wait like four years hey you might lose a bunch of features because it's an iphone but you're probably gonna get more formant twice as well we we were just like i was watching something then i was like oh if you have like a new android you can like tap and hold

someone's picture and you cut them out and i was like that's amazing but i didn't know because like i was like i think up until like seven or something months ago i was using the pixel 2 and that was my day-to-day phone and i was like yeah it's fine but like you know it's amazing when you go four or five years. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty big. That's great. So I guess it's pretty much time to end off the show. We're almost coming up on two hours now. Goodness. So I guess let people know where they can find everything about the game,

where they can buy it, all that stuff. Well, the central location would be superborkborkchicken.com it has a nice big video at the top and then if you scroll down a little bit it's got all the places you can get it and all the socials that you can follow us on um but you know if it's a kind of a standout name bork bork super bork bork chicken uh so if you google it you'll also come up with uh you have to use the full super b chicken because there are other food companies in america right pretty much we're on discord facebook um twitter or x or whatever um and mastodon at the moment i think we're gonna get an instagram at some point but yeah like we're mostly on discord though that's where you can can talk to us and give us feedback and information or whatever like that. Suggestions and stuff.

But yeah, that's the main places. And the game is on Steam and it will be coming to Android, iOS and Switch. And she will be at PAX. And we will be at PAX. And we will be at PAX. Which will be very exciting. And our chicken shirts. You're the only one who showed up with a shirt on. I'm going to represent the business.

Get his name out. We'll make sure we're wearing it at PAX. That's awesome. Cheers for having us on yeah yeah thank you very much great we're very appreciative um first person to kind of like reach out and like get us you know on something so that was cool but also it's just been such a great chat because you're like the vibe has been real chill i really liked it so uh thank you very much for putting putting us into a comfortable position

and letting us talk to you. No worries. Well, I'm happy you guys reached out because with Twitter breaking DMs and I had to like do all that. Honestly, I don't want to pay for Twitter blue, but I kind of have to if I want to be able to DM people. It's so annoying to not be able to because they they also changed it so the default behavior is only your followers can dm you unless they're twitter blue so you gotta like message people

to like follow you or message you first it's so annoying yeah can everyone just use mastodon please this is the nice thing about bringing like people in the linux space on because everyone on linux has her mastodon account it's it's great but i don't want to give them put a money but i might have to um yeah yeah do you guys have any uh other things to mention or is that everything i think that's it okay awesome i don awesome. I'll do my outro then. If you guys want to watch my gaming stuff, I do gaming on Brodeon Games. Right now, I should be playing Portal 2 Co-op with Rogue Ren and going through Final Fantasy 6D. Check that out on Twitch, YouTube, also on Kick if you want to be there.

That just happened. I restream. It's everywhere. If you want to go check out the main channel, that is Brody Robinson, I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week, and if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version anywhere you can find audio podcasts, there is an RSS feed, stick in your favorite app, and you're good to go, if you want to see the video version, it is available on YouTube at techovertea, and all of my socials for this account

tech of a t main channel brody robertson or i think it's a brody on linux something like that it'll be in the description check it out um i'll give you guys the final word what do you want to say enjoy super long chicken yeah see you guys later