Tech Over Tea - A Faster Take On An Old Classic | Hell Byte Studios

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Hell Byte Studios is an indie game development from Australia working on the upcoming title Bloodreaver, taking inspiration from older versions of Call Of Duty Zombies and mixing it with a Doom style of movement along with a more gothic art style, you get a game that's really fun. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://www.hellbytestudios.com/ Itch.io: https://hell-byte-studios.itch.io/ Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2906070/Blood_Reaver/ ==========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. And today, we have Ewanon from Hellbyte Studios, the developer of Blood Reaver. It is not out yet, but there is a demo on Steam? Yes? Itch.io? Demo's on Itch right now, available through our Discord, but we are listed on Steam for wishlisted. Okay, awesome, awesome. listed on Steam for wishlisted. Okay, awesome, awesome.

This was probably... It's probably one of my top picks for the Avcon games. I kind of... One thing I really hope Avcon does one year is have like a... Some sort of indie games room competition where they get people to like vote on like the best game. I think it would just be like a cool thing they could do, but I think this was definitely one of my top picks.

It's hard to decide on my favorite because there were a lot of really good games there this year, but... Look, for me, it's just kind of the style I like, right? That's the thing. I really like what this game has going on. So before we get way into that, how about you explain who you are, what your position in the studio is, and then get into like what the game itself is? Sure. So my name is Ewan Wynne-Jones and I'm the director at Hellwhite Studios. But as a small team, I'm also the UI designer. I have a good hand in level design. I'm the producer for the team as well. So yeah, we do lots and lots of different things within the team myself. Yeah, we're a 12 personperson team based here in Adelaide, SA.

And yeah, working on our first major title, which is Blood Reaver. That's a really big studio for like our first title. Yeah. No, so we originally, we all studied together. The whole team did just in different disciplines. And, you know, we worked on this on this throughout our last year of studying. And we got to the end, we had an amazing prototype and we were like, you know what, let's not let this go to waste. We already know what our market potential and niche is.

Let's form a studio and let's try to do this for real. Wow. So what is the breakdown of skills in the team? So what is the breakdown of skills in the team? So I've got five artists, a tech artist, two character artists, and two environment artists. And we've got three programmers who are all good at different things, you could say. And then we've got four designers, which include myself, Matt, our level designer, Jackson, our sort of like creative lead,

who's my co-founder in the studio as well, and then we've got Aiden, who's systems design and quality assurance and all the jazz that comes with that. I can definitely tell that you guys have artists on the team. That's very clear from what I can see in the trailer, from what I saw from actually getting to play the game. Is this running at... Why is it running at 480p? No, run at something that's sensible. I could definitely tell that you guys had a clear style in mind with what the game is this running it why is it running at 480p no run it something that's sensible um i could definitely tell that like you guys had a clear style in mind with what the game was like you know it i always like to say that nowadays game like graphical fidelity doesn't really matter what's way more important is having an art style having a a design that you want to

have for your game and actually sticking to that design, because that can be incredibly difficult. Oh, absolutely. Whilst I did mention before we started recording the animations, which do need work, and we'll get more into that afterwards, I do think that the core for a really

cool looking game, especially the environments, the environments look really good. I think that is definitely already there. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, like with what we wanted to do when we set out, we were like, let's have that sort of dark fantasy, gothic aesthetic, you know, really drawing from inspirations like Bloodborne, sort of that core inspiration there, and then bringing that into sort of the classic round-based shooter mechanics, kind of like, much more like Hot Zombies. So blending those things together to create what we like to think is pretty cool.

So you said that you guys all came from different backgrounds. What were you actually studying when you were in uni then? So I was a design student alongside four other designers on the team. The course that we went to had the different disciplines, so they had programmers, designers, artists sort of thing. So we all came together and decided to work together, just had a mutual

love of dark fantasy, the occult, and wave shooters, really. Okay. So for anyone just listening, explain the core game loop that exists. Because I had the trailer playing on screen, but I do have a lot of people that just listen to this in their car and whatever as well. So at its core, Blood Reaver is just a dark fantasy wave-based first-person shooter. If you've played anything like COD Zombies before, you'll understand the core mechanics of the game really, really quickly.

But then what we think we're doing on top of that is bringing in a more sort of like bioshock style combat system we've got abilities and weapons um and blending that all together with a blood-borne uh art style but now we're actually sort of moving into a more painterly aesthetic as well which which is drawing inspiration from something like dishonored okay because the first thing i saw when i saw the art style and i i know that you mentioned people saw this as well as like doom and things like that because it does definitely have that like you know demons blood you know all that it's got that like doom sort of aesthetic to it and i i do remember you mentioning that this is one of the issues you had with people understanding

what the game was? Yeah. Yeah, so we recently put out a trailer through IGN and our publisher. We were in a little showcase with them and a lot of the feedback we were getting was like, oh, this looks like a boomer shooter. And you know, as somebody that made the trailers myself, I realize now, like, you know, just from doing this more and more, curating the type of content that you end up showing to really sort of show our wave-based shooter mechanics which i in reflection i didn't really do enough of previously but at its core blood reaver is a is a wave-based shooter um yeah i think the one thing that did cause that issue

in the trailer there's no like ui so you don't see the wave in the corner absolutely yeah like definitely including interface-related things in a trailer like that so people can really understand what that looks like is so important. And, you know, I'd only made one trailer before this, which is, I imagine, what you've seen. So, yeah, just incremental learning, you know, take every lesson you can and do better next time.

So when you say, like, inspiration from COD Zombies, that has a lot of different meanings now because it has changed a lot since world at war like world at war black ops that was a very that that's very much like the initial start of it and that had a clear continuation of the style world at war was a lot more simple the maps were simpler but when you went into black ops you understood what was going on there then black ops 2 that had a very it had the same core mechanics but it had a lot more i guess in depth in the map like i remember back when black ops 2 zombies first launched and people were trying to work out like how does the bus work how do we actually go between

different areas what can we do in these different areas how like there are these things that we seem like we can activate but how does that actually work and i don't even know what zombies is like in the more recent games i stopped playing back then but from what point in the sort of zombies sort of thing is it pulling inspiration from so we've really sort of like looked all the Zombies releases in the past couple of years and seen a bit of a dissatisfaction in what some people in the community are really saying about what they don't like about the way that Treyarch's sort of been taking the franchise. And we've been really trying to hone in on the features that people really loved five,

six, seven years ago in something like Black Ops 3 and 4, and drawing the best stuff out of that to sort of extract that out and work that into our own systems. But at the same time, there definitely is some newer systems in the more later releases that we're picking certain pieces from and then blending into our own stuff. But like Black

Ops 3 and 2, definitely where the sort of core inspiration comes from for the core gameplay. Okay, that's cool. i do really like this i always liked doing zombies i never was someone who played it really extensively i know there are people who you know had spent hundreds or thousands of hours trying to like piece out like the individual parts of each individual map like how these different things like fit together and where the perfect routes to take things are. From the experience I got to play of Blood Reaver,

like I only got to like the first six rounds, I think something like that. Like to be fair, like it was a combination of two things. One, I'm terrible at FPS games. Two, I have no idea what's going on with the mouse settings on that game. Oh yeah.

It was a little bit... whoever set it up was setting it up perfectly for them. Yeah. Yeah. But even so, like, it was a really fun experience getting to play that game, because I haven't really touched that... as I said, I haven't really touched that since, like, Black Ops 2. So I saw the game... like like when i was walking around avcon i thought initially it was i was going to be like some sort of boomer shooter because that's that's what it looked like from the movement especially the movement because that's one of the big differences between what

you're doing and what like zombies is and things like that the movement you have is a lot more reminiscent of things like doom it's a lot faster you you're not just a dude who's just like slowly walking around like you actually can just like zip around the map um so it gave me that feel first but the second i sat down and i saw that round number it's like okay and i saw like the little um currency counter you have in the corner like okay i know exactly what this is. I've done this before. People who have played similar games

like COD Zombies seem to get it straight away and they love it. Like we had some people over the weekend of AFKORN being like, I love what you guys are doing with this. Like this does everything that the newer Call of Duty Zombies aren't really doing.

And you're like, you're bringing back to those nostalgic features. And that's a big win for us to have somebody that's involved in that community say we're doing the right things. So I understand what the art style for the game is but why this sort of art style? Why did you want to go for this gothic Doom, Dishonored, Bloodborne style look to it? I think for us we sort of looked at what else is out there in the market you got games like killing floor warhammer vermin tides cod

zombies of course as well um in in that wave shooter sort of genre and there wasn't really anything that specifically drawn from like demonic dark fantasy i think in the way that we're trying to do um they're almost semi--medieval fantasy to a certain degree with tech woven into that as well. So we wanted to differentiate from other games to really create a core universe that people could identify as unique and really get behind, I think,

is the core reason there. Okay. Well, why... Why actually wanting... Why did you want to go and make a zombie-style game in the first place? Because there's so many other... Even just in the FPS genre. I know you said that the modern zombies games don't really...

Or modern zombies modes don't really fill the void that people want from it. But I assume that you had a lot of experience playing that and other members of the team probably had experience playing with that growing up and maybe I assume don't like what's going on with the modern games. So this is where having my co-founder here would be amazing. Jackson, he was the core inspiration for Blood Reaver at the crux of it, where he sort of came to me and was like, Ewan, you're great at producing teams.

I've got this amazing idea. I've identified this niche in the market for the Cod Zombies audience. I've got a great idea. Let's try to bring that together. So that was really him being a massive fan himself and saying, you know what, there are problems that I believe us as a team can fix. And then it just sort of snowballed from there really. We started building the team and picking out the best people from each discipline and saying

we want you and you're an amazing level designer, you're on the team now sort of thing. So what did it look like when it first started? When it was just that like proof of concept. Funnily, when we first started there was a whole divergent version of the game where we were originally concepting where it was all about Norse gods and mythology and then there was like I think high-tech semi-fantasy elements in some sort of the level design and we were gonna set it in Scandinavian Europe and after a few days of this I sort of the level design and we were going to set it in Scandinavian Europe. And after a few days of this, I sort of was like, I think we got a couple too many references.

And as a team, we sort of sat down and go, oh, let's pick one of these, one of these. And then Demons sort of came out. Yeah. So we went around with a lot of different ideas and then sort of picked the best and found the ones that gelled most well together and then other stuff that didn't feel like we we had the breadth of the time to really investigate and do justice well it's not like those ideas are necessarily bad and maybe you know if you want to do something further in the future you could certainly build off of like i i I do think, like, something

Norsenspite actually would be really, really cool. Like, I, you know, I get, like, the whole demons thing and all that. That's really cool. But I definitely cannot... Like, Killing Floor at least has that sort of inspiration in a sense. Going

completely outside of zombies and demons and trying something entirely different i don't know it could work if you had like the ideas that could fit with it you know it's something that we found recently when um we were we were ideating on some of the new demons that were working on it like for the core horde uh more specifically it's, how do you create an enemy type visually that can move slowly and then can also move really fast, but it doesn't look like from any point that it's holding its power back? So how do you design some kind of humanoid that is either restricted or is super powerful that doesn't really,

it doesn't feel like when they're attacking you that, like, they're being held back by anything. Right. And so demons and the way that we've started concepting demons now, which is sort of more, I guess, like tortured, undead, like possessed, you can say, sort of fills that void while, you know, with zombies, they can do that really well where limbs are missing, you know, heads are off and whatnot, and they look like their legs are broken, so they walk slowly. Trying to find a way that we could do that with demons as well was actually such a design challenge. And we worked really hard with

a concept artist to come up with a motif for what we're moving to now that allows us to do that and really have that wave evolution to make you feel like, you know, these demons are becoming more powerful and they're, they're unleashing their full potential on you. What actually goes into like designing the enemies for something like this? Because obviously I, I only saw probably like the first two enemy types. I saw the regular horde sort of demons and then the big dude to slap you and then you die. But what else is present in the game at this point and sort of like what really goes into concepting something like this?

So in terms of designing a demon, something that we really considered first is like, again, the universe that they exist in. How do these demons come to be? Why are they the way they are? And that sort of informs all of your initial referencing for how you construct them. So we sort of went away and did a bunch of world building and came up with the answers for those questions. And then started to push again, like what I just mentioned about how do you have consistent web evolution that feels right to the player, identifying body proportions, style of decay or body gore, for example. And then we bring all those references together at a bank that we give off to an artist alongside a brief of saying this enemy needs to do X, Y, and Z. We then go through an initial round

of concepting where they just put out a load of ideas with drastically different sort of interpretations of the references. And then from there, we sort of pick out a few pieces. Oh, we really like this design. That piece of how you draw that arm is really good. Let's reference that again. And then you go into stage two where it's like, okay, we've got the style established. Now let's find the one that we're going to do a turnaround of so you get front side back uh perspectives done um and yet you've got that and then you do sort of a final color version of the demon that then gets given to an artist um so they can create in 3d and realize right yeah so it's it's quite a long process from concepts to in the game gold standard, especially for an enemy like this, sort of like our core horde enemy. It takes a few months to say the least.

And, you know, as one of the ones where we're building on top of our pipeline at the minute as well, there's always back and forth and establishing things for the future. Yeah, definitely takes a good amount of time. With the regular horde enemy, are they just like the same enemy or is there some variation between them? So it's interesting. In the version that you can play on it right now, the base mesh, the base body of the demons are the same. Sure.

But then their skin tone, their demonic sigils on their bodies and the horns, the shackles on their wrists and their ankles are all generated at runtime. And it's actually a really good point that you bring this up, because last year when we were working on that version of the demon, I was like, oh, now we've got 16 billion possible variations of demon in the game. It's amazing, it's amazing. But, you know, in practice, when you actually start playing

and you're looking at those demons over and over, round after round, there actually isn't enough silhouette change that really actually makes somebody go, oh, those are unique. So we've completely changed our process now of how we're approaching that, where instead of generating random attachments, you could say on onto demons

when they when they spawn it's now where we're sort of working towards a set of uh while similar bespokely unique uh like base horde enemies so one might have a completely different head uh completely different set of like spikes and and dismemberment sort of qualities about them but across the board they're all still of the same class of demon, if that makes sense. Right. Yeah. So the process becomes more involved.

Because I think of a game like Dynasty Warriors, for example, like you're swinging through hundreds of enemies. Like, you know, it's not a super important detail because you're going to sort of forget what they look like relatively quickly. But if everything that's running at you looks like a copy paste of the exact same model, it just ends up looking cheaper. Absolutely. Absolutely.

It's something that we've noticed and we're working really hard behind the scenes to make sure that the base horde is bespokely different and unique across the sort of horde. So I'll reference it this way as well. Like, Cod Zombies, for example, they've got the liberty where they can dress their horde in different sets of clothing, but they all sort of look similar, but next to each other, they are unique. And it's like, how do you do that with a naked demon? And that's a design challenge um and that's something a design challenge that we've been sort of looking into recently as well so yeah like i sort of said

completely bespoke heads body types with different levels of sort of like gore and spikes all coming out of them to create the illusion of um that sort of like clothes motif uh again to sort of give that sort of like differentiated differentiation between all the base demons. But I assume also making them similar enough where you can tell that they are the same enemy type and you're not worrying about a new mechanic that is going to... Yeah. So it's such a design

challenge to do that, to not push it too far at the same time as well because we've got a new enemy type that we're actually working on right now called the Bloater, which basically is is a lesser demon the the base horde enemy but then they've got like huge growths all over the side of their body um and that is bespokely different from any of the others to indicate that that has additional mechanics um to to fight against you with right yeah right because it's easy enough to distinguish

when there's like a size difference, you know, the regular ones and the big ones. But when it's a more subtle one like that, I could certainly see there being a lot of discussions around how should this be designed to make it actually clear to the player. Because you don't want the player to feel like what happened just now was unfair, where they just couldn't tell that there was an enemy that was different yeah

yeah so it's it's definitely a big design challenge in lots of different areas of game development but you know having a roster of enemies that you can clearly identify through silhouette that they have different functions is so important. And again, we're working with our team and our concept artists to make sure that that is really clearly identifiable from all sorts of different levels of distance. One thing you mentioned in there was dismemberment. Like, is that in the game right now? What's the plan around dismemberment? So with the Itch version, again, that was was sort of made i don't know if we mentioned it before but uh that was made

over four months as like a proof of concept itch um i guess just how different is the version to what was shown at avcon or is that that is the same that is the same version okay so you've seen that version of the game uh now internally now we're working on some like multiplayer and everything and all these new demons so that version is is a bit further ahead now we're working on some like multiplayer and everything and all these new demons. So that version is a bit further ahead, but we're waiting for a couple more months before we show anything off there. Going back to what you said before, just remind me. Yes. What was the original question?

Oh, dismemberment. Oh, dismemberment. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So in the Itch version right now, there's no dismemberment, but in the version we're working on now, there will be at least partial dismemberment of the demons. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Do you want to say what that's going to indicate gameplay-wise, or is this going to be a visual thing?

It'll be a... There are mechanics around why you might dismember a demon from the waist down, for example. Again, if you've played something like Zombies, you know there's the tactic of creating a crawler to allow you to move around the map and not have to worry about zombies. So that's definitely something we're looking into.

And also for special enemies, dismembering certain limbs to knock off a bespoke weapon that they might be using against you as well. So, yeah, we're developing, as Doom coined it, the destructible demon system of our own. So we're looking into that, yeah. Right. I think of something like Dead Space, for example. Obviously a much slower game, but dismemberment is a very core part of dealing with encounters and that. Definitely. Just all of that stuff from a development standpoint is, it adds so many elements onto the pipeline of how you create enemies.

But with a game like this, your enemies and how you defeat them are part of the core concept of the game. So we really are pushing towards making that as tight as possible. Right, because it's fundamentally a relatively simple game loop. Like, as soon as you work out how to play the game, like, these games all turn into the same idea, which is you run around in the circle, you get the zombies to chase you, the demons to chase you, and then you shoot them down.

There's obviously different demons that are going to come in later, but that's the core fundamental way that it all goes down. So having some way to break that up, having exciting things that happen to the demons like dismemberment definitely breaks that up.

And you want to have a core game loop you don't want it to feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again no absolutely and i think that's where for us um our ability system uh our blood magic combat system can shine um where you know you've got drastically different ways to to with demons. You've got now in the game, not in the itch build, but ultimate abilities where you charge those over time by defeating more demons, and then you've got a whole different way to take them down. So I think we're definitely aware of that problem,

especially high-round gameplay in similar games. It's like, oh, you're just doing the same thing wave after wave, and it's like, how do you give the player something to to break that up and allow them to sort of have more ways to engage with the enemies as opposed to just i shoot this guy i run away i shoot a big enemy right a high wave is something um i think we might have talked about at avcon as well like that is like at some point you've introduced all of the enemies you're going to introduce. You've unlocked the entire map.

You've found all the weapons. You've got the upgraded versions of the weapons. Like at that point, what do you do to keep someone wanting to play it? Or do you even want to keep someone playing it at that point? Or is there like a, a point where you're like, okay,

you can keep going, but we've effectively decided that this is the end. So we've actually got two things that we're working on for that. So like some of the more recent zombies entries, they started to include an exfiltration system where you can choose to leave

the game and end your run at a certain point for a point value. That is something that we're including as options for players. You know, you say you do all the things you want in the map, you can choose to leave. But also with a discoverable narrative, that also offers a canon ending at the end of each Easter egg,

you could say, for leaving the map in the most, the good ending, you could say, of each map. So we're offering players sort of multiple ways to complete all of their, not quite objectives, but their personal goals within the run and then leave at certain points. So with that map that was available for the Avacon build, the HIO build, how big was that map? Because I saw like three different rooms before dying, but I did notice there were a couple of doors that I hadn't opened yet. So in that particular map, it's the beginning of the end. It's one of the maps that will be available in early access, which is

actually getting significantly larger internally, which is great. But in that version, as you can play right now, there's a total of seven or eight rooms i believe uh you've got the exterior of the cathedral you've got the graveyard and the main entry area the garden and then you've also got the inside of the cathedral where a lot of the the uh later round sort of gameplay might take place so you've got the actual um in a in a sort of chapel and then you've got the library to the side is that that the one that's shown in the Steam trailer? I believe so, yeah. I tried to get all of the areas in that trailer at some point,

so you should be able to see the whole thing. Okay, right, right, right. Oh, yep, yeah, I see. I think this is... Yeah, this looks like a cathedral, yeah. Okay. So what we actually tried to do with that as well is design the spaces to push players around the maps at different points.

So the cathedral, the chapel itself, is super tight. But then there are gameplay reasons why you have to go in there. We've also placed what we believe is the best weapon in that space and the best ability as well. So, you know, having to go into there, trap yourself in the area for the ritual. Yeah, like there's reasons to go to all of the spaces at different times one thing we kind of um we'll get back back to that but one thing we kind of jumped over was the um ability system the the blood magic system so as someone's playing the game how do they interact with that so right now as the game stands you've got um firing your weapons on your right hand with

the left click of the mouse, and then abilities are on your left click. So left and right click for the two sides of the combat system. How that works though is what we like to call the blood magic economy, where you're shooting demons with your weapons and using your bullets, and that gains you their blood that then you can use your abilities with. And bullets, and that gains you their blood that then you can use your abilities with. And yeah, so it's that constant balance of using the weapons to power your abilities and then dealing massive damage with said abilities.

So I think a lot of people come into this game being like, oh, I'm just going to use the weapons. But we've actually balanced the system so that the weapons damage really falls off as you get later and later into the game to really push players to use your abilities a whole lot more.

And yeah, so your weapons are your point gainers or your blood gainer and then the ability is like the big damage dealer that you'll have on the other hand. Yeah, because I noticed that early on you get to the graveyard, there's the shotgun there or whatever it is. Early on early on, you get to the graveyard.

There's the shotgun there or whatever it is. Early on, at least, you can just fire down hordes, not really think about it. Is there a bonus damage for a headshot? I couldn't tell. There is, yes. You do bonus damage, and I think you get bonus points for headshots on kills as well. Okay, I was just aiming headshots for everything anyway. as points for headshots on kills as well. Okay, I was just aiming headshots for everything anyway.

But yeah, at that point, like first couple of rounds in, like you're just firing things down. And I think at that point you can also grab the sword. Is that right? Yes, you can. If you're in the graveyard,

you can get one of your first two abilities. So the starting ability, that is just like the little pea-shooter blood magic thing? Yeah. Blood knife, I think it's called, if I remember correctly. So that's sort of like almost an SMG in your hand that fires out little blades of blood daggers at the enemies. And then you can grab the sword in the next room and yeah i guess this sort of leads me into the thing i was saying earlier about like the animations um you so

you guys have artists on the team but you don't have animators and yeah yeah it's like it's they're not horribly bad but i can tell that they were not made by an animator like they serve the function but I think the sword feel like the sword is the worst offender in my mind at least from what I played because it you just like

it's this big great sword thing and as I was saying earlier it kind of feels like slapping them with a pool noodle like it's powerful but it just doesn't feel powerful I I absolutely agree with you and it's one of the the biggest bits of feedback we've gotten so far and again like proof of concept for the base game yeah yeah features um but yeah animations are a big thing and we're we're looking into uh bringing on an animator to our team at the moment as well to really get sort of that higher quality that the rest of the game deserves to have. Yeah, yeah.

It is definitely something that we're super aware of. We know how they need to look. It's just something as a limitation within any team, really. You've got areas that you don't have the skills for. And it's an area that sorely needs a lot of work. And I can confidently say I think we've got a good solution coming in the newer versions of the game

there's not much of the sword in the trailer oh no there is I think there's one shot there's like three seconds and then it's like later in the video yeah here it is like it's also hard to tell like how far the range of

the sword is um like melee weapons are always going to be a bit weird in the game like this because you always want to be standing away from the enemies but the melee weapon you're getting close with it and because of the the animations and the enemies as well, it's hard to tell how close you can be without getting hurt. Yeah, so that's just all stuff that we will be working very hard on dialing in. The user experience

feedback on something like that is so important to make sure people understand when they're going to get hit, if they can move out of the way, and when, say, a sword swing actually connects with an enemy. And that's where potentially a destructible demon system might come in really handy to really see those sort of attacks connect because when i like the first thing because of the rsl people are going to think of you know is things like the melee weapons in doom like you hit someone with it and it's like you feel like you hit something with like

and not even just that but like the guns as well i feel like with the guns there's also a lack of response from the enemies i don't i don't know if there is any sort of response um but if whatever response is there it's like yes you're hitting them and yes you can kind of tell you're hitting them, and yes, you can kind of tell you're hitting them, but they're not like flinching in any way, or at least any really noticeable way. Do you guys have a sound guy? So amongst us designers, we've done a lot of the sound ourselves. Two varying levels of success, I think. For certain weapons, like the revolver, for example, I worked with Jetson, our co-founder,

to sort of bespokely make all the sort of pullback of the triggers, the shooting sounds, what an actual sort of revolver might have. Some weapons and enemies got more attention than others, I guess, in sort of the time we were developing. Because it's not just animation that gives you impact, it's the sound of hitting something as well. Like, if you hit someone with a sword,

there should be some sort of clear slashing and cutting and bleeding sound. And if you hit someone with a gun, the gun should have a really impactful sound and there should be some sort of impact to the enemy. I'm sure you've thought about all of these things before, but it is definitely, for me like the major thing about the game like the the rest of it i can clearly tell there is a lot of work that's gone into it and it's like it's still fairly early on

but it feels quite polished for the state that it's in yeah then held back by like how it feels to hit things how it feels to interact with things and like it's sad because that's like it's not something you think about straight away when you're playing a game but it is something that is very noticeable when it's missing yeah yeah so it's um like sound design and animation design is so important especially in like an FPS game. And it's just unfortunate, I think, in the current state of the team that we don't have anybody that's got the professional experience that we really needed, at least before.

We are looking into those solutions now to hopefully bring that quality up. And we're fully aware of this being the weakest part of the game. And yeah, it's something that I can assure you will be being changed heavily in the future. I did see there was a Reddit post from like one of the times that the trailer was posted where someone pointed this out

and like whoever responded, whoever was on the Reddit account at the time was like, yeah, we know. We're still going to be reworked. Oh, it was you? Yeah, yeah. Actually, as I've been mentioning as well, I was talking about the demons before.

Both the demons you see in the demo are being entirely reworked um the lesser demon and the chaos demon the two that are available there we're actually in full production for their full full uh reworks at the minute um i think from what i showed people over the weekend because we've got concepts and some 3d stuff coming through the pipeline people are like oh you thought they were cool before? Now they're 10 times better. Okay, that's good to hear. That is really good to hear.

Because I thought, like, the... I think the, like, the lesser demon, like, they worked a lot better from what I could tell. Like, the bigger ones, they... I assume those were added later on and maybe didn't have as much polish to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You can say that again. It's ironic you actually bring that up because when we first had our initial launch build on Itch, the Chaos Demon actually had a magic ranged attack where it would fire magic sigil circles in a predictive manner, under the player's feet, where it would fire like magic sigil circles in a predictive manner, sort of under the player's feet, where it would predict where you were running to and then fire them right under you. And we found that without fail,

every fifth round, players were dying because it was so, so hard and the feedback on it just wasn't there whatsoever. So we actually, in about three or four days, stripped that out and re-added its melee attacks but even still like just adding a bigger enemy that has a bit more of a range wasn't that interesting and we're currently concepting the uh the new mechanics for that enemy and i can i can tell you now that they're looking pretty cool by the scene well one of the

things that is obviously going to be something you have to design around is the speed of the player because it's it's one thing to just you know if you're walking around with like in zombies you can design them to walk at the speed of a person you're not moving the speed of a person this one you're moving the speed of like i don't know if as fast as in doom but it's fairly close and if you don't have some way to counter that with the enemies as no matter what sort of enemies you add you can just run away from them in a and be halfway across the screen within like two steps it doesn't really matter what's done there so i assume there's some design being done around that as well oh definitely around the movement right now we're really dialing that in I think a lot of us internally in the team are like oh it's probably

a little bit too fast for the type of game that it is right now um so yeah there's definitely a lot of consideration going into that and of course with with enemy types being able to slow the player down potentially environmental hazards doing the same as well um yeah we're definitely cooking on a bunch of that stuff well i would think you like it'd also be interesting to have enemies that are close to the speed of the player or maybe do like charges at the player so the speed actually does matter to get away from them in those cases you know it's great to hear you saying this because it reaffirms that things we're working on people are interested in and people

are like oh naturally that might work for the game and it's like well just you wait and see because again I think of games like Doom and they have similar things or Left 4 Dead which have their big like bulky charger dudes but in that game you are like fairly slow so getting away from them is

like a big challenge but yeah no absolutely like I'm very glad to hear that you guys you are like fairly slow so getting away from them is like a big challenge. But yeah, no absolutely like I'm very glad to hear that you guys are thinking of the same sort of ideas here and you have been I guess listening to a lot of the player feedback and sort of building around that. How do you find yourself going through player feedback? Because that um how do you how do you find yourself going through player feedback because i i can speak from my perspective of doing youtube stuff there are people who are going to tell you things that directly conflict with what other people tell you where you're like okay you both cannot be right because you are saying opposite things so i think something that that a lot of us designers learned while we were studying is that you know know, all feedback is not weighted equally.

And at times you need to see a bunch of feedback and then actually just pick out what's useful out of it. So somebody might go, oh, the game's bad. And like, cool, that's your opinion. That's not necessarily useful feedback. Or, you know, I really love this feature about this thing. And they go into minute detail about, you know, or maybe you tweak this feature to be a little more like this. That's good feedback.

That's something you maybe write down and then reflect on later once you've had other people to give similar feedback. Yeah, it's definitely a thing you learn as a developer and I assume as a content creator as well, is that all feedback is not necessarily made equal. developer and i assume as a content creator as well as the all feedback is not necessarily made equal and uh you've got to sift through it all like um yeah to to get the best stuff out of it um but in terms of feedback as well something that we actually have um working with us is our publisher they have external feedback agencies where they can sort of give out the game to to people that it's their job to

to to give feedback on game features and whatnot so we've had a few rounds of that so far and the things that come out of that are really really useful because they're employed people that it's their job doing that sort of stuff um but a lot of it that we're actually getting back is stuff we're already working on which again just reaffirms a lot of the time that we're internally moving in the right direction yeah well what was the um the feedback like from avcon like i i did see there was some people in there that were getting relatively high rounds that experience with these kinds of games but i assume you also would have had people who it was their first time trying a game like this who didn't really know what to expect and those people are the interesting ones because they're going to interact with it in a way that might be unexpected if you've played a

game like zombies you know okay i kill these i have this money in the corner i can go buy a weapon on the wall here i can unlock a door like this but what about those people who just didn't know what they were getting into? So I think with people, I guess you could consider them your secondary audience, if you will. Once they sort of sit down and play for a few seconds, they get attacked by a few demons. They're like, oh, my screen's going red. I'm probably getting damaged. They start to realize and learn pretty quickly from what we found that you need to shoot demons. And then, you know, just the way that the sort of user interface is displayed, you've got that counter on the side of the screen

with bright yellow numbers going up. Yeah, for people that haven't played before, it can be a few rounds worth of learning. And we sort of account for that in the game's balance, you know, gradually increasing the sort of difficulty from waves one to sort of three are your, increasing the sort of difficulty from waves one to sort of three are your here's your time to really just mess around and try try learn the mechanics with very slow moving demons um but yeah it sort of really ramps up at round four and then round five you have your first boss round which as we as we sort of coined internally in the team separates the boys from the men um so the chaos demon tends to be the thing that really kills people the first time around but i kept standing in that really thin alleyway yeah i don't know

why i was there i could be anywhere else besides there one thing we really noticed from avcon was that if people did die at the chaos demon they were like can i play again and try to be better so it's sort of the game that inspires you to sort of oh you, I died, great, cool, but I want to try again. I want to beat that enemy or I want to get to that next round and see that next area, for example. But absolutely, as you're sort of saying, of like new player experience, a tutorial can be super important in a game like this.

I think as a new IP especially, it's something that we'll absolutely look into later in development. You know, naturally you do that towards the end of your cycle. But yeah, the new player experience is really, really vital, I think. Yeah, that's... With a game like this, you don't really need that much of a tutorial because the core loop is fairly simple. But at least, I guess,

introducing players to how the purchasing system works. It can be, if you haven't played a game like this, it might be kind of counterintuitive that you get a weapon from the wall. Like, why are there weapons on the wall? Like, okay, that's weird. Or like, work how the revive works because i i got it straight away because there's like some other games that have done similar things but

you die and then it's like why is everything blue like i thought it was over yeah i do now so i think with the the revival mechanics as they sort of are in the game right now that was a a bit of a cop-out on our end to have a full revival system given that the game's single player. We obviously will, with multiplayer coming in, have a proper down state and players sort of running back to each other and reviving each other. But being a single player experience to start with, we needed to come up with a way that people could keep playing and having sort of like an undead mode where you run back to your body seems the most appropriate for the type of game we have right now.

That whole mechanic, though, is becoming something map specific in one of the maps we're working on now, though. So it's not going away, but we are reincorporating it in a different way. Okay, okay. So at this stage, how many maps are planned for the game? So in the full release, or I guess I should say our early access release of the game, we'll be launching with two. And then halfway through early access, our plan is to drop a third. This is exclusive information, I believe.

And then the full game will launch with four. There's our current development plan, at least. I think it says the maps on the steam page actually i believe that is out of date now because we've added some more things okay okay because it says our last stand beginning of the end and the vast of vasifar how do you say that the decipher the cipher i've never seen what does that mean what does that i've never seen that word before that is something for the players to discover in the game oh i see i see okay i thought it was like some word that already existed okay makes sense cool yeah it is not something that exists it's

something that we have made for the universe this isn't just me being stupid then awesome that's a nice change okay so two maps initially one later on, and what is the long-term... Obviously this is going to depend on how the game goes, but what is the long-term support plan for it? After early access is done, after the game is ready to ship, whatever term you want to use for it, what happens then? So us as developers, we love this IP already. And, you know, if enough people buy the game, we want to support this game for a long time.

Internally already, we have got plans for, I guess, quarterly DLC, you could say, where we drop a new map, new weapons, new story continuation each quarter over the course of probably a year, year and a half. And, you know, if that all goes well and people are still loving what we're doing, we'll go for a season two and then continue on. So idealistically, I think by the time the game sort of reaches its sort of like limit and like sunset period, you could say, we'd love to have eight or nine maps in the game. Okay. And they are being concepted already we are

future planning ourselves so we know where where that story might be taking the players but um yeah that is that is a couple of years in the pipeline you could say do you have a guy whose job is to like keep the story in check or is that like a thing that everyone's getting involved in so in terms of our narrative team there is three members of the team, all from the different disciplines, two of which have creative writing degrees. And I think one of them, Alf has written books before,

as far as I remember. So yeah, there's a pretty robust narrative team behind things and making sure the story makes sense and the way we want to sort of push the narrative to the players and let them discover it i think is being being worked on pretty well from from what i understand so you can be vague here not to give spoilers but how is the story going to be told i guess how do i how do I say this? The beginning of the end, which is the map that you've played so far, set on the cathedral. When the full game rolls around, you'll be introduced to four characters.

These are mentioned on the same page, I believe? Yes, I believe so. Artemis, Saxon, Edward and Ren. Yes. So you'll be introduced to those characters who, for whatever reason, happen to do something to reignite an ancient war and

unleash the demons back on the world. And it's their job to sort of discover why that happened and why they can now use blood magic and follow the story through their eyes so that's all i think i can say on it at the minute okay well is it gonna i i'm trying to get something out of you that's not good that you can actually like is it going to be told in a way similar to zombies where you're going to do things in the map and it's going to tell you

parts of the story? Yes, absolutely. So all of the narrative that we will be pushing out to the players is discoverable. So through Easter eggs, through a continuous timeline progressing from map to map. Yeah, it's all there for the players to discover. There'll be things on walls in the environment that might give you a hint towards something that might not even appear for three maps um that sort of thing we want to be able to build a universe here and build a connected world that people sort of go oh my god i learned this thing in this map down here that now makes something make sense back in the very first map that might have played six months

ago so you've made so it's going to be a co-op game is there going to be some sort of interaction between the characters that are like playing in there then so we are currently looking at ways on how we can uh incorporate voice acting and uh characters speaking to each other to show off more of the narrative um obviously with that, it's quite expensive and we're just sort of looking at the best ways to sort of find talent for that at the minute. But there is definitely plans for a narrative system where, you know, for example,

Ren might say something to Artemis in response to a location event there, for example, that might progress some personal story. I'm sure there's a lot of things that you would like to do that are just a matter of funding time finding people to do it absolutely you know being a small studio we recognize that you know some of our competitors as competitors are triple a games with 300 million dollar budgets we are not that, unfortunately. And there is only so much we can do,

but we're really going to push hard to become a competitor in this genre, you could say. I think just on that as well, like referencing a game that came out recently, like Skur Ritual, for example, that's made by a small indie team as well, and they're doing really, really well. So if we can sort of hit similar benchmarks to them,

I think we'll be very happy. Well, you mentioned that you've already got like a bunch of people who've wishlisted it at this point. Yes, we just hit 5,200, I believe, after being on Steam for about two months, which is incredible. If any of you guys out there are listening have wishlisted, thank you so much.

We love the support. It's amazing to see, you know, a small team of developers, you know, being able to show their work to the world and people actually say, you know, I maybe might buy that, which is really cool. That is really cool. I'm sure that you had never expected that sort of response to it. Oh, no, not, not I guess this early on Definitely that was a big shock

We sort of hit a few thousand in the first month or two And then we were like, oh wow, this is still going It's just great to really see the sort of numbers that we're starting to pull in That is awesome When's the game targeted for release? Or early access? So at the minute, we're looking to launch early access in possibly September next year

to line up with Steam Nextpost and PAX. But we'll have sort of Kickstarter and closed beta demos throughout next year. That's the plan. Okay. And then full release into the plan. Okay. And then a full release into 2026. Okay. If everything goes to plan, of course.

That's the biggest issue. Yeah. Assuming you don't have some crazy idea, I was like, hmm, what if we add this new system that's going to take a little bit of time to do that interacts with every other system yeah, so that's really my job

within the team, when half of the guys come up with this crazy idea of like oh let's add this flying demon that spits out fireballs and throws you across the map, I go maybe not, maybe Blood Reaper 2 right, right no, it definitely

is conditional on everything going to plan and we're not over scoping and adding too many systems that don't need to be there for now at least but you know we are thinking about the future and how we can get to a release as soon as possible yes scope creep is always a concern with any project doesn't matter if it's a game project an open source i don't know desktop or anything you want to do scope creep especially when that scope creep gets outside of the initial like it's one thing when you're expanding within the scope what you're doing and like you know cool things in here but when you're like okay well what if we add this new system that's way outside the scope yeah well okay we've got that now

what if we start expanding off of that and you can get to a point where you just never end up releasing something so in terms of scope creep have you ever heard of star citizen yeah um what is the money they brought in

700 million yeah I've been a follower for a long time and it's like I've gone from early high school to now working in the games industry before the games released. They've released things. There's like some- Oh, yeah. They've got like, I think it's like a shooter thing. There's like a ship demo thing. They also have like $48, 000 dlc so you know yes yeah like i as a developer i love following it i love seeing it progress and obviously you can play the game but you know the the scope creep and sort of that might be written in the annals of history one day for one of those games that grew so much well there are some cool things coming out of that project though.

I don't know if you've ever seen what they've done with server meshing. Oh yeah. I find it really interesting as a developer. For anyone who hasn't heard about that, the problem with MMOs is you have different servers and no one likes different servers. Especially in

most traditional MMOs where you have to pay to transfer. I grew up playing RuneScape. So going to something like Final Fantasy XIV and learning that people pay to go between servers was wild to me. Because in RuneScape, you could just click to the different world. Like, I'm here now. Whatever. I want to play in Poland today.

I'm playing in Poland today. But the idea with server meshing is... And they didn't come up with the idea, but they've got some crazy stuff they're working on with it. Basically, you have different servers serving different parts of the map, and all of them interact with each other. So if you're in two different parts of the map, and you do an attack, for example, that crosses a server boundary, that attack can then still hit an enemy through those different servers. So this allows you to have these giant maps with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of players in them.

And theoretically, if it fits together and works, you just have a seamless game. As the great Todd Howard once said, it just works. It just works. Yeah. Nah, in all seriousness though, like, I've been following that project for years. I think it's amazing what they're doing.

Um, people joke about Scope Creep as a $48,000 DLC, but I really genuinely hope it comes out one day, cause you know, I've always had my full HOTAS system to play it and my team I'm the guy in the team that follows Star Citizen so we talk about it occasionally and talk about all that stuff and everybody bullies me

for having spent money on it back in the day Oh? Do you want to say how much you've spent? Oh no I only bought a $48 ship I'm pretty sure. I was never somebody to buy one of the $300, $400 ones. Yeah. Okay, just had to check.

Yeah, no. As a game developer, of course, I'm not making that much money, so I don't really have the money to spend on imaginary ships right now. Right, right. Well, one thing you brought up earlier is that you guys do actually have a publisher so what does a publisher actually do for you because i've spoken to some game devs who are doing things entirely on their own they don't want to have a publisher they don't want to get involved in that they just want to do things how they're doing things but for your team

what is having a publisher do and why did you guys decide to get involved with a publisher? So for us, having a publisher means that we can just be exposed to a lot more people across the board. So they do a lot of our marketing for us and sort of assist us with social media, community management, all that sort of thing. community management all that sort of thing um like recently i think actually better still when we first launched our steam page our publisher had a sale on the front page of steam at the time so immediately from launch we were directly on the front page of steam which you know gave us i think something like a thousand wish lists in like the first 48 hours which you know as as indie developers probably never possible um without something like that, I guess, in the state that we sort of are right now. Yeah, which was amazing to sort of like see that sort of like reach almost immediately.

And I guess more recently with the IGN Summer of Games Festival, our publisher again had like a showcase and we were featured in that too. So we got a trailer on IGN and we were on Steam again. And it's just like that stuff is just, I guess, financially locked for so many small developers. Like, I don't know how much it costs, but I can't imagine we'd be able to afford it on our own. So on that side of things, they do a lot of work for us. And on the creative side too, they aid us in producing graphic assets for social media, trailers and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of things they do, but not necessarily game development orientated. That's all on us.

Yeah. Well, social media stuff is one of those things where i see a lot of indie game devs just kind of ignore or they just let i guess one thing i really i see a lot of uh indie studios is maybe they'll like be active on social media like for a months, and then it's radio silent for three months, six months, and it's like, hey, here's an update for the game, and I get that, like, the social media stuff is a job unto itself, actually doing that well, doing that consistently, keeping updates and stuff about the game, like, that's, that's also difficult, but I feel like that's, that's one of the areas that a lot of people really just leave on the table, that is many ways like that's for a lot of games now a big part of your marketing like if you have some video that goes semi-viral on twitter or like on youtube on on tiktok even like that's a big part

of getting people to know about the game and it really needs to be given that sort of attention oh absolutely i totally agree like um social media is is a full-time job for any team member and i can't imagine you know like working in like a one or two man team where you're trying to make a game and then three days of the week you're doing tiktok posts and instagram reddit facebook everything else it's else. It is its full-time job. And I think for me right now, between me and one other team member, we kind of manage that stuff for us. But even now, I know we're probably not doing enough. We haven't gotten TikTok yet, which I know we need to. And it just feels like you're pushing

out these posts, but they're not really reaching enough people because we're probably not doing the right thing yet. It's like you throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks uh really and it's just it's an iterative process i think um yeah from when we started posting i was uh like my posting style i guess on how we make content for the team has changed quite considerably because you know some things got more views than others and it's like oh maybe way that way of displaying the graphics was more interesting to people it's like i, I didn't study, I guess, media and social media science or anything like that.

And I guess we're trying as best as we can with it. But a publisher can be a massive help on that regard. Yeah, I didn't study it either. I've just winged it this entire time. And I think that... Do by learning. Yeah, pretty much. There's this...

I think there's a lot of good resources out there as well. Like, it's not like you have to go through a formal education to work out how these things work. Like, there's so many... Like, YouTube is a great learning resource for anything that you're unsure about. Like, even just, you know... Even if you guys don't find an animator, for example,

if somebody wants to also pick up more animation skills, like, there's so many good resources out there on how to do animation, how different tooling works, like, what's the benefit of different tooling? Like, all these different things that just weren't really available in this same sort of way,

even just a couple of years ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's like YouTube is just such a massive resource for learning these days. Like, I remember when I first started getting into game dev, like, if I had questions that I didn't get answered in class, I'd go watch a Brackeys video or a CodeMonkey video and just learn it myself.

And yeah, it's open and free for pretty much anybody in the world which is it's even better one of the benefits of the internet i guess in this day of ai oh these days ai is an interesting one that people talk a lot about when it comes to like game dev and stuff i don't know where that's going to go like there's a lot of there's a lot of like legal concerns around it and like ip and all of those sorts of issues and i i really don't know what's actually gonna happen but i think we're gonna find some sort of answer within the next five or so years like i i do think we're in a bubble with it but but I don't think it's going to go away. Like the internet was a bubble back in the late 90s where every company was like,

I'm going to be company name.com. And it's like, okay, but what are you actually doing with the internet? Like, what is this actually adding to your product? And that's what you're seeing right now. Whereas a lot of things, there's a lot of like fast food places where it's like fast food with AI. It's like, okay, what are you doing though? What is your product? What are you

selling? No, I totally agree with you. It's definitely not going anywhere. We've got to learn to integrate and work with AI in the best ways possible, the most ethical ways, especially in the games and creative industries. I have tons of friends in the art side of the industry that are like fully against AI, don't put their work on certain websites anymore because they're being used in AI sort of networks. And yeah, it's just about, I guess, the larger corporations finding a way to tackle these ethical problems so that we can work, I guess, harmoniously with our AI overlords in the next 10 years.

That's certainly a way to put it. Yeah. If any Google homes are listening, please don't kill me. Okay, well, let's actually get back to the um the the game itself so when you were at avicon were there any issues that people brought up with the game that you weren't aware of that because i'm sure there's a lot of repeats of the same stuff you'd heard you know tons and tons of times before one thing i was surprised about with avcon this year like i i i'm usually the person who if a game has bugs i will be the person to find them and i'm surprised

by how little i found avcon this year like it was a lot of the games there were like really really rock solid and it was hard to break them yeah like i think a lot of devs put um a lot of effort into like their convention builds being the most stable possible and you know i remember talking to one of the teams that they're like oh we were up till 5 a.m fixing all the bugs the night before and it's like you know people really care about this sort of stuff and being able to showcase a polished piece of your work is so important. I think in terms of us though, 99% of people didn't encounter a single bug until one man sat down who now holds all of our highest records in the game. And he sat there for about two hours trying to break the game next to Aiden, our QA manager, being like, oh, I've

managed to get out of the map. And Aiden just goes, oh, God, I didn't fix that, did I? So, yeah, it's always great to learn that people are interested to break games. And if they can, you know, you just watch them do it and then find a way to fix it. I wish I'd found that one. That was, how did, do you recall how that happened like um there's so one of the abilities in the game right now is like a charge ability um which like pushes you forward and lets you like launch but you can jump at the same time that it activates and it'll launch

you up into the air so if you like do what's called like a double jump which you can actually do by like input cancelling with the with the game as it currently stands so you a double jump, which you can actually do by input cancelling with the game as it currently stands. So you can double jump and then launch yourself out of the map. There's some really, really interesting scenarios you can get yourself into. However, to be able to do that is actually really difficult

and again, 99.9% of the player base probably wouldn't really ever find that. And we were like, you know what, probably not worth investigating fixing for now, at least. But yeah, it's like that 0.1% of players will find how to break your game and show you up. Right, right. On funny bugs, actually, a couple of months ago, we put out a build when we were at Sage, the South Australian Games Exhibition, where there was just a barrier,

one of the doorways, one of the gates in the garden area of the game. And we realized there was just no collider on it. And you could just walk straight out of the map. And it's like nobody had ever tried. Nobody had ever found it. And we had no idea. And then somebody was just like like if I just walk straight through It's like you just clip through the metal and you're outside of the map and no enemies can attack you and I was like

That's amazing. Thank you for telling us I didn't get and fix it But yeah again, I think all of this to reinforces why QA quality assurance is so important with games You know like you you can make or break a games Reputation by releasing in a buggy state, you know, look at, you can make or break a game's reputation by releasing in a buggy state, you know, you can look at something like Cyberpunk or, or No Man's Sky that launched in a bad state and it took years to sort of build that community reputation sort of back. Um, yeah. We're trying our best to do that.

You mentioned Sage there. I completely forgot that this, uh, that this started. Like this is a really recent expo. Yeah, so Sage has been around for two years, and this year was the second time around. Yeah, it's a really great spot to be at. It's kind of like Avcom, but a little bit smaller. No anime stuff.

It's wholly about the games, which is really cool. Ironically, it's actually what got us a publisher in the end. We managed to talk to some people there, and they got talking to each other, and connections were sort of made. When was that? When was the event? It was back in February, and it happens... I believe it's happening every February from now on.

I will have to keep my eye on next year and actually go. I think as well with Sage, it's like one of those events that really, really showcases even more so than the indie games room, because the focus is all on the developers, just how much talent is coming out of South Australia at the minute. And it's, it's really,

really great to see that there's so many people studying and working just on creating awesome games. Yeah. Yeah. Cause when people think of like software development in australia the first thing people generally think of is sydney and melbourne but because those i think a big part of that is because like that's where i think google had their headquarters in oh the australian headquarters in sydney sydney or melbourne one of the two. And a bunch of other tech companies, they had their Australian headquarters

in one of those places as well. But they are just so astronomically expensive to live there at this point. South Australia is not cheap, but I think the median house price in Sydney is like $1.5 million.

Something stupid like that. It's insane. I recently read a news report that now Australia is more expensive than like London to live in or Adelaide's more expensive than London and it's just it's insane to think I think we're all doing it here I think the only place more expensive than Sydney is like Hong Kong but um the point I was getting at there is places like south australia are a lot cheaper so a lot of people are moving to south australia there's a lot of people who because there's more people here there's people who are finding other like-minded people who have interest in doing game development and when people think of like a game that came out of south australia like the

first thing everyone thinks of is hollow knight of course and i brought this up in like a recent episode i'm so sad by when i started going to avcon my first year was the year after hollow knight was at avcon so i missed it i just missed it but like that's not the only thing that we have in this state like there are other really cool projects that are here. Like, there's Blood Reaver. I've got the card here from Witch Way Up. I've got the guys from End of Ember on the other week. There's a bunch of really cool games that are being worked on.

And I really hope people start to see, like, what is actually coming out of this state. Absolutely. I think over the next few years, the dynamic's really going to change where we go from the one studio that people talk about, Team Cherry, of course, Hollow Knight, to now we're becoming one of those game dev hubs in Australia

that people can really go, Jesus, there's so much going on there. Yeah, yeah. It's exciting, not just like... It's exciting for everyone, not just just people who are doing the game development but for the people playing as well because you know it's it's cool to think like oh these are people who like with south australia being such a small place like in some cases like oh i went to the same high school as this person who made this really cool game. Like, oh, that's really cool. Or like, you know, like Adelaide is a tidy place, right? Like I will meet someone who's like, oh, I don't know you,

but like, oh, it turns out you were like friends with like my brother's cousin or something. Oh, hey, like how does this work? Sure. Two degrees of separation where any would go. That's what I like to say. It's, I don't know. Like, Adelaide, it's a tiny place,

but there is a lot of really cool stuff happening here. And I really hope that people start remembering that it exists. Yeah, it's weird because, like, I'm originally from the UK. I moved here nine years ago. I'm not sure you can tell with the accent anymore. But when I was told, you know, I was 15 and I was moving to Adelaide, I was like, what? Never heard

of it before. But now I've been to the other major Australian cities and I always come back to Adelaide being like, this is my home. This is my favourite out of all of them. There's much along about this city that people don't don't uh at first note which is great yeah yeah there's more here than just the malls balls exactly you've got pigeons as well and the pigs you have a lot of pigeons yes yes uh so one of the things i i didn't really ask about before was so you have the cool game loop of you go through the rounds you find a story you do all this stuff after you finish a round like

after you after you finish your run what happens then so we're sort of working on uh long-term progression mechanics to really sort of get the player player to want to play over a period of weeks, period of months, and stuff to earn and craft, you could say, outside of game as well. So something we're working on at the minute is called our Relic System, where in runs, you can collect what we're calling, at least internally, schematics for things. You can then exfiltrate, like we talked about earlier, leave the map early or whenever you want, with those schematics to allow you to craft things

that you can then bring into subsequent rounds. So that's one thing that we're sort of really looking on, how we can drive players to want to sort of play on a more long-term basis. On top of that as well, like unlocking calling cards for your sort of player profile. Yeah, there's a bunch of things that we are working on. I think a few I can't talk about just now.

But yes, there's definitely stuff we are considering of how do we get people to come back time and time again. Of course, with multiple maps as well, playing with your friends, doing the Easter eggs, discovering things on map three that you didn't know existed in map 1 we have toyed around with also doing some kind of challenge mode system reminiscent of Halo Skulls for example

but you know don't quote me on that if it never appears in the game we are definitely playing the whole mechanics there because that's always one of the reasons why I never I always went back and did like a couple of runs here and there when i was bored but i never really got super into doing zombies like i i like some sort of progression system like like you know it's just like something fairly minor

like this is like first thing people think of is like a roguelite like uh hades or dead cells where hades is a great example because you'll upgrade like the amount of health you have you upgrade your weapons you upgrade all of this like little things that you don't need to do it like it doesn't need to be you can get through the entire game without doing that but it adds something else you can work towards that's not just going through doing the same thing again. Because the other thing that a game like this is going to have is the weapon placement is all going to be in the same location. Unless there's some plan to shift stuff around. So we are actually moving more towards a pseudo mystery box system where only certain weapons will be available on the wall.

Only certain weapons will be available on the wall, and there'll be a lot of stuff that you can only get from some kind of random spinner mechanic that involves both weapons and abilities in that. Okay, okay. Yeah. And then I assume there's going to be some sort of, like, upgrade system, so it turns into, like, a pack-a-punch sort of system. Yeah, so we are doing what we call a blood infuseruser system where you can upgrade your weapons and your abilities as well. And we're also looking at how we can incorporate in-run perk upgrading or packs, should I say, equivalent perks where over time you can complete pseudo objectives with each pact, your demonic pact, your passive bonuses to make them more powerful.

And every time you reset, you'd have to do those again or get a different challenge sort of thing. So yeah, that progression that happens sort of in-game and out-of-game is something that we're really focusing on to try and make sure there's content for people that want to just play it once and want to play it for multiple months as well. So one thing with the weapons is, is there going to be like some sort of risk reward weapon? Because you think of something like the,

is it the upgraded ready gun where if you shoot it too close to your feet, you just might die? Yes. Yeah. Are you going to have anything like that where it's like really powerful, but if you are stupid with it, you will just ruin your run? Yeah. So there's definitely lots of different weapon stats that we're able to play with with the systems that have been made

now so you know like a blowback stat for example like you know you shoot within a certain range you inflict damage on yourself yeah um we're definitely looking into how we can have our range of weapons really um be diverse and of course as well are artifact weapons um which are much more demonic in nature which you know you can you can look at like your wonder weapons for example but yeah we're doing our own stuff with that um which will hopefully introduce some even more cooler mechanics on top of what what other games might offer i don't know if you want to say this yet but with your main hand weapon are you always thinking of it to be some sort of gun? Obviously there's a crossbow as well,

but is the plan to always keep it in that sort of gun sphere or are there ideas of things outside of just doing guns? So right now we've got your sort of weapons in one side of your combat system, but now we've actually added in the ability to aim down sight. And then you've sort of got abilities on your other hand, but now we've been working on a system that allows you to sort of like put away the guns and your other hand

and sort of go into an alternate state, if you will. So, you know, like putting your gun down and then sort of like bringing out two swords, for example, or what else can I say? There's a couple of things you probably leave to the release window. But yeah, we are planning on having stuff that replaces what's in your hands. So again, like reinforce alternate combat styles and like spicing up moment to moment sort of gameplay. Well, okay.

Balance is obviously a thing that's very i i don't know how you feel that balance is balance some people want their game to be where every weapon is viable sometimes you want it to be where there's something where it is a clear upgrade path where you know by the time you're in around 30 the basic weapons are just not going to be viable anymore but like what are your what are your thoughts on this so balancing games is obviously super important we've got two designers that towards the end of a project's life cycle their job is to make sure things are balanced to what we're sort of trying to go for um but in terms of like balancing all things evenly it's definitely with a like this, it's not actually something you want to do.

I think for us, you've played the demo with the crossbow. Yeah. The crossbow basically becomes completely useless by round five, deliberately so, so it pushes players to go find another weapon. But then if you get to the upgrade mechanics, the blood infuser, that upgraded crossbow becomes incredibly powerful to reinvigorate that and allow it to be used again at higher rounds. Again, with the weapons, like we sort of said before,

their damage sort of scales as you upgrade them, but your ability damage works differently. So there's multiple different paths of balancing with that sort of stuff where weapons will get really good and then fall off until you re-upgrade them but then when you hit the max tier it's all about how your abilities can really or your weapons support your abilities if you will flipping that sort of on its head where you might consider abilities to be your support things it's actually more of like your ability is the thing that deals the most damage at higher rounds with blood reaper, so early on you don't really have that much access to your abilities

because you don't have that many enemies to kill. So it's mainly about the weapon damage. But then as you go further, the weapons are balanced around the content when they should be found. Yes, absolutely. And then as you go further, the weapons start to fall off and the ability start becoming your main focus with the weapons being there more to support building up your abilities. So you can do the heavy damage.

Yeah. Yeah. You're exactly right. So it's like you almost flip, flip the stakes from the early rounds of the mid ground, mid rounds to the sort of later rounds as well, which we paid a lot of attention to. the stakes from the early round to the mid-round, mid-round to the sort of later rounds as well, which we paid a lot of attention to. I could show you the spreadsheets that went into actually

balancing those things to make that happen and Jackson is an absolute genius when it came to that sort of stuff. I think that's really cool because I, it might not be immediately evident when a player is trying it but i feel like they'll get the idea after they start messing around with their abilities and see like okay well this does a lot of damage here well okay now it's doing less damage like it's not gonna maybe they'll have to go through a couple of runs to work out like when that swap really starts to make sense and obviously it'll be like a gradual thing as you go through the rounds it'll be more heavily leaning on the ability it wouldn't be like a hard okay now ability time um but i do think that adds some some definitely some uh interesting change to the typical formula you see here.

Yeah, and that's what we really have tried to do, including stuff about our combat style that separates us from those other games to make people understand the core mechanics from other games, but then actually interacting with them, especially as they play more and more. It's like, oh, I need to change my play style to accommodate for the systems in Blood Reaver

as opposed to just playing the game like you would another wave shooter. Yeah. There was definitely a deliberate decision around that. I'm curious to see how that would feel at the higher rounds then. How much of the higher round stuff is there in the current demo that's available? So the game sort of just goes infinitely with the current demo.

I mean like as content, at what point is content no longer being added? Like what point have you found all the demons that are going to be added into it? So in the demo right now there's the two demons the second one appears at round five and once you've unlocked the whole sort of space of the map and done the three rituals around the map which you can do by sort of round 10 that is effectively what what you could call like you've seen all the content right um but it is playable for as long as you can survive for. Yeah, and with the sort of ritual system that we've got in the game that lets you unlock the blood infuser,

it's almost like pushing you to do those early on to make them easy for yourself because, you know, two of those rituals take place in really small spaces. Doing them at later rounds when demons have hundreds and hundreds of health means that they get super difficult. But yeah, yeah, content sort of,

you stop seeing new stuff necessarily around round 10, but we're trying to push that further and further back with the new versions of the game, especially when you start including these regs, which might take 20, 30 rounds to do, especially on a first try sort of thing. So when everything is ready, is there a point that is decided right now for like

where the end of the map should be roughly placed? Um, in terms of when you exfiltrate, we're sort of like working on, I guess, balancing those numbers. Like, I think we've been discussing recently on being like, it shouldn't even appear to around 25, for example, or, you know, it appears at that round and then there's a window that you can use it, then it appears again at a later window. That's all stuff that we'll be working on over a longer period of time. I can't really give really an answer there. ability i think with the way that the sort of abilities are now constructed somebody could have an entirely different experience um with the ability system and the weapon system each time they sort of play based on how they build their sort of character so are there discussions

internally about how difficultly difficulty scale at difficulty scaling should work like is it supposed to be a linear line of difficulty upwards is it supposed to be okay it's a fairly flat difficulty hey it's around five spikes up a bit then spikes up and like five ten rounds later and spikes up like what what's the intended goal here so with difficulty it is it is intentionally quite curated so like we sort of said you've got that sort of linear difficulty to around round five and then it really spikes um and we do that at certain points to really sort of push people to um get better and almost like you have that point the separator points we like to call them where you know uh you might place and relax i guess for a few rounds from rounds 18 to maybe 21 but then 22 is is like, oh, things have gotten much harder.

And there's that distinct sort of step up, up until a point, of course, and then it just becomes exponential with that. You want to make a system that goes on forever. But curating for the first 50, 60, 70 rounds, I think is something that we have been doing already. How long does a round go for? And then how long would it take to get to like round 30 or so? Assuming that you're doing things in a relatively, not perfectly optimal, but playing at a pace

that you sort of intend things to be done. I would imagine. So it's all based on each round has a certain amount of demons that are in it. And that increases each round. So the more demons that spawn, the more you have to kill. And their health also increases over time too. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head.

But I imagine to get to round 30 at a semi-optimal level, you're probably playing for around an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Realistically, it could be longer, it could be less, depending on how you're sort of going about upgrading and doing the rituals and whatnot. Because that's always a concern I think about with roguelite games, where something like Hades has it fairly well tuned even if you're not that great

at the game like a full run takes 20 25 minutes maybe 30 minutes if you're a bit slower then there are some other games like dead cells but it might take like 40 45 minutes and with a game it can start to get fairly tiring especially if you are dying in the later rounds if it takes if the systems take too long to get back up to the later rounds especially if in this case there are things you want to do at the later rounds like maybe you have that exfiltration there maybe you have story elements that can't be done to those later rounds so i do think it is worth definitely considering how long you intend for things to take because if it yeah if it's if it's too long you get to a point where hardly anyone's going to want to get to that point because like okay well you don't want people to start feeling like it's become a drag and they've they've exhausted the content they just want it to be over no absolutely i

totally agree with you it's um it's definitely a hard balancing act to know when to excuse me uh gate the player from certain things and i think with like easter eggs and narrative and all that stuff i think our philosophy is that you can do it or you can start to do it from round one but realistically just of like how those things, it might take you all around the map. Those things take time to sort of unlock. And yeah, like naturally, we're sort of aiming for a certain point or round point or time limit where you should, if you're trying to do an Easter egg, it should take you. Again, I don't have the exact numbers for those things, but we are definitely looking

into how we can make sure that those, those goals are achievable within a reasonable amount of time. But then now looking at some, some other games, you might have Easter eggs that take an hour, or if you're doing them for the first time, it might take three hours because you've got to go back and find different steps that you had no idea existed. In terms of discovery though,

like if you were a player that knew exactly what you're doing you know 45 minutes to an hour realistically could be a time frame that we looked at um okay um no no no promises there it might be longer if that's what people want and that's what we discover well yeah i don't think considering how early it still is in the development they would have like a set time at this point but i do think it is at least worth keeping in mind and making sure you know it's not just something you just let go on just let happen whatever happens basically yeah no anything that we do in that regard would definitely be curated um and tested extensively to make sure that we're not going too far or too short with that sort of thing. So you mentioned having different, and maybe this is starting to get into like character design scope creep.

You mentioned having different demon designs around like the base demon. Is there going to be different designs around the different maps? Or are they going to be the same sorts of variations between the maps? So, I'm trying to think about what I can say. With the base horde, we want to at least in the first few maps keep some level of consistency, and the enemies that we introduce, you know, if there's a special type of demon, that design language stays quite consistent, but then later on, you might see a slightly different variant of that demon specific to that map that has mechanics that are tailored towards the space that it might be in. And it's almost a progression of something you might have

seen before, if you will. So would you have demons that are potentially exclusive to a certain map? Yeah, absolutely. So we are actually currently in the process of making the first mini-boss, which specifically appears on one of the maps we're working on right now. There are others planned for the beginning of the end, which is the Cathedral map. Every map will include at least one enemy type

that is specific to it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's the plan. That's the plan. That's the plan. That's the plan. Just a matter of coming up with ideas for it, I guess,

and making them different enough where it doesn't feel like you're just fighting the same thing. It just looks a little different. Yeah. So, like, actually coming up with diverse uh mechanics for enemies can be can be really interesting because there's only so many times you can do an enemy that runs up and hits you um and yeah it coming up with systems and making a robust framework for systems where you can do a lot of that stuff without relatively too much work

internally it's something that we are doing right now now where a lot of that stuff is based off a certain framework and we can sort of attach a bunch of things together and it just, as Todd Towers said, it just works. But yeah, attention to mechanical variety I think is super important in enemy types for a game like this. So one of the things that a lot of games get wrong is making it so you can see what is happening. I think at this point, Blood Reaver is fairly clean with like the effects that are going on. You know, there's some games where

there'll be just like bright colors going everywhere. It's like, I don't, I can't see anything. Like what is happening but you have mentioned like reworking animations and i assume that's going to like be reworking maybe like effects that happen with things as well every animation every it's all getting reworked um yeah but i i do think it's very important to keep in mind like the visual clarity like a game i play a lot of is path of exile and when you're at high levels of path of exile what what is visual clarity like there's certain builds where the the gimmick of the build is you cannot see what is happening on the screen. Like, it is just... Everything's dying instantly, it doesn't matter, but you cannot see what's happening.

So... No, I've played a bit of PoE in the past. I never mapped my characters, but, yeah, even getting to the point where there's just particles everywhere. Yeah, yeah. It is definitely a consideration for a game like this we have. And, yeah, visual clarity,

so the player understands what they're looking at, you know, across enemies, your your abilities and your weapons it's a big point with with fps games specifically well not just visual clarity with like the enemies but visual clarity to explain what's happening to the player because you mentioned things like uh maybe like an effect that'll slow down the player having some way to indicate to the player that that is actually going on that they can quickly understand because slowdowns a fairly easy one to see because you know you're moving slower but understanding why you're moving slower understanding how to get out of moving slower and other effects that might not be as obvious where, I don't know, maybe the enemies do more damage to you or something like that.

It's not instantly visual. Yeah, so like, for example, enemies doing more damage. How do you indicate that one enemy of the same class is more powerful than the other? It's definitely a design challenge that we are facing all the time and we're looking into the best solutions for. I think other games, for example, you know, you've got enemy A, enemy B. One has glowing red eyes. You think he's probably doing more damage for you. But it's much more nuanced than that, I think,

when it actually comes down to the development of those sort of things. But it is a massive consideration on our part for how we go about doing things Going back to what I was saying about PoE there are points where you have 12 different icons in your top left corner if you've played the game a thousand hours you know what those icons mean but it's not instantly obvious what some of them might indicate

It's funny you mention icon design, actually. It's something that we did a bunch of iterations on with the itch version of the game right now, the demo, for the abilities and the packed icons. How do you get across, I think, more health to the

player? And how do you have a naming convention that makes the player walk up to something see an icon and then see a name of something and instantly know exactly what you're getting from that right and we went through so many iterations for for that stuff and i think one thing that we really sort of went down to is like are you are you world building with this thing or are you gamifying it and where is the line in between there that works for the type of game that you're sort of making and we ended up somewhere right in the middle slightly towards world building but on the on the sort of side of gamification at the same time

um that's so important like to have a good ux and ui designer involved in a project that can accurately get across information in a visual format immediately to a player. It's a big difference in projects I've noticed. Yeah, immersion is great and all, but if immersion is getting in the way of the player knowing what's happening, like, I know there are games where, like, immersion is their core focus, but with a game like this, where it's about high-speed gameplay, like, you don't really have time to be immersed every second of the thing, you know, immersed in the individual element that's on

the wall, like, you've got demons right behind you, like need to like be able to understand what's happening straight away and yeah i totally agree we we went through it multiple times of of you know what was too much what was too little what wasn't clear and what was we ended up for this version at least adding like a notification system just to make it abundantly clear um what you were getting when you bought certain things. I think now internally we're seeing how we can do the identification of that stuff better to not need that. But yes, it's definitely a massive thing in games to be able to get the player to understand, especially in a high-paced environment, what information is being given to you at any particular time, especially with buying a weapon, buying an ability or a perk or whatever.

It's consideration, to say the least. Like with health, for example, a thing you're commonly seeing in games is you pick up the health, your screen goes a shade of green, and there'll be some happy sound effect that indicates your

health is gone up. Yep. Ah yeah yeah and it's also like you mentioned sound effects. It's not also visual it's auditory and then it's effect based as well as there's there's so many things in terms of getting information across to a player and then if if you really want to get down to it it's, how do you consider accessibility with something like that? Like does it still work even if one of those sensors is cut off? Like say you've got the game on mute Do you still understand the thing in the same way?

Yeah, yes, there's so many factors to consider with that stuff Well, what thought has gone into accessibility because that's one of the areas where games have Traditionally been fairly lacking uh my favorite one is a game it'll have a colorblind setting and it doesn't indicate the kind of colorblindness it's just colorblind like okay thank you i guess like that's not very useful um but there's a lot more like dead cells i keep going back to dead cells dead cells is such a great example of this where they effectively added like what amounts to a cheat menu in the game where you can turn off basic things in the game that just for someone who

might have limited mobility just they would not be able to play with it whatsoever or they have i'm pretty sure they have very clear color blindness modes and there's a bunch of other really cool stuff in it and a lot of games have been really exploring this path a lot more than was traditionally done i don't think it's really cool but i know it's also really challenging and adds a whole nother vector of game design that maybe you don't have the expertise to properly address either? I think for us, it's definitely like trying to reach a larger audience. You know, you want to have your game to be accessible as possible with the biggest amount of people there is. So I think the first thing we really did was look at other FPS games and see what accessibility

settings they offered to be like, okay, that's a standard. That's something that we can do. So like, you know, um, controller input maps, uh, being able to rebind your controls, having like, uh, templates for all of that stuff, uh, that, that have like presets. The thing that always annoys me is when a game has keyboard rebinding and not controller rebinding. Exactly. So you have to have both of those things and like being able to be on the PC and also use a controller.

Um, yeah, like all of those things are standard and we're doing at the moment in terms of colorblind settings, like you said like including specific types of colorblindness as Profiles that you can overlay over the game and we're developing a system for that quite easily at the minute where you can basically overlay the different Like shades that you need to polish. Yeah, I imagine that's a fairly well explained thing with game design at this point, because it is, from my understanding, would just be changing the color, like basically putting a filter over the game. Yeah, it's called a post-processing effect over the top.

And from my understanding, there's just like a bunch of profiles you can get off the internet that do exactly what you need to do. So you don't even need to set it up yourself. It's just about creating the interface to be able to flip between those things. In terms of accessibility as well, we are working on a localization system, something that our publisher is supporting us to do, to get those languages, well again, translated, you could say. But having an interaction system and a tech system within the game that is made with localization in mind from the get-go, so we don't end up ripping out everything we've done in two years' time to

make a system be able to do that. We do it from the start, so we don't have to do that later. Yeah, that's one factor that we've we've really taken into account um yeah in terms of like auditory stuff as well um you know having settings for for dialogue so character doesn't or a player doesn't need to have their audio one for example or somebody's death um again like including as many people as possible in this type of game i think is the best best thing we can do. Yeah. And it's definitely a factor that we're trying to address as best we can, even as a small indie studio.

Yeah. Like another thing that always annoys me when games don't have separate audio sliders, where it's like, okay, they have the sound effects way too loud. And for whatever reason, sound effects and voice acting are in the same setting like okay can you not do that please like i get it it's challenging and you don't build your sound system

around that it might be difficult to add in after the fact but yeah it i would actually argue in in unity they make creating like sound distribution and separating all your sound into different, I guess, groups quite easy. Um, so it's something that we're already doing and naturally what we've got like six, six or so different sliders for your sound settings, so yeah, like I hear you there, there's definitely a bunch of games that just combine a bunch of things into the same layer. Especially if you go back to older games, like PS2 games, for example, like you

the same layer especially if you go back to older games like ps2 games for example like you is like master volume like okay i i have a i can turn down my like i think i don't need that no that's that's definitely um good you guys are considering that as well um as i said there like it's it's it's a whole nother vector of stuff that is that needs to be considered then and it's just i i understand why a lot of developers don't put much focus on it because it's really important but it's really important for such a small group of players that i can understand why in a lot of cases it does get left by the wayside or if it does get some support, it'll be a fairly minimal level of support. Yeah, I think with language support specifically, if any developer can support or have any form of accessibility,

languages just bring your game to a whole other audience that you might not even know exists. I think one thing that gets talked about quite a lot in the industry is is the brazilian market and the south american markets there they are huge yeah and a lot of games never localize to any of those spaces and those players just can't play because they they either don't speak english or don't have the option to be able to purchase those games on their storefronts and you know for us it's like if we can tap into that you know that's maybe 10 15 000 people additionally that might play the game and might be able to enjoy it as well so yeah it's just while it shouldn't be something

that indie developers go we have to have accessibility everywhere it's like there are reasons to to focus on that and where you can you might as well bake it into your core systems early in development, as opposed to, oh, three years in we're going to do all of these things and we need to break everything to make it work. I don't know what Unity provides in regards to this, but when you're dealing with translation, there's also issues with right to left languages instead of left to right languages. Like if you, if you build all your UI systems around english and then you want to support arabic good luck have fun with that it's it's really funny you mentioned that actually because um our programmer who's worked on all of our localization systems we did a bunch of research onto exactly how other games have done that and

you know conjunctive sentence structure for how different languages are constructed. You can't just have like hold B to do the thing for X cost. That's fine in English. But then in something like German or Russian, those things are swapped around.

It's like do the thing button and then cost is over here and then something else at the end. And then, you know, flipping that around for something like Arabic. It's, yeah, it's, it's, you've got to come up with a robust structure that in the end is actually Excel based once again with spreadsheets, um, to allow you to sort of include all these additional languages

with all of their different, um, structures and how they sort of make sentences. It's, um, yeah, it's, it's definitely an endeavor, but it's such a worthwhile one. I think we've put the right time into that, for sure. So I know you guys are on Steam, but is Steam the only platform you guys are currently targeting? Or I guess PC? So Steam is obviously the primary target on the PC platform. We are looking to port to consoles.

That is something that as we get further in development, I've got some connections through various platforms that we'll be looking into port to consoles. That is something that as we get further in development, I've got some connections through various platforms that we'll be looking into alongside our publisher. In terms of the PC market as well, though, we'll be on a bunch of different storefronts. I know our publisher said that they'll put us on upwards of, I can't remember exactly how many platforms, but it will be everywhere.

Yeah. Console support, though though is definitely something we're considering okay because i know that's always that's a whole nother uh once again a whole nother vector to support and i know unity has has tooling in there to do it but there's gonna be changes that need to happen around it being obviously you have the controller support there so that's that's the easy part but dealing with the differences between the two consoles i guess i i don't know if you'd want to support switch we'll just is that a consideration or is it just playstation xbox i think for us which is probably not the not the target market and the target demographic for a game like this.

We've done a bit of research, and the general audience for a Switch player base is probably not where most of our players lie. And if somebody does own a Switch, they probably also own either a PC, an Xbox, or a PlayStation. But yeah, anyway, with the PlayStation and Xbox, there's going to be specific things you need to change for those versions of the game.

Then they also have different ways that they handle getting updates out to players as well and having to deal with that problem. A lot of developers jump on saying, we need to do console support very early. There was a lot of people at Avcon being like, we're going to be on PC and we're going to be on Switch. Like, okay, good, but release a game first. Like, get a game done. I know it's exciting,

you want to be on everything, but like, release a game. Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, PC is obviously the target platform and our initial release platform. I'm assuming, like, for early access, that is, I'd love to be able to say with a full release launch that'll be on multiple platforms. We do obviously have the publisher that can actually handle our porting solutions all for us and give us a lot of support there, which makes it more likely we'll be able to hit those goals. But yeah, it's definitely something that I personally haven't experienced doing before. But yeah, it's something we're aspiring to be able to do over the next few years.

Whether it happens at launch or shortly after with DLC 1, who knows. Well, one of the things that is more interesting nowadays is the idea of also supporting things like the Steam Deck as well. And the Steam... Like, I play all my games under Linux. I have... The system we're going on right now is running on Arch Linux. It is kind of broken in some cases, but it works most of the time.

And I've got a Steam Deck sitting on the shelf right back there. Oh, I see. Yeah. It was sent to me as a review unit like a year or so back um i'm not big on playing shooters on a controller so i probably wouldn't play it on that but linux support is weird because it mostly just works and nowadays has gotten a lot better but there are some weird things that games do that cause issues and I don't know if anyone in the team has any interest in making sure that stuff works fine.

Actually, I don't know what the process is to being like Steam Deck verified or marked as Steam Deck compatible. I'm not really sure how that's done or if any of you guys have looked into doing that so far. I know you can submit for Steam Deck support via Steamworks. I know that that's definitely something you can do. I, again, personally haven't used a Steam Deck

before, or really Linux either. So that's not my area of expertise within the team, but I'm sure our lead programmer probably has a much better idea than I would on that sort of stuff. Because nowadays there's sort of like two main issues with supporting Linux and that's games that

are using anti-cheat where they just a lot of the major anti-cheat systems like battle.io and eac they do have linux support but a lot of them don't enable the checkbox to enable the linux support so it doesn't work and the other thing is weird esoteric uh formats for cut scenes those are usually the two things that end up breaking games like um i was playing through the dmc hd trilogy and none of the cut scenes play they just it starts the cut scene instantly skips it um because it's using some like weird old format that i guess just doesn't have proper support for the encoder. But those are the main things. Actually, that's a good question.

Are you guys thinking of doing... I know it's a co-op game, so it's maybe not a really big concern, but are you guys thinking of doing any sort of anti-cheat? I think we actually had a chat recently with the programming team about how we're going to combat that sort of anti-cheat? I think we actually had a chat recently with the programming team about how we're going to sort of combat that sort of stuff. Because especially if you're getting materials in a run

that you can bring out for long-term progression, there needs to be some kind of verification system between online and offline play. It's definitely something that we are looking at. Again, that's a big programmer question that is way above my my goes way over my head so i would ask them um but yeah i believe it's definitely something we're considering in a minute okay no that's fair that's fair um because i know some some co-op games some co-op games decide to do it um then there's other games where they probably should have it

like uh mmos that like final fantasy 14 doesn't have anti-cheat so they don't when you don't have anti-cheat in an mmo you get some uh you get some some fun things like hey we're going to uh like one thing people do in that game a lot is they fish under the map so people can't report them because you can't click on them or they'll fight a boss floating above the boss things like that yeah it actually surprises

me with like a big studio like Square Enix isn't that the developer yeah yeah they wouldn't include that sort of thing I don't know why they don't. They have fairly strong game mods. They actually have employed game mods who they're supposed to keep that stuff in check.

And they do a relatively good job, but a lot of things do slip through the cracks. And then there's games like Path of Exile, which I have no idea how it gets by having no anti-cheat. I don't know what they're doing to keep that in line because the whole economy is based around player items that there's no anti-cheat to stop people doing. So I don't know what they're doing that makes that all work.

Hopefully it gets fixed with PoE too, which I'm very excited to play when it comes out. Yeah, big thing for me is that WASD movement. I like, look, I've gotten used to the click to move, but I really am very happy to see ARPGs going down the route of having WASD. It's just nicer to play. It feels much easier. Going back to what we said before just about accessibility options,

you know, having the option to do both and then a player can make the choice for themselves. Like having adjustable HUD options, turning off the information you don't want to see, or like disabling particle effects in something like PoE. It's just giving, putting the power in the player's hand to have the experience that they want is so important. Actually, regarding HUD customization, what are you guys thinking of doing with that?

Is it just going to be like HUD scaling or is there anything else you guys are thinking? So there will be scaling, there will be certain bits of information you can turn off and on. Again, we're sort of going with what we think is right for the community and what we've sort of learned. So there isn't going to be some sort of toggleable objective system or anything like that. It'll be more just like, do you want your gun name displayed all the time,

some of the time, or not at all sort of thing? And yeah, keeping the user interface designed very much around streamers like yourself, for example, so you can have your profile in the top left and then it not be covered by anything else. Keeping all the information in the bottom third of the screen. Something that we're definitely baking into our process. And yeah, making sure that that stuff's customizable as well. Awesome.

Is there anything else in here I haven't talked about yet? Is there anything else in here I haven't talked about yet? How long at this point has the game been in development for? So the prototype you've seen right now, that was made over four months. I know it's pretty nuts that we managed to push the team that hard to get it done. But this entire year we worked on setting up our studio and we've been working on the game as our multiplayer rework since then. We've been in full development for probably

about four, because company structure takes a few months to work out. But yeah, four months I guess now is where we're at on the rework side of things. And then we're looking again to release September next year in early access. Awesome.

Okay, well, before we end it off, if someone was thinking of what this game is, like how... Why am I so bad at speaking? We tried that again. Let me think before I speak. If you were to describe this game with, let's say, two games that you've played in the past,

how would you describe it? I'll go three games. Okay, three games, sure. I think you could say it's almost as if Con Zombies, Doom, and Bloodborne had a baby, and then it became Blood River. I think that's the best way you can sort of describe the game. Awesome.

Okay, well, let people know where they can find information about the game, where they can get involved in any community you might have. Do you guys have a Discord server? We actually do. Yeah, we've got a community Discord server, and I'm sure you'll be able to link that somewhere in some kind of description somewhere. But, yeah, we've got our website, HellboyStudios.com, just for more sort of company orientated stuff.

The game's obviously available to be wishlisted via Steam. Just type in Blood River, you'll be able to find it. All of our social medias are similarly tagged as well. You can find us on all of them. X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit as well. We recently launched a subreddit, which we're trying to start growing a community on too. But yeah, our Discord as well

is popping. We're trying to build a dedicated little fanbase to start playing the game with ourselves. Awesome. Anything else you want to mention or is that pretty much going to be it

no that's great this has been such a great opportunity Brody I'm really keen that you had me on here it's been great to talk to you yeah as I said I really like this game I think it's really cool there is a lot of games on my infinitely growing list of games

that I want to play so whether or not I'll get much time to check it out is another question entirely. But I'll definitely keep an eye on this. And when it comes out, I definitely am going to hopefully give it a shot when it hits early access. And yeah, do you guys have any...

I'll see if I can sort you out with a key when the release sort of comes around. Awesome. Do you guys have any plans to show off the game at any upcoming events, or...? Yep. So, in October this year, we'll be in PAX, in Melbourne, and then directly after that, we'll be

at Sydney Sapphire Southwest. From there, we'll be at a bunch of events next year, both nationally and internationally through the partnership. Awesome. Sweet. Okay, so nothing else you want to direct people to? Is that pretty much everything then? Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Thank you so much again. Awesome. I guess we'll leave it there. I'll do my outro and then we'll leave it there. So my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Check that out and you will find maybe something that is interesting. I've got my

gaming channel brody on games i stream there twice a week right now i'm probably still playing through devil may cry 4 very fun game highly recommend it and uh metal wolf chaos xd which is a mech game that from software made back in 2004 that got a re-release. You play as the American president who, for some reason, is piloting a mech and wants to save America. It's a game that exists. It's really stupid. And yeah, if you're listening to the audio version of this,

you'll find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you want to find the audio, it is on any audio podcast platform. Once again, Tech Over Tea. There is an RSS feed, so put it into your favorite app and you'll be good to go. I will give you the final word. What do you want to say?

Thanks for having me on here. Wishlist Blood River on Steam. Absolutely. See you guys later.