Tech Over Tea - Breathing Life Into Evocative New Worlds | 100 Stones Interactive

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Today we have Ben Droste from 100 Stones Interactive on the show, a small indie studio that so far has been focusing on puzzle games with their newest title taking a more metroidvania style approach. ==========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://100stonesinteractive.com/ Memory's Reach: https://100stonesinteractive.com/memorysreach/ Memory's Reach Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2126810/Memorys_Reach Eyes Of Ara: https://www.eyesofara.com/ ==========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'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson, and today is episode... Four of the post-Avcon interviews. Today we have Ben from 100 Stones Interactive, the developer of Memory's Reach on the show, and I guess the easiest way to do this is just have you explain who you are and what the game is at a high level and then we'll get more in depth on you know general things about it. Sure yeah so I'm Ben, my background is in environment art and level design so I tend to make games about environments, exploring environments, exploring cool worlds, and that's kind of what Memories Reach is.

It's an adventure puzzle crossed with a Metroidvania. So a big focus on puzzle solving and exploration in a large, interconnected, Metroidvania-style world. So that's very brief about me and the game, in very short. I'm a big Metroidvania fan myself. The puzzle stuff, I don't tend to do. I'm not generally big on puzzle games. I'll play them here and there. Most of the time, I'll play a puzzle game and it's like,

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. And I guess that is sort of a issue with trying to design puzzles like what is what is your like goal with the approachability of the game do you want it to be where most people have a general sensible way to get through it or do you plan to have certain parts of the game where you really need to think about like very heavily to actually access a certain place there's a mixed approach to it for sure so um to take a step back a bit um for a start i i'm not a huge puzzle game player myself i enjoy puzzle games i enjoy puzzles in games but i tend to enjoy games that uh have puzzles in them alongside the main content

rather than being solely about puzzles uh so i liken i liken the puzzles in this game more towards games like legend of zelda like a zelda puzzle box dungeon type design so it's it's less like a game like old like mist or something where you might have to like do some really intricate very difficult uh thought-provoking puzzle solving and more about uh manipulating the environment moving things around shifting boxes raising learn bridges and that kind of more interactive puzzle solving so i think makes it a bit more approachable. There are some more logic puzzle type stuff in the game, but you can bypass that if you want to. But hopefully they're not too difficult and people can get into it. about that kind of interactive Zelda-style puzzle solving than the more hardcore

puzzle game. But when it comes to puzzles, they come in a variety of types from sort of like logic puzzles where you might have to move things around on a screen and line up certain things or whatever, which are

in the demo. Then you get more environmental style puzzles where you move like a Zelda puzzle room where you're moving boxes around, raising lower bridges. And then at the high end, you get the sort of level scale meta puzzle where the entire environment becomes one giant puzzle. And that usually involves understanding

how the different parts of the level fit together and manipulating it or navigating it in order to reach your goal. So there's kind of like different tiers of the level fit together and manipulating it or navigating it in order to reach your goal. So there's kind of like different tiers of puzzles there. So that demo that you had at Avacom was sort of a pretty good slice of what you're planning for the full game then, where you had that sort of,

I don't know how it's described in the game, that sort of hacking interface where you have to move around little orange hexagons. Yeah.ons yeah hexagons i think they're hexagons um yeah and line them up so it could like get the power through the the thing and then there was a bit where you had to use that and lower or you had to go around that like circle area and raise a bridge or no it was raise the the tower thing so you could get across that out that bridge um and doing that allowed you to get to this higher puzzle that would then unlock some further thing i think it let you get through the the the radiation thing if i remember correctly yeah yeah so that's yeah so the demo is designed as kind of a short slice of what the full game is going to feel like to play.

It's actually a custom-built environment. It's not actually in the main game. I was going to ask that, if it was like a vertical slice or if it was like a piece of the full game. It's kind of like I took puzzles from around the full game and crammed them all into this custom-built environment. And the art is from one of the levels of the game as well. So it's all bits and pieces of the game, but together into a what's designed to be a very short experience people can play through at a trade show like pax or avcon and get a taste of what the game is about so if i were to give a chunk of the actual game it'd be much longer and probably a bit more drawn

out in how you have to explore and do whatnot, which is not an ideal experience for a trade show. So it's a deliberate attempt to try and squish it down to something a bit more succinct for the purpose of the show. So, yeah, but it does demonstrate that you have those holographic puzzles, which are more of the set piece logic puzzles. And then the thing with the elevator is that exploration-based,

environmental, knowledge-based puzzle. And then the item you pick up at the end, which allows you to get past the renovation, is kind of where the Metroidvania-style progression comes into it as well, where the different parts of the game are locked off behind different obstacles that you'll need to find

new abilities to bypass. But unlike most Metroidvanias, which are usually action combat games, since mine's a puzzle game, the abilities have to be more puzzle and exploration focused, not combat focused. So there's no new attack or anything, because you don't attack anything. But I can give you different tools for navigating the environment or different tools for solving different kinds of puzzles. So that's been an interesting challenge as well. Well, one thing I also really, I thought was kind of neat is when you're going around the zone, there's like things you can examine on the ground. And I guess that sort of leads into a question about like the, how the lore of the game is going to be told. Is it going to be through just those,

hey, there's like a bone on the ground here hey there's a plant here hey there's like this crystal thingy and you can examine it or is there going to be a more i guess established cut scene system alongside that as well uh no cut scenes except for well they might be like dialogue or something like that and ending but uh no dog no the the narrative in the game is is delivered through uh two means there's there's the narrative pickups you can find uh which give you like explicit narrative information about what's going on in the story these are like uh written notes left behind by the civilization that used to live here, often talking explicitly about the events that we're concerned about for the story. In addition to that, you can also scan different objects around the environment,

very much an homage to like Metroid Prime kind of scanning. And in doing so, you can learn about the world, different objects, different creatures you might find, and that sort of thing. So that'll give you more of a general background knowledge on the world you're inhabiting. And then the pickups give you the explicit narrative storyline. And together, those should give you a really good feeling for the world you're in and what's going on and what kind of culture lived here. That's the goal, anyway. So you're sort of piecing together the information so you don't have like a it's not like hey you go from beat to beat to beat and it's like hey here's cuts in

cuts in cuts in like you have a very clear story it's more like you're going around this world you're trying to see what information you can pick up and understand what really was going on here yeah so it's very much you piece it together like that at your own pace that's uh a large part it's about the exploration so you explore the world you find these different bits and pieces and the more you explore and the more little secrets you find the more of these little narrative bits and pieces you'll be able to put together and get a more complete picture of the story. My goal for it, and actually this comes back a bit to the puzzle part as well. So the main path through the game, through the ending, is the goal is to deliver enough narrative information along the critical path

that by the time they reach the end, you'll have a pretty good idea of what the story was, but there'll be holes in it. It'll be incomplete. But then if you go back and you really take the time to explore and you find all the hidden secrets and you solve all the bonus puzzles, and that's what I didn't get to mention earlier, playing through the main storyline

should be not too difficult, but a bit of a challenge. And if you want to complete 100%, that's where the most difficult puzzles come into it. So if you're not much of a puzzle gamer, maybe you just do the main story and you ignore the hard extra stuff. And likewise, if you play through the main story,

you should get a pretty good idea of what's going on in the story, what happened. But if you really want to know the complete picture and find all the secrets and unlock any sort of bonus hidden secrets that may or may not be in the game, then you'll have to go and find all the additional storyline there as well.

Well, with a lot of... It's flying in my room. With a lot of Metroidvania games out there, they have this very interconnected world where you will go from... You'll be in this starting zone and there'll be this wall that's blocked off that you're like, why is this wall here?

I don't know what to do with it. And then sometime like way later in the game, you will circle back to that area and end up being able to make your way through there. Is there going to be that sort of interconnectivity or with going back to old zones like that, is it going to be more of that like, hey, I have this thing.

Oh, I remember there was that thing like a couple of areas ago, let's check back there and see what was behind that area over there. Well, it's a combination of both. So the world is one large contiguous world, like a Metroidvania map. That should also mention for

people who haven't seen the game yet, listen to this. It's a first-person exploration-based game, so it's more akin to a game like Metroid Prime in the Metroidvania genre than it is to Super Metroid, a 2D platformer. So it's a first-person 3D exploration. And it's one large contiguous world separated into multiple distinct levels or environments.

And they interconnect, sometimes through direct means, sometimes through hidden passages. So sometimes you will find yourself looping around and coming back out in an area where you have previously been, but from a different direction. And sometimes you'll complete, say, the main puzzle level two, get a new power-up and go,

oh, now I've finally got this thing. I remember I saw something back in level one i can now go back there and grab that so it's a combination of both things to make it make the world feel very expansive and interconnected like that yeah yeah having an internet interconnected world like that is always like really exciting to me i always remember the first time i played through something it's not a metroidvania but but I played through Dark Souls, and you'll go through some like random door, and then you wind up down in the forest area, like how in, wait, that's what that door did? Like, I, I've never gone this way before, and you get to like that area way earlier

than you thought you would have, and then you can explore that bit, like it's always really cool to have a world where it, it really, not only... I guess there's a difference between it being interconnected and feeling interconnected. Like, in Dark Souls 1, it felt like you would go from an area, and it made sense you would wind up somewhere. Whereas some games, you know, you go from one bit. It's like, oh, this nice forest area, and then suddenly you're in a volcano. Where, yes, it's connected.

It's one big world. But it doesn't really feel like a big world it feels like different levels that are just have secret like paths to get between them i suspect uh memories reach is going to feel a little bit more like the latter um in that the the different levels are sometimes spatially quite different for instance like well thumb makes sense like you go underground okay well you go down elevated now you're underground and you're in that new environment but for instance one of the environments is set in orbit around the planet so you know that's not going to connect via, like, you know, a pathway. That's going to be a teleporter, right? And there's another area where there's cities,

like a city up high in the clouds, big towers perched on top of raised cliff tops, which can't easily connect to, like, say, the facility in the forest, which is, you know, hundreds of meters below it. I'm not going to have a player ride an you know hundreds of meters below it i'm not going to have to play a ride an elevator for hundreds of meters to get up there so some of the environments will be connected through yeah like you might find a secret teleporter which takes you from point in in the forest level to a point in the the sky level um but then there are other parts

of the game where it is more physically connected right where you're taking a literal elevator from the forest level down into the caves and then from there probably down further into the underground facility level and so forth so you do get a bit of a break from there yeah what i was meaning is when it feels like it's not logically connected like okay so the teleporter makes sense right like you're going through teleport oh i'm in this crazy different location um i'll go to dark souls 2 and uh there's this area where you're in a forest and then you walk through like it's raining you're in this dark forest you walk through a cave and you're basically in bowser's castle there's lava everywhere and like yes it's connected but you're like why Right, it doesn't feel like a natural transition of the environment. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I understand what you mean there.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so what can you say about the premise of the game without giving away, unless you want to, without giving away too much of what the general story is about? Sure. Okay, so essentially you play a freelance space adventurer or space explorer um you've you've acquired the coordinates to this planet um this this long lost alien planet and you've come in search of a rumored alien treasure so the location the of this planet was lost a long time ago but it's always been rumored there was some treasure there

that people are after. You've managed to acquire their coordinates. You found it and you've landed on the planet. You get there, you discover the remains of this alien civilization, but the inhabitants are no longer there. And the story really revolves around exploring this planet and learning about who these people were

and what happened to them. And one thing I'm really trying to do with this is not go down the route of making a big mystery of why they disappeared, because that's done a lot. That's very much a cliche. So the reason that they're no longer around, you'll actually discover fairly early on into the game. And then instead, the story then focuses on

what they attempted to do about it. And so the mystery really is, what was the ultimate solution to this impending crisis? And were they successful or not or to what extent and that's that's kind of what you'll um discover along the way but but the the the great catastrophe they face will actually be revealed quite early on okay okay that's interesting because you say it's like this there's like no one here. So you say, but like whether they're successful or not, like that's a, I'm curious to see how that, how that plays out then.

Hmm. Yeah. So you should get hints along the way that they knew this was coming and they were, they were trying different solutions to either stop the catastrophe or to avoid it or to flee the planet or whatever. A variety of different attempted solutions were taking place at one time. The story is very much around the different factions in society and how they work together or against one another, the different approaches they had, the different ideas, the sort of infighting and cooperation. It's very much the exploration of this culture and this society

and what they did when faced with this crisis, essentially. So it's really about learning about who they were as a people, what they valued most facing such a crisis. And what happened to them is kind of an interesting sci-fi mystery to discover. Sorry, give me one sec. Sorry, my housemate's nephew's over and he wanted to say bye to me.

He's like three years old. Anyway, you were saying about the... What were we going at before I... We were talking about the plot, I guess. Right, right, right. And how you discover the story. Was there anything that you wanted to say more to that before I cut you off? No, I think I basically just finished my point as we were talking.

Okay, okay. there was something i was going to go to after this oh right i know it's hard to estimate considering that you know how all the puzzles work but assuming someone doesn't like how long are you trying are you aiming to target for someone to get through the main story? I'm aiming for around six to eight hours to go through the main story and then several more hours to get a hundred percent completion. How many additional hours is a little uncertain at this stage because it depends on how difficult it is to find all the hidden secrets and solve the difficult puzzles. And since

not all of them have been designed yet or tested with actual players, it's hard to judge just how difficult that is going to be. So who knows? So with that content you had at Avcon, what would be the relative difficulty of that compared to some of the other content in the game? Well, the Avcom one is pretty easy. I know some people have a bit of trouble with... Well, okay. Let's back up a second. So because it's designed for...

It was first designed for PAX and then designed to be taken to other trade shows as well. So it's designed to be playable in 15 minutes on a very busy noisy trade show floor where you're distracted by all the noise and potentially other people around you and your friends bugging you to like move on to the next game so it i didn't want it to be too difficult and i didn't want it to be too open-ended so it's also why the demo is quite linear in the way you solve the puzzle. You basically go from one to the next until you reach the end.

The level that exploration puzzle is taken from is much more open, and you can pretty much go any direction from the start. But for the PAX demo, the trade show demo, I deliberately gated it off, so you have to go through it in one direction. Again, it's all about

trying to make it a lot more straightforward and a lot more manageable in a noisy distracting environment right that's noisy and distracting is a good point with uh where you were set up because there was that edm going on like right behind you where oh yeah people thought that was the um the soundtrack for your game because it was that loud from the other booth. It's like, and the opposite side, it was like mine, right? Because like the speakers are in the backs of the TVs. And so I was getting all their sound and they were getting all my sound from the, by the trailer looping on the TV.

They had their game playing on the TV. So I would get like this, like this like 30 second loop from the game that would just play over and over and over. And it's just, oh my God. I mean, don't get me wrong. It was a nice 30 second loop from the game that we just play over and over and over and it's just oh my god i mean don't get me wrong it was a nice 30 second loop um but after you've heard it a hundred thousand times it was the worst thing ever and it was quite loud as well yeah yeah well to be fair everything had to be loud because everything else was loud they had the main stage that the

main stage speakers were way too loud you could hear everything all the time but it is what it is so oh you deal yeah and it's their first time in that uh in that um area as well so i assume they'll adjust things for next run and see how it goes Lower some sound maybe try put up some barriers. I don't know what their plans gonna be Yeah, probably just need like a backing board or something and the TVs were placed in gaps between the boards So if there was some sort of board behind it potentially then it reflects the sound back I think it was pretty good for a first first go in that venue they really filled it out which is good yeah absolutely um so when you're dealing with designing these puzzles like what what do you actually what goes through that process because like I as I said I'm not a

big puzzle guy myself I don't even know where I would begin to start with making a puzzle that actually seems engaging. And I guess, what other systems exist that you might want to mention? I'm sure there's some things you want to leave up to exploration, people find them. But if there's anything else you want to mention that wasn't in the demo that might be interesting to talk about. Okay, well, I'll focus on the puzzle design process. to talk about? Okay, well, all right, I'll focus on the puzzle design process. So a lot of it comes down to just play testing and experimentation. Like most puzzles, when I design one, it usually starts with me scribbling ideas on paper until I figure something out. This could work, that could be a, you know, you know, I'm a very visual person, so it helps me to draw it on paper and figure out how it might work.

Okay, this could be an interesting idea. Let's try that. I'll then go into Unity. I'll prototype up a very rough prototype in code. Make sure it actually functions and not just I'm imagining it. Because sometimes I'll, oh yeah, it's a cool idea for a puzzle. I'll put

that in code. I'll do it in code and actually have it function. Actually, logically, this doesn't work. When I was looking at it on paper, I thought it would, but logically the mathematics of it, it ends up not working or whatever. So yeah, get a little functioning,

get a little working, great. And then basically it's then just make it, once I've got the core system working, make a bunch of different variations of it. Talking about, say, the holographic puzzles. Yeah, I'm going to picture that one open on the screen right now. Yeah, so in the demo, there's like three versions of that one, right?

And throughout the game, there is obviously way more than that, and then there's different types of puzzles. That's just one type. I'm aiming to have four. There are two and a bit built at this stage. So yeah, and every time you encounter an instance of that puzzle, there will be a different version of it. It was a different twist to it, a different mechanic to figure out.

So yeah, once I've got the core base design of it coded up and prototyped, I then make a bunch of different versions of it. And I basically just pick the ones I think are the best ones. And that one's fun. That was fun. That was not very good. That one's too confusing, whatever. And then I,

what I have been doing is in sticking those in just a little gray box test environment, take it along to the local dev meetup here in Melbourne and that we have that every month With other developers come along and I just bring a log a laptop and I say Hey, you want to play a game and you have people play test them all and gather feedback like that I can generally from that discover a Whether it's actually fun or not uh but b discover where all the usability problems are with it uh whether the the concept is being

communicated well enough whether whether i'm obfuscating the challenge too much or not enough that sort of thing uh there's a... It was at Avcon. I had, in addition to the main demo, I also had two test environments from the main game I brought along to do some playtesting on. One of those had the other type of puzzle that's currently in the game. I don't know if you played that one, but...

I think I just played the short demo. Okay. Yeah, so the other one, the puzzle type that's in that was kind of... It was kind of like a subtraction style puzzle where you basically look at two glyphs and combine them to make the glyph in the middle.

And the idea is that if there is... Is that that one where there's like... There's one of the... There's a picture on your website. I don't know if this is the same one. There's like a three- one of the, there's a picture on your website, I don't know if this is the same one, there's a like a three-prong thing on the top, three-prong thing in the bottom, and then there's like a thing in the middle? Um, what? I'm sorry, I'm bad at explaining things.

I'll just send a link. Um, this one. I believe there's a picture of this type of puzzle tool on the... That should be a link directly to the image, I think. That's a link to my website. Oh, my browser's not open, so this is going to take a little bit of time to open up. Oh, it's all good, it's all good. A bajillion tabs. Um, if that one doesn't... In a bajillion windows. No, think about it. Wait, wait.

That should... Yep, there we go, now it's in Discord. Cool. Oh, ah, right, yes. Okay. So, cool. Ah, right, yes, okay. So looking at that, that's an early version of that one, actually. Okay. So, but, well, it's an early, this is good, though. This is a good indication of why

the prototyping and the feedback was necessary, right? So, the idea behind that, and that's a bit more complicated because there's three different ones to choose from there. The easier versions, there's just two dark glyphs on the outside and the one orange glyph in the middle. And you take the two outside ones and you combine them to make the middle one. Okay. So in the case of what we're seeing here,

where there are lines in the left glyph and there are no lines in the right glyph, they combine to create a line in the center. Okay. So it just adds, right? But if there's a line, say there's a vertical line at the top in the left glyph and a vertical time in the top of the right glyph, they cancel each other out. So when you

combine them, that line goes away. But if there's a line on each side, they stay there. They add nothing or they cancel or it subtracts. So in the case of that picture you just linked there, you can see that the inside spokes, the six lines radiating out from the center, would add together because there's nothing to subtract them. Whereas the outside ring is present in the left-hand glyph and also in the top and the bottom, the top and the bottom. So those lines would cancel out. So that particular glyph that's currently selected in the middle is the

incorrect one. That won't work. And so you'd have to, you'd have to choose the glyph that matches what the combination of all three would make. Right. Okay. Now,

if that was complicated to understand as I explained it, because it's hard to explain, imagine trying to make it intuitive without using any words or text to the player yeah i was gonna ask how do you plan to introduce different types of puzzles because what you have at avcon that that one i i don't know if that was like one of the earlier ones you had because that felt really intuitive even without any sort of explanation like i i was confused initially but after spinning things around like oh you have to make the single line line of the single line double line line with a double line and you have

to like make a line to connect them okay that makes sense so the yeah that one was easier that one is just naturally more intuitive i think because it's basically a jigsaw puzzle and everyone knows how to do a jigsaw puzzle uh this one is well even so later versions of that jigsaw puzzle style like the second one you do in the demo where it has the lines connecting on the outside and it requires a bit of tricky repositioning using the different rings because it's not just a jigsaw puzzle

it's a jigsaw puzzle where you can only move a selection of pieces at any one time basically so you have to move pieces in and out. Yeah, so you... For anyone just listening, you have an out... At least on what I did,

you have, like, an outside ring you can rotate around, and you can bring pieces into the middle which stop them rotating, and then you can rotate the ring around that and bring them back out to put them in a new position. And then you want to, like,

line them up with the outside power things. I'm not really sure what they are supposed to be, but line them up with the outside power things i'm not really sure what they are supposed to be but line them up with the outside lines to make a connection all the way through yeah so uh yeah so like so that's a slightly more advanced version which requires kind of requires you having played the earlier version first you understand the basic mechanics and the basic goal before layering on that more, that little twist. And so that, as I said, that one is basically jigsaw puzzle, so it's kind of naturally fairly intuitive for most people.

Whereas this other version in the image you linked was a lot more complicated, because it's not really a intuitive concept to understand. And the first time I took it to a dev meetup to have people try, no one had any idea. Well, one person got it pretty intuitively and he was clearly a programmer and he understood it as an XOR kind of concept, which is a programming concept and he was fine with it but a lot of people playing it were like I don't understand what I'm doing

and they would like and I tried to make them easy where you'd have like two to combine and three different things in the middle to choose from and people would just try all three until one of them worked and like I don't know why that one worked I'm going to do the next one, don't know why that worked and then they do that and then they get worked. I'm going to do the next one, don't know why that worked. And then they do that.

And then they get to the more complex version, which is, you know, stage the next puzzle, which is takes that concept and then tries to make, build on it, make it more complex. And they've got no idea how to approach it because they don't understand the basic underlying principle of how the puzzle works. So I had to go back to the drawing board

and there was a lot of changes to make. So there was a lot of changes made to the visual feedback on the puzzle about how I presented the information, how I demonstrated that lines were adding or being cancelled out when they overlap, which was not clear in early versions. So now, originally, you would... I think in the first prototype version, you'd cycle through different types,

you click OK, and it would light up that it was correct. Let me go to the next one. I think in that version, I might have actually had the pieces come into the middle to show they're actually combining to make the middle, but they would just, like, slide in, and it would light up, and you move on, and people didn't quite get it.

Later versions, I ended up having like, they would slide over and if their lines overlapped, they would like, particles would explode and they'd disappear to show them canceling out. And various other tweaks to the visual design of it as well, which I can't remember now, but I made a lot. And I also redesigned the progression of them as well. So I went back and made much, much simpler ones

that were, where honestly solving them was not difficult because it was like, imagine there's like, on the left one, there's a triangle. On the right one, there's another triangle. And in the middle, you've got three to choose from. Two of them are clearly not right. And the third one is basically like a butterfly the two triangles so you know that's the correct one so it's kind of like it's

a gimme but then in picking that you can see the two bits come in they combine they make that and you might do that you know two or three times very very simple and then i'll throw in the cancellation where it might it might look like the same thing, but now there's like an additional whatever. So if you try and do additional line around the outside, say, so if you try and do the, the same combination again, it won't work this time.

So you have to pick one which cancels out the lines or whatever. So it forces you into doing the cancellation mechanic, which is the part that really dumped people. Simply adding two together, that was fine. A plus B makes AB. But as soon as you have to overlap lines, no one would understand that. So easing you into that in a very simple way where that was the only concept to understand

and the rest of the puzzle was basically like super simple uh was was important uh so yeah and then just try to wrap it up from there i suppose yeah so you want to explain how the puzzle mechanics work without having to do any sort of text dumping to the the player you want it to be intuitive or at least uh intuitive enough where after a couple of attempts, like you sort of get an idea of what it's trying to make you do. Yeah. Like I don't want to have to tutorialize stuff with text in the game. This is a problem I had last month, actually.

Well, earlier this month, this month's game dev meetup. I'm explaining another mechanic I had a lot of trouble with. And a developer friend was saying, oh, just put some text on screen and explain it. Like, no, no, I don't want to do that. I don't like tutorials that pop up text.

I like tutorials that teach you through doing, through playing the game and just by playing with mechanics and experimenting with them, you come to an understanding of how they function. With puzzles, that can be quite difficult sometimes because you're also trying to make it a challenge to solve. So I guess what I'm finding is that the first time I introduce these concepts, it has to essentially not be a puzzle. It has to be, time I introduce these concepts, it has to essentially not be a puzzle. It has to be, here's how the concept works in a very basic way. Now solve a puzzle with it.

What I had earlier this month was one of the abilities you pick up. It's actually the first ability you get in the game. And I had this in one of the environments playable at Avcon. It was playable there as well, but it wasn't used much in that particular environment. It just happened to be set later in the game, so you happen to have that ability by that stage. But trying to teach people how to use it the first time they pick it up was tricky.

So actually, in the AvCon build, you'd start that environment, and a text screen would pop up saying, you're at this stage of the game, you have these two abilities, here's how to use them. Which is, it's a text tutorial, but it's for the demo. It's just like, I'm not going to try and build a custom tutorial section when I want you to play test this level.

I'll just tell you how to play it and get on with it but this the build I took along to the dev meetup this month was essentially going to be the section of the game where you collect this ability and the first time you use it so it's the player's first encounter with this ability and the first time they have to use it on specific puzzles to interact with

and teach them how to use it and nobody understood it um so yeah uh and again that's one person say just just pop up text it's fine like no no i don't i'm worried you have to probably have to pop up some text to tell you what button to press to use the ability because i'm not quite sure how to say You've got a new ability without telling you what button on the controller uses it. You can do it like a PS2 game where randomly the controller button just appears in the game. No context for it. It's just there.

Well, in the prototype, that's basically what happens, right? It's just like physical 3D text appears. Press B to activate this. Which is not how it text appears in the press B to activate this, which is not how it will be in the main game. It's just like, you know, I just like hacked something in there for the sake of playtesting it. No,

in the main game, it'll probably just pop up like text along the bottom of the screen or something. And, and it will stick there until you use it a couple of times and then go away. But yeah, like after that,

I want you to be able to experiment with the ability and figure out how it works purely through experimentation. And the problem I was having

was that people weren't realizing that it had multiple functions. There's one very obvious function that it has. Well,

to explain the ability, it's kind of like this power, energy charger very obvious function that it has. Well, to explain the ability, it's kind of like this power energy charger thing. Right, right. Actually, it doesn't have a name yet, so I don't know what to call it.

In code, it's called the energy surge ability, but in the main game, it needs an actual narrative name, but I don't know what it is yet. The way it functions is you hold down the trigger, and it builds up a charge. And you see a little bar at the bottom of the screen fill up. And once it's full, if you release it, it does this AOE blast.

And you can use that for a variety of different things. One of them is you can stand on these little conduits on the ground, these little platforms. And if you use a blast on that, it'll power it up and activate things around the environment. And you can also use a for more uh interactive type things where you're actually blasting near certain objects to knock them over or uh explode things and whatnot but

that wasn't in the prototype area uh the other function it has is there are little nodes around the environment on walls and if you're pointing at one of them when you release the charge rather than doing an aoe blast it'll do a direct line shot straight at the thing like it'll it'll power up that specifically so there's two functions right there um people had trouble realizing that they had to point at the things to activate them. And even when they did, I don't think they realized that pointing at the thing was a component of activating it. I think they were just charging the full, standing near the thing,

happened to be looking at it because they could see it on the wall, and it was bright green because it was a gray box environment. So it's like everything's gray and the interactable things are green. So they kind of knew it was a green because it was a gray box environment. So it's like everything's gray and the interactable things are green. So they kind of knew it was a thing, right? That's going to be even more difficult in the main game with actual art. So they would stand in front of it.

They'd happen to look at it. They'd release the charge and it would turn green and activate. And I don't think they always noticed the beam that would shoot out directly at it. I think they thought it's still just doing the blast and it happens to be nearby. And so they get confused when they do a blast near one and it wouldn't activate. It's like, okay, it's a different type of thing. It activates in a different way with a different component of this ability. And

then the third thing, which I had to explain to every player because no one noticed, was that the charge actually has three different stages to it so you charge to full and it does like boop boop boop and when it's full and you release it does the aoe but if you release at any of those stages before then it is sufficient to do the nodes on the wall now you have to charge past 0.1 to do the node on the wall and there are certain nodes which have say three different outputs on them and which one activates will depend on what level of charge you use on it. But of course, the first thing people have been taught when they pick up the ability is how to do the AOE, which is part of the design problem there, actually. They learn to charge

at full and release, it does a blast. Cool. Then they walk up to these nodes on the wall, they charge at full, release, and it shoots out a beam. And then they had a huge amount of trouble trying to figure out how to solve this, what I thought was a very simple puzzle, where you have to shoot a single charge on this node and a double charge on this node. And if you do three charges on both, it's incorrect.

But nobody knew they could release after only a third of the bar was charged and to do a level one blast. Okay. So there's kind of like three different functions to the ability then. You've got AOE blast, you've got the ability to charge a node, and that charge has three levels to it.

I don't know how you would approach this, but the way I would think about it is you would have some sort of visual indicator on your body that indicates some sort of charge level, have some sort of like visual indicator on your body that indicates some sort of like charge level maybe like some sort of like charge bar and as like it flashes every time it goes

between different stages and I would probably introduce mechanics with the short charge first and go to the bigger ones after that rather than starting with the big one and then going the other direction yeah and that's that's pretty much going to be my approach um i haven't had the time to go back and redesign that section yet but that's going to be my attempt i'm going to effectively flip it around like that there is already a ui element that you see the charge

going up so you know it's fully charged it does have markers on it and there is a sound effect and a vibration effect when you hit each of those points but clearly it's not it's fully charged. It does have markers on it, and there is a sound effect and a vibration effect when you hit each of those points, but clearly it's not clear enough. It's not obvious enough that there are three markers. It just feels like part of the charge. How do you visually indicate it? What are you doing with the UI?

It's kind of like a sloped... It starts out small and gets bigger and bigger and bigger as it gets to the end. Like just a series of lines and there's like a marker at each of the thirds. Maybe. Sorry, it needs to be probably more obvious. It was a temporary UI element to start with. It was never meant to be the final one. It was just I need something in there to test with.

So I will definitely have to refine that, make it perhaps more obvious. Maybe the different stages have a different color like the marker changes yeah that's been suggested as well though i'm not a fan of that because i've got a particular aesthetic for the ui i'm going for which is all mostly one color so i'd probably indicate it with a different some kind of shape or something obvious there's a marker there right um might have to do something with the audio to make it more obvious uh but i think the big thing yeah we'll just because once you know there are three it's fine sure right so like it's just the first introduction it's exactly it's gonna be how i teach to people that's gonna be the the biggest driver of hell of understanding it you know i think

i can fill with the ui till the end of days and it won't be as impactful as just teaching it in a better way uh so yeah the redesign will will flip it around so that you'll you'll learn the the shooter the nodes first before we even introduce the aoe potentially i lock it between high end stages which there's some issues with that, but maybe. So maybe if you pick up the ability, you only get a level one. And you solve a puzzle with it, and then you get the level two charge. And you solve it again, you get level three in the burst. So I could do it that way.

No other ability in the game is picked up in stages like that, which feels a bit weird. So I don't know if that's the optimal solution. But we'll see if i have to do it that way then you know i'd rather people understand the mechanic i guess than get stuck because i'm a stickler for having each pickup be a single pickup i really do appreciate the way they're approaching introducing new mechanics um as much as a there is value in having certain things be textual and just here's what you do like if it's a button to press like hey here's how you attack here's how you dodge things like that like that makes

sense to be just tell the player how to do it, there's no other clear way to really indicate that. But I really like when a game slowly introduces mechanics in a way that just feels natural in the world. One thing I think of is there's this Metroidvania action game called Ender Lilies, where between each of the bosses, the enemies in the stage have like a miniature version of one of the boss's abilities.

So by the time you get to the boss, you've experienced basically all of the abilities they're going to have except for like one big new ability they have. So you already have like a general idea of how to deal with it without even getting to that bit altogether. And it feels like a natural progression

of the mechanics you were already playing with earlier now in this big like final culmination that feels a lot more exciting yeah i haven't played that game specifically but that does sound like very intelligent design out there and and yeah like that this this comes down to like a game design philosophy, I suppose, at this point. But games are supposed to be interactive, in my opinion. They are supposed to be about playing with systems and learning how those systems work. And if I have to pop up a text box or I'm playing a game and a text box pops up to tell me how something works, text box where i'm playing a game and a text box pops up to tell me how something works i often i like i just usually just like glance over it really quickly and then and close it

and then i'll start playing go what did that say that might have been important like i i want to play with the systems i want to learn how the systems function and that's and that's fun you know that that's imagine that imagine having fun in a video game okay so this is comes back to uh there's a there's a there's an old game design book called a theory of fun by ralph costa um and he talks actually haven't read it in like 20 years so i'm probably getting it wrong but um he talks a lot of that book about the learning element of games being a large part of where the fun is. It's a very, very good book. I do recommend people interested in game design check it out.

I don't want to talk too much about it because I haven't read it in 20 years, so I'd probably misrepresent it if I tried to. But I do remember a big part of it was talking about um that the learning of those systems is is what kind of creates fun because we are not human beings are learning machines right we we our brains are designed to learn new skills and new things and our brains reward us with you know little dopamine hits for doing that and games can tap into that and so when i get a new mechanic or i see a new mechanic in a game i want to experiment with it i want to play around with it i want to learn how it functions because that is fun um that is naturally fun for human beings um and intuitively fun and i think you undercut that if you start throwing up text prompts to tell people how something functions.

Yeah, it might be that the mechanic is fun itself just to use. Cool, that's great. But I think if it's not fun to learn how to, if you're skipping over the fun of learning how to using it, then potentially you're cutting out some of the fun from your game right there okay no that i a bit of a tangent there no no i i get what you're saying there um i don't really have anything to add to that i i completely agree with you yeah like as much as i enjoy games where you know like I'll play a game and it's like hey here's a wall of text here's how everything works and like

then you just the problem with like a wall of text right is often times you can have everything explained to you but you're not actually going to understand it until you use it anyway so instead of just dumping all that information on you it's probably better to introduce it in a way

where you actually learn it from doing it. Yeah, and understandably, some games can be quite complex and there's just no other solution other than to explain through text. Sure, if you're playing a game like... There's a great example of this. There is a game called 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel. of this um there is a game called 5d chess with multiverse time travel um it's chess but you can like you play moves across different across a timeline so moves can affect things that happen in the past and then there's also different like dimensions where the game's happening at the same

time so your move can like affect things at different points in time across different like dimensions of where the game's happening. And there's no sensible way to introduce this just through the mechanics. Like it's just complicated. It sounds horrible. Potentially a lot of fun, but it sounds horrible to try and like to try and explain to people

yeah I don't know I'll have to check that out it's interesting I think it's like $5 on Steam I was thinking more of more like complex like strategy games or city builders

or something where you might have to explain that you need to build... Every turn will do these things and you might require some kind of text. But those sort of games, people kind of expect text to guide them through. It's almost like reading the rulebook of a complicated tabletop game or something. You're not expected to do it intuitively. Right, right, right.

But in games that I think focus more on simple interactions in their world, I think there's an opportunity there to teach those interactions through just playing around with them. Yeah, and I think my game falls into that kind of category, that field of games where the interactions in the game are simple enough that you can just figure them out by using, given the introduction to them is designed well enough to do so. Well, regarding introduction, how do you ensure that people are clear on what is an object that has a mechanic attached to it,

as opposed to just being part of the environment, but then also still having a way to hide secrets in the world that might not be instantly evident? Yeah, that is and has been a challenge um the way i'm mostly approaching it is uh the most interactable objects in my game are glow with orange light so if you look at the screenshots it's this kind of like glowy sci-fi environment there's a lot of glowy lights all over the place most of the environment the static environment lights are just this greeny blue color and that's just your general background anything that's orange is usually represents something interactable um this is this i don't want to get too much into like the yellow paint controversy that people would go on

about um but it is effectively that right it's like i mean at least in the aesthetic of my game it works right it's a weird alien environment where everything glows with different lights you know it i can perfectly go you know perfectly fine to say the ones that glow orange or you know yellow um that's the one you can interact with and it makes sense it's fine no's going to complain about it. But it is effectively that. For anyone who might be unaware of what he means by yellow paint there. So a lot of, especially a lot of AAA games, the way they will indicate something is climbable, something is grabbable is no context for it being there at all. It's just randomly painted yellow.

So there'll be like a ledge yellow paint and you're in like the middle of a forest that no one's been to in a thousand years and there's just yellow paint there for no reason or like it games do that the game's been doing this for a while and people only suddenly started realizing it uh sekiro for example actually does this as well um but it also does some other some other like basically yellow paint systems where anything that's grabbable has like these marks on it that are always there where it's like why are these marks on everything don't question it that's what you can grab onto and i get why it's there because especially if you think a game like assassin's creed for example where

you're going to be climbing a lot you need some way to indicate what can you grab what can't you grab and doing so in a way that feels consistent is difficult I know a lot of people complain about it

there's a few things at play here so as first of all these are AAA games generally that do this and AAA games need to sell There's a few things at play here. So as... First of all, these are AAA games, generally, that do this. And AAA games need to sell to massive amounts of audiences to make their money back and make the kind of profit margins that the big AAA publishers demand in order to make these games in the first place.

Which means really sanding off any rough edges whatsoever. Any kind of friction the player encounters gets sanded away. So they're usually... They're not difficult games to understand, generally. And that's where a lot of it comes from. It's also where you get helper companions that explain a puzzle to you

if you take more than five seconds to figure it out. You know, it's like, thanks, thanks, buddy. I was going to try and figure it out, but you just told me what it was going to be. Hey, have you considered hitting it with a hammer? Exactly, yeah. That's where that stuff comes from, because, you know, someone got stuck

and didn't realize they could hit it with a hammer. And it's like, you know, we can't have players getting stuck there, have the character say hit it with a hammer. And, you know, it's disappointing, but that's why. They're trying to make it as broad appeal as possible. They don't want anyone getting stuck anywhere. They want everyone to know you can smash those barrels.

That's why there's yellow paint all over them. They want everyone to know you can climb that wall. That's why there's yellow paint there. The other side of it, I think, comes from modern games, especially AAA games, being so high fidelity in their visuals that if there is a ladder against a wall, you may not notice it amongst all the rest of the details in the environment. So in the early days, it was enough just to have a rally against

the wall because the wall was like a really low res texture and the ladder was the only prop in the room because that's all you could render right you know and then as we got as games got more complex we got more you know uh more effects and more uh uh detailed lighting models we could say you know shine spotlights on the ladder and really draw your visual attention to that place. And we still do that a lot in today. But now, now the wall is like a complex brick wall and there's cobwebs hanging off it and there's shit on the floor and it's the whole room is disguised. So you really have to do a lot of work to draw your attention to that ladder now. And, and that's, I think a lot of them just draw your attention to that ladder now and and that's i think a lot

of them just go fuck it we've tried everything else just slap yellow paint over it bright yellow paint so everyone can see it yeah um when you get a point with realism then you lose out on those gamifications that exist in older games because every game like for the until the end of time like games have had some sort of yellow paint system, there's always been a the well made games had some sort of consistent thing you would interact with to do some sort of mechanic

it just, it wasn't always yellow paint, but as things moved towards more of these realistic graphics you lose out on a lot of those gamifications that just made sense like if you have a game that's in a more cartoony style, no one's going to question some cartoony thing that you interact with that is always there that does the thing.

But when your game is trying to look photorealistic, it's harder to come up with things that make sense for those kinds of interactions well it's particularly egregious when certain elements are interactive and other ones are not yeah and you can't tell the difference without the yellow paint um i recently played uh horizon zero dawn on pc and this is that game is i love the game it's a lot of fun but it's particularly bad for this kind of thing where there are there's like scaffolding

like your enemy base is scaffolding up the wall and everything and I'm just like leaping trying to climb it I cannot climb it I can see there's stuff up the top of it I know I can get up there but I have to find the one part of the scaffolding with the yellow rope around the logs that I can climb even though there's an identical part next

to it, but doesn't have the yellow rope on it, you can't climb that. Likewise, they do similar things with cliff faces, where there's like this, I remember this, this is actually one part of the game, it does both these things. It had like this low, low set kind of cliff edge around this kind of arena. And it's all the same

height the whole way around. And it's just above head height. So way around um and it's just above head height so you'd think the character could just like grab it and climb up you can't except for one portion which has a little white marker on it that's the part you can grab right and it to me that kind of really that broke the illusion of the game at that point yeah it's like you know i understand the need to like draw out what's interactable and what's not but if if everything in the game at that point. Yeah. It's like, you know, I understand the need to, like, draw out what's interactable and what's not. But if everything in the game looks interactable and isn't, I think that actually feels quite shallow as well.

Right, right. This was coming off the back of having just played, like, Tears of the Kingdom. So, I mean, it's not really a fair comparison because I'm playing, like, Horizon came out just before Breath of the Wild did. Right, right. One of the last big open world games that came out pre-breath of the wild which i think changed everything when it comes to open world games after that um but i had just played the tears of the kingdom which was of course evolution of breath of the wild

and then i've gone and played horizon on pc and well this game feels so in its environmental exploration feels so artificial in comparison and so limited compared to what was possible uh in a game that says you know what fuck it if you can if it looks like you can climb it you can climb it because you can fucking climb anything um uh whereas horizon was very much felt like a a stage in which certain elements were to be interacted with and the rest was just there to look pretty right right no i i i do get that um and we've got a bit of a tangent from yellow paint tangents are totally fine it's all good um no i get what you're saying about um about uh tears of the kingdom there where like there's a mountain there it's like can you get

up there probably i don't know try it see It's like, can you get up there? Probably. I don't know. Try it. See what happens. It's not going to stop you. I think the thing that takes me out of any game when it comes to exploration is a game that has some sort of platforming system, but then randomly there are invisible

walls where it's like, okay, I could jump over there. I can clearly see I have the height could jump over there like I can clearly see I have the height to jump over there my abilities get me there no problem but it's like nope you cannot do that and the instant that happens like okay I am playing a game right now. Horizon does that as well where the character will jump different lengths depending on whether you're allowed to jump it or not. It's terrible.

I don't want to heap shit on that game, because I really enjoyed the game. I actually really liked it. But there's a lot of stuff like that in it. Yeah. Invisible walls make children cry. It was something I was told by my art

director back at Chrome Studios up in Brisbane. He used to say, invisible walls make children cry. And he would say that because in playtesting some of the games there, they would bring in kids, including the art director's kids. They'd play the game, they'd run into visible walls, and they would start crying because they couldn't go that way. Now, presumably they don't make adults cry when

they're playing games but i don't know i've kind of taken that as my guiding philosophy when it comes to invisible walls in games from now on yeah like if i can run into invisible wall i shouldn't be able to get there yeah yeah i say that i say that making a game where there are invisible walls everywhere because i don't allow players to fall off edges. I think edges are different. Any time you walk... Yeah, I mean, I think I get away with it because once you understand you can't fall off platforms in my game

because there's no jumping. Part of the puzzle solving is navigating the environment without just, like, jumping down and cheating past it. Once you understand that, it's fine, and it doesn't become an obstacle. It doesn't become an incongruity. But yeah.

But in general, if you're walking along a slope, whatever, you're going up into the mountains and then suddenly you hit a wall. I encountered this a lot in Skyrim playing that and it's always disappointing. It's like, oh, playing that, and it's always disappointing. It's like, oh, I want to explore what's up this valley up here. There's trees and rocks that look interesting.

I'm trying to get up there, and then suddenly you're hitting a wall. It's disappointing as an adult. It makes you cry as a child. Yeah, I'm thinking back to when I played Sekiro recently. So at the start of the game, you can swim above water, and it's fine. But later in the game, you get the ability to dive. Now you're supposed to use it to get through a zone later in the game where you're in this cave and you get through this underwater passage. But there's water in other areas. So I'm like, hey, what happens if we go back to the first

zone that had a river in it? The river runs around the entire zone. I wonder if I go back to the first zone that had a river a river in it the river runs around the entire zone i wonder if i can swim to the other side no you go through there and it's like okay randomly hit a wall but like i i get that you know you're not supposed to go there and sure but like at least put some rocks there or something that kind of like stops you from going any further where, you know, it's weird that it's there. Why is it there? I don't know. Don't question it. But at least it's not nothing. I guess it kind of pick your battles, I suppose, with it as well.

Like if you don't get the swimmability until halfway through the game and you're not expected to ever go back to the early areas, then, you know, I haven't played Sekiro, so I don't know how it's structured. Then maybe you go, look, you know, some players are going to run back to the start of the game and try to split up the river. Bugger it. We haven't got time to fix that. Focus on what's important. And you do run into troubles, like, you know, if you have an open world

game, somehow you have to put barriers around it. You know, the world map in breath of the wild has invisible worlds uh you know eventually you reach like sometimes it's a very high cliff but you can actually you know climb up it a bit and eventually there's a wall that's kind of disappointing um they've also got like a really deep canyon around one side that if you fall down it you just die i I think that's... Which I think looks really weird to be honest.

I actually would almost prefer just like a larger cliff or something around the outside rather than a massive massive right angle chasm around the corner of the map. I'm not quite sure what happens if you try and sail off into the ocean far. Usually games are where you sail off it. A lot of games I find just like turn you around and send you back so i don't look my whole breath the wild handles it but a game at some point of world games have to figure out how to deal with barriers when there is no physical barrier in the way a game that does that um really well with like having a water there where it looks like can go forever is um the jack and daxter games so in jack three you go to this desert city at the start of the game, and there's this big ocean.

It's like, oh, I can just swim out there. And then you go out there and you get eaten by a kraken. Where it's like, there's no wall there, but if you go too far, you just die. It comes up with a reason why you die. Yeah, that's funny. Personally, that's how... I don't like it where there's a clear wall, but it effectively acts like a wall.

It just feels more natural and part of the game. And it feels like you can get away from it, right? It doesn't have to be realistic or anything either. I really don't like when people make the argument that something has to be in a game for the sake of realism. Or something can't be in a game because of realism. It's usually a disingenuous argument for a start, but let's not even get into that. They're usually whinging about something else entirely. But what's important is that I think it doesn't feel discontinuous

with your experience. It doesn't pull you out of the experience. An invisible wall often pulls you out of the experience because you're walking along and then suddenly you come to a stop. It's like, ah, ah. And then suddenly you remember you're playing a game and you can't go any further. And that's always just kind of abrupt and disappointing. So, you know, it can just be a simple thing. It could be like the wind blows you back.

It could be a kraken comes out and eats you. Whatever. It's something that doesn't draw you out of the experience. It doesn't have to be realistic. Then it just has to feel a little bit more natural than an abrupt halt. Right. And it's one of those things where if something weird does happen, you're like,

Oh, well that's something I can like talk to someone about. Like, Hey, do you know if you swim out too far, like this thing happens? Like, Oh no,

I didn't know that. I'm going to try that. Like, Oh, that's cool. And it gives you this thing to remember that game by. And that's something that I haven't played the Jak and Daxter games in a long time, but it's something that I always think about whenever I think back on those games. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's, yeah, opportunity then to do something memorable,

making people, yeah. Which kind of brings us back to the discussion about teaching players stuff. If you can figure out a way to make something a learning experience or fun, then there's an opportunity there. If you figure out a way to use... To see a problem and rather than going for the simple solution like pop up text on screen or throw up an invisible wall, figure out a creative way of dealing with it that is allows a player to learn a new system or surprise the player or or you know create something that enhances their enjoyment of the game rather than just you know yeah whatever this is how the thing functions don't worry about that get back to get back to the other part of the game get back to the manufactured fun is it is fun time now have fun yeah go back you you're not

the other fun go away yeah yeah no that you're saying before about the the your game not letting you walk off the platforms i initially didn't realize you couldn't walk off platforms so i was like avoiding the edge like the second i realized you couldn't like okay i i've played games like this i think that's the one time that people just forgive invisible wall because your game doesn't have a jump button so it it makes sense that you can't interact with ledges in that same way that you would be able to in a lot of other games yeah um it was something i was i was toying with for a while, whether I would actually include a jump button and allow people to fall off edges. And I was very uncertain about whether to do it or not. Because a lot of, many of the environment puzzles I had designed up to that point relied on the fact that you would not be able to fall off.

off um uh and i mean from very early on in the game uh in the design process i knew i wanted to have environments made of like weird floating platforms and shifting and moving things um and i decided early on not to add a fall off so that it was a lot easier to navigate because often these are very small platforms and i don't want people just like falling off all the time because they don't take the corner sharpen up or something and also then it allowed me to design puzzles where you couldn't just cheat it by like leaping down to a lower platform and bypassing a section um so i designed the game a lot large parts of the game like that and then when as we were play testing people oh what a jumper why can't i fall off i'm like oh should i go back

and introduce that should i allow you to walk off the edge should i you know do this thing and ultimately i decided not to simply because i'd have to redesign all of these puzzles for one thing i would have to handle there's a whole bunch of additional code considerations there as well how to handle that because you know if you fall off then potentially you can get stuck in areas and there's a lot more of you know there's a lot of qa that has to happen then to make sure you can't get stuck or how i handle um what happens if a player lands on like a slope and slides somewhere and gets stuck in a little crevice like what do i you know do i have to like place collision to get you out of there do i have to like i don't know you know place respawn volumes yeah give

some sort of like cheese thing to like teleport back up to the top or something. Yeah, so it introduced a whole bunch of... These aren't unsolvable problems. There's plenty of games where you can jump off and get stuck in places and you get out of it, so, you know. But that's a whole lot of additional considerations that I wasn't planning on initially. Plus having to redesign all the puzzles is like,

you know, nah, screw it. You can't fall off edges. You can't jump. This is the game I'm making. You explore the game using the abilities I give you, and one of those abilities is not a jump. So if you want to traverse to

a platform up there, you have to use the translocator ability, which allows you to grapple to a point and teleport to that point. And that sort of thing. So that's kind of my substitute jump, I suppose. Yeah, I'm thinking on the demo you had, and if there was a jump button, I'm thinking of

a number of places that you could very easily softlock it. At the puzzle where you're supposed to go around and raise up the tower, you could probably jump down to that ledge where the bones or whatever were, and not have a way to get back from that?

Well, there's a platform there that moves, so you'd be safe there. The place you wouldn't be safe is if you jumped off a ledge before solving one of the puzzles. Because you solve the puzzle and it turns on the elevator. If you had jumped off before turning off the elevator, then you'd be stuck. Right, right, right.

But in that case, well, I mean, in the full game um with the level that's that puzzle is taken from those elevators are on anyway so that wouldn't actually be a problem so but yes like but the point your point is right like um once you can start jumping off edges you just have to start doing a lot more extensive qa and you have to start as qa you have to start then actively trying to break the game and getting to places where you shouldn't and trying to softlock it like that. It's what, that kind of softlock is what we would call a non-progression bug in that you get yourself into a situation where you're unable to proceed further into the game. I'm one of those people that the second I see a game has a jump and then maybe like an ability that raises you a certain height I'm the kind of person who is going to look for the place where I can clip out of the map because oftentimes a game has somewhere that you can like jump onto a ledge

and there's like a pixel you can stand on and then you can reset your jump and jump higher and eventually break something that was never even thought about trying to do yeah and most players won't do that um a lot of some developers will do that when they try and break each other's games i did that to some to some people at avcon that was fun um that's okay probably the same as mine uh and obviously like speed runners and stuff and glitch hunters will try and do that sort of stuff as well and and you know you'd you do the extensive qa that you can you fix the ones that you think are the highest highest priority you know the ones that most players are likely to encounter by accident um you don't want people having a bad experience getting stuck by accident

and then if you know if a speed or a glitch hunter wants to go through and discover these little edge cases more power to them, they know what they're getting into they get themselves softlocked they knew the stakes going in so yeah but by not having mechanics like this, by having it

you walk around and there are puzzles it gives you a lot less to worry about and a lot less ways that things can go really wrong it does uh it has its own problems it's not foolproof like there are certainly areas where you can if i don't set things up correctly you can soft lock yourself or whatever and you know i just have to be careful i have to so i still have to do a lot of qa to make sure um you can't you know solve a puzzle and then quit out before doing the next part and then maybe you haven't saved the state i didn't save the state of the puzzle correctly or you know whatever it might be a bug in the save system where you save that you solve the puzzle but didn't save that the elevator was in position and now when you reload it the puzzle but didn't save it, the elevator was in position. And now when you reload it, the puzzle's solved, the elevator's turned off, and you can't progress.

So there's still a lot of QA that has to be done. I still have to make sure I extensively test it and look for all these edge cases. But I think generally, yes, it does simplify a lot in terms of the QA I have to do. And especially as a one-person development team, that is a huge bonus.

I say one person. I always mention that I have got audio and a writer doing part-time work on it as well. And at some point, I'm probably closer towards release. I'll actually hire someone to do QAI as well. So I have someone doing full-time QAI on it for a while uh so yeah so but the game is certainly simplified a lot

by by just completely removing certain mechanics well yeah obviously there was still going to be qa and you need to make sure the puzzles work and all that like but my point was like do you have less moving parts so there's less that can go wrong yes yes i have i have a different set of moving parts yeah yeah but hopefully they're less prone to um weird edge cases if something goes wrong with the moving parts i've got in my game it's generally because i haven't set it up correctly right right it's usually a fairly obvious problem. Yeah, like you have. The more... I think this comes down to how...

how dynamically interactive the game is. So in a game like mine, it's the... it's less dynamically interactive. It's still very interactive. You interact with a lot i'm using the word dynamic as in how how free form the interaction is with the player so if you think in a game like uh like a first person shooter it's it's very dynamic they can move around any direction you

can jump sometimes you can climb ledges you can shoot a variety of guns and explode things and monsters run everywhere. There's a lot of interactions that can take place in very unique and dynamic ways. Whereas in a more strictly designed puzzle game like mine, the interactions

are fairly limited to what you do when solving the puzzle. The different buttons you press to cycle through the different glyphs or turn things around. So that's not to make like a judgment call on what's better or what's not. They're different styles of game.

But I think that by making it less dynamic experience and more sort of almost pre-programmed in a way, then it potentially makes it easier or potentially reduces the number of edge cases and makes the solutions potentially easier to find. If you encounter a bug, you can probably isolate exactly what caused it. Like, oh, I forgot to enable the Boolean on this thing.

That's why it didn't activate properly. As opposed to, I left up this wall, slid halfway down here, enable the you know the boolean on this thing that's why it didn't activate properly as opposed to i i left up this wall slid halfway down here fired the grenade which launched me backwards a bit which made a clip to the wall and you know who knows what else so yeah well one thing i was thinking of by not having a jump button is it introduces a very different set of environment design issues so in the original version of Final Fantasy 14, they didn't have a jump button in that version, but anytime there was a slight lip on the ground, you had to walk all the way around it so you could actually

navigate to get to the level above that. And they fixed that by just adding a jump button in the updated versions because they needed something there. It just felt bad to not have that so you need to make sure that you don't have those bits where it just feels weird to navigate around a zone because that jump button is lacking yeah that i mean that comes down to level design in a bit there it's like you know making sure that you don't place obstacles that just get in the way and in a way that feels tedious. And I do that when I'm designing my game

and blocking out the levels and I build a path like, is this path too long? Does it feel like too much of a nuisance to have to walk around here? If there is a slight ledge, generally,

if you're not supposed to get up there i like to separate it dramatically and that kind of works for the aesthetics of my game it's supposed to be like this this massive feeling not necessarily massive in scope because again one person team but massive feeling alien environment with these giant like mega structures and huge alien buildings so if there's a ledge you can't get up to the ledge is up here it's like a huge ledge if there's a gap is it to cross then it's like it's a chasm you know so that helps a lot in my game and if it's a small little lip then generally i'll just i'll place a ramp there or i'll just slope the collision up so you can just walk up it if it's that low that it looks like you should be able to step up it then i allow

you to step up it because i don't want it to get in the way if it's impossible it looks impossible right right and because of the well yeah it doesn't feel weird when there's just random walls around the place because of the the setup you have it's like okay well yeah this alien planet okay yeah they're doing things here why why are they glowing orange things that's just as weird there's um well there's as an example there's one part in in one of the environments i designed recently where it's a lot hard to say so the path joins onto this sort of like hexagon platform. It comes up. It hooks a little bit to the left, to the right. I'm not sure what direction I'm on screen here, but hooks a little bit off to the right

and then into this corner of this hexagon platform. And then from the adjoining side of it, another path comes up that way and it goes out there, which means if you walk straight ahead you have to hook a little to the right and weave around this little gap and what i found was before i even play tested with other people just play testing with myself i'd walk up and you'd want to cut the corner because but you'd constantly hit this little invisible wall which is it's only a very small little little triangle that gets bigger and bigger as you get

further away, obviously. But if you start trying to cut the corner a little bit too close, you can't walk past because there's an invisible wall there. And what I ended up doing was just pushing the wall back and placing the visible ground collision in that gap.

Basically out in space to a point where it felt it wasn't too large um which allows you to basically cut the corner and walk over empty space um but now nobody when i saw people play it nobody hit that wall and nobody i think walked far enough out that they noticed they're walking across open air so it's it's a real kind of like finessing the level design um around it to make sure that being able to navigate the environment feels natural without things getting in your way,

unless they're supposed to. Right. That's a very specific example in that one little case, but yeah, that's the sort of thing I have to do. I did the same sort of thing in the, in the, the demo you played as well.

There's, there's certain areas where I just built custom collision around certain parts of the environment to make navigating it feel more natural and smooth than if I just used the geometry collision that's already there Yeah, I'm picturing in my head what

that would be and I see where you're coming from with that From what I can tell, you clearly have a lot of experience with game design. I know there was a game that you have released previously. So it's clear that from... I've not had a chance to look at that.

But it's clear that you have a lot of experience dealing with these problems. It's not like this is your first attempt thinking about these issues. We didn't go over this earlier but like what is your background in game development like what what is your like i don't know brief history here or full history whatever how much you want to talk about it sure okay well i've been making games for about 20 years at this point. Right. Long time. I studied art and animation at university at one of Australia's first game development courses. I don't know if it was the first, but it was one of only two available at the time.

Wow. Now every university's got a game design course, game art course, game program, everything. At the time, there was like two places that offered game dev courses when i left high school and and only one of them was in brisbane so so i did that and um even then it wasn't really a game development course it was in order to get accredited with the government, because no such thing existed at this point, they basically took a collection of different art and animation units and tried to fudge them around to make them game orientated so they could still give me a degree at the end of it, or a diploma at a degree. It definitely wasn't the best. I learned a lot. don't get me wrong but um certainly the the courses are out there now i'm sure are much more specifically

targeted and much better at teaching design and game development than the one i did back then um but yeah i studied art and animation. I found that I had a liking for level development, level environment art. So most of the course focused on, say, character art and character animation. But there was a couple of units where we did environment stuff.

And I found I really enjoyed that. So when I left university, when I graduated, I focused on that. So I went for – I actually went in for a job interview at Chrome Studios up in Brisbane on the very last day of my degree. So I basically went in the morning, did the job interview, got off for the job, and then went into class to do my last class before end of degree. So that was kind of fun. Yeah. So I got hired at Chrome as an environment artist. I worked on a Spyro the Dragon. So it was a new beginning.

It was the Spyro reboot. Okay. The very old viewers might remember, say, Spyro on the PlayStation 1. I made the Spyro, or worked on the Spyro reboot. Oh, that one. Yeah. Yeah, I do remember this one. Yeah, it came out on xbox gamecube and i think we're in ps2 at the time yes yes so i got i was a junior artist i got hired on that i was on that

for like the last six months of its development so it was largely complete by the time i started um but i got to play i got to build a little bit of that, which was fun. I then worked on a bunch of other games at Chrome, various different license titles. Usually I didn't do any of the in-house IP titles. That was usually a different team did that. So, yeah. Got a bit of work on a Star Wars game, which was fun. That was nice to have on the resume.

Then the global financial crisis hit back in the 2010s, where suddenly all the money dried up and the Australian games industry collapsed. Everybody lost their jobs. Everyone, all the companies shut down. We were working on the happy feet to the video game at the time mm-hmm so happy feet directed by George Miller of Mad Max that's what best known for Mad Max but also made

happy feet and he was making happy feet to the movie at the time and we were making the video game for that. And that's when Chrome shut down at that point in time. But my understanding was, this is my understanding anyway, Warner Brothers was keen to see the game actually get completed to tie in with the movie. So thanks to the work of the producer on our team at the time, working with Warner Brothers, they managed to organize a new studio,

which became called KMM Games, Kennedy Miller Mitchell. So that's Miller as in George Miller, the director. And I actually don't remember the other two, but it's their film studio. It's Kennedy Miller Mitchell's film studio. We became KMM Games, their game studio. So basically

I was kind of in limbo for a week or two until that all got confirmed and then I came

back in and I found myself sitting right back in my same seat at Chrome where I just was two

weeks ago. But now I'm working for KMM games, not Chrome, working on the same game as I was at

Chrome. So that was a weird time. No, that was... That's what it's saying here. No, there was some like... Did something on it? I don't know. I forget how that worked out.

I think there was some sort of ownership change hands or something at some point I'm not sure exactly what it was Okay, this is confusing then L.A. Noire was Team Bondi and they got eventually bought by

Rockstar Rocksteady, no, yeah, Rockstar, sorry Yeah, you're right, I think Warner Brothers or KMM, or someone was involved in it somehow, but no We were the KMM studio and yeah, we made Happy Feet, we were told Oh, we're totally going to keep you on, we're going to get another

project for you, we're going to do more I don't think anybody believed that we were going to keep us on afterwards, and lo and behold we shipped Happy Feet and they shut down the studio At least from what I'm reading here, it says that some Team Bondi people were transferred over to KMM, a subsidiary of it or something. I don't know.

It sounds confusing. I thought the name Chrome Studios sounded familiar. I love the title. It has many Tiger games. I knew I recognized the name for some reason. Right. title, it has many Tiger Games. I knew I recognized the name for some reason. Right, oh okay, yeah, cool. Yeah, so that's what they're most known for, obviously, Tiger Games. Which, I don't know if it's still the case, but it was like the highest rated

game on Steam when they did the re-release of it. Which is hilarious and wonderful. Yeah, I never worked on any of the Tiger Games, unfortunately. I started there, I think, just before or after TIE3 launched. I think it was just before, so yeah. Yeah, and that was the last one they did until they did the 2D one years later. Yeah, yeah. 2005 they released TIE3. Yeah. Yeah, I started in 2004,

I believe. So, okay. So it would have been like most of the way through production, but you're on a different team. Yeah. Chrome had quite a lot of people. There was like at its peak,

it was like 400 people across the country. Cause we had Chrome at like multiple studios at one point, but even in the building where, even in the building where we were situated in Fortitude Valley, it was like a four story building and there was like a different team on every floor right so you had like the engine team that built chrome's proprietary engine up on the top floor the next floor down was the team i was on um then you get the next level had we we often call them the hellboy team because they worked on the hellboy game and they went on did others but we always just call them the hellboy team um and then you had a lower floor as well which i i don't remember who

was down there um i know i know half brick was down there at one stage before half brick when half brick was very very new half brick made fruit ninja and and jetpack joyride and stuff before they went on and found that kind of success, they were working on the GBA versions of Tasmanian Tiger and stuff. And before they had their own studio, they worked out of the basement of Chrome. That's so sad what happened then. I didn't realize

how big Chrome was before the global financial crisis. Yeah, it was huge. One of the designers there he would relate a story where he remembered um when when chrome shut down and lost a lot of people um the same day that that happened some i don't know what it was it might have been like a another another company uh we had a business not games related coming up entirely where maybe like like 100 people lost their job and and politicians were all over it

at the time but not a word about the 400 people that just, or even more than that in the Australian game industry, because Chrome was like the last one to shut down before that you'd lost pandemic. You'd lost freaking THQ and a bunch of others as well had gone. I think Chrome was the last to shut down before Sega went a few years later, actually. It was creative assembly. But here's the go. Yeah. And then he was likeaker went. He would basically say that

from that incident, he came to realize how little the Australian government cared about games, basically. How little the industry meant to them. Because when a company of 80 to 100 people shuts down,

they can put on their high-vis vest and their hard hat and go to the site and be outraged about it and cry crocodile politician tears. But when 400 people working in games lose their jobs, yeah, not a peep. So I think things have changed a bit since then. They care enough that we now have grants,

which is great. That took a long, long time and a lot of hard work by people to make them happen. And I'm thankful for that, partly because I'm the recipient of one of those grants. So, you know, can't complain.

So yeah, definitely things are better than they were, but it still does seem like that, you know, unless a politician can stand somewhere with a hard hat and a high-vis vest uh they don't care right so i'm looking at another tangent but yeah totally fine sorry yeah i'll quickly wrap up the rest of my history then i went from from kmm to sega where i worked for about six months until they shut down sega so that didn't last very long and that's where i thought bugger this i i'm done with with just getting fired from companies i'm gonna start my own studio and and the next studio that gets

shut down i lose my job from is going to be my own so yeah hopefully that won't happen but hey uh yeah so i taught myself how to program. I made my first game. Oh, so you were just like an art guy before that? Yes, I was totally environment art. I had dabbled in design in my own time, but hadn't done it professionally, had never programmed before.

And I was actually very worried about it. I was very worried that I wouldn't be able to do it because I did a programming semester at university, and I understood nothing. I did not get it. It made no sense to me, and I was like, I think they gave me a pity pass, I called it.

They don't want to fail anyone, so we'll give you the lowest possible mark just to get you over the line. When I thought, okay, the tools now, because Unity was just becoming quite big at the time. Unreal wasn't really at the point where it was viable as an indie at that point, as a solo indie. But it would soon become that a couple of years later. But at the time Unity was really coming into its own, C-sharp I had heard was fairly easy to learn. And there was also a lot of visual scripting tools and stuff available as well.

So I thought, okay, I can at least try this. And so I did some online courses to try and learn at least try this and so i did some online courses to try and learn c-sharp programming and i actually found it like actually not that bad yeah and quite you realize quickly that the issue is how we've been taught to you not exactly that's exactly what it was and what i realized like back at uni they're basically teaching a pseudocode where we have to like we'd write out in pseudocode what we wanted the functions to do and it made no sense i did not get it and even to this day i don't do that it's like no i just i just write the code you know like anyway so no the course i did basically explained it by having you write code and explaining what an if statement was and what a loop was and how these things function and it's like oh okay that makes sense cool all right I can do that.

Yeah, that's why I went to UniSA. They originally did a Python course as their first course and then migrated into Java and other things. Now they do an entire year of Python just to teach fundamentals because there's no point doing the pseudocode nonsense. Python is basically pseudocode, but it does things. It's an easy language. You don't need that much to understand. There's weird, like, the Python people are going to explain some weird, complex Python things. But the basic stuff to teach you how programming works, if statements, loops, all that stuff, very, very simple.

Sure. And that's like, I tell other artists that want to get into games, like, oh, should I learn programming? Is it hard? Can I make a game myself if I don't have a program? Like, yeah, you can. Because like, 99% of what you'll do is if statements and loops. Once heart attack. But, like, it's true. Like, until I built my first game, it's basically if statements and loops. That's it. That's it. Once you got that, you're, like, 90% of the way there. So, that first game, that is the Aizavara, yes?

Yes. So, that's... It's almost like a simplified version of what I'm building now. So, it was my first game as my first solo project i tried deliberately to keep the scope really manageable so we were talking about how there's no jump button and no falling off edges in the current game you know as a vara there's not even any movement like you don't even walk around okay um it's it's purely point and click so well partly is because it was designed as a mobile game first i ended up

launching on pc first and then going to mobile just because it ended up being easy to develop in that direction but originally i was designing it as a mobile game which i would potentially later port to pc so it was entirely around designed around touch touch base controls so you would drag the screen to look around um and you would tap on a door and the camera would move and fade out and fade into the next room you tap on a puzzle the camera zooms into the puzzle then you like drag things around touch tap twist turn very very like tactile interaction um again yeah basically designed to be played on a phone right um but i end up releasing on pc first just because I was developing on PC anyway

and it was just easier to get it out on PC first and then downscale it to mobile rather than go the other direction. But as a result, a lot of the design sensibilities of the game were catered around that. But also, I chose that path because I wanted to keep it simple for myself.

Because again, I wasn't a programmer. I was learning how to program as i built the game so i wanted to simplify it as much as possible and remove as much complexity as possible from the the programming so it's all very simple interactions um in terms of in terms of code it's like click the thing animation plays drag the thing you know opens the door whatever i, you know, opens a door, whatever. Right, I'm seeing the trailer here, and there's like a bit where there's like a paper with cutouts on it, and you like line it up with the numbers that are on the other thing behind it. And like, there's another one in here.

There's another like a line one, where you like, you have to like select the different lines that are visible. And yeah, clearly like, it's very simple stuff. Here's a lot of like rotating an object, um, much the same as like what you have in, in this game, but it's, it's a different aesthetic here. I can see how a lot of what you learned from that game has been applied to this one as well. Well, that's kind of where this game, where the new game comes in, right?

So I built Eyes of Arah and I learned a lot doing it. I learned how not to program for a start because the programming, the code in Eyes of Arah is awful spaghetti code. It's just awful, it's atrocious. The new game is much, much cleaner. I'm very proud of the new game. And that's what you're going to think when you go to your next game. You're like, wow,

what the hell was I doing on the last one? Oh, I'm sure. But I already know it's miles better than the last one. So, you know, hopefully the next game will be miles better again. But yeah, so like in terms of the design, this new game,

I basically wanted to wanted to take what i built the first time and expand upon that so last it was a puzzle game um but you couldn't move around so okay i'll make it i want to make a game that focuses more on exploration and is more free form so you can actually walk around the environment um one thing i wanted to change from the first one is that there is a large number of puzzles in the game um quite quite a large number of puzzles in the game um every one of them almost every one of them is unique um and i think as a result of that the quality overall tends to drop right i think there's a few really good puzzles in there i'm quite happy with but i also feel

the quality suffered in a few areas as well which is because the sheer number of them I couldn't give them enough attention or I needed a puzzle to fill up a part of the game and had to come up with something so I was like, okay, that's and people seem to love the game

it's still like, on Metacritic it's got the highest rating than any game I've ever worked on, so, you know, could be proud of that. But, you know, there were parts of it I wasn't happy with personally. So the new game, I was like, okay, I'm going to have fewer puzzles in the game, but I'm going to spend more time on them

and make them better and more interesting puzzles. So that was kind of my two pillars going into it from the old game, was fewer but more interesting puzzles and more exploration built into the environment. So it is very much just an evolution of what I was doing last time. So it's, I guess, technically the same genre of game. There's a bit of adventure puzzle um but blended with metroidvania elements in this case but so it's a very different take on that genre so so you know i certainly wouldn't

say they're similar uh in in many ways but there's definitely an evolution right so does this mean your next game is going to have a jump button and you're going to have platform puzzles it might it might no promises we work on one dimension at a time right right no i think that's a that's a good way to do it instead of trying to you know you see a lot of indie game devs where it's like hey i want to make a game what do you want to make oh an mmorpg is like no stop don't do that i mean even this game even this game is too big like it was supposed to be smaller than eyes of ara it's shaping up to be larger and take longer which was the two things i didn't want to do but here we are so you know i'm terrible at estimating scope everyone's bad at it especially if you've never done it before so yeah do not make an mmorpg you will not finish it you know i'm making what is supposed to be a six hour exploration puzzle game and it's already taking me close to three years and and ongoing so you know

go small people right go small yep and then cut it in half. And half again. So what has been the response you got at AvCon? Like, obviously, people can't really comment on the audio because they couldn't hear it. But from the game itself, how did people respond to it? Did people notice any issues that you didn't know about? Or was that demo you had fairly polished for um for being at a con like that uh yeah so the response was pretty much what i expected um which is to say

people like the demo um which is great they like it they play it and they go and wishlist it which is fantastic that's what i want them to do by the way for your listeners and viewers uh the demo we're talking about is up on steam as well awesome so you can actually download and play it at home as i mentioned it was designed as a trade show demo so it's quite short um and everything we've discussed it's not an ideal steam demo i am planning on putting out a longer more in-depth steam demo in the future which will be a bit of experience for playing at home. But if you do want to check out the game that was at the show, either come along to PAX at the end of the year, I'll be there,

or check it out on Steam and give me a wish list. So what do people take back from it? They like it, which is great. Didn't really find any bugs or issues in the main demo because it had been fairly well tested at that point. I took it to PAX.

I took it to South by Southwest last year, PAX East in Boston this year, and other shows as well. So it's been well and truly road test at this point. I'm not really learning new information from that demo. What I was very keen to do was bring along the two levels from the main game and have people play those.

Because I felt that Avcon being a smaller show, but still open to public, was an opportunity to do some good playtesting. So a bigger show like PAX, it's kind of like a massive marketing opportunity. I just want people playing the demo, getting a taste of the game, and giving me a wish list. But for a

smaller show where first of all, there's less press there, there's less attendees there, there's less PR opportunity involved, that doesn't really have a big impact on the number of wishlists in the end. If you look at the Steam wishlist chart, it's like this

little blip from Avcon. It's like nothing. So I kind of anticipated going in, the value I would get out of Avcon wouldn't be in trying to promote the game. It would be in potentially in playtesting the game. So I brought along in addition to the Steam demo, I brought

along two levels from the main game that I could have people play test. And they were much longer. They took like 30 to 40 minutes to play through. So it really was a time commitment for people to sit down and play. Some people played through all three, which is fantastic. They must have loved it. But yeah, I learned a lot

more watching people play those two levels. Because they're the sort of ones that have only been playtested by other developers at this stage. So I already knew where most of the issues were, but it was good to just get the general public playing it, people who potentially never played the game before, coming at it with fresh eyes and sort of seeing where the stopping points are with that,

what works, what doesn't, that sort of thing. So I took a bunch of notes, got home, and yeah, I made changes to it as a result. So yeah, I already made some adjustments to the levels and whatnot based on what I saw people getting stuck on or feedback and stuff. That's really good. Some weird issues maybe with puzzles being confusing initially, I guess? They're mostly to do with the level design. So there were two environments to playtest. One was

still very much in grey box format. So actually that screenshot you sent earlier with the trees and stuff, it's actually that level. So there's a couple of outdoor sections which have been dressed to a certain extent with props, with lights and the trees and whatnot. But then all the interiors are still in gray box form, which is basically they are literally just gray boxes. They're just like a blank wall with a grid pattern on it. And it's just me like, it's like doing a sketch in a notebook before you do the real real painting you're just sketching out the rough idea yeah and it's a similar sort of thing um you know i've seen screenshots online of like uh valves prototype levels where that for like half-life and software they're like basically orange boxes and cubes and stuff everywhere the same sort of thing um uh so that's that's the format that that level was in.

So that was more, it was testing a very early in development, very rough kind of level. And then being able to make, well, it's at a stage where it's very easy to make changes at that point. It's like, oh, that room doesn't work. I can completely redesign the layout of it. It's quick and easy to do because it's still very rough.

So there was that one. I didn't have to make too many changes to that. That one had also been tested at the dev meetup quite a bit, so I didn't anticipate many changes for that one. But it did reinforce a couple of concerns and things I kind of knew, so that was good as well. The other one was an underground caves area, and this one was a lot more final. All the rooms had not final art, but close to final art done for them. So there were fewer changes I would want to make at that stage as well.

But nonetheless, I had people run through it, and I did discover a few areas, mostly in the way the level was structured, that people were having trouble with or getting hooked up on um so i went back and made some tweaks to shift things around or added yeah going back to an earlier conversation about the yellow paint and highlighting parts with lights and stuff um doing stuff like that i couldn't i couldn't really justify redesigning large chunks of level given all the the art had been put in there but i could you know i could shift a few rocks around nudge a few rocks add some lights to like highlight a path better that sort of stuff and and those sort of tweaks basically to like make the experience a bit smoother and

helping people along if they're getting stuck where they shouldn't be getting stuck that's the thing so you already had a lot of a lot of chances a lot of chances to show off big parts of the game. So it's not as much that... A lot of the devs I've spoken to already, like Avcom was the first time they showed off their game in front of a convention like this. So they had a lot more

that they could take back from that. But you've already had a lot of these experiences already. So there's less that you were going to get out of that experience it's more like it's a chance to play test it it's so might as well play test it basically yeah and that's i think that should be should be a developer's approach when they come to a show like avcon where it's where it's a smaller show in scope It's either going to be the first time you're showing your game and you're going to learn a lot from it,

or I think that if it's not the first time, then I think it's a great opportunity to do playtesting of stuff. Because as I mentioned earlier, a show like PAX, you get way more people, you get way more press attention, it has its own Steam event associated with it which drives a lot of wish lists. It's very much a marketing opportunity.

But before you take your game there, before you take your demo there, PAX should not be the first time you show your demo. Maybe it's the first big public event you do but it shouldn't be the first time people other than your development team are playing it um like even even like pax australia last year was the first event um that memories reach was playable at but prior to that for like the six months prior to that i was taking the build along

to the local dev meet up every month and having people play it. And so by the time it got to PAX, it was very well refined and polished. There were very few surprises discovered at PAX in terms of bugs and stuff. There was one very critical bug, which was annoying, which for some reason never showed up in any of the playtest sessions. But that aside, because it's extremely rare, it's an extremely rare bug, but when you've got hundreds of people playing it every day, suddenly it's occurring rather irregularly.

But yeah. But yes, so an Avcon is a great opportunity to show your game for the first time. Hopefully you've had playtesters prior to this, because you shouldn't be going to any public show without having taken it to devs to play at least. But it's also a good opportunity to

playtest your build, refine it, so that in anticipation for a larger show, you can have a much more polished experience. If you're in a position like me, where you've already gone to several shows, then it's a great opportunity to show something new and to get those playtested as well. I think you get a bunch of gamers coming through

that aren't necessarily developers that will give you a different perspective on things. And it's a small enough show that's manageable to have longer demos without people waiting long queues. Whereas at PAX, people line up for games. So you don't want them lining up for a long time, which is why I kept my demo at like 15 minutes to minimize the number want them lining up for a long time, which is why I kept my demo for like 15 minutes to minimize the number

of people lining up. But Avcon, like I could have a 30 to 40 minute play session on one of the new levels and there'd be no one lining up because it's a much smaller show. And there'll be times

where there's just nobody at the booth, you know, which is a little disappointing, but also, you know, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it. Well, it's an anime and video game convention. So, you know, there's going to be

people there who are big anime fans who are never going to show up to that part, and that's why I'm really happy that I think, it started like two years ago, we have like a dedicated game exhibition now in South Australia, we have SAGE, the South Australian Game

South Australian Game Exhibition it's I haven't gotten a chance to go yet but the South Australian Game Exhibition. I haven't gotten a chance to go yet, but it's like fully dedicated games. Obviously, it's a lot smaller than PAX because PAX is this whole big worldwide thing, but it's more of a focused game development, game showcase thing with just indie game devs there and i'm curious to see how that's going to play out in the local adelaide scene as well

oh yeah that sounds good i did hear about that while i was there so yeah that was the first time i'd heard about it at avcon when someone mentioned it people asked if i was there like no i'm not actually from adelaide yeah they didn't do great marketing for it. So I keep talking to people who went to Avcon or they like video games and most people have no idea it happened, no idea when it happens because it's in like February or something. Okay.

Yeah, they just didn't market it whatsoever. It's an awkward time of year, but... Yeah. I think I'd like to try and get along to it. I'm not sure I'd get along next year but maybe yeah it's growing every year so you know at some point in the future if you yeah want to go another one then check i probably wouldn't take the game to it um but i i well maybe i would i don't know um i'm not sure if they take out of state games or not but um i'd at least like to

just come along as an attendee and just check out what everyone's working on. That's one thing I didn't get a lot of chance to do. I'd never get a chance to do at shows because I'm always on the booth, right? As a solo dev, I'm pretty much at my booth 90% of the time. Well, you're going to drag a friend along.

Exactly. If I'm lucky, I can drag a friend along and usually it's the same friend and she helps out, which is great. But like, you know, she's just there to like drop by

occasionally if I need a break or whatever. I guess that is more of a problem with coming from out of state as well, if you are coming to something like Avcon

where it's like, now you've got to get your friend on like a plane to get over here unless you got like a local friend to do it. Well, I was able to

convince her to go because she had a local friend in Ad it. Yeah. Well, I was able to convince her to go because she had a local friend in Adelaide which she had been promising to visit for a while and never getting around to so I kind of guilted her

into coming by saying you have to visit your friend, you know. So, she got a free ticket to the show and sent her to her friend and then they, yeah,

so she straight up a little bit helped me out a bit and then, you know, went off and spent the day with a friend. So, you know. I got my helper. He got a visit. Everything's good.

Well, yeah, like. I think I would say, I'd like to go to a show and actually be able to play other people's games. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah avcon was quite enough at times on the on the sunday towards the end where i could actually just leave my friend at the booth and just go for a wander and check out a bunch of them so i did actually get a chance to play a bunch this time which was great uh but usually most shows i don't have a chance to play any games while i'm there so i'd like to go along to uh sage and actually see what people in adelaide are working on and actually get a chance to really thoroughly play them all yeah no that i i can definitely see that especially if you're at pax right and you're saying there's lines there like you can't really disappear from your booth

for that long unless you've got like some other people that you can have doing it and then you don't have anyone there who has like a deep knowledge of the game so you have make sure they have like an understanding of what's going on it it's like a whole process i would imagine to get someone actually like able to man your booth in a way that is reasonable instead of just standing there looking pretty exactly i mean like if it's well my friend has a pretty good knowledge of the game at this point she's helped me out so much on it she's done several shows for me, so she's got it. But even so,

if you're a solo dev, then chances are you're getting friends to help out or something, which means you pretty much have to be there. You have to promote your game, you have to talk to the press, you have to fix if something weird crashes, you probably have to restart it or whatever. So, yeah, like, if you're on a team great then you can take shifts

and you can go wander games while you're a teammate like you know is it but you know as i see it i feel like pax is you're there to work right like you know your job is to be there and promote your game and if you have a team great because you can take shifts promoting it but if you're a solo dev then i think you should not waste the opportunity you should be there promoting it but if you're a solo dev then i think you should not waste the opportunity you should be there promoting it right no take breaks for your own health and well-being but don't take breaks just so you can wander off and play games like that's yeah that's my opinion no i get that uh well we're coming up on the two hour mark so i guess we should probably be wrapping it up um let this fly still bothering me um let people know where they can um find your game uh where they can find your previous game if they want to go play that and

anything else you want to direct people to oh yeah well you can find both games on steam so one of the eyes of oh you barra that's e-y-e-s no um that's also available on android and ios and switch nice um and the new game memories reach uh first person

exploration based adventure puzzle cross metroidvania that sounds interesting to you no i'm not that's. Did you just read the Steam page? That sounds interesting to you. No, I'm not. That's what the first line of the Steam page says. That's because I've given that one-line pitch like 100,000 times.

Fair enough. That's the one part I remember about the game more than anything else. Right, so yeah, you can find that also on Steam. Memories Reach reach go check it out go play the steam demo give me a wish list because wish lists really help especially as a small indie solo dev wish list numbers are critically important um and yeah my website is 100 stones that's 100 the number 100 stones interactive.com if you want to check out the webpage, but they'll just link you

to Steam in the end anyway. But yeah. And that has all the socials linked there as well, so like the Twitter and all that stuff. Yep. Mostly active on Twitter. Occasionally on some of the others. Easy.

Nothing else you want to mention? That's pretty much it any events you're going to be at anytime soon I'll be at PAX Australia in October and that's the only one coming up that I know of

I won't be doing South by Southwest this year that's too much and too short a time fair enough it's now the week after PAX this year there's that's too much and too short a time fair enough this is now the week after packs this year there's only a gap between them so yeah okay not doing those back to back um yeah no otherwise otherwise the next big big thing that come out will be an extended steam demo i don't know when that'll be um i do want to get something out for a future Steam Next Fest. So that won't be the October one.

Maybe February. We'll see. But I will do a Next Fest before I launch it. And there'll either be a demo out for that or before that. So, yeah. Okay. Nothing else you want to mention? That's pretty much it?

Yeah. It's been fun awesome uh i'll do my outro and then we can uh we can sign off so my main channel is brodie robertson i do linux videos there six-ish days a week um check it out see what's over there i've got the gaming channel brodie on games i'm probably still playing through devil may cry 4 what's in the other slot i don't know check it out this will be out whenever this comes out, um, yeah, I don't know, maybe I'm playing Kingdom Hearts or something, I don't know, check it out, if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at

Tech Over Tea, if you want to find the audio version, uh, that is Tech Over Tea on all your favorite podcast platforms, there is an RSS feed, so go grab that. It's on Spotify as well. So, yeah. I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say?

Oh, thanks for the opportunity to come on the show. It's been fun chatting about all random topics relating to game design.

I enjoyed getting sidetracked onto things that weren't about my game for a change, which was nice. Being able to talk about game design

philosophy and it was great fun yeah absolute pleasure see you guys later