Tech Over Tea - Deep Diving Into Game Development | Paper Cactus Games

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Once again we the 2 of the members of Paper Cactus Games on the show to talk about Fox and Shadow, it has been about a year since they were both on the show so lets find out what has changed since then.==========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==========Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2134370/Fox_and_Shadow/Website: https://www.papercactusgames.com/foxandshadowTwitter: https://x.com/PaperCactusGameInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/PapercactusGames==========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 Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://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 we have a returning indie game podcast. Last year, we did an episode with two of the people from Paper Cactus, the developers of Fox and Shadow, and now they're back again. So for anyone who hadn't seen that prior episode, how about you introduce yourself, and then we'll go from there. Would you like to go first, I reckon?

Yeah, yeah, I'll go first. I'm Jackson from Paper Cakeers Games, like we just said. And so I do a lot of the programming work for that. But, you know, indie games being indie games, we all wear many hats. So I'll be running around doing production, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, and I'll let Leo describe himself and maybe a bit of the game. Yeah, hi, I'm Leo. And I deal with most of the visuals as the lead artist and parts of the game design,

which we kind of work together on with Jacko. and Fox and Shadow is a dual deck building roguelike and where you pilot little drones to scavenge from a broken city and you mix and match human emotions with robot commands to build decks to kind of tackle any obstacles in your way. I think the first people anyone... Like, the first thing anyone's going to think of when they see this game is Slay the Spire, right?

Like that's immediately what comes to mind. It is, like you see Slay the Spire, you see sci-fi but my experience trying out the game it's not just that it's just that's a very good comparison to like sort of get people to understand and up to speed with what the game's trying to be so we like to think that we're a bit of a mix a mix of slay spy and transistor where we've taken the very card um card battler with the whole randomizing of your deck plus transistor system of combining moves to create new moves

and I think that's at the very core of our system. The idea is that we give players a lot of control on how the decks emerge, how they can customize it, and how they want to tackle the challenges ahead. So... Yeah, I think that's... No, go on. One of the things I was going to say is

like I think your intro there is actually a really cool one because yeah, that is one of the fun things you keep coming across is that exact reaction of oh yeah, so it's Slavis the Spy right and then people are like yeah yeah i'll keep going to try like slave the buyer is fun and then they go oh i get it now yeah it's that real moment of like when we've been able to see that i think it's one of the weird challenge for us maybe on like a marketing front is to be able to put those aspects like

be able to be like okay cool but why why more than slated spire and really sell that maybe um and like help people see what cool stuff there is about it um yeah so when i last had you guys on the show, I believe it was, I want to say it was a couple of weeks before the Kickstarter happened. I think so. That sounds about right. Yeah, I was, I was having a look when it happened, and I reckon maybe a month or so before that, because that was mid-ish last year.

Yeah. It would have been around this time here, almost a year ago. Yeah, just thinking like the, yeah, the Kickstarter was in October. and that's just burned into my brain because it was post-PACs. So it's just like straight out of a bunch of convention season into a Kickstarter is definitely a not stressful way to live a life. Right, right. No, it's great.

Also, yeah, lots of effort and not much downtime. So I guess how did that go and what was the intention with it? So I... As far as the Kickstarter went, we got what we needed to. We helped us get some more development funds to help provide us with what we needed to get to an early access date. And we've been chugging along with those funds since then. Yeah, it was primarily just to help us get a bit more funds in our pockets just so that we wouldn't have to move off and do other things and put the project on hold. Yeah. And I think it also, in addition to that as well, it has like a couple of other really cool benefits, one of which is being out to be like, cool, how do we, how are we like describe yourself to people and like, do people actually vibe this? Like, yes, cool. Like we're going to get a bit of cash and stuff like that, which is like probably like the primary thing. It's like, yes, we need this to keep eating and living and making the game. But it also means we get a chance to see, okay, are people willing to buy into this?

And it was really cool to see that and see the community support for it. And I think, yeah, one of the really nice things is because so far to fund this whole big venture of making a video game, we've had a bit of government support. And now it's been really cool to get also the community coming in to help with that. I really like having that sense of like multiple stakeholders. And, you know, not just feeling like one person is giving us all these resources to do stuff. So we're like beholden to that maybe.

Like, yeah, it's really nice. So I think that's a really cool, cool feature of it. And, yeah, it also, like, fuzzles us to describe what we're doing, like I was saying. So I think it's, like, a really good thing for us to focus in or, like, what are we building and, like, really understand it in a way where, you know, like, you know something, but then you have to say it. Right. You get tested on, like, yeah, cool. Like, as the words come out in your mouth, are they making sense? So, yeah, I think that's all really good stuff for people as, like, they wouldn't necessarily expect it when they're doing a Kickstarter.

So that'd be my, like, my recommendation if they are going through it. It's like, those are, like, weird hedge-edge benefits. Yeah, that's one of the things I've noticed having a lot of indie game devs on this podcast. A lot of them, they have a really cool idea and are not really sure how to explain it to people. Like, they can show you gameplay and they can just be like, hey, here's a demo, try it out. But they don't really know how to talk about what the game is in a way that sounds engaging and other people are going to understand the sort of vision they have for it

and I guess putting yourself in a situation where you kind of have to do that otherwise no one's going to try to fund the game I guess it does act as a it sort of acts as a forced learning experience definitely yeah I'd say that in conventions as well just like being there and like having

you know a hundred people a day or something that you're going to have to be like like so what's the game and you're like well fox and shadow is a rogue like deck builder like um and you know yeah um i think the challenge the challenge in the the kickstarter one is that you don't have that back and forth so like in a convention i can go oh okay cool what's your like experience level if i say rogue like deck builder am i talking some other foreign language to you or is it like are you like oh yeah hell yeah tell me more like where are we at um and then yeah when you're doing just that like hey we're doing a kickstarter now and like broadcasting it out there isn't that yeah that too

two-way. So it's very, very good as like a reinforcement on top of that. Right. So with the Kickstarter, you kind of just get this like, you get this first impression and that's pretty much all you get. More or less. And I think the other thing with indie games is a lot of us are trying to do things that push or twist on an existing genre. So it's a lot more difficult than saying, oh, we're a Metrovania or we're a deck-building rogue-like. We also have to start explaining some of the mechanics

without explaining the mechanics. We have to sell the feel of it. And that's sometimes very difficult to do without having a large playtest group or having a lot of experience trying to sell the games, which is why conventions are so important, because it gives us a window to see where

people click in on a game and what they actually is honed in on. So, again, And it really depends on whether or not games have had the chance to try that experience. And the other thing is that sometimes we just make really complex ideas, and they're really hard to sum up in one to two sentences. Yeah. And that can be a really good test on if the idea is too complex, maybe even for play testing.

Like sometimes you'll get that, you get the thing where it's just like, yeah, speaking about it is not right. You do just need to feel it. But sometimes you can be the kind of like, okay, is anybody picking up what I'm putting down? is a good check as well. Yeah, yeah, all those kind of things I think are really important. But yeah, all of this, just in case we got any of the indie devs listening, is like a really good reason to go out into cons if you can

and try to get your game in front of people, even if it's like a super early stage. I don't know, like there'll be a bunch of other reasons and things people feel like maybe they shouldn't go out and do cons or something, but I'm like always there just being like, show the thing, do the thing, make it happen. because I think it's just a good experience if you're going to feel like you're going to have to do it later do it earlier

find out all the hard bits and then know what they are so that when it matters more later then you'll be in a better place to do it then I don't know yeah also like people come back and actually see your game evolve after multiple events and it's actually really nice to hear people say oh this game evolves every year

it's good to see that you guys are still working on it It means that people have actually remembered your game. Your game is in their consciousness. And they're actually looking forward to it to some level. And that's kind of how a lot of exposure works. You keep hitting people until they realize, oh yeah, this is something I dig. This is something I want to be a part of. And I think also there's, even though it's going to be less people,

I think there's still a lot of value in going to like smaller cons. I can imagine some devs, you know, they, they want to work on the game and they're really dedicated to doing that and they want to take their game to, you know, a Pax or some of the big event at some point, but they don't really want to do the smaller events and I would, maybe you have some opinions here, but I would say the small events help because it gets you, it puts you in a mindset where you know how to talk to people who are playtesting your game before you take it to a large event where more people are going to see it. So you get that experience at a smaller scale, and then when you take it into that big event, you're able to sort of show off the game in a better way than you otherwise would have been able to. Yeah, I'd say so. I think that the smaller columns are actually really good for meeting up with other devs. And what you get is a share of knowledge, tips, and techniques, as well as their own experiences,

which means that you don't have to go directly through them. it really depends on what mindset you're going to the cons with are you going there to get wish lists or are you going there to I guess learn about your game and how to sell it because realistically right now the consensus among most indies is that streamers are the way to go to advertise your game social media is difficult to pierce the veil

And as we were talking about before, just before this show, I guess, we were talking about sometimes how your most popular posts aren't always directly relevant to what you are actually trying to do with that account. So what you're doing at the conventions is you're doing testing. You're doing testing. You're doing market testing. You're doing play testing. You're also trying to make sure that you know your local community so that when they do something, you can help boost them. and then, in turn, they can do the same for you. So the local cons are really, really valuable for that reason.

Well, on that note, that's sort of why I brought the devs back for this one. I didn't know you were going to be there at the power-up event in Adelaide, which is a really small event, like super small event. Like, for anyone who's not in Adelaide, it's not even a con, really, because it's a free entry. It's two floors hidden in a shopping district in Adelaide. And I think there was maybe four, five games. I think it was five.

Yeah, something like that. Hidden away in this like concreted warehouse room. Yeah, it was five, I think five or so developers. And then a bunch of other like kind of, kind of, playstations, or sorry, like, places where people could go and play games set up there. And so, yeah, we had some, you know, like they had a silk song sitting there

as a thing you could go up and play, so that was getting a lot of use. But yeah, and then some like artist alley stuff around nearby. But again, it was a lot, I know also I think, if I understand it correctly, it's like a lot of the artists who couldn't be part of the main AFCON event get a chance of this one. Yeah, artists with a main focus there.

Yeah, which is really cool because, like, I think we actually had a bunch of really good artists who, like, it's frustrated because they should have been, that Avcod, like, you know, there's a really competitive selection process there. So I think it's great that we have, like, an alternative venue for those guys to be able to do their stuff. So, yeah, it is kind of small and it is kind of like, oh, yeah, it just kind of pops up out of nowhere. But, yeah, they're like, those are great because what I found really, like, amazing about this one was it's being pretty small in previous events, but they've kind of

figured out how getting people in the door works. And then we had, like, just definitely so many more people this time around. And yeah, I think that was like something that probably like the artists were knowing like from like doing business there and all those kind of things. It was, yeah, it was really popping this year, which was cool. I look forward to like even more of it. So yeah, by doing those little cons, you can make them into bigger cons. Right, yeah, people who are going to go to those are likely going to show up.

And yeah, it's going to get bigger, but also they're likely going to see you in other places like at Avcon or wherever. age if you take it there or any of these other places. Yeah, totally. And I think that's one of those ones as well where, yeah, I don't know. I always like thinking about the players that we're making the game for, right? Like these are the people who, like, when I can see their enthusiasm, like, for the game and their excitement and, like, that's stuff that's hard to fake, then I know that,

okay, cool, we're on the right track and we're doing something. And, like, I don't know, as a game developer, I'm, like, making some kind of small, positive change in somebody's life, that's awesome. Like, if you're ever, like, stuck in kind of, you know, like, development hell or something where you're just like, oh, man, today is a hard day and, like, do I really want to keep going? He's, like, knowing that there is that sense of positive feedback, like, yeah, do not underestimate the value of that, I think. It's very cool.

Hmm. Hmm. I guess also with these smaller, I, I think you guys were at Avicon, yeah? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I maybe walked past where you guys were, but were you guys, like, squished between two other games? I feel like I might have seen the poster.

But it was like, there were two games next to you that had big crowds. If I remember, if I'm thinking correctly. We were, I think we were decent size. We had two tables of stuff, and we had like merch being sold at one of them, I think. Okay, okay. Maybe I'm misremembering then. Yeah, I mean, the thing is that, like, Afcon being Afcon, you know, the crowds are, like, ebbing and flowing. Well, Avcons be getting bigger and bigger every year as well. Yeah, which was very cool. Like, the whole two set up thing, like, the fact that they're actually, like, getting used out of two venues was neat.

Yeah. And I really enjoyed the extra space for foot traffic this year, because last year was very cool for scale, but also very crammed. So, yeah, this was really good. Yeah. But yeah, no, I think that's the feeling I have at AvCon now a little bit as well, which is a good thing. But, yeah, usually I try to find a time to sneak out and go talk to other indie devs. Well, if you say for after dark, you know, it usually quietes down then. So if you want to talk to people, then it's usually a lot easier. Yeah.

And then you're also getting to that point where, you know, a lot of the devs are also getting kind of like, okay, so we've been here for. We're about 12 hours down. Right, right, right. That makes sense. It's still good. I like it. Because you kind of get that kind of like, oh, okay, cool. If it's quiet, we can just hang out.

But, yeah, no, I think it's more a testament to the size of Avcon. And, like, the stuff that's happening there is, like, yeah, my ability to just, like, go around and, like, meet all the new faces and make sure they know about all the community events and stuff. It's just like, it's the new logistical challenge, I guess, yeah. Yeah, from my side, I think I spend. probably the entirety of Saturday, just playing... I wanted to go try out the games from the devs I didn't know.

But then there was also like 10 people there I'd already had on the podcast before. So like, okay, I've got to go talk to you guys as well. You know, see how your game's going. Because I don't even know how many games they had there this year. But I'm pretty sure I spent most of Saturday just playing games. Yeah, it's 40-some. something I think, if I have to say it off the top of my head, was about the number. And I'm like, yeah, it's, you know, when you think about that and, like, how many,

how many people they're, like, talking to the folks and then playing the games, yeah, I'm like, that's, trying to cover all that would be rough. Yeah, it's, no, it's great, though. Like, I love the fact that there is so much going on now. Mm. And it's, yeah, yeah, like, huge fan. As much as I didn't particularly like the layout last year, I do. I do see now it makes more sense

to have the games be something you see immediately as you walk in because back at the old location it was in like a separate room they were using the whole of the entertainment setters convention, the building on in the big building near the train station

the big is it called the Entertainment Center? Oh, convention center convention setter, yeah. Yeah. Had you been to that one before when it was still there? Yeah, that was probably where iPhone has historically been for like the last 10, 15 years. Yeah, it started at the Adelaide Union and then moved to there for quite a long time. Yeah, and it was always just like a weird little add-on it felt like with the indie games room where either we were tucked away in some small little room or we were in the corner out of the way.

Right, right. at least at the Wayville, is it the Wayville Showgrounds? Yeah, I forgot the name. Yeah, yeah. We had the interviews placed alongside some of the bigger events, and it was a much more inviting area. It didn't feel as dark and dingy.

Not to say that, yeah, essentially there was just more lighting. There was a bit more open. It was a bit more inviting. And it does help the mood a lot. Well, it also helps that it's something you say, as soon as you're walking because at the old location you had people would walk in you would have the entirety of artist alley and then the um the ex the the the the the like all of the like corporate sellers like crunchy real things like that that would be in a big

room and then after that point is where the game stuff was but it was like you know as you're saying the lights were kind of dim you could if you knew it was there you knew it was there but a lot of the foot traffic was sort of like it was like it was it was like focused towards the entrance of the building. Yeah, particularly in like kind of like a little closed off area as well. And it always, it did feel like a like, yeah, you, it was kind of like, oh, okay, cool, I've walked around most of Avcon and now I guess it's time to go check out the indie games or something like that, right?

Yeah, so I think it's been cool to kind of have that open up a lot more. But I think that's, it feels like a little bit of an almost historical like artifact in the way it was set up like that in that like it really was about that indie kind of atmosphere rather than necessarily trying to be a corporate selling atmosphere so um and that is one of the things i really liked about afcon is that like you don't have to be this super super super polished game to bring your stuff there it is really about just having the chance to put it out in front of people and so i do never want that to change about afghan um and i try to give that feedback to them whenever i can um but yeah it's cool to be out of now have like a bit more of a platform

for both styles of things where you've got, you know, some folks like us who are there going like, oh, okay, cool, we've, like, done kick starters. We've got some merch and stuff we can sell if you're interested in buying it and all that kind of thing. And, yeah, being out of bee alongside folks

who are just like, yeah, I've just here with a laptop and tell me, is it fun? Like, you know, that kind of stuff like that's. Yeah, I saw a couple of people with our student projects there who they want to turn into a full game. Yeah, amazing. And that's like a great, like, kind of outcome milestone thing to have for a student produce, like, cool, we need to be able to put it on a desk at AvCon

and have people be able to play through it. Yeah, it means you've got like a really tangible end goal. So, one of the things that you were talking about when we were at Power Up was you're working on like development tooling. I'm blanking on the full context of what you were saying, but that keyword stuck in my head. Yeah, yeah. So I guess to try to summarize it a little bit, one of the big things I've been working on. And the reason there's not been, in our game, a lot of the players who've been kind of tracking it and like seeing the demo and stuff like that probably haven't seen a ton of like outwards progress for a lot of things for a while. And the reason for that is I've been going through the back end and just trying to basically rebuild it from the ground up, so to speak. And the reason behind that is we want to have really good developer tooling so that we can get the game design.

is being able to just change any mechanic without coming through me is the programming bottleneck. So being able to kind of separate the programming logic for like how does the system and the engineering run. And then the like game design like logic. So to be, you know, people be able to talk about things in terms of like, oh, when the turn ends, this should happen. Or like, this character should take damage. And you can just kind of do that from within the like editor rather than having to be like, okay, cool, I'll just open up my, like, ID and type some code in and stuff like that. And, yeah, that's like, I don't know, because, like, that kind of developer tooling stuff is stuff I'm pretty, pretty passionate about. So, yeah, like, there are a bunch of other cool, foreign effects that I could probably ramble about for a while, but I'll try to, try to hold it back.

But the main trade-off, I guess, is that, yeah, we're still sitting in here. And Leo is very patiently waiting for me to get a bunch of stuff ready so that we can hopefully show it off at packs. We'll be coming in hot, so to speak. But, yeah, basically, I think as soon as we hop out of this, I'm going to be back to work on some of that stuff because I'm really excited for it. I think like the fact that Jacko has been giving I'm taking the time

to develop these tools it means that I've had a lot of opportunity to actually do all the other artists that need to be done and I'm like almost nearing the end of some of the pipelines

which is actually really nice because I was very worried at the start of the project that I'd be like sitting here for a year while Jacko was done with all the game content and we were just waiting

for all the visuals so like it's actually worked out very well for us. We'll be getting a very big re-haul all together and everything's going to be completely different once Jacko has done with what he's doing. So I'm super excited for it to happen. Well, if you want to go more into

details of the developer tooling and like sort of what you're trying to achieve with them, I'd love to hear that. Yeah, awesome. So I guess I'll start with saying that like so we're a pretty systems heavy game. So one thing I've noticed, at least like this is kind of me, I'll espouse and personal philosophy, but like the one thing I've noticed about a lot of like game engines and stuff, particularly Unity is the one I'll pick on because that's what we happen to be in,

is that it's very well geared towards stuff that's like, I don't want to use the word tactile gameplay, but things like platformers or, you know, to a certain degree, first person shooters or things like that, but like real time there's a physical world and stuff like that that's happening there. And then you want to add like a systems heavy layer to that. And all of a sudden, I'm looking at stuff like, okay, cool. So I'm going to need an event system. I'm going to need actions like that that are going to happen and things like that. And Unity has tools for doing that.

But they're pretty bare bones. They're not very ergonomic. And they certainly aren't speaking in the language that game designers would want to be speaking in. There are kind of third-party plugins that you can pull out for doing some of these. But again, like a lot of the ones I've seen are very, like, I'll go with like, you know, feel is the classic kind of one that a lot of people use. Like I saw somebody using the corgi engine or something like that by more mountains and try to make a game out of that or they'll look like the top-down shooter thing.

And yeah, just like trying to piece those together and use those tools. And yeah, like none of it really felt like it was the kind of thing that would really be working in a systems heavy game where I need like, okay, this, my character does damage now, but oh, this character has like a status effect that's like whenever I take damage to do this stuff. And maybe I have a status effect where it's like whenever my, a character I've targeted it triggers a status effect. Like, you know, stuff happens with like all these chains of logic that are flowing around the place. It, you know, that's probably a very overly complicated version, but it's really hard to express that with any of the tooling available to game

designers. So you'd really need to be a programmer. And even then, you've got all these edge cases that's suddenly going to bubble up. So what I'm trying to do with that is make a system that lets people just kind of go, okay, cool events. Like, will trigger actions. Actions might have a couple of effects, and you can say who they're targeting. I won't do the first. full technical breakdown of the whole system, but you can see already, like, how with that kind of a framework, now you can start building your own, like, individual gameplay actions. Like, if you have an effect that is a damage effect, and it targets something with health, then, you know, it's going to receive some damage. Like, those kind of things. And now I'm talking in a game

designer's language, and they can make tools with that. And the ultimate thing would be, you know, like, it doesn't just have that. It also has, like, stuff for a map with turns and tiles and tokens that move around. So you've kind of got all of your board game mechanics sitting in there as well. So if you're like natural happy places like board game stuff, you could be like, oh, cool, I can just iterate with this. And then also trying to make all this stuff happen so that there's like a graphical front end that's listening to all these changes and being able to replay at like a slower speed,

what's being acted out in this kind of logical backend simulation. The two things are, like, not running at the same time. We want all of the back-end stuff to just play and know what's happening. And then the front end can, like, take the time to explain to the human what's actually going on, even though it's happened in, like, 10 milliseconds in the back-end. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff like that. And I think, yeah, the other one would be, like, having prediction. So, like, preview of all the possible options.

So let's say it's on your turn. One of the things we want to do is be like, oh, if you did attack this, character, like how much health would they lose? Or which characters are actually available for me to attack right now? And so the back end will do a lot of that preview work and kind of go, okay, cool, this is what would happen if, you know, this branching possibility. So you can see like that's a kind of a bit of a complex system. We also don't want to simulate the entire possibility of everything because that's too much. We can't do that. And your poor laptop battery does not want us doing that. So we won't.

But yeah, that's a bit of the technical challenge there to be able to really get that going. And you can see like all of that work, like that complexity spawning out is for something as simple as, oh, here's like a little like hover over like tooltip change number for what the damage would be. So the surprising level of like complexity and like doing things to this kind of depth to get that like very simple little feature. Yeah, so it's a bunch of fun. I think the only other bit I'd say is I'm also trying to make it all like serializable. trackable means that we can kind of have, if we wanted to, the history of everything the player has ever done, which gives us a lot of fun stuff we could potentially do with narrative in the game

if we want to be kind of seeing what the player has done previously and reacting to that. Right. So if they may be defeated a boss with a certain type of damage, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Or if I noticed that you're only playing this type of card. Like, yeah, or if back at this point in time you said X to this person or every single run that you've ever taken, you've always picked this option. You've never gone this other option with this character. And we think that there's like some narratively interesting moment that that should happen if that's being this kind of repeated case. We have the tooling to be able to express that if this back-end system works and does that. so yeah there's like just so much capability that would be built into it it's yeah it's the classic

thing of like oh man like all the possibilities right right it's like we build this tooling now we can do anything we want with it like what where how far do we take this yeah um and like i think the last bit i'd say like kind of based on all the excitement i have around it um and this is stuff i've kind of talked with leal about a bit we don't have like a solid solid of the roadmap or plan for this, but something I'd really love to do is to take as much as I can of it and try to open source it and make it so that like, you know, if I feel like I don't have it there for me, as much as I enjoy building it, I would have enjoyed just being like package download. Thank you. Yep. That'd be great. Let me start doing this. So yeah, like being able to do

that and provide it back to the kind of developer community would be super cool. There's probably like another level of polish on top if I'm going to be giving it to other people outside the team like documentation all that kind of stuff that's it's a bit more but yeah I'd really love to be able to kind of contribute back in that way and yeah then if people are like oh this part sucks and I wish it worked better then they can tell me and I can fix it and it'll be better for us hopefully um yeah that's awesome that is definitely awesome and uh developer tools are one like these engines are obviously very generic right like unity is very it might have a flavor towards 2D platforms but it's intended to be a super generic tool and the tooling it provides internally

is going to be in a way that is applicable to most games but that's an area i haven't really had many discussions about with developers building your own additions on top to make their development process easier. But like, if you look at any of the, any of the games that people love throughout history, they've always had some sort of system that has made it, okay, unless you want to go super far back, system that's made it easy to build things on top. You know, you think of, like, all of the map editors for older games, like Quake, for example, when things like that just make, especially with a smaller team, you don't want to be bottlenecked by the development, having to say, okay, I need to write all of the code for this.

Even if you modularize it, there's always going to be things the developer is going to have to add. And being able to automate some of that systems and make it so the artists and the designers can actually do things themselves besides just doing the art or just doing design documents is obviously going to make the team flow in a much more functional. a way. Yeah, I mean, I'll throw to Leo on that one maybe because, A, I've been talking for a while, but B, also because I think getting the perspective of how, like, as much as we can say, I can say, oh, I think this is great. I think there are a bunch of trade-offs. And I think getting that perspective from like the kind of other side of things is pretty cool.

So I don't know. I guess on your end, Leo, how do you find using it particularly while it's in development and not the final finished product? Honestly, the fact that I can interact with most of this without having to know a lick of code makes it really effective. It means that I can quickly iterate on whatever we're putting into the game, do balance passes, do changes and add in new content without having to ask Jacko to do it. And that means we get faster turnarounds. It means that Jacko can add in and work in some on our other features and make it so that I, game really sings so essentially rather than having all the workload in jacko and me sitting and twilling

my thumbs after all the art and design is done i get to actually now help out with the design i'm sorry the implementation and that's actually a good workflow once we do get the system in yeah yeah yeah i think that's that's one of the ones as well as it lets me kind of like as i'm developing it obviously i'm getting the feedback from the design So we're using it of like, okay, cool, like, is it, like, what can I do with it? Or, like, I think sometimes it's one of those ones where I'm like, oh, man, I feel like it's just like this system isn't quite good yet, but I'll like, when in doubt, push it out, basically. And then go, okay, cool, they'll find a way to work around it. Like, okay, it's going to take me a week to like re-engineer this to do it this way.

They're like, no, no, okay. But if I had to do it in like 10 extra clicks, I can do it like this. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you could. It's a bit painful, right? And then they'll be like, I'll just do it into extra clicks. You know, like that kind of stuff. It helps you break out of, you know, try to over-engineer things, I think, to a certain degree.

And really go, okay, like, what is blocking the game from progressing and, like, where can we try to hit those pain points? So I think, yeah, it's good to have that aspect to it. And I think kind of also bringing it back a bit maybe to, you kind of mentioned map editors and things like that. Yeah, I think those kind of tools are particularly cool, and one of those ones that inspired me a little bit. So, I know, I'm thinking back to, you, like, I don't know, like the Age of Empire scenario editor stuff, or, like, age of mythology would be one of the ones, because I remember being able to listen into, like, events or something like that. I think it triggers and, like, have, you know, a bunch of characters spawn to create this kind of cinematic event in there, and just being like, oh, cool, I'm like some small nerdy kid who doesn't understand programming or anything, but, like,

I feel like I'm creating a thing. Yeah, that's one of those feelings. I was really excited to try to be added to Fox and Shadow as well. We don't, again, have a firm timeline for it because that's going to be a bunch of extra work on top. But if we have this framework, a lot of the heavy lifting for creating something like an in-game, like modding experience is kind of done.

And it's a matter of us getting our developer tooling and exposing that more and more to just, like, be part of the game and letting people remix what we have for Fox and Shadow and just, like, creating their own version of it. You know, I've got this pie dreamer, like, yeah, we go and, like, have a platform where people can, like, download and share

each other's modded versions and, like, have a little leaderboard you compete on or something like that, you know, like all the pie frames. You know, I also wear the producer hat, so I'm, like, producer hat on, like, okay, okay, that comes after release because we want to make sure we do get the game out the door for people. That's like priority one, two, and three.

But yeah, we want to make, like, try to just, like, make the game so that it's something that's fun and joyous for everybody. And I think a lot of people get a kick out of being able to tinker with things like that. So, yeah, it's something I'd be pretty passionate about. And in much the same way, like, it'd mean that if we, if I do do that open source framework, it means other developers can also put similar stuff to that in their games, um, more easily maybe. So yeah, it's, um, yeah, just like there's really cool opportunities there.

Yeah, but you don't, you mentioned there with the producer hat, like you, you don't want to go too far with it because it sounds like there's a lot of ideas. And just looking at the, um, looking at the Kickstarter, there's a lot of stretch goals that were there, which, you know, you can keep developing this game for another four years if you really wanted to. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, we sit somewhat next door to the folks who did Silk Song, and they sat on that for a good period of time. And like, they spent that time well, like, just kind of fine-tuning stuff. They weren't just, like, kind of sitting on their butts, you know? They were, like, they work hard. Well, I feel like most people know this now, but Silk Song was originally going to be a DLC for Hollenite that expanded into a game that I think is longer than Holo Night. And sometimes it'd be like that. Yeah.

You know? Like, yeah, if you want to really take an idea and, like, let it go to its ultimate thing, it, like, that takes time and effort and iteration. But, yeah, at some point also, like, practical reality is hit. And when it's your first game, as a small studio, you know, where, like, we need to get things done. We need to make sure that the game actually gets in people's hands. And I think, actually, like, I think it was you that was talking about this. just the other day, Leo. But yeah, like, a lot of the stuff being that the things you learn from

your first game, you'll need to apply to your second game. I think it was either you or Sean. It's both. I very much subscribe to that. Like, you learn... Hello, hello, Lou. Discord decided to cut out my audio. I couldn't hear you guys for a second. Does that. Okay. I didn't hear anything that Leo was saying to just start it. Can you hear me now? I can hear you now. Test me, testing. Okay. So, I, I'm now trying to remember what I was saying. Right. I think a lot about learning is taking something to completion,

about making sure that you know what you're doing, and the more you do something, the fast you get. It's the same with art, the same in the writing, same with coding. The experience is what matters. So being able to finish Franklin Shadow means that we will be better equipped for future projects and will be better equipped to see problems before they happen. and it means that we have a better flow and it means that nothing that we do

is wasted because we learn from it and ultimately that's what the indie journey is it's about making mistakes and getting better because again a lot of what we do is for us we're making games for us we're making

this unfoxion shadow because we wanted to make a game like this and while it may end up in the public hands primarily we're designed for us. Yeah. Because I think, you know, it's a classic thing of like, okay, like, do you just make a game

that you know you'd want to enjoy or, like, again, the players would want to enjoy, and the answer is like both. But like, I am a bit of a subscriber to the, like, if you don't enjoy the game you're working on, gosh, that's going to make your life hard to actually, like, figure out if you're making a fun game. You know, people find ways to do that, but like, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It just, I think particularly if you're strapped indie dev, like, you just don't need that extra level of, like, difficulty. Just make a game that you enjoy. Which I think is really cool. Ultimately, if you can't make a game that you're enjoying, like, how can you make a game that anyone else is going to enjoy, right? If you enjoy something, you know that there's at least one person that likes it. If you don't like your own game, you don't know if anyone likes it. Hey Brody

Hi Hi If your Discord is messing up We can move to a boosted server And that may make the connection a bit more stable I don't know It should be fine That usually I don't have

You don't have two disconnections in one recording If it happens again We'll jump over to that All right sounds good You heard what I was saying though just before, yeah? I believe so. We were talking about, like,

just like the person. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you make a game that you enjoy, at least, you know, one person enjoys it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I would, like, one of the things I'd say for that is, like, I think when I've seen people try to do not that, it involves, like, copious amounts of play testing,

like, A, B, testing, you know, all those kind of things. But now you're kind of getting to that, you know, more classic software engineering tech, where you're like, like, you know, glasses up. I have a problem to solve. Right. Like, you're doing engineering and, like, psychological evaluations almost. Like, it's like not what they say, but, like, where I feel it goes.

And I think it lends itself well to the classic, like, loot box, money-sucking kind of environment, which I think can be very financially lucrative because it does, Like there's no part where you have to be like, oh, yeah, is this game fun anymore? You've got a metric, which is how much money am I getting out of this? Right. And how can I maximize that? And it really deviates from, is this an enjoyable experience? I think that's almost the logical conclusion of doing that is that you kind of tend to end up going down that path.

And before I get too morally high horsey about it, I feel like there is, you know, people need to eat. get some kind of financial role for the game so I'll not try to demonize it too hard but obviously there are places in society where that's being taken way too far so it's not to like throw any shade against like

you know the I don't know the door modeler for some AAA game company but like you know if your entire position is modeling the doors for some you know massive RPG right like your position is so diluted

that you don't even know what the full game is. But like people have to pay their bills. I think a lot of it comes down to are you working for passion or are you working for money? Right. And if you're making an indie game, you could be trying to aim for money, but if you don't believe in the product

and you don't find a fun, how can you assume that anyone else will? Right, right. And I think there's always the fine line of straddling of making yourself happy versus making your playbass happy. Because you can quite quickly develop a playbass that you never intended to. I point to media like My Little Pony and various other things. But you can very much quickly go into a route that you didn't expect.

And it's up to you to figure out whether you really enjoy it or, you really don't. So I think, at least with my art, I ended up in watercolors, despite that not being my preference in terms of what I like to consume. But it's a process that I found easier and it seemed to resonate with different crowds. And that created a connection with an audience that I didn't quite expect to connect with. So a lot of, this entire act of being in indie dev is a balancing act between what you want

to do and what your audience wants you to do and what you are you need to do to be financially responsible. It's always a struggle to find the center of that triangle. Well, yeah, I think it's important to have a vision

but you can't ultimately you are producing a product and it's important to have a vision, like, you see a lot of games where they have a vision initially, and then they listen too much to feedback and just completely diverge. And sometimes that works. But other times, you end up trying to create something that appeals

to everybody. And by doing so, it doesn't appeal to anyone, because it's such a, it's such a watered down experience that nobody is really connecting to it. because you've tried to please everyone with it. I mean, I guess the way to think about it is games are a conversation. You're trying to say something when you make a game. You're trying to send across a message. You try to send across a feeling. And that's very hard if you don't know what you're trying to send across.

And when an audience complains or says something about your message, it's not necessarily that your message is wrong. the audience doesn't quite have the same scope to what you're saying, what you're thinking. And you need to be able to pick out, say, there is something wrong here. What they're suggesting may not be the right fix, but they are right that something is wrong here. How do I either enhance my message so it's clearer and that people start to resonate with what I'm saying? Or is it a message that I need to send out? Right.

And you're always stuck between that. question. You get better at dealing with this as you as you sort of get more experience and you sort of understand where you want to be. That's the crux of the entire creative process

behind game dev or any media really. So I guess it's the audience is right about something. They may not be right about what they think they're right about and you really need to stay true to what you want to do.

At least in this space. Yeah, I'm sure you've both seen, you've both seen this image before. The problem solving is an art form not fully appreciated, fully appreciated by some. Yes. So, everyone who doesn't know about it, it's the, it's that picture of trying to explain

what a swing is, and different stakeholders are going to have different ideas and different approaches on how you would solve it. And the user, they just wanted a simple tire swing, but the user's generally not able to explain. Players and users are able to explain a problem, but they aren't really great at explaining the solution to the problem.

They can say a system is broken, but not necessarily how you're going to go about fixing it. Yeah. So like the classic one is a really good. description of what you encountered and what you expected is amazing because then yeah like the person on the other thing can take that and go okay cool like at least this part is objective and we can work with that but yeah so much of everything we do is like i don't know yeah fundamentally emotionally emotional and not in the negative sense but like irrational creatures of like you know we're

not like logical like fundamentally human beings we have feelings and we miss things or misreads stuff and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's a very interesting challenge to like kind of, yeah, match expectations, I guess, for what people have. And sometimes you just can't. You'll get a negative steam review because it's like, I really wish there was like a, you know, a fishing game in this. Like, you know, it's a very arbitrary example. But I think people will get what I mean, right? Like it's like, yeah, you can't please everybody. And like, yeah, like you're saying, you probably shouldn't try to. You have to head out in a couple of minutes.

So if there's anything you want to touch on before then, we can do that right now, and then we'll set everything back up for just me and Leo. Yeah, no, I think that's pretty... I think we've covered, like, a lot of really cool stuff that I was, yeah, I'm always excited to talk about the kind of, yeah, framework for building the game and the game design thing. I think the one last thing I will say,

I think is really important on what we've been talking about is for people looking to get into games, you know, I don't want to like send people away from those stable jobs in game dev because the industry is hard enough as it is. So if you get that opportunity and you think it's a good opportunity, you know, and it's something you do, you are passionate about working games, take it. Because, yeah, the indie dev path is, it's raw. Like, yeah, if you're not there because you really, really want to be an indie dev, um, I'd struggle to recommend it. I think people should, but they have to be kind of crazy like us.

It's not a nice well-trodden path. The great reward comes with taking huge risks along the way, and it'd be almost irresponsible of me to say to people, hey, go take those risks. But that said, if people are interested in it, definitely feel free to drop me a line or jump in Discord and ask questions. If you're around Adelaide, come meet us at Game Plus

or anything like that. Like, I think as a community, like helping each other makes the whole thing so much easier. So yeah, definitely, definitely engage with that. And then hopefully, yeah, all the people at home are playing games will just see even more cool indie games coming out. So that's the benefit to everybody, I guess. All right.

Yeah. I guess if that's all, I'll set things back up for me and Leo. And, yeah, it was a nice chatting again. yeah no always happy to chat and I'm glad we got to like have that kind of yeah our sit down or so and um yeah always always happy again if you ever want to chat more um just let me know and i'll jump back on awesome awesome um so leo you still good to continue for a bit longer absolutely as long as you want me okay awesome um i guess yeah let me just pause the recording so we should be back now okay the rest of the episode is just going to the two of us. Jackson had things to do. Anyway, I guess one thing we hadn't really touched on is there was a bunch of stretch goals in the Kickstarter. So you had some stretch goals for additional characters and additional drones, yes? Yes, that is correct. So I guess what do you

want to know about them? I guess, well, what is going to be in the game with where the Kickstarter reached, and I guess what do you plan to do with what wasn't met? Okay, good questions. So at least in our game, we're going to have, at the bare minimum, two drones and two humans, and that gives us a combination of four different decks, and without having that combination, we kind of don't have what a game was intended to do. So it was never going to be a question whether or not we were going to do that many, um, At least two humans and two drones.

What we wanted to do was three drones and three humans. And realistically, a lot of the stretch goals involved getting funding to pay additional artists to do card art. And that was the main reason to get the Kickstarter going. It was to get additional funds so that we could actually afford to do additional content for the game. Now, that being said, what we're going to end up doing is probably releasing a game into an early access state with what we have, the two drones and two humans. And if there's a willing or if there's enough time, we'll get the phones, we'll then hire out the additional artists to do the work. Or I might simply just do the rest of the card art on my own. because what getting to the early access state does

it gives us more time to work it gives us time to accumulate the funds it gives us better testing bed it means that we can kind of evolve the game in early access and get more content out and the idea with early access is to have all of our features complete but to be able to slowly eke in

and test out content and to add it in as an ongoing ebb and flow until we get to a full release state so the intention is eventually to do the three drones and three pilots yeah that's it because what we're going to be doing is also once we get to feature complete we'll be reaching out to publishes in hopes of getting additional funding for what we need okay okay so there's quite different there's quite a few different avenues on how we proceed but essentially we just need to get to an early access state, which I'm so excited to get there, because we're on the

castle of Jackal breaking through on the entire system rework, which means the rest of the new content can now flow into the game, and they're really what makes our game shine. So what you see is the very base level of functionality in our game. It's not quite enough to really delineate us from Slay the Spire as much as we'd like, and it's not quite as far as we want on the customization level for the characters and the cards and being able to expose all that nice, juicy, tactical goodness. So, yeah, the intention is to eventually do the other characters. And you know, it's just a question of who's going to be doing the art.

Right, right. Yeah. Because I think off the top of my head, there's about 20 to 30 illustrations per set. And then there's another five sets to do. So that's about 150 plus illustrations that I'd need to complete for... Right. Yeah, you can see how that's kind of a big task to ask. Even if I was pumping out, what, one a day?

I'd still be there for the entire year. One a day for the working year. Right, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with the card taxes, I don't believe this was in... Maybe it was in the game last time, and I just didn't know it was there. But at PowerUp, I got to play around with the card combination system. So taking the trait, if I'm understanding it correctly, you take the trait cards and then the other cards,

and you can merge them together, and then you get some special new card from that. And you can also then combine your duplicates of cards, and that will decrease the cost of card or increase the effectiveness of it, depending on what the card is. Exactly. So the idea here is that you get a lot of... One of the big things and big mechanics in deck building games is the idea of getting rid of your basic cards and thinning your deck.

Our system incorporates that all in one move. So essentially you've got your very basic command cards which are inherit to your factory settings drone, your factory default drone. And what the humans do is they add in their emotions and they can't change how the programs work and how the maneuvers are pulled off and essentially we're getting rid of that basic card

and making it more powerful. So you're already getting a lot faster progression of power in your deck. The duplication system helps further thin your deck by adding in all of the same cards together and basically, oh, I want to be doing this defend move but I want a stronger version so I can do it more and moves for turns. So that's what the jublet system does.

The next layer that isn't quite in the game right now is the virus-in-vodd system. So when you're going through the world, you're essentially beating up robots and you're taking their data, you're taking parts of them to try and enhance your programming. And so sometimes those cards that you do take in are modified. So sometimes they're better with the upgrades

and they give them extra little perks. And sometimes they're filled with viruses because you just hit the robot too hard, and the entire systems have gone corrupt. But these add little variations into the moves that you've got on. So you're starting now really customize the cards to how you want to play and how you want your deck to evolve, and you get that really fine-tune, I guess, deck that feels unique each runs

because you're not just playing with the same old cards every run. You're playing with the cards with additional perks. it's very much similar to Wild Frost's charm system or Monster Chains' gem slotting of their cards and that's the next stage that I really want to get into a game Is that different from the cards having the modifiers on them because that was something that was in the game of power-up? So right now we have rudimentary power-ups in

but they're pretty much only exclusively purchased what we want to be able to do is add in a system which we're calling the overkill system where the rewards you get from enemies change depending on how much damage you deal oh okay yeah so the idea here is that if you get a robot exactly to zero HP so you basically deactivated a turn off the switch you haven't actually damaged them beyond what you need to that gives you a high chance of mods and upgrades which i'm sorry upgrades so better gear but if you go with overkill and deal excessive amounts of the damage and we're talking like dealing almost 150% of the target's HP you're getting overkill so you've kind of reduced it to base metals and you're getting a lot more money but you're also getting cards with viruses because the data that you're pulling out is corrupted so this is the way that player gameplay really impacts

what you get as loot and that's something that we really wanted to be part of a game that how the player runs through the game changes their experience. This is again shown in our narrative systems where depending on what cards you have, so the emotions, the traits that you've taken and the commands that you've added to you to change the narrative choices you get in different encounters. So what we're trying to do is building in that whole holistic experience of how the player goes through the game really impacts how they're. what the game throws back at them.

Sort of like Undertale, sort of like, there's another game that's all the tip of my head and I can't remember right now, but we were very much inspired by that Undertale genocide pacifist run

sort of aspect. So there's sort of a, you want to encourage the player to not just hit an enemy as hard as possible, but if they want to get better card rewards,

to sort of think about how they're defeating an enemy and sort of juggle that idea in their head. Do I want to risk take an extra turn of damage to maybe kill it at, you know, perfect kill? Or is it better to just get it done over with, get it like killed immediately, even though the card reward's going to be slightly worse there? Exactly. That's the choice that we want to throw on the player. And like, this is, what we're doing is we're adding an extra level of skill. and planning into a game. Players don't have to engage with it.

It's not like a min-maxing strategy, but it is a strategy that rewards people that are playing the game as we want and to a higher level. Right, okay. I think this is a really cool way to approach and really a... I am excited to see how this all actually plays out.

because there are we sorry you go no no it's um I'm just like I'm always interested to see how card games try to differentiate themselves

because you know at their core they all share that same that same singular mechanic of you are building a deck you are trying to create some sort of useful deck for whatever encounter

exist. And I'm always interested to see how these games try to add new flares into that and just make it a unique but familiar system. With a twist. Right, yeah, yeah. I think when we're going and approaching design, you have to talk about the intent of the world that you're making because how the players interact with the world inherently colors how they're going to perceive your story, perceive what you're creating. So while I'm choosing a medium of interaction is very important. Like you wouldn't, I'm just going to go with board game analogies here. D6s are very simple. They've re-rollered eye is completely random. You almost have

no control. But the way you'd add in control is changing what each of the faces do, give the players a sense of customization. And suddenly, RNG is no longer RNG. It's, I planned this. I did the cool thing. Not, oh, I rolled a D20 and got a one. Oh no, I failed! It's like, oh, that now triggers my other ability.

And so on and so forth. So the medium that you choose to convey your game mechanics is very important because there's only so many things that you can do with that said medium. But what you choose to do and what you choose to omit speaks volumes

of what your game actually is. we really wanted to get the sense of scavenging we really wanted to get the sense of planning and plotting and trying to get resources out of things which is why this overkill system is so cool because it's now you're starting to think like how the humans in the world will be thinking because they're trying to get scrapped to kind of survive they want to try and maximize what they get and it's a question of do we be highly efficient and become more powerful or do we literally go a shit and wreck everything and there's like different fantasies that now players

can actually play through because I'm sure if you've played any strategy games or even any fighting games there is such a glory of completely

curbs stopping your foes but the narrow victories are also just as throwing because it's like oh my God I can't believe that worked oh my God

I pulled that off perfectly and that's what we're really targeting that kind of feel that that juice to gameplay it's not just I'm doing everything I need to survive I'm scrambling for a win it's I'm doing this my way I'm going to win my way so you want the game mechanics to feel like it makes sense for the player in the world they are doing things that they're able to experience the world in a way that they want to experience it. Yeah, essentially. And we're also training

the player to accept our storyline. Because once they're in that mindset of thinking about approaching problems in specific ways, they start to lean into the narrative. And I think, I think Eldon Ring is one of those games where you get the power fantasy.

You can level up to infinity. you can become whoever you want to be and the game lets you do that it's such an open world story you've got powers that you can level up abilities you can learn and it's all how the player progresses it really gives the sense of freedom

whereas a game of chess has very rigid roles you're limited in what you can do but so is your opponent so it makes it a very even battlefield where everything is reduced to the most optimal move you're meant to think about how you can win with the least amount of losses well actually

chess is more about how you want to win but there's a lot of um you could add in to that factor it's like oh legacy chess you if you lose a piece you go into the next round without having that piece so then suddenly the game changes very drastically because it's no longer a symmetrical game and you're adding in the idea of loss and that's probably a way to consider wars like you aren't going to be completely refreshed after a fight but that's the kind of feelings that we're targeting that's the kind of things that we're thinking about when we're making mechanics

or we should be making mechanics because nothing I feel really turned off when say in a fbs shooter I've been running through the entire town gunning, shooting, and taking down all my enemies and absorbing bullets. And suddenly, in the cutscene, I get shot and I'm on the floor. Right. Or, like, my favorite one is, I'm playing, like, an RPG, MMO, something like that. And I'm playing a healer, and then someone just dies in front of me.

It's like... Exactly. I was just spamming a revive, like, five minutes ago. What is happening? Essentially, and what they've done is there's a disconnect between the mechanics. game mechanics in what is possible versus the world. And if the healer could heal

but not revive, that will feel so much more pregnant. It's like, oh no, this is how it feels. I wasn't able to heal him in time because of X, Y, Z, and now they can't revive. And there's a very fine line to balance between in-world realism

versus fun, because can you imagine the MMO where you can revive someone? Sure, sure. it. So, yeah, I'm signed around because I'm like a reason. No, no, I think what you're saying makes sense. I think

when game mechanics disconnect from the story and you, like, with the revive example, you can create systems where it makes sense. Let's say you can revive people, but, you know, if this

person dies, they're sent to some other realm, right? Like, you can make it, makes sense in the plot why that person is killed but when it's just oh I'm playing a healer I can't heal in the cutscene like that's immediately creates a weird disconnect it does it does and like the one of the solutions is oh you know very specific things to revive someone

so you have to feed them something or you have to put something that they have to swallow and if their jaw gets blown off they cannot lock a spoiler sure but yeah it's just like you have to have those little details when you do story, I think. Otherwise, it just all falls apart. I think one of the worst offenders is like Kingdom Hearts.

You go through, you're basically this immortal, darkness killing thing, and you get wiped in every cut scene. Like, Kingdom Hearts 3 was like a very sad experience to me where you went through all the worlds, and Sora never really retained any of their lessons between the worlds. It was just like, oh, didn't you learn this in the last game? oh you're learning this again power of friendship and then

in the final boss scene everyone gets wiped spoilers but again it's just like those grand climactic scenes don't quite make sense whereas

again this is spoiler territory have you ever played Final Fantasy Crisis Cool no I've not played Crisis Call yet okay I won't spoil it then but essentially how the game ends

actually feels thematic they've tied in the cinematic with how the final fights go they really make you feel those emotions

those endless moments I won't spoil because if you ever get to the game it's like a really great ending No I only recently like three months ago played Final Fantasy 7 the original on the PSA one

so I need to get around to crisis court at some point yeah yeah it's a good game pick it up um i very much enjoyed it but yeah it's like when games nail um the blend between mechanics and story you're doing a job as a designer and players aren't going to be reading your story from back to end they're going to be interspersed with moments of gameplay um unless you're like a game that

has 20 hours of cinema intro cinematics and then yada yada yada you don't actually get to shoot anyone right um but but what the players end up doing most the time is running through your gameplay loops. They do the same parts of things over again to achieve what they need to do to progress the story. And if it doesn't feel good and everything isn't tied together, then there's going to be a huge disconnect.

Hades does it well. I was just going to break up Hades. It makes sense, just at a basic level, it makes sense why you are constantly dying. Like that is a core plot, to the game. Why are we constantly doing runs? Exactly. It feels so nice to know that these characters are immortal, but they have a set respawn point, which is why they don't just shrug off everything. And it makes every battle

seem so frantic because you're at the bottom of the well and you're trying to climb up the spider's thread. You're fighting your way to victory. And every time you fall back down, it's like you have to go through the entire experience again. There's no. short cuts there's no do-overs there's just you need to get there and it feels more frantic the better run you get so because like the first time you finish Hades is amazing because it's like oh my god I finally beat it I've gone through all of this I just finished tutorial yeah um and it's the entire experience the story is you fighting through hell and I think they've done a great job at that

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I completely agree. When then even just like later elements, like when you go to the surface and, you know, it like all of this is justified or once Hades decides he wants to not be an asshole, why he continues to fight you at the end of the run, like it all makes sense why he continues to do so. It does, it does, and it's just good writing to, writing with a nod to what you're actually doing because yeah

I don't know there's so many games out there that don't they're it feels like the narrative the mechanics there are they're all separate fields that are siloed and they never talk to each other and that means that nothing's

interesting to find and I think that's why indie games are doing better than AAA games in terms of innovation because as you said, you could be the door guy at a AAA company. You have no

context for the rest of the world. You could easily forget or not be told about, oh, doors don't matter because this character can run through walls. So then, why are you making doors? You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just all those little context things

that are harder to flow through a big company. Not to say that they can't. It's just harder. There's just so much communication overhead. There's so much people that... People don't always want to read or listen in or learn about the thing they're doing because they're treating it as a 9-5.

They're going in, they're doing the work, they're coming out, and then they're doing what they really want to do. Whereas with Indies, you have to go in and do what you really want to do and then clock out and be able to take a rest. Rest is really hard for Indies. I think you made a really good point earlier about the story and the gameplay feeling siloed in a lot of games I think RPGs are really bad for this

where a lot of the time you know it'll be like you're a new adventurer blah blah blah and like you know 15 minutes into the game you're fighting some giant dragon when you're supposed to be some guy who just left his village 10 minutes ago right right now I'm playing through Trails in the Sky

and I think it does a really good job at making you feel like you are a beginner adventurer. Like, during the, during the start of the game, right? Like, you'll be sent on, you know, one of your early quests is go kill rats in the sewer, right? It's not a difficult encounter. It's there to sort of explain the combat mechanics, but it's like, it doesn't throw you into things that are way too difficult too quick. Like, the craziest thing that happens in the first, like, eight hours of the game is you go and fight some bandits.

And this, it feels like you're actually, you know, it makes sense, right? Like, you've just started being an adventure like a week ago. Like, all of this makes sense. It makes sense why you're, this is the, like, thing you're getting yourself involved in. I think that sounds like it's a very character-driven story. opposed to an event event driven story because stuff like

found fantasy is driven by the events the worlds the things that throw and upend your world that you're left dealing with things that you're not expecting to whereas a character-based story is all about the people that you're playing it's a lot more grounded usually

usually and it's all about their experiences and they are the story and I think that's where when you're going in as a consumer you need to know what kind of story you're going for um like again i'm always going to jump back to a movie and cartoon references but like bill um in the scheme of things stephen universe in the early days was a very character story

while there were plot big plot events going all of the personal moments were what mattered the events helped just introduce new characters and new threats for the people to deal with They gave new context to people's struggles, but the people who were at the heart of it. It's why there was so much of Stephen's downtime and not with him going through and battling all the diamonds or whatever. And I think that's just people's taste in what they want to experience has changed. It's why tabletop RBGs are taking such a prevalence because people want that connection. They want the stories. They want people to care about.

and they don't just want a cookie-cutter action flick with the same spy with a different face. They don't want the same story re-skinned. They want to connect with people. But yeah. I think every... Good way to put it. I think everyone thinks they're Hideo-Kajima

and thinks they can tell some giant overarching story across seven games but you're probably not Hideo Kajima Yeah probably not Hideo Yeah like you can You can do it and you can do it really well But you have to really

Really understand media You can't plan everything out At the same way because the context of the world shifts Every couple years I remember back in 2010 when mobile phones and iPhone, sorry, I'm not back in 2010, when

mobile phones came in, the world changed. When COVID hit, the world changed. Understanding changes with each new technology or each great event that happens. And there's going to be huge shifts. Like, I think a couple years ago,

what, AIs weren't even, like, in the general consensus. I saw this, I saw this, I'm going to send you a picture because it's a, it is a throwback to what these AI image generators used to be. Give me, where is the picture? Here it is. This is a post from 2022 that came across my feed.

For anyone just listening, this is a picture, I think, I don't know, one of the, I don't remember which tool this would have been at the time, but it's 2022 generating a picture of a capy bar are riding a skateboard and it looks horrendous the skateboard is like clipping

into the capy bar his head sometimes it's not even standing on it half the time and the image is incredibly low res it doesn't look good but like no one at the time realized how much this would change everything

people did realize but there's a lot of people who didn't think it would happen this quickly I think so Like, you always will be surprised at how quickly change sneaks up with us. I mean, I think about how long it takes you to learn something. Think about how long it took you to learn to tie your shoelaces. Now, consider that you'd have to do tons of other things in that process, whereas AI gets to do the same thing over and over again until, yes, that's correct. and there's just so many people

in putting into it to test it and that's probably why it's explored at such rate is why technology grows at faster and faster paces and it's why I feel like a grandpa sometimes looking at all the features that people are telling me about because I'm like, I've never needed to use

that and now you tell me this is now automated? Oh my God where has the world gone? And it's just hard. Like I don't think Us as human beings are capable of keeping up with tech, because we've got so many things

that we need to do to survive, to thrive, whereas there's always someone else working on it, and there's not just one person, it's entire groups and organizations, building something. And I think that's just the speed of civilization, unfortunately, that you kind of don't get to keep up. Well, at like a biological level, we're still fundamentally the same people that were living in, like, villages 5,000 years ago, right? Like, yeah, we haven't changed at the same rate, especially the same rate that things are advancing now.

Yeah, it's just like crazy to think that we've kind of changed the world so much that the environmental pressures are not as big of a concern. for us where we triumph biology with our technology essentially we very much develop techniques of getting around things we hyper optimise things

without understanding the consequences like this technology can advance but like social reforms take years and years and years laws and legislations just can't keep up because no even if people see that there's a problem you need to prove that there's a problem

and that the proof comes that's where the problem lies so if technology advances too fast you'll never see the problems coming I mean yeah again mobile phones internet it changed how everyone interacted

yeah Tinder changed it how dating works yeah yeah drastically so I don't know if you ever look at the I don't know if you've looked at the charts of how many people meet online compared to, like, you know, meeting through other means. And about 2007, it just goes, woo, sky rockets to the moon. It just means that we don't really connect with our local community anymore.

It's harder to see your neighbors because we're talking to someone across the world who has the exact same things that we like. There's the exact same things that we enjoy, the things that we want to be. And we fixate and we find community online, which is now not bound by space. And that can leave people feeling very isolated because there's such a, there's bits of information missing when you don't see people. Like right now, there's probably context cues that you're missing when I'm gesturing with my hands, but my webcam isn't here because I'm at the office and I don't have a webcam there.

But there's just so much you miss from the physical presence. and it changes how people react it changes how people learn it changes how people see the world I think some people are starting to notice this in the past maybe two or so years definitely post-COVID I have seen so many board game stores open up

like I've been seeing so many other stores shutting down and board game stores are everywhere now I used to I used to like go into the city to find stuff like, no, I could just like there's at least three places in a relatively short distance from me now

I think some people are starting to realize that there is value in connecting in person and even though most people are still doing stuff online I think there is a growing a growing group

of people that want to do more with other people around them? I think so. Just like weird other flow and effects, but more games are also harder to produce now or at least get shipped and manufactured because the manufacturing costs have gone straight up thanks to COVID, and the same with the shipping costs.

But that's like a completely different tangent. I think people, it's why D&D got so popular during COVID. It's like, oh, I can talk to people and actually interact with them in a meaningful way and not just chill and talk about the weather. I've got something new and exciting to talk about, and board games provide a shared meaning, a shared experience. I imagine that if consoles actually lent into the couch, co-op and play aspect,

people would also be going for those games more, but a lot of our tech has moved away from that concept. Like, everyone's got their personal devices. You've got your little switch lights, you've got your Steam decks, you've got games that have require you to buy multiple copies of the game to play together like Splatoon and it's just like

where's the good old golden I where I would spend hours of my afternoon playing the same old map over and over again trying to snipe my friend from the bottom of the hill and have them at the top of the hill is like ah where's that happening now

you know well this is what I really like about games like it takes two, because they have the friend pass, so only one of you need to buy the game, that's great, because, you know, if you want to play a co-op game with someone and it's some AAA game,

if you're in Australia, that's probably going to be $110 at, like, full price. Yeah, and then you have to buy multiple copies. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. I know. It's just like a weird world we live in. And I think

I think the movement to get more physical interaction is better like it will people are now getting over the technology and trying to get back to where we were before

right it's less exciting because it's not as new it's sort of something that everyone everyone's kind of used to it now like you know I remember I remember when the early iPhones were coming out

and you know a new iPhone Wow, look, amazing. It has some crazy new feature. And now, if you show me the past five iPhones, I could not tell you which ones which. I think that's honestly better.

It means that people don't feel pressured to be like, oh yeah, that's a new iPhone. But that's not what the companies want. And their changes are so minimal. It's like, oh, I've got a better lens. Oh, I've got a better battery. But realistically, you don't need to change unless your phone's breaking.

which is why, in my personal opinion, they're not built to last. Because I know that I've got my old Nokia from back in the 2000s or whenever I got it, it still works. And I could use it. I could, but, like, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles. Right.

But, yeah. Actually, I don't think you could use anymore because the 3G network was shut down, unless it... Oh, just, like, phone lights? Like, as in, like, just normal phone calls. I don't think it's going to work on an Australian network anymore Shit, really? That's so sad

That's so sad A lot of other countries still have their 3G networks up So you can probably take it with you But yeah, I think I want to say like a year or two ago Telstra shut down the 3G networks It was like a big government shutdown Which is...

Shit, I'm so outdated Well, it also broke a lot of 4G and 5G phones Because a lot of phones are not made for there not to be a 3G network that exists. So there were people that had phones that on the box, it said 4G LTE, it required a 3G

network to actually do some little stuff in the background and just stops working properly. Damn. Yeah. That's actually kind of funny. Yeah, well, it also created a problem for emergency services because they didn't announce anything.

So like you, didn't even know what happened. So there are people that they don't have phones and don't know that they can't use emergency services anymore shit that's not good that's really not good

that's really not good like the UK handles it much better if um if you're if you're in the UK I believe they just send you they'll like ping your phone be like hey this phone's not going to work on our networks that's a reasonable way to handle it

then you know yeah no it's better than what's his face, that politician that sends out mass political marketing through our emergency systems. You know who I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So, we kind of like diverged from the game for a while. That's all right. No, yeah, no, it's definitely fine. I like going down the random tangents. One thing I talked to Jackson about it, power up, was sort of the idea of

game balance and I sort of ran into a problem very quickly I went to a boss tile like three tiles in and immediately

got nuked yep I guess do you what do you have to say in regards to sort of balancing a game

where your progression system is kind of tied to R&G I think so the inner not gaming in me wants to say get good but that's probably not the answer

so I think balancing is the player needs to experience that lost once and then they won't do it again but you also don't want to make it prohibitive this is like a hard topic to approach in terms of balance

because I can talk about specifics but I also want to talk about generalizations in the genre, in games in general. At least in our system, we've got a little threat system a la risk of rain, where the longer you are, the more you do, the harder the game gets. And that's not fully functional right now.

So what would normally happen is, after a certain period of time, those harder bosses would start to appear roaming on the map. So theoretically, you'd be able to see them, and you'd know that they're there. You could fight them and learn, oh no this is not something I'm ready for but then what happens there

is that if players get completely curbed stumped at the start by such an enemy they start to learn to avoid them and that's not quite what you want to do long term speaking so in most games you gate it between X amount of fights

to make it feel like it's an approach channel you don't let the player decide and what our solution is since we have a free room map is free room map what we're intending to do is to have the little elite start to chase you down

if you've been in the map too long. So you can avoid them at the start and we won't have them so close at the beginning but as you progress more of them small and more of the start taking out the objectives that you want and it gives you

a time pressure to actually do things fast. Not too fast but like fast enough and balance can really only be through a lot of play testing because you can theory craft all you want but until you know what the general level

your audience is sitting at you can't figure out where the correct balance is and in this genre we tracked both people that are very good at the game and a very high level and they like say oh 3,000 that's perfectly easy easy. I can do it. Um, but then you have people that are new losers run or is like,

I don't know what I'm doing. And then that's too hard. So it's usually a question of finding the middle ground, but also getting the harder challenges through ascension levels or like, um, glory runs essentially. Well, I think it's also important to make sure that the player is informed of what their actions are going to do and what the enemy actions did. Yeah. It gives you context. It gives you

an idea of how to react it in hack and slash games. It was like the wind up. You get to see the enemy. They'd flash. They'd pause for a second. And they give you an opportunity to dodge or get out of the way. In strategy games,

at least as a new trend for the last, I don't know. eight, nine years, you get to see what the enemy intends to do, the intent system. And that's how a lot of games make you feel like it's not complete RNG. You get to plan around whether you need to block or an attack. And then it's more of a question, have you built up enough to how you deal with such a foe? But you still get the opportunity to plan. And the RNG is more about your options in that turn.

So that's, I guess, the shift from traditional turn-based RPG. you have all the net set but you don't know what your enemy's going to do so you have to kind of predict and plan around it so I think the reason why deck building games are so fun is because you've got RNG but you've got control over the RNG

is not just willy-nilly and I'm getting away of the topic of balance but balance comes through a lot of testing and figuring things out yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah, I don't know how good way to answer it Because a lot of it comes from intuition Although it comes from just observation and data

Yeah Yeah, like The problem of Like Different games are going to have different ways You have to approach this problem, right? If we look at a game like Sekiro, for example Sekiro has very limited options

You have your katana, You have a throne weapon, and you have maybe, I think it's like six or nine abilities. This is a lot easier to balance than you look at a game like, say, Dark Souls, where it's still, the boss is going to do very procedural things. The player only has so many actions, but you have a lot more tools that you're disposed with. There's a lot more weapons, there's a lot more spells, a lot more abilities you can generally use. And then, like, but the player is still in complete control, right? in a game like Dark Souls you can choose to use

whatever weapons are available to you at that point in time then you look at a game like Hades for example or a game like Slay the Spire or Fox and Shadow where actually I'll separate that a little bit I think Hades you can have a bad run in Hades where you get like terrible upgrades but a sufficiently skilled player can beat the game

with no abilities whatsoever. Like, people have done that before. Yeah. Then you look at a game like Slate Aspire, like Fox and Shadow, basically any sort of deck builder or any sort of game where the player power is fully tied to progression, where there's still a skill, obviously a skill aspect there to what card you upgrade, what card you select, how you build your deck. But you can have a truly terrible run in a card, in a deck builder,

where, I don't know, you get no damaging cards and you're just constantly sitting there trying to defend and chip away at the enemy's health. So in terms of games where there's an action economy, what you're looking to balance is, what the enemy does, is it possible to escape that turn with zero damage? And I think that's the way to balance it,

is that I'm tying how much an enemy does versus how much I expect the player to be able to block it on a single turn and sometimes it's like this turn you should be completely blocking in which case I rate up how much energy I've got so in our game we've got four energy and technically you can get all your defecas down to one

one energy cost and so essentially each energy is worth about five blocks so if I want a player to block it for an entire turn a heavy hit is about 20 damage so that's where you also want to give players opportunities to damage so that you're not just turtling that you're not just having to chip things away and then you'd be adding an extra moon that the enemy does

that gives players a chance to attack it is very much similar to how you do a hack and slash where the player has both wind up time and recovery time to be able to have windows to do damage without taking damage and the idea of every game is that you should be able to have a perfect run there should be not a game where you can not get a get you can't you can't finish it with without losing a single point of HP and I think that's a test that you have to run and a test that you have to figure out because I if you can't do that you've over you've made your game too

hard if you as a developer cannot get a perfect run in a game you've made the game too hard and you represent maybe a high level in that field because there's going to be people that are way better and better than you add in any specific genre. But if you can do it perfectly, and that means a player that doesn't know the genre can do it imperfectly. They might lose a couple times,

but they can learn, they can get better, and they can actually do it with taking some damage. So I think that's the philosophy I take into game balancing overall. Hopefully I'm not rambling too much. No, no, it's totally fine. at the same time it shouldn't be too easy for a player to get a perfect run

like this shouldn't be something I think I think in a game like Balatro for example yeah Balatro you can have a run where you just clear every point target

by like 10x because you just got some crazy jokers early on and the early parts of the game are an absolute joke yeah But those runs are not going to be your normal ones. Most of your runs, you're going to be, you know, early levels, you're going to be doing fine.

And somewhere towards the midpoint, that's when you're going to start really thinking about these point targets. And I think for a game like that, that really works. And they've done a, they've done quite a good job at ensuring that the player can get some level of power fantasy. But it doesn't feel like. you're just, you know, running through the game without thinking about anything. That's why we have mobile games, too. No shade to mobile games. Idle games are perfectly valid way of playing games.

It's just, there's not a challenge there. Sure, sure. Again, I think the audience of Balochow wants to be challenged. And they want a chance to build up to their combos, to the favorite thing they want to do in the game, and then they want to be able to get to that point without dying too much. So what you usually end up doing in a lot of strategy games or turn-based games is that the first three levels are free games, more or less.

So you've got the first few fights that are very easy to do. It helps get you started on a build or a pathway to success. And then from there on in, it gets a lot harder. and I think that's how you end up balancing strategy games you're balancing action economy you're balancing what it takes for people to upgrade their skills

and you're only wrapping up the difficulty once players have had a chance to actually get situated into that run so yeah it's hard to codify this into a specific strategy on how to balance a game

but you look at all these little data points and these are the things you can tweak. These are the tools of the trade that you can adjust your game with. Yeah. Well, also, with the,

wanting to add more characters, more drones, and obviously without more cards, then that creates a whole other, a whole other vector of player power. Another way that they can approach problems where you need to, especially if you have

we hadn't really talked about how these other characters were supposed to work so how do they differ from what exists in the game with the one character so far because they're obviously going to have to approach you're going to approach problems differently so balance is going to have to be done in a

different way so I guess what we end up doing when we do make new characters is we have as a design pillar about what the experience is supposed to be. A lot of the swarm robot is about building up numbers to crush foes. It's all about applying enough poison or melt to take them down. It's about building up your swarm to build up your defences

so that you don't have to spend energy doing defences. And it's a very safe totally built. The hot shot is all about dealing status effects, and it's all about playing around with amplifying your own damage while reducing the enemy's ability to hurt you and playing around that concept and they're meant to be a very fast pace, they're meant to be hitting hard every turn.

They're not, sorry, they're meant to be hitting fast, but not especially. Whereas the next human character is called Keeper and he's very much this plant-loving guy, a big, gentle giant sort of character. and the idea behind him is that he's very patient he has a lot of defensive moves but a lot of his moves also build up power

so you're both shoring up your defenses but you're preparing for that one big hit and his mechanic plays not only over one fight but cars that build power between fights and we're giving them like growth mechanics as part of his base set aside from that like his passive ability

is supposed to let you hold cards so you get to hold on to a card that you've drawn and so overturns you can sort of wait to use this move so you can sort of retain it and so you can unleash it at the perfect moment so he's very much about patience and timing and the final human

that we haven't managed that all the art for is called fluid and the idea is is that they build their cards on the fly They're all about very quickly changing between me. So right now in our game, you make your cards outside of battle. But this character has the ability to make cards in the battle themselves. So they're very much shifting the deck.

This is also a little longer. Original one who plays to make all the cards fight. But that was scrapped because it was too hard to teach. But by the time you get to this character, you sort of built up the experience to actually play this game. So this is supposed to be like the more advanced character. Yeah, exactly. And essentially, this is how we flavor will just slightly differently. So one is very much a debuffer and hit fast, but not.

And kind of deal, take, you're willing to take damage to deal damage. Whereas Hebrew is very much, I'm going to turtle and I'm going to lay everything out perfectly. But I have to get to that stage where I can hit one, King hit someone. Because all of his moves are very expensive. and fluid is very much as I'm going to do what the cards let me do and I'm going to try and make that fit my situation it's very much tactile planning and also it gives you a lot more choices and yeah it means that some of

it is a advanced character because new players might feel analysis paralysis where they've got too many options and they can't play any of them because they don't know what to do um yeah um our robots go in a very different kind of fashion we went we treated our robots as classes rather than play styles so like the the little swarms the little spider robots they're basically row classes um hit hit hard um show up defences and then melt people whereas the observer our second robot is all about repeating the same action so you get to play a card and then you get to copy of their card to play it again.

It's about hitting and then storing energy. It's all like planning. So they very much synergized well with keeper to be the perfect turtle. And you get these kind of mismash and emmeshing of different playstales and ideologies

without having the player to be like oh, I've got I'm just going to use Slare the Spires as a reference. I've got one poison card and one Shiv card and I don't know how they can interact whereas the sets are kind of tailored to guide players

to find sets that do all interact all the cards are meant to synergize in some fashion and now I'm just kind of talk talk talking the last character the last robot was supposed to be like a summoner class where you take trophies from your enemies and you build different tools or support items out of it

out of your foes and they're very much you want to be fighting multiple enemies at once to make the most of them but yeah so I think that's like kind of the overview of the different archetypes that we're going through and how we

and mesh them together they generate new identities and the card sets kind of reflect those identities and those mindsets which is why I wanted to have a different artist do everything just so that we have ties between between, oh, this is a very different character because the art's different, because how they play is different. And it's all tying back to the feel of the game and trying to make sure that people understand what we're doing with the mechanics and visually representing it.

And, yeah. So each of these play in a very different way. That's the plan. Yeah. Which obviously goes back to what I was talking about before with balance. know, you know, these are not characters that exist fully fleshed out in the game, but this is going to create a very, and every, every deck builders has to deal with this problem. When you have very different playstiles, it creates a very difficult challenge to make each

of them feel viable. You don't want them to feel the same, right? Like that, you're never going to have a game that is 100% balanced. No game is 100% balance. No game is 100% balance. but it shouldn't feel like there is an obvious, correct choice. So, when I was talking about action economy, now this applies

over to the course of a fight. So, Hotshot might be dealing consistent damage, but they still might end up taking the same amount of turns as Keeper. But the nature

of the turns changes the feel of the character. So Keeper might be playing a lot of defend cards, and then doing one hit, whereas Hotshot wants to be playing some defense cards, some attack cards at the same time.

So it means that the nature of how you play and how you think changes. So theoretically we should be balancing action economy over the course of a fight, over the course of a player's HP, over the course of enemies' HP. And that's how we would be balancing it. Feel is very different.

And this is why, most deck building and Rogelight should have months of playtesting and you should have a large playtesting pool to actually pull it off probably because if you have cards that are super unbalanced then the games

it feels bad people will gravitate towards that one mechanic and then they'll just keep doing that mechanic they'll be like oh I don't get this I don't get this card the optimizers will go oh I'm going to reset

until I find that card players will optimize the fun out of a game yeah exactly so by having multiple viable strategies then it feels better you also do want your game to be slightly unbalanced so that

you do it on a card level or a move level so when you get that card you're slightly disappointed but then it means inversely you're going to be more excited when you get the card you really so you make the lows you have to make lulls in order to achieve highs

if everything's about contract if everything's samey then what's the point of making a choice right right yeah you want those you want those cards that appear where you're like wow this is exactly what I need right now this perfectly synergizes with the build I have

this is going to make the entire this is going to make the entire run just having this card yeah um and then the bad cards make you hungry for the good cards so they taste better so it's like you're starving you're slightly using hunger as a seasoning and you're because like if you can imagine when you're hungry

all food tastes amazing but if you're full even the best meal doesn't appetizing right if I've had lost to eat. I don't want a steak. I don't want a whole bunch of greasy food. But if I'm hungry, the grease almost makes it better. So, everything's in context. Everything's in moderation. Well, even the bad cards aren't entirely useless because you can discard them. You can sell them. Yeah. And like, they still have a function. It's, so it's not like, you don't want

the lows to be so bad where it's just like, this isn't a complete waste of my time. You want that is, you want it to be a downer, but there to still be something that can be done with it. Exactly. You want it to be a disruption to your plans rather than a roadblock. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, everything's in balance and everything's in, like, harmony, yada, yada, yada, yada. Everything that I'm hopping on about. But yeah, um, I don't know. Bad cards are good. good for different reasons. I think we talked about this a bit last time,

but I guess it's good to touch on if anything's changed now. Metaprogression, so progression, like, out of a run. So primarily meta progression happens through story and unlocks of different card sets and characters, as well as mods and upgrades, but again, they haven't been quite implemented in the game at this point in time. what we want to be able to do is have players have a

for trying to get as much money as they can on the run and we want them to be able to bring their back so that they can then purchase upgrades to make their experience better. So what we're doing is we're creating a positive... Oh, you've got a high score? Oh, that means you can now do more things. But we also want to make sure that the game is possible

on the very base run where you don't have all these things. because what we want people to do is to start out super exciting where everything feels new and fouled by all the possibilities and we want to eke out those points of discovery without making it feel like I have to optimize my run because I can't win without these things they make it easier but we want it possible to do it without and we also want to make sure that once they've unlocked everything they're already hooked

on the game and the gameplay loops they don't care about unlocking you know i don't know i don't have any examples of games that i've really enjoyed the process where i've unlocked everything and then i just stopped playing the game because it means that the gameplay loop wasn't the draw but the thrill of unlocking was i know it's It's hard to describe the feeling. I really enjoyed Ballotrol, but as soon as I managed to unlock all the Jokers and played a couple of rounds after that, I was hooked because I wanted to make certain bills run.

I'm an optimise a game player. Right, right, right. And that's what kept me going with that game. And as soon as I stopped having goals or things I could unlock, the game lost a little bit of its charm from it. But it was still an enjoyable experience. Well, it lasted. I think Hades is another good example.

example of that. What, like, what really drive me to continue playing through Hades was story events? Mm. And once, like, yes, there is the heat system and yes, I know there are people that run just stupid heat levels where it's like,

you have the time of how long each zone's allowed to take and everything's harder, and, for some people, that's enough to keep them going, but for me, I want there to feel like, I want it to feel like things are changing in the world. I want it to feel like, I'm actually progressing

towards something happening outside the run and even though it's like little drips of story here and there I think Hades did a good job at encouraging the player to continue going even after they've completed like most of the main story elements I think this comes down to different player motivations

and I depending on the system that you know there's a couple different options but there's like achievement hunters the story hunters

there's thrill seeking hang on let me pull this up so this is Bartle's taxonomy of player types and let me pull up a nice little image

and hopefully this works Google is frightful at the best of time so like there's people that want to kill there's like people that want to get achievements people that play to social art and people that go to equal so from the sounds of it

you kind of settle more aspect you want to discover a new thing whereas I'm going closer to the achiever and essentially I want to get an experience every part of the game

And then when I'm done with that, that's when the game ends with me. I don't often dream about the world too much. There have been games that have done it from you, but there's different motivations for playing. And games like Splatoon or co-op games are all about the social experience. And you could be discovering new worlds together or just gunning down the enemy or trying to win objectives. And that's kind of where social things.

And killers are, it's the Moabah game. games, it's the ones that have leaderboards, the ones that have you players. Right, you're playing like a battlefield or something like that. Yeah, exactly. So when you design a game, you have to consider what kind of players you want to draw. And that changes how you design the game. So Fox and Shadow, we wanted to aim for both exploring and achieving. We didn't really want it.

The social aspect is nice, but it's not our primary focus. and neither is killing though we do have scoreboards if players do wish to use it so like we're trying to have a little bit for everything but we lean heavily towards the discovery aspect and that's what we want

so that's why we've got all the combinations this is why you discover combos we discover cards and mods and unlock everything because we want that sense of achievement and discover right well yeah for me when I'm playing a new game

especially in RPG, I am the kind of person that if I see a, if I see a fork in the road, that's not a fork in the road. That's just the second place I'm going to go to. I will, anytime there's a fork in the road, I will go down one until I'm like,

does it feel like there's a story element that's going to happen here? If yes, I'll come back and do it later, and I'm going to do everything over here first. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, if a game has like a quest board, for example, I am going to do every single quest that is present there until I continue forward. Like, I want to make sure I'm not missing any part of the world.

And it's not about achievements, right? Like, I don't, I don't care. I'm not the kind of person who's going to sit there and, like, grind out max level or something like that. But if there's more, if there's more of the world to see, I'm going to do that before I do anything else. it's like when the story event cuts you off from the exploring area I've reloaded saves before

and like redone like an hour of gameplay because I missed out and some stuff I could have done because of a story element dude I used to be the same kind of player I very much used to be I used to basically

100% everything was to see the entire world enjoy it to its deepest depths but I don't know if it's just like I'm getting older or my response changed. But I don't think I can subscribe

to the 100% anymore that I sort of understand where people stand with I'm just going to do and play through the story for my optimal experience. And it's just

like one of the things that what kind of player you are changes. And also sometimes make it a very weird and toxic loop where when you try to 100%

things, there's just so many things that when you get to the end of the game you're just overpowered and the entire story feels like a chore like all the moments in between so you don't quite get the intended experience and that just shouts out to the designers

didn't kind of gate your experiences they didn't prevent you from over level they didn't make sure that you had the optimal experience they gave you too many avenues and the avenue that ruined your experience

yeah I think Um, have you played Expedition 33? No, I have not. I really want to. Okay. Um, without spoiling anything, when you get to the final act, you can just, you can either choose to go deal with the final boss, or they made the choice to have all of the, like, super bosses and all of the, like, they didn't have an end game. So all of that stuff is available before you beat the final boss. so I went and did it

and I intentionally had to slow down how I was damaging the final boss to make sure I didn't skip any dialogue because otherwise I could one shot the final boss that's such an interesting problem to have yeah it's a lot of games run into this it was like a perfect example what you were talking about there where you just let the player get way too empowered

Diablo is a good example of this where you could technically grind to level 60 or whatever it is and you

would just be one-shotting the entire story like it just means that in those kinds of games the end game

is the game the story is the tutorial yeah I don't know it's like it's an interesting dichotomy

because it means that they kind of know and I think that's the important thing when you do design a game that you know what kind of experience you're making because part of the exact same way where like the story the tutorial is the first 10 acts then the game starts when you start doing end game content when you start doing maps and all of this stuff

like anything before that point people don't even pay attention to it it's like every time a new season starts it's always a it's a question of how quickly can I get the story you out of the way. Dude, I feel the same way about Diablo. But it's just like, it's also why

even though they've got fantastic cinematics, the story is like threadbare. Like, I don't give a shit because there's no investment. There's no challenges in the main story. Everything's already being geared towards the endgame, so I don't care about the early game. It's

not the point of the game. Yeah, exactly, yeah. But I think the games that focus heavily on endgame, focus also on addictive loops of loot and rewards and seeing numbers go brr-r-r-er.

And in a sense, they're easier to make. They're easier to make that kind of experience. Whereas a good story is harder. It's harder to playtest. It's even harder to do revisions to the story once out

because you can't tell how audience to a given story until they've seen the entire thing but that's also asking playtesters 10, 20 hours or like

you can't get them to replay it either so they can't do comparison of notes and then experiences are subjective based on what people have seen well even if you do replay a story like it's never going to be the same experience again

even if you've made like modifications to it it, like the core story thread is still probably going to be there so they're going to understand major plot points that happen so you just, you really can't go through that, unless it's a game where you know, it's like Undertale for example,

where there is different branching paths but if there's not, you really, it's really hard to get some, like even if they want to do it again to really get that feedback in a proper see I would love to make games with like branching storylines but there's so much cost involved with that because you're spending on a lot of time and content that plays may not even ever experience yeah yeah yeah because some players go through undertow and say oh yeah

yeah I've done pacifist I can't bear to hurt anyone else and they turn the game off and that's it a great story but when you have branchy story lines and then you deal with or the costs of localization, every word that a player doesn't look at is money that you've spent for no reason. Well, I think a great example of a game that has branching a story that people are never going to see is the Stanley Parable,

because some of the triggers for some of the branches are really stupid, and you're not going to find it if you look at a wiki. And it's also why you don't need Stanley Parable too. Yeah, no, it's just like, Like, you have to know your audience when you do branching storylines, when you do this sort of gameplay. When you make your game and design it, you have to know who the player your place is going to be and why you're making it. Because there's no point in putting branchy star lines in the game like Path of the Exile or Diablo.

No one's going to ever, ever touch it. No one cares. The only thing they're going to click it for is what reward do I get from the branch? that is all they care about. Exactly. And that's also like... Like, here we, like, there's technically a branch in the story early on where there's like three bandits

and you can choose either to save each of the bandits or kill them all. And there's... No one cares what the bandits' names are or anything about them. All they care is one of them gives you an HP boost, one gives a movement boost, one gives something else.

If you kill all of them, you get an extra ability point. That's all the matters. Pretty much. That's MMM. in a nutshell. And again, you have to condition players at the start to say this story game for care. People don't care for big chunks of text. They watch short interactions that give them a lot of context about the characters and you're meant to make up. What theoretically you should

be doing is with your mechanics, you should be filling in the character's personality by how they act, how they play, what they do and see when your players not directly interacting. It's all the that you need to lend to your game mechanics for people to actually like characters like Transistor

you don't ever have to stop to hear the story but the story is told Transistor and Bastion the story is told while you're playing the game so it never feels like you're stuck in a cutscene

and unable to react unable to the game you're constantly interacting with the game that's what makes them such beautiful experiences but yeah I don't know

I could go on and I was like I could go on and hours and yeah talking about this one facet of game design no I do

I do like having dialogue that happens when you're doing stuff the Tales games do this for example where you'll go like you're just walking around the world

and then people just start like they just start yapping there and like it's not taking you out of the game you can just keep going and engage in other things you're not

like it has its cuts But it doesn't try to tell everything through, like, if you have two characters standing there just talking to each other, does that need to be a cutscene or is there a better way to handle that? Like, a cutscene should be reserved for something that needs to take the player out of gameplay. We're trying to do something that wouldn't really fit in the world. Have you ever played Oxen Free? How do you spell that? No.

O-X-Y-E-N O-X-E-R-E-O-S-N-F-R-E-E Oxen-Free, I think Oxen-Free So it's like a visual novel game But the beautiful thing about it Is that a lot of the character-building dialogue happens while you come from location 80

You don't have to interact with it But the options do pop up And it just means that it feels organic And I think If I ever wanted to make a visual novel I'd be using Oxen 3 as a template because it's just such a good experience that feels grounded.

It's not just two heads talking at each other for God knows how long. Okay. If you need a story game, that's probably one I would recommend because there's branching storylines and it gets really timely to actually try to figure out

all the triggers. It's like another Stanley. Ah, okay, okay. Well, we could probably just keep talking for, hours, but we probably should end this off at some point. Oh, dude. I feel, I feel the same. I've just kind of run out of water and I've been staring at my empty jug for like the last half an hour. If you wanted to get some water, we could

have paused for a moment. Are you rude? But yeah, no, we should eventually figure out when to stop or where to stop. And you should figure out where to stop with the game as well. That's also an important thing to work out somewhere down the line, somewhere through early access. Yeah, pretty much. I think what we'll probably end up doing is we'll get into early access with our two pilots, two drugs, and then hopefully get enough funds or time for us to do the fluids. So we have three pilots and two drones, and then I'd be happy. Okay. The third robot is like the cherry on top, and if we get enough funds to do a fourth or a fourth robot and fourth human, that'd be even more better, but like that's also crazy complexity. And, um,

I would die in design. Which one is the game? Yeah. Yeah. All of the traits and all of the drone cards. Yeah. Yeah. Complexity explodes in our game.

If you were to have four and four, how many cards would you have roughly? Give me a second. I've actually done the calculations for this. Okay. And this includes, like, the combination cards as well, yes? Yeah. Okay. Um, well, okay, let's actually find which document would be best to look at that.

Uh, bu, bu, bup, bup, bup, b b b b b b b b b so we'd be looking at probably about 690 cards. Ah. Uh, something like that. Right. Give me a second. I might have done the number wrong. Uh, will this change numbers for me? yeah 540 540 cards not much better but okay yep and then if you add on mods

and viruses into those combinations with the ones that we intend to do at maybe 5,900 15 different combinations uh-huh right and then the complete the estimated and there's obviously going to be much less than it's like

a big number I can show you the give you one second just because it's like I don't even know how to read that

quickly this would be like all the combinations different drones mods and viruses Oh so that's 11 billion

20 million 975,875 yeah like we'll probably end up cutting a huge chunk of that just by limitations on mods and virus basically you get with what we intend to do

variation in how any given card can be and then you've got how many cards in the deck yeah so we the game explodes with complexity right so just for anyone who's listening that's 590 actual cards and then the modifiers and the viruses those are random things that are added onto the card

yeah and you can have up to four mods or virus on each card. So it's not, they're not making 11 billion cards. No, no, no. No, no. How many, like, modifiers

and viruses does that work out to be? I think we're looking at 26 viruses and 64 mods would get us to that number. Right, okay. Yeah, it's a dumb thing,

and this is just me being centered in English is that we've got a virus for each letter of the alphabet. for reasons I'm not going to go into that that's just a design perk that we've had done and I've committed to

so when it comes to translating sitting here because not everyone English alphabet I'm sitting a heap there I'm sitting a heap there okay so I guess if people want to keep an eye on the game

and check it out, where can they head to? You can either head to our Steam page and look up for Shadow. We've got a demo out now, gain an update in the next week or so to actually reflect our game better. You can join our Discord.

I'll link to you later. You can join our mailing list, which will get you updates when big things. I try not to spam the mailing link. I don't like any spam. That's fair. That's fair. But yeah, so those are the easiest places to follow our progress and get in touch with them.

Awesome. Yeah. Nothing else you want to mention? I'm good for now because if I start mentioning something else, we'll be here. Oh, is the game going to be at any cons coming up? Right, right, right, right. We're going to be at Pax. AUS

and we're going to be at IndyPod 63 we're also demoing our parsing the tabletop RPG

in the tabletop section as part of arc at the table and there's got 15 sessions weekend and I may be

trying to test out a new phototyped and sent you a small photo of that but yeah that's we're at packs next month and i think it's like october 10 to 13th i might be wrong um we're also making

appearance at i need to get the name correct um um got to find the emails apologies about the right no it's so good West Horan's Comic Expo at the West Horan's Library on October 18th. Awesome. Cool, cool, cool. That all, nothing else that's worth mention?

We intend to be in early access by the end of the year. We'll see how the development plays out. Okay, okay. That's always a hard one. But yeah, thank you. Good luck with that. Yeah, we'll see how we go. Thank you for having us.

Yeah, that's a pleasure. Sad that Jackson would be here the entire time, but I still think it worked out pretty well. I think timing-wise, we all kind of worked out. Well, yeah. All right, I'm going to grab some water. Okay, I'm going to do my outro, and then we'll sign off. All right, thank you very much. Okay, so my main channel is Brodie Rupperson.

I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I sometimes stream there as well. If you've not seen it yet, I did a cosmic stream the other week. I've got the gaming streams, Brodion Games. Right now I'm playing through Yakuza 6 and also Silk Song. And if you want to see the video version of this, you can find the audio... If you want to see the video version of this, it's on YouTube at Tech of a T. If you want to find the audio version, it's on basically every audio podcast platform.

Are you grabbing that order already, or... I guess that's a yes. Okay, I guess I'll just sign out then. See you guys later. Hi. Oh, you're back? Hi. Yeah, I'm back.

Sorry, I'm muted because I was like... Oh, I thought you'd already go on to grab the water. Do you want to sign us off? I'm still not... I haven't pressed the stop recording button yet. Yeah, thank you for joining us. It was great to be on Tech Over T. I noticed in the chat you wrote Tech 4T, which is not my show, but it is what it is.

No, it's not. Anyway. I'm so sorry. No, no, it's all good.