Tech Over Tea - Flip Your Way To Victory | Turtle Flip Studio

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

==========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/2318660/Which_Way_Up_Galaxy_Games/ Website: https://whichwayup.info/ Twitter: https://whichwayup.info/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. I have lost track of what number of the post-AvCon discussions this is. I want to say... six. Yeah, that sounds close to right. It's either five or six. Anyway, we have Nick from Turtle Flip Studio on the show. How is it going?

Hey, Brodie. Very well. How are you? Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. This is actually my second podcast recording of the day. I had one at 11, then I did some regular main channel videos in between, and now I'm doing this. So we are going to be like six hours into talking by the end of this which is not that crazy for me but for a normal person it's probably a bit um too much but yeah that's impressive yeah i feel like for uh maybe a developer slash software engineer such as myself that does sound like too much talking i'd rather just be in a dark room. Well, right now you're sitting on the floor. People can't tell because you've got the nice blurry background,

but you are on the floor or on a stool on the floor. You said there was a stool as well. So what's the actual go there? Well, just based on my setup, this is a little bit maybe thrifty, a little bit ad hoc. I have a 4G router connected to my laptop which is going through an Ethernet cable which is very short. I put the 4G

router in the best place where I am right now to get the best signal. I'm just on the floor next to the couch with my one headphone as I've mentioned to you. So when my battery runs out, I'll have to replace it with my other headphone, if it does, but hopefully not. And everything is going to run smoothly. Well, you know what?

That connection you have is perfect because Which Way Up is a four-player local co-op game. I know how to do segues. four-player local co-op game. I know how to do segues. So before we get sidetracked on random stuff, what is Which Way Up? And generally, what is the premise of the game and why would someone want to play it? Well, Which Way Up is a multiplayer party game.

It's for two to four players. I have a little sticker here if it decides to not go blurry. That's nice. I think we were giving these away at AVCon as well. Maybe you were able to pick one up yourself. But the game is inspired

by Super Mario Galaxy, which is a game that I've always really loved and held close to my heart. I really loved the feel of the gravity mechanics, being able to kind of long jump around planets and then kind of float around. And I just wanted to prototype that at some stage.

After I prototyped that, I was inspired by another developer friend, colleague of mine, who made a game called Boomerang Foo, which is a multiplayer party game. And he's an amazing friend of mine who's given me lots of advice. And so I thought I would try to make something somewhat similar in the party game genre, but with this kind of gravity mechanic. So the game is a collection of mini games if you like or i refer to them as uh we refer to them as galaxy games i don't really love using the term mini game um because i kind of think that they're a little bit more than that

when you talk about mini games people think about mario party, which are extremely bite-sized and sometimes those minigames are just, you know, spamming a or something like that or ruining your palm with a joystick. So yeah, we've got, we're releasing this game, Which Way Up? Galaxy Games with 12 Galaxy games and you'll be able to kind of play with your friends across random mini games across multiple rounds to see who is the best at doing various things in space i don't recall all of the games that were present i don't know if i even played all of them but i do remember there was the um the infinite runner where there's like the black hole that's slowly getting bigger behind you and eventually takes up

basically the entire screen and you can knock people back into it and i think it's like if someone is knocked out twice then they're out of yeah i think it's twice correct me if i'm wrong there but once they've fallen back twice then uh they can no longer get a point for that round uh there was the golf mini game or the golf galaxy game, the way you had to basically knock the ball around the planet and the planets would have like a gravity around them, would like go around and you wouldn't get into the hole. There was the one way there was like bombs where you had to knock the bombs onto the other people's planet.

And if it stayed on there by the time the timer ran out, you would get a point. There was the soccer game where you were trying to hit the balls into your goal so you could get an additional point. And what other games were there? I know it might be hard to rattle all of them off your head and you're probably going to forget that some of them exist. But yeah, what other ones were there that might be of interest

yeah can i screen share a little visual uh you can try i'm not sure what will happen to my overlay let's see what happens if everything breaks okay um i will just yeah yeah, it's, we'll make it work. Uh, yeah, okay, we see, we got it here, cool. I'll fix it up afterwards. I can always send you a little screenshot later. No, no, I got it on the thing now. Okay, so I thought I would provide a little visual aid.

We've got these little kind of video game cartridge slash cards that we've been developing the visuals on. This wasn't in the game when you were at AVCon, but we're going to be putting it into the game soon. So there are 12 little cartridges, we're calling them. And so you mentioned an infinite runner. So that's kind of like running away from a black hole. That's called Event Horizon.

So that's second from the left. I'll go left to right. Yeah, that's probably the easiest. So I'll start again. Constellation Catch is furthest from the left. Constellation Catch is kind of like a King of the Hill type mode where there are a bunch of stars all over the map. And what you're doing is it's kind of like a...

It's a game to test your platforming skills. So you have to go around, collect a star. Once you collect it, it starts a timer from about nine seconds to count down. And once that timer goes down, you get the point for that star. And the star turns into a little constellation. We put in real constellations all over the map,

so it kind of transforms into a constellation. The way you play it is that you try to steal people's star before their constellation gets caught. So you're constantly chasing people around, changing stars back from other people's colors, and protecting your own. So it's like a territory war, almost inspired by Splatoon. Event Horizon, like I said, it's pretty self-explanatory You just try to survive, run to the right of the screen We find that people seem to be They find that quite an intuitive game

So there's not much to explore or explain There's also the ice asteroids that you can slip around And that become harder to jump off of Yeah, we've got all sorts of kind of like mechanics um throughout the game like you said slippery planets just make you slide around really quickly um and then there's like bouncy planets which are made out of jelly and then there's also like uh little springy planets which kind of um just interact with the force um with you with which you land on them.

So yeah, in this game, you either just keep running to the right or you can kind of push your friends into the black hole. It depends how mean you want to be to your friends. Next minigame is Gravapult. Gravapult is kind of like protecting your base. So there are little bombs all over the map that you have to go around and pick up you can only hold one bomb at a time

and what you do is you throw a bomb at another person's planet it has a little timer on it so people can defend their planet by knocking the bombs off but if the bomb goes off then the person who threw it gets a point.

So you're defending your own planet and attacking other people's planets with bombs. Common Collect is inspired by Rocket League, except we kind of call it reverse soccer. So we wanted to be able to kind of have a soccer game that's not team-based. We'd love to actually implement teams in general to have like a team round but just based on the variety of the games and the mechanics we're doing we just haven't gotten around to it yet. So Comet Collect at the moment you kind of push these or hit these soccer balls using your little kind of comet push ability into your own kind of little area. So it's like you're collecting them. You're collecting these

little asteroids or stars. That's one of the ones where I noticed that there was a bit of confusion every time I played with new people. I played, I don't know, like probably like 10, maybe like five different runs of this, like, throughout, like, an entire game, different people every time, um, whenever that one came up, I noticed a lot of people, they understood it was soccer, but they didn't understand they were supposed to get it into their goal, they were trying to get into other people's goals, and, yeah, I, I'm sure if, did it say in, the the the when you go into like the each game there's like a pre thing that tells you like the rules of like how it works does it mention in there

that you're supposed to go into your goal or is that people are just not reading yes well first of all people don't read that's definitely something we've noticed from play testing and i think it's a general ux thing a user experience design rule um but yeah it's a it's a problem that we have with this game mode and um it's it's tricky because i i wouldn't mind changing the mechanics so that you defend your own goal and score in others but i think the dynamic that it created in terms of scoring was just not as desirable as the other one um as the current way that it works um so it's something that we'll probably keep looking at and and the it's a good question to kind of say that the whole process um for our game is very iterative like

we're constantly um taking it to play testing events and every kind of mini game like we have this kind of bar graph is constantly in our minds going up and down in terms of their relative quality or how they're performing or various problems so it's kind of hard to to juggle it's almost like spinning plates. There's always going to be one that's like the worst or has the most bugs or isn't as fun. And they vary a fair bit in terms of their gameplay. Siri is listening to me.

Sorry. So, yeah. Anyway, I think that one actually is also a little bit tricky for people to pick up, but something that we like to balance is that a lot of the games are really easy to pick up

and really kind of easy to master, and there isn't much of a kind of skill gap, I suppose. But we've also wanted to have many games that are the other way, that they still have a large skill gap and are difficult to kind of get quite good at. So in my mind, Comet Collect is one of those where if you play a lot, you can actually get quite good. So yeah, and it was one of the first mini games

that we created. So I kind of hold it close to my heart. Right. And I enjoy it quite a bit. So yeah, shall I continue? Yeah, yeah, keep going. We've got plenty of time. We've got, I definitely want to go through all right so star ring uh similar i guess to um constellation catch in that it's it's almost like

uh maybe not capture the flag it's it's a territory thing so you maybe not a territory thing you you basically just have to stay in this moving bubble. And I don't really know how to relate it to any other minigame. I think it's pretty much inspired by a minigame in Fall Guys, where I think they did do something very similar, where they have something, a little area on the map which

is moving around, and everyone tries to stay in there as long as possible um and in our game um the dynamic that that creates is that everyone is constantly well hopefully not always but hopefully everyone's trying to come and push each other into space so those valuable seconds you get when you kind of throw someone or hit someone to go off the screen and then get destroyed, that's where they have to respawn. You get to stay in that bubble for five more seconds, and that's valuable time to get your score up.

Yeah, so the way I understand it is you stand in there and it builds up like a percentage, and then when it just gets up to the full percentage then match over. So if you can knock something out for like an extra second that might tip you just that little bit over the edge we end up at being at like a higher score. Yep. Yeah, you explained it much better than I do.

I appreciate it. Did you play the next minigame? Did you play Overload? Yes, yes. I think that one came up a couple of times. Nice. So, Overload, basically, bomb tag

is the best way I would describe it. Someone, the game just randomly selects a player, someone is the bomb, and you're just trying to offload the bomb onto someone else. And so I think we have a timer of about again nine seconds um and if i think there are three stages so this isn't actually

obvious but there are three stages when you have the bomb and they're kind of like um time reset intervals so if you get, if you're still in the first stage and you give someone the bomb, then the time will go all the way back up to the full kind of nine seconds reset. But if the bomb drops below like seven seconds, then you're in the second stage.

And then any swapping of the bomb will go to the second stage time, any swapping of the bomb will will go to the second stage time which i think is somewhere around six seconds so the drama curve of the game is that it's kind of at the beginning it's not too stressful there's this beeping that happens kind of like a bomb ticking down and which gets gradually faster and faster and um yeah eventually someone blows up that's one of the ones i found where if you get really good at the movement it becomes and like knocking people back like that becomes a really really hectic game and it can like even when it's down to the last second and you're just swapping back and forth it can last a surprisingly long time

with people who understand like how how the game actually plays and i had a couple of rounds where i think on that last second we swapped it back and forth like three or four times just trying to get the bomb away from us out of curiosity did you out of the few play sessions that you had did you experience um like one uh two players three players and four players or was it always um playing with four people at the same time um i think there might have been there are there were a couple of rounds where where alex jumped in to fill a slot but most of the time there were just people walking by, like, hey, this is a cool game, and usually we could fill it up.

Maybe there was one time where there was three people, but most of the time it was always full. There was a lot of people who were interested in playing the game. That's amazing. Yeah, I ask because it's interesting to think about and when and realize that the dynamics of all the mini games change they can change quite a bit depending on how many players there are um which is a difficult design challenge for a lot of these so we actually have um different levels on different level

designs which will only pop up if there are four players for instance okay um and different levels that will only pop up with two players um some mini games are just always the same level for so starring for example it doesn't matter what how many players there are we just put the same levels in there but something like comet collect which might seem pretty obvious they have there are bespoke level designs for two players because there are two goals on either side and that's the case for a number of the mini games so yeah for overload itload, it's quite a different game or feel, I would say. The level designs aren't super different. They are different just because of spacing. But yeah, with four players, it's super chaotic.

But you always do sense that everyone's obviously running away from this one person, which is almost like this repelling magnetic force feeling. It's definitely one of my favourites as well, just to play. I play this game a lot. I don't know if it's my favourite, but it's definitely a contender.

I really like Event Horizon. That's a lot of fun. It's probably my top two, I would say. Yeah, Event Horizon or Overload. Nice. So those first six that I mentioned are actually the mini games that are available in the demo that's out. So we have a demo already on Steam

that you can go and download and play. And it might be an older version. We're actually planning on updating the demo with a bunch of new stuff that we've been working on. Same mini games, just a bit more content, kind of new mechanics. We've refreshed a few things here and there. But that's where we kind of draw the line with the demo.

But I'll go on, because I think that the build that you played at AVCon had a few more minigames. So Nebula Nab was inspired by, I guess, little ducklings following their mother duck around. So someone had the idea that maybe you have to go and collect some little tokens and then they just keep following you around and you kind of... It would be cute. We just thought it would be cute to have something follow you around in a line

and then we kind of imagine mechanics around that. So in this game you go around and pick up these little creatures called pips, we've called them, and every character has their own pip. In fact I have one of them here. so we've my my my partner actually started crocheting somewhat recently and we've been crocheting a lot of the little uh the characters from the game and this is sunny's pip they have gigantic eyeballs for the size of their body but they're quite fun to play with and to do silly things with. So what you do in the game is you go and you collect these pips. You can collect up to five and they all follow you around. But the more you collect, that actually changes your... And this is something people probably wouldn't realize easily while playing.

It changes the feel of platforming. So you can actually run faster but your jump height is lower oh um which yes it's hard to to notice and it goes up linearly so if you are able to collect five it's it's very noticeable but if you've collected one or two it doesn't make it a huge difference that's probably why i didn't notice then yeah so it's a subtle thing um but it's kind of like i like kind of building a little bit of depth into the games that isn't necessarily super obvious um and then you can kind of pick up if you play a little bit longer or notice after a longer period of time. And so anyway, the goal is that there is this kind of central...

It's actually designed to look somewhat like an atom, an atomic model. You pick up these little pips and you drop them off into the atomic model. And then you score a point for that. And the atom only has, I think, some number of slots. It's actually different depending on the number of players, but let's just say it's 12 for 4 players.

So there are 12 positions, and you drop off all the little pips. If you drop off the most, then you win that round. Yeah. And part of the fun that I quite like about minigame is knocking people's pips off their little stack. So once your ducklings are following you around,

you can go and kind of just... You can even just run into someone's pip and it just gets knocked out and it changes back to being a neutral pip. Then you can collect it or you can even comet push it and then knock it out. So that one, I think that's one of my favorites. Again, I think that's a higher skill ceiling one.

That one can be a little bit tricky. I think when we did that, we ended up having, there were a lot of times where people just were not scoring for a lot of the round. People were just like trading back and forth. Same with the Gravapult one as well. If people were paying attention and noticed when bombs were on their planet, oftentimes you would have rounds

where they ended with one or two points. Yeah. Some of the minigames are actually, I think, a little bit more well-suited to two players. And I think Gravapult and NebulaNab are really good examples of that, where I actually find it really fun. Like I said, I play that game

a lot myself. And I play a lot with my partner. And we get very competitive. And Gravapult and Nebula Neb are favorites of ours Overlord and Star Ring as well actually

Star Ring for me is the most annoying one because she always beats me in that one I really just don't understand why and I just keep you shouldn't be beating me every time I made this game I should understand what's going on.

Why are you beating me? Stop beating me. That's my problem. Yeah, so next mini-game is called Hole-in-One and I think this one's reasonably obvious. It's basically golf in space and

a lot of people have likened it to Angry Birds space and I lot of people have likened it to um angry birds space and i think that's a reasonably good um comparison although we don't deal with knocking down objects at all it really is just about um getting your little tiny golf ball what's on a tiny golf ball to getting your little tiny golf ball, sort of tiny golf ball to reasonably big golf ball, actually into the flag or close to the flag. Yeah.

So I think I had always wanted to have a mode where you just get to stand still as a character and try to just play around with orbiting mechanics, shoot a shot that kind of goes, you know, around one planet and back another, or you might decide to kind of shoot at full power and ricochet off something or, yeah, what have you. Yeah, that's one of the... Did you get a... I did play this.

I played it a couple of times, actually. This is one of the... I think it's a cool concept. The only problem I have with it is it's in the current form way longer than every other game so yeah because i how does the timer actually work with this um so my understanding is it adds time to it after the hole is after you actually land in the hole yeah so now you're definitely right that's something that we're kind of trying to balance as well because a lot of the um other mini games the the goal is to get them to go

finish around 45 to 60 seconds um but golf in fact the first time we play tested it it took it was it was much longer than it is currently and because we thought oh we'll put nine holes in that's that's golf right um and the timer didn't work the way it did now so we found that it just instead of playing one round of golf, people were playing like the whole tournament, the whole little match was just golf. And so right now it's actually shorter than it was then. But to answer your question, the way that it works is you start with a timer,

like a global timer for the round. I think it is somewhere around 30 to 45 seconds. And it just runs down. And as soon as anyone scores, puts a hole, a ball in the hole, then the timer pauses and then everyone else gets a last, like a final shot, like a last chance to score a hole as well. So it was kind of like a fairness thing, I suppose. Like it's in my mind,

I like to try to keep the game somewhat casual, I suppose. So it's kind of like, yeah, the last shot. It also, I think the mechanic lends itself to some really dramatic and fun moments. If someone just happens to be able to get this last shot in, it's quite a nice piece of drama. Everyone's watching and waiting. So as soon as that moment finishes, then some amount of time is added to the clock because as a reward for finishing a hole so you might be playing the first hole you start with 45 seconds and then you you've got 20 seconds left

on the clock you finish the first hole move on to the next hole and then it gives you like 10 seconds to the clock or 15 seconds to the clock and so you're constantly kind of depleting your clock, but it gets it back depending on how well everyone is doing. So we did it that way, hopefully, so that if people aren't that great at golf, then the timer will just go down and they'll finish the round. But if they are good at golf, then it'll keep going up until the maximum of six holes

that we have in there. And then it kind of forces a draw situation. But yeah, it's a good point. And again, something that we will continue to play test and figure out the duration of. I guess Event Horizon can also go a really long time as well but uh just because if people are really good at the movement like you can get to the point where there were a couple of rounds we had like three quarters of the screen was the black hole and i

was like when is this going to end um but the one of the things uh that mentioned when I was talking to him about it is the idea of stopping golf when there is a clear winner, when you're at a point where another person is not able to get enough points to take over. Yeah. Yeah, we talked about that, actually. And it's still on the table. Yeah, we talked about that, actually. And it's still on the table. My position on it at the moment is kind of, like I said, leaning towards, I guess, casual gaming.

Well, it's very much a balance. Those are my two kind of big design goals, is to make the game casual and fun, but also have this kind of gap for competitive play. Because I think, you know, there are, you know, groups of friends, people that have known each other quite long who have come to playtesting events and played it and really gotten into it. And I love that. But I also love seeing like little kids playing with their parents and being able to pick

up the game. So trying to capture both of those audiences is my goal. And I guess I want to lean towards just allowing the gameplay to happen. And the fact that there are just more holes in the mini golf game is why I just want to let it play out. I've seen heaps of play sessions in which there are just kids that they have no idea what the score is. They don't even care.

They're enjoying the feeling like they're in the game, feeling the gravity running around each moment, I guess. They're just enjoying moment to moment. And so I just wanted to create, yeah, allow the moments to evolve and happen happen naturally i guess if you're not set on it one way or another you could just default to playing all the rounds but have like some settings that you can configure when you actually set up the game like because i'm correct me if i'm wrong but you can choose for certain games to not be in the pool yeah that's right um it's a it's a good idea

actually um and we're planning on redesigning that this a little bit but like you said at the moment when you set up the game you choose your characters and then you go to a screen where you can toggle all of the mini games on and off depending on which ones you want to play and that will decide which get which get randomly selected in the pool so you could just decide to toggle everything off except for one game and just play game after game of um you know comic collect or whatever that um but yeah we're going to yeah modify that that flow a little bit so we're going to have a few different types of kind of game modes we're going to have what will be called a party cup which is what is currently in the game where you can um the default will just be all the mini games but you can choose

to customize them like we just described then we'll also just have a single kind of galaxy game in which the flow is more about choosing a single one and then choosing a number of rounds. Because we figure that people will kind of decide to either just have a party or maybe they want to play something very specific, like they have one in mind or maybe they're, you know, I've found or at least i've seen with playtesting if people get very competitive over specific games like why like just like i said why does my girlfriend always beat me in this one game and i just i

just want to get better and i just want to beat her like at this one mini game so so you think like a mario kart for example where you'd be like, I want to do a tournament or I want to spam Rainbow Road. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so that's how that redesign is going to happen very soon. Yeah, where are we up to? Berry Barrage is the next one.

And I don't think these were in the Avacom build or at least I don't think I played them. Yeah, these are the last four, which are pretty much in development at the moment. So they're all getting very close. I think Bumper Stars might have been in there. Did you play a minigame where you were orbiting around a big star or sun? And it's kind of like sumo wrestling.

All the characters are just flying in space in orbit. And they basically have a little dash ability. And they can choose to dash into other players and knock them out of orbit. Almost in like a ring of Saturn. I don't think I've played that, no. Okay. All right, cool. So we didn't have that in the build,

but that's very close to being completely finished, and it's feeling very fun, in my opinion. So I'll go backwards. Let's go back to Berry Barrage. So I'll go backwards. Let's go back to Barry Barrage. Barry Barrage is a minigame which is somewhat similar to Event Horizon. So you have lives and the camera is static

and the goal is to stay on the screen in a similar way to Event Horizon. But the difference is that there's kind of like a treadmill underneath your feet. So you have this kind of spinning treadmill at the bottom of the screen, and it's kind of spinning one way, it speeds up, it slows down, it spins the other way, it moves up, it moves down,

and you're trying to stay on it. And at the same time, we have these planets orbiting overhead, and we also have berries, these kind of space berries raining down from the sky. So this one has been actually quite a tricky one to playtest and balance. It's gone through a lot of iteration. I think we're getting pretty close to having it playable,

but it's difficult to balance the chaos to get those numbers right to see how many berries should rain down from the sky how quickly should they the spawn rate of them and then the maximum spawn rate all that kind of stuff I'm guessing the berries

are like a point system for that round? No the point system is just going to be lives. So the berries, we actually designed a lot more berries initially than we will have in the final version because we thought, well, the idea was that thematically these berries would do different things. In the end, after playtesting, we kind we decided that

one of the berries was just more fun than the others, but we're going to still have two of them. The main berry is called a bounce berry, and it's basically a jelly type berry. This berry falls from the sky. If you happen to hit it

while you're in the sky, you happen to hit it while like get hit by it while you're in the in the sky you'll get trapped in jelly um and you still kind of move you can still maneuver in the air but a little bit slower when you hit the surface if when you hit any surface you'll just bounce straight off because you're you're kind of stuck in this jelly state um and you have kind of it's kind of like being stuck in ice, but you're bouncy. And then once you hit, I think, three, you hit the ground three times, then you shed your jelly, and then you can move around properly.

It can get very chaotic when you're just bouncing around all over the place. If these little berries happen to land on the surface, then they'll spawn a little bouncy like jelly pad and that's just another obstacle that you have to avoid and if you land on it you just get bounced around the screen. So we have those and we have bomb berries as well which just come up less often but they're just a little bit more of a kind of 10% of the time golden snitch type vibe, where if you hit one,

you would really get blasted off into space. Right, right. Okay. Okay. So it's pretty hard to describe minigames when you haven't played it, but I guess you'll just have to wait and see. Judging by what the next one looks like,

that seems easier to explain? Yes, hopefully. So, Hollow Planet, actually, we might change that title soon, but it revolves around a dragon in the center of the screen who is shooting fireballs at you. Well, the mechanic that you see on screen is similar.

So there are a few things going on. So the icon that you see is one of our characters falling off a platform. So what happens is that if you just jump on one of these platforms, so we just have the scene is set up so that there's a central star, which is kind of made out of magma and lava, and there's a dragon in the middle, and there's a whole bunch of platforms surrounding the whole thing.

As soon as you, as the character, lands on a platform, the platform will start falling away and dying, and it's about to be destroyed. Very similar to a mechanic in a lot of Mario games, Super Mario Odyssey. Yeah, so it just turns orange, and then it starts to kind of fall and destroy destroy and then it kind of explodes after three seconds. So you're constantly trying to just jump around and not die, not fall into the center planet.

At the same time as all this is happening, there's a bullet storm occurring, which is being produced by the dragon. So the dragon in the middle is shooting out fireballs all over the place on the screen. So you're kind of having to juggle not dying from falling platforms and also avoiding fireballs. So that's that minigame. Okay, that makes sense.

Is there a live system in that one as well? Or how do you like win that one? Yeah, also live system. Okay. So people in our little internal playtesting, we found that people are just trying to kind of shoot each other off the screen at the same time. There's quite a bit going on.

So that's another thing we're trying to balance as we playtest, is making it easy enough to find your friends and then shoot them up into space, because that's definitely something we want to encourage. I touched on bumper stars briefly. I would say it's essentially you are flying through space but you're in orbit around a planet so you're not running around on the surface of planets you're just kind of floating in the orbit of this kind of star and you can move the joystick to kind of really gently move

the player's position on the screen but but you also have a dash mechanic, which you can power up with a little power bar, aim where you want to dash, and then go off in a certain direction. So it feels a little bit like a billiards or a pool game, but the balls

that you're trying to hit are the other players, and you're trying to knock them out of orbit of the orbit that you're trying to hit are the other players and you're trying to knock them out of orbit of the orbit that you're in. And that one I think is quite intuitive and easy to understand and quite fun, I think. The dash system only exists in that mode, yes? Yeah, it does.

And like I said, because it feels very different, you're not running around and jumping on the ground. There is no real gravity, I suppose, apart from the gravity that is holding you in orbit around the whole planet. So yeah, just like mini-golf is a very different system and feel from the rest of the game, Bumper Stars is similar.

It's a different kind of player mechanic or controller. And yeah, the last minigame, also subject to change the name. Currently, we're calling it Big Mouth. You can see the little icon there. It's kind of like, I think we've called it a void imp before, but it's kind of like a black hole-based creature or a creature that is just sucking in everything. We wanted to design an asymmetric,

more similar to Overload, but even more kind of asymmetric minigame where one player gets the feeling of a lot of power while the other players are kind of almost playing them as a boss so this is almost like the boss stage um so the this big mouth character is kind of like a vehicle um so i think at the beginning of the game, all the characters will try to race in to be the first person in the big mouth, in the big vehicle, the boss character.

Once you're there, you can move around the stage just by pushing the joystick, and then you can just suck pretty much everything in and just eat it. So you can eat planets, so you can eat planets and you can eat players and the way you score points in this mode I believe we'll have two ways to score points you can score points by being the big mouth by being the boss character and then eating other players every player you eat you score a

point or you can score a point by being one of the other players and we're going to have the bombs that we have in gravapult all over the place and you can collect one and then throw it into the big mouth's mouth while it's trying to eat you and if you do that you'll do damage to the big mouth and then if you do two hit points of damage, you'll knock a player out of the boss, opening it up for another player to jump in. Ah, okay. Okay, so it sort of encourages players to, I guess,

work together initially to get... Fight initially to get a big mouth, and then when someone has it, work together to get them initially to get a big mouth and then when someone has it work together to get them out of it and then all of a sudden break the team up and get in there straight away yep exactly

all of that what you just said is theoretically would be great but I'm sure it will be much more chaotic in practice I would love for people to be able to strategize but we'll see how it plays we haven't playtested it

a huge amount yet I think we've done like two internal playtests so it's still pretty early but I'm pretty excited about this one, I think it's going to be quite fun and silly so yeah that's all 12 I'm pretty excited about this one. I think it's going to be quite fun and silly. So yeah, that's all 12.

Awesome. Let's just fix up the overlay. Okay, that's not as bad as I thought it would be. I'll just stop recording for a moment and we'll fix that now. Okay, so at this stage, you currently have 12 different game modes, if I counted correctly. Yep, 12 different Galaxy games. What is the plan initially for release?

How many do you want to have? Because obviously you have ideas that are a work in progress now. Do you have other things that you haven't started on? Or are there things that you want to do, but it's just like, I have to release a game one day and I would like to do all these other things, but time. Yep.

Great question. So we're releasing with 12 minigames. That's the plan. That's the number. And so it's very exciting that we're getting close to finishing them all. It's been a huge milestone to have started them all. And they are now all playable. So you'd have no idea how exciting that is for me.

So apart from that, we're also going, we've also started working on a little bit of a single player experience, which is just going to be kind of like a little challenge or trial mode. So each character is going to be able to go on a little adventure. And within an adventure, there'll be six challenges. And a challenge will consist of a few checkpoints and such. But they're essentially just one screen where you have to complete a few tasks.

And each adventure and each character will be tied to a specific minigame and the mechanics that go with that. will be tied to a specific mini game and the mechanics that go with that. So the first adventure that we're going to have, for example, is Sprout playing golf. So there'll be just a bunch of kind of single player levels where you just have to complete all of the golf courses as fast as you can. And so there's going to be a timer at the top of the screen running down. The faster you can do it, the higher the accolade that you'll get. So it'll be like a gold, silver, bronze system.

And so our plan is that we'd like to release content for possibly probably three of the seven characters on release and then update the game after we release with more content um just because of time restrictions and also we'd love to um uh dedicate our development time to a few other little features here and there so yeah that's the plan with that so like i said there's gonna be party mode oh sorry i was gonna say um why add the uh the single player content because you know the obviously the focus is that like you know multiplayer co-op like what why what would encourage you to add that content as well yeah um it's been it's been basically the response from play testers

we've been trying to get the game out to a few influencers um giving the steam key out at taking into play testing events and we've talked to a lot of people and the response we've been getting is that you know people really they they enjoy in, obviously, the party game vibe. So a few important pieces of feedback are, like, they essentially all revolve around the theme of how am I going to play this if I don't have friends at my place? If I don't have friends, how will I play it? Yeah, that's one way to say it

if I don't have friends then yes then the single player experience is kind of what solves that so we've received the feedback will you have any single player content a few times so that's basically what we want to do with that is just kind of have like and it's like

the asterisk is that it's it's a very it'll be a very small experience like the core experience of our game is multiplayer party game so it's essentially a way to practice on your own i suppose just on the side and the other avenue for that kind of question is how do i play i don't have friends locally or maybe friends in the same country, which I think is a lot of gamers. A lot of gamers have friends who are mostly online friends who they've never necessarily met in person. So solving that kind of problem is where we would love to implement online multiplayer. So in the, and that wouldn't be very deep initially. So we're not going to have matchmaking.

It's just going to be connecting with friends or having like a friend code. And we're still, to be honest, trying to figure out how we're still, to be honest, trying to figure out how we're going to do that within the time and within our budget. So it's actually something that we really, really want to implement, but it's still not completely confirmed. And so, yeah, single player, online multiplayer, that's kind of the next thing.

Those are the next priorities for us and what we're focusing on. I know that one of the things Alex brought up was people have suggested like, oh, can we do like a PC, like play like enemy characters? Like, oh, can we have like NPCs who are like we battle against

instead of, you know, actual people? And obviously doing that would add a lot more complexity and having that work well in each of the modes and feel fair. It would be cool, but again, you want to release a game eventually. Yeah, you're saying all the right things. That's exactly right. Yeah, we'd love to add some bots as well. But the nature of the game, I guess,

like you're implying and like you're saying, is the fact that it's lots of mini games means that adding bots is actually maybe a lot harder than one might expect just because of the breadth of work. Like you have to design a bot. Say it's a simplistic bot because we're not going to develop crazy AI systems, obviously. You just want it to be able to navigate a system

and be competitive in a game. And it has to be reasonably specific for a game mode or a mini game so we'd have to kind of you know design a base system of a bot and then basically um customize it to every mini game which is almost like doing the work of creating a mini game 12 times again um so that's something that i kind of i i decided pretty early to maybe just avoid that just because of that problem and kind of lean towards online in my mom in my mind it's it's been we either do bots or we do online um and i think i i think people would and i think i i think people would my i guess assumption was that people would prefer online than bots if they had to make that choice yeah so with some of the modes having bots

you would need to intentionally program them to be stupid because with some of the modes like if you have it in like event horizon you could very easily create a bot that just follows a pathing algorithm and never loses. Or instantly knocks someone back if you get in range. And same with the bomb one. Overload, where you are the bomb. Overload, where you are the bomb You could very easily have it where they Chase down the second And will take the shortest optimal path

Or in hole in one Where they know exactly where the hole is And just make the perfect shot on the first try So you would need to intentionally make the bot stupid So it actually feels fun to play against Yeah, that would be another difficulty For sure Because part of the

the which way up world is kind of trying to understand how to navigate gravity and I think that it's very, well it's not very, but it's not intuitive for our human brains to understand these systems and actually people have asked me or suggested you know why don't you have some sort of visual which can kind of visually show you where gravity is. And I've always shied away from it because I like the idea of people creating this feeling, this intuition, this generated response of how gravity feels and how it works rather than

seeing it and it being kind of obvious. I think after you've done a couple of rounds, you get a general feel for it. Like it's, I can understand that on like your first, maybe like run or two, but I feel like after me and a couple of friends had played it like three or four times,

one of my friends was getting too good at it. So Alex handed him the switch controller and was like, you can play on this one now. was getting too good at it so alex handed him the switch controller and was like you can play on this one now because he had like it was just usually me and him and then some other random people so he was like and a lot of the time um we ended up explaining how a lot of the modes work to people who were coming along as well because we played it by that point like three or four times um so he was like just be stop it don't be mean to the new people let them let them have fun with the game as well yeah that's funny that that is a tricky part and that's an experience that i can relate to as well

having played it so much um yeah exactly i can't really remember how we got there but we went on a little tangent. What was your question? I don't know. We talked for 50 minutes about the game modes you had. I think I was talking about, you mentioned the visual feedback on gravity.

Yeah. I don't think that's necessary. I think... As long as the gravity feels consistent and it works as you'd expect between the different rounds I don't really think that's necessary at all like you just, you play it

you get used to it, yes you have no idea what you're doing and yes you're going to have that friend like you know you'll have that friend who plays Smash by themselves or plays Tekken by themselves who you're like, why are you too good at this game? But amongst people who are not

doing that I think you can get a feel pretty quickly and you can even against someone who has been playing a bit you can score a couple of points here and there and it does you can pretty much get up to speed relatively quickly. it doesn't

take that much effort if you've played games before and you understand like how the gravity system works like it's it's not too difficult i maybe feel like the real young ones it could be a bit difficult to get used to um but i don't think any amount of visual indication for someone like that is gonna be super useful anyway because they would get it more by feel. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think there's already so much going on visually that to add even more would just be overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do remember what we were talking about.

The reason we got here is because you asked about bots being able to cheat too much. And you're right. It would be if we designed the bots well, I guess we would be allowing the bots to predict all the different ways in which they could jump, platform, or shoot a golf ball in various arcs, and it would be way too obvious to them.

They wouldn't need to create this intuitive feel and try to platform their way through space because they can kind of just predict and that's yeah definitely part of the problem of designing bots like how do you design a bot to be stupid so that is a whole interesting thing and and and that is to say creating and designing and developing npcs and bots and games is a huge task so and it's definitely something that you can take for granted as a gamer i think yeah and it's it's very obvious when a game has the most minimal possible like um bots they can design like you'll play a lot of a lot of games like a lot of action games and you notice how they do the pathing and it's just shortest route

so you step up a ledge and they just start walking at the ledge because they don't know that they can walk around it things like that yeah totally and i can see myself doing things like that because sometimes you just need to get things working so it's fair so how many um characters are there at this point um we've got seven characters in the game um they're all people ask this question a lot so they they don't't differ functionally. It's just an aesthetic thing. We'd love to put a couple more characters in, maybe on an update after we release, or maybe in a DLC.

So we have a few more kind of in the queue ideas, space-related celestials. But yeah, at the moment moment we just have the seven i don't we're all seven in the avcon demo because i don't remember the guy with the the pyramid head um yeah pyramid head or prism is in there um i think they are in we don't have two of the characters in the demo which are I believe Sunny and Luna the sun and the moon

but everything else all the other characters are available we recently actually decided to kind of change the design of one of the characters so there's one character is named orbit and they're a character that have a few little kind of moons orbiting around their head right now uh the second one on the steam page um i think so so you might notice that they're

kind of like a chocolatey color. Yeah, yeah, okay, that's what I mean, yeah. I just, I wanted, well, we had stickers. They're not the stickers that I showed you earlier. This is a relatively new holo sticker, but we had like smaller separate stickers for all the characters, each individual one, and we would take it to playtesting events. Unfortunately, we just found that people weren't really

going for orbit. I just had too many left over. And one of the problems that we have with the game is the design of the character colors and spreading them out as much as possible so that you don't um two characters aren't too close right in color so we kind of had a bit of a design phase where we we spread the colors out a little bit more so sprout actually became a little bit more lime and um orbit became teal so we're in the process of updating that in a few of the little pages but I

think it's a it's a nice change and Orbit is now a little bit more vibrant and they kind of they complement a lot of the other characters now. I really enjoy it's like my design mind enjoys different character combinations like the star Stark and Or but playing at the same time the teal and the kind of pink colors go really nice nicely together that's quite fun maybe it's a tough question and I doubt you're gonna have a good answer for it but do you have a favorite of the characters um now that there are there that is a tough question I could I could probably of the characters?

That is a tough question. I could probably just speak to everyone's favorite. Everyone seems to really love Sprout and so I have a soft spot for Sprout as well. But if I tried not to do that, I think I really like Prism.

Prism is kind of like a little pyramid head, like astronaut. And they're just a little bit weird and crazy, is how I kind of imagine their personality. And that's certainly how we're developing it. So like in the single player campaign, we've actually got someone who's writing some backstory on a universe and building a world so that we can have dialogue during the single player adventure.

And so we've kind of fleshed out their personalities, which is a lot of fun, a fun process to be able to do. That's interesting because I wasn't expecting there to be any sort of world building and lore in a game like this. I kind of expected it to just be a fun little party game. Yeah, and it

really is, but it's just kind of like when you're trying to flesh things out, even a little bit, you can go too deep. It's kind of fun to be able to do that because if you want any kind of story, you need some sort of turmoil, you need some sort of challenge

and then you question why are these characters going through this challenge? What motivates them? Before you know it, it's too deep for the type of game that it is. Yeah.

But I think it's always good to have more backstory than less. Right, right. Even if it's a very simplistic narrative. So how many people do you have working on the game? The team kind of varies depending on the phase of development. At the moment, I think we've got maybe five to seven people working on it at the same time, and they're all different. They work in different ways.

Some are working once a week, thereabouts. Other people a little bit more often, four or five days a week, especially ramping up to release at the beginning of next year, working on it a lot more than we have in the past. So yeah, it's been a really fun process to work with so many talented people. Initially, as I started the game, just prototyping it, it's really changed the way that we've designed the game.

And like I said, I've had to change the way that I think about it. It's no longer, I guess, my game. It's the team's game. And a lot of the decisions are made by all of us now. So for me, that's been a really fun and interesting process, which I've really enjoyed. So what does the mixture of skill sets look like with the team? Like, what do you guys have?

So, yeah, we started with, at the beginning, a concept artist. And that has kind of turned into the lead artist and they just kind of um they do every a lot of things that are related to visual design um ui ux but we do a lot of that together. So I'm really interested in UI and UX and it's a very collaborative design process with that. But they do pretty much what I do, all the character design, all of the concept art and anything that looks pretty will be, we can credit them.

So that's Sydney. Sydney Liao is our concept artist. And then we have a 3D artist, Adam, and he's been around since very early as well. He'll do the 3D modeling and animation

where we need it. And then along the way, we've got a few other... a couple of programmers, a game designer who's kind of like consulting. He is the one who's once a week at the moment. It's very useful to be able to kind of bounce ideas back and forth from a game design perspective.

And everyone does as well of course um and we've also got um so our composer and sound designer is someone called memo demo um who you can find online they do amazing work and I kind of just I was recommended that this artist from a friend and I looked them up and messaged them on SoundCloud and we collaborated and working together on this and yeah I think yeah and then we also have like I said someone who's working on the narrative now so that's been quite recent and that's been a uh really cool and interesting process uh to have them on board um and and yeah like you implied it's not going to be a huge world so that they're not developing something huge we're going to have little bits and pieces of dialogue um for the little single

single player campaign but it's also nice to kind of just flesh out the characters a little bit you clearly see they all have their own little personalities so I'm sure that'll add a little like a little bit of fun to it as well and I don't know if you maybe want to keep going

down if you want to do a second one in the future maybe you can play more around with lore then and maybe do more of that but you know as you're saying you don't want to go too far with the uh with the law of the game like this because you could yeah turn into a whole different game and like wait this was supposed to be a party game wasn wasn't it? What are we doing? Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I would love to do some sort of sequel, which would not be the same genre,

but it all depends on the success of this game. If it does well, then we'll see what happens next. But yeah, I always wanted this game to kind of be a couch co-op game where you would kind of be jumping around in space. I always loved the game Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time where you can play two to four players. I'm not sure if you can play one player, but you're two to four players and you have a vehicle in space and you're all kind of moving around in this vehicle and there are different little control panels that you can run to to be able to control various parts of the spaceship

but you can go to the helm to steer the spaceship as one of the characters or you can go to one of the turrets on the left or the right or the top or bottom or you can go to the shield it's a very fun game it's quite hard in the later levels.

So I've enjoyed that game, and I've kind of wanted to create, turn Witchway up into something similar to that experience where you're adventuring with people. Maybe it would be procedural. Maybe it would be kind of roguelike, or maybe it would just be a designed world in a similar style to

like Super Mario 3D World or something like that which is very simple and just about fun platforming so yeah that would be an ambitious future goal of mine I think

but we'll see. Finish one game first. That's a good plan. Actually finish the game, release it. You've got to time period you want to get it released, so don't start on something new until at least that date.

I'll try. It's hard. That's what your notes are for. just start jotting down ideas you're like okay i want to do this i'll do this oh maybe maybe we can uh maybe we can do a road that'll be cool i like the character like the characters are really cool and they're really cute characters so i'm sure you could do something expanding out the, like, the world and do some other genres with it, um, but, yeah, at least for now, like, what you have is, um, super, super clean, like, I, I think the art's really cool, I think the movement is really nice, like, when I played the game at Avcon, it was probably, it probably, it felt like probably the most polished game that was there,

It felt like probably the most polished game that was there. There were a couple others that were really, really good as well. But I really like games where they have a heavy focus on movement. And the movement here just feels fun. You can very easily make a system like this where it feels kind of wonky, where you don't really have control over the character. And it feels like that the first time, but once you get a feel for how the gravity system works,

like, it works really well. I'm sure because there's been a lot of work on it and a lot of playtests it beforehand to get to this point I'm sure when it was first uh first being played around with it was nowhere near as uh as comfortable to play yeah well I appreciate hearing that and you're right it was um that was kind of like when I uh I was working on the prototype that was the the most difficult challenge and basically i told myself if if i couldn't get the um feel right of the controls or the player controller then this isn't a game worth pursuing any further um and it was really yeah i i did a bunch of experience experiments about like the control system about you know if you if you're on the top of a planet

was my little um example planet uh if you're on the top of a planet was my little um example planet uh if you're on the top of a planet and then you start running to the left what happens like when you're at the bottom what does left mean on the joystick now do i keep running that way or is it supposed to swap or you know all those kinds of problems and or you could also ask if i'm holding left sure it stays the same you keep going that way but what if i let go of the joystick on the bottom and now at the bottom what does left on the joystick mean does it mean what it meant before do i go that way or does it now mean that way and so i i i ended up concluding that like left and right in terms of relative to the gravity it shouldn't really matter it's more about what is

uh i guess intuitive to our human brains which is just the direction you're going so i think i was inspired by the way that vehicles work on halo where you just kind of point your joystick in the direction you want to go and then the car just looks it magically just goes where you want it to go and it looks really cool the way that the car drifts and and kind of turns around so that's essentially how the system works and it does actually take a while for some people to pick it up um because it's just not something that they've encountered um before and i think that's a hopefully that's a good thing. It's like a double-edged sword, you know?

It's like we try to design things a lot of the time that people, players have seen before so they can pick things up a lot easily. So, you know, that's why we make first-person shooters again and again and again. People understand how to play them. But they're not necessarily that new or unique unique or innovative um so yeah i appreciate hearing that and it's been fun to watch people pick things up

um yeah so what is your personal background like have you done any game development stuff in the past even it was just like personal little projects that never got released or is this like the first proper game project you're doing um i guess the first proper thing that i've done is um it was just a solo project basically and it's a little puzzle game called ashy lake of light um and it's what it is is it was a little mobile title it's also out on steam and it's just a series of levels in which you help guide a little firefly to fly around some lanterns that are floating on a lake and get them to a kind of end goal position. And so how bright the lantern is determines how much the firefly

will rotate around the lantern. So that was a puzzle game that I made that I released, and I worked on it for probably, I can't remember, probably would have been two years, quite a while. That was my probably first serious foray into releasing a game. And before that, I've done a bunch of prototypes, experiments, and game jams with friends. And I mentioned a really great friend of mine earlier who made the game Boomerang Fu. So I also did a bunch of level designs in Boomerang Fu.

So maybe half or close to half of the initial release of Boomerang Fu, I did the level designs for those levels. I did the level designs for those levels. Yeah, my experience has been just kind of growing who I was as a game developer through the Sydney game dev community. We have this event called Beer and Pixels, which I have attended for a number of years and met a bunch of friends and colleagues there. And it's been just always fun to take a game there

and see people play it and play other people's games. And I've kind of learnt what it is to make games. And there's no one way to make a game, obviously. Everyone has different paths and different goals and different things that they... different sensibilities. So, I don't know, I think the games that I want to make are probably also inspired by my background before that, which is I'm more of a mobile developer and designer.

So I started out, just out of uni, I made this app called Lost on Campus. So I started out just out of uni. I made this app called Lost on Campus. And it's an app to help people find their way around university. So you can kind of sign in and sign up. No, I know this app. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. A few people randomly will know it who got lost on campus in Australia and then came across the app. I met with this company called Student Services Australia and we kind of did it together design-wise. But yeah, you essentially search for the place you want to go and it will help you get there, hopefully. That was one of the first big projects I did as a mobile developer.

I did a few other projects along the way and then I found myself at the Creative Lab at Google, like I mentioned, in Sydney. I was there for two years and I did a bunch of augmented reality and AI experiments so it was very much about prototyping and creating things and thinking about new ways to use technology and how to make things intuitive and all that kind of thing

so I'm very much someone who my background is programming but also design and trying to bring those two things together um so yeah that's kind of like a little bit of a story when you mentioned lost on campus like i i didn't use it in like my my later years my first year at um university of south australia like i was i constantly had that app open trying to find where anything was nice that's cool i didn't know that myself but a bunch of friends who told me about it like hey download that like ah yes thank you Thank you. That's awesome. That's fun. That's a blast from the past for me. I kind of, I had made an app when, you know, the iPhone came out.

This is going to show my age here, I guess. I'm not that old. When the iPhone first came out, it was like, you know, an exciting thing for developers and programmers. Oh, you can make your own apps so i kind of got excited to try to not only make an app for the iphone but learn how to program i guess that was one of the ways in which i taught myself programming is by like making this app and one of the cool things that the iphone could was show your location on a map it had it had GPS built

into it that was you know groundbreaking that was amazing so I was like yeah I just started uni and I basically I was a first year and I had that problem I was like I don't know where anything is and so those two moments aligned and I made this little app just for you the university of new south wales where i went and um then another i put that on the app store and then yeah this company saw that i had released that and then we made lost on campus um yeah that's funny that's really cool actually like yeah i'm sure it's weird when people mention that they have used that then it's like you just it's something you worked how many how long ago was that because you mentioned like when the iphone was coming out so

yeah yeah i mean probably 2018 ish oh okay so it was okay it was quite a bit after the iphone originally came out then. Okay. So you're not aging yourself that much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. I was like, wait, you're looking really good for having been in uni in 2007. I can't really remember

how long it had been out, but it was exciting enough for me. Sure. Yeah. Not aging myself that much. for me. Sure. Like, yeah. Yeah, not aging myself that much. I agree. Yeah. That's really cool.

So what did you study at uni then? Is it at all related to what you're doing now or is it like one of those degrees where you have it and you're like, yeah, it's kind of a degree I have? Yeah. Well, it was a bit of an unusual one so i did actually study programming so i did i did computer science i did a double degree it was computer science and digital media um and it's a degree that isn't well as far as i know it's not really offered

anymore and it wasn't offered for long um because was a bit unusual. You kind of had to have a programming brain, but also be interested in design. So UNSW, I would go to one campus, which was a shuttle bus away. One campus would have photography classes, video editing classes. We would do art theory, 3D modeling and animation, sound or music composition. That would be like half of my degree. And then the other half I would go to the main campus and do computer science related subjects like networking and computer graphics and just like object oriented programming and things like that and so and so I didn't completely teach myself programming with you know making an

iPhone app but you know there are so many ways to learn coding, obviously, so not all of them are necessarily super practical or will let you do the things that you might want to do. It's very different to learn creating an app for anhone than it is to write a python script to um you know trade shares automatically or whatever yeah i i found that i learned a lot more just doing a project than i did usually an entire semester of uni it's like okay you it it's good for an entire semester of uni it's like okay you it it's good for getting some of that more like technical mathematical background stuff sure but when it comes to like learning how to build some software like you're going to learn so much more by just sitting down and actually making some

practical project whether that be that be a game or a lot of people um one way they'll learn a new language is build like an http server and doing that you will learn so much more than listening to someone talk for two hours a week yeah i completely agree and that's that's always been the way that i've done things is that i just get excited about an idea and it's kind of like the thing that motivates you is wanting to finish it or wanting to see that result and part of the satisfaction for me has always been like showing it to people and seeing them actually use something in the way that I want them to or even use it in an unexpected but still positive way, and also getting over the pain points of usability, which is such a huge part of this industry, I guess, when you're learning and you're starting out.

If you want to even be involved in that, a lot of programmers will never see that, I suppose, because they might just be working on the back end, or they don't really care about UI, but I've always been interested in the whole thing. And I think as a game designer, if you want to be on top of the hierarchy in terms of developing the whole game, it's pretty important to

have a decent understanding of all of the systems and your user and your player and how they're interacting with things. So That includes UI and user experience and also all of the game design things like narrative and the mechanics and sound and everything. It's huge. Game development is hard

and encompasses a lot of different aspects but it's very fun and satisfying especially um it encompasses a lot especially if you're someone who is not good at handling uh scope creep if you're someone who's like oh shiny thing oh shiny thing oh and you end up having this game where it's like a mishmash of systems and you're like this is cool i've done a lot of cool things here but none of it really feels like polished um and i get it right like you just want to make the cool new thing and you're like i have an idea i want to implement it and i get it right like it totally makes sense but again you have to release something eventually. We've fallen into that trap many times, and I have personally.

That's one of the biggest learning experiences I think. It's constant. Even if I think I've gotten better at that, I'll do it still. It's so hard to not get excited about stuff and just add it to the list. But you seem to kind of talk about it uh as though you've got quite a bit of personal experience like you've mentioned that theme yourself um i i have done i've done a bit of development work in the past um doing some um web development stuff

and uh especially in that case, because it was sort of my first experience working for a client, I let my ideas run a bit wild. Plus, I talk a lot about open source projects involved in the Linux world. And there is a lot of people who like making really cool projects and especially

with um with open source stuff because it's primarily done as volunteer work it's like passion driven a lot of people have a lot of ideas is the best way to put it they have a lot of ideas and not a lot of free time. Yeah, I understand completely. I did a game project one time just for myself, I think, in an engine that's a game engine that's open source called Cocos 2D. In fact, I used Cocos 2DX, which was, I think, Cocos 2D. I can't remember exactly which language it was done in first but someone

or a team of people open source people had ported it to C++ which meant it could yeah so it meant it well Cocos2DX I think is C++ oh

Cocos2D on its own might have been something else or I can't remember Oh wait 2D is Python then there's an Objective C version and then 2DX is C++ Yeah so I kind of

yeah I went into the 2DX version and I think I was interested in getting it to work on the iPhone and on Android. So I liked the fact that it was cross-platform, and you could have one code base, and it was quite performant. But yeah, like you said, the open source community and the management of that just made things, I guess. It's a different experience to using a gaming

engine that's been developed by a larger team or company that has the resources and management capabilities to kind of organize things a little bit better. It's a really cool project. I really like Cocoa Studio X, but I found it very hard to navigate the documentation. You run into an issue, it's very particular. You'll just have to post something to a forum. Some people will help you sometimes. Maybe people will never respond to you. So it's like, well, I just need to do this thing. I don't know how to do it.

And so, yeah, it can be tricky. Yeah, I guess that's why a lot of people just tend to gravitate towards Unity or towards Unreal, because basically anything that you want to know, especially Unity, like, there's going to be some YouTube tutorial video on it. Like, same with, like, Blender. Like, people have done a lot of videos on this software. You can find that information pretty quickly. And if there isn't a video, there are really big communities around it and you can usually find someone who who's already asked

the question or somebody who knows the answer and right now there is at least like there is a developing community around the godot engine especially after there was the whole drama with like unity changing their like runtime license fees a lot of people freaked out and it started building up more people trying that out so there's a lot more resources around godot right now but it's obviously nowhere near the level that unity has and like it probably won't ever be just because Unity has so much... There's so many people who can't leave it because they build up so much tooling around it and it's just got such a big head start around it.

But I'm at least seeing people giving it a shot and seeing if they can build stuff with it. And it's gotten a lot better over the past couple of years. Yeah, definitely. I have been tracking that as well and it's certainly something that's on my radar and i'd love to experiment with but i think the busier you get the harder it is to kind of change tools as well like you mentioned um not only just like in general if you're just someone who's practicing and you have a little bit of experience but if you're trying to

say i don't know if you have a full-, but if you're trying to, say, I don't know, if you have a full-time job, if you're trying to run a company or something, it's such a huge, I guess, cost, time, money-wise to kind of just change a tool completely. And it's similar for Unreal. I'd love to learn Unreal and just kind of understand it a bit better

so that i can really know the differences and and pros and cons between unity and unreal um but again you just that's like a month of your life figuring that up so and and even unity i don't really know how to use all the features and tools within unity so they're huge beasts and they're amazing. Yeah, it's great that software like this is available. And because there was a point where having easy access to a game engine, at least a game engine of the quality of Unity

or the quality of Unreal just wasn't really the case. Like there's always been, at least for a long time, there's been things like RPG Maker and Game Maker and other things like that, but it's only like maybe in the... I don't know when Unity first came out, but let's see... Unity... 2005. So it's only been since 2005 since Unity's been around. I'm sure it was not a great engine back then, but before that, like, if you wanted only been since 2005, since Unity's been around, I'm sure it was not a great engine back then, um, but before that, like, if you wanted to build a game, like, the tooling that was available was a lot, a lot more limited, and you were basically gonna have to either learn how

to write a game engine, be working at a company, or use one of the far more limited engines that were out there. And people did it. There are great games people wrote back then, but there's a reason why the indie game scene is a lot bigger now than it ever could have possibly been back then. Like the tooling that's available, the documentation that's available,

the resources that are available, makes doing this so much more accessible than it's ever been yeah you're totally right the landscape has changed completely and it's really interesting seeing actually um how different indie developers within the community develop their games and the different tools that they use a few friends who are amazing game developers, they've just been able to get really good at using specific game engines. There are some game developer friends

who are just amazing at GameMaker. I think it's one of those tools that maybe you can get incredibly good and fast at using these indies that they can create pixel art really quickly and they know how to use GameMaker to make very

like exactly what they need to make because they have it in their head and they can like pump it out in a few months and for me it's very humbling because I have no idea how they can do it so quickly to be honest i can't make anything that quick um but yeah i think if you get good at a tool you can really you can really kind of optimize your workflow um and some of the lesser known ones people can get really great at and it's just funny yeah meeting people and they just love certain tools

like oh i made it in this random tool that you've never heard of and actually i helped make it or something like that so it's really cool to see that landscape and and in fact it's interesting because some tools will let you make things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to make. So in our community there are some devs that are making a game called Bits and Bops which I do believe is in Unity but the developer actually created their own plugin to be able to create this rhythm heaven game and it's a really cool game the artwork and style and music are all amazing but I believe

I went to a talk and they were saying that they just really couldn't do what they needed to do in terms of audio latency with the tools available in Unity or Fmod so the developer just had to make their own plugin and they actually I think made it available

on the Unity Asset Store afterwards as well or maybe that or they're selling it to other companies I'm not sure but just a great example of how you know specific tools will only let you do certain things and if you want to kind of create

or design a new style of game, perhaps, that's when you do have to break the mold a little bit and design from the ground up. An example I always bring up whenever this topic comes up is Noita. Have you heard of Noita? No, I haven't. Okay, so Noita is this game where it's a roguelike game where you are a wizard, you have this wand,

and you basically can build up different abilities to add into the wand. You can add them in any order. So it might be like duplicate projectile, flaming projectile, and then, I don't know, some other thing. And the order you put them in can completely change the way that the wand works. So you could build a wand that, well you test it and you just die because you didn't put things in the right order. But that's not the fun part. The fun part is they had to build a custom engine for the game because they have destructible terrain, but not normal destructible terrain.

They have this pixel art where every single pixel is a simulated physics object so yeah i actually remember the game now i just didn't connect the name i've seen it yeah it's an amazing looking game i i think i watched the gameplay and it looks like there's just so much going on. There's so much like, I don't know. And I can, I can imagine that the backend and how they built that would be quite complicated and interesting.

And, and were you saying, were you about to say, sorry for interrupting, but they, I did go on. Sorry. This delay can be a bit annoying sometimes

I pretty much said what I was going to say basically each pixel is a simulated physics object and they just could not realistically do it performance wise in anything else that existed so what did they use? They ended up building something custom for it.

Yeah, they built something custom just for specifically what they did. There's a lot of other really cool things about the game. There's a lot of different particle interaction. You sometimes come across lakes of alcohol and lakes of oxygen and just random things. It's one of those games where you will die straight away on your first run because you have- you did something- you had some fire near something that was

flammable, you didn't realize it was flammable, but the coolest part about it is the way they do their their physics simulation, but it's overall just a really cool- a really cool game. Yeah, no, that's amazing. i'll have to definitely play it now um because it's been on my radar for a while well one of the things um that we talked about before we started is you sort of had like a an interest in the whole like mac gaming and Linux gaming

thing as well. We talked about that a bit before we started recording, but if there's anything you want to say while we're actually going, yeah. Yeah, well, I don't have an incredibly deep knowledge about it, but

ever since Apple, I guess, started started I'm sure there are there were some other companies doing system on a chip so basically the the Apple silicon movement that has started a shift I think in the industry at the very least I've been interested in how that's affected gaming on mac and this whole kind of running windows games on these systems it's been cool to track so i'm pretty sure that apple kind of released this tool or a tool set which they were kind of initially aiming at game developers to say, I think it was like a porting toolkit or something

like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Evaluate how your game can run on a Mac by using these transpiling tools. Sorry, your Windows game can run on a Mac. And the tools, I think they were maybe adapted from

Wine or Crossover. I can't quite remember. Yes. But yeah, they allowed you to run your Windows game on the Mac. And a lot of the, I guess, the maybe homebrew community were getting their hands on these tools and porting games and seeing how they ran. And I think the fact that that community just kept growing,

I suspect probably Apple noticed that, and it seems to me like they're starting to, instead of making an evaluation porting tool, change their strategy a little bit, maybe just start to move it towards more of a product where people can just can just just like um um what's it called the steam deck i think proton yeah proton based on wine yeah that maybe apple will do a similar thing in the long term you know i can imagine

their app their um you know maybe their apple tvs um will run Windows games at some stage or what have you. Or iPads who knows, maybe iPads will run Windows games as well. I mean, I think these chips are powerful enough and if the transpiling process is good enough then they can

probably handle the task. It's a bit more complicated than just like what Wine's doing on Linux or Proton as well, where it's just converting those Windows calls into Linux calls, because you also have the issue of you're converting the x86 calls into ARM calls and you're converting the Windows calls

into Mac OS calls. So there's more that goes into it and it's theoretically supposed to be slower, but to my surprise, not as much as you would expect. And these tools are only getting better, and at least from the demos that I've seen of gaming on a Mac, like, I wouldn't expect it to run as well as it does, but as you said, they are, like, really powerful chips, so I don't know, like, if you make things, something that's, like,

optimized well enough, and then you can just kind of brute force it with how good these chips are, um, I don't know, you can get something that works at least well enough. Yeah, it is quite surprising to me how well they seem to be coming out. So, yeah, I'm just interested to watch the space and see what happens,

to see how Apple positions themselves, I think, because, you know, and I'm kind of curious about Steam as well because, well, it makes sense that Steam isn't really interested in the Mac. The user base is incredibly low for Mac users, but I think it is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. But I don't think Apple would necessarily want to kind of position themselves to be in league with Steam, I think they want to create their own ecosystem. They've got Apple Arcade. So it's probably going to be more

of the case of kind of dealing with game developers directly. And they've started to do it a little bit more. I think they had Kojima up on stage at one stage. I think they had Kojima up on stage at one stage. I think they got him to port

Death Stranding, I can't remember, onto the Mac. That sounds right, yeah. So, yeah, interesting space. I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy, so I'm curious to see what will happen.

I really don't think it will overtake in any way the PC gaming space, but I do think the hardware landscape is changing. When Nintendo released the Switch, that was a huge change, I think. PC gamers didn't go anywhere, obviously, but there was this huge other kind of sector audience that popped up.

And I think that kind of style of system on a chip gaming devices which are equally as good as these huge PC rigs. You know, it can't be ignored for too long. And when we have generational shifts,

you know, kids being born just using iPads and tablets and what have you, they're not going to be building PCs as much, I think. Regarding Switch, are you... And I know this will obviously add a lot more work, post-launch are you planning to do a Switch release as well or is that just not something that's really being considered right now? So we're planning to release on more platforms than Steam more platforms than steam uh but we just haven't announced that yet um that's all i'll say on the matter uh right now but we would love to to release on the switch but nothing announced yet

not not not yeah yeah because when people think party games like the main thing people think about is you know obviously like the nintendo consoles like that's yes there are party games and other things sure but like that's what most people are going to be like okay this is this this is you you buy the the the switch for a lot of party games like even if even if you're buying it to play other things like most people have at least a couple of party games that they add to their roster as well yeah yeah like i said uh i'd love to see the game on the switch um and you you can look out for an announcement to come for the more platforms that will release one but like yeah not announced yet a matter of uh again time and money and getting it done yeah porting to more platforms is yeah just just more time money testing quality assurance and it's all part of the strategy as well of like what system does your game suit most. So those are all things

that we're thinking about and figuring out if we do it before launch or after launch and all that kind of stuff. Yeah well obviously if you're developing something on you know being developed on PC the game runs on PC so it's the most obvious platform to do that first release on and just get something out there, even if it's not, like, the main platform where it would be, like, most exciting. Yeah, exactly. It's actually been interesting. We, like I said, we want online multiplayer to be in the game and it was really easy to kind of integrate with steam remote play together and I wouldn't even say we needed to integrate it was an optional thing that we tie

into an API where you can invite friends within the game but we wanted to make it a bit easier and it's been interesting to see people play and stream using that method. seeing remote play together is such an amazing feature on paper. And it sometimes works really well. That was a comma. But other times, it does not work at all,

which is really sad. So yeah, it's been a really cool thing to try out and to have there as an option. But yeah, we'd really love to have our own online system, which again, we will see if it eventuates, but we're very positive about it. Yeah, SteamWorldPlayTogether is really cool if

in... I've had cases where... Yeah. I have the exact same experience, where I've had cases where I'm like, this is great, this is awesome. And I'm like, this is cool that it exists, but let's find another game to play that maybe has

its own multiplayer that might work more consistently yeah totally and that's that's been a good learning experience as well i guess just to just see people play the game. It's almost like, was it worth people having that negative experience, I guess, because we've had some streamers who've been excited to play, get their friends in on the Steam Remote Play session, but then it doesn't work. And so that's kind of like, it almost gives a negative mark to the game in that sense. So, yeah, that's been an interesting thing to learn from.

And I will say this as well about Steam remote players. Avoid trying to use it from a Mac, I would say. Like, Steam has definitely developed the, you know, how well they do work on Mac. And me being an Apple fanboy, I do all of my dev, and I play a few games on Mac, but I've tried to kind of connect remote play to a Windows friend, I guess. And it tends to not work.

There are all sorts of hardware issues, which if you think about it makes some sort of sense, I guess, because, I don't know maybe it doesn't make sense it should work um because really one computer is just streaming the video to another computer and you're sending um hardware signals which should be kind of interpreted by steam so i don't really see why the way your hardware is kind of uh controlled maybe in code and decode issues that could affect the latency that's true i suppose but still depending on what codec they're using it might change things but for us it was more about hardware. So it might just be a kind of a testing thing on Mac.

I know that I've had heaps of problems with like going from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac and all the various hardware that is supported in terms of controllers. It's been really cool actually in the last, I can't remember, maybe three to four, five years something like that apple has started supporting um x um xbox one and playstation 5 and playstation 4 controllers so they work really well um and i have like a little mfi controller as well um that apple supports with their own protocols but um yeah we just find windows to windows with remote play together is the way to go that's the highest likelihood for working not that there'll be many users who use mac anyway

i don't know have you tried using using remote play together on Linux much? Um A little bit Uh Yeah To be fair It's been kind of like worst case scenario Like trying it across continents

So maybe it could be better if I didn't do that Um But Yeah my experience in a lot of cases has not been super great. That was Linux to Linux. But maybe it would be better if I didn't try across continents and I did a much less latency intensive situation. I think it's really cool that it is there though. On the cases where it does work well, it works

pretty well. Yeah, no. I am a big fan of the feature and I just hope that they continue to develop it, test it, get feedback. And like I said, the game can work quite well. Especially if you're in the same geographic

location or region I've been surprised at how low the latency can be in which way up while playing with remote play together so it's really exciting when it works it's kind of like a big celebration moment. Well, we are coming up towards the end of the episode. So if there's any final things you want to say, maybe anything about the game we didn't touch on that you feel like should be mentioned? No, not especially. I think we covered heaps. Maybe I can just say

if anyone watching is out there and they'd love to give the game a go, there's a demo out on Steam. We'd really appreciate a wish list if you happen to enjoy the game, the look of it, or if you play the demo. And I guess, yeah, you can follow

us on social media. Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. We are WitchWayUpGame. All of that is linked on the WitchWayUp website, yes? Yes, that will be there as well. Okay. And yeah, stay tuned, I guess. We also have a Discord server if you're interested in testing

and I guess staying up to date with any news or game dev updates we have but yeah, stay tuned for more, we'll be announcing a few things soon but yeah, thank you so much for having me, it's been really cool Yeah, it's been a pleasure, do you have any

plans to show off the game at any cons coming up later in the year or are we done for the year yeah good question um we're going to pax in melbourne uh we'll be there um i think we we might be at south by southwest I'm not sure yet. And I think there might be another one which I can't remember. But in general,

we're just trying to get to as many events as we can. And I was very, very lucky to get Alex from the Indie XP who you met at AVCon to host a game there. He did a great job there he was a very uh very passionate to talk about it he was like yeah i'm not the like the dev guy but like

you know i i know a lot about the game i can talk about it yeah alex is amazing he's been he is yeah he joined the team I mentioned the team before and I actually forgot to mention him. Oh, my God, I feel so bad. But Alex is basically our marketing team and he has a few people that he works with as well, but they head up a lot of the social media and we do a lot of strategizing together about marketing and it's just so useful and marketing is so important in indie dev and it's something huge that I've had to learn

about. That's been one of the biggest kind of growing moments and opportunities for me. And so, yeah, Alex has been very helpful and really, really, really nice guy. I'm very lucky to have him. Yeah. As I said before, when I met Alex, he was a cool dude. If we didn't have enough players there,

he was always willing to jump on and fill the slot there to have another person there. He was obviously better than most people at the game initially, but, um, as soon as we had done like three or four rounds, he was usually not very high up on the, on the list, but even so,

uh, being able to fill up that, that game there, making sure there's always enough people to play it. Like that was, that was really cool. Um, yeah.

Uh, yeah, I think it was good. It was cool to end it. It was, it was really fun to get a yeah i think it was good that's awesome and that it was it was really fun to get a chance to play the game and uh i played as much as as i did um i i went back to the the booth a couple of times as i was going through if there was like an empty slot there and didn't really have anything to do for a bit um usually popped in for at least like a another round or so and and yeah it was definitely one of my favourites from Avcon that's for sure

That's really nice to hear and it's cool to hear that you got pretty competitive I'll have to figure out how to play you and maybe some of your friends at some stage in the future once we get the online multiplayer beta going

maybe we can send you some steam keys and we can have a little play test i'll probably be incredibly rough by the next time i play it but even so um yeah that could definitely be fun um anything else you want to mention or is that pretty much everything um no i think that's it um yeah like like i said keep an eye out on uh for our announcements i think like we we're actually hoping to do a kickstarter soon to help us get over the line so um if anyone feels like um helping us out and backing us we'll be having a few little rewards on there this sticker is going to be free with every physical reward and we're going to have a bunch of these little crocheted amigurumi little creatures there that'll come with some of the backings as well so yeah that'll be something to keep an eye out

if you're interested. It's always nice to see a Kickstarter game where there's actually a game. It's not starting the game on Kickstarter. Yeah, well, that's been an interesting thing. I didn't necessarily know if it was the right time or the right medium to use because maybe Kickstarter is... are we a bit late for

kickstarter but to be honest we we it would be great to be able to implement all the features that we want to finish the game that we really want to make and so that's kind of we thought why we thought let's give it a go we don't know how it's going to go the kickstarter will be successful but again another learning learning opportunity. We just have a goal and we're going to see what happens and we'll learn along the way. Awesome. If you've got nothing else to mention, I'll do my outro and then we can

sign off. Sounds great. My main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Check out the channel, see what's over there. I don't know what will be out because this is going to come out a couple weeks from now. The gaming channel is BrodyOnGames. I might still be playing Devil May Cry 4.

What are we doing in the other slot? I don't know. Check it out. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at TechOverT. If you want to find the audio release, it is on every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed, so put it in your favorite app and you'll be good to go.

I will give you the final word. What do you want to say? How do you want to end us off? Thank you again so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. You actually had some amazing questions, actually. And so it's been fun to kind of delve into the past.

And yeah, anyone wants to play gravity-based party games? Oh, yeah. I thought maybe one of your earphones had died. You just swapped back over to the laptop mic? Yes, that's what happened. Okay. The sound quality changed, didn't it? Yeah, yeah, I just noticed it.

It's all good. We can do it again. just noticed it's all good we can do it again no it's i really don't mind no no it's all good um i just i just noticed that you didn't have uh one of the earphones in um yeah it was absolute pleasure i i really enjoyed this and if you ever want to come back on and chat again i would absolutely love to do so this and if you ever want to come back on and chat again i would absolutely love to do so yeah that'd be great i'd love to as well um really it's cool to just like chat about random uh oh um mac gaming space that's a lot of fun as well yeah i like to keep them fairly casual and um yeah i'm glad you enjoyed it yeah no it's cool i i like the medium and uh i'll have to go back and watch a few more of your episodes now well signing out thanks a lot