Tech Over Tea - Game Development On Linux With Godot | Tim Krief

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

It's been about 4 years since I last had Tim on the show and since then he's been working on a new game project which is just away from fully releasing over on Steam ==========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========== Links: https://links.timkrief.com/ Itch io: https://timkrief.itch.io/ Fallacy Quiz: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2847380/Fallacy_Quiz/ ==========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. Welcome back to the show. Today we have a returning guest. I think you were on, what, two years ago? Something like that. It's been a while. Welcome back to the show, Tim. Yeah, it was maybe three years ago, I think. What episode number am I on? Wait, actually, it might actually be four years time time since the the covid yeah uh make makes no sense for me so because i think you were on episode 50 or something like that so i'm on like maybe and i do weekly episodes and it's 250 now don't don't go check it out don't don't check it out geez that was ages ago um how you been

yeah how's life been hi everyone so my name is tim uh tim kreef and um yeah i'm a game developer. I'm French game developer. So right now we are like 10 hours apart or something. Something like that, yeah. It was hard to schedule the meeting because I told you Tuesday, but then I checked the time and I was like, wait, for my Tuesday, some of my Tuesday is not your Tuesday. Right, right.

So that was funny. Honestly, I find it a lot easier to work. It might seem weird, but I kind of find it easier to work with US times just because it's such a big gap. Like with a US time, it's like 18 or 20 hour gap. So it's almost the next day day just a few hours different with like any european time it's it can get a bit a bit difficult sometimes yeah i can be up at four in

the morning sometimes recording i'm not today it's it's 8 30 p.m here which is nice um but yeah uh time zones are fun basically i'm not a fan i i'm really glad to be back because last time you told me uh um if i if i have a game releasing or something like that i can come back and i did not have a game releasing for quite some time so it means a lot to be able to come back and have something to show but basically it's an absolute pleasure to have you back on yeah yeah and i've been listening to your show uh since then you're one of my main source for not just linux information but linux, I guess. Thank you for that. Yeah, because the last one was the one with the bird. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The oracular Oriole video. Yeah, the worst, worst. But you know what? You really clicked back me on this one because I was like, oh no, do I need to update something? Do I need to... Is my computer going to burn like tonight?

It's just a stupid wallpaper. I like to keep people on their feet. You got it? I can do these serious videos all the time, but I like to just throw in just a random little one just to just to make sure that people actually are paying attention yeah that that's that's cool yeah

i so i do have a couple other fun ones that i do want to talk about at some point um i there's a really dumb pull request uh that uses a really really stupid library that i think a lot of people have no idea exists. So that's going to go up at some point. Um, and I've got one, I've got an end of year video that I think is going to be very fun that I think is going to bother a lot of people, but it's going to be too funny not to make. So I'm going to have to do that in the next couple of weeks. I'll check them out. So I'm gonna have to do that in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, I'll check them out. So for anyone who is unaware of your work, I guess we can just get straight into the current game that you actually released. Because I think the last time you were on here, were you working on Crafty County back then? Yeah, I was working on Crafty County back then or was it yeah yeah yeah i was working on crafty county back then um so the thing is when i was working on crafty county i knew that um you had to um expect more work than you um yeah you have to expect like way more work than what you will think because at some point on on crafty country i was like wait if i want to finish this game now that i i see the scope i i see how things work. I think there's like two years of full-time work on this on top of what I already spent.

So I had multiple choices. I could try to get funding and commit for two more years on this project. Or I could... But that will be my first project first project that i will release or i could try to release other stuff um that will that will have um a smaller scope so that i can technically uh get through them by myself because i'm on a shoestring budget, so I cannot really, at this point, employ anybody. I have friends that help me with some stuff,

but they are not working on my games, you know. And then, so this project, so this project is called Fallacy Quiz. And this is funny how it happened because at first I received a message telling me that my Google developer account is going to be terminated because I was inactive for too long. Right. Because I had a developer account to publish apps.

So I was like, what should I do? Should I publish something on the, like an app so that I can keep my account up and running? And at that time, I was really interested about cognitive biases. I wanted to make maybe a video series about that on my French channels that are not like dev related or stuff like that. And then I was like, hey, it could be the perfect match.

I could make a quick app, quiz app about that stuff. Then I rushed to get something running. And then it completely transformed because I ended up ignoring entirely the app requirement. It's not going to be an app at all in the end my right now my google account is being terminated i didn't even know they cleaned out old accounts yeah yeah they they want me to they have insane requirements for uh like for for staying there you know but at this point i was like at this point the game i was really interested with this

game and the fact that uh the scope was um way way smaller it it's a quiz, it's a quiz game, meant that I could go full crazy mode, ambitious about it, and that's what I like. And so this little prototype that was two months or so was um expanded a lot and i thought i was about to release it like two or three months ago i even sent you a dm like hey my game is going to be out in two weeks or something so maybe you can talk about it but yeah now like now it's going to to finally be out on Steam on December 19th. So I have finally a date. So that's really cool. And yeah, it expanded a lot. The game is in 3D with hand-drawn stuff in it,

with a virtual 3D book inside it to have access to definitions and there's a local co-op, local multiplayer mode, 4 player full controller support things add up quickly when you want to

make things correctly so we can talk if you want about how long each features took but yeah so the game was released in beta state on itch.io

and got a lot of interest because it was put in front page featured so it's really, really, really, really refreshing to have eyeballs and people getting you feedback. It's a lot of new stuff I experienced as a developer because before that I was working on stuff

that no one played and now like 400 people got the the beta wow yeah i think the first thing that like instantly sticks out with this is like the art style is very very striking like for anyone just listening um basically as you're going through each of the questions that are being asked there's like uh there's like some guys that are cut basically like cut out with paper being held up with like popsicle sticks and they're actually like having a conversation and it looked yeah i've never seen there might be another game that uses a style like this, but I certainly haven't seen anything like this before. Yeah, like little paper puppets with illustrations.

I have maybe more than 100 illustrations made. Now it's going to be a feature, you know. It's made by a human. yeah i have one of the illustrations and there are 200 questions it's each questions you have two illustrations that show up so i have enough illustrations so that they are always topical to the to the question and that way you you have some context just looking at the little pictures. Well, just that part by itself, how long did it take to do that art for it? So...

Well, I'm sure there's also the brainstorming stage for what you wanted to draw and then actually drawing it as well. So maybe that's the interesting part. that how how do i know what to draw so i i'm i wrote all the questions not all the questions because i had a first batch for the beta but i wrote a lot of uh questions uh 80 i think for the beta. And for each question, I wrote keywords that were just keywords. And then I used all this information afterwards to make a list of all keywords from all the questions. I tried to join keywords that look alike. And then I had a list of keywords

so that I could draw stuff to match them. And that way I was able to know what I should draw. And then for the second batch of questions, I created a full tool to edit questions, to be able to select keywords and from the keywords to be able to match keywords with pictures. And so this tool is over-engineered, but it's really cool.

I was able to see- Automate some of the process if you wanted to add more questions in the future. Exactly. A lot of stuff now is helping. So now I have the full list of all pictures and I can see how much I use them in my questions, like the frequency, so that the next question could try to use

the illustrations that I use the less so that when you play the game, you don't just have the man picture again and again and again. And so after all of this, when I created all my other questions, there are 200 in the game right now, I was able to, in my tool, to give ratings to keywords, keywords illustration pairs, so that some keywords were rated badly because the illustration did not match it correctly and that way i was made of a table with a score for the worst keywords so for instance sometimes you had like disagreement and this one was represented by just a man for instance and so this was low rating so i had to so i knew i had to redraw this one with a specific one for for this use case i'm not sure if if it's clear or not but no i yeah i i think i understand where you're going with that um so basically you have like a and you have the index of keywords or like a table of keywords.

And then basically you can assign images to each of those words and then use those images for further questions basically. And then rate the keyword picture match so that I know if I give a bad rating to that i know in the later stage when i i'm going to uh uh draw stuff that i will have to redraw that because the pairing was bad uh so yeah so all of that meant that i was never going on krita. So everything was drawn in Krita. I was never in front of a blank page. Like, what should I draw now?

No, no, no. I was getting through them like, okay, now I need to draw that. I did everything on stream. All the drawing was done on stream. All the drawing was done on stream. That way I was not stopping. I was

going and I think all the drawings maybe three or four working day for all the drawings. Okay. Okay. I found one of the streams. Okay. So basically you just have it all blocked out and then you just basically use those blocks you have to draw each of the

piece of art you want yeah okay it's a big a big spread a spreadsheet right right okay okay right right right right right okay that makes sense that makes a lot more sense then so basically you just had you you started with the questions first and then you you knew what keywords you wanted and then just drew out from that rather than doing the other way around where you start with the drawings and then you don't exactly know what the questions are necessarily going to need and that that way I can use the most of my illustrations because if I do it the other way,

like, oh, I might use a hot dog and then I have no question about that. So the thing goes unused. Yeah. Yeah. And also that tool was a lot of, so yeah, I made a tool to be able to edit all the questions, the translations too,

because the game is in English and in French. So to be able to see all the translation, the keyword pairing, to select what the answer is going to be, it made the job way easier than just working on a big json file because that's what i had to go through for the the beta and that was the rough so and and then yeah i was gonna ask um and also there was more you wanted to say that i was i was

gonna ask how did you go about uh doing to ask, how did you go about doing the question side? How did you go about deciding how you want questions to be structured? Specifically, what you wanted, like what fallacies you wanted to base things on? Because I'm sure there's a ton of things you could have included that you didn't necessarily have time to.

There's like, there is a scope limit that you need to set yourself to otherwise you're gonna be in the same situation again and you're never gonna the first like i think it was the first day the first day i decided to focus on like debate fallacy like the fallacies you will encounter when talking to someone and let aside all the cognitive biases. Because my initial idea was all fallacies, including all the cognitive biases,

all the stuff that causes you to fall into dark patterns. Suncoast fallacy, for for instance is not in the game because Suncoast fallacy is not really something that is rhetorical or logical that someone is going to use in an argument. They cool but it's more a cognitive biases bias. A lot of A lot of rhetorical fallacies exploit cognitive biases, but I decided to focus the game on what you will encounter in a debate with someone. So that was my first decision to cut the count. count and then I just I just

already had a list of all the I went through a lot of lists a lot of people when they list that kind of stuff they go really technical and you have

a little difference between them but for for most of us we don't we don't know what this difference is right so it's more like they're conceptually very similar but if you're getting very deep into the weeds there are technical differences between these concepts but most people unless they're like really thinking hard about it it's gonna seem like the same thing yeah like when you um causation correlation uh uh fallacies you have like five of them uh maybe it's maybe the cause is is the same for the two for the two consequences maybe it's another one another cause maybe they are related in my game there's just causation consequence correlation yeah like there's one fallacy

correlation like there's one fallacy and a lot of stuff like that I grouped them so that it was going to be easier for people and more useful for people because most people they don't need to graduate logical

school they need to be able to point out to their speaking partner to point out this was false. The reasoning was false because this is that type of fallacy. And be able to explain the broad idea, you don't need to exactly point out the Latin name.

So yeah, my game is going from that perspective. I'm not choosing any... I'm not choosing ad hominem. A lot of people use the term ad hominem, but even that

is not in the game. I think I use appeal to spite or something. So, yeah, I try to use common words to be able to describe stuff. I feel like that's one you could probably get away with because most people i feel like yeah at least once yeah of course but it was like to to like it's the um it's to show you how much i i i tried to not use that because you don't know the other ones like some of them like no i've got a list open on wikipedia right now. Argumentum ad baculum. I don't even know how to pronounce that correctly. Okay, just imagine yourself in a discussion with someone.

Ipsy Dixon. This is an argumentum ad baculum. Yeah. It's not really telling of what's happening. Yeah, but even by doing all of this, so in the end, I have 50 fallacies, different fallacies. In the beginning, I had less, and some people pointed out some more interesting things to add.

For instance, the fallacy fallacy uh was added the fallacy fallacy is when you use the fact that your your um argument from interlocutor is using a fallacy to tell them that they are wrong but you cannot tell them that they are wrong you can only tell them that the reasoning is you can only tell them that the reasoning is wrong yeah this is one people really like to use on the internet they just like to be like logical fallacy

it's like can we have a conversation please like what are we doing right now so but even with 50 fallacies a lot of them are subset of uh one another like you have broad uh broad categories like generalization and then you have um uh

generous generalization uh biased generalization hast hasty generalizations, stuff like that. So it was also hard in the game to be able to have them in. So I had to make sure that they will not show up at the same time in the possible answers so that it's not frustrating for you when you play to be able to have to choose between a category and a subset of this category as the two options right right what one is more specific than the other but the two of them are true yeah i could definitely see that being kind of annoying especially if like yes if you have like a deep knowledge of this sure you probably work it out but if you're someone who is actually using

this as a thing to like learn about these fallacies you may not again understand those distinctions properly yet and yeah probably be able to really work out what especially work out what you're doing wrong which would be more annoying right you think you've got the right answer but it's like oh it's this other category but in your head they're the same thing so putting yeah i i see exactly what you're saying there that was one of the feedback i got from the the beta people were like what okay you're telling me the answer was this but then you go to the next question and now i cannot really reflect on what's happening so after each question you're able to check the fallacy glossary and i'm okay this one i might have been a bit too ambitious with this one but I made a full

3d virtual book oh that's what the book is okay so um maybe maybe you can check on yeah I've got the trailer open on steam right now okay so the game uh so you're playing the game so it's it's at the beginning of the trailer you're playing the game and then at the end of the question you can check the glossary and it zooms out of the monitor I didn't notice the monitor part

and you're now in a 3D environment where there's a book on your desk that you can open yeah the book is really environment where there's a book on your desk that you can open yeah the book is really how does the book

work? I'm actually curious from like a technical perspective how that actually works because the computer screen part that's fine it's just you take the 2D image you glue it onto a 3D model fine but how does the book work? yeah the book was really fun too. Maybe we can circle back

to the technical things for the book later. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, because first, I wanted to say that about how did I decide on what topic to include in the game. I think it's really hard to learn about that stuff.

Like, I spent... Okay, I had a lot of resources about this in my bookmarks for years. And I was like, yeah, one day I'm going to go and check them out because I think it's i think it's really cool uh to help me think better and to help me when people uh try to can i swear here yeah go ahead yeah people try to bullshit me so i can i can um check that but i never I think a lot of people do that. They just have a bookmark with, hey, that seems cool. A list of 50 fallacies that people use.

And I never checked it. So when I, at the beginning of the year, as I said, I was interested about that stuff. And I went and I checked everything one by one, and it took me one or two days, like, as if I was a student in, like, a year three degree on that topic. And information was not easy to ingest. It was written by people that were not debating day to day, that were studying text about that stuff all day long. When you try to find fun ways to learn about that stuff, you have videos that are sometimes good, but even those videos are like one hour long list of... Yeah. Or maybe I found like a...

It's a really cool video of a teacher just explaining that stuff to you. But again, it's 30 minutes for one fallacy. And it's like a lecture and I was like wait, isn't that supposed to be one of the main stuff people should

be able to do like reasoning why is it so obfuscated or in books or you know I think there's

I saw one game on the trolley problem there's one game on the trolley problem and I think we need more games like that to explain and make philosophical or logical

topics more relevant and more easy to ingest I think there's a couple of games on the trolley problem, I don't know which one you're specifically talking about but I saw one but I'm not sure which one might be but yeah

that's that's the kind of game i remember one that like a lot of streamers were playing and not that long ago but i'm blanking on which one it was i'm sure someone's gonna know in the comments so yeah so i think that's why um and some people did quizzes like you know you have quizzes online uh about all sort of stuff but i think uh this i think this one is the like i i tried to give the level of polish that will make it um so that you would want to go through it right yeah looking at like a wall of text or just a wall of questions like you know if if you're studying it and you want some yeah like refresher material sure but if you're someone who is maybe just trying to first learn about this topic or you want not a 40 minute lecture on a logical fallacy,

having something that's considerably more approachable, I guess does help a lot more people actually even consider trying to learn about the problem. Yeah, I hope so. And so now we can go back to the glossary, the fallacy glossary. So how I made it technically. So the worst part was writing the content.

Okay. Yeah. Fine. Because, yeah, it's not like boilerplate content. I I'm I try to with the same spirit I try to use simple words and I try to give solutions for what what you could do in a conversation to go out of this situation like if someone is like for instance doing an appeal to authority. What should you do? You know?

Because I see a lot of people that have the good arguments, but they fall into traps when they... For instance, someone tried to use the association fallacy like when you tell the person that they are associated to another person that is badly

Right, guilt by association Yeah, that's the one, guilt by association and a lot of people answer to this trying to tell, no, I'm not associated with them, you're lying, or stuff like that. But you can just tell them you're using the guilt by association fallacy and even if I'm associated with them it means nothing about me so what i you know you can have the the upper um uh position in in that exchange and well if you try you're arguing

with a reasonable person yeah but um yeah i'm imagining the conversation in front of an audience sure yeah yeah yeah okay okay yeah yeah yes just leave the room at this point if you if you're arguing with someone that is not reasonable you know like okay uh have a nice day you know um so yeah so back to the technical uh part and yeah that was a really rough week of me trying to make it work and the best the best way for doing this is to divide the work into smaller step and focus on the smaller steps, creating a black box with all the nasty stuff in it. And then you can use this black box

as if it was a working thing. Most of my book is horrible horrible like most most of the the code making it work i it's horrible but if i if i made it in a way that all the code was in like one script i could not handle it but i'm working on um parts so first i'm working on one page how do i make one page work so i modeled the page in blender with the animation to open the page this the animation took a while to figure out because the the the shape was beautiful and then when i tried it in the game it deformed all the texture you know so yeah like a really good job and like looking just i keep looking at it i'm not noticing anything that like looks like it looks like a book that's flicking through pages yeah yeah i

went really far with it because i'm even making them the how do you call that the back the the back of the book i make i'm making that um slight slightly changed its angle when you go through the pages. Oh God, you are insane. And also the page is like is angled to lay on the table. And the more pages you flip, the more they will be packed together because they're more weight. yeah but yeah so i work

on one page to make one page work when i open then i work on the same page but now i need to to open it in the different position i don't have an animation for closing the page and i cannot use the same animation because if I use the same animation in reverse the physics is not the same because when you take a page and you flip the page

that will be strange to play that animation in reverse because that will mean that you like if you had to do that with your hand that will mean that you take this You have one? What's happened here? There we go, we're good. Okay, here we have one of my prized possessions, my copy of the Complete Edits Guide to Windows ME.

Okay, okay. I paid like three dollars for this. Okay, so let's say... This here. Let's say we have this page that we're flipping over, say this one here. So if you were to just... I don't know if you... There we go, here. Yeah. So if you just flip that back over like that... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not the same animation if you open it. And if you open it in reverse. So what I did is each time I close, each time I play the animation in reverse,

my page do a 180 rotation so that I can open it from the other side. Oh, that's okay. Okay. But then the textures are wrong. So at the same time, the textures also flip 180. Mm-hmm.

But as I said, all of this crazy stuff, it's a black box and now i can use a page this is one page and it's working you know i can open and close the page so now i i i create a new a new um so it's it's called scene in godot a new scene where I use my page to be able to, so I have also the textures that are rightly mapped. So now I create a new page with textures that I can have 2D stuff drawn on them. And I was amazed. At first I was like I will have to pre

render the text for all the pages. I didn't have to. All the pages, maybe I think there's more than 100 pages. They are all drawn, so they're all only drawn

once most of them are only drawn once because I only need the picture to be drawn once but they're all drawn at the beginning and stored in memory and it works and at first I was like I will have to make some trickery to only

display the two active pages I did not have to do that. So kudos to Godot for being able to handle that many pages, even on my 2018 laptop. So I did tests to be sure it was not just like my developer computer. Oh, that works. Let's ship that and yeah it works fine in my 4090 it's no issue yeah yeah i'm not ubisoft okay yeah anyways yeah anyway so yeah so then then i made um i was about to draw stuff on those pages to draw stuff on those pages then i made um a stack of all the all the pages and i'm this one was like to be able to animate all the pages that was quite some work um i made functions to um dictate the position of the page the the the of the page, the scale of the page, based on where it was in the book.

And everything is procedural. So if I want to add a page, now I don't see this code anymore because everything is procedural. I had to tweak stuff to be able to add hard covers. Yeah, because the cover is hard and flat. And it doesn't work the same as everything else. And then once all of this was done, I was able to use all of that with a new scene to be able to generate the pages at runtime. So I have templates for my pages, and I have my database of all my definitions. And all the pages are generated at runtime and okay so all of this seems complicated but i also add uh an index where you can click on the names of uh the fallacies in the index in the book like on the pages you have

links so you have to interpolate the click based on the 3D environment so that was another kind of worm also I have to I had to make the page interactable So that was another can of worms.

Also, I had to make the page interactable. Honestly, I'm surprised you didn't just make it so you could grab a corner and slowly flip it over as well. No, because that's not really adding much neither is the book okay will you

have read if it was just a block of text sure yeah I'll give you

that it's look don't get me wrong it's really cool again okay it's a great idea it's just this was clearly a lot of work people go here just to flip pages so it's it's a win in my book

wink wink so how long did the book take you? I okay the technical side I think it was a big week a full-time week and it's only for it work then I had maybe one more week for the one or two weeks for the content and then maybe maybe some more days to refine the visuals the textures because I tried to

use realistic textures and stuff like that for the book to be able to be read during the gameplay that was maybe one or two weeks on top of this because it was there was

some refactoring of the quiz itself to be able to make it play inside a 3D environment but when it worked it was so satisfying I was torn at first about letting people

check the definitions during gameplay because it's weird you're like in a quiz why would you have access to all the definitions but then with that perspective of

you are posing the game on the monitor and you are looking at a glossary on your desk, you're telling the player, hey, that's what you're doing. You're exiting the quiz, checking definitions. So it's clearly communicated that then you go back to the game. Well, if you really wanted to, you could also just have a harder mode as well

where you can't look up the glossary. really wanted to you could also just have a harder mode as well where you can't look up the glossary there is a secret level of difficulty in the game an extreme difficulty extreme difficulty yeah yeah wait so okay what what's expert mode then how's that what what is that do you okay so if you're easy you're expert then what is this extreme yeah so easy easy mode is is it a fella uh is it fallacious or not you don't have to specify what type of fallacy okay okay and then when you answer the game will tell you hey by the way, this was this fallacy. So that way you can warm up, learn the terms,

what all the fallacies are, unlock them, because at first they are not unlocked in the glossary. You have to unlock them to be able to read their definitions. And then when you have sufficient score, you unlock the expert mode which now you have to select what type of fallacy is going on you have four options so now you you saying valid or fallacious is not uh sufficient enough. You need to exactly point out what the fallacy is. Sometimes it's simple.

Other times it's tricky. And then there's a secret mode. This one is experimental. And this one is the extreme mode. There's no valid statements anymore because even in expert mode you still have

valid statement from now and then like without any fallacies in them in extreme mode you don't have them anymore and you have six possible choices instead of four. And this time, I'm... Remember when I told you that I made sure

you didn't have categories that could step onto another? Now I'm making sure you have all the possible right categories that cool uh collide you know and you don't really have access to the glossary in this one and i by you saying it was experimental i'm assuming that's like not ready yet it's in the game but you know there's not a big uh button to play it it's you have to go into custom mode and select this level of difficulty when you unlock it and why did i make that that way it's because as i said the categories collide they um so i'm not sure a lot of people uh like a lot of people will say hey my answer is was right it is an appeal to fear for instance you know uh when it was another another one was more specific so that one was the one um that was supposed to be correct so i think most people will not like this

so yeah that's why it's not uh and also i like when you you play a game you think it's done and then you unlock a secret stuff and you have more no i i get Yeah, that is fun. I am... Yeah, I always like... Especially so with, like, when I was younger and I just had lots of time to just play games, it was fun to just, like, come across, you know, a secret boss in a game or a secret area that you... You know, you're supposed to be at a game.

You haven't, like, glitched out of the game. It's just not obvious how that was supposed to happen. Yeah, yeah. When you play Mario and you go in on top of something, you're sure no one ever told to go there. You're like, I'm the first one going there. And then there's a coin. Right, right, right.

Telling you, hey, we know you were going to go there so well mario is a really good example because there are there are cases where you can go an alternate exit through the level and that's how you would get to like the cannons and stuff to get to like the yeah yeah just get like entire worlds in some cases yeah yeah i think the worst case was Mario 3D Land where you unlock another game like at the end of the game they say oh by the way there's another game there's

all the levels there's double the amount Nintendo does that a lot because they are targeting different player categories they are targeting different player categories. They are targeting children, hardcore players, people who like Mario but they have a job. And so they give you a lot of exit points.

of exit points. They give you a lot of occasion to tell you, hey, by the way, if you enjoyed the game, you can just leave now and you've seen most of it. But some players say they want to play for like days. So they are like, okay, for you, you can continue playing for hours and hours. And I think that was in Tears of the Kingdom. I see a lot of people that liked the game at first and now are telling, yeah, it was mid. Did you see this reaction online of people saying, yeah, it was not that good, Tears of the Kingdom? I don't recall it, but I probably wasn't paying super close attention anyway.

Yes, I was watching a lot of people commenting the game, and you have those videos like six months later, was the game really good or was this and I think a lot of those people they played way too much of that game I on my game I'm at 200

hours or something and it's not fun yeah yeah no I get that. Yeah, there's some people that like to absolutely no-life a game. And there are very few games where you can legitimately put in hundreds of hours and still find it enjoyable. And even then, there are games that have content for that. I play a lot of Path of Exile, and Path of Exile 2 came out the other day.

There are people who've already put it came out on saturday people have already put 70 hours in the game um they never stopped no and you know you look at the you look at the reddit and the reddit is just game bad game bad get like go outside yeah so i'm sure if you stop at if if you my first 60 hours of tears of the kingdom that might be the best gaming experience of the decade you know of course if you if you water down this experience with 200 more hours where you chase down uh little uh trinkets right it's not fun they they put that many stuff in that game so that you could encounter them just by going anywhere they don't put that much so that you have to go and find them all and i think that's i yeah i think that's um that's that's why some people uh go back to

to this review and say i didn't like it that much yeah i'm i'm the kind of person who, when I was younger, I would try to achievement hunt and platinum a game or whatever specific system they call their achievement system. And I've come to realise as I've gotten older, like yes, I could do that

but I think a much better way to handle games is just play it until it, like, if it ever stops being fun, just stop playing it. Like, it's a video game. It's not a, I know that, you know, again, going back to the Path of Exile example, if you mention in the global chat,

if you ever mention that something is fun, you know, you'll get tons of comments like, this is Path of Exile, fun is not allowed here. Obviously, people are joking. Because this is a game where people will spreadsheet out their entire build. They will spend, you know, 50 hours just like, just theory crafting a build before the league even starts. If you want a good example for anyone who's unaware of path of exile let me just if you just look at the path of exile skill tree

it has um well path of exile one it has 1350 nodes i'm looking at it right now yeah yeah the pop vexel 2 has more nodes at 1500 it looks like a parody yeah you don't obviously don't get every single point each of those so they're they're your different characters start at different points on the on the skill tree so all of the classes are on the same skill tree

that's why it's so big but even then like you will get 120 points or so to assign to your build so people spend a lot of time theorycrafting that and like where was i going with this right people spending way too much time playing a game and just not having fun with it just play it like hades who was a good example that came a game the early access game came out not too long ago. I'm not grinding it. I'm doing new stuff when they add it,

and then I stop. Because I know if I play the game too much, I'm going to outlive the fun of the game. Yeah. Yeah. I did the same for Echoes of Wisdom that came out recently. I saw people commenting on the lore, the story of the game,

a week after its release. And I was like, no, this is a fun little Zelda game. I'm not going to know life to finish it right right and I finished it like one month or two months after everyone else

and people were already like retrospective of this game I'm like I just finished it it was fun it's it's a and people were were like hey it's the worst reviewed Zelda ever uh and I'm like yeah it's not supposed to be the next tears of the kingdom it's a GBA game for the next generation you know and also i really doubt that's true i i'm there are there are there have been some bad zelda games in the past let's let's not pretend like this is the

worst no the worst thing like for the past 15 years or something okay sure if you give that criteria because yeah i i guarantee if you go back if go back, I'm sure you'll find a couple of things in there. Yeah, Zelda 2 was... Even Nintendo is like, this game never happened. But I think we need to praise little... Like, Nintendo is one of the last big players who is putting out little experiences like this.

Right, right. the last big players who is putting out little experiences like this you have Sony making spending hundreds of millions of dollars on remakes well no just remakes are one thing remakes of games remasters

remakes of games from the prior generation that you can play on the PS5 because it's a PS4 emulator. Yeah, like the Horizon. Yeah, that's the worst offender. I think we need to praise when a big player like this does make a little game that is not supposed to be the next big thing and that is supposed to be

played like uh in the in in the transit in the in the public transport and stuff like that and uh yeah yeah the the horizon that's funny because i got um in a steam sale during the the summer i got horizon um zero dawn the first one. And I was able to play it with all the PC improvements with the foliage that is moving and stuff like that. And it was really beautiful. And I was like,

wow, that's so cool. I can have better graphics than if I had a PS4, PS5. And then they... And I was like, hey, that's not really different from a game that will come out today because they added patches to... And then they make a full remaster of the game

and I'm like, why will they ever buy this right right that's so weird yeah i i miss the days where the giant studios would make these random small experimental titles like you know we can talk you know ubisoft back when they were doing prince of persia or assassin's creed in its very early days like assassin's creed they didn't know that was going to succeed the first game was really weird also the main character was voiced by an american even though everyone else had a very obvious middle eastern accent i i don't know why the main character was American. Don't think about it. Not very important. But they did do a Prince of Persia, a little Prince of Persia. The issue with that one is... Oh!

Uh... Wait! Uh... That... Did... What happened? Eh? Uh... Okay, I'm gonna restart the call. That's weird. Why am I here twice now? Okay. That'll probably fix itself in a moment.

What I was going to say about... What I was going to say about Prince of Persia is... It's probably a really good game. The issue is... The market of Metroidvania games is very very it's very different than it once was right like metroidvania is now the like the indie category people have a price in mind for what a metroidvania is is going to cost so if if you tried like a triple a AAA game the best thing in this story is they shut down

the team what was the Microsoft Microsoft shut down the studio of a really popular game Hi-Fi Rush so yeah they made a

small experiment. This was not the next big Prince of Persia. That was, like you said, the metroidvania. It's a saturated indie market. They tried to make one. And people, I saw reviews, people liked it. It was a little... But no, they looked at the numbers and they said no it did not reach

expectation right uh closing down the team and yes same thing if i rush it's they even themselves said it was uh above expectations and they shut down the team yeah i think this is the problem you have with these these studios they're so big that if something isn't a breakout success it's basically deemed a failure and i i don't know how much longer that can really go on for and they and they expect all the games to be a breakout success and they are putting a lot and a lot of money to try to get there and that's why I was saying I think we need to praise

Nintendo because all the other studios the big players I think that they are really going to their like is Microsoft going to their like is Microsoft going to have a next console Microsoft's a weird one

I'm not sure because they do everything on they remember they owned Windows yeah but it's so costly all their projects is so costly and then when it fails they they have

people that studied for years and years marketing and draw the wrong conclusions on why it failed one warner bros said uh we need more uh... After the Suicide Squad, they said we need to double down on live service games. After the success of Hogwarts Legacy. Yeah, there is a high possibility that Suicide Squad is being shut down after the next season. During the Black Friday Steam sale, they sold it at two dollars and 99 cents and

i i think they did get a player a player base boost by like a thousand people because look it's three dollars right like you heard about this game for so long it's bad yeah it's three dollars sure might as well but that's not how you like keep a game going yeah we we and we did not even talk about concord but i'm not i'm not sure we need to add on that on that fire yeah but yeah well then you have other like other games where they just release in a like concord at least was not a buggy game it's just a game people didn't like games like redfall came out and it just wasn't finished yeah but again there is so much if concord was a small experiment they they they they bet on on on those projects as if like try to to start small Where is the Concord 1?

Where is the small Concord game that people ended up enjoying? So then you make Concord 2 and people really like it. And then you make Concord 3 and then you spend $400 million on that one because everyone knows the characters for the past three

games they all have their favorite they line up to get it you're making the fifth game of the franchise no one ever ever seen your in universe right you're trying to make boulders gate 3 before you've made anything else exactly why like they thought it was going to be a giant cinematic universe if you look at like their their um their like project release schedule they had a comic plan they had multiple comics planned they've got an episode in um that secret level series that's coming out yeah they've got like they have four seasons planned the the characters in secret level none of them are in the game So that secret level episode was going to be an ad for their new season where they're gonna add those new characters

Right like they were trying they were trying to do they were trying to do like Infinity War without doing any of the other movies And without any comics right right like they didn't have you know 80 years of Marvel comics they were just like oh yeah let's just let's just do it

just by itself but then as we said to make the first game of the series that would maybe be a 2D pixel art game, you need to invest a really small amount of money on a really small team that you need to micromanage and that will not give you a constant stream of revenue.

And so you cannot really talk about it in the investor investor meeting about that small project you know right so i think that i think that's why but then um and yeah so coming back to uh achievements and uh finishing games and stuff like that i think in the in the in the past players uh were just having one game for christmas like some players still do like children still do but us then we were you say that but a lot of them only play like there's so many good free to play games now that's the difference you could be a 10 year old and play you know Genshin or Fortnite or

Marvel Rivals Roblox yeah and like these are all free and you could play these games for thousands of hours oh yeah for sure but when we were children

you had one game and achievements were the only way to get some more content out of those games and I think some players kept that habit even if they have a gigantic backlog of games because of some still sales and as you said if you don't enjoy

if you don't enjoy grinding the achievements you, now you're an adult, you have a big catalog of games, they are free to play, go try something else, you know? Oh, that's the other thing about that Path of Exile, that is also free to play.

But I think the issue you also have with people is... Okay, so if you sit down to play a game, and then on your second monitor you have a livestream open, and then on your other monitor you have a YouTube video open, and you're in a Discord call, and then you've got your game on the main monitor, like... Look. Yeah. You're not in a situation to enjoy a game. There are some games where they're basically like um effectively

just like background noise a game like web fishing if you if you've um played that or heard of that where i heard of it yeah yeah for anyone who hasn't you it's a very simple fishing game you just stand in a river or fish tetris tetris 99 or stuff like that sure sure. But if it's a game like... Hellblade. Hellblade. A game like Kingdom Hearts 3. A game like Black Myth Wukong. If you're just giving the game

like 10% of your attention, you're never going to enjoy it. You're ruining it. Right, right. I watch my house when I play games. He's like watching a live stream. He's got the game

in windowed mode on his like secondary monitor. The game's not even on his main monitor. So he's got the stream over here, the game over here. Like what? Like, yeah,

you're not going to enjoy the game. And that's, I think that's the reason why we have a big uh back catalog like this because i have a lot of games where i'm like when i when i will have time just sit down, stop listening to a podcast or stuff like that. So I have like Nier Automata, Piling with Hellblade, like all the games that I did the tutorial part and i'm i'm like yeah i i can't

wait to to play them some days someday yeah yeah especially story games right like there there are games where you know it's going to involve some grinding like i play a lot of monster hunter and you get to a point where you're just... You don't need to pay attention. Like, there's a hunt you have to do. You've got to go kill Baratheon or whatever, get some parts for an upgrade. Like, you don't really need to pay attention.

But if it's a special... Like, Nier especially. So, like, that's a game where I would never recommend listening to anything in the background, because I'ming that game it's like that sets the tone of every scene how much of

you said you had started it how much of it have you played? the town collapsed and I battled with the people in the collapsed thing town I think it's the beginning I'm not sure battle with the people in the collapsed town.

I think it's the beginning. I'm not sure. Have you seen the desert? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I went there, yeah. Have you seen the circus? Yes.

Yes. The second you walk into that zone and the music starts playing and you see the really weird yeah they're not hostile yeah it's there's it's a really eerie moment you start to think wait am i possibly the bad guy here is there something more that I'm not being told? And you just don't get that if you're listening to ACDC in the background. And you just start fighting them

without even questioning it. Right, right. Yeah. But one thing I will say that is good about the uh at least at least the western triple-a game industry not really having an idea what it's doing that there is like a there's a lot of big companies in like china that are coming up and in japan that are like you know making games that people are really enjoying right now but it's it's opening up a space for some of these indie games

and I guess moving into that AA category. Like Devolver Digital is a really good example of this. I remember when they were a tiny, tiny company, but there are so many games under their belt now and all of them are these tiny experimental games and maybe they're not all for you but like yeah it's they're really there's always something really cool like balatro nominated as game of the year it's not my game like i i'm not a super big fan of it but like i get it it's it's a testament of kind of a switch of, yeah, as you said,

it's opening opportunities. Players want to play games. So if you're giving them remasters after remasters and failed big experiments, they will still want to play games and they will try to find new stuff like what's the new stuff they might buy your remaster

but are we playing Last of Us part 1 remastered part 2 that's yeah I think there's there's a difference between

like remasters and remakes especially especially so when it's really transformative to the game like Final Fantasy 7

remake is a great example of this because it takes a game and it it makes something that you know

a lot most people have heard the name final fantasy 7 but you look at the graphics of the ps1 game and you know like for some people that's just not really that approachable but yeah you take that experience and turn it into something that frankly is the best thing that square enix has done in a long time because they are kind of floundering with the mainline the mainline new Final Fantasy games and not really know what they're doing

yeah but the problem is when you keep having that happen when it's okay let's do another remake and another remake and another one and I think people buy them but

because they they're like i have my favorite game in the best possible way of playing it i'm not sure people played not all of them of course right i am sure people some people will play them but i'm sure a sure there are um uh marketing towards people like hey that's your favorite thing right so you you will buy it right um and and that's that's the dis even disney is doing it with the movies i was gonna say the live action disney stuff yeah yeah and where is the toy story one remaster i want this like okay this is a tangent but why on why are they not just taking all their files and rendering them again with today's technology because that will be so cool. If you check Toy Story 1, it still holds up pretty good. It looks really good

for what? It was like 90... What year was that? 99, I think. Was it? I think 99. 95? 95? 95? Jesus Christ! Yeah! At some point, you have

Buzz Lightyear jumping out of a window, you know? And I was like, wait, they have subsurface scattering. Like, 30 years ago? They were crazy. Because you can see the light shining through the plastic. But then you see the dog. Wait. Yeah, okay.

Okay, yeah. And then you're like, please, just re-render all of this. And this will be your only allowed remastered. Because I'm not going to go see Lion King. Yeah, you don't want to watch me faster? Yeah. Again, it's going back to the same thing, right? Like, when you're so big,

it is so hard to make an experimental new change. I think a great example of this is what's happened to Far Cry. They absolutely cooked with Far Cry 3. They made an amazing game with an amazing antagonist. And then they made Far Cry 3.5. And Far Cry 3.5, and Far Cry 3.6, and they, and like, Far Cry 6 is just Far Cry 3, they just keep making the same game, because they had a formula that worked, and it's the same thing with Assassin's Creed for a long time, where they just kept doing the same thing, they did change with, um, like, the Egypt one, they made it more of an rpg so they did like experiment with

that but they it's still you know you play a ubisoft open world game right like it's climb the tower get the vantage point it's like the same thing over and over again and it's yeah it was good 10 years ago but like it's 10 years of the same thing when they released I don't even know the name of the it's the first quadruple A game yeah yeah

Skull and Bones? Yes that one Skull and Bones when they released the first quadruple A game I'm just when they released the first credible credible a game yeah I'm I'm just a 1a but one day I will be credit one day I will be

the first credible a I from my my next game I'm going to announce it's 900 million dollar budget yeah when they released this credible A game, I checked it out. And then I bought Black Flag on PS3.

And I played Black Flag on my... I dusted my PS3. I had to set the date and time because it was shut down I think I had a better experience playing my $2 copy of Black Flag on my PS3

than people playing Skull & Bones I saw people doing comparisons and why I don't know if my question is what what are they doing now or how they did it back then okay i don't know which one is it because i i think on some aspect is it's how they did it back then because I think a lot of people were making games out of passion and being exploited.

Right, right. And I think today those people may be fed up with that. Yeah, a lot of them are going to make indie studios. Yeah, they were like wait I made the best game ever and now I have a bigger cubicle if you're a super talented game designer

like why would you stay at a big company that's gonna have like 10 layers of management above you to make any decision yeah but I really I'm not doing any

hyperbole when I say I think Black Flag might be on the PS3 like I'm not saying the remaster on modern computer I'm saying when you run it on the PS3 right now i think it's a better experience than skull and bones was at release and i don't know at that point what the

experience is but i yeah yeah i think the difference is the focus of the game and this is this something like really bothers me every time i i watch a a like a game trailer and half the trailer is focused on hey we have realistic models of the tongue like i don't care like oh we have we have sub-surface light scattering on the eyes. Like, okay, cool. Where's the video game? Right? And then you have Nintendo that just is like, hey, we are making games.

Hey, we made Mario 30 years ago. You're going to buy the new one enjoy yeah yeah yeah but they're they're like yeah we're we're using uh um a 10 years old 10 years old hardware but we had a fun idea for gameplay so go and try it out i think the issue you have is go and try it out. I think the issue you have is computers have gotten so fast, consoles have gotten so fast, that there isn't limitations in rendering anymore.

And this has gotten more so now that there's been this push into, like, frame gen and DLSS, so now you're having these fake frames generated. So you can have these games that are just pushing graphics to the extreme that are not really focused on optimization, and they're pushing just things that don't matter.

Whereas if we're talking about an indie game where you just don't have the skill set to make realistic 3D models, or you don't have the time or the budget or if we're talking about like ps2 games you just you didn't have the ability to make realistic 3d models now people try don't get me wrong but if you want like i think when the hardware was more limited it forced developers to focus more on style and substance rather than photorealism and photorealism is cool but when everything is photorealistic it stops being an interesting gimmick i think there's also the fact that um the the two big players, Microsoft and Sony, I think they're a bit late on what they're betting on.

And they bet on realism and graphism for the past two console generations, and it paid out. They had great success because they had great upgrades from the PS2 to the PS3, and even from the PS2 to the PS3. And even from the PS3 to the PS4, we add significant better graphics from the PS3 to the PS4. But honestly, from the PS4 to the PS5,

I don't see a lot of difference. Like, I know some people, they will differ that it's drastically different with ray tracing and stuff like that. From my point of view, when I played GTA on the PS3, I see

that it's struggling, it's not showing me as much detail as it could. When I play that on the PS4, it's kind of perfect. And when I play that on a ps4 it's kind of perfect and when i play that on a ps5 i first i don't have a ps5 but when i look up comparison online i don't see a lot of differences and i think the final nail in the coffin for this mentality of let's bet on graphics and it will work out is the ps5 pro because they unveiled the ps5 pro and it was even people were that were like a playstation

make the best graphics even those people were like what are you doing that's it i have my 4k tv i'm playing my game in 4k where's the game i want a game now to play my new console is is it really a new generation like is the ps5 really a new generation i'm not sure i i don't feel like it i i remember seeing the ps5 pro announcement and may look maybe it's just the youtube compression right but like i looked at the side by sides and i just i couldn't see the difference in a lot of cases and when there was a difference you know it'll be in like oh look the crowds in in gran turismo are more detailed like yeah yeah don't look at that i'm not driving at five kilometers an hour i'm not gonna see them and i had fun on on we sport tennis when it was 2d sprite at 2 fps well my favorite my favorite racing game is need

for speed most wanted the entire game has a piss filter on it. Everything's yellow for no reason. So, yeah. So, yeah. And when you say maybe it was a compression, no. People bought the, that's it. People bought the PS5 Pro. They tried it and they told us it's not a big... I saw reviews that were like

yeah, because reviewers try to be positive and enthusiastic so they have to give a positive aspect of the... You want to keep getting invited to those Meteor events. So yeah, if you enjoy

playing at this distance from your TV, you will see difference. That will be dramatically different. But if you play at, like if you sit on a couch, you don't need this new console. I

honestly, I do think we've actually kind of hit a point of not even just diminishing returns at this point like i when we when when i see these like big games that are like you know these crazy ue5 games i just i just look at them like i this doesn't look any better than like, any of the... Like, when like, because UE6 is eventually going to come out, there's going to be some tech dominoes, they're going to be like, look at this, perfect, realistic

lighting. But I think the other issue, and this is one of the things I actually don't like about ray tracing, I feel like ray tracing is it's this... How would you say? It's kind of taken away the creativity of lighting. Because a lot of...

There's this idea that lighting needs to be realistic. And it... Sometimes. Yeah, in some games it makes a lot of sense, but... That's the thing. Realistic is one art style. Right, that's the problem.'s realistic is one art style right that's the problem yeah we've put so much and nintendo again great example of this nintendo doesn't care at all that their games don't look realistic yeah they they have better much better looking water than they did

on the game cube and they've much better look- like their physics engine, considerably better, you know, they can- they have much higher quality models, but you look at a Nintendo game- this, I think, is the prime example. You look at a Nintendo game, and you know exactly what game that is from, and I think this is the case with games like Astro Bot as well, and that's what Sony did really well with it. But then you look at a lot of these realistic looking games and I couldn't tell you what a screenshot of them are from. Yeah, and I remember, I don't know if it was a Game Award or a Summer Game Fest or something like that.

But at some point we had a lot of... I think it was the summer game fest uh where there were there was concord revealed and there were um um black mirror the new the new no not black mirror mirror no like what's the game? Perfect Dark, sorry. Total Shield. Yeah, I was really far. They unveiled a new Perfect Dark. And I think a lot of the audience was exactly as you said, like, it's the same game. You're showing the same game 20 times now.

But as you said, ray tracing, times now but as you said ray tracing it was unveiled as a way to simplify work for developers and exactly as you said I think if every like it's going to be

way harder to give identities to games using only ray tracing because then you have you have to um to like use real techniques to create like you need to be like um um a cinema at this at that point you need to employ photography people to be able to place lights at the right place or stuff like that.

But at some point, one indie game maker is going to come here and just use a big pixelated shader and everyone will like this game. Great examples. Have you played Ori before? Ori? Yeah, O-R-I. Yeahi yeah or i yeah yeah yeah the lighting that game's not realistic at all not even close but it's gorgeous yeah and so so yeah so you we are achieving a realistic game games really well but then when developers had to use all the tricks in the book to

be able to obtain a level of realistic vibes at that point it was only vibes of they had to make decisions they had to choose like I'm going to add

a way to shade the character should it be smooth should it be should we see the edge and every little decision was made by someone

and when you play the game you don't see every little decision but you feel the intentionality behind everything. Right. And intentionality is getting thrown out of the window with ray tracing, but also AI. Yeah, yeah. How do you feel about the, maybe not like AI content generation,

because that's a whole other topic unto itself, but the idea of like AI frame generation. We can start with that. We can go to the other direction. So not raster graphics, just, you know, the traditional way of handling things. I'll look at like Monster Hunter Wilds, for example. I'm going to play the game because I love Monsanto. But the recommended graphic settings are DLSS enabled, frame gen enabled.

It's like just to get 60 FPS on medium, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my point of view on this is if you use AI, machine learning, all that stuff, for tasks that you know exactly what output you expect, and it's a simple task that you can describe really simply and you could invalidate the output by seeing the output, and you really keep it at that scale. I think those uses of AI are good.

For instance, handwriting text recognition. Sure. This is a great use case because you know that this is not the word you were trying to write and this if you want to do that with traditional algorithms it's horrible

you will need to like to detect edges and like it's horrible but as soon as you take different tasks and you skip the phase where the user sees the output of one task and you group tasks and you have a big output of different tasks and you don't know at all how the AI did that kind of stuff, that's when you lose intentionality, as we said, but also you introduce bias and you introduce edge cases where you didn't know it will happen that way.

So for instance, in handwriting, the worst case is it's a drawing and not a word. So you have an A instead of a little stick figure, you know? But for a lot of other cases, if you didn't know the user will input something, then you don't know what it will output you have no way of knowing how it works and if someone tries to understand how a neural network works it's it will work it will need like maybe hundreds of people working on like for years to decode the weights on the nodes and to understand, oh, that's how the AI did it. They first detect the edges of the writing, but you cannot just figure that out. It's a black box where you don't understand anything and it's really complicated to decode.

So for frame generating, I think it falls into the category of we know what we expect. We know the worst case is an artifact. Like the worst case is, oh, that was a bit blurry or the harm of Spider-Man is now merged with the building for one frame. But it will not change the look of Spider-Man is now merged with the building for one frame, you know? But it will not change the look of your game drastically.

If you stop moving the camera, it's exactly what the artist intend. So for me, it's harmless in that case. Same thing for some denoiser. Don't do amazing work without really changing what you expect. So for that kind of AI, I don't have an issue. The thing is, the way it's marketed by... I find it really funny the way it's marketed by and I find it really funny the way like it's

genius from the from Nvidia and to have marketed all those technologies to have made all those technologies and marketed them as as if it was hardware new hardware stuff when

anyone with the technology could have included that in their game. You know what I mean? It's just a trick. It's a complicated one, but it's a trick. They marketed that as if it was

from the graphics card point of view. So the games uses that software instead of the games having that um uh trick did you see the um the announcement for the intel battle mage cards i heard about it okay so there was a point in it where they were explaining their like AI graphics stack

so they're like okay so we use XCSS which is their like DLSS competitor and then we have frame gen to interpolate new frames and to compensate for the extra input lag we have this other system which predicts what your input is and then sends it to the GPU so we can ensure that the the the

input lag is less and the demo they showed was very funny because they they compared the XCSS and frame gen with that system versus without, but they didn't compare it against not having any of that. So they were like, oh, look how much better the input lag improvement is compared to this. Like, okay, but what about actually rendering real frames?

Rendering the frame, yeah. I think they did frame interpolation so the stack now is you're rendering a 720p frame

and you're interpolating pixels to have a 1440p image and then you're interpolating frames between them to have double the frame rate and i think it's and then you have your your your ai input management thing to ensure that your input lag is not too high so it's uncomfortable to play and then at the end you have

the player that plugs that into their tv with frame interpolation turns on yeah just with latency look at this point why even have a video game just just imagine everything just just interpolate everything but i think it's a good compromise because we don't need 4k right i 4k i remember when 4K was first coming out, people were like, is this going to be the next jump? Because, you know, I was there with the move to 720p, and that was a giant jump. I was there with the move to 1080p.

I was there when some people tried 1440, but like that, I think it's around 20% on the Steam Hardware Survey. So, you know, a sizable amount of people, but it just never really caught on as much. And then 4k, it's just like... It's never really been a big deal because with the the earlier resolution jumps, firstly there are a lot smaller jumps, right? Going from 720 to 1080, to 1080 is a lot less than 1080 to 4k because that

is a 4x increase in the number of pixels you have to render but also yeah but it's a bigger increase uh from the your perception sure sure uh but my the other point i was going to get at is as those improvements were happening we're also having a lot of improvements in model quality and improvements were happening, we're also having a lot of improvements in model quality and games were being rendered at higher and higher like internal game resolutions like for the models, for the grasses, for the improved physics engines, improved game AI, so we never really got to a point where those- like it sort of caught up and 4k's always been like further down the line and on monitors like frankly 4k doesn't matter like on a on a big tv got like that's cool sure but like if you're playing on

a 27 inch monitor like yeah so so from my point of view if if you have a 4K monitor or TV and you want to play your game in 4K, from my point of view, there's no need for that. So if you interpolate the pixels for your 4K TV, you're barely going to see those new pixels. And so if they are interpolated, is it a big deal? that you're barely going to see those new pixels. And so if they are interpolated, is it a big deal? Of course, if you're rendering a 360p game and trying to get 1080 from that, I think that will be horrible. I can confirm, I've tried it before. It's a funny experiment, right? Like, it's it's a funny experiment right like it's cool that it

can happen but like it's yeah it's not good but when when we're when we are debating can you really like you see a lot of videos can you really see the difference between those two tvs that one uh i'm not going to tell you the resolution. And then people have to be like that close to be able to say, oh yeah, there's a difference. At that point, there is a perceptual difference, of course. But at that point, you can just use interpolated pixels to fill the gaps. And I don't think it's a big issue.

And that way, from the developer perspective, we can then focus on making good games and not making games that will run on 8K. Please don't continue increasing the resolution. We don't care. And we don't want developers to have to... Developers already have to like developers already have to um lower their like to think about a someone is going to want that native on 4k at 120 and i think people don't understand that when

developer have this goal in mind it's it's going to have impact on first the game cost so the game like all of your game you have a budget for it so if you put time and effort for making it work on 4k 120 fps that's effort not not put into another quest another you know right. So, yeah. So I think we I think we should all target I know a lot of players will be mad about this. 1080 60 FPS. Well, you shouldn't really be.

If you're tying your game to your frame rate, I think we have a problem there. I agree with the 1080 part, but like you you don't i'm not saying to okay sure i'm saying targeting so that means oh so like playable at that rate sure yeah yeah so when you make the game with you the intended hardware so for consoles it's it's uh it's way um simpler. You know what the hardware is. For PC, you expect the players to have, for instance, 3060s, okay, GPUs.

And then when you make the game, you need to make sure if they have a 3060 GPU, the game should be running at 60 FPS on 1080 1080p so that's what i'm saying where when i say targeting if someone has a 4080 ti or i think they're it's 50 now i'm not sure i don't 50 comes out next year i believe yeah if they have 40 80 ti or something like that and they want to run the game at 4K 120, they can try, you know? But I think we should target 1080, 60 FPS and then we can unlock greater resolutions

or frame rate with interpolation and DLSS and stuff like that. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. Well, I guess we've sort of like gone down like a side tangent for a while, but I did want to ask you about, now that you've got your game releasing on Steam,

what is it, like eight? Ten days from now, nine, ten days from now, something like that. Yeah, yeah, that's it. What is the process like of actually getting a game onto steam like how do you do that where do you begin so i'm i'm not sure what i can i i'm sure there's stuff i cannot say because there are agreements but i'm going to talk about stuff that i read i i read online anyway, so that's already known. So you have to pay a fee to be able to create a page on there.

You have an application to be added. Then they accept your page. So you don't have to show any game for this. You just have to show the concept. And it's recommended to create the page as early as possible to be able to get people to wishlist the game and to have some hype for the game. I, I already have 1000, more than 1000 wishlist on.

Wow. Okay. That's cool. So go,000 wishlists on Farax's list. Wow, okay, that's cool. So go wishlist it before the release because I think your place on the store will be impacted by the number of wishlists. I'm not sure about this, but that's what everyone's saying. Yeah, I've heard that from other indie devs so I I would assume that's the case yeah but then you you have to make all okay so I have so many hats because I will I will have someone employed to just create all the assets for the store you

have to create so much assets uh for all the possible like you know when you play the game you have a little a picture of the game you're playing this and this is in it's in landscape then you go into your library and it's a portrait of your of your asset of your game you have to create all of this um logo and yeah so the logo you should have your logo already but you have to provide uh the logo the icon for the launcher all of that stuff you have to to add it then you have to create pages i made the decision to make a game that is available in French and English. So you have to localize everything. And then you have to submit a build to Steam. In my case, I already had a beta version of the game.

So I could have just released that on Steam. But I wanted people to feel like it was made for Steam. So I was not really a Steam user before. This, I had an account and I think I had Portal 2 because you had a code in the box like 10 years ago or something like that. But I wasn't really a user, so I bought some game this summer

to try to see what people might expect from a game. And there are some features I feel like that are expected from games on Steam. Achievements. I feel like people like to be games on Steam. Achievements. I feel like people like to be able to have achievements for the game. You have controller Steam

input support to be able to use any controller. They made a really good job from the user. Specifically from the user. I see. What's the developer experience like?

From the user perspective, it's so cool because you can, like I played with gyro control Horizon with my PS4 controller. So that was really nice. From the developer perspective, it was quite a mess.

I had to make an abstraction layer into my game to make it think the Steam Input was a real controller. And I had to interface with Steam Input. I would assume that Godot probably has something there to help you with that? There's ank made by uh i uh wait i need i i need to shout out because they they make an amazing amazing work go to go to steam it's called uh so go to go to steam is an sdk is the way to interface with Steam SDK with Godot.

It's not part of Godot, but it's supported by... Yeah, the developer is called Gramps. They make amazing work on this tool and they support people in their Discord server and all. So yeah, the community is really helpful. I did not have to create my own way to interface with Steam SDK. I had the chance to be able to use this tool.

But even then, you need to make it work with your already made game. Next time, it will be easier for me because I will think about this while making the game this time I didn't have this chance but then you need to create your own controller default

mapping that was a strange process because you need to make that from the client okay as a like I think you have yeah I have to you have to make the map like you create the actions

and that people can map you make that in a config file that you submit but then you also have to map those actions that in a config file that you submit. But then you also have to map those actions to the actual buttons from the client as if you were a player tweaking the game. Okay. And then you need to set that as the default for the game.

So that was a weird one, especially when you're on Linux and you have both Steam running in Flatpak or natively on your computer. You have to find the config files in the mess that is.

You know what could happen here. Okay, yeah. So that was interesting. You also have to support cloud saves. So yeah, I decided... Oh yeah, also, once you support the Steam input,

that means that the game should be able to run flawlessly on the Steam Deck. I was going to ask you about that. That's really cool. I don't have a Steam Deck and I don't know how to get verified yet, but if I

understand things correctly, the game should run on Steam Deck just fine because I made it on Linux, so that part is good. Assuming you're not doing anything horribly stupid, you've got controller support, so that part is good. Assuming you're not doing anything horribly stupid you've got controller support so that should be fine. Should. Yeah exactly

and also we didn't talk about this but my game I added full multiplayer mode. Local multiplayer mode. Four players can play together. Two players can play together with two two player can play

on a keyboard on one keyboard with uh one of them is playing with wsd other one is playing with the hours so you can play on the laptop with two two two person if you don't have controllers or stuff like that but you can go crazy and plug all your controllers i tried with joypens i tried with the ps4 controllers and it works um is there anything special you have to do from the steam input side to make that happen apart from solving my own bugs, I think it should, like if you can support one controller, then you should be able, like as I said, I made an abstraction layer in my game so that all the interfacing with Steam

will be then plugged into my game as if someone was playing with a standard controller. So I had some issues that I had to fix, but it was my fault. But what that means, that means that now you can play at remote play and also remote play together. Oh, okay.

Is there anything special you have to do from that or is that just all like, that just works? If you support Steam input it should work. Okay. So I played a game remotely with one of my

friends through the Steam remote play together. So I was pretty happy that I didn't, because I don't have any experience with networking yet in my games. So you can have an online multiplayer experience using Steam Remote Play Together. so that's pretty cool yeah because it's it's becoming harder and harder to gather four people right right what about things like um

steam cards what what's that well that's That answers my question. Should I add that to my to-do list right now? You don't really need to. Steam cards? What's that? What are they called? They're not called Steam cards? The Steam... Steam... What the hell are they called? There's like a collectible system within within steam um what the hell are they called oh like um all the workshop stuff what the hell are they why am i blanking on the

words are they not called what the what what are... I thought they were called Steam... What? Are they not called Steam Cards? I'm really bothered now. Are you talking about the workshop? Steam Workshop? Is that what they're part of? The Steam Trading Cards. There we go.

No, I did not... I've used for this in my game game okay because some games like you'll just like do an achievement and it's like here's a card and people like trade them on on the steam you can like sell the cards and okay yeah if i there's a lot of games that do it a lot of games that don't it's certainly not a requirement by any means but it's another one of those things you can do if you have a game on Steam achievements were

quite there were no achievement system at all in my game so I had to find like fun stuff to fun achievements to unlock i had to make all the icons for all the achievements and i had to make all the system to be able to track if you unlocked it or not um so that and i okay and i had to make sure every work that I was doing on my game for the Steam version, I will be able to cut for a non-Steam version of the game. So there's a lot of layers to be sure I will be able to just remove the Steam content without having to remove achievements, for instance.

Like I might want to add achievements for a non-Steam version of the game, like maybe a built-in achievement system in the game so there's a lot of um a planning to be made to be sure you're not like making a mess uh a tangled uh mess where you cannot release your game without having steam stuff inside it you know you know i'd never even thought about that i guess that is that like i just you know a lot of games do end up releasing on platforms like GOG and things like that but just if you want to support Steam the fact that there is all of this extra stuff that you need to

and I'm sure it's the same if you wanted to build on a console right you wanted to build a PS5 there's probably some system there to get their controllers working and then they have like certain games on console now have keyboard mouse support and then they have their own achievement system but then the different consoles have their own different achievement system so if

you want to do the xbox one it's different from the playstation different from nintendo yeah that that just had never really like come to me as as a thing you need to actually consider. Yeah, and then you have to support a lot of platforms as one person. I had to cut, for instance, Mac compatibility. The game works on Mac M1 chips chips like in Apple Apple chips the thing is they want me to sign my code or something and I what I wanted to release the game and I was like so it's not working on Intel Macs I would have to have a dedicated version for Intel Max. And even with a dedicated version for Intel Max,

it's not working on all Intel Max. I had some people try and it crashed their computer completely. Oh. Yeah. It's working on Apple M1 that people tried, but it's not working right now with the steam sdk because the the sdk itself is not signed by me so i will need to figure that out and i was like i'm one person go get the non-steam version on itch when I release it

yeah that's understandable I have I think I have 20 person 20 Mac users that wishlist the game so I'm like I'm sorry but no that's understandable

yeah but yeah it would be great then to release on yeah i'm i'm future-proofing because i want to release that game after on other platforms after this um so it it will i will be able to to do so yeah that's cool um well that and at least now that once you've done it right once you've done it once doing it for a future title now that you have that knowledge and hopefully you've written the code in a way that it can be like reused maybe or at least like even if it can't be reused directly you've understand the concept now yeah you can build that again in the future maybe at some

point build a a generic solution or if you want to just ship it between different games like you can go ahead and do so and and just to understand all the packaging building depot system of steam they they have three layers of they have packaged depot builds branches and you haven have to understand all of this now I understand all of that as I said if I the next game I will have all of this in mind from the get go

it will be way way easier in the end to have everything in the game yeah and I know what to what the scope might be for this part of the work

honestly when I released the multiplayer update I think it was in August I was like let's get the Steam stuff done and release and maybe it's October, September release Like, let's get the Steam stuff done and release. And maybe it's October, September release.

Yeah, good luck with that. To end with the steps for releasing on Steam, then you show your build, like you send your build. They played the game the the the the review uh i'm not sure i can share too much about the review but they did get to they did unlock the expert mode expert mode in the game and they did try one game in expert mode. So I'm like, yeah, there's someone out there that tried my game and that made good advice for like you might want to, for instance, when you unplug a controller, you might want the game to pause.

So that means two things. First, they try to do that in my game so they they spend time to try to do stuff in my game to see if they work but also they they might have a list of things to try to see if the game uh lacks some features on it yeah a lot of games i'll find if you try to plug in the controller after it's started or you hot swap different controllers some games just they will either not detect the controller that you've plugged in or they will use the wrong button prompts it'll show the playstation prompts instead of the xbox oh that's probably another thing you've had you had to deal with do you actually show the button prompts? I dumped it down so much that you can use any button

to access. Okay, okay. You just need to show like a D-pad maybe if that's what you want to show. I hate Xbox and Nintendo for having A and B at their different place

and for Xbox to have it at the same place but doing different actions this is a button on nintendo and this is accept on nintendo this is circle on ps playstation and this is console this except either some older Japanese titles and this is a problem I've run into before it was quite common for circle to be accepted because circle is often used in Japanese

like tests to mark the thing you got correct and cross for wrong maybe so yeah so in my game, if you do any of those ones, it accepts. Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, that saves you a lot more assets to draw. But, yeah, but I have a cursor on screen to show what you're targeting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And that took me a long time to get working because I also need to make that work

for multiplayer so you have different cursors pointing at different buttons but Godot don't have any native solution for multiple focus you cannot have multiple like two UI items

focused at once by two different persons so I had to make my own way to interact with UI to be able to make all of that work so that was a big part of the work well we've passed the two hour mark now and i think this was a good episode i really did enjoy this there's uh there's there's plenty more that we could talk about

in other episodes in the future hopefully we're not uh yeah wait four years to do the next one yeah i would be really glad to come back in the future yeah so if anyone wants to go and have a look at the game or get in contact with you or anything like that where can they go so the the game i have a um fallacyquiz.com you can go there and you should be able to find the the link to Steam here so that's an easy way to find it falasiquiz.com all letters attached if you want to find me

I have timkriev.com but maybe links.timkriev.com because that way you can find me online on various platforms. Blue Sky popped off recently. I was hesitant of getting out of Twitter, but getting more followers on Blue Sky than on twitter was a great incentive to so yeah so i'm i'm on blue

of course i'm on mastodon too and you can find all those links on links.teamcref.com you also have to reach on there as well for some of your other titles yep yeah yeah and yeah if you want to get in contact with me feel free to do so um i will be glad to to talk i really like your links websites that's like a it's it's some people go a bit too crazy with it but like i think that's like a nice a nice effect you have going on there i need to rewind at some point. I went too crazy before that one. The first attempt was a Voronoi simulator kind of stuff,

and it was too much. I think the only thing that looks out of place on your site is the text that's not in any of the boxes. Like, the boxes themselves are great, but the text is just like, ah, yes. Generic sans serif text. I'll try to fix that. But it's completely responsive.

Yeah, no, it works really well. So, that was the main focus. Yeah. Yeah, so when does the game come out? Just as a reminder. So that was the main focus. Yeah. Yeah. So when does the game come out? Just as a reminder.

It will be out December 19th in nine days now. Maybe if you're listening, it will be a week or something. Oh, yeah. I'll get this out early. So I might put it up as the next episode. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Just so it's, you know, actually like ready for when the game comes out. Yeah. Anything else you want to mention? I already know what I want to do next, what my next project is going to be. Okay.

I'm really glad that I got a lot of experience through all of those experiments and projects that now I feel like I can work as a major developer. I know how to go to the end of a project, which is a big hurdle for indies. So I'm really excited for the next project. I've wanted to start the next project for three months now, but I did not fall into the trap of starting again a new project during another one. So yeah, can't wait.

Awesome. Maybe before that one's done, you can come back on. So, you know, it's not four years from now when that game's done. Sure. I know, it works out now to get in the future. If you want to come back on, there's plenty more we can discuss. It was a really fun episode. Yeah, I didn't have an opportunity to rant about uh having both snaps and flat pack

on my computer well yeah we can do that next time then we yeah we we don't have two hours right now to talk about that but we will need to talk about that absolutely absolutely um yeah as for my stuff uh my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I've got the gaming channel Brody on Games. I probably have finished Kingdom Hearts 3 at this point, and I hope to God I'm going to be done with Blacksmith Wukong. I'm so sick of this stupid secret boss.

It is... Whoever designed Erlang Shen, you deserve to live in the fiery pits of hell. This thing is so stupid! Anyway, I've got the React channel as well. Feel free to check out.

I just upload clips from the gaming streams there. And the podcast, if you're listening to the audio version, you can find the video version on YouTube at TechOverTea. If you'd like to find the audio version it is on basically every podcast platform we also have the video release over on spotify so uh yeah you can check that out as well i will give you the final word what do you want to say thank you very much for having me okay that you know what that's actually the shortest final word i've ever had. Absolute pleasure.

Yeah, I'd be happy to do this again anytime in the future. See you.