Tech Over Tea - I Defeated My VR Sickness!! | Fringe Realities

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Today we have the developers of Project Nova from Fringe Realities on the podcast once again, Project Nova is a VR space puzzle/atmospheric game and this year I got a chance to try it out at AVCon 2025.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://fringerealities.wixsite.com/my-siteSteam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3446100/Project_Nova_DemoYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@FringeRealitiesTwitter: https://x.com/FringeRealitiesLinktree: https://linktr.ee/fringerealities==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm Azuja host, Brodie Robertson, and today, this is the first of the post-Avcon podcast. So, if you are interested in seeing a bunch of indie game devs talk about games, we're going to be doing so for probably the next, I think next couple of months of episodes. There's going to be other ones strewn in between as well, so if you find that fun, pop around for them. So today we actually have a returning studio, the developers of Project Nova Fringe Reality, How about you guys introduce yourself and then we'll go from there.

How are you doing? I'm Matt. It's not, Mark. I thought you're gonna say a bit more than that, maybe. No, man, I'm nice and simple. Keep a short and sweet. Fair enough, fair enough. I guess the very first place, for anyone who hadn't seen the prior... Just to have this one be like a self-contained thing. For anyone who hasn't seen it, what is fringe realities and what is the game that you guys are working on?

on? We are a, currently, we are a VR-focused indie dev studio from Adelaide. We did four years worth of study through AA to, like, you know, gain our technical skills and stuff. And from there, did a business course, formed our team. And we're now in the process of wrapping up our second game, which is Project Nova. Project Nova is a VR, shockingly VR sci-fi

atmospheric puzzle solving more of a walking simulator vibe as most VR games are basically you are an engineer aboard this vessel the Nova Aurora

and whilst you've been in stasis the ship was struck by a passing meteor and from there you wake up and are tasked with repairing the various systems that have been damaged so what are both of your roles in the studio just so we're clear on that

I am the environment artist I'm level designer I do all the lighting for the game and some audio too okay awesome Um, well, this year I actually got a chance to try out the game. Last year, when I had, who, I had you on, Matt, who else was with you? Alex.

Alex, yes. Okay, okay. Yeah, um, last year I hadn't actually got a chance to try out the game. I thought it was cool. I think, I don't remember who put us in touch. Maybe it was, was it Johnny or someone else? I think it was Johnny, yeah. Yeah.

Um, I thought the game was really cool. I thought it was a neat concept, but you can't really, fully understand what it's going to be like unless you've actually tried it. And is the demo you guys had at Avcon the same demo that's available on Steam, or is that a different build? Yeah, yeah. The one that's up on

Avcon is also the one that's up on Steam right now. We're doing some post-avcon upbeaty stuff to it, just based on some things we sort of saw over the weekend, but overall, nothing too major is getting fixed up for Switch. Yeah, luckily no one broke our game.

Yeah. Well, how long's it been a work in progress for at this point? We passed two years on the week of Abgon. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Is that how long has been in development for? And had it been like an idea before that maybe hadn't been started?

Is it or is it like two years of actual like work? I think it's like two years of actual like work from pre-production right through. I think I got like a memory on my phone pop up of like the post-it notes up on the like wall of our old office. Mm-hmm. that's awesome um so yeah this year actually got a chance to play it and i'm i've never really been much of a person who does VR gaming i don't have a headset myself i have done some stuff in the past uh i knew someone who had like an oculus dev kit too back when those were first the thing uh they were not pleasant at the time i've used a vibe before i've used a cheap headset

before and i definitely had an issue early on where i would start from motion sickness. And I was worried about that when I went into playing this. I know we talked last time about like dealing with motion sickness issues. And I do want to get more into that as well. But when I played it, I didn't have any issue with it whatsoever. I don't know why. Like I wasn't even using the teleport at the time. I was just walking around. And for some reason, for some reason, it just, nothing really felt off to me. And that's good because it actually allowed me to experience. what it was like and really try it out and sort of understand what you guys were going for here. Yeah, we seem to have had that feedback across the board where it's on a lot of people who've never even touched VR before have played it and haven't experienced any motion sickness. People who normally do don't experience motion sickness. I think of everyone that's ever tested it, I think it was one fellow at AvCon last year got a bit. funny and I had to sort of stop and I think another one this year she had never touched a

headset before and this was like her first time ever putting one on and she felt a bit off but like overall like 98% you know well that's actually honestly that's that's nice to see right like knowing that people can actually play the game like that's a let alone whether they enjoy it like just the the the entry point of we made it a game that is actually something people can play and doesn't immediately make them sick. It's a good deal. 100%. Yeah. So, if I remember correctly with the demo, the opening segment was you going through that

hallway and then having to like cut the panel and find like the chips and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, power batteries, essentially. Right, right, right. Okay. And one of the things that immediately became clear to me is that there is, like, an intentional use of color to indicate the items that actually are interact. I did notice that there are some other things that I don't think you can interact with that use a green and red, like lights on the wall. But besides that, like, for the most part, like, if there's an object, there's.

was useful. I think that's a problem that a lot of games do have, not just VR games, where it's kind of hard to work out what is the thing that you're actually looking for? And what is the way to indicate

that that's the thing you're looking for whilst keeping it like in a way that makes sense in the world? Yeah, we designed it that way on purpose. We also had some colorblind people play and there was a little bit of confusion as to

what color was what? Specifically those batteries that you're talking about. Originally there was that little red strip to indicate if it was empty or not, but the whole thing

was red. Right. And the green one was also completely full as well. So they had trouble indicating which one was which. so we ended up

just essentially just making sure that people know that it's empty by like your phone battery right so it's got like a tiny little bit of like red just to indicate

you know it's dying so that seemed to have helped um so you're not just using like color as a queue you're also using like geometry as a queue as well yeah we put symbols in as well. Like the laser cutter that's directly next to that puzzle. Yeah, we've put in like the

image of like the laser cutter to indicate, yeah, what you need to do in that section and then again, those two are coloured as well. So what was the state of things during AvCon last year and what's changed since then? Because I, again, I didn't get a chance to play that version. But it did sound like you'd worked on some tutorial stuff that maybe wasn't there before and yeah basically how's how has it improved since that

last demo? You want to tag that one? Because you were at the Avcon last year. Yeah, that's true. Avcon last year it was a much earlier demo. Basically we had sort of gotten into a point

where we were happy with playing it, but it was also like still very early on. It was like very sort of bare bones, which visually not a hell of a lot's changed, but we've gone in and polished up, made things look a bit more older, degraded, some quality of life stuff. Optimization. Yeah, that's the big one. Like, especially with a demo, like, it wasn't too bad overall.

But, like, just going through making sure with all of the, you know, art stuff that we've added in afterwards, like, set dressing and, you know, the tablets and these extra rooms that we've put in now, bringing all of that in has obviously taken up more space and power and stuff. So we've needed to, like, switch things around and optimize some stuff. But even as a whole for the game, like, all we had last year was this sort of earlier demo section. But now the whole game is close to completion. So we're working on sort of what comes after the demo. Because this is more of like a vertical slice of like the sort of 20-ish minutes worth of the gameplay of like the full sort of hour, hour and a half. So does that exist right now or is the demo like what you guys have?

The whole thing exists. But only thing that's on Steam right now is the demo. Right, right. looking for a full release around September. And most of that is, yeah, like, finished off now. It's just, like, testing, tweaking and, like, marketing. Yeah. So, yeah.

So when it comes, I want to go back to that, like, whole thing with the, the coloring before. Have you considered, because I know it is obviously red and green, have you considered adding in the option for people who are red green colorblind to indicate that through different colors or some, filter that could be applied to. I know you can obviously do filters with like the Nvidia control panel and things like that. But have you considered actually having something like that

directly in the game itself? Not currently. If there is demand for it, like post-release, then 100% yeah, we'll definitely look into that. Right. I know it's something like in like Nvidia, AMD has it as well where you can just apply that over the top of everything.

so someone who does need that could, you know, there's already a workaround that exists to make that problem go away. But I know a lot of games still do have settings of their own because, you know, if it's a setting within the game, that gives the developers more control over how that's going to sort of interact with the game elements rather than just like a flat filter over the screen

dealing with the problem like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of, as I said, it's just like, we would, like, love to do something like that, but you currently, there's not the biggest demand for that right now. Like, we have only had, like, a smallish, like, sort of sample size from, like, our cons that we've been to, and we've only come across it, like, maybe twice. Right.

Okay. And, yeah, so, like, because we've had, like, written feedback stating that, and that's where we actually did set, like, sat down. and actually talked about what can we do that's the most value for time to try and fix rather than implementing a whole new system.

Sure, sure, right. Because obviously that takes quite a lot of time to do. Sure. Like, at the end of the day, like you can keep adding things until the end of time, but it's just a matter of... Correct, yeah.

Where, what, you know, scope, right? Like, how big do you want the scope to actually be? Where are you going to actually find a point that you want to release this title? and, you know, work on the next one, do whatever ends up coming next. Yeah, 100%. So, going through the demo,

the first section was the whole little puzzle thing where you find the chips and the energy cells. Then from there, the spacewalk isn't next? The spacewalk's a little bit later, isn't it? Correct. It's technically next in terms of the big thing that you do, but yeah, there's a bit of walking in between. Right, right, right, right.

Visual stuff. Yeah, the Spacewalk was a section that I heard about last time that I was, I was concerned with, with how it was going to feel when I actually tried it myself. Because it's one thing to be fine on the ground where, you know, you're walking, you know the grounds below you, but, like, my, maybe my problems with VR comes from the fact that my first experience literally was of rollercoaster demo on the Oculus DK2

which is the worst possible way that you can experience VR for the first time, especially if you're doing it standing up. Yes, 100%. Yeah. The first person to tell us that either. Yeah.

Look, the whole idea for that spacewalk actually came from a BBC Spacewalk VR demo. And I played that, I think, through twice. It was cool, but at the same time, it was awful. Because you had zero control at all.

You were, like, a static player, and the camera forced your movement. Which, that's what made me sick. And normally, like, I don't really get sick in VR, because, like, I've been developing for it for a while. I'm used to, like, extremely low frame rates that would make everyone sick. I've just grown tolerant to it. But, yeah, like, playing that, and as soon as you get, like, certain movements that are normally given to you, taken away, no good.

Right. Okay, so it's, it feels too limiting, and because of that, it creates, like, a very jarring experience where it, like, you know that you're in a game world, and it, like, throws you off. Yeah, pretty much. It's like the roller coaster. It's like the same sort of principle. You're not in control of what you're doing,

which I think is where your brain decides, you know, this is not good. Like, I bet if you were on that roller coaster sim and you were sitting in a seat, it might have actually felt better. Probably, yeah. Because when you ride roller coasters, you are in a seated position and you're strapped in. whereas if you're just standing up and you're just having this like roller craster like thrust upon you

you're going to guess it sure sure sure um yeah no I think it's a really fair point the because I think of the people that go and play things like gorilla tag and they have absolutely no issue of that whatsoever but you might be right

that it's not necessarily the speed at which you're moving it's the sense of control And in a game like that, you know, you have complete control over where you're going to go. So even though it's very fast, even though you're falling, even though a lot of things are happening, like you know that you can do something about it. It's not something that is just happening. It's not something where you feel completely disconnected from what's happening within the game. Yeah.

it's yeah control is key the spacebook segment was very interesting I went into that I was like so you start with it

you put the helmet on which is neat I like that that was nice little touch didn't have to be there but it was a nice little touch and you get out to the bars and it is

it is cool to be like you know I know initially you would expect to like you know climb along and grab the bars but I very quickly

felt kind of comfortable with it and was just throwing myself across and I did that with the expectation that I was going to feel bad like that that's the reason why I did so and it didn't happen it didn't happen whatsoever and I look my my my angle wasn't great and I kind of screwed it up a couple of times but it was it was still fun I think the only problem I had with the spacewalk is when you go under the bars and I'm sure other people people have had this as well where there's like the open section onto the left hand side people have thrown themselves over to that bit and that's like outside of the map you're not supposed to be there and I did the same thing as well um I I'm assuming other people have done

the same thing as that's not just a me thing yeah we've had everyone do pretty much everything right at this point like there's yeah a giant like the vent that you start climbing across at the very beginning then there's that like little jump that you have to like get onto the outside of the ship there's a little gap there that actually shows inside where the lab used to be we actually had people

just want to go in there for no reason but because we found that people were doing that we had to put like a killbox to stop people from doing that yeah the other thing we could have done

is like put more geometry there to block you from sort of going in. Right, like another beam coming down or something where it's obvious you're supposed to go in there. Yeah, but then it's also like, hey, if you're going to throw yourself in there, here's the consequences, you know what I mean? Sure.

Yeah. We also did extend the time of respawn to because it was actually pretty like close and immediate to your area. And we did notice that like because people were thinking themselves

around quite a lot that they didn't really get to see much if that makes sense so we kind of just extended the time it would take to like respawn you so you could actually see more of the ship right right it's just a visual thing

so you made like a bit more forgiving for where it's going to knock you out yeah effectively right that was also sorry no going going That was also based on some feedback and stuff that we had as well. Because initially the way that we developed to be sort of that instant thing was like, we just assumed people would be annoyed if they like flung themselves and they're just like drifting for a bit before like coming back.

Yeah, sure. So we were like, yeah, to save you guys the pain point of like being frustrated, we'll just, you know, you get too far, you're back in the thing, respond. Then yeah, we got the feedback of, oh, there's no consequence. You don't feel like you're drifting away. it's like, well, it's the, you know, I mean, to find the middle ground, I guess. Like, it was interesting. We also have the, um, the, like, jetpack or whatever it is.

So you can, you can, like, adjust yourself back towards where you need to be. That's actually, uh, not really a bug as such or, like, a feature. It's kind of like, it was a bonus of using the continuous movement. because with the teleport mode you don't get that you are literally it's way more unforgiving in terms of like how the gravity works but because you're using continuous movement

the character controller it still wants to like use those forward inputs and move you so it might seem like you have a chairpack on but you're kind of just walking through space I see so when you teleport does Does it, like, immediately cut your momentum?

Yeah, for the most part, yeah. So, like, we kind of tried to, like, design the area around being close to grab stuff. Like, being able to, like, yeah. So we also implemented a checkpoint in the middle, which you have to, like, tell, well, you can teleport to it. You don't have to, just to make it easier. but yeah, it's just so you're like near things to grab. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right, going back to the whole thing about the kill zones and how far away you can get, this is a problem that a lot of games run into because you're always going to butt up heads with the people who want it to be convenient and the people who want to take really stupid shortcuts because they're trying to speed run things. Yep.

There was a... I don't remember what the game's called, but there's this... It's like a... like run real fast, you kill enemies, jump around, all this sort of stuff. And the dev originally, they wanted to make the killboxes

very, very hard, very clear. Like, there were ways you could use the momentum and jump over entire building and skip half the level. So he wanted to do that. to make it initially that you couldn't do that. But then that annoyed the speedrunners. And then he got rid of that.

And then because he had a leaderboard system, then the speed runners were entirely dominating the leaderboards. So it was like, okay, do we have a leaderboard of the speed runners who want to do like skips? And then do we have the speed runners who want to go the intended route? It's like, you have to sort of decide what the vision is and where you want to, because people are always going to find ways to break the game. no matter what you do

they're always going to find things so you have to have this vision of what do we intend for people to do and what is the extent that we expect people to do that we want to sort of we want to not necessarily encourage but allow forward the way that we are designing it yeah

we have an unintended skip in the spacewalk where that checkpoint is and where you have to like cut the debris in that tiny little section there there is a proper checkpoint like save system so if you mess up you'll be respawned there

but because of the respawn system that people were commenting about that then allowed people to actually just fly straight over the top of it and completely skip the checkpoint and go all the way to the ladder of the other side

I see so you can skip it if you want we're not going to have any consequences for that if you screw up you'll go all the way back to the very beginning because you didn't get the checkpoint so that's kind of like consequence for doing that it's funny that you mentioned the whole speed running thing as well because at the conventions as soon as people start to get comfortable with it and then they die they get quicker which then leads to them dying more because they get overconfident they get overconfident and just fling themselves.

Yeah. I think you did it once. I think you did it once. Like, we've had, like, we had one kid play a bunch. Hmm.

And he spent, like, he sped through the whole thing faster than anybody, but he spent like a good two minutes just flinging himself between things, getting slightly off course, damn it,

just, but, and then like, he'd missed the grab and, and over and over again, get to the next point where he's like, finally, I got that bit down and then do it again.

And it's like, You just got to slow down. The game's not about doing it quickly. The game's about you feeling what you're feeling. You know, like just take your time. Yeah, it's a fun consequence of seeing people just getting overconfident. Yeah, like once you've done a segment and maybe didn't hit the checkpoint zone, but you've done most of the segment.

Like, yeah, I understand why you want to run through that as quickly as possible. You don't want to deal with it. Like, you know, I understand the. atmosphere thing but like once you've already done it and you screw up right at the end you're like okay i don't actually i don't want to do this again there's like very few situations where i i will do something and mostly do it and then want to do the exact same thing again like um i'm playing kazan the first berserker on the stream right now which like a souls like game if i die just before i get to a save zone i'm not going to fight everything i'm going to avoid every single

thing possible to get back to where I was. Yeah, you're going to play it properly once or twice. And then after that, you're just like, I don't need to do this anymore. Yeah, yeah. And you just run through everything. Yeah, yeah. Unless there's some, like, you know, you're grinding resources, whatever. Like, in cases like that, sure, yeah.

But, like, if the goal is to get back to a destination, I'm getting back to the destination. And then I'm probably going to die earlier anyway and ruin everything and spend three times as long doing it. Yeah, 100%. What I do like about the... Oh, sorry? No, no, you're good. What I was going to say,

what I do like about the Spacebook segment is, obviously, we talked a little about signposting earlier with the coloring of the elements, or coloring of, like, the chips, the coloring of the energy cells. There's a lot of... I understand some of the discourse online about signposting,

and a lot of games. doing it in a bad way that just doesn't feel contextually consistent, where it's like, okay, why does this random rock have holds on it? Why, why is someone going around the world painting the rocks yellow? Why is there scratch marks on everything that clearly indicates where you can climb on it? And the example I wrote up to you when I was there is in Expedition 33, this is minor spoilers for anyone who hasn't played the game yet. One of the earlier expeditions, their goal was they were the climbing expedition. So they went around the world.

Their goal was to put climbing holds on everywhere the people in future expeditions are going to want to get to. So there's like a consistent law reason why everywhere you go has these obvious holds that were placed there. And like when you find their journal, you find like a big stack of the holds that they were carrying around before. they were able to, like, finish off, um, finish off their, their mission. Um, and from that point on, there's no more holds left. So, like, like, it actually, like, it makes sense in the world. And in the same way here, it makes sense that the things you climb on on the ship are going to be colored.

It makes sense that there is a clear visual indicator that the, the maintenance area of the ship is going to have bars that you can see. A hundred percent. that's, that was the intended part behind it, that, you know, this event had happened on the ship, and the maintenance crew had to find a way to get back up to the bridge. And so it was just like, okay, well, what equipment would they have on the ship and what would they do? So they would have these, like, handholds, and they would just weld them to the outside of the, directly onto the ship. So, yeah, that's, that's the use of those. Mm-hmm.

From there, I believe you go back into the ship, you take off the helmet, and I think maybe surely after that, that's when you see one of the first law tablets. Maybe there's a law tabler earlier, and I missed it. There's one. Okay, okay. Maybe I started forgetting about it. Maybe I missed it. I don't know. But this idea, I've seen a lot of games do this, where rather than putting you into a screen where, rather than putting you into a screen where,

it's like, okay, this is law time, time to law dump. It's like, you can continue going and doing whatever it is you're doing and just let the law play. You can hear it, you can listen to it. And, you know, I do like that as a system, right? Like, it's nice to not, it's nice for the story of the game to not take away from the game, right? Like, cutscenes are nice. I like a really fancy cutscene

That's all cool But at the end of the day I'm playing a game There's exceptions for Kojima games Because Kojima just wants to make a movie And they won't let him He'll make a movie

At some point He's already made enough content For a movie But Outside of cases like that Like I just I want to play the game Yeah 100%

I know earlier on In like VR games, how they would do that is they would actually pull you out of the experience and put you in front of a cinema screen style and play a cut scene on that. Right. And then they would reinsert you back into the game. And that was never an option for us. It was just strictly like world building.

We want like notes you could find or in this case, it's just information on the tablet. And then we were just like, oh, we already. you can't be bothered reading it, so, you know, we created the actual audio dialogue for it, so you could just, like, push the button, throw it and walk away and still be talking. I do think there's, like, an aspect of, like, limitation breeds creativity there where

because you're in VR, you have certain limitations on what you can do, right? Like, yeah, you can put someone in front of a cinema screen, but, like, it just, unless you have a contextual reason for why that's going to happen, And I'm sure you could build a game around where it's like, okay, hey, you're in a VR game, in a VR game, right? And it's like, okay, the law is outside of the VR game. Like, there's like, actually, you could do that.

And it would make sense if you wanted to do it in a good way. But if it's just like, if that's just happening for no reason, it's always going to feel like something is wrong. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. The whole point of VR is to immerse you in what you're doing to then strip that back and then bully show them. that, yeah, no, you are still just playing a game. You might as well have just made it on a flat screen monitor, you know? Like, you take away the purpose of what you've done.

So, yeah, like, we knew that we wanted to have the war in there. And we've got a couple different methods of it. Like, there's the tablets you can pick up, but there's also a couple screens that have little, like, logs and stuff from the past history of the ship. And, yeah, like, both of those were just, like, I think I'd played Fallout while we were sort of developing it or like closely before and like playing through that I would always listen to like the little logs as soon as I'd find them

or like I'd look through all the like computer terminals and like look at the different stuff same with alien isolation which is probably a closer fit for our game where it's like in that you can find you know like oh you got to go into this doctor's office and you know get his key card and if you get the key card you can log into his computer if you want another computer you find

like he's talking about oh my god there's this thing it's crawling around the ship blah blah blah and you like find his body like stuff like that like we don't have any dead bodies or anything but like it's a thing of it adds to the world and makes it feel more lived in

in a way that's more believable than just like if you're going to spend all your time by yourself on this ship which is the whole point where it's like you're meant to feel like the isolation and like the fear of space and just being alone like you got to amplify that somehow and yeah we found that like having little bits of world history that showed other people were here the heightens that really well so was a lot of that stuff there in last year's demo or is that a lot of new stuff?

No. Like, it was all planned. But yeah, none of it was there, which is one of the biggest things of feedback that we got last year was that no one was really feeling the atmosphere. Right. And it was like, interesting, because before that, people were. But in the full game, like, prior to where you're at, there's probably like 15 minutes worth of gameplay, which is set before the incident. so you get to see that there's other people

on the ship and you get a sense for what it was before and then you go back to sleep wake up and you know shit's hit the fan

so it's like okay so this is what's wrong now like stuff's changed this is clearly different but because we have to try to find a good short spot

to like make a demo out of for the story game it's like we chopped it to this section and then lost the starting bit that gives you the context to make this creepy

but then in doing that it's like okay well we can still keep all the stuff that we're adding in here for the full game and just add to it more but it goes to show that like okay yeah well

stuff here you lose the context we've got to reinsert the context and thus this is evidence of life and all that sort of stuff yeah that is a big problem I do see with

demos for story heavy games because if you you can take the opening segment and then not have any of your interesting mechanics yet, you can take the middle segment and have no context for what is happening but you can still show things off

or you can make some sort of custom vertical slice that introduces law introduced some mechanics but it is like a whole different thing you then have to develop outside of your regular sort of development cycle And, you know, if you're, if you're doing a demo for like, um, let's say you have a game that's like a Mega Man clone, right? Like, making a demo for that, that's a really easy thing to do because from the start, it's clear what the game is.

But when your focus is on world building, how did you decide that this was the segment you went with? Was it just, it was, had things you wanted to show off? Like, what was the process there? Initially, the whole dawning of the idea and, like, the centralization of this is the part of the game that we want to show came from the fact that we wanted to build a vertical slice of the game to then go and pitch to, you know, publishers and funding and what sort of stuff, which included that starting sort of section. It was after we got knocked back from all of that stuff. stuff that then we decided, okay, well, we can't afford to make this thing be big, but we still want to show off the work that we've done. And as such, we had to like condense what we had and just pick a good spot where we can introduce

the key mechanics and we're still using those key mechanics and like show them in a way that doesn't feel forced. And yeah, we just happen to find, like, work out the. okay well all the stuff that we're doing in the starter room in the full game we're technically doing in this room now so we can just insert it here sort of thing and it'll just work and like it became a quick fix to a big problem of like okay well we can't show the extra starting bit now because that'll be over half the damn game in this little demo

but yeah so we've had to like chop it into this middle section whereas initially full demo bit with that initial 15 minutes would have been only like you know a quarter or a third of what the game was meant to be because we don't get all that extra stuff

at the end now it's like finding that little slice of what can we show that gives enough of the inkling to what this is without completely you know giving everything away

so with what was shown in the demo like mechanic wise basically you have the spacewalk segment which I think was really cool the I guess welding slash repairing

the ship segment so finding the key cards in wherever they are in that zone cutting off the panel putting the new thing in and that that and mechanic was reused for other segments like where there's like a larger

like PCB you take out and I assume that's going to be used in other segments as well. Is this sort of the extent of the mechanics that are going to be there to play with or are there other things that are in the full game which aren't in this demo? There are a few more planned here. Not planned, there are.

Okay. It's just, yeah, just you have to wait for the full game. Do you want to talk about any of those? Or do you want to save them for the full game? Um... How much do we want to give away? I mean, we can mention it. It's not like it's going to detract from the overall experience.

Okay. If people are watching, they're clearly interested. Like, it must have given something. So, further on in the game, um, one of our doors to a specific area is locked. Mm. And you basically have to take control over a robot. in a, like, a vent system.

So you have to, like, walk through a vent and do a little puzzle in there to, like, restore power to the door. So, yeah, it's basically, yeah, taking control of a different character, I guess. Right. We have a... I think...

Would you got a little line puzzle? Is that what they called, Matt? Yeah, it's something like that. I can't remember what the actual... It's basically you start off in a... a circle and you drag your finger across other circles to like draw a path to the end, basically, without screwing it up. Yeah, we have that valve puzzle. It's not super difficult to turn a valve.

It does a thing. Other than that, that's kind of it. We didn't really want to reinvent the wheel. Right. Because I'd say it's very difficult to come up with something that's brand new. So, like, in our last game, for example, like, we had an actual, like, bulk cutter that would cut, like, locks. Alex spent probably months making and testing that because of just the way that you're, like, actually doing it. It's the same as how you would do it in real life.

And it's hard to do. Okay. So, you've got to kind of find some, like, middle ground of, like, what is interesting. Mm-hmm. Not necessarily complex and hard to do, but what is best for the situation. Mm. I'm going to curious about those robot controls. So, I assume, the way I'm imagining it, correct me if I'm wrong here.

I'm assuming when you take control of the robot, you effectively are, put into the robot's body and your head movements control where the robot's looking your normal movement is going to control how the robot moves. Yeah, it's literally the same as like

your player controller, except you're a robot. I assume you've like adjusted the movement to feel different from the regular player though? Not too much. However, you are drastically downscale.

Sure, sure, okay. As like an actual character because you're an event and like the human can't really get in there. So, yeah, it's more or less the same, but yeah, just shrunk. Okay. It could also be a way of not necessarily like, I'm not sure if it is slower, but when I've played it, it feels slower. I don't know if that's just because we're like enclosed in the vent. We don't really get a sense for like how fast we're really moving. But it definitely feels like because you're smaller or whatever.

you're moving slower, which is interesting. And adds to the freakiness of the little vent. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Right, because, like, I was, I was thinking with the robot, like, you wouldn't want it to be able to move exactly the same way as a person,

because it's, you know, it's a little robot. So you'd usually, it would have some sort of, like, tank controls or something, like, a slower movement or something, something that made it indicate that you're in a slight, different thing. Obviously, because you're in VR, there are certain things that if you did try to do, it would, you know, feel off, right? Like, if you tried to slow down your head movement for the turning of the camera, that would just immediately throw people off. But... Oh, yeah, 100%. Mm. It's, I think for us, it was a case of, like, we wanted to shift your perspective to something else, but we didn't necessarily want to, like, teach you a

brand new mechanic in a way. So it was, for us it was just kind of easier to just take what we had already and just put it into something else. Hmm.

Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So you wanted to sort of reuse what was already built there and then just adjust it into a different perspective.

Yeah. Right, right. Okay. No, that is, that is cool. I kind of wish the robot section was in the demo now that actually does sound kind of cool yeah if it had been you know like if we had had the capability to make as much of the game as we wanted to like with funding and stuff sure it probably could have been but because of the way that things ended up like we only end up

using the little robot once because the multiple uses got kind of chopped after like This section, and this is where we're stuck with. So it was like a consequence of planning out the story and the mechanics to evolve in a certain way and then having to, you know, shrink it back. But yeah, like, he's cool. Yeah. Yeah. You'll find several of them in different areas. So for someone doing like a.

normal, not trying to throw themselves around as quickly as possible playthrough. For the full game, how long would that reasonably take? I'd probably say about maybe an hour, hour and a half dependent on, you know, if they're

new to VR or not. How much they explore. Mm-hmm. Because, yeah, there's like a few of those extra rooms and stuff that we added in and obviously this whole extra puzzle and stuff, like, and depending on the ending they get as well. we'll change that slightly too

but yeah what do you wish that you could have done if you had gotten this publisher funding like what was the early yeah what of the early plans that you had in mind I'm sure there's a lot that could be said here um

hate for a centers that is yeah huge that would have been great but I think the biggest thing is just having the rest of the ship that we sort of intended because you know we were going to have another big spacewalky section out the back of the ship and

the whole other womb and you know like you've got to reheat the engines and all this sort of stuff but like all of that sort of had to get trimmed off to then you know scope in reality sucks but

is what it is. Yeah we had multiple endings planned for the game more than two. Yeah we had I think the initial plan was three and all three of them varied in scale but yeah we had to drop one of them out

but we still wanted to have the consequence of like okay well if you succeed you do this if you fail you do this because that was like in the earliest design brief of sort of what we wanted so yeah we like we've kept that in but it's much more

toned down from sort of what we wanted but yeah like perfect world, the full ship, all the mechanics continuing to sort of scale up and get reused and different ways and stuff and just adding in more world-buildy sort of stuff.

Like, you have more ship, you have more stuff to put in the ship to then make it feel more flushed out. Like one of the things I would have loved is to have had like a room that you can sort of peer into but not really see where you can just kind of see like a dude floating like I know it's messed up

but it would have been like hey that's cool like consequences of like what's happened and stuff like that but yeah just I'm a big sucker for like world building and details and stuff like that just in any game so like adding in as much of that as I can

is like big for me and yeah like you know that's that's my end of it I guess uh Mark is there anything that you would like to have done? He pretty much said it all.

Right at the beginning, I mentioned paid voice actors. That was definitely one of those things that if we had the budget to do, to do that. Also, custom music and sound effects, because a lot are from just sound libraries that you can just pay for, like granted we've, you know, chopped and layered stuff to get the effect that we want but yeah

in our budget we definitely planned an audio designer as well marketing is the big one as well having like a budget for that would have been really great and yeah like

actually having someone who sort of knows more of what they're doing so to give us a hand at the door because currently it's just kind of me going on social medias and just kind of interacting I've started looking at Reddit and stuff a bit more because like the community and stuff there is relatively active and stuff and I'm just it's a learning experience for us as well

just in doing it all so that's like what my next few months is going to be before release is just kind of interacting with people sending emails and you know trying to get some visibility on it so that'd be that would have been really nice is to just like not have to worry about that but such is life yeah would you like to further broach some of those ideas you had

in a future title or were they things that you would kind of own make sense within this project um I mean there's stuff you could probably rework

into other like games and whatnot but like one of the biggest things was obviously if you get like one ending of the game

in its current state you know It leaves the door open to then add in more stuff, like sort of down the line. There's like, you know, DLC or whatever, but like that then implies that the game is going to be popular enough to then receive said DLC. And the same was for Nightlight. We had like an extra sort of little area planned that I'd sort of come up with when we were doing all the initial like, hey, come up with a creature and a reason for them existing.

And I was like, hey, this could be really cool. And we were like, yeah, it would. but it's very different to the rest of the game. I mean, we got halfway through production at that point, and we had to take stock of, like, how much time we had, and we had to sit down and make those decisions to be like, okay, can we do this, can we not? Does it make sense for it to be in there?

It's not. It's got to get cut, and I got cut. I was the first to put my hand up and say, like, yeah, I know it's different, which is why I designed it that way, so cut it if we got to cut it. um but yeah like so there's always sort of stuff that like will end up on the chopping room floor that would have been you know cool to have and could potentially get branched off into something else but like story wise obviously it'll have to be kind of different if it comes its own full separate game but like yeah like i could definitely see different aspects of like hey you wake up back out of stasis

and there's another issue that you have to go and fix in X room on the ship or in X location and that becomes its own little like 20 minute $2 add on whatever and it's just like in there you can add some more world building and stuff like that and you know reference other things in the full game and whatnot like I think that would probably give the extent of what we'd be able to do this one if it ever gets to that point which would be really cool don't get a song But, you know, I'd love to make a bigillion dollars and add in the full rest of the ship and fully customized NPCs and all this sort of stuff. But, like, you know, it's got to get there to get there. Sure.

Which, yeah. Plus, I think we've worked on it that long now that we're ready to kind of work on something else. So to recycle lost, not lost stuff from this, but like to recycle anything from here would then just kind of be like continuing to work on it. So I think a bit of a break would be. nice um yeah it's been two years ready to play with something new so obviously besides the whole you know audio stuff and voice actors which you know a whole different issue if you wanted to complete the ship and do all of this stuff like if you wanted to let's say you just said okay we're going to keep doing this until everything is done with the team that currently is working on

What, how long more do you think that would have taken? Oh, at least six months. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would say. Maybe more. And that's like base level, so the, all the testing of it all and whatnot, like, chuck on an extra couple of, like, on top of that. And you could probably look at, like, 8 to 10.

Mm-hmm. Which is funny, because the initial plan for the full game was going to be the two years, which is what we've now ended up taking with it but because of okay wait to hear back from funding and play with this and scope down because obviously we don't have the time to take it the full way

but now we've ended up sort of pushing that further and further for testing going to cons getting feedback with that sort of stuff we've kind of ended up at the point where it was like well if we had just sort of sat in our rooms for two years and you know not

fathed around at all we'd have the full thing anyway, but the way that things are sort of played out, it's not the reality. But yeah, if we were to add all that stuff in, yeah, easily, like,

another probably good eight to ten months, I think, with all the testing and extras and whatnot. Yeah, it's like six for base content, because I could model out the rest of what we had probably like a month

per room, I think, is kind of where we were at. It takes like, you know, a week to two weeks to, like, model it and then bit after that to texture it and revisions and whatnot. But then, yeah, functionality and all the mechanics and stuff, that's where the massive time sync comes in. All the testing that comes after that, too. Yeah, exactly. So it's funny, like, I could, you know, sit here for the next month and a bit and probably

smash out like two rooms if I wanted to but then handing that over and being like hey now you guys have all of this work to do right is where the bigger issue comes in um which is why when we were sort of at the point of okay if we don't get this funding how do we plan for that we sort of scoped it in of like okay well here's this room and this thing that would happen in the bad ending anyway and like stuff that would be required to go to said room and blah blah blah to begin with but have this as the backup

and then if we get the funding brilliant like we'll still use all that stuff anyway but if not at least we've got a finished product that we can then say cool we've managed to like tie in a cohesive story right um and obviously I'm glad that we did that because unfortunately

way things have gone the way they've got. But yeah, like, all of that only took us, like, a few months between then, and that was, yeah, like, big room, all those mechanics, and then the various sort of ending and stuff to play around with. But, yeah, it's like, you know. So, I presume this is the... Avcon was the last con that's going to be shown out before release. There's nothing else to come up.

Yeah, I believe so, yeah. So with that being the case, and with that being the sort of last time you're going to have, like, this big, you know, demo of people, like, directly in front of you, we can, like, directly ask them questions as they're going through it. Obviously, you can test with friends and all this sort of stuff. But what sort of was the response from Avcon? What are issues that were discovered?

Obviously, you didn't have anything major breaking from the way it sounds, which is good. Good being this close to release. But what issues did people find? And not just that, what did people actually like about the state things were in? I think the biggest thing that sort of we found that people found was just like the direction of some stuff in terms of like, whether that be instruction. or like overall navigation of certain areas they were struggling with a little bit um but obviously in the con environment you've got all of the other noise and stuff so it's one of those biased bits of feedback where we have to analyze that as well and say like okay is this a genuine issue of

okay these people can't work out what they're doing or is it a thing of they can't really hear what's going on to hear the instruction as a result of you know the main stage having you know anime stuff going on right like any any points about like atmosphere at the con you you can't yeah yeah that useless comments when you have music blaring and all this people yelling everywhere around you like it's the worst possible environment to try and see if the atmosphere is hitting with people ironically like we did have a few comments on like yeah you guys have hit, like, atmosphere and stuff, I felt really, like, immersed and stuff and all that sort of stuff, which is really good to hear, because that's obviously one of the biggest

parts of what we're trying to go for. But yeah, like, metrics in terms of, like, what people liked. Like, we've got, like, a list of, like, I think 80% of the people actively ticked that they like the visuals and the environment and, you know, the mechanics and stuff like that, where It's like the overall experience they enjoyed. There was only one person that outlined they weren't a big fan of the mechanics. And I think they said that it was just kind of like really simple. But there's also a thing of like, we're a four-man team. We can't go super complex with stuff.

And we're trying to play to that in terms of how we design what we're doing. Play to your strengths, really? Yeah, exactly. So like we can make a really cool environment. We can make you feel immersed because we know we could do that from the previous game. So, like, taking that and the stuff that we didn't do well in the last game, which we found out about the hardware, we chose to move away from and not do, which was, you know, enemy AI and, you know, shooting and combat and all that sort of stuff.

Like, it didn't work well in the last one. It was very clunky. So we focused more on, okay, well, let's just have them in the world. and play to the fact that like they are stranded and alone and all that sort of stuff which we seem to be hitting which is cool um and then yeah it's just like keep it simple in terms of the other stuff because we can't go super complex and if it's a problem for some people unfortunately it is kind of what it is um but overall it doesn't seem to be a huge sticking point which is nice um yeah so you said most people were viability with it but besides that one guy who had issues with everything um what what sort of

general feedback did you receive that can actually be sort of improved upon tutorial stuff for start like there were definitely some people that were a little bit confused about how to use your little like multi-tool laser on your hand um so when you got talking how to do it, like they would either like click the button too much and like either get like the blue welding laser and then sometimes they would like

try and cut that with that and then you have to instruct them to right, you know, hit the button more so then they'd the right one. Some people had depth perception issues where they were like holding it above and not close enough because obviously it is very apparent when you do hit it because sparks fly out.

One thing we did find that people would then, like, cut the lid off, but there was nothing telling them to actually grab the lid itself and pick it up and put it to the side. So we've since then, like, I think added in a third step saying, hey, once you've cut this, grab this, put it over here. Right, with that, when I was doing that segment, I didn't really. the lid was useful still, so I just chucked it away and had to go find it. Yeah, it's funny because, like, being behind the computer and watching them do it,

and I see them do that, I think to myself, you're going to regret that. Because, like, if they will throw it as hard or as far as they possibly can, and then I laugh going, you're only going to have to go and just go get that, and then, like, you see their reaction, they're just like, oh, oh, damn, I actually needed that for something. so yeah with that being the case have you run into anyone who soft locked the level because the lid maybe clipped into some terrain and you weren't able to get it back luckily not lid but i think last avcon we had someone drop one of the microchips through the floor which had not happened to one of us but like in you saying that like yeah

like someone grabbed it it fell out of the hand and I think when they grabbed it they pushed it into the floor and let go and it just and we just kind of stood there like well yeah I suppose in like mitigating that it's basically you just grab the floor colliders

you just extend them downwards so they can't and you raise it like up a little bit so it's like in line with the floor so then hopefully there's no like clipping issues so like you drop something and it's just like oh, it's on the floor. It's not like, you know, this much like underneath the floor

where you can't see it. Right. Right. I mentioned this because there are segments where if you stand too close to something, the player controller will vibrate up and down. So if that can happen, my guess would be there's possibly ways you,

that, you know, objects would vibrate in a way where they clip into something and things go very badly. it's probably not something which most people would have run into from what I can tell but there it's one of those things where there's very possibly cases which were missed which you're someone will if there is a way to do it someone will find it yes 100% we had one of our fellow developers from our last project who we gave the game to to test we just wanted him to play the game just to see

you know if he would do it he decided to not do that and do the developer thing instead he he literally tried to break and did break a lot of stuff whereas yeah yeah

I was that which is good because we needed to find out but also like you know what you're meant to be doing and you're actively not doing it to spite us because we can hear you chuckling while you're doing it. Right, right. Like, I'm glad we found out,

but also just open the door. Yeah. Like, yeah. Hey, have we learned that you could shoot yourself up into the ceiling when you were using a door? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, is that door's closing? Is that what, you know, is that?

Yeah. Yeah, well, just a little bit of like history, I guess on that door problem the reason why we are not making you open any doors in our new game is because people forget how to use doors in VR and doors in games

in general we discovered like there's full like developer rants online about like you know I don't know what people's problem are you walk up to it you either pressy or you grab the handle or you push it open like it's not

it's like the D&D problem where like oh there's a door that's closed how do I bust into it or break it open it's like it's just unlocked like it's not a puzzle you just put your hand on the like handle and you open it up but yeah because it was causing so many issues

in night light yeah in this we opted for like hey how do we design around that hand scanner automatic doors yeah yeah and we haven't had an issue yet Which is good. Yep.

So, you know, it's a very pleasant thing to not have to worry about. Yeah, if you give players the ability to put something in the way of a door, clip into the... They get too close to a door as it's moving, whether it's opening or closing. People are going to find a way to break things. Yep. I was playing... When I was playing Kazan,

earlier today. It wasn't a door. It was another bit of terrain. I don't even know how it happened. I fell off this ledge and they have these like fold out like screens. And if you land on them in a very specific way, you just bounce into the air. The game doesn't even have a jump button. I don't. I don't know why. It's brilliant. It's actually intentional. It's crazy. And then with the door problem, if you have doors that will automatically close, you know, that means you can push colliders through walls potentially, especially if they don't stop for anything, they will just keep trying to push.

We've not, at least to my knowledge, we don't really have anything big or important that you can kind of leave in a doorway for that to happen, because like any sort of important room that you enter, it kind of locks behind you and keeps you in there. Right. But like...

I had to mitigate issues. surrounding this issue so like in that room we are doing the electrical puzzle with the circuit boards

there's a giant generator off to your left which has a space between the top of the generator the roof so we were just

playing around and I grabbed the chip and I just went like that and it landed up there and like well I softlocked myself because there was no rate to retrieve

that So basically, it just ended up me just putting colliders everywhere. To stop that from happening. That really is a very important thing I hadn't even thought of until just now. When you have the placement of objects and kids playing the game, because you have to worry about how high something is placed so someone can actually interact with it. Yes.

I say that. In nightlight. We had a, like, little server thing that was about two meters tall. We had, I think she was probably, like, six or something, like, at one of the cons, put on the headset. She saw a broom on top of this thing. I don't know how she reached it because she was no taller than a meter herself. But she got up there, she grabbed it, and was flinging it around like crazy. like she she worked it out

I think that's one thing about kids they'll they'll manage sure sure it's shocking sure you can find workarounds for it but like oh yeah obviously

design around the fact that like keep things convenient but yeah like they'll they'll find a way I will add one more thing to that is that within our settings there is actually high controls Okay, okay

So yeah If you are just a little bit too short Yeah you can come in and adjust your height Mm-hmm, mm-hmm Right, because that reminds you There was another demo at Avicon Where it wasn't It was similar to the

The hold segment with the spacewalk But this was with ropes And the I couldn't reach one of This was an issue they had like notice As people were going through it One of the ropes was just a slight bit too far away and people were not able to reach it. Luckily, they had a bar across the top and you could climb across the bar and just skip all of it. But it's one of those things where if you design it around yourself and you happen to be someone who's a bit tall that has a bit of a larger wingspan,

you might not realize that until you actually playtest with someone who, you know, is not as, tool is, doesn't have arms as long as you, and you realize, especially arm length, arm length's one, like, you can deal with the height, but arm length is one where you actually kind of have a, unless you increase, like, grab distance, you kind of don't have a way to fix it as easily. Yeah, just something we've talked about, U.S. times. I have a freakishly long arm span for my body. I've got an extra 10 centimeters on my height in my own.

arms. So I have no problem reaching whatever I'm trying to reach for. But Daniel, our other artists on the team, he's a shorter gentleman. So having him test is the like flip side of the coin where it's like if he can manage, which he does, like he's got no issues or whatever, then we can cope. But I think in general, like as a rule of thumb while we were developing in terms of like interaction and stuff I think we tried to keep everything roughly at chest height for us which is then like if you're tall than us you know cool it's you know you bend down a little but if you're shorter it's you know high height or whatever like it's not like we've got that little bit of

variance of like okay it like nothing is like right here that you have to like interact with because yeah like obviously shorter it's going to be sort of more difficult but i think rule of thumb i think we were aiming for like 1.1.2 to 1.5 i think meters was like general rule of thumb for like playing with stuff and then yeah obviously bending down to cut off the stuff on like the table at the sort of end of the demo was like use your knees i guess how many people were like me and didn't bend down and didn't see that there was a thing to interact with in that room. There were

a few. Yeah. Especially last year, nearly everyone that played it walked past the third is the large

ship that you had to replace in the whole of the big one. Nearly everyone would walk around whole table looking down and as they got to that corner, look up and keep walking. Okay, that's a thing. Almost as a rule of thumb. We were like, they'd get to it. We'd look at each other. We're like, they're going to do it. And they're like, nah. And sure enough, just, and I'm like, how do we make them look down? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So I put the big blue top with some tools down there. So at least it, like, attracts the eye of like, oh, there's stuff here

to then hopefully, we still get people that do miss it, though. Yeah. yeah yeah but you don't want to be like super in your face you know you don't want to like have like the big flashing light of like fix me like it's already glowing green

like we can't that circles back to around to like what you were saying about sign posting it's just like we don't want to go overboard with it but we have to like try and highlight

something in hopes the player will see it. You know, what we maybe could do is put some of the spark effects that we've got on there and at least like, yeah, maybe, hatch the eye, but like, beyond that, you know. Right.

People will just have to take their time and work it out. I also did miss one of the items in that room initially. I walked right past it like two or three times. I think you did the same thing where it's like you're walking, you're looking where you're meant to be looking and then you just look away as you've walked past. Where it's like,

like you'll find it eventually. Like if you're playing like you'll wander back down there and you'll see the big red crate. But like I think it's just a thing of like you're looking at the room, you're looking at the room, looking at the room what's over there now? And it just happens to be that exact moment. Because yeah, like

it's a very like the crate down the bottom most people find straight away the one to the side less people find straight away but other people will find the one on the side and not the one down the bottom so yeah like the one on the side is if you go down that way to begin with

because it's right in front of you it's fairly easy to see but if you go down grab the one that's in the lower section and then keep on going around the crate is like it's right next to one of the consoles so you could

easily just keep on walking and I'll see it. Right I was going to say if you're consistently seeing people miss it is there something near it that is catching people's eye instead not currently I mean other than the console itself I'm not sure if the monitor

that that one is on or not but that could be something to look into yeah just placing items around the area maybe like chucking a light somewhere above there just very dimly yeah the one down the bottom

I know for a fact I avoided putting props directly next to it because it was already kind of like on the edge of the sort of walkway, but I put props above that on the catwalk so that if you walked up to them, you would then sort of see it either in the background or like, you know, it's in your line of sight effectively. But yeah, like nine times out of ten, people find them, whether it takes a couple minutes

longer or whatever. Like, they will find it. Like, it's rare that we have to sort of sit there and say, oh, I don't know what I'm doing. you know I think in your case when you went to walk back upstairs I was like you did walk past it just to save you from like walking all the way back now

With the con demo I kind of wanted to just actually get through it If I was playing by myself Yeah I would have spent more time doing it Yeah exactly So yeah I figured to save you the time of walking back up And doing a full loop I was like yeah Just back behind you sort of thing

But yeah it's one of those things where it's like It is a game where you need to kind of look around and explore and do that sort of stuff. So, like, it lends itself to, like, if people do take it a little bit longer, but they're still actively looking, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It means they're engaged enough to continue searching. But, yeah, it's just, like, when they miss that one panel on the table and then find all of the pieces, and they're just carrying this, like, microchip around looking for, like,

where the hell it slots in, and they continuously. keep looking up it's like right like i'd yell at you through the screen but i don't you know like you go to you you'll get there um last avcon we had a rule of thumb after i think the third person that we got up to go and help was wait an extra three seconds because as much as people look like they were struggling we would stand up and in the time that it took us to stand up they'd work out what they were doing. So it was like, just wait the three.

And then if they're still stuck, then help. But like it was like that three seconds where it was like, okay, they've taken enough time where like they're sort of like looking around confused. All right. And then like as I stand up,

they looked over and find it. I'm like, and I'm back down. But yeah, like after that, it was like a consistent thing. It's like, I can't remember if it was you Mark or Daniel.

went to go and help someone and I just put my hand up like just wait I think it might have been Daniel that did that and then sure I said just wait give it a couple seconds

and he's like what do you mean and then like saw them do it and it was like you know it was bizarre but like

people will work it out they just they take their time right and the people that can't then there's the issue of like okay well why were you struggling

right um but yeah like if it's an issue with like tutorialization of like okay we're like I didn't know I had to pick this up so I didn't know what I was doing or I can't hear the instructions because of the con or whatever or you know we had one dude stream nightlight and he as soon as he heard the guy on the radio which is the primary source of our instructions and stuff because he was streaming he went I'm not going to listen to whatever thing that this guy is saying I'm just going to talk to my audience and and then walked into the next room and I don't know what I'm doing. And it was like, really, dude, you don't say. But it was because of that, yeah, like we ended up putting posters and shit around the room to like kind of give more dietic instruction. Right, right.

And yeah, it's like you learn that like some people are just not going to listen. So it's like, yeah. Yeah. Well, there's always the issue of, this is the thing in, um, in, like, UI design, where you shouldn't be conveying information through one singular means of, like, you, like, you, like, say you have like an, an error prompt, for example, like, you shouldn't just indicate that's an error by making it red. It should have some sort of error icon. If you use sounds, there should be an error sound. Like, the multiple ways to indicate that same information. because different people are going to sort of consume that in different ways and even if someone isn't necessarily streaming like someone they may not realize that what's being said is supposed to be like actually important for the next room um so having like additional information additional ways to convey that that

approach like there's definitely value there some games go overboard with that where it's like we have a checklist on the screen at every point in time everything has an arrow above it we have a map that has all of the arrows on it right like you you can do it too much but yeah at the same time having something subtle in the world to indicate it like that is you know there's something there's something of value there right like oh yeah like we you know like after that guy especially where it was like, I don't know what I'm meant to be doing or like we saw, I think in nightlight

especially, to leave that main lobby area that you start in, you have to close a shutter and like pull it shut and then that allows you to get onto the elevator and go downstairs. Like that is the first instruction you hear, but then we tell you that like, okay, once you've done that, you then have to take the elevator down. People were focusing more on the elevator part than the actual shutter instruction and they would go to the elevator and then once you open the elevator you get instructed to go and get a key card you find like people would find a key card immediately but then they'd forget about the shutter right so we added in repeating audio for the shutter but then people still like they couldn't find it they couldn't work out what's going on um so then

yeah like that was an additional reason for us being like okay well maybe we really do need to put a big poster on the wall saying okay like night guards are not to leave you know this area without locking the door it's worded something like that and then there's like a diagram of the like thing getting shut

which yeah we saw like some people look at and take note of and other people again didn't other people worked it out straight away like just kind of like oh close the shutter and they looked like the red handle and they were like oh cool and they walked up and shut it immediately like it's one of those things where it's like people obviously like you say

like they what's the word consume information differently probably the only other thing we could have done there was like have like a green light or a red light or something above that little door that said like whether it was locked or unlocked

but like how funny you go sure sure sure right and a lot of games do this in like a very a very subtle way to indicate where you need to go. Like, you've seen a lot of action games where the placement of enemies is sort of used as like a trail of breadcrumbs for the main path to go down. So there might be a side path over there and you might see it if you see it. But like the main route, it's like enemy here, enemy here, enemy here.

And it sort of guides you in that direction because most people are going to want to go from encounter to encounter. Yeah, we I don't know if we necessarily had a similar thing in Nightlight because our enemies were kind of like on like a little wandering path Sure, yeah But most of the time they were invisible anyway So you couldn't really necessarily use them as a method of getting through the way you're going But in that one we had like the convenience of like, hey, you need to go to the utilities room

And we had a big sign saying utilities Right, right. If you're not building, you have the convenience of, it makes sense to have signs everywhere. Yeah. Which on the ship, like, we've got a similar thing. It's like when you're walking down the corridors, you've got the big sort of signs that give you the rough layout of where things are. And then on the actual rooms themselves, they've got the little readouts. Yeah, I think one of those was like go to the one of the sections, it wasn't like go to the laboratory or something like that.

Like, it was clearly indicated, like, this direction is where it is. There were other places you go, and there were, like, law tablets in there. But, like, the main path, like, you get a lot of, a lot of nice conveniences when you are in an environment where having signs, like, is not out of place, right? Like, signs... Again, it goes back to the whole signposting thing. Signposting in a way that contextually makes sense to the environment you're in. yellow paint on things for the sake of yellow paint

it feels lazy because it is lazy but if you're in a situation where there is actually a reason to say this is the way you go like you know that that like if you can fit it into the law of the world no one complains about that

because games have always done this it's just it's when you see a lot of games doing the same approach in the same way like that's why people get annoyed by it yeah that was my one gripe with god of war 2018 i believe it was like the stuff that you can climb on is just like randomly painted gold right and it was like you've got this massive open world scale game

which is like super realistic and like super law heavy but now you've just like hey i can climb on that ledge because it's painted gold it was like it was one of those ones where it's like okay this is a game right so like I get it and it's one of those ones that made me feel like it was a game where it's like it's a in almost like a negative sense right where it feels real weird yeah oh sorry gone I was going to say in that same vein like if it was a horror game or whatever and it's showing you your path because it's blood and like this is where you're going because people

have come through here or there's like smear it on a wall in like an arrow or something something like that. It's like narratively, it's like, okay, this is the way to escape because this is where these people have been telling you to go. But like, it's almost more acceptable there because of the context versus, again, if it was yellow paint, it's like, okay, well, that's just fucking, you know. Yeah, yeah. I don't excuse my language.

Yeah, I know it's so good. You say whatever you want. It's so good. Where it feels really disconnected is, I believe it was Horizon Zero Dawn, where there are areas. you can climb and areas you can't climb and the place you can climb are indicated but there are areas that like

logically if you're climbing with the climbing system you've been introduced with how far you can jump all this sort of stuff where you can clearly get there right and this is this is something invisible walls are something that really really annoy me

I will I will see a game where I can get to that bit but it's just like you stop here And there are so many better ways to Like you can put a rock there right Like put anything there Or in in near for example

In near automata There's a bunch of visible walls in the desert It's just like make the rock a little bit higher Or in the in the carnival area Just make the fence just a little bit higher Put something in front of it Like you have you have elements in the world that can block your path

but you're not using them instead you have a situation where it just an invisible wall just makes you feel like you're in a game right like that immediately makes you feel like you're in a game yeah we use some of that sort of stuff in Nova

we've got this massive maintenance barrier that has a hologram on it that's clearly like very red and says like maintenance and then you can't go past that on the other side of that there isn't a maintenance barrier there is a whole bunch of like spilt over crates

that's literally blocking the players path yeah so it gives us our environment stuff that for that reason which you don't notice is really invisible wall-esque until you try to teleport

through it and it's got like the big wall where it's like yeah no right right right um and obviously just moving through the environment it's like tall of a new so you can't get past it or anything like that um but yeah like every situation where we're like trying to block the player from doing something we came up with the narrative of reason or like an in world reason for it like because

yeah invisible laws piss me off too like there's nothing more frustrating than like you said like thinking you can get to a spot and it looking like you can very clearly get to said spot and then it's just like no yeah yeah like i get why like you got to have limits but like something You know Yeah, I agree fully And then you have games like They don't have the invisible walls Because this is not a Nintendo mechanic

But there's a game called East 8 Where for some reason The devs let you multi-bind actions And when you multi-bind actions You get some very interesting situations So if you Bind your role, attack And character switch

Every time you do it it raises you just a little bit higher in the air. And the game, the game has a lot of load zones that are accessible, that shouldn't be accessible. So you can, I think the game to actually normally finish, I think it takes like 80 hours. The speed run for it is like maybe three.

And when you start skipping load zones as well, It also creates a situation where characters are included in the party that shouldn't be. So by the end, you have four of the main character in the party at once, because there's different parts of the game where there's different versions of them. So because you're not going through the proper areas to unload them, you know, it creates a real weird situation with the game. It has no idea what's going on. That's brilliant.

It's one of those beautiful cases of like, Okay, this is clearly not how this is meant to be done, but it's an amazing side effect. Yeah. But yeah, I can just, I can picture the developers watching them do that for the first time and going, uh-oh. Yeah.

It's in the game still. They just left it there. Once they've done it, once everyone starts doing it, surely that they can't be like, okay, well, if people are having fun with it, we can't strip that away. Yeah, yeah. But it's also a thing of like,

they're missing out on 77 hours worth of content I guess so it's like have you ever played Warframe I have not but I've heard very good things yeah I haven't either are you aware of like how the movement system kind of looks in Warframe where people like jump around like slide across the floor

and like get a lot of speed from it no but I've played games that are similar I guess okay so the like the main core of the movement system is you do like an air dash and then you can like slide across the floor and air dash again and you just like zoom around the map this is a glitch or it was a glitch it was something early in the game which players were doing and was not intended whatsoever but the devs saw that so many people were doing it it was broke it was like way too broken initially you could skip entire levels and move like 10 times fast than you should but they

realized that players were enjoying this idea. So instead of saying no more fun allowed, they modified it in a way that addressed the player concern. Another example I think of with this is in Path of Exile, where early on what people would do is when you get to like the end game section, you basically always want your potions to be active because some of them give you more armor and more evasion, things like that. So what people were doing is Initially, they were doing something called pianoing the flasks, which is they just run their fingers constantly along them, because as you're killing enemies, it's regenerating flask charges as well. So you could just forever do that. Eventually, people started using like auto hotkey scripts to do the same thing.

The devs realized that everybody was doing this. So instead of saying, no, there's now going to be a cool down on this, we're going to change how any mechanics works, you don't need to do so. They introduced something into the game where you can now condition activate potion. So it's like, oh, if you are on fire, you can use this potion to reduce to give yourself fire immunity. If you have full flask charges, it will automatically use it. If the potion next to it is used, it'll activate that one. So they provide the system within the game to address a player concern rather than just saying, we don't like what you're doing. This is not out. Like, they addressed an issue the players had rather than saying this is not within our vision,

we're going to say, you can't do that. Yeah. I think the term that I've heard used to stuff like that is when a bug becomes a feature. Oh, yeah. It's like, you know, like, yeah, this isn't how we planned it. This isn't what we intended on.

This is a major, like, screw up on our end. But if people are enjoying it, at the end of the day, you make games so that people can have fun. Unless it's Dark Souls in which you want to punish them. But if they find that fun, then, you know, at the end of day, mission accomplish. So, yeah, like, I, yeah, it's a compromise that I think is worthy in terms of, like, if that's where the fun is, then let people have fun.

So as you've gone. I was going to say, like, in nightlight, it was something that we learned in terms of interactivity in our sort of first room that you spawn in we only had like a couple little things that you could sort of pick up and play with to start with but the more that we added in slowly for people to pick up and interact with the more people interacted with like they at one point and especially the kids and stuff they would go into that room grab every single thing fling it around like it's nothing right anything not bolted to the ground they're going to pick up literally literally and they got mad when it was bolted to the ground um to the point that like

there was like a green packet of chips in a bin and i remember it was green because we regretted making it green because it stood out in the bin but yeah not just the kids full grown adults would look down in the bin and try and grab it and because it was in the bin we were like oh that's fine it could just be like one of the set dressing ones you don't need it like fuel leaf for decoration but like yeah people would try to pick it up and they're like oh okay I guess we've got to make that one grabable now too so like moving forward

from that it's been like okay have that stuff in place from the jump like in the med bay it was like Matt made a captain's hat and the first thing I said was people are going to try and wear that

100% people are going to try and wear that and they did try but we had made them mechanic to make them wear the hat. So it's learning that, yeah, like, people want to touch everything, and if they can't touch everything, they get upset. Even then, they still have to have a limit, though. Right.

I think the earlier in the game, the more stuff you can grab, because people are still fanatically, like, oh, this is so fun, grab and toss and ball and whatever. but then as they move forward they kind of get past that initial like I want to throw stuff part of it and it's like okay what's this game actually about so we can kind of get away with making the less of it

grabable where it's like okay well if you've picked up that white cup 43 times already in like the start of the game now it's just stuck in place because you know that you can grab it so you're not gonna want to grab it because that's not the fun thing to grab hey what's that new thing let's make that

yeah you know right right um so yeah it's it again it's a balancing act in terms of optimization and stuff and what as well but um yeah it's definitely one of those things where it's like you you learn quick about um where the fun is and like what you're perceived level of what the fun is versus i'm going to grab everything and swing it like a madman like i remember uh in one of the i think it's like a bedroom or something there was like a little tableted in there But there was also a coffee machine with a mug. Yep.

And obviously I had to go grab the mug the immediate, immediately after I saw it. Yeah. We don't have it set up so that you can actually like spurt coffee out or anything like that. But like, yeah, like we had those same little cups in nightlight on a water cooler. So we were like, you know, people liked it there. It might as well carry it across. and just have a couple things you can it's more role play than anything

because people grab it and like pretend to drink and like throw it across the mark five but like you know it's again if they're having fun they haven't fun yeah I think in one of our trailer shots that I don't think got used

I was just filming B-roll for Matt and yeah I was in the crew quarters and I picked up one of the cups and there's this massive poster that says like happy birthday so I just picked one up and just did a cheers and just threw the cup away yeah I think with um you know you see all of these like you know simulator game 5,000 and in a lot of those games it's sort of I guess it's sort of conditioned people if they're in a VR context or something where it looks like

things are going to be grabable people kind of expect that to be the case now. It's like, if there are things that are like, if again, if it's something that doesn't look like it is bolted to the ground, it's something they're probably going to expect to be movable.

And I'm sure that's created some fun optimization challenges as you've wanted to expand sort of a set dressing in an environment. Yep. In the room down the hall from that bedroom alone, there's like bookshelves.

Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Which in Nightlight, I don't think we'd let you pick up the books, but a lot of people tried, and they were frustrated that they couldn't. And even in this, like, before we were at a point where we could pick them up, like, people would try and grab them. And we're like, okay. Yeah, it was literally one of my jobs this week to go and add in more books and, like, folders to grab on those bookshunders. shelves. But there is a limit though because you like you don't want too many because you know the game still has to be able to run fine right. Sure, sure. So luckily like we made a blanket

rule from like shelf X upwards. That's it. Everything else is just static and you can't grab it. Right, right. Yeah. Otherwise you end up having a situation like, you know, Skyrim 5,000 cheese wheels. Yep. I've seen that. Which... I... Go on. I'd love to see someone manage in VR and just throw up. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because zero frames, when it's stuck to your face ain't a fun time.

Right, right. But yeah. I've used the cheap headset and have it, like, sort of disconnect from where my head is, and it's not pleasant. Never is. No. so as you've been going through this project what have you

learned through the process like what what did you sort of expect to be the case that didn't really play out in this game I know obviously it's not the first one so you definitely had a lot of learning experience from that one already but what what new came from this that you weren't

maybe I don't know just whatever direction you want to take it I mean for me personally I learnt a lot more optimization stuff like from our last project we just had

big scenes and just put a lot of stuff in it so there was obviously like rendering costs for that obviously and at some point there really was it as evident that like there is too much here

but in this one I designed well me and Matt designed the ship to be sectioned off into tiny little scenes that we could like asynchronously load and have less in them or as much in them as we needed to make it run well

I had like all the geometry that Matt gave me apart from like the major major rooms they're all just separate pieces that I just had free renaver to just put in there and then we rolled with that and then

we started testing the game and went oh you know what that's actually very expensive we can't we can't do that so I then bought a mesh combiner tool which

basically got implemented the same way occlusion culling works if you know what that is I should be, do. If you want to just briefly explain it for the viewers, that probably would help. Occlusion culling is basically, it takes a cone, and everything in that cone will be rendered. So if you're, like, panning across these items over here will literally get, like, turned off, unrended.

So it's basically reducing the cost of what is on screen and helping the frame rates for the basic. principle of that. So the way I planned how I would combine the meshes was based upon occlusion culling and how much I wanted to render in one go.

Even today, there are still issues because Unity is known for not having the best occlusion culling tools. So one of the issues currently that we're having is that in one of the whole

you can be staring directly like at a wall but the bottom section of like the elevator where you go later on in the game it's just kind of all rendered for no reason I see

so that's where there's like a performance drop because it's rendering too much so that is like still one of the like things on our list to try and figure out how to fix What don't you, Matt?

Nothing unperfect? No. The big one, I think, was trying to learn how to set up modular kits to be used for the environment design and stuff. Because, yeah, in the first game, I kind of just took the gray box of the whole level and just modeled over it and optimized it from what it was, which was like a, a nice. million cubes in like one little spot to make up a complex shape to then you know hey that's now just a cylinder or stuff like that where it's like it's proper like mesh and probably optimized uv et cetera textured all that sort of stuff but like going through the modular process of design and stuff obviously gives you way more freedom in terms of hey this can't be this

size anymore or like it feels wrong sort of walking through it now or or doing this thing over here actually we want to change the way that this is laid out having it be modular it's like okay well now you've got corner pieces and long bits of wall and short of bits of wall and stuff like that you can just you know chop and change however you want on the fly which i think we ended up doing yeah that's how we added in our new content um yeah with the med bay the captain's quarters and the crew quarters where Matt had planned where they wanted to go but it was like being covered

by a whole bunch of like hallway geometry so it's very easy to just delete that current geometry that's there and then just turn on the old stuff and then just shift it around or like oh I need this much more wall and then you can just drop it in

so plus it also made the walls and stuff look women are interesting once you've got like the option of like okay currently this is all just a flat wall with like maybe some like stripes and stuff on there but

you know I'll chuck in one of the like little like more computery sort of techie panels and see how that looks and oh that's better but I don't know maybe one with the vent on it and like the simplicity of just being able to like

the freedom of choice super useful which is one of the biggest things where it was like in nightlight because I like modelled everything in terms of like

the environment stuff it was way more rigid and way more difficult to go back and fix stuff because of that and I was like exporting like whole levels that were like

fully modeled out we would have to have review sessions so like he would make it we would bring it into unity we would start putting all the materials on it, you know, one by one and make sure, like, they're correct,

and not screwed up in any way, or, like, oh, over there, there's just this massive, like, hole in the floor over there that you, like, forgot to fix. Yeah. Which, therefore, like, yeah, you'd have to redo it again. And on my end, that hole could have been, like, a millimeter between things and the anti-aliasing, you know, made it invisible.

but the second you bring it into unity and you've got like a bright blue skybox behind it you can see this massive blue strip and you're like, that's a problem and then I'm sitting on version 17 of the apartment buildings and Alex is sitting there like rocking himself asleep because I had to bring everything in over

and over and reapply the materials that was a whole afternoon or it was just like hey there's another little hole up there and it's like God damn it I thought I fixed that one and it's like no no you fix the one next do it, but because you shifted that over, and now there's another one over here. And it's like, oh, of course there is.

So, yeah. Never ending circle. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, the big thing of like, okay, we shut ourselves in the foot over here doing it this way. Let's learn the new way, which is more modular. But then we can keep more bespoke stuff for, like, the bigger rooms and whatnot. But, like, overall, it saved us a shitload of time in the grand scheme of thing. but like the first pack that I made oh boy I think I spent six weeks which is longer

than I spent on some of the bigger rooms like in terms of modeling stuff just trying to make this thing work because it was the first time I'd ever done it right um or at least done it in a way that was like land ahead of time where it wasn't like okay there's a hole in that wall over there or like here's just a frontage of an apartment that you can chuck elsewhere it was more like this is foundational like this is a 75 centimeter wall this is a 150 centimeter wall and like we had these segments set out ahead of time whereas like okay i have to make this work i have to work out what the hell i'm doing um which was yeah a big task up front but saved so much time later on and once i did once i could use those same bits as like foundation of like okay well i've done it

once now i know what i'm doing for this next pack and this next pack and this next pack um and i think we ended up with three or four in the final game which like each time I did it got quicker and quicker but it was like yeah that first month in a bit where I was like I'm so over this like why I could have just modeled this whole way in like 20 minutes but here I am six weeks later but yeah you know it's um the uh I can't even think of a good analogy it was a pain in the house it was a pain in the ass that comes back to like you know say I'm

sorry afterwards and you forgive it but in the long run it's probably for the best so that you actually can use these components again and especially for larger projects right like if you take on something that is going to be large in this you're going to take on something where you are going to want to reuse these

models these tile sets whatever like yeah like yeah well that's all that is that is

hopefully something which as you go into whatever the future title is you can you know start getting the ball rolling quite a bit faster knowing

better development processes knowing a better way to handle just doing all of this hopefully that can allow for more to be done with whatever you do next yeah 100%

yeah every single thing that we do is a learning step so like and that's I think one of the bigger reasons

why we picked sort of sci-fi and stuff this time as well was like okay we've done the realistic thing we've done the old school tech

you know let's let's jump into a challenge and make a spaceship which yeah that first six weeks made me go

why the hell did we do this But beyond that, it was like, okay, yeah, this is pretty cool. And yeah, like, 100%. Like, if you're not learning something new with everything that you're doing, you're losing an opportunity to, like, grow as a creator, as an artist, as a designer, as a programmer, et cetera. Like, even, like, probably in the realm of, like, podcasting and YouTube and stuff like that as well, like you're always looking to improve what you're doing.

So to take advantage of that with everything that you make, it's a no-brainer well what do you got an idea for for the next thing once once this once this project is done once it's released do you have any ideas is I'm so I'm sure you've got you've got things you would like to do but are you kind of said on anything that you want to do next yes and no yeah we we had an idea that we were pretty fomon, which we sort of concepted and did some very, very, very early stuff on during our first grant submission process, like in April last year, just while we had some downtime to

like take a few steps back from this and like wait to hear back on how we were going. But in the time since, obviously with more stuff that we've learned with this and, you know, different issues and stuff outside of that it's like is the smartest option should we innovate a little bit to make it a little bit different how can we make it a bit more unique all this sort of stuff where it's like we have a base idea should we like should we talk about it a little bit it's up to you that smile says says a bit what do you reckon ah I have I mean, that's for off cam. Off cam, yeah, okay.

That's for off cam. I'm not going to, I'm not going to leak anything here. Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah. We've got a list of a few ideas and stuff that we have genuinely got just a folder of like project ideas. And we've got this little form that we fill out in terms of like, not like an application or anything, but just like, here's like a list of criteria in terms of stuff that we would. want the project to be, who it would be targeted at, what we want the players to feel, some, like, gameplay stuff, all that sort of stuff.

And we've got a bunch of those of just, like, random ideas and stuff that we've come up with over the last few years. But, yeah, this other one, we kind of went in deep and just, like, spent a good few weeks, like, busting out a GDD and, like, a proper art bible and stuff for, but, like, obviously, since kind of had this realization of well if we decide to head down this route is it smarter to do something slightly different and stuff like that but yeah we yeah it's yet to be seen on monday we're going to have like a proper brainstorming session and like go through some stuff in terms of how can we improve on the idea and stuff like that so who knows maybe next time you get back to us

you'll hear some more about it with whatever it ends up being Well I do plan to do Sage next year And I do Avcon every year So if you have something early By then Hey I guess I will uh I'll see it by then

Possibility Yeah by then I think we're hoping to By Avcon definitely But Sage we'll see But yeah It'd be good well we're coming up on the two hour mark now so let people know

where they can find the game where they can get the demo all of the information you want to direct people to yeah Project Nightlight is on Steam not Project Nova is what I'm here for God that was both on Steam that's true they are both on Steam

if you look at Project know that you'll find two games um but the one that you're looking for is the one with a little spaceship in the the key art i did notice that there was another another game of the same title we discovered that right after yeah we discovered that right after abcon last year where it wasn't there the weekend before and it was there the week after and we were like fun yeah okay yeah but yeah that's a whole thing um plus there's like apparently been like a dozen also games over the past 20 odd years that have used that title that have just gone nowhere

so yeah no it's not exactly an uncommon word like it yeah i would expect so it means new in latin so like it's going to be called blah blah blah nova something or other like but it's a space term so it's like sick um but yeah whereas like that's the game uh project nova demo is out now um if you look up fringe realities on whatever social media stuff yeah google um but yeah We're on Twitter, X, whatever it's called now, Blue Sky, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Reddit now is what I'm trying to start cultivating. And if Mark sort of sits back a touch, you'll see our logo. Oh, yeah, yes, yeah.

Yep, yep. So we're at fringe realities on most things, or some variation of that. Good, consistent branding, which is better than I do. do? You do what you can. We were lucky that it was one of those ones that no one had picked up yet. And I'm like, you're done. I made the mistake of using my name for everything, which is a bad idea. Turns out there are other people called Brody Robertson that exist. I can't believe that. That's insane. There's actually, I think, an amateur golfer with the same name. For a long time, she was the one who took up all the search results. I have taken over the position now, though,

so... Yeah. I have once been added on to... Twitter from the mistake of someone that has my exact same name in the UK that is in the Defence Force. So I've been added about defence things before that just isn't related to me. That was fun. I typically just go about my username online. so like I'm rarely me

which saves me the headache because typically there's only one username per site which is very handy but yeah like you know I yeah my dad

going through school shares the same name as a footballer from Adelaide who then went through and started doing finance which is what my dad used to do. So they kind of ended up in the same field. Right, right.

And I've only been asked once by an older teacher. When he saw my name, he's like, oh, there's no relation to. And I said, like, I said the name. And he went, I went, no, he's not my dad, but they have the exact same name. And he's like, oh, okay. And he looks so defeated. And I was like, I'm sorry, old man. like you know

but it was like it was really bizarre and on that when I like when my dad was teaching me to drive he took me past his office on purpose just to like see if I'd clock the fact that it was his name on this sign and just he was just looking at me smiling as I drove past and went what hang on and he's just like what what's going on like what

and I'm like you can't pretend like you didn't just see what I just saw but yeah I think thankfully I'm the only one of me like everyone's like there's a bunch of people called Matt yeah very rare name yeah yeah never been a Matt yeah there's two of us in every given place I can guarantee it but yeah like Matt surname doesn't seem to be a common one at the very least like I don't think my

their name's super common to begin with, which... Hey, no other was mine and I still got it. You know what, that's 100% fair. Yeah. I'd say yours is probably rarer than mine. But yeah, I think I'm the only one in game development, which... That's something. That's convenient.

Yeah, Tandy. Well, anything else you guys want to direct people to, or is that pretty much everything that you have? It's about it, really? Yeah, that's sort of it from us, I think. Okay, I'll do my outro, and then we will sign off. The main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream there as well, so check that out.

I've got the gaming channel, Brodyon Games. Right now, I'll be playing through Kazan the First Preserker, and I'm also playing Split Fiction with Wren. So check that out if you want to see Co-op Chaos. And if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform, tech over tea. You'll find it on Spotify. Spotify is video, which is cool as well. And if you do want to see the video and not be on Spotify, it is on YouTube.

Tech of a T, basically every platform. There's Tech of a T, Twitter and Blue Sky. I think it's Blue Sky. I don't know. I don't ever post to those accounts. I just posed everything from my main account. I should separate them. I don't.

Doesn't matter. Anyway, how do you want to sign off the episode? What do you want to say? I love this This is my favourite part of every episode That's such an on the spot Like That's why I do it

Be good and kind to others Ooh nice Peace love and other drugs