Tech Over Tea - I'm Beyond Terrible At Card Games | Paper Cactus Games

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Paper Cactus games are the developers of the upcoming indie rogue lite deck builder Fox & Shadow which whilst being familiar provides a few interesting changes like a dual deck system, a hex grid map system and tries to tell a story along the way. ==========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://www.papercactusgames.com/ Twitter: https://x.com/papercactusgame ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brady Robertson, and this, I believe, is episode... Four? Yes, episode four of the post-Avcon discussions. Uh, there's a lot more to go, so... Hang around for those, I guess. Today we have Leo and Jackson from Paper Cactus Games, the developers of Fox and Shadow, a roguelite deck builder that you've probably seen games like Slay the Spire, it seems quite similar to that but I think it's best if you guys describe it and if you feel like that's a accurate description.

Well, hi I'm Leo and obviously my friend over there is Jacko like that's an accurate description. Well, hi, I'm Leo. And obviously my friend over there is Jacko. But that's pretty accurate. Like our game was heavily influenced by games like Slay the Spy and Grifbans. But we decided to throw in our own little twist. We wanted to give the players a lot more control. And so we implemented what we call as a dual deck system the idea is that we have a human and a robot the robot provides the base cards whereas the human changes how these

cards work so it's like um i like to make the comparison of you've got one model of car if you put a nervous driver behind the wheel it's very different to putting a very angry driver behind the wheel. There's one that you obviously not want to be driving with. But the idea is that you get these two cars, they mix and match, and they do things that the robot couldn't otherwise do with human input. Okay, that's cool. Jackson, you want to introduce yourself before we get way into the actual game itself? That's cool. Jackson, you want to introduce yourself before we get way into the actual game itself? Yeah, that's me. I'm Jackson. I do a bunch of the programming, basically. That'd be my main focus. I help out with a bunch of production work on the game.

So yeah, between the two of us, Theo gets to cover more of the game design, the art kind of side of things. And then we also have many other people working on the team as well. But yeah, so that's me. And yeah, it's a really fun project to be working on. So yeah. So if I understand correctly, you were the mastermind behind this starting? Oh, that'd be Leo. Leo had the initial idea. But actually, I'll let you tell the story, Leo. Yeah, well, actually, we... I guess our conversation about paper cactus games at Fox and Shad really started at a wedding. We were dealing with a pretty hectic wedding. A lot of things were happening.

A lot of things needed help. Jackson was part of the groom's bridal party, and I was there as a friend. And also my wife was part of the bridal party as well. We ended up running around a lot, getting everything sorted. And the morning afterwards, we just decided to start talking. And we both happened to have a passion guess passion for game design uh we started talking about what kind of games you make and i guess that's where we started talking about fox and

shadow yeah definitely it was one of those ones where we both saw that each other were people who would like okay like we'll be hands-on when stuff needs to get run. We're not just going to leave it be by the wayside. And yeah, in addition to that, just Leo having that kind of vision for the Fox and Shadow dual deck building system, kind of just as I was wrapping up some work I was doing at Adelaide Uni as kind of...

There was some defense research, an open-source project that was going on there at the time, and I was wrapping up with that. So I was like, oh, okay, okay games it's hectic everybody knows do we let the game development thing it's hectic do i really want to get into this and i was like yeah i just can't let this idea go by like it was it was too good too attractive i was like yeah let's do it so did either of you have prior experience with game development before, or was this, like, we're just going to jump right into it?

I'm just going to check with you first, and then I'll follow up. Yeah, so I have kind of been making games on and off since high school, I guess. They threw Game Maker at us for, like, one lesson think, in like in middle school or something like that. And then like probably switched back to PowerPoint because that's what you do in an IT class, I guess. And that left me wanting something shocking. So I just kind of sat there like making all these games and really enjoying that. And then coming out of uni eventually after like kind of doing a bit of a computer science degree there, uni eventually after like kind of doing a bit of a computer science degree there um i ended up uh yeah kind of founding a company with some other friends at the time coming out of uni called

crown games uh so we made you know greg's adventure like kind of mini golf game where you like roll an egg around a maze and then you know it has a number of bounces until it cracks uh you won't be able to find it on the app store anymore we've taken it off since it was our first game and all that kind of stuff but um yeah the um we got to do kind of a bunch of cool stuff there and we tried to really, went from like really small to like really big when we tried to effectively make like Diablo for the phone with our next game after that.

So, you know, we had ambitions. So you made the indie game dev, I'm going to make an MMO mistake. Or it's like, this project's way too big. What are we doing? Yeah, effectively. We just kept pivoting until we tried to find the fun. And we eventually found, we were like,

oh, this is going to be a good game now. We're here, but we're also like, what's the scope for us making it? We got a bunch of offers for money to help us with making it. And then we went, I don't think it's responsible for us to do that. So we, I mean, there's a fair bit more to that story, but for the sake of time, yeah, like that's, that's kind of some of my past experience there.

And then, yeah, went out and worked, decided like, okay, going in and actually work as part of a software dev team and like a set up environment would probably really good for just like acquiring those kind of skills and that was really yeah actually really good for that um and so yeah then here i am now bringing that all to paper cactus awesome yeah so that's that's me and my experience my path is kind of different i've got no formal training with illustrations or video game design or whatnot. I actually started out as a dentist. That's a new one, okay.

So basically, I studied and I was doing art as a hobby. I was joining comic tournaments like Artists at the Ready and basically honing and learning my craft there through, I guess, osmosis of being an author of the creatives. Then around 2020, I developed a tabletop RPG called Parsons. I also did, I did all the game design, I did all the illustrations, I did a lot of the marketing, and I had that published, and I picked up other work here and there. I'm doing graphic design and layouts for other tabletop RPGs like the Wild Sea, which did very well for itself. I think a couple of years back it won the Ennies, like a tabletop RPG award.

So by the time I met Jacko again after many years of basically no contact I had started to shift out of the desire to be a dentist and it happened that COVID had just kind of messed around with the healthcare community I was having my own issues with my eyes and then along came Jacko who also wanted a change. That's where I started jumping into the project. So it was very much a big step and a big change for me but I don't regret it one bit. Well it sounds like you had the idea before you guys started speaking. So where did that idea actually come from? Well, I guess with, it sort of spawned off of a couple of different ideas.

It spawned off the story ideas that I had back way, back in 2012, some concepts there. I always liked talking about the themes of isolation and how people interact and how people change things. The whole idea of combining different things and how tools can evolve based on who used them. I had also been previously working with my tabletop RPG, the whole idea of like combinatorial word magic that would involve lots of different people. So I kind of got sick of drawing just people, and I wanted to go back to my true passion of just drawing robots.

I have a really bad habit and almost addiction to drawing robots. So I wanted to do something sci-fi. I wanted to do something robots. And that's where I started thinking about this idea. I can't say when're not really solidified. I think I was very much just designing in my head as I went until I met Jacko. Okay.

Well, I think we should just be fair in there. There's not just you guys in the team as well. We couldn't obviously have everyone because it would be way too many people here. But if you want to just briefly go over the other people involved in PipCactus as well, just anything else. So we've got another programmer dealing with our UI. The name is

Lynette, is it? Lynette's on Bambino just recently. You may know them more as staff if you're part of the community. Their name has changed recently, so that's the context there. Right, okay, fair enough. Yeah, they just recently went through some changes

and they are changing their names. So they are an old childhood friend of mine. So I've known them since almost prep, very, very young. And we have been in contact. We have a lot of things in common with games and anime. And they were shifting out of another career, BWS, like a retail more or less. But they had studied some game design early on in their studies. We also have an environmental artist,

Fris Hill, who was a graduate of architecture when I knew them. And they also decided that they wanted to have a little bit of shifting in careers. So they very much became a 3d environmental artist talked about environments with us talked about a lot of layout and whatnot and they're also hoping to do a bit of work within film as well in the future we have Zen is an old comic friend of mine working on narrative with us.

They also act as my second head when it comes to art. So they provide me with a lot of feedback. They provide me with a lot of assistance and they've got a very good, um, grasp of how stories are told. Okay. And then we have John, um,

John Ostman, who is also known as sound worlds in some circles, and he's worked on numerous projects as a sound designer and composer. I know some of them as, like, Rooftop Renegades is one of them. He'll also be doing some work for Towerpoint.

That name rings a bell. Rooftop Renegades. Yeah, yeah. It was a Melonheads game. I don't think I've played it, but I definitely know the name. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, you would have seen it around a little bit. It was by Pat Webb,

who, yeah, just recently was heading up some of the SAFC games stuff. So that was, yeah, very cool to have him actually be a dev and then go in and be kind of in that government support role to help other people with that knowledge.

Yeah. Right. And then there's one more I'll list on here, Andrew. Yeah, Andrew. It's also another childhood friend of Lynn and I. They're working as our web designer

and helping us to re-supply the website and whatnot. I do believe there's also one more member that isn't listed on there currently. Jack, you would like to? Yeah, so we've recently had Vincy join us. So Vincy Chan has joined us to help out with some of the kind

of advertising social media, like mainly social media side of things um and you know help poor nerds like me who can't manage that by my own apparently um uh and and keep us on track all that kind of stuff yeah that seems to be a consistent theme with everyone i talk to unless they specifically have an interest in social media or they have a team and have a social media guy uh oftentimes that part tends to just get kind of left to the wayside yeah i mean there's just so many things to focus on like i mean leo knew you could probably speak to this much better than i but like god knows i yeah too much i can say from marketing my own game previously, it takes a lot of effort and it becomes about 50 to 90% of the job, which of it, but then my tasks grew a lot heavier as we started to evolve as a company and we started needing to talk to publishers and organizing grants and funding, essentially, that I couldn't also take on the load of marketing.

That, and I had my first child last year which drastically changed my time so correct me if i'm wrong but it sounds like basically nobody in the team has like formal game design training it's just like there's you like there's programming knowledge obviously and there's music knowledge and some art knowledge and some background in other things related to like writing but nobody has like formal training in specifically how to apply these skills into game design no um and i don't um yeah i'm i'm not actually super worried about it in fact i almost really kind of enjoy the diversity of backgrounds there because it is one of those ones where I think that a lot of where games and it's not to minimize the game design or the formal training that's there. But some of that like core inspirational work of like, okay, yeah, cool. We could add these techniques and like this game design aspect of things in various places but those inspiration sources being so varied and

all those different like aspects coming into it i think is a really important aspect of what we can hopefully as a company bring that's like new to all of the video game market that is you know booming there's like plenty of devs um but yeah so no formal training i've obviously worked on some in the past um so i've definitely got exposure there um but yeah and i think even with leo you know having the the kind of past links tabletop rpg stuff that gives you that real iterative sense of working with players to get that kind of back and forth of like oh cool i don't understand what's going on here this doesn't really feel fun, you know, like all those kind of like hands-on learning experiences are really cool.

I honestly think that also not having a form of training has been actually a little bit of a benefit because we're not stuck into very similar thought patterns that come out of what universities and other courses will teach you. It means that we've learned a lot by osmosis from our community, taking bits where we found it useful

for our own processes. It's a lot of evolving thing. Well, I wasn't bringing that up to say that the formal game design stuff isn't important, but the reason I bring it up is because you don't need to go through some long course to learn how to do game design. If you want to do it,

there's so much resources out there that already exist for free that you can pick it up through other means. You can migrate from other areas. Like if you've got programming knowledge, like you did defense stuff. If you've got programming knowledge in some other area, you can migrate those skills over to something else

and actually work on something and just get started on doing the thing that you want to do yeah definitely i think like to put it simply i think you're basically there with like just do a thing um yeah like the the key one from i think me for growing up was like the making games thing when i had like something that was finally accessible at the level of where i was at which was game maker like i i knew nothing about code or anything like that i used the kind of drag and drop interface to do things and i i didn't want to touch code i was like ah it seems painful tedious whatever and then i realized oh it's like gonna literally be the only way i can solve this particular problem i have all right two lines of code i'll just. Two lines of code.

I'll just do two lines of code. And like just working in through that and like gradually building up. I think, yeah, by the time I got to university, like the amount we were taught at school for programming was kind of like always basically behind where I ended up teaching myself. Cause I was just enjoying it.

And so by the time I got to university, I was like, Oh no, this is the big league now. Like I'm, I might need to actually do some prep study for this. Like, went and tried to teach myself C++. I was like, oh, man, this stuff looks like a bit hard.

And then accidentally got, like, carried away and, like, me being worried about what it was going to be like. And, like, basically taught myself the first semester before we started university because I just kind of got used to self starting in that way and once you build that habit if you can and everybody's you know got their own ways of approaching stuff but yeah I think if you apply that to game dev then you've got that skill now for whatever other career you might want in programming or you know animation or whatever your field is so yeah definitely just jump in and have a go at things. So I know it's been an idea since before the game actually started,

but how long ago did it start where like the first line of code was written, the first bit of art was done, like the first formal start of the project? Like how long has it actually been in development for? I reckon if I had to put a date on it leo you can jump in because a lot of it was like very like you know talking about the idea of back and forthing it um a bit but i reckon it'd probably in 2021 okay i'd say. Yeah. 2021. I did reuse some of my old art concepts that I have stashed away,

but I solidified them with Jacko probably around 2021 for realsies, more or less. That's when we actually intended to make an actual video game. Mm-hmm. So what is the state of the game now? And what was actually shown at Avcon? Is that like a vertical slice? Is that like a core system of the game that you just wanted to test out?

Like, is that the combat alpha that was mentioned on the website? Or is that something separate? No, so that particular thing that's shown there is basically what we're calling like a bit of a pre-alpha. We've been kind of very keen on running into Avcon and various other conventions and showing off what we do have

to get that player feedback. We can go into that a little bit later. But yeah, at this point in time, we don't consider it to be the vertical slice. There's a bunch of features there that we are very excited about and that we don't currently have in that build. And we're super key to like actually finally get them in there and get players hands on them.

So yeah, we'll be having like a kind of community alpha. We've done the kind of pre-selection for that and getting a bunch of people in to help us test out those, those final combat features, some of which wouldn't have been at the, the Avcon live demo. And then after that, we'll be having

a narrative where we look at some of the more longer-term meta progression that's in the game and really let people get a hands-on with that once we feel like it's at that level. Okay. So before we get too

much into anything else, what is the premise of the game? Like, what is the setting? Like, what's the style you're going for here? Well, I guess Fox and Shadow is set in this apocalyptic world where the environment's more or less being ruined. People are being forced underground into cryo stations and an ai kind of runs things um and over time while humans have been asleep um copies and

variants of them have kind of taken to the surface and grown separate from the original program and kind of taken over the city so construction of the haven for people have kind of been it's like it was started but never really finished so what's happened is that ai has realized okay there's some things that i need humans to actually get sorted to get done to make sure that they can survive these unforeseen circumstances and so they start working outns, the foxes, to sort of bring back materials, bring back scrap, to sort of help them finish the job. So that's the very high-level premise. Right, right, yeah.

So that's kind of the background and setting for the world. And so you kind of jump into being one of those pilots, effectively, one of those foxes, who is then kind of given a bit of agency to go out and pilot a drone throughout this outside world and bring back the bits of scrap that are needed to like kind of keep the habitat you're in running and yeah um that's that's the kind of core motivation for the player uh but then you know many things unfold in this world up on the surface and in all other parts of it that uh you, you'll get to experience as the game goes on. So, with the, I assume there's going to be some sort of world building that you're going

through the game. How is the story planning to be told? Is it going to be through, like, encounters you have in the world? Is it going to be through some more explicit cut scenes after doing certain events, beating certain high-level creatures? What's the approach here? The approach is sort of twofold. So what we have in our, I guess, roguelike run is that you've got the pilot, they select a robot, it goes to the service. It encounters a lot of different other kind of rammed and broken

down AI that have kind of developed their own personality. And you get to see how the world happens through that lens. The different emotions, the different behaviors that are imparted on the robot changes what stories that you get to see through these events.

And then when the drone gets home or when it inevitably fails, we jump back to the boroughs where all the pilots are kind of living in isolated little pods. And they're having exchanges with the overarching management AI and the foxes in the character character select screen talking about their experiences and we wanted to kind of evoke sort of like a hades inspired um dialogue where depending on how the things that you achieve on your runs the narrative the story changes and you sort of hear little snippets so we're aiming for a very slow burn piece of narrative where it happens over multiple sessions. Right.

So if I'm imagining it right with like the Hades-like system, so if you get to a certain point, you beat some like big boss, get to another section, and then you lose after that, like people in that area will then comment on what you had previously done there. Yeah, more or less. So while we're not going to be going with a free roaming area like Hades does, it will be more or less chat dialogues that do pop up and they respond to things that you have achieved, bosses that you've killed, materials that you've brought back. Okay, okay. Yeah, definitely creating that kind of like sense of a responsive

world um that you're a part of rather than you know that kind of very stale like oh okay and rinse and repeat roguelike we want to we only get that sense of like okay things are happening yeah yeah that's a system i really do like from hades um i understand it's obviously like a complex system because there is a lot of writing involved in that. And I'm sure there is a lot of complexity from the programming side on that as well. And making sure you have events triggering from certain things. And then what do you do if you have multiple events trigger that lead to two different dialogue options?

Like one example in Hades is if you beat Hades on the first run, like there will be specific dialogue. The only C on that run, um, like little things like that, which it's, maybe it's not important. Maybe most people won't see it,

but if someone does run across that, it's like, oh, this is like a neat little, neat little thing that most people just don't even know is here yeah yeah it's all those little edge cases and like that one as well it's kind of like it goes almost to like the heart of gen film and like the the kind of like oh if if i did have this case you know you're thinking about it and being like

i would want something you know for that yeah it's that kind of aspect and yeah it's one of those ones where as a studio particularly as a first game you know like credit to those guys like they've they've honed their craft now and they've put out a masterpiece you know um and so we're going okay cool where can we where can we like put our efforts into and like also make sure that you know if we don't quite do it the right way the first time we have the chance to like iterate on it and like okay yeah I think we're good with this now so we've set ourselves a tough ask but we're really enjoying doing it so yeah looking forward to how everybody else finds it yeah if they enjoyed it half as much as we have and we're in a good place well from the programming

side if implementing a system like that like what actually goes into that like what how are you approaching it? Cause I, there's probably a bunch of different ways you could realistically make this work, but like how, how are you guys looking at it? Yeah.

So for that one, um, there's kind of like a two tiered aspect of it. Um, one of the bits that's kind of like a bit more solidified is some of the script, like story scripting stuff. So inside an individual scenario or an encounter or something like that to try to help with artists being able to like designers and narrative designers being able to visualize what's actually going on in a scene.

I ended up using a visual scripting style system to try to like help that sense of flow of like different pathways and branching possibilities uh so that's kind of within one particular scenario um and then at the higher level there's basically kind of effective like a like a series of checks um and like a filter on you know prioritizing what should show preferentially as like a thing that can pop up, but also a certain amount of like random choice within bands of, okay, these events are like available to at this point in time and we want to make sure it's not completely algorithmic in what the player is seeing.

So that there is that sense of, oh, like I will just encounter stuff. And because of the whim of fate, like we're going down this path now. So, yeah, you want to make sure that, you know, as much as you can create this beautiful system for it, like you still preserve that sense of chance and discovery. Yeah. And on that note, it's actually really cool when you start doing the architectural design and going through those things to kind of be able to refer back to um gameplay design principles like the pillars of gameplay so we wanted meaningful choices um and discovery as like two of our key pillars there um so you know kind of be able to make sure that i hold both of those um as we're like developing that system really helps okay so i'm sure that this having a system like this adds a lot of it adds a lot of interesting work when it comes to like doing the writing and

then if you want to have like different art that shows up in these different segments as well like it adds a lot of additional work there to make it not feel like you're just seeing the same thing over and over again it's like it it's cool to have a system like this but if it basically just says the same thing but in like a slightly it's like it's like a cookie cutter hey you beat this thing hey you beat this thing like yeah it's okay sure whatever but like if you want it to be an actual like unique thing that it feels cool to discover i'm sure that takes a lot of additional effort to really feel meaningful yeah and there's always going to be bits where you know you kind of reach the end of what's humanly possible with the people and like the

manpower you have available so you gotta release something you probably see it in hades as well right like um yeah you know you get that like kind of same piece of oh you know okay you've talked to me a million times before and you can talk to me another million times we can't keep writing dialogue for this right um yeah so we you just have to kind of trust that the players you know kind of understand yeah there's like limits thing i don't unless people want to go down the whole generative AI route for things, which is a whole other ballpark, not one that we're exploring for this game. Yeah, so that's, like, I guess the potential solution

to that problem, ultimately. But, yeah, no, I think for us, like, the crafted experience is still pretty important. Yeah, I see what you're saying about the generative AI stuff. Like, I've seen some games that have explored it. There's this, like, detective game. I don't remember what it was called. You put, like, some, like, I think it was, like, a robot detective or something.

It's, like, there's, like, yeah, I don't remember the exact premise. But you, like, go around to these different people, ask them, like, oh, what happened to this scene? What happened with this and being generative AI like you can just ask them stupid things and the guards they have in place are Reasonable but like any system you can get around the guards and just ask them really stupid things like hey What did you have for breakfast? start asking them really stupid things like hey what did you have for breakfast like it's just like it has nothing to do with the game and like you just see what they do with it but yeah like if you want to have an actual like good well-crafted experience like we

we're nowhere near the point where it's it's good enough to like build an entire game around where you actually want to have a consistent narrative like if you if you're fine with haha funny equals random equals funny sure it works well enough but it's not gonna handle like you have a set world that you're building here and you want to actually make it make sense yeah i think i remember a friend describing them playing that um that demo and they were saying even like trying to like stay within the bounds of like what the experience actually was meant to be there were you know a bunch of places where it was kind of like yeah like you know yeah running around so you know who knows maybe like fingers crossed that gets worked out a bit and all like the other kind of issues around

that kind of stuff gets worked out a bit as well um but yeah um no for the moment we'll uh we'll accept our our failings as mere mortals and uh and keep soldering on so with this being a roguelite deck builder like this is obviously not the first roguelite deck builder there's a lot of roguelite deck builders it's one of the more popular roguelite categories right now um what are you guys do okay what what is like the core system and then how are you guys trying to do something different like how does the deck building work? How does moving around the zones work? Like, what sort of system do you have to go between different encounters? And yeah, just generally, like, if you're in a run, what are you doing?

So more or less with us, well, I'll start from the high level. Most, well, a lot of games, when you kill kill an enemy they're simply out of the fight and taking inspiration from darkest dungeons i decided to design in a slightly different route so when you defeat the enemies their bodies still remain on the field now this allows players opportunity to continue attacking these foes if they wish so. The more damage you deal to an enemy, the more the body breaks down and that changes the types of rewards you get. So if you reduce an enemy's HP exactly to zero, you get some pretty neat cards, more powerful versions. Cards have special properties, modifiers that have been attached to them. But if you decide to go overboard

and deal excessive damage, you get more scrap or money and you also get more broken down cards that are filled with the viruses. So it becomes a choice of the player to decide, do I want a lot of money or do I want more powerful cards? And that comes at a crossroads of choice. It's very much a choice that the player can actively choose to make to turn how they want to approach the run um because there are a couple different ways to this um there's as i said the two types of decks we've got the um the behavior cards which relate to the pilots um and their emotions and we've got the directive cards which relate to the robot in combat really you can only use the directive cards but out of combat you can affix

the human cards to the robot class to change how these work so we've got our basic attack which is called leak and that does six damage if we add a card that says a card for our first character um the hot shot that says insult it becomes deal six damage and add two weak to the enemy whereas if we add something called brave um it becomes hit um deal six damage to all enemies now the complexity builds from here in the fact that you are given the choice to mix and match between these cards. So rather than being offered at the end of a fight

a simple choice of three cards, you're really given the choice of what you need next. So you're given a choice of either the Behaviour cards or the Directive cards that are unfused. You go up and then you can fuse them afterwards and each combination leads to a unique type of card. So from here players get a lot of choice. They can build cards as they like. The next stage of that is where we have where inevitably you'll pick up duplicate cards.

At certain points on the map you'll be able to fuse or refine duplicate cards into a more powerful version of the card. So a lot of the game becomes a choice of when do I combine my cards, when do I refine my cards, what do i want and then additionally with this um each encounter has a little bit of story and we've got narrative which is told from the ai and the management ai's perspective but then there's also text sometimes a star will sometimes a different that is um be spoken to the player but the corrupted rogue robots. And the more viruses you collect,

this is a feature that we hope to add, we'll see how things go, the text will slowly unravel and give you a different type of story. And with our map navigation, we've chosen for a more free approach where you're giving a basically a tile a map tile a set of map tiles where you can freely navigate around

Exploring from tile to tile which means that you can spend as long as you want in a single act Or as short as you want you can simply rush to the boss The longer you spend obviously the more resources you gather, but also the more harder enemies pop up. I was going to ask if there was any drawback to sticking around. Because otherwise there would be no reason not to just

grind out each act and just be really powerful for the next one. I'm not sure if you might have played Risk of Rain at all potentially i played it really good years ago i haven't played risk of rain 2 but i did play the original one risk of rain yeah risk of rain 2 great um so like the the kind of like sense of okay as time is going on everything's getting that little bit harder and it's the part of the balancing act for the game is really that like tension of okay am i am i like geared up enough

to go to the next place yet or or um am i like am i hanging around too long what am i doing am i just sitting here farming oh that's gonna make my life so much harder right um so yeah yeah letting players kind of pick that strategic midline um and and see what suits them uh it's kind of a bit of the uh a bit of what we're hoping to go down for that over map screen. And we've kind of got a bit of a threat system that like the more stuff you're doing in the world, the more kind of things are starting to notice you and come online and wanting to deal with you. And that kind of, yeah, plays into a bunch of the narrative aspect of the game then as well. So with the system of it getting harder, is this based on like actual time or is it based on the number of tiles you're

across uh it's based on a couple of different factors and we've got like you know tuning parameters for all the little ways so like you know whether or not you choose to defeat your enemies um whether you go into the kind of like have a chat with the merchant and buy stuff from him you know, all like, there's a bunch of little factors that are all there contributing their own little bits and pieces

to this like threat score system that's going on in the background to kind of see, okay, cool. What are we, what are we putting you at at the moment in terms of like how much everything is like kind of coming at you?

Is the player going to have any indication of like the current threat level or is that just something entirely happening in the background we want to give them an indication of the overall threat level currently we you know we're open to workshopping this and getting feedback from people um but we want to kind of stay away from like any single like you know like it being distilled down to some like single number that people just go oh my threat level is currently you know this exact thing to the decimal point this is your star level in uh in gta yeah it's it's it's meant to be you know kind of like the maybe like you know low medium high you know catastrophic

like really yeah i if i was going to pick between that or the the risk of like racism like that kind of like sense of like oh you know like a very qualitative description of what's going on would be cool so like cruisy like undetected or you know up to hell has broken loose right you know like that kind of thing yeah okay i think we want to give um players enough information to make meaningful choices um everything is about what the play was to do and how they want to approach things. So they can balance whether they think it makes sense to keep going or, okay, I know I'm not going to survive going up to the next tier. I need to get out of here now. Yeah, basically. Or have them potentially plan ahead a little bit

and start to think about, oh, if I am going to go and cause a bunch of noise, then is that going to make my life harder? Am I geared right for doing that? Yeah, all those kind of little trade-offs. Yeah. Just kind of, it's one of those ones where we're also saying meaningful choice, but we're retaining a little bit of ambiguity

just to make it so that, you know, if you have all the information, it actually takes away from your meaningful choice because you can kind of plan a very optimized, like, okay, this is it. This is the exact thing. And in some circumstances, that's cool. But if it's like every single time, there's just like a single answer for whatever it is

and you don't have to make some kind of meaningful decision about what you're doing next, then it can kind of take away from that spirit a bit. So really making it so that your intuition as a player and your choice of strategy is going to be the thing that gets you through is one of the aims so across the nodes that you've already cleared out so you've like beat enemies here beat enemies here question one is can you go back across those nodes and question two is if you can are those nodes safe going back across or may something happen um if you go back to a previous one so the idea is that um when you traverse through nodes you've already been through they're typically safe typically

however our elites they're really hard enemies we want them to roam around the map and the longer you spend on the map the more of them that appear and the faster they move towards you so yes the towers are safe tm um they're safe until they're not safe anymore. But players will have a very easy indicator to say, okay, this is now a hotspot. I need to avoid this or, you know, I could lose. Okay. So the reason I ask that is because if the threat system had gotten too high and you're like, okay,

I need to rush to where the exit was, like you cleared out a path to the exit to the next act, there was no elites along that path you could just zoom back up along that path and get to the end yeah more or less yeah assuming nothing jumps in the way right as you're doing that yeah you know then there are a variety of things that might be able to happen there and that's one of the things that you know we don't want to put all the cards on the table necessarily but yeah like things things might the world doesn't necessarily stay the same while you're just pottering around doing whatever you want to do it's safer but not guaranteed to be safe yeah yeah okay right that makes sense um so okay what sort of nodes are going to exist along the map you mentioned there's the merchants

there's like the i saw the regular encounters and then there's like elites anything else that's going to be notable that you want to mention yeah so we also have yeah yeah so you know at any point in time you're kind of trying to find your way to these like elevators or ways to get downwards through the city. So starting on the surface layer of the city, kind of bringing back some of the scraps that's not there, working your way through down lower and lower to where your pilots are sequestered. And that's the kind of like things get continually more spicy there. So you want to get to one of those access tiles that allows you to go down through the elevator. So things like that.

access tiles that allows you to go down through the elevator so things like that um and there are a couple of other different methods that we're tossing up for allowing people to do that at the moment which are very cool um and so in addition to that one of the kind of features that leah was talking about earlier was the ability to um refine cards so to get two of the same cards and add them together so there are workshops that you can find throughout the city that have like just this little bit of charge left in them they're not very well maintained or there are workshops that you can find throughout the city that have like just this little bit of charge left in them. They're not very well maintained or anything like that, but you can kind of go in there and take two of those cards together

and use them. So it kind of like ends up with a reduced cost card or like a more effective card. And that is like something really valuable for the players to kind of go across. It's like a little bit of a power spike if you can kind of find your way to one of those um they also let you like kind of repair your drone a bit as well which is very very useful um so yeah those are kind of like some

really key points of interest uh for players to kind of head across um and then yeah there's various um kind of i don't know encounter tiles tiles, and you can be in narrative events that are in those. There could be just kind of things that are going to more or less be very hard to not just be straight-up battles. Yeah, so those are the kind of stock standard ones.

Is there any more tiles you want to talk about, Leo, that I might have skipped over? Can you talk about what other things you can do with the merchant, besides buying? Oh, no, no, that's a good point. Yeah, so the entire concept of the game is that you're scrapping robots to get cash.

So it also makes sense that the merchant can take some of your HP to turn into money as well. So if you have something that you really want to buy, you can start selling parts of your drone. It's up to you in the end whether or not you can make it all the way home without that missing HP. So the merchant becomes a sort of locus for us to buy additional plates, get additional money if we need it, and also rare cards, rare mods on cards as well. I think that's the main thing that Jacko hadn't talked about. So yeah it's

very much a resource focused game, very much about time as a resource, money as a resource, HP as a resource. as a resource it's yeah so when you get to the end of an act what happens then I assume when you beat the boss there you get some sort of like

special card for beating the boss like it'll probably better rolls than you would get on normal things but is there anything special that happens before you go down

to the next act is there like a point to heal is there a point to combine cards or anything else special that happens before you go down to the next act is there like a point to heal is there a point to combine cards or anything else especially that happens there or do you want to answer that one so right now what we are contemplating is putting like a little elevator scene where

you essentially go down the city you go from the top layer to the layer that's kind of the wasteland the one that's being exposed to the sun or the harsh environments then to the second layer which is like the city that was meant to be built for humans but kind of taken over by drones and then the third layer is where your pilots live more or less but in between each one we want a little elevator scene where you can either upgrade cards or buy cards have a visit from the merchant and

this is probably a feature that we're still debating about just because the city is kind of tiered like this we were considering having little voids or like holes where your robot can jump down and fight other a series of harder fights that go straight down to the next level. Okay.

Okay, that's cool. Yeah, it provides a different sort of choice for the players and also lets them, I guess, take a gamble on what is happening next. Okay. It's one of those ones where a lot of the the bits and pieces here are us being like this is a cool idea i think the best way to find out is to like put it in front of players and see what they do with it you know like um like we internally play test it and like all that kind of stuff and then be like okay the final judge is the players um and that's the kind of stuff where i think it kind of almost comes back to that point before of um being able to attend like conventions and like stuff like that

and see what happens when somebody sits down at the game in front of you um because like doing remote testing is cool as well um and like very necessary and all that kind of stuff but there's something like very very neat and very visceral about being able to just see somebody who's just walked in through from a con and just like sat down there and have them go i have no idea what's going on here or oh man that's sick i love this so much and then you just go wow okay i never thought somebody would like gravitate so much towards that little system like let's let's keep going with that um yeah those are the really like yeah cool. They keep you going as a developer. Honestly, going to events is actually really important because

your tests aren't biased towards your genre. You get a lot of people that you don't expect to play your game, and you can sort of gauge whether or not your game design holds up for even people that aren't fans of the genre or have never heard of this genre. like the moment we say

Death Building Roguelike we either get the response of oh Slay the Spire or I have no idea what that is it's just how iconic Slay the Spire is but it also lets us get data on blind playthroughs where the Kongos

don't necessarily talk to us. We may be busy with other people, but we're always listening. We always see what they do. We get to see what habits form, whether or not people decide to just rush straight to the boss, go back and forth, trying to farm all the tiles, or they're trying to make the perfect deck

before tackling the harder enemies. It informs us of what theories we have behind player motivations, player tactics, and gives us physical data on how they emerge without us interfering or spoiling the data. So it's really important to go do these events. Yeah, big shout out to avcon and all those kind of events for helping put it together well i saw that you guys were at um you guys were at sage

earlier in the year as well if i'm correct yeah yeah yeah absolutely very cool to have that up and running for like two years in a row now we'll be able to show that a chance to go i was gonna go this year and i forgot that it was in february so i've not had a chance to go just yet uh it's rough yeah i didn't realize it was like it's part of the fringe and i didn't realize the fringe was happening until the last day of the fringe i completely forgot about it yeah yeah it can be like that a bit hey um yeah so many cool things so many things you plan to go and do and then you know life gets away yeah yeah yeah um no it's been very cool to have sage kind of pop up as like something where the government's actually like really getting in behind the industry and supporting things in that way um yeah so uh just huge thanks to them for doing that um like and if that's happening at

all levels so like state level federal level with level with Screen Australia, helping with a bunch of funding and then even like local council. Like, yeah, City of Adelaide has been really cool to us as well. So yeah, big shout out to all of them. But yeah, like having those events that can kind of bring people in is both really good for us. But then like I remember at Sage a lot as well, there's like all these kind of kids coming through looking at like a future career in games or something like that and they kind of get to see things they can aim for and like have people that we can say oh yeah yeah like keep keep following

like this path or okay like here's some stuff you should know or like you had to impart that kind of wisdom a little bit maybe and it's very cool to have like somebody I bump into at Sage one year, come back and be like demoing a game there the next year. And like, yeah, those kinds of moments are awesome. So yeah. Awesome. I random question that I completely forgot out before. Is there a, I would assume there is a, a size on a size limit on the decks. And is there a limit on duplicate cards?

on a size limit on the decks and is there a limit on duplicate cards there is no size limit on the deck well technically there is there is a minimum that you always have um just because in this game specifically we avoided putting in the option for players to actually remove cards you sort of remove cards by refining duplicate cards. So this means that there's a high limit of having at least five to six cards in your deck at all times. That's the

bare minimum. You can only refine each card once. So basically, you can't keep upgrading a single card into a more powerful variant. It just stops after once. So basically, you can't keep upgrading a single card into a more powerful variant. It just stops after once. So you will inevitably have your deck

grow, but players can theoretically reach six cards if they try very hard. Okay. Yeah, so it's about trying to grow responsibly, I guess, a balance between having good quality stuff and then not too much just generic stuff,

unless that's your strategy, maybe. Who knows? And was there a limit on duplicate cards or not? Nope, no limit on duplicate cards. Okay. In fact, some strategies might actually revolve playing multiple of the same card in a turn. So

basically we have one I guess emotion tree which is called angry and the idea is that you set yourself on fire and you do more things based on that. And the idea is that the more

fire or melt that you've got on you, the higher damage that comes out. So players may try to use the same card over and over again to build up that melt to deal excessive amounts of damage and end the fight in one turn. So we... There are a lot of cards that have been

designed to encourage the use of duplicates. Okay. So at some point, you're either going to fail a run or you're going to beat a run. So what happens when you finish a run and what do you lose out on if you had failed the run instead? So I guess what happens when

you finish your run, you've kind of gone all the way from the surface, you've taken the long way home, and your robot delivers all the scrap. do I say this or not, Jacko? I think there's some certain narrative stuff we want to keep close to the chest for the moment to not

spoil things for the place. I didn't expect you to get into that i was talking more about like resource wise like do you lose out on some of the the scrap you collect or so the idea is that if you manage to get all the way um to the bosses a lot of your scrap is then transported back home which means that you can use it to um as i guess unlocking different perks different features in the game um over time however if you don't get to the end of the run um like if you don't get to either any of the bosses or the end of the run then you'll lose most of the scrap that you have actually collected so a lot of it is basically rewarding players for making the trip to the boss meeting it and then moving on to the

next act so that there is actually some progress that does occur because like essentially if you're holding around all this money all this um material if you don't get a spot um to the deposit box it's never going to get back home right oh so you can deposit it like along the um the the journey as well it's not just like right at the end it's something that we're hoping to test and plan for but it is nothing that we have confirmed as of yet it requires yeah okay we got we got a couple of different options that we're really trying to make sure we'd like nail down that bit that actually definitely feels fun um so you know one of the ones would classically be between acts um it's kind of like a nice break point it's like kind of a part of that reward of

even like beating the boss it's like okay cool how much of my scrap do i want to put back into the bank and say yep cool i've locked that down and how much do i want available for the rest of the run to be able to kind of go through and have that resource pool to to launch into further success so it's kind of like a choice player would then have to make um and we just try to like make sure we really get that um whether that's the particular final system we go with where we don't want to lock that down yet but that's one of the avenues we're definitely exploring yeah right because there's different ways you can approach this where some games you'll have like some sort of resource system and if you fail before the end then maybe you don't send all of it back or maybe only to the latest checkpoint you'll send

it back and then there's a game like hades where like certain kinds of resources you don't get until those later parts that run anyway so you actually need to get to those further points otherwise you're just never going to see them um it's like what resources are going to exist is it just like scrap as a generic resource or is there different kinds of resources that are like different kinds of scrap different uh different other different things you might collect yeah i mean so scrap would be the obvious first one um there are other aspects of things like the virus system where we were talking about that in terms of what that enables kind of in a meta progression sense that again kind of starts

to get into some of those narrative options that unlock and that necessarily kind of unlocks some other parts of the game that you wouldn't maybe see. But not in like kind of one of the things we're like hoping to really see if we could get with that is rather than be like strictly, oh, I've got this resource, therefore this is unlocked kind of thing it's like oh cool there's now something more i know about the world right which means that this other stuff can happen and the world evolves in that natural way a little bit more um so rather than yeah making it some

kind of like specific resource uh per se that it's like no okay what's going on in the world with these um with these new discoveries so besides the narrative stuff is there plan to have some sort of out of run progression system so what we have what we're intending to have as a full release of our game is three robots and three humans, which gives us nine different sets. Now, what we want players to do over the course of playing our game is unlock them one by one. So the first time you unlock either the pilot or the new robot, you get an additional one deck.

But then if you do the other variant, so if get if you talk to a pilot then you get the drone then you suddenly get two decks and then three decks and then another three decks so it's that's how we want players to unlock and progress things we will also be having certain cards not available certain branches of cards not available on your first run so the more you invest into a certain robot um or pilot the more emotions that they get so we're we've done this on purpose to allow people to sort of learn the game as they go and not to i guess overwhelm them with choice at the very beginning to avoid analysis paralysis right right so yeah so so one thing we kind of skipped over there is what is the

scrap actually being used for that you're bringing back why are you collecting that is it or is it something you can't say so scrap is more or less used to sort of repair the bunkers underneath so basically all the facilities have been running for a while they need new parts they need new materials to

turn out more robots to turn out more pieces to help bring the day where humanity kind of wakes up from cryostasis and can return to whatever city is happening that's the story reason for it um and then the kind of mechanical reason is that it becomes a resource to unlock different things, different perks that are given to the player because they've achieved well in the game. And yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So part of it's like, you know, management wanting to, you know, give you a little like thanks for keeping going, you know, keep going to do thanks for keeping going you know keep going to do a better do a better job do a better job do a better job like you know trying to bring you into that cycle um yeah so that's um that's like definitely one kind of the the part there but yeah you can see us like holding back on some other narrative stuff we're like oh we want to share it but yeah we also want to kind of like let players discover it um in the game a little bit as well so yeah we're doing probably that fine line so in this uh in this combat alpha

you're doing is it just the like the one set of human robot you have or do you have all the ones you've made so far accessible uh we've decided to um only have the first set available um just because it means that the experience we get, we get very specified data on the set. So we get a lot of feedback, we get a lot of testing out, so that when we do move on to the next set, we may opt to switch the pilots over in our convention builds, just to make each experience slightly different.

So we usually hit up Avcon, we usually hit up Sage, and we'll be hitting up PAX again. So we want players that do come back, they get to see different sizes of games as the game progresses. And it just means that we get more direct feedback on one specific set. Yeah, and so to kind of further on that, like anytime we're running something like an alpha test, we usually want to go into it with specific questions that we want answered um because otherwise it's a part of it is like it's very cool to just like give players the chance to play the game a bit more and you know they're they're all quite keen for that so i think we've um a big shout out to the community for like just being so enthusiastic about wanting to help us and

yes we'll we'll give you as much as we can as soon as we can um and yeah for um for like the combat alpha specifically just turns out that the questions we want to answer with it don't necessarily need all those like in-depth pilots which means we can kind of cook on that design a bit more um until the point where we're ready yeah cool okay this is ready for alpha testers to go nuts with um basically yeah are you able to do oh go on sorry so you know you go i was gonna say are you able to do a full run during the combat alpha or is it just like one act that's available uh so particularly in the beginning yeah particularly in the beginning one act and it's one of those ones where realistically we will probably do like rolling updates as it's going along um you know we don't

have like a fixed thing exactly because we want to see the data before we start committing to like the further the pieces of it and make sure we're like okay cool that bit's solid let's like expand and expand um but yeah just being able to kind of like tease in some of those next bits that yeah like okay it's one act and then okay two acts and so on so forth um kind of being revealed throughout things yeah so what is the goal with the combat alpha then like why are you guys doing it like what what information you're trying to get out of this so uh you go oh okay so the um the main one for me would just be that kind of very base ux of it um so the act of literally okay i'm playing cards to defeat an enemy um do people find that intuitive can do they understand like when we write stuff on the cards

like the way we're going about writing them, is that something that people are getting or are they kind of sitting there just kind of really puzzled by what's going on? Like the targeting indicators, all those little bits of UX that, you know, this sounds kind of completely different from all the gameplay testing side of things, but those have been some of the big blocks

that we've been stumbling on throughout some pieces of the development where we go, oh, we've created this wonderful system that we originally had a thing where you could combine cards on the fly. And so there was this, in your hand, it was three cards and three cards in a nine-grid system.

And we're like, okay, I think this, on paper, this has a bunch of really good things for it. And then you put it in front of a player and it's like the actual user experience is pretty abysmal. If you don't know already kind of a lot of the game mechanics so you know we were wondering like can we teach people this and i think the answer is just like no like it's just as a as a thing that a first-time player coming into the game has available to them that was just too much and so kind of going back to the drawing board and

doing like a more simpler traditional card setup was the right way to go for that um and be able to answer those kind of questions is something we've done in the past so similarly coming through this combat alpha just making sure that the ux sound effects the the damage indicator coming out for people is something that all feels right as a package right um so those kind of bits and pieces um yeah that that kind of stuff and then like the set balance and things like that um you know having the full cards available we haven't had that at all the previous conventions there have been some cards in the set that have been omitted and so now we're kind of going through okay how is this full set balance right i'm seeing things like in one of the screenshots you guys have here um like there's

the energy siphon card and the siphon part of it is like over the uh the the placeholder art you have there so i guess things like making sure the cards are actually readable as well is like part of that yeah yeah definitely i reckon those those website shots will probably do a bit of an update sometimes yeah andrew keeps asking for the updates on them. I'm like, ah, I just a little bit more, a little bit more.

Give me another couple of weeks. But I guess also adding onto it, there are a couple of mechanics that we haven't actually tested in public yet, like the overkill and the looting system, because it's not a system that we see very often we need to sort of gauge what the player base's response is

whether it's clunky, whether it's unintuitive, whether it's unfun and that will change our design so a lot of it is also validation of our design as Jaco said before we've had very interesting design choices where we tried

a little bit to take it too far from what the base experience was of the genre. It's been one of those ones where it's like sometimes we're like kids in a candy store, you know, we're like, oh, this would be a cool mechanic, and this would be a cool cool mechanic and this would be a cool mechanic

and this would be a cool mechanic. And like some of them it's like, oh, okay, you might have to save that for a future game. Like there's just too much stuff going on here. How are you currently planning to indicate the overkill? Because obviously zero is easy enough. They have zero health, they're dead. But if you are doing the extra damage,

is it just like a visual breakdown is it some sort of indicator over the top as you're doing that additional damage or what what what do you think i was thinking for that yeah so there you go uh so i was gonna say one of the ones that we're looking at at the moment is the underlying all of it using the kind of similar status system to be able to um to mediate a lot of it like the kind of tech background so that's where i'm jumping in i guess like nerdy programmer um but then how we display that is like quite open to like like a like a skull or something like that kind of going where the shield could be i think like we could probably talk to a bunch of the visual aspects of it a bit

more. I guess the plan is to have another bar that sort of builds up. So you've got the first health bar that goes down, the more damage you deal. Then obviously we have another indicator, an icon, as Jacko said, to indicate that

you're now past the point where they are alive. And the bar starts to build up until you hit that maximum, where you've broken them down as much as the system will actually allow. Like, I think while it will be fun to let you continually break down them to infinity and beyond, there needs to be hard limits to everything, which is just part of design. There needs to be hard limits to everything, which is just part of design. So having a bar is a good and traditional way of demonstrating you've done something, you're hitting the limit.

I'm sure balancing how much would need to be done to keep it still entertaining would be a bit of a challenge. Would you want it to be an additional percentage of their health? Would you want it to be a set number, just generally a set number? Finding what really makes sense, I'm sure is going to require going through some of that combat alpha testing. Oh, absolutely. I think the current status is that we're setting a minimum of what it can be. And then if it exceeds that minimum it becomes a percentage of the original robots so

like if they had 15 health to begin with then it might be 10 damage as a base minimum but if they have 120 it might be closer to 60 right oh but it does require a lot of testing is why we want the combat alpha. Yeah, you don't want someone to just it to be like, oh well I've beat this big enemy and now it's like I have to spend like three or four turns just breaking it down. It's like Is that fun? Maybe like a couple of times, but does it really work? Well Yeah, that's what the play testing is for Exactly, and like we'd obviously once all enemies are sort of deactivated we'd set in maybe one final turn um where the players can do so so they're also going to do

it within a specific time limit okay okay right that makes sense um because yeah i could i could see that being a problem otherwise we If you just let the player... If you let the player choose when to leave, you will have players that choose not to leave. Yes. Honestly, it's a fun game then. They're enjoying themselves. Mm-hmm.

Fun is very debatable. This is actually a random other example of another game um i play a lot of path of exile um there is a mechanic in that called delve and there is this absolute psycho so delve is basically like a a roguelite system where you go to these different nodes you get resources those nodes and you're basically just going down- the idea is you're going down through this mineshaft. Now most people they'll get to like three, four hundred, maybe a thousand floors in if they really like Delve. This guy was like, okay, I'm gonna get to the limit of Delve and the limit is the

16-bit integer limit. So he's been doing that for the past three months, only doing that mechanic. And I think just today, he finally got there. I don't know how many hours. I think it's like 65 days of total game time. Something ridiculous like that. Just in this one league. So again, if you let people do something for too long,

they will do it for too long. You'll have at least one person who will spend way too much time doing it. Hey, congratulations to that guy. That's a service to humanity right there. He's carding the Uncharted. We're proud of him.

And I mean, the fact that we're talking about now is also an important thing to note. It becomes a way of people sharing what they do in this game and why they enjoy it. And we may be laughing about it right now, but it is now something that we are talking about. It is a highlight. Yeah, yeah.

It's really cool to just let people experience things in their own way as well, I think. Like kind of part of that discovery thing is like, you know, what's beyond the horizon? You know, even if the answer is, oh, I think I have a pretty good idea. I'm going to hit like the integer overflow or something like that.

Like, you know, but I got to try, you know, I got to find out. Like that's like a real human instinct. So I'm like, yeah, that stuff's cool. I mean, I think the overkill system is, the one character I'd like to reference back to is the question mark, question mark, question mark in Act 3 of Slay the Spire, where there is an enemy with 999 damage. Now, you don't have to do that 999 damage, but it feels good when you do it. So, yeah.

I think you don't actually have to beat them i mean you don't have to do all the damage to beat them because they self-destruct in what six turns but it's just like oh can i it's that that same mentality right right right no i get that no that that makes a lot of sense um well okay so you mentioned you have these different characters. Obviously, if you're going to have different characters, they're going to specialise in different things. What is the one that's in the combat alpha specialised in? And if you want to say what the other characters are all about as well. Do you want to handle this, Shaka, or should I?

Yeah, so I can do a brief overview of it. So the one we've got in the combat alpha at the moment and the one you've seen at convention builds is Hotshot. And so kind of like more of the brash kind of character that's basically kind of very straightforward and in your face about how they go about life. So it works well for a beginner player kind of like okay i'm just gonna go in and hit things um and so like a lot of their kind of

personality traits that you can unlock either revolve around honest or something maybe more like unruly or angry or you know those other ones and then there's kind of like kind of like the ability to be like kind of like be that gamer insulting kind of thing. People can play into that. And each of those has their own mechanics around it. So that's the pilot that we have available there for the first set of things. And we also have the swarm bots,

which are these little robots that go out. And Leo's got a whole backstory that well maybe we can go into later but effectively they're running around the city kind of like collecting pieces of crap and observing things and seeing what's going on um and so they've got the kind of at the base level the ability to kind of like leap on things and like kind of defend themselves a bit but also the ability to kind of summon more friends in and so kind of through power of numbers things like that? Yeah that's the one yeah so through those power of numbers

kind of like beat the enemy through just that as well as you know like kind of melting things down a little bit to kind of help bring them back and using that to fight so those are the kind of two base characters there and you know we've got some other card art that we've oh sorry some other the kind of two base characters there. And, you know, we've got some other hard art that we've,

oh, sorry, some other like kind of key art that I think was shown around the place that has some of the other characters. And I don't know if you want to talk any bit more about them. So I guess I'll talk about the robots first. We've got another class of robot that we're, I guess, codenaming the Observer. And it's sort of like a personal recording companion robot that also acts as like an overseer of what all the other robots were supposed to be doing.

And the idea is that they can store energy. So every time they get hit, every time they get attacked, they take damage still resource um a status resource that they can expend to do different things in the fights um and they can also record moves so they can sort of remember the moves that you've played during a combat and recall them up later in the fight okay then the third one is third robot is called the recycler and he's sort of like he's supposed to break down um other robots other enemies and turn them into useful components uh this one is more in development and needs a little bit of a review just between us because the branch that we want to take this

is that um you can break down robots you can use the scrap and the metal that you gain from the fight to build different cards for that fight, or even revive dead robots to use as your sort of hide and companion to help fight. So they're more like a summoner class. Okay, okay, that's cool. Yeah, like the Necromancer vibe, yeah.

Yeah. And then we've got two other pilots that we've got planned. One is called Keeper. He's sort of more like a dad figure. He's their stoic kind of figure that takes his time, sort of build up energy, build up reserves,

build up statuses to sort of finish everything off in one blow. He's very much a defensive character as like thorns and building up, I guess, cards that become more up I guess cards that become more powerful growth cards that become more powerful over each fight that you take some of the bit of his theme is just to jump in there is like kind of like being a bit of a gardener almost like you know really like tendering like like that kind of stuff so that's where that kind of a growth theme comes in from. Yeah.

And then a third character is fluid, and they're more or less, I guess, we still have a very strong attachment to the original gameplay style that we intended the 9x9 grid, the three cars and three cars. So what we hope to have with the fluid is that we give the players the option

to combine cards while they're fighting so that you can be a very flexible fight depending on what you need this is most likely going to be the last pilot we unlock so that when players reach fluid they sort of have a very good understanding of what you're doing and then suddenly this becomes super special um they're more like uh an artist um they're sort of someone that doesn't quite know where they fit in sort of finding their place in this weird world that they've woken up into okay yeah um are you planning to add any additional later on or are you set on like this is what we're gonna have so this is a question of funding and how well the game does fair enough fair enough um just because the way we set up the

system if we add an additional robot or an additional pilot we suddenly have to make another four sets of another like three sets of moves or four sets of moves and um, another, I guess, three sets of moves or four sets of moves. And the more we add, the harder it gets to actually make more cards. So it really does depend on how we do as a product. Um, and I have ideas. I haven't shared them with Jack yet, but I have ideas. Yeah. Oh, no, he's got plenty that he has shared with me but I know there's always more this man

is not short of those but yeah no it's really cool like yeah we're hoping everybody loves it as much as we do because we really want to keep doing things for it and even then yeah we'll hopefully be having a bunch of other features that kind of like trickle in

throughout the course of like post-release. I'm going to drop a little sprinkle tease for something I want to do is kind of like really nice mod support and things like that. So looking to kind of take some of the dev tools that we have and put them out there for players to use. The degree to which I can really like kind of justify going and making them out there for players to use. The degree to which I can really justify going in

and making them really user-friendly to that nth degree that we can put them out for players is basically going to be somewhat dependent on where we see community support landing. So yeah, that's the kind of shout-out there to everybody. I really want to do it. My little passion project. But yeah, hopefully I can do that that's

awesome hopefully like honestly yeah yeah definitely speaking of that the way we've done our animations is actually quite flexible in the fact that if i need to add more animations to a robot it isn't just i need to redraw everything but i've used sort of like a puppet system. So we've got very 2D models that I can add more animations quite quickly if necessary. So if the game gets popular and specific enemy drones sort of become favorites, people go in and add their own little bits and pieces and rejig, I guess, animations that suit what they need. And that would be a very basic and first step for adding more content

in because I'm remembering there's a I forgot what it's called hold on I'll just find it because there's a really popular mod for Slay the Spire where you can play as the monsters

Slay the Spire Downfall I believe where you can play as the monsters. I have a set of spires down for you, I believe. Is that what... Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's the one. Yeah, stuff like that is really cool when stuff like that becomes possible in the game. That's the sort of stuff where the modders really do some cool stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And really letting people get in and mess with the parts of the game that are the fun parts, basically. So I want to try to make it where possible so that the rule sets that we're messing with are something that they could kind of take in and go mess with their own. So, you know, whether that be like, okay, what cards are available? Sure. Like how did the effects on them work?

How is the map being generated? You know, like all those kind of like little pieces, those like input bits of configuration and just letting them run wild with as many of those as possible. Yeah, you know, whether or not we get to the point of like them generating whole new art assets and stuff like that, it's probably like, you know, there's like a bunch of,

then like we'd have to potentially do moderation for it if we wanted to like have some kind of like communal platform for it. Like, you know, it's interesting. So there's like a bunch of thorny issues to to like solve there if we want to like really back this as a company um but yeah like it's it's very cool and i really really want to want to push down that path um so yeah hopefully people can let us know if they're super keen for it um we'd always always love to hear that from people

one thing i didn't ask about earlier is um we were talking about the UI and how information is displayed, when you have a card that's fairly simple, like, I don't know, what's your basic attack card called? You say Leap? Leap. With a card like that, you bonk the enemy, it does a number of damage. That's easy to explain, but when you have the more complex mechanics like melt for example uh how are you planning to display what mechanics like that do to the player like is there going to be some sort of tooltip system is it going to be some sort of help system you can see where it lists out all the mechanics yeah so for that one we have a tooltip system in the game at the moment so anytime you know some kind of effect like that is being applied to the enemy um if that effect is on top of them you'll be able to see it like and hover over that um like little status icon and get the the thing in the very kind of

classic thing for the genre um hopefully we can get like some more like nice visual indicators in there as well so that you can really see okay this has happened and like a plus melt kind of pops up as it's happening and just give people a bunch of things to be like, okay, something has happened and this is the change and this is a name associated with it and this is an icon and they can see that very clearly. And that's a very tactile way of people being able to learn the game by playing rather than necessarily by reading.

But then in addition on the cards, you know, you've got those big long like kind of descriptions potentially and being able to kind of like have like the melt keyword there highlighted and then a tool tip that pops out that can describe melt over the side if you do want to go read through um and then one of the other things we're looking at as well is potentially just kind of bringing things to a more um glyph based kind of description of the card so where possible you know rather than writing a word having the pictorial representation of that to really just be a bit more efficient with space and like hone in on people's like you know shape language a bit more than just like so much words

being thrown at you right right because i can imagine some cards it could trying to work out like what you want to actually fit on the card i can imagine is quite a challenge yeah uh like you can always make the font smaller but if you want it to be readable like you have problems there yeah yes yes just yes um and even even beyond that you know there's a certain amount of text you can throw at people and like even if you tell them like all this stuff in text like do they understand what you've said by the time you've used that many words at them with like kind of like this logical twisty stuff like some players will some players will love that like you know the kind of people who are born to go through like the people who play yugioh who want to read an essay on each

of their cards yeah and then you have like so i remember some of my earlier ones when i was throwing builds at some of my friends um they would just not read the text um they they they just wouldn't and i was like oh cool do you not understand what the card like what the text is saying and i was like it's like five words and like they're like oh no no i just don't read them like and like these people play roguelike they enjoy it it's just like they will they will learn by playing which is like a really wild thing for me because like that's not how i play but right they just know what the card art means after having used it yeah so they might see something like the numbers or something that pop out there but like yeah it's it's kind of interesting and so did they have a blast so like yeah okay cool

like what can we do to help make that like play style and that like approach to games like you know we could either be like oh no we don't we don't like it i don't know it doesn't seem productive at all so it might as well be like okay cool how can we lean into that yeah yeah I look if people are not going to read the cards like there comes a point where like there's only so much information you can provide you can only provide it in the most in so many convenient ways if people are just not going to look at the information no matter how you present it at the end of the day like i don't know what you can do about that yeah i mean and it's a it's a tough problem like so some of it uh this isn't going to be everybody of course but so some of it uh will extend from like accessibility stuff so people

with like various different levels of vision and things like that you know they'll see a card and they'll see the text they'll just be like this is actually too like in like a bunch of the games this is like too much of a strain for me to actually try to read it in the forms that it's presented so they'll kind of be able to pick out like a few key bits and pieces but then like kind of just learn what it does um potentially uh and so there's like yeah coming back to that kind of glyph system where okay cool we've just bought ourselves so much more space to be able to like enlarge things for people now um and be able to like slim down some of those mechanics and find really efficient ways of describing stuff and

then potentially maybe take some of the cards that were really complex and go this is a really cool effect and like love the theming and all that kind of stuff. But it's just like, there's too much going on in this card. It's something for a modder to make for people who want to, want to do that potentially. And like, but maybe is, is that part of our base set? You know, like all those kinds of questions. Yeah. So you mentioned, sorry, sorry, go on, go on uh just adding to the glyphs um also color coding

things um as friendly as possible so if a defensive it's a defensive effect we probably try to use blue text if it does damage red text just to make the correlations and links between them a little bit easier because even if they're not reading they may be looking and taking in color and that's just another layer that we can do to help those i guess people that are playing games like that to make those connections yeah so being able to like not rely necessarily on silhouettes but also not rely on colors like having both at all points in time so yeah so you mentioned um accessibility accessibility in there uh are you guys having any thoughts about like how you're going to approach that problem because obviously that's like a a big area and there's so many different

kinds of accessibility that you could look into adopting and then there's like the time constraints and the money constraint like like what do, what are you guys at least considering for that? That's a very broad question because there's a lot of different parts to it. There's a lot of different ways of having accessibility problems. At least from speaking on our team broadly, there's a lot of different things that people on our team deal with and process information very differently.

Like I, myself, when I said that I had eye problems, I developed cataracts a while back. So I very much don't like things with too much detail. And I like to kind of gloss over my words as much as possible, just to kind of get things going. I use color.

I use different phrasing to kind of get things going i use color i use different phrasing to sort of build a pattern so people do understand um so we talked about glyphs we've talked about color um we've also we're trying to make our ui kind of expandable and almost modular in some aspects for us behind the scenes we're trying to make our text very large as best we can without making it too big. And we're keeping a lot of the UI very simple and also very similar styling so that it becomes clear that this is a UI element versus a visual element, a story, like an aesthetics element. There's some other parts that are harder to necessarily do, like in terms of all the dev work that

goes into a lot of these. So for example, stuff like text-to-speech is one of those things that would be like, oh cool, that would be amazing if we could build in support for that. But then like the actual way you go about doing that, there's like a couple of different options that are all bubbling around in my head and I wouldn't want to commit to any one of them. But the main thing is just like looking at

where that fits into our workload production. It's unfortunate that that probably comes at this point in time, like in the kind of like post-release phase of things, which is really unfortunate. I'm not like, I want it to be there on like day dot, but you know, just like the way it's like lighting up, it probably looks like that. It'd be something I get to be like, okay, cool. Now I get to work on,

see if there's something I can do to address that for this community and hopefully at least bring that support there for people who wouldn't otherwise have access at all um so like features like that um yeah it kind of spirals out from there you know and some people have um things that they can already use to assist themselves like magnifiers for different bits of the screen and things like that um and like you know potentially looking at like doing filters for different color patterns where people have particular color blindness, things like that.

Yeah, there's a wide variety there. Having different input device support as well is one of those ones where we're kind of interested in. Because I know you guys are planning to support Switch, so I would assume that the PC version is going to have controller support as well i don't see any reason why you wouldn't do that if you're going to go switch at some point in the future yeah so controller support is one of those things that we definitely want to make sure we get in there once we've got the ui like kind of locked down a bit um in terms of what we want to do with mouse and

keyboard we are we've been like kind of iterating with it in mind all the way through um the primary one for pc is kind of yeah definitely looking at the mouse and keyboard particularly mouse driven um keyboard support obviously to accelerate but like you should be able to play with just a mouse and not have any issues um and then yeah hopefully that that's one of those ones where like once you start targeting those little bits and pieces there are some of the third party um like providers that will get a you know provide things for whoever has whatever kind of accessibility needs um those devices will work with those kind of um frameworks right right i guess i saw what was it the um i'm not sure if you would have seen the Neuralink guy recently Oh, playing Civ? Yeah, just with his mind

So stuff like that, you know, that's just using the old mouse and keyboard stuff so you can go a long way with some of those kind of crazy, but yeah Yeah, so hopefully we can support a bunch of things A lot of the esoteric devices basically just hook

into controller support anyway so if that's there like usually like that gets you most of the way there yeah definitely yeah so we're pretty pretty like hopeful that we be able to get all of that in for release and stuff like that yeah that shouldn't be too shouldn't be too much of a challenge i would have thought yeah so i i did mention that you guys are planning to do that switch support as well um that obviously adds a lot of additional work on top of uh just doing just doing pc yeah so the switch support is potentially a conditional one. It's not our first choice there. We'll be looking at how dev timelines work for that. It's something that we really do want to bring it to Switch.

But yeah, we've kind of been saying, like, Switch asterisk, I think. Right, right, right. I mean, it's like the whole process of localizing a game. It would be great for accessibility and reaching a wider audience, but it is a contingency based on a lot of different things.

And obviously out there, there are a lot of different translation and porting companies that we may end up resorting to. But as our first game, we hope to not do a multi-platform ship. We want to focus on the PC, all the nuts on some of that Steam ecosystem, really,

to make sure that we nail it the first time and that we don't have too many issues to deal with at launch. There will be many here and there that will pop up unexpectedly, but we don't want to add complications to that if we can because I did see there was a lot of people at Avcon

where like it was their first game and in many cases like it was like a one person team and it's like I want to target PC, mobile and all the consoles like okay like that's great but like keep in mind that like that's a lot of work. Like, release a game, make the game first,

and then, like, post-launch, or if you're able to get a team, or if you're able to get, like, a porting studio, like, you know, don't overwhelm yourself with all of this additional work before you even got the game itself made yeah all right so that's one of the ones um in some of the work i used to do for the defense contract research stuff you know they wanted us to do heterogeneous compute so you run on mac linux windows uh we want oh we want to offload code to the gpu okay that should just natively handle that in code generation oh well i love that okay how about fpgas like you know we're not like the you

know you just get like um interesting like and it was a very fun project like because you just got to do all this random misogyny stuff with like kids in a playground sometimes and that was that was amazing but um yeah the, just like that kind of level of heterogeneous support has taught me, okay, cool, scope your priorities for delivering. Okay, we're already supporting three different platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac. Like let's nail that down first.

So with Fox and Shadow, are you guys just planning to target a Windows release or are you planning to do Mac and Linux releases as well? Mac and Linux releases as well, yeah. Okay. Yeah, we try to get people in the team also daily driving those platforms. So that's like me at the moment, I'm doing the Mac daily drive and then Lynn has been doing the kind of like more of a Linux push there.

I can't remember what distro. Yeah. So, you know, just trying to make sure that, yeah, like when we run into stuff like, oh,

cool. Oh, like some of our shader things seem to just come out black on like Vulkan for some reason. Okay. Who messed this up? It's like, oh, no, no, it's just a Linux thing. Oh, okay, all right, all right. We can go in and see if we can fix that.

And having that consistently all throughout the dev process rather than trying to fit it in at the end somehow has been one of those ones for me, I guess just based on past experience, it's like, yeah, you want to know the problems early. Just be like your users right like if we want to support people who might play on a mac which is totally fine there's no reason our game shouldn't run on a mac then yeah like one of us should be a mac user it's like just being representative of your player base is where we can yeah yeah this is a not doing that as a problem i i see from a lot of other games that do have

especially the linux sport like they'll a lot of time you'll see a company with like we we exported our game with the linux build but they never properly tested it they don't have anyone on the team that is a linux expert or knows anything about linux and yes your game technically runs but like there's all of these additional bugs that nobody on the team knows how to fix nobody the team knows exist and yeah often in those cases especially it's better to just not even bother adding the linux support natively and just rely on what valve is doing with um with wine and proton because oftentimes bad linux support is worse than just letting the open source stuff fix it for you yeah yeah and it's it could be a rough one like that so that's where like trying to have a couple of at least like a couple of different

distributions and people who have like kind of dived into stuff and lived it firsthand i mean yeah even then you still run into the problem of like oh it works on my machine you know like that kind of thing and that's where like kind of like trying to get some of the alpha tests to at least be like oh okay cool linux though like um and i know i've got a couple of people who are already like kind of chopping at the bit for some of that stuff um and see what their esoteric setups do to our poor, poor build. And then, yeah, if it turns out it's just like not viable for us as a company or something like that, we're just running into way too much stuff because fundamentally, you know, we're going through the Unity pipeline of things.

So, yeah, we're hopeful that it should all work out pretty well. But, you know, we're not going to push broken buggy stuff on consumers. That's definitely not the idea. Yeah, the other problem you see is games that let one of their builds get out of sync. Like Rocket League was really bad with this early on. And they had no excuse for it. Like Rocket League is Rocket League.

They have a lot of money. They could have supported it properly if they wanted to. But they had the Windows version, works great. They had the Mac version, works great. Then they had the windows version works great they had the mac version works great then they had a linux port but they didn't properly support it they let it get out of sync with the other releases and because it's out of sync now it doesn't work with the multiplayer so now you've lost the main reason to play rocket league and it's like like the the port there was no reason for it to still exist because it basically

didn't work um there are other games this has happened to in the past as well like torchlight um i believe taught the original torchlight might have happened with um where it just didn't work anymore on linux because they'd also built it around like a 10 year old version and it didn't run on modern versions like yeah yeah it can it could be a bit of a rabbit hole as well um and that's one of those ones i think was like if you want to support it um i mean i guess the step one is at least being like very honest about okay what what do we actually know that it runs on and works with like what are our parameters like a dev team for what we can be like, yes, cool. This is supported. And anything else beyond that,

like good luck. So yeah, at least if we can try to be clear with the player base on that, that's my hope that we can do that. But then, you know, it's also a question of like, how easily does Steam let you signpost that to people?

So yeah. And how, how easy is it to communicate the nuance? Yeah. Right. And then if something does go wrong and like you guys can't keep it up just be like just be just be honest about the state it's in like yeah we know it doesn't work anymore like we're just gonna get rid of it like i know people liked it and all that but like we can't keep this up basically

rather than keeping something dead around until the end of time yeah put it out of its misery exactly so yeah um what was the response like that you got from i guess from both sage and from avcon i think what we've been noticing over the years is that a lot of people are drawn to the arts first um and then once they get into the game they sort of have fun and they get in they a lot of the players that are of the deck building genre of the deck building fan base um they very much appreciate the ability to have choice between their cards um and at first people didn't quite understand what was going on if we we didn't catch them right after they did the first battle and say, oh, hey, check this out. Some people did miss it.

But as we've gone along with development and actually put tutorials in, better UI, this problem has been going away. So it's been very much a useful retrospective to compare how we do between cons and the feedback we get. Because if we gain the same feedback over and over again that means we haven't addressed the issue but if we're not and we gain praise for different parts of things it means that we are making good steps forward um but it's been yeah generally positive

yeah i mean one of the cool things for me has been having players who do come back to the booth and play the game like every year um which is like it's kind of wild the first time i think we had somebody uh rock up in an avcon i think it was like the sunday morning or something it was like 10 a.m you know usually it's like kind of like a little bit a little bit dead at that point in time we're back at the convention center particularly the first year back um and so if you have whatever reason like some guy like just rocked up and sat down and like just played fox and Shadow for an hour. And we didn't have to move him on or anything because it was like, yeah, we have the free seats.

It's like, yeah, you just play as long as you like. Please go for it. And just having somebody actually sit down and do that is incredibly rewarding as a dev because basically, oh, okay, cool. People care. Very, very nice. So yeah. We've leaned up that happened again this year too yeah yeah awesome must be one of those ones where i stepped away from the booth for a bit but yeah it's just awesome that um like to both get that feedback but then be able to see okay what

is it that's like dragging people in um and then yeah people like kind of jumping in and joining the discord and all that kind of stuff and wanting to know more and just like checking in on the state of dev and stuff like that. Yeah, really kind of keep us going, yes, okay, cool. Like we need to make sure we're giving these people some more stuff to come with soon, yeah. So did you guys notice any sort of new issues

you weren't aware of from that testing at Avcon or was what you're showing off like polished enough where it's not gonna just suddenly light on fire if someone does something you didn't expect don't think I just thanks to Jack being fairly thorough with all the programming and setup of how we've been developing our project. We haven't actually encountered that much of a crash. And my headset just died. And we've had crashes.

I hope you guys can see. I can hear you. Yeah, we got you. We got you. But more or less, it was actually the first time that we started showing off our music at the conventions because previously we've always had the sound on mute just because a lot of the build up the the pieces weren't quite finished that previous convention so we had it this time playing at on the TV behind us so it gave us a lot of feedback on how all the sound effects worked whether or not the soundtracks were nice or whether or not they became grading after time but i can say it was really good to experience how long was that gone oh it was like two days for the for the total part yeah yeah how many uh like yeah 10 to 5 not 10 to 5 something

10 to 6 yeah so a good seven hours Kind of extended out the back a bit. Well, Saturday, I don't know. Were you guys still around on, like, after dark? Or did you guys leave? No. Okay. We didn't do that this time around.

Because I know there were some people there that were there until, like, 10 o'clock showing off stuff. Yeah. Monster effort. Good on them. Yeah, it was a... Saturday was a very long day yeah yeah yeah i mean

the sound stuff's interesting as well right because it gives you a um different perspective than like obviously what like the sit down at home experience would be with like some speakers or like headphones in your own private room um so it lets you kind of almost stress test certain parts of the audio if that makes sense like you're in a busy convention floor like okay in this situation what actually happens and you can it's not necessarily super representative of the final like player experience we're actually expecting but there are some interesting stuff there like i think it's useful for our composers they just like hear that um we got a few like minor little bug notifications here and there like little bits of like statuses that were like oh i expected to do this and it kind of did that but like this and then you go oh okay yeah

gotcha we'll we'll like patch that but yeah like leo said you know if we're going to bring something to a convention we don't want to crash it um that's kind of like rule one it's like you know everything should be stable um whether or like some of the gameplay stuff is like a little bit like like unintuitive or doesn't quite line up right. Okay, there'll be a few bugs there as well, iterating on development. But yeah, the core engine needs to be good. Yeah.

And apart from that, some of the really good feedback is just people sharing their experience of it. Because that's the key thing at the end, right? It's like, are people having fun or not? And so like us being able to answer that question or like them sharing their view on it is like, yeah, always really good feedback. It's also good to show where we need to focus more efforts on in our development, whether it's to show more of the story,

whether or not our narrative length is too long. And it's just all these little pieces that we overlook after staring at the project for too long so it's like always a good reminder of what we need to change and fix yeah like the other narrative one oh sorry oh on the narrative one um there was a like one of the little tiny tests we were running was just like oh okay let's give players the ability to respond with basically the same response but just change the way they'd phrase it um and like see if we could use that to kind of draw them down a different path and like kind of like treat that as a bit of a learning exercise and we found that some players like kind of got it and like ran with it some players didn't really understand but just like

kind of skimmed through it because narrative whatever like blah blah blah um and then some players just sat there and like would kind of like look back at us like a deer in the headlights being like oh no what should i pick because like they didn't really feel like they had the context to to make that decision that early in the game um and that was like a very interesting one for us because we're like okay like a very interesting one for us because we're like okay cool like the best way for us to find out how players will approach this thing is to be like okay so what do players do when we give it to them and yeah being there at the time as well is very useful to be able to like get that um i kind of like quality like that

emotional thing out of them and they like their natural response yeah Yeah, very cool. Yeah, like, the people who skip every bit of text, like, again, what I was saying before, if you don't read the text, like, you can't help those people. Like, they just, there are some people who, doesn't matter what the game is, like, story, not game, don't care, ignore it, I'm going to play the game now. Like, you know, you can put them in front of a JRPG

that's like 50 hours of cut scenes, like skip, skip, skip, skip, like not my problem. I'm going to play the game. Yeah. Yeah. To each their own, you know, to each their own. Yeah, you know, also try to do what you can to make sure that, you know, whoever is downloading,

like, yeah, there are limits to what you can do to like still like they're kind of opting out of a bunch of things like let them opt out i guess where we can but um yeah you know still hopefully have them have a fun experience um at the end of the day um yeah you know our aim is not to necessarily shove the narrative down their throat or anything like if they want to opt out they're gonna they'll probably miss out on a bunch of the experience but through their own choice i guess i mean we've done little bits and pieces to make sure that people that just want to experience the combat gameplay have the option to always just attack whoever they're talking to that is always an option um but it's probably not going to end up being the most rewarding of those paths.

But it is an option. Well, that's actually kind of fun. I like that idea. What I was going to say before is I've been going to Avacon for probably close to five, six years now. And I've noticed that over the years... for probably close to five, six years now. And I've noticed that over the years,

the quality of games that have been shown off has been going up each. Obviously, there was that break during COVID. So a lot of people had a lot of time to work on stuff during that, which is awesome. That's probably a big part of the reason why now, last year and then this year like people who got a chance to work and stuff during that like the quality is like way way

higher but i remember back in like in like 2018 where there were a lot of demos there where they didn't have that like level of like con polish where you could get them to crash fairly reasonably reasonably they would have very easy to access like game breaking bugs um I don't know it's just it's nice to see that there is this this game development scene developing in South Australia where that really it did exist in the early 2000s but after like the global financial crisis a lot of stuff completely died then and it's taken a while for stuff to really like ramp back up and actually see not just a game development scene in SA but really like an Australia-wide game development scene. I think at least in Adelaide most of us game devs are actually connected some way,

where there's a friend of a friend, or we're very much a tight-knit community and we try to help each other where we can. And that means once one game dev, one studio starts to develop at a different level, they also bring all the other Studios to come up with us There's also been a lot of support that we get from other government bodies particularly screen Australia as a way With the games expansion funds which has actually provided a lot of devs with the funds They need to actually get started and hopefully attract publishers. So think between that and events like GCAP and all the ease of communication

these days, the level has just been growing at a, I guess, really steady and great pace. Yeah. I'd say the same thing like this, like certainly feels like there's a bit of maturity in the industry, you know,

like particularly, you know, once you get stuff like, like you're like having the big success, like hollow knight and all that kind of stuff and and that'll like building a lot of steam behind things um means that yeah you know like then government and start looking and going oh yeah like we do want to support this industry and we do believe in its future um uh and so that's been really cool i mean like on the avcon one specifically there is i actually have a like a soft spot for the avcon kind of like it's crashing but i brought it anyway kind of vibe

right i'd be sad if that left uh that's just me personally maybe everybody else feels different but i really like the fact that i can go to like all the devs around the space and be like oh no no don't don't be scared. Show your thing at Avcon. You know, maybe it's not as polished as you'd like or whatever, but it's never going to be as polished as you like. Put it in front of some players.

Please put it in front of some players. I think part of that is not having the same like barrier that exists with like going to PAX because like PAX is very expensive to go to. Definitely. And I think like previously as well, it also kind of had a bit of that, like the way it was set up in the convention center,

it was like a bit cloistered off, you know, it was kind of like it's a little cave that you go into and all that kind of stuff. Whereas like now in the last one, you know, we've got like all these massive screens provided and all that kind of stuff. that was like really cool as like a leveling up of the the setup there um yeah it's a big shout out to the organization this year um and yeah like that that was been very cool to see but yes i still kind of really do want to make sure that it's one of those ones where i can tell people like hey bring it there it there. It's so much better to have some kind of experience there that people can stumble across.

Just because one of the ones I remember from my cryon days back when we were doing that was having that ARPG and we'd have a build running on phones or like that. And then throughout the con, I'd just be there on my laptop completely dabbing and somebody would be like, i wish this worked like this and i'd be like okay yeah on it like you know just like do that with the idea that if they came back the second day they would see that change in there or maybe even like later that afternoon um you know really just going okay like we're here to interact with the people at the convention as much as

possible um and you know there's a balance between that and like having a stable build, right? Like, you know, so yeah, sometimes that's just like really fun to roll with that vibe and work at that level. So yeah, I kind of, I don't know. I don't want to advocate it because it is, it's hectic. It's really hectic to do that. But at the same time, quite fun. I had to get these two at once.

Yeah. So you mentioned that. I know that he shouldn't have been doing this because he was already aware there were issues with it, but Dan from End of Ember, he was working on a build, like, the day of, and, like they're like they've got like a programmer guy now he's like can you like not do that right now like we've got it in a state where it's good just don't touch it yeah i think i think there's like a there's a key part there which is like

whatever your like architectural setup is. Because I think Dan's one is definitely coming in from that kind of artist vibe of things, where he's like, okay, I've got these things, and I've got them in the game, and they're working together. I've seen around the space before, and I've seen some of the problems he gets to run into, which is like, okay, cool.

It looks like it's working, and it's all working together. And even other game devs can have this problem as well from a programming background. But are the core systems good like are they all working together in a way that protects you basically so that like when you get that fault at the higher level it kind of gets caught in the lower level and doesn't propagate further um yeah and you don't get into like soft blocks and all those kind of things um yeah like what's what is there to prevent that who's like thought through from that level um so if you can answer those questions beforehand it's really cool

because it means you can get into the con and like just dev with a lot more freedom if you want to um so a big shout out to that kind of line of thinking but yeah again to each their own you know for sure i can sort of speak to the last minute changes on doing things because like I very much as one of the artists and the ones kind of working on the visual side of things I'm always like oh this needs to look right

this needs to look perfect and I've got to look at it again if I don't get this right and you kind of get into this like really narrow mindset this tunnel vision of not looking at the product as a whole. You only look at your section and you kind of forget that any changes that you do make could actually mess something up really irreparably and you could end up with a bad build. So I think that just comes with experiencing and knowing that even if it's not where you wished it would be, it's still good.

There is still value in having it seen and having the feedback that you get from it. It's not your release build. It might be your actual release build, but in most cases, it's not your final build. You'll get to work on it later and you're better off having energy to attend the convention and enjoy yourself by asking what you've made by asking what you've achieved so i think working at the con while it seems like a good idea in hindsight you're better off just taking what you can that you can only get out of con the experience with players yeah if you're gonna do it you need a team around you um you you cannot be a solo dev do it oh okay i'm sure there's there's gonna be the exception to the

rule right but like yeah i i like i remember like going okay i'm gonna like take a break and like nap down here don't mind me now like you know it was it was that kind of like stage of like fresh out of uni programmer life um that you could like just kind of roll like that but yeah like as you can tell i'm not doing it at these conventions i'll think like you know stable prepared not allowed there we go boss says no well on that note i think that's as good of a message to end on as as we possibly could um so let people know where they can find the studio find the game uh get involved in any community you might have and all the other stuff you want to direct people to uh so we're based in Adelaide hurrah but the easiest place to find us is through our website

www.papercactusgames.com on that side has linked to all our socials and it's probably the best place to find us the easiest place to communicate with us is through our discord which is a link on the website or through I guess Twitter?

Kind of. It's a weird place to exist on right now with Twitter. But yeah, go to our website, the easiest place to find us and find out more about us. One little question. When is there going to be footage of the game on your

YouTube channel? So, currently currently I'm working on a small little animatic. Okay. So I want that done at the very least. And then I will get some gameplay footage and splice together a trailer and go from there. Okay. We've been very, at least from a marketing perspective, I've been holding off on the videos

until we have a very good representation of our product to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot, more or less. But yeah, I am keen for that to happen. Okay. Was there anything that was missed there, Jackson? Anything you want to direct people to that was not mentioned?

No, I think that should be good. We've also got a couple of the other platforms that you'd expect, like Instagram and all that. But yeah, we're mainly looking for that website one. And we have a newsletter if you want to sign up for that as well. You can find that at the bottom of the website. Sweet.

Nothing else? Are you guys going to be at a con anytime later in the year? Or is it pretty much done for the year? So we'll be going to PAX this year and South by Southwest. So we've got a booth at PAX and we'll be demoing along with the game showcase at South by Southwest. Those are the major public appearances that we're doing that are open to main consumers. Awesome. And also we will

be at Gamescom later coming up in August, but we're not there kind of like showing off the game or anything like that. We're just there kind of attending and doing business talk stuff and all that kind of fun thing. But I don't know, feel free to drop us a line and say hi if you're around.

Awesome. Is that everything then nothing else yeah i think that should be it okay yeah um okay we'll do my outro and then we'll sign off so my main channel is brody robertson i do linux videos there six-ish days a week check it it out, see what's over there, I've got my gaming channel, Brodeon Games, uh, right now, I'm probably still playing through Devil May Cry 4, and I don't know, maybe I'm gonna play the Path of Exile League on stream, check it out, see what's over there, uh, or maybe, I don't know, maybe I'll do something, I don't know, find it out, anyway, um, the, if you listen to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you want to find the audio release, it is on every podcast platform. Search Tech Over Tea.

There is an RSS feed. Put it into your favorite app and you'll be good to go. How do you want to sign us off? I never tell people they're doing this. It's always fun. Oh, I love that everybody if you can make games make cool games if you haven't tried making games make cool games

do it absolutely yeah Prevost the same thing as long as you've got a passion for things you can make it happen it just takes a lot of hard work. You know what? That's perfect. Sweet.