Tech Over Tea - Mixing Action RPG With Animal Crossing | Catalyst Games

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

Today we have Aiden from Catalyst Games the developers of the upcoming Dungeon and Dining Tables on the show to talk about the game, a dungeon crawler combined with a house building mechanic where how you decorate the house is directly tied with your combat stats.==========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.catalystgames.com.auSteam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2941630/Dungeons_and_Dining_Tables/Twitter: https://x.com/CatalystGamessYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@CatalystGamessTiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@catalystgamesFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/dndtgame==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as it was your host, Broody Robertson, and today we are, I guess this is an early Sage podcast, but it's actually one of the ones that we missed from Avcon last year, which was June, July, whatever, whenever it happens, a while ago. So, welcome, Aidan from Catalyst Games, the makers of the upcoming Dungeons and Dining Tables. How about you introduce yourself and just explain what the game is? Sure. So, yeah, my name's Aidan. I'm the creative director for Catalyst Games.

We are a small indie studio based here in Adelaide, South Australia, and we're working on our first kind of major original IP game, which is called Dungeons and Dining Tables. So it's a bit of a labour of love. It's a passion project for me and the team. And, yeah, we've been working on it for about two years now, and we're getting really, really close to our demo release. So I'm very excited about that.

That's why I've come to join you here today, I guess. So a little bit about Dungeons and Dining Tables, it's a cozy RPG. So you delve through dungeons to collect rare pieces of furniture, and then you take that furniture back to your house to decorate, and the cozy your house is the highest stats are. So all the furniture that you collect has these different sigils and different stats that are on the furniture. And as you place it in your house, you get those buffs on your character,

So you can get things from like maximum health or extra speed or extra attack damage as well as some cool abilities as well. So like temporary hearts and like bees that will follow you around and all sorts of stuff like that. So yeah, it's a cool little idea. It's super cutesy. It's a it's a 3D game. Kind of gives you a bit of a like a Pokemon meets Zelda kind of vibe in the art style. But it leans more into kind of like a Diablo 3 arcadey ARPG. as well. So we've got some really cool elements. I'm really excited about it. So yeah, yeah,

it's a cool idea. How long is the game in a work of progress for at this point? So we work on this part-time. So as a studio, you know, trying to make sure we keep the lights on and everything like that. We do a couple other things as well. So we've been working on a part-time for about two years now. So it's actually, it's really funny. Today is the official third birthday of the studio. So I started this company three years ago as of today. So, yeah really cool. That's awesome. That's awesome. How many people are working on the game? So we kind of, we go through a couple of different people. Usually it's somewhere between 10 to 12.

I think we get as low as eight. And I think right now as we're coming close to that demo, we've got like a core team of about six that are working on it just to get us across the line. We work with a lot of different contractors. So we have all sorts of artists and musicians and programmers and that sort of thing that come through. And yeah, the idea is just to kind of like help upskill more of the industry and, you know, share the wealth a bit when we can and that sort of thing too. So, yeah, we try our best to give everyone an opportunity to work on it. So you said there's a core team of six.

You said you're the creative director, yes? Yep, that's right. What is the skill set of the core team? Yeah, so we have a technical director, which is a guy named Luke. Luke's our technical director. He's awesome. And he handles the majority of the programming tasks and the larger architecture systems. So that makes sure that, you know, the framework is built and the foundations are there for us to build a game. I do a lot of the design. So as a creative director, creator, I'm the kind of vision holder for the project. So, you know, it was concepted by me. I do a lot of the design and the user experience side.

And then we have Ty, who's our artist. He's our kind of art director. and he has a team of artists that he works with as well. We are very heavy on the art. We love a good looking game. So he is in charge of everything to do with our pipeline on the 3D art side. And then we have Hannah, who is our 2D artist. And she handles everything from the UI to like the marketing assets

that we use for Steam, our big banners that we have and all that beautiful 2D art. That's all Hannah. And then we also have Nathan, who is our composer. So he has all of our music and all of our sound effects and make sure all the animals make cool noises and, you know, voice records all the characters and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, that's kind of like the core team. There's a few other people as well, but that's sort of the makeup of the whole thing.

Do you have a pretty comprehensive full team, like core team then? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of these guys have been working on this project for about two years now as well. I think technically our newest guy in that whole group of it is Luke, our technical director and he's been here for almost a year now. So yeah, it's it's great when you can have a core group that's been on a project for a while because they kind of just get like the feel of it because they've seen it grow and develop. And I'm not sure if you guys have seen any of the old trailers, but it looked very different when we started to what it looks like now. So yeah, just having a basically having a team that has worked on it for a long time, they can see where

the improvements are and they know where they want the product to go. So yeah, that's been a really fun. Do you happen to know where I could find any of those old trailers? Oh yeah. So if you just look up Dungeons and Dining Tables on YouTube, we have a game trailers trailer. If you look on that one, there's an old one which might come up first, might come up second now. And then we also have the new one which was on IGN recently as well. So yeah, you can kind of see the difference between the two trailers, which is really cool. You'll definitely be different. Like a year ago, I think was the first one, maybe a bit of Okay, yeah, I think I found it.

Why is the video not playing? Thank you, YouTube. Oh, there we go. Okay. Yeah, so I can... Immediately what stands out to me is, like, um, I guess lighting work. Like, the, the core style is still there,

but it's clearly that, like, shader, that shade of work hasn't been done at this point. And it, it feels a lot more flat, I guess. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So a lot of that was, um, at that point, in time we did have a slightly larger team and we're all just kind of like throwing stuff at the wall to see what worked. Really trying to find the fun in what the game was. So there wasn't a huge focus

on making it as pretty as we possibly could. But if you have a look at that compared to like the newest trailer, you can see that we've really updated the art and made it look a lot, a lot cleaner and a lot better. So, uh, yeah. Oh yeah, that's the first thing that immediately stood out so that's me when I played the game. Every time I played the game, it clearly has a very cohesive style to it. And like, whenever you see an indie game,

it's very clear when you don't have a full team because a lot of people very specialize in like one thing. A lot of games have really technical systems or really great art, but most people don't have a skill set that covers everything. Yeah, no, you can definitely thank Ty for that. Ty as our art director has been phenomenal.

Just like following his direction on making all of that stuff happen. Another shout out I can make is to Tony, who's one of our concept artists. So Tony is the one that's designed all of the enemy types, done them all kind of up in 2D, and then Ty essentially makes them in 3D and rigs them up and animates them. So it's been a really cool process to see, like, everything from like furniture to enemies to whatever come to life from like a 2D drawing, a sketch initially and then a coloured one.

and then off to tie to turn it into 3D, and then you can see it all come together when the animations get all blocked out. So, yeah, it's awesome working with a team of artists. I'm not an artist, so for me, I really love it, because I'm like, wow, you guys are magicians, you know? You know, I know the feeling. I can, like, programming is my, my focus.

So anytime I see, like, actually well done art design, like, it's just impressive to me. I don't, you know, I've done the donut tutorial for Blender. That's about as far as I've gotten with that. Yeah, I think, so I went through the, like, AIE school pipeline as a mature age student. So I think I started when I was 28. I went back to school and learn about game design. And one of the units in that was, like, how to 3D model.

And I just remember that being, like, the hardest one. And I spent so long and I made this tiny little rope bridge that was, like, really low poly. it's like, you know, like sticks with with planks. And I was really proud of that. And I'm hoping to put that asset somewhere in the game as a little ode to what we did originally and how it all started. So yeah, but yeah, art is definitely not my strong suit. I'll leave that to the to the professionals. So how did the project originally start?

Like, what was the inspiration for it? Yeah, so the original inspiration kind of came around like COVID times. So I remember I was like stuck at home. I was with my girlfriend at the time. And we were playing a lot of Animal Crossing and we were playing a lot of Diablo. And so what would end up happening is, you know, we'd play some Animal Crossing together. And we'd be like, oh, yeah, this is good. We'd play some Diablo together.

We'd be playing Diablo and go, oh, I really wish I could decorate my house. And so we'd go back to Animal Crossing. We'd really wish we could beat up some demons right now. And then we'd go back over to Diablo. And so, you know, we had a lot of fun doing that. And I had a lot of fun playing games like Starview Valley. And I felt like those types of contrast were really cool. I did feel like Stargey Valley didn't have the depth that I wanted in the combat system.

And so I just thought, you know what? These are things that I love to do. I wonder what would happen if I smush these two ideas together and turned it into a game. So, yeah, that's kind of where it originated from. I have a huge passion for, like, randomization and replayability and that sort of stuff, big fan of rogue likes and, like, Slay the Spire and those sorts of games as well. So for me, I was like, if I can do something where every single time I do a run is completely different and I get completely different rewards and then I get to spec myself out based on that, I'm going to have a good time playing it. And if I have a good time playing it, hopefully someone else will also have a good time playing it.

So yeah, that's pretty much how it all came to be. But even then, like right back in the day, like I didn't think that it would be, you know, the kind of quality that it is now and all that sort of stuff. it started off as a very small like top-down game where we had some assets that I think I bought from like the assets store like the Unity store and it was like this kind of top-down more Diablo style thing where you ran around with a little sword but then yeah once we brought artists onto the team they they really like pulled pushed with that vision and and it really changed what that game looked like we did all sorts of things we changed the camera angles we decided to make a more cinematic camera.

And so, like, even the first prototype to where it is now, are vastly different. But the underlying theme and the underlying game design is still there. Yeah, whenever I look at a... How would I say it? Whenever I look at a game where the focus is this mix of combat and then house design, I very much lean heavily on the combat side.

I am the kind of person where... I'm sure you've probably thought, about people playing it like this where the house is a means to an end where the way that I would design the house effectively would be how do I stat to the best? Absolutely. I'm really excited to see some builds like that. I just want a whole house just full of chairs, you know, just chair house. I think it would be really cool and really fun. But we have designed it in a way where it kind of balances a little bit. So I'm hoping that people will be able to make some really pretty houses and different aesthetics and different themes and still get all the stats that they want as well.

But for those min-maxes like you and I, I think, yeah, yeah, fill the whole place with bookshelves, fill the whole place with legendary couches, all that sort of stuff. I think it's going to be good. Especially the most important thing for me is, if a game lets me not put a single point into health, I'm going to put as little into health as possible. If I can just stat into damage as much as possible. That's usually what I'm going to do. And then if I die in one hit, I just don't die. Fair enough. Roll everywhere all the time. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And the idea of the system is that it kind of does let you plug and play what you want to do. So, you know, you've got like a heavy attack and a regular attack and a roll and, you know, all those sorts of things, potions and abilities. And

depending on the types of furniture that you collect, those cool downs could be reduced and those sorts of things. You know, there's ideas in the future of things like being able to teleport around and all sorts of stuff. So, you know, I don't know what that will look like in the final form, but yeah, I'm really excited to see how people decorate their houses and how it impacts their gameplay and, you know, the things that they really lean into. You know, we are pretty community first. So we have like a big discord that we've built up. I think we're like maybe three or four hundred people there now, which is, ooh, really awesome for us. And so we have a bunch of really great people on there. and we love sharing ideas with them and hearing what they come up with

and seeing what we can do to kind of add that into the game as well. You know, different kinds of characters and pets and cosmetics and those sorts of things as well. So yeah, it's all very community first. We want to make sure that what we build is something that people will love.

So yeah, I think it's going to be cool though. I do want to talk more about the house design side, but since we're on the topic of combat anyway, I don't know if things have changed since the last time I've got to try it, but that was one of the areas where it did feel

feel like it was kind of underdeveloped. Like, for example, the first boss, you could, at least at the time, you could just whack it and out DPS it before it kills you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we've done a lot of work on the boss. The bosses had such a, like a bumpy road to development, to be honest. I think one of the first versions of the boss had this move where he, so for those who don't know, it's a big couch troll.

So it's a big troll that's holding a couch. club and it swings it around to try and hit you. And in the first iteration of that, it had this spinning move where it would spin around the whole area, like swinging this couch around. And for some reason, we could just never get it to stay on the ground. And it would just helicopter up into the air and disappear forever. There were so many different like bugs and issues with it. And we changed it up a little bit. So now the iteration that we've got at the moment, the kind of gameplay that you'll see is yes it will swing its couch around you've got to run up and hit it but you also need to avoid it when it has a shield on because you're not able to hit it then you'll ricochet off of it

so you need to use a heavy attack to break that shield and then also if you get too far away from him he'll he'll start looking at you and he'll charge right across the arena to come and get you as well so there's a couple of different modes there but I'm hoping people figure it out and they they have some fun with it the other thing that we do as well is during our convention builds. So when we go off and show it to everybody, we actually give you a much cheaper version of the boss. So he's got like pretty much a quarter health of what he does in the game. And he's much easier to defeat just because we want people to have a good time playing it. We don't want people to be like stuck on the boss for ages and miss out on parts of the

story and that sort of thing. So I'm hoping that a little bit more balance on that we should have like a really solid first boss fight. So yeah, really excited about that. Yeah, part of that ability system that we've been working on with the, the sigils for the furniture as well, is essentially how we're balancing all of that. So, you know, you've got your regular attack.

You've got a heavy attack. You can roll around. You now have a potion that you can pop as well, which is really good. So, you know, we have that kind of rogue-likey sort of gameplay while you're through the dungeons. And then as you add more furniture to your house,

more abilities will pop up, which is pretty cool. So, yeah. When I last played of the furniture was just stats, So there's abilities now. That's right. Yeah. So we've added more to that stat system just to make it a little bit more rounded out. So for example, with the furniture, it comes in different rarities.

So you've got common furniture and you've got uncommon furniture and rare and epic and legendary and then some unique items as well. And a lot of the unique items will have unique abilities. So for example, the couch trolls couch, you can get that in the game and you can put it in your house. And when you do, you get some. temporary hearts. So when you start the next level, you've got extra hearts, but only until those hearts are taken. So very, very similar to that kind of gameplay. Yeah, there's a couple of things

that I want to add in there, but a lot of it is secret for now. I don't want to give too much away because some of it's really cool. And probably the one that I like the most that we will see in the demo as well, hopefully, is the bees. So we have a furniture set that gives you a chance to spawn bees when you get hit and they kind of work as like homing missiles. and they come in and hit and everything like that. So, yeah, if you think about kind of like some of those abilities you'd find in like a Diablo-style game, we're really leaning into that on the combat side to make it a lot more varied. We want to give it a lot of depth without too complicated.

So, yeah, it's all about the simplicity of it and kind of the gateway into harder things. Yeah. Regarding, like, I guess, combat design, a game design there, With the Uniques, is the intention for them to be just better furniture, or is it to enable sort of different kinds of play styles? Yeah, so the kind of main idea for that is to enable different play styles. So a lot of the unique stuff, the unique sigils that you'll get on some of these furniture, are kind of tied to the bosses that you'll fight. So as you go through the gameplay, each boss has its own legend.

set of furniture. And so if you were to grind that boss a couple of times and fight a couple of different versions of it, you'll get different furniture drops within that set. And then we also have a crafting system that lets you kind of recycle and craft more of the things that you want as well. I think kind of late game, there's an idea for being able to take those sigils off of one thing and put it onto another thing so you can really mix and that what we want to do. But for now, you know, for the demo, we wanted to go real low scope. Make sure it's simple and easy and we get the ideas across and then yeah if everybody likes it we'll keep adding more stuff to it so yeah no that definitely does sound cool um yeah all of that sounds like

like real like really like the furnit again i i'm looking at this from someone who is very combat focused and i'm sure somebody's looking at like you were saying from that like animal crossing sort of side would sort of be more maybe more focused on like design and stuff but I'm just thinking, especially with being out of sort of combine things together, I'm sure that's going to be a fun bug nightmare and balancing nightmare, because there's going to be combinations where you don't intend them to be as busted as you intend them to be. Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's something that we've been talking about internally as a team as well, is like, what happens if every piece of furniture gives you health? Like, does that mean we just have 100 hearts across the screen, or is there a limit? all about stuff. And realistically, I think a lot of the data for that's going to come from testing. So my hope is that, you know, when we give out the demo and people can play it, we can get a lot of feedback and some analytics on, you know, do people really need a bunch of

health? You know, are the dungeons too easy or too hard and all that sort of stuff? And because I come from that design background and I'm more focused on kind of like the wider picture of the game, a lot of that data is really helpful for me to help educate the team on like what direction we should go and why we should go in that direction you know a lot of it comes into play when we think about like what kinds of enemies people want to fight and how long a dungeon should be and you know what kinds of things should happen in the dungeon you know whether it's all combat or if there's some narrative stuff or some

puzzle stuff and so we're going to we're going to try a bunch of different ideas on that and just see what everybody thinks and you know if it comes out good then awesome that'd be great So what enemy types I don't know how far exists in the game But at least in the demo What enemy type is going to be there Because I know in like the con demos that I played There was like the basic ants

You had like the spellcaster ant There was a big heavy ants I feel like At least from what I played Those are the ones that are sticking out of my mind Yeah so for the first area Which is the forest It's called Lampshade Grove

So obviously we're going to going real into that furniture theme. So for Lampshade Grove, the main enemies that you'll find is you'll find a small enemy which is called a chompy, and he is kind of like a mosquito-type enemy. Basically, he just runs after you

and gives you a big chomp. You know, very small fodder enemy. You can smack him away, and that's super fun to do as well. Then you have the termite variants. So we have a Tersquire, who is kind of like a small guy with a sword, He has a couple of attacks.

And then we have a Tur Ranger, which is like a bow and arrow guy that shoots arrows at you from afar. And when you get close to him, he runs away and all that sort of stuff. Then we have the Tur Tank, which is like kind of a more armored guy. He's a little bit bigger, a little bit slower.

And you'll have to hit him with that heavy attack to get rid of his shield and all of that. We also have the Turr Knight, which is a much bigger guy. You probably saw him in the demo as well. he's the one with lots of health and real crazy. Only spawns very, very rarely, but if he gets here, then, yeah, you're going to have a bit of trouble. And then on top of that, we also have, we have a, I think we just call it the loop bug,

but it's kind of like a treasure goblin type character. He's got a big sack and you have to chase him around and knock him about. And if you do, you get a rare piece of furniture as well, which is pretty cool. So, yeah, those are kind of the main variants. I wonder if I've forgotten anything else. There's the castor as well. He shoots meteors of furniture down at you, which is cool. And then, of course, there's the boss.

So you've got, like, the big couch troll that you'll fight at the end of the forest area. So, yeah, that's the kind of main squad for that area. And then we have a couple more areas coming over to desert and some other stuff as well. And there'll be variants of those. I think we're making, like, a moth character as well. That'll fly around and shoot moth balls at you, those sorts of things. So, yeah, there's there's. There's more coming, but for now, in the forest, you'll probably see those kinds of guys around.

Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the first things you're probably going to work out with, like, larger playtesting is any of those places where things kind of break in the dungeon? Because I remember in the demo, whatever the last one was, I remember someone managed to roll and clip in to like, clip on top of a rock. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've been playing around with physics a lot with that as well because the engine has its own physics system, but we also kind of added our own on top of it. And that allows us to do things like, you know,

when you hit an enemy, it goes flying really far backwards if you're hit him with a big attack and those sorts of things. It gives us a bit of knockback when we're attacking and all of that. But yeah, sometimes both of the systems don't interact with each other perfectly and you end up like getting stuck in the same thing and one goes on top and one goes on below and that. And I think that's just a part of game dev. You know, at the end of the day, like, you know, there will be some kinks that need to get worked out.

But I would encourage anyone that's playing the demo as well, absolutely, you know, send us a bug report. Let us know that that's happening. And that helps us kind of prioritize stuff in our massive list of tasks that we need to do as well. So I think for the most part, though, people are here to have fun. So if it's fun and it doesn't break everything, then, you know, I don't know if we need to fix it. You know what I mean? So, yeah. Well, if it put you in a soft lock state, like, surely, if you get stuck on terrain or, you know,

or there's like a required enemy that gets knocked into something and now you can't hit it. Yeah, yeah, so we'll definitely be fixing things like that. But yeah, I think there was, at one time, we had this ability where we had this, like, heavy attack where you swung this sword and there was this big fire trail that came after you. And there was something in the way that if you pressed, two or three of the buttons at the same time, you could just launch yourself

and it would just go this fire attack into this roll into another attack into a roll and you could just like clear the whole map in like two seconds. And so we patch that out, so that's pretty good. But yeah, there's like all sorts of little things like that that come up all of the time. So yeah, if you see them, definitely let us know. I'm always the kind of person that when I play a demo,

I try to break things. Like that's usually my goal. I I think that's most of us well I don't know I just kind of I kind of like

seeing systems behave in a way that they're not supposed to like one of the one of the things I always like to think about is this a series called East and in the eighth game

you can multi-bind different actions which is always a recipe for disaster but one thing you can do is if you put attack, roll, and character swap all on the same binding, roll slightly increases your height, and character swap resets your role, and then attacks, for some reason, part of that as well. But if you just press the button, you just,

you just fly out of the map, and this is like a core speed-running thing for that game, and it was never intended by the devs. It was never patched either, but I love finding things in games like that. Yeah, oh man, it's so crazy. And I think the thing that I love the most is just like watching people play it as well and just seeing like, oh, wow, I definitely never thought about doing that at all. I don't know how they got out of that part of the map and, you know, all those things. So, yeah, with the demo, it's still going to be really early days.

So, you know, expect that there will be problems and all those sorts of things. But, you know, we'll make sure that there's enough stuff in there so you can unstuck yourself. and, you know, if you, hopefully you won't get too demotivated. Yes, no, but we'll work really hard to make sure that the gameplay is really solid. But, yeah, if there are bugs or you find stuff, like, yeah, show us, let us know. We've got a big Discord, like, show us all the things that went wrong and all the things that went right as well. I want to know, like, all of the cool, rare, like, random furniture that people get and how they

decorate their houses and, you know, what, what color their axolodal is and what, you know, what outfits they want to wear and those sorts of things too. So, yeah, all of that stuff is super important to us as a small team. It really helps kind of guide us in the direction that we should be going. So, yeah. So the goal in the dungeon is to collect resources, collect furniture. When you're outside the dungeon, what is going on there? Oh, yeah.

So you have kind of like this hub town, which is called Kindle Rest. And basically, you've got the town and all the townspeople that are involved. around. And in the first part of the story, you kind of wake up in this town and you don't know who you are and you don't know where you are. And it's kind of a bit of a fact-finding mission to figure out what's going on and how to get back to, you know, wherever you were before. All of the characters in the game are quite cute as well, but they all have a bit of a wholesome storyline that they lean into as the game goes on. I don't want to give too many spoilers or anything like that. But yeah, but basically each one of the characters is dealing

with its own kind of insecurity, and it's your job to help them kind of come to terms with that insecurity. You're not necessarily there to fix everybody's problems, but just to help people kind of manage, you know, what they're dealing with. And basically, you start in the town, and the town's in a pretty strong disrepair. You know, there's only a few people there, and as the game progresses, you bring more people into your town. So, yeah, you get to understand all these different stories and meet all these different characters. And yeah, they all have different systems that they interact with. One of my favorite things about this is that obviously you can decorate your house,

but you can also decorate all the houses of the townspeople as well. So, you know, if you level up their houses and, you know, fill their house with comfy furniture, then it'll interact with the kind of quality of life of that system a bit more. So Alder, who's the carpenter for the town, he does all of the crafting menu stuff. And so as you upgrade his house, you get access to more better crafts, grafting recipes and, you know, better quality and being able to change colors of fabrics and those sorts of things as well. So that's all focused around him. Obviously, your house is what impacts your stats and there's some base stats on there as well. And then, yeah, the other thing is

that you decorate the town a little bit. So there's these little areas that you can pump resources into. And when you pump those resources in, Outer will come and build like a notice board and a potion stand and a little market square and those sorts of things as well. So, yeah, the idea is that we kind of have this experience where you're building this town up and then you run off into the dungeons to go and collect all the stuff and then you come back and continue to upgrade and improve your town and hang out with all your cool towns people so yeah so in obviously a completely different vibe but in many ways similar to what you do

in the hades right you go through the dungeon you get resources you meet the gods you come back and then use the resources to build up the underworld basically same It's a very stock standard, rogue light kind of experience where, you know, I think Rogue Legacy does it really well like that as well, where, you know, you do the run and you come back with the resources and you upgrade the kind of castle and find new heroes and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, those are some of the games that I really love playing as well. So I just wanted to add elements of all the stuff that I find really fun and what the team finds really fun as well as not all me, like what the team loves to.

and I'd put it all into one thing and see how well it works. So, yeah. But rather than just say doing an upgrade, in this case, you actually have a lot more control over how you actually want to lay out your home and lay out the other homes. Yeah, so I'm really big on personalization. I think that something I really love about games is being able to, you know, just like personalize your character as much as you want.

So change your colors, change your outfits. to change what weapons you use. And obviously with this one, you know, we're decorating a house, so you get to decorate the house the way that you'd like. And then you get bored of decorating your house. Or you're happy with decorating your house. So we have, you know, options to decorate other people's houses too. So that's sort of what that was all planned around.

But, yeah, I would really love to see, you know, what colors people pick and what outfits are the favorites and all those sorts of things. So we're going to lean very heavily into that, you know, customization. We good? You're back? Everything's good. Oh dear.

Can you hear me? No. Hello. Hello? Looks like you're back. Sure. Okay. I hate this.

I think maybe a slight disconnect or something. Yeah, I guess so. Where did you? I'm not sure if you kept going there what you'd said. Ooh, where, where did we get up to? We're talking about house design, you'd design houses for everyone else,

when you get bored of designing your own house. Yeah, basically, that's pretty much where we were. Yeah, pretty much. So, like, the core of it is, like, just being able to personalize your character. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm big on personalization, and so being able to change.

your outfits and your swords and your color. We also have pets. We have wings. We have trails. So I'm really keen to see what are the favorites in that, you know, who uses what particle effects and who uses what costumes and all that. So we're going to lean very heavily into the customization. So if that's your kind of game, then this game's probably for you. That's cool. This does raise the question of game scope. Like, This can be, that entire system by itself could be a game by itself. And the dungeon side could be a game by itself. So how big do you want the game to be?

How do you make sure that you actually have a game to eventually release? Like, what criteria is here? You're right, 100%. You know, it is a little bit ambitious as a first project. But, you know, we've got a really solid team that we work with on this. And while this is our first independent project, we also do some work for higher stuff as well.

So, you know, we do release projects with other partners and those sorts of things too. It is, yes, it's definitely an ambitious scope. I'll completely agree with you on that. But we have done what we can to descope it and remove a lot of the excess baggage that's on the sides as well. One of the ways that we've done that is just by simplifying a lot of systems. So rather than having, like, for example,

we used to have it that when you got a piece of furniture, it could have a plethora of different stats on it and it would have like one to three different stats on it and all of those would have a range of different numbers and we've completely done away with all that in lieu of just like a single icon essentially. So the, you know, depending on the type of furniture that you get, you get more icons or more sigils, I should say. But it's kind of like a one for one now rather than this whole big overarching system. That just helps a lot with the balancing and that sort of thing. The other thing is that we know that our target market could be a bit of a younger audience as well,

because it is quite a cutesy-looking game. And so we want something that's simple enough that pretty much anyone can pick it up and play it. We're really focused on accessibility as well. So while it does feel like there's a lot going on, you know, a lot of it is very simple. Well, not very simple, but, you know, simple enough that people can play. play it and still have fun. Right, right. So I guess how, maybe it's a hard question to answer, like how much game do you want there to be? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, there's two kind of worlds for this one. There's sort of like the world where, you know, we make the game and there's

only a few people that want to play it. And then, you know, we've finished it and we start working on the next game, right? But then there's also a world where this is like a really great project. And there's a big audience for it and we build a giant community around it. And at that stage, it's kind of like, well, what does what does the audience want to see? Because if you guys want to see more stuff, then, you know, we'll organize to do that as well. One of the benefits of being in indie studio is the fact that we're independent, right? We can decide, you know what, I will spend a couple extra months doing this thing or, you know, maybe I won't spend a couple of months. You know, I can see a future where, you know, we have a bunch of, like, seasonal content like Diablo does

with new dungeons and new enemies and new furniture sets. You know, I can see a world that, you know, we add a whole bunch of cosmetics that come in and special challenges that you can do. But all of that is post-release content. Sure, sure. So all of that's like, we've done the core game. We have the core story.

And then after the core story is finished, if there's an audience for the game, yeah, we'll do more stuff to make it cool for everybody. But, yeah, that's probably the most, like, professional answer that I can give about that. As far as the current scope goes, you know, we're feeling pretty confident that this thing is going to come out relatively soon. I'm not going to give any dates or anything like that, but yeah, we're really hopeful that we'll see it out soon enough. Maybe an easier to answer question then.

What is the scope for the demo? Great, yeah. So the scope for the demo is it's pretty close to what you guys have probably seen at conventions. So there's a couple more cutscenes and a couple more little extras and some polish on that as well. But effectively, it's the first half of the first act of the game. So it's about a 30-ish-minute demo if you just play through the full content. But if you want to repeat dungeons and things like that, it can go out a little bit more. Maybe if you're a speed runner, you can do it in 10 minutes or something.

I'm not sure. But yeah, so it's not like a heavy, heavy demo that will take hours and hours to play. but I'm hoping it'll give everybody just enough of a taste of what the idea is that you can go, oh yeah, this is something I'm into, or you can say no, I'm not into it, and I'll take it off my wish list. So, yeah.

So as you mentioned that you can build a notice board and other things to add into your town. So I assume that as you progress with the game, there is going to be some sort of expansion of the mechanics. It sounds like you wouldn't have access to the abilities right, from the very start.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we've kind of built it in this way that like each story that you go through with each of the individual characters unlocks a different aspect of the game a bit more. So to start with Alder is the guy that your story kind of revolves around and you learn a lot about the crafting. He's the one that gives you the heavy attack. And that's in the form of this kind of big spectral hammer that you used to kind of bonk things.

which is super fun. But yeah, his whole situation is he's a carpenter. So, you know, you get a big hammer attack and that lets you break down resources and that sort of thing. And then you can use those resources to craft with him and all of that. And that kind of builds out that system. But then you've also got Percy who's in the town as well. And he's the local tailor.

So he does everything to do with the cosmetics and all of that. But he's also kind of the pseudo like head of the town. And then there's some characters that you meet later on. Harmon, who's a big snake, and he is kind of a musician character, and, you know, he teaches you stuff about magic and stuff about the stars and that sort of thing. And then there's some characters you meet along the way as well, and that just opens up different areas of the game for deeper systems. So, yeah, yeah, it's hard to talk about it without giving too much away, but yeah, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, you have to play it.

It's a cool experience. And yeah, yeah, I think people will like the story. I hope that they vibe with it. And yeah, and I think the gameplay will be simple enough that you can get into it, but deep enough that you won't get bored. You mentioned the heavy attack there. I remember the last time I played it. The heavy attack was very awkward because I think it was just you lean back with the stick,

but there was no real indication of how far it was actually going to hit. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I think when, if that was something that you played relatively recently, it was, yeah, really prototypy. So, you know, that's a big thing about being an indie dev is that a lot of what we're testing is really just like throw spaghetti at the wall, you know. And if it works, great, we'll keep it in. If it doesn't, then we move on. And there's a lot of testing and a lot of changing.

And because there's such a huge amount of change in iteration that happens as well, it's also really hard to talk about because you don't want to say, oh, we're going to have this great idea. You know, we're making multiplayer. And then everyone goes, oh, it's multiplayer. Please don't clip that. We're not making multiplayer. It's not one. We're a tiny team.

But, but yeah, you know, like it's hard to talk about some of those things because they might not make it in, you know, and some of the largest systems as well might have to be scrapped and those sorts of things. But that's just in the process of what development is. So, yeah, so the heavy attack was something that we tested out, I think maybe the last two conventions we went to. And it seemed like people love the idea of the heavy attack, but that it needed a lot more of a clearer telegraph. It needed to make more sense that it was like a big area that you're able to hit.

And we've also made that clear in the kind of design language around like what you can hit with that attack as well. So yeah, so now you can see there's kind of like an orange tint around things that are shielded. And you can use that heavy attack to destroy the shielded things. So yeah, it's like a bit of design language in there and a little bit more of a pull. polished idea. And as we continue to test and we continue to get feedback, those things will get bigger and better and, yeah, hopefully turn out. So it's almost like you never even knew there was a problem in the first place. So, yeah. I think that's what I like about seeing, as I said, I like breaking games. So I kind of like seeing that process of games being built.

And it's really fun to see a game, you know, at one con and then see it sort of progress over the years and it doesn't matter what game it is. Just a project that keeps going, you get to see it actually really improving, learning from those issues that were brought up at the last con, improving upon the system, maybe having new different problems, but those old issues now are clearly, they've clearly thought through the issue, even if maybe, even if the users don't necessarily know how you'd best solve it. because that's a problem. A lot of people are good at identifying a problem.

They're not good at identifying the solution though. So it's very easy to say, oh, the heavy attack, it's unclear, but you could probably get 10 or 15 different ways to make it clearer, but you kind of have to decide on what is going to actually be the best because different people are going to have different sort of intentions and ways they want to, I guess, demonstrate that ability. Oh, 100%. And, you know, that's why we, we love doing the conventions, you know, because you can get so much feedback. And it's actually crazy how much feedback you can get just by

watching someone play, rather than hearing of the, oh, you guys should add this or you should do this. Right, right. It's a jump button, you know, all of those things. Just seeing how people play and how they experience the game. And when they come up to a challenge or a pathway, what direction do they take? And does everybody take that direction and if they do why is everyone taking that direction um and that's kind of leans more into that that design stuff and you know the reason that i'm kind of here uh so i really love it and and you know it's a big it's a big thing for me to make sure that i go to all of those conventions as much as i can as well so usually if we're demoing the game you'll probably see me

at the booth or uh you know i'll be kind of around watching or like sneak in a look from the back while other people are explaining what the game is um because yeah because i i love being there I love meeting everybody. But more importantly, I also like to see how people play the game and how they engage with it and with it having a good time. You know, like if people are having fun with it, then, you know, then we've done our job. So, yeah, that's really big for us. And it's not necessarily always about what people are doing. In some cases, what they're not doing also is really important as well.

If people aren't interacting with the system, why aren't they interacting with the system? Is there some problem with sort of showing it to the user? Is the system not as necessary as we thought it was? And there's some issue there that you can completely circumvent it. So seeing, like, let's say, for example, let's say you have the shield and you have the heavy attack. If nobody is using the heavy attack, but they're still managing to beat these enemies, clearly there's some sort of problem there. Or maybe if people are just avoiding these enemies, are you showing the user that the heavy attack

actually deals with this in the correct way. That's exactly what it is, you know, and as the developers, we know everything about the back end of it as well. So I can tell you where every bug is and every problem is. And as soon as somebody runs into one of those things, I can write that down and go, ah, yes, that was exactly what I thought was going to happen. Or I can go, I have no idea how that happened, and I don't know why they're where they are, but we've got to see them do it again. And that happens a lot. And obviously going to conventions, we get a lot of a lot of different types of people that come past, you know, a lot of different ages as well.

And, you know, we've had some people who are like, you know, we've had some people that are in their 20s and 30s that really struggle with the game. And then we've had people that are five or six years old that, like, just smash through the whole thing. So it is really hard to find a balance in that as well. And, yeah, our aim is just to make things intuitive as much as possible. So that, you know, as, you know, apart from making a big giant yellow box in the direction that you need to go, right? Or a big giant arrow. just trying to lead the player through the game so that they have the best experience they can, right? So that's that's sort of where it comes from from the design side, yeah.

Yeah, one of the things that did stand out to me is when you first wake up into the town, you kind of feel lost. I know that that's kind of the intention initially, but at least the last time I played it, I did kind of feel like I wasn't sure entirely where to go. Oh, yeah. You know, we had a lot of feedback like that. So we had a lot of people that when you wake up, I think a big part of it is that you're facing the wrong way.

And then there's not really a clear direction on where you're supposed to go and those sorts of things. And so what we did is we just, we made a couple of changes and we tried it again. And we noticed that after we did a couple of things, people found their way a lot faster and all those sorts of things. So now, I think for the last time that we played it, we might not have had this in, but now you've got a little butterfly that you can follow.

So there's a little pink button, and that'll tell you your mission's in that direction. Oh, okay, okay. So that's really helpful. We've also made it that you're facing the location of the first checkpoint. So that way you can see where it is. And as you go to explore the town, you can kind of follow the butterfly or follow the question marks. So, yeah, so there's a bit of that that we've involved as well. But then we've also added a little bit more exploration.

in the town itself. So one of the things that we didn't really have in the original demo there is like the packages. We didn't have furniture around the town. So it wasn't really any point in exploring all that much. But now I think we've got like six or seven hidden packages all around the town and, you know, they unlock at different points and when you have different abilities. But for the most part, you can kind of see them and go, oh, how do I get over there? Well, maybe if I go around. So, yeah, so we've really tried to like tease the player a little bit and engage them in and exploring the town and exploring the areas. And then that's hopefully going to flow into our dungeon generation as well.

So there'll be areas that you can get to when you have different abilities unlocked. And, you know, the easiest way to show that off is we have certain areas at the moment where there's these big rocks in the way of doorways. And once you get that hammer attack, you can break those big rocks down. And then you can access, you know, more dungeon to explore and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, things like that is going to be the real core of the gameplay when we get to that. kind of full content release. But for now, we're hoping that everybody has a good time.

And yeah, if there's anything that breaks, they let us know. And if there's anything they love, they let us know. And yeah, just keep on that indie journey, you know. Keep on grinding, right? So, yeah. I always do appreciate that Metroidvania-esque kind of thing where it's like, hey, there is a thing there. You can see it.

But you don't have the thing to get to, that thing yet. It's a ledge that's too high. It's a block that's in the way that you need to break. It's some sort of lock door. And sometimes games don't do the best job at blocking those things off. Um, you know, if, if you give, if you give me a double jump and a dash, I'm going to find a way to get there even if I shouldn't. But yeah, like, it is, it is nice to have a reason to return to locations you've been to before. now that you've unlocked some additional thing that you weren't able to do before. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's the total plan for the game as well. As you unlock more abilities, more things are open in all the dungeons. And it might make you go, oh, you know what, I really want to go back into the forest and see if I can, you know, unlock the portal that takes me to the wherever or the, you know, all those sorts of things. So, yeah, I'm really excited for it. I think it's going to be a real fun time. So what has that con experience been like?

Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a part of the process, you know, like at the end of the day, it's all just part of what we're learning. And, you know, as a as a young team as well, a lot of this stuff is like, we figure it out as we go. But, but yeah, it's, you know, that's just the way that it goes, right? What is the, I guess, reception to the game being like? I mean, it's been pretty good for us so far. My biggest goal was I wanted to hit 7,000 wish lists with this game before we launch. That was my really big goal. And very recently we had one of our trailers go up with IGN, which was really awesome.

And I think we're seeing just over 9,000 wish lists now. Wow. I'm really happy about that. That's something that we've been. really excited about. I think I might actually get a cake for the team that says like over 9,000 on it or something like that. Oh, that just went up recently? Like very recently? Yeah, yeah, really, really recently. The IGN trailer went up, I think, like a week ago or something like that. Maybe, yeah, yeah, found it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. It's really cool because we've been working on it for such a long time.

So it's great to see other people are interested in it too. I think we had someone share a video on Twitter as well that did, I don't know, 40,000 views or something like that, which, you know, we're not a viral game. You know, we're just a little mob down here. So, yeah, to have anybody recognize what we're doing and love it is amazing stuff. So, yeah, yeah, it's been really cool. And, yeah, I'm hoping that that momentum continues to build when the demo comes out. So, yeah.

yeah hopefully that um that does happen like i i think there is a good there is a good cool game here but having having that wider audience actually trying it out because cons are not the best place to like demo stuff right especially especially sound and like music there you you cannot add a con i have no idea what the i'm sure the music is great i have no idea what it sounds like i've never heard it yeah yeah no that's that's the you know the big problem with cons as well is that it's a very loud environment. You know, it's great to get some early feedback, and it's great to get lots of people around.

One of the big things for us, as well as there's a small studio, you know, we can use it to get our brand out. We have merch as well that we sell at conventions too, so we have little tote bags and stickers and key chains, and we have desk mats now as well, these beautiful desks mats with the LED lights around them and the whole thing. Everyone at our studio has one on their desk as well. So, yeah, so we like to be able to kind of show that off.

And, you know, when I see someone walking around with like a Dungeons and Darning Tables tote bag, like that's a big win, you know, that's the promo that we want for everyone. So, yeah, so it's things like that is really great about conventions and, you know, people that come and support us, especially as a small studio as well, is just awesome. You know, it's just so cool. But you're right, they don't get the full experience. They can't sit there. in their own homes with their own, you know, oh, I think there's a car going past or something

very loud. Sorry, yeah, a motorbike just went past. But, yeah, you can't sit there in your own house. So you have to be very polite when you're at a convention. Not that everyone is, but for the most part, everybody's there, you know, very polite. I'll take five minutes to play this. I'll move on to the next thing. But when you're at home, you can sit through all the cutscenes.

You know, you can see the story. You can listen. can, you know, play at your own speed. And that's my hope for this demo is that, you know, when everyone gets to play it, they play to their own speed. And hopefully it's paced well enough that they have a good time. Yeah. Right.

You bring up the good point there about the time to play the game. Avcon's gotten, like, a lot bigger over the years. And there's some games that there's just always sort of people around. And you, like, it's, it's, it's hard. hard to really, especially for a game where you might actually want to sort of get engrossed it, it's kind of hard to really try it out there. Like if it's like an up indie fighting game, for example, one round, you can try out the game. If it's like a little puzzle game, you do like three or four puzzles, you kind of get the idea. But this is more of like, it's a bit of a

longer experience where you do a dungeon run, you design the house and you do another run. So it's, it's kind of hard to really get a proper experience of the game there. Oh yeah, yeah. And, you know, we are one of those games that ends up getting a bit of a line sometimes. And so, yeah, it can be hard. I think one of the things that we've done recently to help with that is we've got two computers now. So we, you know, we've got two laptops that people can play, you know, side by side,

which has been really good. But yeah, it's, it is one of those games where, yeah, you do want to sit down and have a bit of a play. And like I said, the demos, about 30 minutes long. So, you know, when we take that to the intervention, it's, it's hard to to get people to have a real proper experience with it. You know, we do have a convention build that's slightly shorter, but, you know, it's, it is what it is. I think in our convention build as well, we have it that all the enemies drop health. So every time you play through, you're always getting health. So, you know, you don't. Yeah. Yeah. So that's not, that won't be in the

demo. But, but, yeah, just things that like, once you're able to play it on your own, you know, I'm hoping that you'll have a bit of a clearer experience of it. But yeah, I'm really excited about it. We're joining the Steam Next Fest in February. Yes, yes. So that's, I think, is the 23rd of February. So I think I'm allowed to say that now. I'm not 100% sure if it's been announced.

But, yeah, I'm sure it's fine. I can check. Okay, no, it's been announced. Okay, no, you're good. You're good, you're good. I'm good, I'm good, that's good to know. So, yeah, so we're part of the Steam Next Fest, which is going to be really exciting. And then we're also launching our Kickstarter at the same time.

So I'm hoping the Kickstarter will give us a bit more of a boost to say, oh, yeah, we're really into this idea. And we're hoping to do some cool rewards with that to cosmetics and digital stuff, but also some physical stuff. So, yeah, I think that'll be really fun. what are you hoping to do with the Kickstarter? So we do want to try and get a little bit of extra funding, but it's not really the purpose. So with the Kickstarter for us,

the core purpose is kind of like a marketing hype. So the idea is that if we have a bunch of backers that really want us to build this game out, that'll really help us identify where our market is and how big our market is. Because at the end of the day, you can have a lot of people say, yeah, I'll totally get this game when it comes out. But unless people start, like, actually buying it, you never really know, you know what I mean?

Like, my mom will buy, like, 10 copies. You know what I mean? So, like, I don't know if it's all that. So for me, it's a really big green flag, if it goes well, because it says, yes, you guys are on the right track. This is the thing that we want. But my focus for it is I really wanted to make sure when we put the Kickstarter out that there is a demo that people can play.

So that way you can give it a go. You can see if it's your vibe and it's what you want. And if it is, then, yeah, you can consider backing the Kickstarter. The idea for us is that as a small team, it does help us with cash flow. You know, our team is, you know, quite lucky that we have a really nice office space that we have. And we have some workshops that we run that bring a little bit income in for us. And, you know, we've been fortunate enough to partner with Green Australia for what we were a recipient of one of their grants a year or so ago. which really helped us put things in perspective of what it was that we were building.

So, yeah, so we've been very fortunate to have a bit of help along the way. So this is kind of like that final step where it's like, okay, if this goes well, then we're essentially ready for what the content needs to be built out for launch. Otherwise, you know, if it doesn't work out, that's cool too. We'll probably still continue working on it. Just might be a little slower. Yeah. It's always nice to see a Kickstarter for something that is not.

like a theoretical game. There's actually a game. Yeah, well, because I back kickstaters all the time. So, you know, the amount of games that I've been like, oh, I cannot wait for this thing to come out and then seven years later it's disappeared. And, you know, so I know the horror stories as well. And so my big thing is like, give them something, you know, so we can we can all look at it and go, okay, this is kind of what it's probably going to be, but more content.

And so, you know, our aim is to make sure that some of those systems are like really robust and really polished. So it's really clear what the gameplay is. And then it just becomes a whole content thing. It's like, okay, well, now we want the desert. Now we want the cave. Now we want the whatever, whatever, you know? So yeah, if I can make that all come together, I'll be really happy about it.

So you said the Kickstarter's there more as like a way to gauge interest. Do you have any plans to, you know, a lot of projects where they will have the kickstar. it's like, oh, if we hit so-and-so goal, we'll add additional content of various forms. Is that part of it with this Kickstarter or is it just purely for gauging interest? Oh, definitely. Definitely. There will be different reward tiers, stretch goals, the whole thing. I have a meeting to plan it out like next week.

I did notice that none of that stuff is like on the page yet. Yeah, yeah. So we'll do exactly what most kickstaters do. We'll do the stretch goals and the ideas. You know, I tell you what, if we, I'll say right here on this podcast, If we make a million dollars from the Kickstarter, I'll buy an axolotl. I'll buy one and I'll put it in the office and we'll all have to take care of it. I don't imagine that's going to happen. But yeah, we'll put some really fun Kickstarter stuff in there. And my big aim is that I really want to give

this out to as many people as we can. So, you know, we'll probably do like a pre-order price that's kind of like a cheaper version of what the game will be. And, you know, obviously we'll have a steam key and that sort of thing, but, you know, we might have some console stuff. I'm not going to confirm or deny any of that stuff, but, you know, we'll see what it looks like when it all comes out. I'm very excited about it. Hannah, obviously, is our 2D artist going to really help with making those assets and making it really pretty for us. So, yeah, yeah, one of the things I'm working on at the moment is we're trying to figure out how we can make some plushies. So I think that'll be really cool if we can do that. So, but again, don't quote me on it because, you know, it's all up

in the air and we're trying to do 100 things and we know how it goes. But that would be a cool idea, I think. I always like merch. Merch is always always nice to see. I'm such a big fan of merch. And we have so many different like Auxolotl, you know, toys and things all around the office. And every single time we have someone visit, they bring an Auxle. So the whole thing is just filled with plushies.

But it would be really cool to have our own, I reckon. So, yeah. Now, obviously, you can't really confirm anything there, but you did mention there was some interest in console, at least. The console is obviously, like, a whole different piece from PC because then you've got to deal with SDKs and all this extra stuff. Absolutely. You know, we kind of designed this game as a console first game.

And when you come and play it at a convention, most of the time, there's a controller. Usually it's an Xbox controller. So, you know, we are very mindful. of that and we have built this with that in mind. But, you know, being a small team, we don't know, you know, like at the end of the day, if I'm going to be real honest with you, I have no idea if it's going to work on Switch or PlayStation or Xbox or whatever. So, you know, as much as I'd love to say, yeah, absolutely, there's going to be on all the things. You know,

we'll do our best aim for that, but, you know, it's going to come down to funding and it's going to come down to how much content's in there and, you know, and whether we can do it or not. So, you know, yeah, mindful and hopeful with fingers and toes crossed. I don't know why anyone ever would play a game like this with keyboard and mouse, but is that all working just fine as well? Oh, yeah, we're totally fine. Absolutely. I prefer controller.

I do as well. I have a controller plug all the time, but yeah, yeah. But you can absolutely keyboard and mouse. Yeah, yeah, exactly the same. Yeah, you can keyboard and mouse. It's all good. And also in the settings, you'll be able to change all your button, hot keys and keybinds. So, you know, the core of that is we want as much accessibility as possible.

So whatever is the preferred format of how you play, we want to make sure that you're able to. Does that include rebinds on the controller? Yes, absolutely. There's so many games that just decide to leave that out. It's so annoying. I hate it. I think it's like everyone goes, oh, it's going to be a really high. job and I'm like, yeah, but like it's, it's a hard job, but it's a job that's worth doing.

Yeah, but like, it's one thing if you don't have rebinds, but if you built the rewind system for keyboard, it's the same system. It's just different key names. That's true. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know what? That's not my job. That's Luke's job, so he can deal with it. Yeah, he's going to be upset about that. As soon as I let him know, it's his job. No, very cool. No, like, it's, it's just one of those pet peeves I have like most of the time I'm fine with whatever as long as the game's not doing like weird obscure bindings it's usually fine out of the box

but it does annoy me when that's not an option there because especially for the accessibility case there are people that make use of these like specific kinds of controllers where they you know they might only have one working hand for example or maybe proper movement in one hand and then like partial movement of the other and being out of like fully rebind like that

is basically a requirement to even play a game. Completely. And that's something that we're really focused on. You know, like I said before, we're really community first. And, you know, we've had a lot of developers that we've worked with that have had different kinds of abilities and disabilities and all those sorts of things.

My cousin, for example, he tests our game a lot. He's actually come on to help us with some level design as well. He's colorblind. So, you know, we've got to make sure the colors are right and that there's different color settings for him as well. So, you know, we're really focused on that. We just want to make sure that everyone gets the best experience that they can. So, yeah, yeah, we're doing our best on that. And again, you know, feedback on that's going to be really, really important as we build it out and

hopefully let more and more of the community play it and test it and all those sorts of things. That's cool as well. Yeah. Like that's color black, that's another one that's often just like left out entirely. Like nowadays you do have the like in the Nvidia settings panel. panel there's like a colorblind filter thing. It's not as big of a deal nowadays. So it's not a crazy big deal of a game doesn't have it. But it's always nice to see it. It's nice to see that like extra little, the extra little touch of foot there. Yeah, I just, I think it's really important to have that little bit of attention to detail. We're a very like 1% more kind of studio as well. We want to make sure that, you know, everything has been thought out and and everything that

everything deserves attention. And I think that we, you know, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that this comes out in a really positive state. Obviously, we want to hit our deadlines and everything like that as well, but we also want to make sure that it's a good experience when it comes out. You know, all of our team is like that, and everybody has these small little obsessions with different parts of the game. Like a couple of them as like Hannah put together this really cool furniture symbol language that you can find throughout the game and you can read like sentences and ideas and text

that if you can cipher the symbols, and Nathan as well, because he does all the music, he's made it so, like, depending on the theme that's playing, the birds will tweet a bit of the harmony to the theme and all sorts of stuff like that. And it's just those 1% extra things that really pull it into, you know, a really high-quality space. And all those obsessions are what kind of like push us forward.

So, yeah, I'm really into it. And obviously, I have my own obsessions, which I'm not going to talk to you about. But, you know, definitely replayability, definitely randomization and how that all, whole system works. So yeah, a lot of, yeah, a lot of effort has been put into those. A lot of love has been put into those systems. And I'm just hoping it comes through in the demo. Something I always like to ask people is what is the sort of guiding principle for the game,

that like North Star that you focus the game on? Oh man, the North Star. So obviously there's like the core gameplay loop, right? Like there's the dungeon to, to decoration, to dungeon to decoration. But if I were to talk a little bit more, I don't know, a bit deeper about like the North Star of what this game is and what it means and why it's here,

it's a connector, right? So the idea of this game is that it's built in a way that it reminds us of when we used to play games like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon and Jack and Daxter and all the stuff we used to play as a kid that maybe you played with a play parent or a friend and, you know, a single player experience, but you shared the controller

and those sorts of things as well. And the idea for this is I want to create an experience that's simple enough that my kids, when I have kids, could play something like this and go, you know what, that was the game that brought me into gaming. And so I really want this experience to be something where people go, I play it for the nostalgia and I show my kids the game because it fits their vibe as well and now we play Diablo together and now we play the other stuff together because we started in something that was simple and easy and it connected us together um yeah it's a really big focus on connection and a really big focus on like the the wholesomeness of the um of of helping all the townspeople and building a community together so um yeah to get a bit deep and philosophical on

you that's uh that's why we're building this that's what this is um and i hope that rings true Sort of a bit of a side tangent there. Do you remember what the first game you ever played was? Oh, yes, absolutely. I have my first game and also my favourite game is a game called King's Bounty, which came out on the DOS system, the old King's Bounty.

They've made a couple of things like onwards, but if you look up King's Bounty DOS, you'll see, okay, right, 16 by 16 pixel Sprite. everything's a very yucky green color. This was a game that my dad taught me about, and I just remember having the little booklet, and the booklet had a map of, like,

all of the different islands that you could go to, essentially as a bit of a... I don't want to go on a huge tangent about this, because I will, but to give it a bit of context, you play as a knight who has been hired by the king to find his magical scepter that has been stolen by a dragon,

which I think is the coolest. storyline ever. But essentially you kind of traverse around the world and you find these bounties and you need to go and essentially be a bounty hunter to take out these villains that are in these different castles. When you take out a villain, you get another puzzle piece to try and figure out where this scepter has been hidden somewhere in the three or four islands that the game has. I really just loved the game. I loved being able to connect with my dad on it. My dad and I played it a bunch and every time you play it like all the spells move to different towns so you have to find out the towns or the villains move to different towns so you have a little checklist in the back

of the book we can go this villain's in this castle and the fireball spells in this town and so you know where to go to get all of the stuff you need to to fight the next guy and it just had like a really like livable world which was so crazy for the dos era to have a game that felt like it was alive regardless of whether you were there. And that's kind of been my inspiration for getting into games in the first place. You know, that and board games. I absolutely love board games. But that's my first game and also my favorite game.

My first game is not my favorite game. It was Spiro Into the Dragonfly, which is a bit of a rough spiro game. Bit of a rough one. But the original Spiro games, great games. Oh, yeah, I played those bit later. and yeah, they're fantastic. If anyone hasn't played it, go go, go play the Toysobob remake.

They're great. We'll play the PS1 games. Whatever, whatever works. They're both great. Yes. If you learn nothing else from this podcast, please go and play Spyro. Yep, yep.

So right now, what are the areas you feel like sort of need the most polish in the game? Like, what, yeah, like what is still kind of underdeveloped that you would really like to see expanded? I mean, like, the easy answer is all of it, right? Like, at the end of the day, you know, where we can be a little bit of a perfectionist

group. So there's so many things that we're like, oh, it's good, but it's not quite, you know. Right, right, right. I think for a lot of what our systems are, you know, we've tried really hard to test a bunch of things. And in doing that, it means that we have a lot of what's called technical debt. So technical debt is basically there's a lot of, of code there and some of it's a little bit tangled. So once we're finished with getting this demo out, our next big step is tackling a lot of that debt and kind of paying that down. So, you know, cleaning up some of those systems and the back end to make it a little bit more modular and,

you know, making sure that there's not, you know, a system plugged into a system into a system, and everything can kind of still work, but is a little bit less full on and connected. That's just the nature of the beast, really. But that's probably like the biggest. thing I can think of from that standpoint. The other thing is just more content. I just want to get more content in. I want more levels and more ideas and more puzzles and more, you know, chunks that you can play in and more furniture and the whole thing.

So it's just about getting more and more and more stuff. And once those systems are fundamentally, you know, built properly, then, yeah, all it is is content. So it's just about like, where do we want to go with this now? You said more and more and more stuff. goes back to what I talked about earlier with like dame scope there comes the point we're like how much stuff do we want to have and when do we actually want to get this released? Yeah, so I think a lot of the plan for me is that we have, we have a pretty solid scope

for what the release is going to look like. And then based off of, I guess, you know, the reception from that release, we'll be able to make a decision on what other stuff we want to add, you know, like, you know, maybe we call IKEA and we say, you guys like furniture, we like furniture, maybe we do an IKEA style level. I don't know. Who knows? How long is a piece of string? But, yeah, like, the thing is that we're building this because it's something that we're

passionate about. You know, it doesn't have to hit a particular, like, revenue target or a number or whatever. Obviously, you know, we have likes, we have dreams and things we would like it to do. and we have invested, you know, quite a bit of time and money and effort in making this thing happen. But at the end of the day, that's never really been the focus for us. It's always been about making something that's really awesome. And so if there's an audience there and they want more content, then, you know, it's likely we'll build more content for it, as long as it makes sense.

So are you able to talk when you want the game out, or is that still something that's far enough away to really answer. You know, I think it's far enough away to really answer. That being said, I think for what the schedule probably looks like is based on the demo, if everybody loves that and it's not too broken, then, you know, then yeah, it makes sense that we'd probably get closer to a release earlier. It's likely that what our schedule looks like at this stage, being independent, being on our own, we're probably looking at some kind of early access.

and that early access will have more content than the demo for sure. But it'll probably not be the full finished version. And then we can kind of use that and the sales from that and the audience growth to help us make better decisions on what the end of that game looks like. So at the moment we kind of have a three-act story. The demo will be the first half of the first act, whereas the early access will likely be the first act and the second. act, and then the third act would be in the full release.

And then that's kind of how we would build the storyline. There'll be some post-game content at the end where the release is as well. But, you know, you never know what the future looks like. You know, we could have this great conversation. And then tomorrow, Riot decides that they really love us and they've just heard about us and we're amazing and they want to give us $100 million. And now it's a seven-year cycle and it's a multiplayer game and then it gets shelved. And then we've become high-tail, right?

I was going to say, where are we going with this? But, you know, like, you never know what's going to happen. And I think that's part of the fun of what it is that we're building. You never know where we're going to be. We never know where we're going to be. And so, yeah, it's just about, like, making sure we're ticking all the right boxes and everything looks green and ready to go. And, yeah, I'm pretty confident in it at the moment.

It does look very green. It looks very ready to go. And, you know, we're pretty good at communicating that as well. So we're real transparent about our dates and what we can say and what we can't say. And yeah, we'll keep everybody updated for sure. What would you be thinking for like the postgame end game content? Is that just more of the dungeon? Like, even if it's not things that necessarily going to be in the game,

do you have ideas that you'd like to try out? Oh, absolutely. I have so many ideas for what I want for end game content. One of the cool things that we've been contemplating is the idea of cursed first. So things that give you like really big O.P. Buffs, but also give you a kind of downside as well. We love the idea of a kind of shadow world where you can go through a bunch of versions of the dungeons that are a little bit harder with different bosses and those sorts of things. I love the idea of a boss rush. I love the idea of like something similar to like the Diablo

Riffs where you kind of go through on a timer and then you fight a big boss at the end. My big thing for this is I just, I want more and more content. Like I said, more and more. more and more. But I think if we build the framework in a really positive way and make it really replayable, then people are going to enjoy it way after the story's finished. So yeah, yeah, we'll see what that looks like. But yeah, I don't want to give away too much of the story either because it's going to be a really fun story and I don't want to give too many spoilers. But yeah, you'll get to meet some cool characters and they impact the world in different ways and then you're going to have to go and sort that out. So yeah. Yeah, hard version of the Dungeons is

just like kind of makes sense. I think of like, you know, you can also approach you with systems like how, again, going back to Hades, where you can add optional challenges onto the dungeons as well. So it's like, oh, there's a time limit. Oh, the enemies have more health or have a have a shield or other things like that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's like all in the plan. We kind of already have a bit of a system like that for some of the randomization in the dungeon. so something you probably wouldn't have seen because I don't know if we implemented it properly at the last demo day

but we have like an empowered enemy type which is essentially just an enemy with a couple of extra cool abilities and stats on it and so the dungeons will be peppered with those depending on the difficulty as well and then you know the difficulty also impacts like how many flaws of the dungeon there are

and all sorts of things like that so the idea is that we'll have a bunch of different options and a bunch of different ideas one thing that I'd really love to. I have no idea if I could even do it is just like an endless dungeon where it's just you go floor to floor to floor and like every, I don't know, every five or ten floors is a boss and then you just keep going and everything just scales harder and harder until you just are dead. Right.

You know, so I think that could be really fun, but I have no idea how we'll implement that. So yeah, maybe that'll have, maybe it won't. But potentially post-release, right? Like at the end of the day, a lot of this stuff might come out, you know, as we get. closer to the end. So the other thing is, like, we are building it with, like, modding support in mind as well. So, you know, being one of those games that is really focused on personalization and customization and, you know, having your own furniture and all those sorts of things, we'd really love to just, you know, help the community as much as we can to allow them to build stuff too. So a lot of our code

is kind of built in a way where, you know, if you wanted to extend on it, you probably could. and, you know, what we're going to do is maybe make a couple of our own little mods when we get closer to release just to see how it works and test it all out. And then, you know, they may not be core to the game, but they might be something we release on the side as a bit of a, here's something fun that we made where, you know, you can do all of this extra stuff. So, yeah, there's little things like that that we're thinking about to. Okay, okay. That does sound cool as well.

Yeah, because, I mean, I don't want to build the whole game. Someone else can. Yeah, that's true. So what has the development journey been like? So starting from that idea to now, you know, having a core team of six people working on it, how did you get here? Oh, wow. I don't know how much time you got because that's, I don't know if I have enough time to

talk about all of those things. But, you know, it's about as good as anything, you know, at the end of the day, there's lots of peaks and lots of valleys. It is absolutely a roller coaster trying to build a business, especially in the creative space. You know, obviously, like Dungeons and dining tables is the game that we're working on now. But when we started the studio, like, that wasn't even a concept yet. There was a different project we were working on. It was going to be a hexagon turn-based like civilization type thing. We've got robots and all sorts of stuff. And we ended up shelving that project because it was way too big scope.

And it wasn't as like the team didn't like it as much as I like this one and all those sorts of things. And maybe that'll have its time in the sun. I have no idea. But, you know, we went through a lot of different iterations. We've worked with a lot of different contractors. And we've had people come in and out of the business, as you can imagine. And on top of that, we've been really successful as well.

We've had lots of awards that we've won. You know, we've won a couple of awards, one for the most impactful studio in South Australia. So as part of our business and our ethos and the values that we have, you know, we work with a lot of kids. We do a lot of workshops, which we run through a bunch of local councils, schools, and libraries. We also have a co-working space here in town as well. So we share that co-working space with a bunch of other creatives.

And recently I've started a program which is called Catalyst Launchpad, which is a games incubator that helps game studios to kind of flourish a little bit more and springboard them up into the realm of game business. So yeah, so we've been really fortunate to have some strong partners on those types of things. And, you know, it does mean that there's a lot going on, right? But it's all really fun stuff. So, yeah, yeah, we've had a lot of success. and yeah, it's just one of those things, right? Like as you build your business, anyone that's built

a business before understands, you know, it's putting out fires constantly, but you know, you wouldn't want to do anything else. So, yeah. No, all, like, all that sounds that

the, well, it's, Jesus Christ. Some days, some days, I just can't speak. Not all of that, all that sounds cool. If you want to tell more of that, like, story of how the studio kind of got started, I would love to hear it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so, yeah, so the studio started a couple years ago.

So effectively three years ago as of today. Today's the birthday of the studio, which is really crazy. And it started because a couple years before that, so, yesterday in 2020 I lost my granddad so you know we were going through a COVID everything was really he didn't he didn't pass away from COVID he had a lesionnaires disease basically he had inhaled some fertilizer while he was out gardening which was the thing that he really loved to do and and it was just a real shock crazy you know everything kind of went all of a sudden and and at the time I was in a very different place. So I was running another company. I started a telemarketing

company. I worked in sales and marketing and finance. I'm sure that was very fun. Very, oh yeah. So I essentially got to a point where I completely burnt out. And I just, I didn't want to do any of that stuff anymore. And I just wanted to do something that helped me reconnect with with him. And so when I was growing up, we used to make board games together. He taught me everything about board games. We played chess, you know, we played backgammon and card games and poker and all sorts of stuff. And I really just wanted something that that I could do to connect with him. And so when I was kind of getting out of my spiral of closing my business down and COVID and all of those things, I applied for a couple of jobs. I looked to be like a dealer at a casino.

And I looked into like how much it would cost to make a board game and all sorts of different stuff. And then I found an ad for AIE, which is the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. It's a games and VFX school. They have offices pretty much everywhere. But here in South Australia, there's one here in town. And I applied for it. And at the time, one of the things I was doing is a bit of a passion project is I was making Minecraft mods. So it was something I was really into, there were data packs, but basically a vanilla kind of mod. And I made this one particular mod, which was called Asvidel Meadows, which is all based on Greek mythology. And it did pretty well and like a nice, a big YouTuber played it and all those sorts of things. And I had a Discord community

and everything. I was really pumped making that stuff. And it was fun and I had a good time and I met cool people. And so I put all that in my portfolio for my, um, my intro into game dev. And I said, you know, I don't have any formal training and I've never been on this path before. But, you know, I really like Minecraft and this is what I've been doing. And they basically said, yeah, that's good enough. Join the course. So, um, so I joined the course. Um, and I met some amazing people there. Most of them are like in, in my studio. I've worked with us. Um, and then, um, yeah, I went through the design pipeline there and I learned everything about game design and, you know, the psychology of games and the history of games and all those sorts of things. And I really just pushed myself to immerse myself in video games.

And so I had always known that I was going to start a business. I love starting businesses. I like working for myself. One of the other things about me is I have autism. And so as someone with autism, I really reject the status quo quite a lot. lot and I do find it really difficult to work in a nine to five job you know as most neurodivergent people probably can relate to and so for me I decided I wanted to start a business and so in my third year at AIE which was the graduate diploma I started I started Catalyst games and I started it

with a friend of mine he came on as a kind of pseudo co-founder he's since then moved on to do work in esports and all sorts of cool stuff that he's doing. But ultimately, I started this studio as a bit of a connector to my granddad and a connected to all the things that I find joy in. And so that's sort of been the motivator the whole time. And because of that, like, I can't sleep. I don't eat properly. I just work all the time.

And I just have such a fire for what it is that we do and what the company is becoming. So, yeah, as a kind of indie studio and as a creative studio, you know, Dungeons and Dining Tables has been our core passion that the team love to work on. But we've been, you know, we've been really fortunate to work on some other cool stuff. We just released an app in partnership with a company called Imagination, which is the Disney Game Night app, which goes along as a companion to a board game that they have. That's all Disney branded, which is such a cool thing to work on. But yeah, we do things like that. We teach kids about games. All our content is very family friendly.

It's all educational kind of stuff. A lot of our work for hire is educational. So, yeah, like all of it kind of comes back to that same value set and that same thing that we've been doing for a long time. So I know that's probably a really long-winded answer as to why, you know, how it all started and why we're all here. But I can't think of anything better to do. I think this is the best thing for me.

I think it's the best thing for my life. And I love supporting my team and, you know, allowing them to have all these cool opportunities to go and show their game off at all of these cool different events. And, you know, we've been traveling all around Australia. And, you know, we went to Bali last year for Unreal Fest, which was really cool. And, you know, hopefully there's some more international travel this year. And, you know, we just keep going, you know, keep going. and yeah, I'm just, I'm really loving it. And, yeah, and it would just keep building and making sure this is the best that it can be.

So, yeah, I don't know if you want to get super into that, but there you go. That was, that's the story for you. No, that's exactly what I want to hear. That was great. Oh, good. As other people who have had on the show before, it's always nice to see someone who is really passionate about what they're involved in. in? Oh, yeah.

I mean, you have to be, right? At the end of the day, like, why else would we do all of this work? Especially, like, for free, like, living on noodles and all that sort of stuff. There are parts of this that are really, really tough. And I think, you know, if you're not passionate about it, there's so many other things you can do and not be passionate about and probably have a better time. So, yeah, it definitely is a labor of love. just not just from me but my whole team is a massive labour of love everybody's here because they

really want to see this thing succeed and you know i'm doing absolutely everything i can to make sure um that they get recognized for that so um yeah that's that's the core focus that's always going to be the focus and um yeah hopefully uh hopefully we win you know well with the game being at 9000 wish list before steam next fest like you know like you you're already off to a really good stuff. Obviously, those aren't all going to convert into sales. It's never how. But like having that as a as a baseline already,

that already indicates that there is interest in the game. Now having a demo out for the game for like the wider audience, it's only, you know, you'll see what's going to happen next month, I guess. Well, that's right. You know, we can only hope and pray. I'm not big on counting my chickens before they hatch. Sure.

So, you know, but realistically, if one person wish lists us from that, that is good enough for me. I'm very excited that there's one more person that loves what we do. So, yeah, 9,000 is an amazing number. I'm super excited about that. I'm so happy for the team as well because, you know, all of that is just recognition that they are doing the right things and are going in the right direction. So, you know, it's everything from the art to the music to the code to everything. Every person that has touched this product has touched this game, you know, everyone should deserve a pat on the back for that. So, yeah, I think it's amazing.

And, you know, if it gets bigger and better, then that's even more amazing. I never thought that we would even be where we are. So I'm really happy that I get to do this with all my time. Maybe some plans are going to change throughout the year, but what do you currently have locked in as cons you're going to? Oh, okay, locked in. There's a few that are coming up. So the main one is, well, actually,

the first one that's coming up is on the 31st of January. So we're at the Ferry Fauna Fair, or 3F, say that five times fast, which is an artist market that's at the Woodville Town Hall. It's a smaller market, but that's exactly where we want to live. We are very focused on supporting South Australia and supporting other indie games and other artists as well. So we'll be out in full force there. Then in the beginning of February, we are at SAGE, which is the SA Games Expo.

So we're actually a sponsor of SAGE this year. So we get to put our little logo on their website and all those sorts of things. We'll have two booths, one for the game, so people can come past and play. and the other one is to talk more about our games workshops and some e-sports stuff that we're going to be doing in a partnership, which I'm really excited about. And then the next one, I think, is the Games Expo, which is in Melbourne,

and I think that's at the beginning of March. Apart from that, nothing else is really locked in. I think there's a lot of stuff going on, and there's a lot that we would love to go to. Right, right. I think a big thing this year will likely be, probably Pax again this year, I think, if we can do it. Definitely G-CAP, which is the big developer conference,

but if we can go to Pax in Melbourne for Melbourne International Games Week, we'd love to be there for that. And I'm just going to watch that to make sure we don't end up on the wait list again this year. And then last year, we went to Pixel Expo in Perth, and that was really fun. So it's likely that we'll do Pixel Expo as well. Yeah, so all of those were really fun. The only one I'd really like to go to that I haven't been to yet

is the Queensland game festival. Apparently, that just went off last year. It was a big event and lots of people, and I'd love to be part of that. And then with our e-sports partner, we might be showcasing our game at a couple of other little things, something in Queensland

and something in Sydney and some other stuff all around. So I'm really excited to just show it off to more people as much as I can. But, yeah, that's the stuff that's locked in and the stuff I can talk about. So, yeah, that's good. Is there possibility of Avcon again this year or?

Oh, absolutely. Okay, that was just not one of the ones you mentioned. Yeah. Sorry, I totally forgot about that. I understand. Will you listen to out like 10 different things? Yeah. Yeah.

I think Avcon's in April, so it's likely we'll do that one in April. I think June? No, it's June, isn't it? July. Yeah. July. Oh, who knows. Who knows?

There's so many things going on. Yeah. I get pretty friends. when it comes to calendar events. As you can tell, it's a long time for us to pin down this. July 4th. There it is.

Yeah. And I do appreciate you spending the time talking to me as well because I know it's been a bit of a back and forth to get us here. So, yeah, really appreciate your time on that. No, no, it's totally fun. I enjoy the game every time I've got a chance to play it. And, you know, I just, yeah, I like talking to people that are doing the cool stuff.

I like bringing on, especially like essay game devs. Because, as I said, maybe it was before we started recording, I feel like a lot of people just don't really get the recognition that their games kind of deserve. Like obviously you have, whenever you think of South Australian games, the first thing comes to mind is Holonite, right?

But there's other games that are made here that are not Holo Night. Yeah, that's true. That's true. You know, it's really hard to be, you know, an outlier, and that is the outlier for South Australia. Right. But, you know, I think the thing is, like, as a community, we're all.

really friendly and we're all really lovely to each other, which is good. You know, it's quite a tight-knit community. And that includes the Holy Night guys as well, you know, as much as they're, you know, I guess big and fancy and all those awesome things, they do, they do still come to different events and, you know, play the games and everything like that. And I think that's awesome. You know, I love getting advice from those guys. So, yeah, like, it's awesome to see that, you know, even at that stage, there's still community and they're still building and having fun and playing games as well. So I'm hoping that, you know, if we ever make it to any kind of status, even 1% of that, that that doesn't change us. We can continue to do cool fun stuff. So yeah. So you said earlier that you

had like a game that had already been shelved. Do you have some ideas for things you would like to maybe explore after this game that you haven't really done anything with yet? Oh yeah, I have so many things. Like one of the big ones I'd really love to do is when I was studying at AIE, we got to make a bunch of game prototypes. I really loved just making cool little four-week projects. I thought that was really fun. And I think once I have some time, which will likely never happen.

But when I do have some time, I'd really love to revisit some of those ideas and be like, this is what this looks like five years after the original version of this. And just see if there's any improvement, you know, any improvement at all. I think that could be a really fun little thing to do. I'm really into chess, so I'd love to do some kind of like chess game. I'd love to do something with like chess pieces and beautiful lighting and like make it kind of dark and mysterious and like a cool kind of like chess inscription type thing. I think it would be really fun.

So that's always a cool idea. Obviously, Dungeons and Dining Tables 2, 100%. I think that the team would really love to do that. The other thing is I'm really big on like strategy stuff and turn-based stuff. I think as I get kind of a little bit older, I lean more towards strategy and less towards real-time. And then I decided, you know what, let's make a real-time game. That was a silly idea.

Yeah, maybe something in like a turn-based genre or like an RPG in that space. I love the stats and I love the number. and the randomization and fighting different monsters and getting XP and doing all that stuff. So maybe there's like a spin-off game that's, you know, Dungeons and Dining Tables, the Turn-Based version or something like that I think would be really fun. Apart from that, I don't have any other huge ideas. It'll just be this for a while. One of the big things about this IP is that I really love the IP.

I think the brand is really good. I think it stands for a lot of really positivity. and, you know, if we're going to put merch together, I'd love, I'd really love one day to make a board game for Dungeons and Dining Tables. I think that would just like tick everything off on my list of things that I want to do in life. So, yeah, maybe there's a Dungeons and Dining Tables, the board game in there somewhere as well. Yeah. Nothing confirmed, just possible ideas in the future. No, no Dungeons and Dating Tables and board game yet.

But, yeah. So I guess we've pretty much hit on most things in the game. Is there anything that you feel like we probably should touch on? I mean, like, I think we pretty much covered everything. Like, yeah, I'm happy with everything that we talked about there. I mean, like, the big thing is I just really want people to play it. Right, right. Here we go, see if you like it.

You know, if you're into it, awesome. If you're not into it, then, I don't know, play something else. go play Hades or something. But yeah, I don't imagine it's going to be the perfect game for everybody, but I am hoping that it's going to be a fun game for some people. So, yeah, that's the core for me. Obviously, if you want to support us, the best way that you can is through our Kickstarter that will be going up, absolutely play the game, absolutely wishlist the game.

That's the like free thing that you can do that really helps us out is wishlist and share and all those sorts of things. And interact with the community. We have like a fan art channel where people post pictures of axelotles and we have a pets channel and those sorts of things on the Discord. Anytime someone makes some art, we print it out and we put it up on the wall. We have a big wall that's just full of fan art. So yeah, so yeah, just interact with us and we'll keep making cool stuff. And you don't need much of a computer to play the game as long as it has a process that you're pretty much good.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like, actually, there's a really funny anecdote for you as well. When we started the studio, we bought a bunch of, like, basically computers that were going to, like, the bin from AIE. So it was, like, the worst, oldest kind of school computers that you can imagine. And we still develop on those. And some of them blue screen and some of them are okay. And we wanted it to be something where if you're going to play this, you should be allowed to, regardless of what your tech is. So yeah, that also helps on the console side, right?

So yeah, you should be able to play it. Fingers crossed. That is definitely nice to see. Like, actually keeping in mind that not everyone has fast hardware, like you might make a game that has a relatively low poly art style, things like that. But if you don't actually test it on slower hardware, you might, it might look like it should run,

but you might have done something in the background where you're checking something every frame that shouldn't be done where modern hardware kind of hides that. Actually having it on real old hardware that you know it's working on is always nice to see.

Yes, that's the reason that we have old machines, not because we are poor indie studios. Well, look, you know, two birds, one's down. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, on that note, if there's nothing else you want to touch on,

I guess we can sort of wrap up there. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think it went pretty well. I think so well. Personally. Yeah, is there anything else that you need from me? Do you have like an ending thing that you do or anything like that? We kind of already mentioned like the Kickstarter and stuff,

but I guess just as like a thing altogether, where can people support the game? Where can people find the game? Yeah. Yeah, great. So, yeah, the places that you can find the game and support the game is you can find us on Steam. Dungeons and dining tables, if you Google that, you'll be able to find us. Just scroll past all of the Dungeons and Dragons tables that you can buy, and you'll be able to find us there.

We have a website now, which is Catalystgames.com.com. We have everything about what we do as a studio there as well, including our impact initiatives and those things. And of course, if you can, please back our Kickstarter. Obviously, the Kickstarter is something that's going to help us continue to fund the game and let us know that there is people out there that are into this sort of thing. So, yeah, the Kickstarter, wishlist the game on Steam, and interact with us on social media. I will make sure that I reply to every comment that I see come up. So, yes, please do that.

Okay. And if you happen to be at any of these cons throughout the year, play the game, yeah. Absolutely. Come play the game. Come say hello. We've got axolotles. It's great. I will probably be, I'll definitely be at Sage, I'll definitely be at Avcon, look, maybe I'll shop

at other places, who knows, but I will definitely be running around the indie spaces at both of these places, so, yeah. Awesome, well, I'll see you, I'll have more business cars to hand out to people. Yeah, well, actually, to be, to be fair, it's, it's still the same stack of, I got too many printed last year, so it's still the same stack from last year. But, you know, it's good, though. yeah we still don't have we just we don't have business cards i gotta get some business cards actually so you can just um get imprinted at office works is it just let me just go and design something mine's

mine's this it's pretty it's pretty simple but like you know yeah i think mine'll likely be like the logo or something yeah yeah yeah i don't know logo contact information name that's pretty much that's all you need pretty much right that should be good enough so i Nothing else you want to mention? No, no other links. No, I'm pretty happy with that. Yep, the website, the Discord and, no, did we say the Discord? Oh, you didn't say the Discord.

Did you say the Discord? Oh, we mentioned it a couple of times. There's the Discord. It's on Steam. Yeah, it's on Steam. There's a Discord. Hang out with us. Richless game, check it out. When's the memo out?

When Steam? 23rd of February. So that is when. Steam Next Fest is, yeah. Okay. Okay. If there's nothing else to mention, I'll do my outro and we'll sign off. Fantastic. Okay. Sounds good.

So my main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I also stream there. Check that out. I've got the gaming channel, Brodyon Games. I'll still be finishing off Holonite Silk Songs, so check that out. And also, DMC Devil May Cry. And if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version.

every podcast platform, search tech over tea. There is also an RSS feed if you like those. And if you want to find a video, it is on YouTube, tech over T. Also, Spotify has video, if you like Spotify video for some reason. I'll give you the final word. How do you want to sign us off? Oh, have fun, play video games, support local indies. That's everything you should do with your life. That's from me.

Fair enough. Awesome. Thank you, Brady. Absolutely pleasure.