Tech Over Tea - Perfect Video Game For A Linux User | Chironex Studios

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Wishlist it now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2164660/Grist/Today we have Evan Sparks from Chironex Studios the developers of the upcoming Grist on the show, an ASCII graphics terminal RPG but not ASCII graphics like a classic game but ASCII art graphics.==========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://chironexstudios.com/Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKyUOGNwTFw==========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 always your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we have the developer of a game that I thought was really cool at Avcon. From a studio known as Kyranak Studios, this is the developer of a game called Grist. It is, well, honestly, I think that's the best way to know what it is, just to show you, and introduce yourself while I'll play the trailer. Fantastic. Yeah, my name is Evan Sparks.

and I am the sole developer at Kyrinex Studios and I've been working on Grist, which is a science fiction RPG with, I call it a terminal wave aesthetic. So it's Aski graphics, it's a kind of synthwave sounds all combined into this thing. It's retro nostalgic for something that didn't quite ever exist.

It's like heavily inspired by a lot of those older, you know, terminal-based RPGs, but it's sort of a, I guess, a new take on it, I guess. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of it, some of the inspiration is like my memories of growing up and playing games, like a particular one that stands out is I had a friend. I grew up in a small country town in Victoria, and I had a mate whose dad worked for the local hospital, and I went around to his house one day, and his dad had bought home the computer, the one computer that the hospital had and he brought it home i think to learn how to use it and uh it had like

an amber monitor and um of course there was a bunch of games on there there was a bunch of you know we found the the c slash games folder that had uh i don't know if you would know this one uh people might there was like a star trek game with text graphics that that someone made in the 80s And it just kind of showed a grid and you say, I want to move to the next grid and I want to fire my phases or torpedoes and that kind of thing. So a lot of inspiration from there and from modern games too, you know, from definitely things like Dwarf fortress and caves of Cod. Would that Star Trek game be EGA Trek? Ooh. I just looked up text-based Star Trek game and there was a Reddit post where someone was asking the exact same question.

I mean, this one, I'm pretty sure, is older than the EGA Star Trek. Star Trek, 1971 video game. It would have been that, I'd say. Okay, okay. That's a little bit older than me, but I was playing it, I guess, in, you know, in the early 80s at some point. Yeah, look, and a whole bunch of stuff. I didn't quite understand, you know, that I played and had a great vibe, but being, you know, 10 years old or something, didn't really quite get at the time what I was supposed to. A lot of the time that you had no instructions, you had nothing, you just had a game on a disc or in a folder somewhere, with no idea what it was trying to do, what you were trying to do in the game.

But they were good times. Yeah, I've never gone back and played something like this old, but I've never gone back and played something like this old. I have gone back and played some of the, you know, some of the classic text-based games, things like rogue and stuff like that. And, yeah, even going, like, as new as that, there's still a lot of design to it where you have, like, now you can look up what you need to do. You can find best strategies for everything.

But if you just go into the game blind, you will fail very quickly. You have no idea what you're doing. It's very funny because there's, you know, channels now that play these old. games and there is a particular one uh the c r pg addict who has like a a blog where he he his goal originally was to play all the c r pg games um that were ever made and uh at some he had this list and then at some point well people were like well what about other computers what

about consoles so the list just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger um but it is funny to see a game that you know as a child you remember playing for like months and wandering around, never really working at what to do or whatever. And then you see one of these videos. And you've, you've probably put in, you know, dozens of hours as a kid into this thing. And when you watch someone actually complete it, it's like 40 minutes. Right, right, right. That's all it takes.

It's like you grind up over here, you go down there, you get the thing and you hit the wizard and he dies. And that's, and you win the game. And you're like, oh my God. Yeah, this is a quote. I don't remember who I heard it from originally. might have been like Josh Strach Hayes the YouTuber

he was saying that gamers will always optimize the fun out of a game when you find the optimal path everything else becomes irrelevant so as a kid like you will you will try out things that are dumb you'll grind on spots

where they're not optimal to grind on you'll like do all of these things which at the time you really enjoyed but once people realize, especially as you get older, once you realize there's like a correct path to do it, especially if you have other things you want to play as well, a lot of people very quickly gravitate towards that path. Yeah, look, it's a, I think it's a double-edged sword that one, because I, for me, there is sort of a pleasure in deriving that optimization.

That's, that's kind of a fun thing. And so, um, for example, example, the Souls games, I'm not a big speed runner or anything like that. But even with those, I would finish them and then immediately kind of start them again and just start looking for sequence breaks, looking for things, well, hey, that's how I did it the first time and it took me like 80 hours to finish the game. And now I kind of have a better idea. Can I do it in 20 hours or something like that? Can I get to this area before that area or something like that?

Which is kind of fun. It's a really interesting question. So Grist itself is a bit of an optimization puzzle in terms of its gameplay. So every mission that you do is like a randomized map. And depending on the mission type, there will be optimal strategies. And I'm totally, I'm really excited. to see other people, like people find different strategies that I'd never considered, because that's always the fun part is when they go, oh, if you do this and that and that,

that's even better. And it blows my mind that, you know, because sometimes I never would have thought of doing that. But, uh, yeah, it is, it is interesting. And we're going through it now. I don't know if you're playing, but I've been playing night rain. I know, I haven't been, but I do have a lot of friends who've been playing. Yeah. It's, it's definitely.

we're seeing that develop those strategies develop and then yeah it can be sometimes you get into a game with people and they're running around and they're doing you know the wrong thing and you can kind of feel like oh well hang on a minute there is that temptation to be like that's not the right thing and and this is going to take us 40 minutes and we should be over here doing this instead and yeah that's why I kind of fall out a lot of those sort of it's one thing you're playing with friends but when a lot of lot of people do it with like open co-op just queuing with random people. The games like Helldivers, you know, queuing in an MMO for example, what you end up having happen is you know, it's sort of the, it's sort of the expectation

that everybody kind of knows that this is the approach you should be taking and I know there are people who, you know, like to just do their own thing, but when you're wasting other people's time, it kind of feels like you should be doing the optimal thing, even

if that's not necessarily the most fun thing to be doing. Yes, yeah, yeah. That time pressure is interesting constraints. So obviously my game is a single player. I don't have to deal with that kind of thing. And you can save and load in the middle of it. So even though there's kind of a timer going on during missions, you can just sort of turn them off and go have dinner and come back and finish them later.

But yeah, it is funny. I play Night Rain mostly with randoms. just because of time constraints and other people who I know playing it are usually available at different times to me. Right, right, right. That has been very funny. And, you know, I enjoy, like, if I think we should go here better, I'm often happy to just go along with what people are doing

because I might learn something. Right. But then if it becomes obvious that actually this is going to get us stuck somewhere, then, you know, I will try and sort of ping the castle or whatever and see like, hey, guys, we should maybe head over this way. But I do, I love when things like really kind of work out well, too. You get these great moments where funny things happen. I think I was just playing it last night and we were waiting for another player who we'd,

so if you know the conceit that the rain comes in and you kind of get trapped in this circle and you fight a boss and then at the end of the end of the, the second night, sort of a portal opens up after the boss and you teleport to the, the big boss of the mission. And somebody had died in the rain shortly before the second night boss. And what happens is, uh, if that happens, this is a funny one. This is a funny optimal strategy is that just, you should just let them die. You shouldn't run out and try and resurrect them.

because if you do that they're going to come into that boss fight kind of at a disadvantage because they won't they will have been using healing items and stuff to not die in the rain and if they finally died they've probably run out of those healing items so they'll come into the fight without them if you just let them die they'll respawn they'll lose a level of XP but they'll get all their healing items back which is right probably better so we've done that we're just like you just die that's fine and then we beat the boss and then they ran back to get their levels because you can then pick up everything you dropped and level back up to where you were.

So me and the other player had gone off and we were just mucking about. And there's like a Slavic squat pose that you could do, which is named after Patches, who's like a famous character in the Souls games. Yeah, I've played all of them except Eldenring at this point. Yeah, sure. So we were doing the Patches squat while we were waiting for this other player to come back. And then while we were waiting, my partner had come over and was talking to me. So I wasn't looking at the game.

I was talking to her for a minute. And then when I turned back, there's all three of us now. The other player had come back and just joined us. And there's all three of us squatting around this thing. It's got just those little moments. I really enjoy these little contact with strangers and have a funny experience or something. Right. I don't get why the whole cheering of random things is fun.

And like, it makes a lot of sense why people do it and why it's so appealing. Yeah. There are definitely been hard ones where I've just been like, oh, wow, like what happened there? That was crazy. And there are times where I've had to go because I've got family and I've got obligations and stuff. And there's been times where I'm like, I actually just cannot get around. I have to disconnect from this session and leave, which is a bit brutal. but I still enjoy it

and the good outweighs the bad it's got a really good game design I quite enjoy how they've meshed those two elements the kind of the play of the soul's games with the time pressure and the rogue-like elements so yeah

that's fair that's fair enough about that I've been thinking a lot obviously about its game design lately because it was weirdly for kind of an action RPG thing was very pertinent to what I was doing and how I was working on the map for this game a lot and it just got me really thinking

about the maps for Grist and how they would function with various points of interest and even just the shape of the map and all that, so yeah, very good. Well, I guess it takes us directly into like what the gameplay loop of Grist is because it is a

the whole rogue-like rogue-like terms, all of those, people have made video essays about how the terms don't actually mean anything and, you know... Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, if you want to talk about an actual rogue-like, you know,

we can see the game Rogue, we can see what that actually is, then you have Rogue likes, where it's like, oh, let's take one or two mechanics. It's sort of an established term at this point. I'm not a fan of the term. I like games in the genre, but I don't... Yes. The term doesn't mean anything.

yeah terms i i find genre terms are very frustrating um a lot of the time but yeah that is a funny one and there are there are like multiple definitions you know there's the berlin interpretation of the roguelike so named because of the the berlin conference where they they set down which elements um which is all very funny i think yeah so i originally I never set out to make a roguelike or a road light. And what I set out to make was essentially a board game. Okay. And the very first conception that I had of this game

was the idea that there would be lots of crew members or lots of party members and they would probably die a lot. And the original design, the one-page original design, it was a collectible trading card game and that you would buy booster packs with different party members in them essentially and different events that you could do and I figured around with that idea

for a couple of nights and then realized that you really need just millions of dollars to start a trading card game I think you did because it's like The printing costs of all this stuff would be insane.

So I thought, okay, I'll, you know, that was a fun idea to kick around. How would I turn that into a video game? And that was when I started, yeah, trying to piece this thing together and drawing on different aspects. There's a whole lot. It's very interesting. It's been a long development and it's gone through many phases. I was talking to somebody recently about this.

sat AV con because they said they didn't play many video games they played more tabletop role-playing games and one of the drivers of this game being what it is was wanting to play the Traveller RPG Tabletop RPG which is quite old and not having anyone else I could convince to play it so I'll go I'll have to go and make one. That one is quite famous. There is an old video game which you might be able to find like a ROM of

that was for the Apple 2. Okay. Now, what was this called? Thank you, Redo. Empire? Um... Sundog Frozen Legacy. Space.

What's it called? What's it called? Yeah, space and space too. And they were basically, they just ripped off Traveler extremely hard. And they, I think, got, in fact, sued out of existence. Okay, yeah. Something like that. Yep, yeah, right here on the Wikipedia page.

The game was based on Traveler, created by game designers workshop, which sued Edu, Woff, Copran infringement in 1980. then they settled out of court, but talk both games off the market. Yeah. Right. Yes. So I haven't played them, but they just, I watched some videos, and I thought, great. So that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, we're coming from, from, from a, so the influences, really were, um, um, essentially, uh, card game.

Okay. Which is a board game that I was playing a lot of at the time. And the Traveller RPG and these old text-based, text-based RPGs. Which sort of, yeah, fed into that. I know you were asking me about the gameplay loop. That was a while back. No, that's, that's, that's, like, important to sort of have that background to know, like, what the game is anyway.

So obviously, I never really set out to make a rogue-like. I just, I knew there are a couple of things I want to. wanted to achieve ultimately. I wanted to do something a little bit interesting with turn-based combat. It was more influenced by cards, but I also wanted to have, like, positioning. So, you know, I enjoy a good Final Fantasy fight scene, but the fact that, you know, oftentimes the relative position of the characters has no effect on anything. Right.

And I was like, well, we could probably do more with this. So there was wizardry and some other games would have front rows and back rows. So those kind of ideas went in there. And for a long time, I had the combat down and I had this sequence of events down. You would go into an encounter and that would be a bunch of sort of things happen in combat or skill checks, D&D style things. And so I had that part of it down. And then it was just sort of became. what do I do that joins all these parts together?

And I went through so many versions of this. I went through sort of there is no map or anything. It's just those bits sequentially and a little couple of paragraphs of story between each one or something like that to sort of fully open maps that you explored that kept auto generating as you went along and all that kind of thing. And we finally ended up now after a long time. on these small kind of board game style randomized maps that you explore within a timeframe and with a particular objective.

But now the big change really was changing kind of the in-between downtime management phase, kind of decoupling that from being, originally you were kind of in a spaceship and you moved around. And decoupling sort of the management bit from the movement section, um, um, let me actually do what I wanted to do with the movement, the map area. So yeah, it kind of just slowly transformed and drifted into becoming this, this rogue like thing where your, your crew would die or, or get re,

reborn. So in the conceit of the story, um, you are, you're on this planet, right? Right. There's this planet called Atropos and it's a shell world or another term is a Matrosca planet. So it is a planet of layers, many like concentric spheres. And each sphere will have its own city or agricultural world, kind of a whole entire civilization living on this sphere. And there's a plague that is infected this planet and is traveling through all the different layers. but you live in this city, the megacity Targis, kind of right down the bottom.

That's where you are at the very, at the heart of this shell world. And this city is the plague hasn't reached there. So they've closed off, they're quarantined, they're terrified of anything coming in. And to interact with the outside world, it's all mediated through these what are called proxies, which are essentially people that you print out on a 3D people printer, and then you send them out to the world to do things for you so that's the idea and they only last a few hours

so in terms of the game you have six to eight hours or six to eight turns to move these people around a map in the outside world before they start falling apart right I guess that's a that is an interesting sort of plot device for why you wouldn't just immediately lose characters

like a lot of games where you know you die it's like oh how do how do we like justify a character it's like, oh, they don't actually die unless they die in a cutscene. Instead, it's just they're fainting. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, all that stuff is funny.

And I get, um, I do. I get, uh, at least I don't, it doesn't bother me so much when other people do it. It's just when I do it when I want to have something in a story. For instance, the whole deal with kind of you being in a spaceship that I got rid of, um, because I wanted to do things that then would

only, they could only kind of work if there was, like, faster than light travel in this world of the game. And I just, I just wasn't willing. I was like, I'm not putting, I cannot put FTL travel in the game. It will annoy me. It's like the whole conceit was that it doesn't exist. So, um, so I changed the story instead to get around having to do that. Um, and so yeah, so this, this works.

It is interesting. I, with the, when I played the first. Let's go back to Souls. When I played the first one, Demon Souls, and I thought that had a really interesting take on that. I know in the game it just sort of says, well, you're trapped in the Nexus and you die and that's where you always end up. But from a kind of a philosophical perspective, there was always, I felt something there in the way of a Buddhist conception of the world, that you go through these cycles and the cycles keep repeating. and that was emphasised by the end of the game where essentially

it just repeats and that's kind of the canon ending of the game is that everything is just all going to happen again essentially which I thought was yeah really interesting I think they've kind of moved away from that a bit have you played Sekiro

I've yeah I had now that I haven't finished so I've got to go back and finish it I'm halfway through it I think Okay, so you're far enough to know what I'm going to say then. So, Sekiro, you know, the main character is established to be immortal. And it's one of those few games where the bosses actually respond to the fact that you are constantly bugging them. Like, they will, like, after you've died a couple of times, a lot of them will have a different voice line at the start of the fight.

Right. Sort of, you're like, hey, piss off. I've already killed you like 10 times already. Yeah, I like that. That's really cool. That kind of thing. So, yeah, it is interesting because for a while I had an issue writing dialogue for this game as to who somebody is speaking to. If you're talking, so you're in this, you've got a crew of people that you're sending out of these proxies, but you're not out there themselves.

You're sitting behind a computer terminal sending messages back and forth. Yeah, so a couple of times now I have. uh, somebody speak to you through the proxies, but in this case, but, but now I can make it explicit. I can say that they, they understand that they're talking to somebody behind who they're talking to, um, which is interesting. That's resolved that problem for me. Anyway, which is, which is good. Yeah. I do like when, when that stuff happens. Sometimes you can kind of just hand wave stuff away and go, it's a game. Don't think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but I do like if there's a tie, if there's a little,

thing that you go, oh, well, you know, it's this, or people in the world understand this. Right. Like, I've talked about this with a couple of other people when it comes to the idea of, you know, yellow paint and signposting and, you know, why is everything that is climbable, very clearly marked as climbable in the game? And the example I always bring up is Expedition 33, where one of the, have you played the game at all? Do you know anything about it? I haven't. I know the game, but I haven't played it, yes. Okay, the basic outline is, for some reason, not going to explain it at the start of the end, but you'll get it when you play it. There are these expeditions sent out that are trying to resolve this problem going on in the world.

You're in Expedition 33. One of the earlier expeditions, they were the climbing expedition, and their goal was to go around putting climbing holes on everywhere that people might want to get to. And this is like the plot justification for why there are these very obvious. climbing points and everything and it's like a very subtle thing and you don't it's like an completely optional bit of a story that you don't even need to see yeah but it does add a lot more like it makes it feel like it's a world that it's you're you're part of a journey right like you are expedition 33 you are not the first people going out into this world trying to solve this problem oh that's a good one fantastic and there's a lot of like

other like other neat little things in the game like that that sort of hint in the same way but that's like the most obvious idea of hey we've given you a plot justification for why something very gamey is here yeah yeah yeah that's very neat i do agree that is you games can just be fun though right like you don't need an explanation for it right no absolutely not no um one of my favorite games is uh or series is like earth defense force which is um if you've played is you shoot lots of aliens and it's there's no reason for kind of anything to happen in that game it just does and it's fine we enjoy it yeah i like when a game just fully embraces the fact that it's a game and you know we're just going to you know we don't need to be serious don't need to do

anything that makes sense like yeah yeah it's a game yeah enjoy it have fun that's right that's right it is uh it's interesting one of the so i mentioned that tabletop RPGs were a big influence and one of those ones that are, I used to, I haven't played this in years, but I played it during high school is a game called Paranoia.

Have you ever heard of this? It's, it disappeared for a while, but I believe it's back now and it's I don't believe so. It's very, I mean, in a way it's similar to this game. You have five lives for a start. Every character make has five lives.

So if you die, you just have to get back to where you were with your new life. And yeah, its conceit was very much, you're playing a game. So your character's dead. So we're just going to respawn you or make a new one. And part of the fun with that was that, yeah, the game was just sort of absurd. The computer would, the computer that ruled everything would tell you to go somewhere and do something. And then when you got there, the computer would be like, well, you're in violation of policy 12 because you don't have a permit to be here. And you'd be like, well, you told me to get here.

And it would be like, well, say it would be executed on the spot or something like that. Right, right, right, right. And that was just silly. So, yeah, that was very funny stuff. So going back to the sort of gameplay loop within Greece. So it's a roguelike game. You go out. You are these proxies.

You kill things. What is the goal of doing the run? What are you trying to achieve? and then once you've finished a run, whether that be succeed or fail, sort of what happens then? Yeah, so in terms of the big, there is a big story, so the initial kind of thing is you're just trying to pay rent, just trying to pay rent, and you've signed up for this program where you can be an operator and gotten accepted, so you send these proxies out. So there are in the world a bunch of different factions, and they will essentially post up jobs

for you to do. So sometimes they are to do with the maintenance of the world. I believe the first one really is essentially like elevator maintenance. So there's these elevators that travel between the different floors of this planet. And so you're just clearing away some hooligans from outside one of those. And yeah, ideally I want these to be able to tackle different ways. So sometimes there are different kinds of missions. that collect a bunch of sort of resources.

There are ones that are more fighting things, and there are ones that are more about skill checks going through sort of story experience things. But essentially, you spawn into a map, and you have about six to eight turns, generally, on that map to achieve a goal. And the goal might be, for example, in the first one, um there's an elevator tower and there are some uh vandals they're called that are sort of camped out

there and you just have to get rid of them so there are a couple of options for doing this and the the basic one is uh fight them if you head straight there you'll find that they're a much higher level than your characters and you'll get beaten up and and eventually probably lose the mission um so So what you're trying to do is find a way to sort of I describe it as get as overpowered as possible in as short a time as possible. So that's what I mean by sort of an optimization strategy is you're looking at the map and you're trying to see how can I break this essentially, which is something really nice about roguelikes and things that I find is you can have situations where you can break something completely wide open. And then because of the nature of it. everything is then sort of you win or you die and it's reset right right so it doesn't then become

i've completely trivialized the rest of this this game because now i'm back to the start i have to break it open again or i might not have that same opportunity but that's the idea so you're looking at the map you're looking at where are these points of interest that you can go and you'll have generally as you play through it's about learning uh roughly what is going to happen at these places So you might, um, there are, on the city maps, so we have different kinds of maps, forest locations and deserts and oceans, but you sort of start out with these city maps. And, um, there will be points of interest like a communications tower is one. And a communications tower will generally give you, uh, kind of like an XP bonus. It will involve skill checks.

It will result in an XP bonus. usually not a lot of fighting is going to happen there. So that's more about kind of going to an area, using your character's skills to hack into the system and then obtain some kind of reward. So it's a non-combat way to level up your characters or to improve their skills. Whereas you will have, say, a weapons cache,

and that's where sort of the local police are keeping all their gear. And you can go raid that and you can, you know, beat the police up, take all their stuff and move on and you'll find different kind of stuff that you'll find equipment special kinds of ammunition etc and that will you know you'll know that this will involve combat so if i've got a great combat team and i want to fight something that's going to be a great place to hit up i might hit up an amocation try and get like ammunition from my sniper that has uh different status effects like stun or confuse or something like that so yeah when you spawn in you're looking at the map, you're looking at those locations and you're planning out of route.

And then as you go through that, then things will start to change that, that, you know, ideally no plan survives contact with, uh, with reality, essentially. So things will happen as you go through those events that are going to change what you have to do. You might have characters get wounded, um, and that kind of stuff that are going to have change or not get the weapon that you want somewhere or, you, or, you know, Yeah, find that there's a stronger enemy. So not in this one, but in other missions, we have kind of roaming enemies that will move around.

That will be a high level. So you'll be trying to do what you want, but also avoid them at least until you're strong enough to deal with them. Um, and yeah, and that's that's kind of it. So it's like I say, it's a card based combat. Um, and you are picking up new cards as you go along by raiding places, by fighting enemies and by visiting shops. So sometimes you're like, I want, I just want to go here and I want to want, to fight these little people in the trees and they're going to drop a whole bunch of like

ranged attacks, essentially rocks that I can then go throw at somebody else. Right. When you talk about the idea of overpowered runs, I always think back to some of the most fun runs I've done in games like Enter the Gungeon or Dead Cells and things like that where like the first time, or Hades another great example,

the first time I beat the final boss of a run, it's always going to be some beyond overpowered build. I got perfect luck. I have a weapon that, you know, it does probably two times, two or three times more damage than normal weapon would do and everything just melts. And that's, that's so fun when it happens. Yeah, there's a joy in that. It's, um, I get really, not depressed, but, you know, it's, it's sad sometimes you see a game where, you know, you're having these great experiences. And then for whatever reason, it's like somebody, is, oh, we need to balance that.

Mm-hmm. And especially in like a single-player game, it's like, no, you don't need to balance. Like, you don't need to balance that. I don't understand sometimes when they're like, oh, the game needs to be more balanced. They like, no, but you should have unbalanced moments. I find the leveling system, this always frustrated me since, uh, oblivion. Skyrim, they fixed it a bit so much, but the elder scrolls ones in oblivion where they, they really went for that, um, you know, the, uh, scaling.

So the faster you level, the faster the enemies level. What happens then is, you know, leveling and power, it just sort of becomes this linear thing. And you never get, you know, I feel it's a lot more fun if you have this progression that kind of you climb up, you climb up, you climb up. And then if you go back to where you came from, in my head, you should be like stomping all over everything. You should go back to the starting levels. and you should be wamping everything and, you know, having a ball. Oblivion's actually a prime example, because I know people will often talk about one of the, there's an early area that you basically should do as, like, Skyrim, you can kind of just ignore the story

and do whatever you want. Oblivion, if you do that and become overpowered, there's some areas that become insanely difficult, even though they're like three story missions in. Yes, yes, I know exactly, you're talking about like the city of Kravach or something, I think it is, like the very first oblivion gates mission that they send you out on. And it's notorious for people being on forums or being on Reddit and saying, well,

I totally ignored that until level 15 and now I'm there and it is just a nightmare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because of that scaling systems, I used to always make these builds and I'd be like, I'd throw a bunch of skills in there and then it'd be like, whoops, I've leveled up all the wrong skills. And now all the enemies everywhere are waiting. stronger than I am.

I have to kind of go back and be like, all right, let's just do this again. Sorry, Discord does this thing where it'll just like break everything, break all the sound on my side and then keep, you can probably still hear me when I was talking, couldn't you?

I can, yes. Yeah, Discord, Discord sucks. I hate it so much. I don't know I keep using Discord. Anyway, you were talking about Oblivion and... Being overpowered.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Well, that's, yeah, I think sort of one of the philosophy of those games is that they would think we don't want people to get madly overpowered. And I know, I'm pretty sure that's what people do in like Daggerfall and Morrowwind, particularly Morrowing. Yeah, Morrowing could fly by the end of the game. Yeah, yeah. Just keep jumping. Just keep jumping.

Just keep jumping. And eventually you'll be jumping over cities and everything as you level that up. And yes, flying and all those sorts of things. But, like, by the same token, that's what people remember about those games. That's what people kind of loved about them. I do think there is a place for balancing when it's too easy to become overpowered. Like, going back to Expedition 33, there is one move that one character had that could do, with basically no effort, do four billion damage. The Superboss with the most health had 30 million.

So it was like, that might be a little. Excessive. Yes, yes. 30 million health. Oh, that's awesome. I should start putting... I started with very low health numbers in this game, which they'll probably stay there.

Because it was coming from a sort of a board game background where, you know, five health on a monster is quite a lot. Right, yeah. I think like D&D, right? Yeah. Like, if you see it like 30 health, like that's a real big deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a fair bit.

And particularly looking at things like I was playing a lot of sort of these games Eldridge Horror and, um, Harkham Horror, and you've only got like six hit points, or four hit points. So a monster with eight hit points is huge. But yeah, you've reminded me of this game Wild Arms, Wild Arms, which was a PlayStation 2, JRP, cell-shaded kind of sci-fi western. And it is a great game. I recommend it to anyone to play it, but there's spoilers.

You can break it. There's these sort of items that you get that you can equip to any character, and whoever you equip it to kind of has a different set of skills. They're like charms or something like that. I figure what they actually are. And there's one of the characters has like a shotgun or a sniper rifle or something that has like two shots. And if you give him, I think it's the Lucky Sevens card or whatever it is,

you equip that on him. then he will fire his two shots and if you attack again he will whack them with the butt of his rifle for like 9-999 damage which is like as high as the numbers go and that finding that out yes kind of breaks the whole rest of the game because it just all becomes about hitting stuff with clive's gun waiting for to get those two shots off and then hit them with the butt of the gun so yes i do i get that Yeah, I do think there is something nice, like, it's really cool to break the damage cap in those, like, early RPGs. Like, right now I'm playing through the original Final Fantasy 7. Yep. No any damage cap yet.

I'm still doing only like 3,000 damage. Um, but I like, it's like FF10, right? I have finished FF10. When you get the ability to break damage cap, that's so cool. The problem that Exhibition 33 has, though, is you break the damage cap so early. in the game. Like, when you're in Act, once you finish Act

2, and then you still got like another 15, 20 hours of story left. And then there's still the end game stuff. So, because there's so many things that scale damage on top of it, you kind of, like, you can play those older RPGs

and sort of keep your damage low, but because the damage cap is there, there's sort of this expectation you're going to do more and more and more damage. And it creates a really hard situation to make those bosses feel fun because either you have a situation where you're doing so little damage that it takes forever to do a fight or you do so much damage you skip one of

the earlier bosses and then you go back to it now it dies in one hit yeah yeah yeah that's right I know that feeling yeah well I can't think there's something on the edge of my brain now game that I played that was kind of like that I remember struggling through the the start of it and then by midgame though you were just kind of whacking everything in the rest of the game was kind of really dull because you just hit everything and wiped it all out that is one of the the things I like about this um the roguish elements there is that is is that reset right so if you have a yeah if you get you you might get to that point where everything's melting.

Great. And then you finish that mission and you sort of back to not exactly square one, but yeah, it's all kind of back to normal and you've got to reach that, again, reach that state and hopefully in a different way or for a different mission, it might involve with different, you know, circumstances. So when you do finish a mission, what do you, like what do you get from that? Like what sort of permanent upgrades or. locks or how does that sort of go?

Yeah, so because of the plague in the world, you can't bring equipment back to keep using. So that gets sort of automatically sold off for you and you'll get some rewards for that. But we do have these kind of sort of we have a bunch of rewards. So there are these tokens that you can trade for stuff and we'll see what happens with them. um there is the the monetary value that you get that you can use to like uh ideally eventually when i get around there kind of buy things for your apartment where you live and and do that uh and for your characters so as you go through you start with like a bunch of classes and you will unlock more classes um through the missions and then you can you can sort of level those

classes up so if you imagine that each each time you do a mission your crew are getting uh printed out from a template. But you can improve that template. So even though it's going to start at like level one each time, you can modify it to start with a new set of skills, different abilities. And then they have these passives now. So if you'll say,

now these weren't in. I've just, these have gone in since AVCon. The idea was there. It was just a time constraint of having it functioning. So these are kind of, items that you can, uh, equip to a, a crew member or put on, put on one of your template crews. Uh, and they will do kind of like small, some of them or a lot of them

will be a small bonus like HP 10% more, um, start with a, uh, you know, one or two points higher strength value. Right. So like minus that boss. Yeah, yeah, minus tap buffs. And then other ones are more kind of um we want to have more like play style changing ones that will actually turn so they will tie into like if you've got a a tank class then you there might be something like so there there is a tank class and they have a move that attracts damage to themselves and you can combine that with another move that resists damage to to become you know pretty tanky and pull attention away from your teammates or from the other the other proxies

and take a lot of damage for them which is great but then also you get like passives that will deal like retaliation or thorn damage spike damage so once you start stacking those on now they are essentially

becoming an attacking class simply by drawing melee attention onto themselves and then you want to look for synergy so you want to look for things that will passives that will say like when an adjacent ally is struck that this might happen or you know get life back when doing this XYZ so yeah the aim is to have those start to change the classes from sort of their base roles into more specialized yeah different

different roles. So yeah, you get those. And then you can, yeah, you'll get better and worse ones of theirs. The idea is like each, each they, uh, everything is kind of a card. So these, these have suits. They all have diamonds cups kind of suits on them. Uh, and each class can, has a limited number of slots that have each slot matches a suit.

So you're kind of limited in how you can equip those to your classes. But then, so one of the things as you level up a class is like unlocking more passive slots and, and that kind of thing, unlocking more ways to modify your starting conditions. So that's essentially what you're doing is you're choosing a mission, going in, starting from scratch. There are different kinds of goals for missions, but the basic one is go here and resolve this encounter through combat or through skill chess checks. And so you choose a route to go through the map to get there. find that when you get there that this particular enemy does a lot of melee damage does a lot of like randomized melee damage to different characters in your party and you're struggling to deal with it because there's a lot of

HP going to squishy characters and they're dying so you might then you know lose that mission you still get a little bit of reward you still might gain another passive or something that you get to keep and then go okay I'm going to do that again, but this time I'm going to like, uh, put spike damage on my tank. I'm going to go through the mission. I'm going to hit up places and try and get cards. So, um, you might know if I go to this particular location, I'm likely to find, uh, taunt abilities there.

So I want to go here and I want to pick up a bunch more taunt abilities on my way to the boss and then when I get there, I'll sort of have my spikes going and I'll use taunt and the boss will do their multi-hit aoe and that's all going to then get redirected to the person who is who is shielded and he's doing retaliation style damage so that's that can then become you know a strategy to beat that boss and you might find other strategies on the way you might find that you can actually um so another viable strategy might be actually to go to one of these communication towers hack the tower steal trade information or something like that and then just bribe them when you get to the boss say hey instead of

beating these people up and taking this stuff go beat these people up and take their stuff i was going to ask you you've talked a lot about combat and you've mentioned the skill checks and the skill checks are cool but like is because you the fact that you have the skill checks there and there are possible alternate routes is it viable to sort of avoid combat as much as you can and focus on non, I guess, I guess non-conflict routes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not possible to entirely avoid it at the moment,

just because you have random encounters and I don't really have a... I mean, you could retreat from them, I suppose. But it does depend more so on the mission, yeah, itself. Ideally, I would like to have some missions that are pretty much just non-combat, if not entirely. I always wanted to do something like that. And we will, yeah, we'll see how I go with those. But at the moment, there is always sort of combat in some respect.

The game started as a combat engine. And so I think that that kind of influenced that fairly hard. um yeah it is interesting i it is because i went back to my old design recently and i was just thinking about the things that i'd had to change and i had to cut out to get where i wanted to be and uh basically i in all that i kind of put that together and went oh there's a whole separate game there i could make a little game that had no combat and just worked sort of this way and probably was a lot shorter and a lot easier to finish but that's fine we'll see I've spent a lot of time so it is um for if people are interested it is like a custom terminal sort of emulator

that I've written for this game I'm sure people in my order is going to be very interested about this yeah so um using uh monogame I have this um this sort of asky engine that that I've spent all this time making and it's backed by it's a bit of a Frankenstein. So it's this ASCII engine front end. And then the back end is essentially a board game or a card game. And everything is kind of made out of these customizable cards, which is sort of a fancy if you're a programmer. It's a very fancy way of doing component level programming where anything in the game can have a variety of components on it and be. So if something is a card, the important things about cards, I was really inspired by Magic the Gathering here in the way that they, Magic the Gathering is basically a card game where the rules are printed on the cards. Right.

Right. And I thought that was great. What a great idea. Each card has its rules on it. And so that's how Grist works. Everything in the game is a card and it can have any number of these rules on it. And the rules could pertain to. how to draw this card in during a mission if it needs to be drawn during a mission they

could say does this card have hit points or not um there could be a rule for at the end of around do something um and so on and a card can have any number of these things on it so it's a fairly flexible system which is great and i spent a lot of time working on it so now i figure i need to probably make at least three games that use it to justify the time investment in doing it this way. Yeah, the first thing that I saw, I'm sure the first thing most people will see when they, when they see the game is the art style, right? Like the way the game looks is very, like, you know, there's like a look for indie games,

right? Like when you're a small team, there's like certain things you can and can't do. but, like, you don't really see ASCII games that, like, new ASCII games that often. It's, it is very rare to see. Yeah, not a lot. And there's something that it is, when you do see ASCII games, a lot of the time, there are actually a couple, there's one out there, but a lot of time what you see is essentially kind of like a symbolic or non-representational art.

So it will be basically a roguelike. The character will be at. We know that at means you. Right. And if there's some cobalds, they might be represented by the letter K for cobald and O for an ork and so on. Whereas with Grist, what I'm doing is using the graphics to do Asky Art and to do animated Asky Art.

And there are some. There is like the Stone Story RPG is very good. uh that does that um that's actually a great resource the developer of that has a youtube video where he walks through how he creates his art so if you're ever interested oh wow um and he does it all in notepad it's it's i have i have had to build myself a tool and everything but he's just put it doing it all in notepad so that's that's that's much more advanced but it is funny and yeah you have to think in this you start to think in this how do i make something out of these symbols and um it is interesting at first i was very

sort of strict about you know using lines and dots and shapes and they had to be sort of a lot cleaner and as i've gone along i've become more happily to do kind of uh shapes that imply the appearance of something more so than directly represented uh in what way uh you know like um uh using like a little comma somewhere to to to to to to to hint to at a ponytail or... Ah, okay. Yeah, or something, yeah, things that become more of a hint at something than trying to do sort of just, you know, a straight line is an arm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is fine. But then sometimes, yeah, just a shape that will let your brain go, oh, there should be an arm between those. So I'm going to see one there, even though it's not exactly there. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That kind of stuff. Yeah, it is really good.

It's been really funny. Because I took the game to a Pax not long after I'd been working on it. I'd only been working on it about six months or something like that. How long has the game been in progress for at this point? Too long now. What year are we, 2025? So about three years. Okay, okay.

The plan was a game that could be done in 12 to 18 months. So we're now at double that. But I am very happy. And if you look at my initial design notes, it says, don't do a map. Don't have a map because that'll take too long. And of course, I was like, oh, yeah, it needs a map. Yeah. So that's what I blame.

But yeah, I just, I had, was kind of wallowing around on some other stuff. And I had this, this project that was a bit stuck. And it had kind of gone into limbo with COVID that I had been working. working on it with an artist and suddenly we were both living in other country, different countries and I was, you know, having to sort of be school teacher to my kids and all this kind of stuff. And it was, it was very much in limbo. And I wanted to kind of, you know, get my thoughts together and sit down and say, all right, what's something that I can by myself make and finish and have a good chance at finishing, you know, the other thing it's not out yet so i don't want to get too ahead of myself but um yeah that's right so i wrote this yeah this specification for this and um was pottering away on it sort of doing from time to time doing a little bit of work from it or on it and uh then i'd done a couple of packs in the past and um

The guy who was there at the time, I'm not sure that he's still there now, but he called me and said, are you going to show something this year? And I had said no, so of course I said yes, I will, and then hung up and was like, what am I going to show? What am I going to show? So I was like, all right, I've been working on this thing about three months and Pax is in another three months. So it became a very kind of stressful and expensive acceptance testing project that I did. Are people actually going to come and play the ASCII game if I take it somewhere? And it turns out, yeah, actually people do. And all kinds of people.

Young people, old people, people of every kind. really a nice crowd of people. I was like, this game gets a really nice audience, which is always good. But it was amazing. It was, that was really amazing because I would have, like, I would get people come past and we'd get like, like, a kid would go, dad, look at this weird game. And his dad would go, oh, oh, that just reminds me of like my first job. You know, writing databases in, uh, D-base 4 or something.

something in 1988 and um which is what i my first job was yeah fox pro 1996 it was so a bit later than that but it was it was those you know there's asky based sort of terminal systems for um stock ordering it's up anyway people had yes see it and they'd come over and then um they'd be intrigued because they were nostalgic for that kind of style and their kids had been intrigued because they'd never they'd never seen much that looked like this And then they'd sit down, the kids would sit down and play it for, you know, half an hour or something and have a great time and off they go and everyone was happy. You know, that was really inspiring. That was a great moment.

That's when I knew that it kind of, it worked, you know, obviously there were problems to solve and things to sort out and it really badly needed some tutorial components because I was going horse explaining how to play it to everyone. But fundamentally, the flow of sort of combat and events, that that main gameplay bit worked and people liked the graphics and they liked the music. So from there, that was kind of like, that was the green light to that, okay, well, let's go. Let's, let's go. Let's make a steam page and get going. Is the music done by you as well? Yes. yes so um yeah it's the music is a bit inauthentic uh i like to say that it's it's not

the music of the game so much as it is what you're listening to on a cassette deck while you're playing the game right um occasionally i think of like i would love to have a a little like a kind of a sit emulator or something like that running as part of the game um but i don't have time to essentially make that right now. So that's kind of a future project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love to do something like that. So I am a musician myself and I have a sort of a previous history in electronic music.

I don't, I have the green screen behind me because I'm in a studio right now that is just a huge mess. But that's, yeah, that's something that I do. And I still do. I was at on the weekend playing. a gig somewhere for that. And I'd love to have kind of essentially a

you know what a modular synthesizer is? The name's ringing a bell. It's the one with all the patch points and all the leads. You'll see people nerding out over them. They're the big ones with the thousands of leads. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And in the last 10 years or so,

they've kind of had a renaissance. and it's become it is funny so yeah a lot of these synthesizers now will have modern modules and there'll be ones that are sort of analog electronic components built in the old the old fashioned way as as it were and then there'll be modules so the idea is you can just sort of buy a new module and pop it in to your system and plug it in and it will use the same standard power and audio and control signals specs to communicate with your other modules so that you can take say this one makes a sound this one filters a sound this one delays a sound and this one does sort of oscillating control values and you can rewire those using the front

panel patch points in any configuration how you like them and a new development now is that little boards like 80 megboards, tintsy, that kind of stuff, they're very cheap. And you can, and there are often audio headers or audio shields for these, that it's become very easy to essentially make your own digital modules now out of basically off-the-shelf components, out of Arduino and that kind of stuff with, you know, 3D printed controls and all these kinds of things, which is very cool. So you see, you have these great big analog synthesizers, and there might be like six instances of Linux running in there somewhere behind the scenes, you know, that I don't

really even know about you, turn along. There are quite a lot of things. I've got a keyboard around here somewhere that is a big sort of professional looking synthesizer keyboard. And when people got them and they started opening them up, they discovered there are raspberry pies inside them. And, uh, right. Some people were really quite upset about that

But it's kind of like I didn't really bother me You're not paying for the chip in there You're paying for the software And the sounds and the controls And all that kind of stuff Honestly to me Knowing that's there is kind of cool

Just because that gives you a lot of freedom And just like Messing with it if you really wanted to Yeah yeah It is interesting It is Yes And there is like

even stuff I have a drum machine where is this hang on a second good so so I have like this thing which is a synthstrom deluge which is designed in New Zealand and it's a a synthesizer slash whatever we we got on here slash drum machine that we'll do all sorts of noises and it has so it is a custom design I can't remember the chip it's running on but it now has a hugely dedicated custom firmware team which is just amazing this sort of you know They, the people who made this, uh, essentially open source the software that it runs on. Oh.

Uh, so there is like an official firmware that you'll get when you buy, if you buy one, it has the stock official firmware on it. And that's kind of guaranteed to not break anything, basically. Um, and then there is at least one, if not more, uh, community, um, firmware is derived from that, uh, which is great. It's amazing. What a great model to do, you know. Mm-hmm.

So if you think, like, the other day, I was having a rehearsal with someone with this, and then I was like, oh, I just wish it went, if I held Shift and did that, it would do this really useful thing. And then, you know, and they were like, well, you should go add it to the custom firmware. Probably should, shouldn't I? So that's really cool. I mean, yeah, small Linux devices, the ubiquity of them and it has been really great for the music industry for DIY music hobbyists and professionals alike, which is very cool.

I didn't really look into that area. I know a lot of people are doing some really cool stuff with like smart home devices and things like that. I had no idea about the music stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So I did, I've only done a little bit myself, but I did a computer science degree at some point. I was mostly self-taught and had worked in the industry. And then when I was, you know, older in my 30s, I was like, oh, I might just go get a piece of paper, all right? So I signed up to RMIT to, you know, I convinced them that I didn't need an undergraduate.

I said, I've worked and done this stuff already. And that was fine. So they let me into the master's program, more full to them. And then one of the subjects, I had a subject on operating systems. And so our project for that was, we had to do something with the Raspberry Pi. We had to do something with it and modify the OS in some way, ideally, and, you know, do a presentation on it. So, yeah, we built a drum machine or a sampling synthesizer. Um, which at the time, now there's, now there's heaps of them.

But at the time, there wasn't, um, a lot of those. I don't have the prototype anymore. I gave it to a friend, but, uh, it was, yeah, really, uh, it was built out of a Raspberry Pi and, and the, like a rear view camera that I got screen, just the screen that you could buy off eBay, there were these like self-install kits for camera for your car. Right, right. And it was kind of a cheap screen that had a HDMI input or something like that,

or had a couple of different inputs. It might have even just been AV. And then I just kind of had like a busted up keyboard that I used for input into it. But that worked. I can already imagine what this thing looked like. It was all mounted in a cardboard box. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, so good time. good times um doing that but lots of fun and yeah i i learned a lot about that was a good project just to learn a lot about linux to do as as a lot of it you know became what can i turn off what can i get what functions of linux can i disable um to get as you know as a steady kind of clock rate as as possible so that i've got reliable audio output over so many channels um without stuttering or whatever like that without some process suddenly 10 minutes in going, hey, I need all of your CPU for a second. Yeah, I've got I've got fun problems like that right now.

That's, uh, yeah, um, every source and I have these audio output's fine. I don't care about output. Audio input problems are the part where I'm concerned with. And there are there issues right now where CPU, spikes will cause stutters. And this is a known problem. It's been known for a while. And the devs are not entirely sure how to consistently address it.

Yep. Yeah, that stuff can be a problem. Especially like, I mean, older computers, older designs, or you have very predictable CPU scheduling, but modern computers, no, and it's out of your hands a lot of the time as an application to have anything to do with that. So, but then, yeah, when you're doing audio, you have some of the hardest real time limits that you can possibly have. You're like, this buffer needs to be filled and it needs to be filled within, you know, a very, very short amount of time. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Unless you, unless you want huge latency. So there are interesting problems, but, um, I mean, the raspberry pies now, uh, this was like a first or second generation one. And so I think now they're quite a bit more advanced. But people who do all this stuff on tainties and stuff now, which is very cool, very, very, very cool. I haven't really done any for a bit. What I want to do, this is long roundabout story is what I would like to do eventually one day is kind of have my own sort of drum machines and stuff running as software in the back of the game. So I can build a patch.

Because what I tend to do now is I tend to design a sound on a keyboard or something. and then I record it and loop it up and arrange it and stuff. But I'd like to not have to do that and have sort of the sound design purely sort of being done inside the game already and then it can just be fully reactive to the game. Right. Okay. Which is, yeah.

But in a way, this is how, like, say, a Commodore 64 worked, right? A Commodore 64 literally had a synthesizer designed by a guy who designed full professional musical synthesizers on a chip, on a chip inside the computer. And now people still, they collect those chips. You can go on Alibaba and buy yourself a handful of fake knockoffs of those chips

because there is value to somebody in producing fakes and selling them. And that's cool. And so the game, there is no latency. The game is just literally saying to the synthesizer, quick play this sound. The player fired their gun and it needs to go bloop. So you need to sort of make this sound. And I think that's great. That's super reactive. For a long time we moved as audio fidelity got higher, we moved away from that reactive, that ability to be reactive.

So even with the, say, mid-90s, LucasArts kind of games where they, they had this system called iMusic, that was a sort of reactive music system. I have no idea how it worked, but sort of pirates of the Monkey Island and that kind of stuff used these systems, iMuse. Anyway, so they were using MIDI, they were sending note data. So the information that they kept stored their music saying, play this note on this instrument for this length of time.

And that's how, so then in the code, you could vary that. You could say longer or shorter times, whatever, be very quite reactive still, even though once the sound was playing, that was kind of it. You couldn't do anything about it. And from there, we went to CD audio, which suddenly everything was amazingly huge fidelity. It was just a band playing. Amazing. But it was also static.

It was also just a fixed piece of music that was unchanging. And now we've come back. So we have these applications, we have FMod and Rwis and these audio APIs that people use for making games, which are very advanced and very, very cool. And they will support things like having multiple layers of audio and blending between them based on events being sent by the game. And games triggering loops. So they are very cool and very advanced. And I essentially just want to make my own one of those that is not as enterprise.

but more of a kind of an indie level thing that works how I want it to work, that works, kind of approach it more from a, sort of a modular synthesizer paradigm. So these ones are very much come from like an arranger paradigm. They're still kind of made with the idea of kind of writing a score using a sort of a left to right time timeline. And I just want to do something different. I want to approach it with a different, get rid of that timeline or, you know, say if I want a different timeline, I can drop a different thing in.

I can use a grid-based system. I can use a sort of a procedural, nonlinear mathematical function to say what notes to play instead, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's my goal. One day, one day we'll see. That does sound really cool, though. I can see why you're excited about it. Yeah.

Yes, I think I think it would be good. A lot of time is just I make a noise, I make a sound that evolves. And on my keyboard, it can evolve forever and sort of stay unique and interesting forever. But to get that sound into a game, I have to capture a slice of it and then kind of try and make invisible loop points and stuff. And even like, I'm getting better at doing now shorter slices that are still interesting. They're sort of, they're turning into the. those, um, you know, 10 hour music for work study and tool kind of things sometimes where it becomes like, yeah, how can I make a short piece of music that you can just listen to forever

without getting bored of it, uh, which is an interesting challenge in itself, but also I'd like to just to be able to do these evolving sounds and just have them continually, um, doing their thing as it were the whole time in the background, which, you know, we've got lots of, lots of CPU cause these days we can surely free one up for that so just just over on the same page and everyone listening and the idea is rather than wanting to just capture a sound to play in the game you want to basically have a digital synthesizer so you can create those sounds within the game and then adapt them as the game needs yeah that's right so modify them on the fly in response the game can just yeah immediately send events to the synthesizer and it can make things brighter or

darker or more intense or less intense and um and so on and uh we can we can still kind of do that there are ways to kind of do that now i just like my way right that i want to do it but again the whole um i didn't want to map in the game the scope creep issue yeah yeah that's right but i'm being pretty firm about this one because uh i know that this is that would be a lot of work. So yes, I have to release the game. But I'm really happy. I'm actually at a really happy point. So the whole map, the scope issue there is, um, and that flow is, uh, like we're still working a bit on, on some of the reward functions so that when you, you do finish a map, you feel like, yeah, I've got some really

great stuff out of that. Um, so that's where the passive abilities tie in and stuff. But, uh, yeah, I'm really happy. So I was doing like Paxes and I took the game to a GDC last year. So I had it in San Francisco at a couple of events, which was really nice. But doing events and demos and things, it was kind of like taking me away from actually fixing the things that needed to be fixed. Yeah. It was meant there was a lot of. short time sort of you know surface fixes good enough for a demo kind of stuff but to actually

get into the guts of it and really do some work i was right finding myself yeah sort of short on time for that so i was like all right no more no more of those um there was a demo on the shop which i had have pulled down um because i was just making such big changes that i was like it's not going to be representative anymore of the game. Now that will be back up. What are we now? July. Yes. Probably in August.

Okay. Okay. That's my plan. Very possible. I've got a bit of a backlog. So maybe by the time this comes out, maybe a bit after that. This should be out sometime like mid-late August. Okay. Oh, fantastic. Well, that's all right. That gives me a... If not...

I'll see. I'll see, you'll have to put a little disclaimer or a little thing. If it is up, I'll let you know. Yeah, because I've been kind of in the weeds. The phrase I think of is either, do you read Douglas Adams at all? I'm aware of the name. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and show my age. Sorry, yeah.

No, I can't. Yes, what did you want to say about it? That's all right. No, he just had this phrase, the long dark tea time of the soul. And I feel like that's what I've been in. in. I've been in a long dark tea time of sorting this map out and this kind of this game flow and just these bits. How do you get into a map? How do you get out of a map? What happens to your characters between a map? Do they persist? Do they level up or what? And then I just had basically

sat down with this list of questions and worked through all of those and worked through everything there. And now I'm at the other side. So I'm feeling really good. I'm kind of feeling really freed now. And so doing AV-Con, like I said, I'm not doing any more of these events, but somebody at Pax, the last time I was there, had come past and said, you all should come and do A-V-Con. And I was like, I will, no worries. Well, I'm happy you did, because now you're here. Yeah, that's right.

I am happy I did. And there was a long enough gap that I could actually do everything that I wanted between that and that. So by the time they came up with saying, hey, are you going to do it? I was like, actually, yes, I'm ready to do it now. So that was really good. I'm happy I did that. So, yeah, in a good place, in a happy place with it, with all those kinds of things and

about to get the demo back up. I don't want to put a date on full game release, but, yeah, it's not going to be another three years. It's not going to be another 12 months, hopefully. So we are going to go into early hours. access. So once I feel like there's enough content that I'm happy that anyone buying it into early access is not going to feel ripped off. That's that's when we go into it basically. But the systems are there. Pretty much it's just about all there. And now it is just

putting in that content. A couple of different mission types, couple of different environments. Yeah, so that so that you come along and you've got something to do. You can't you play it for than five minutes. So you talked a bit before about like cons taking quite a bit of time. What is the set up time kind of like for you? Like when you know you're going to go to something, like how long does it take you to get prepared for it? And then like sort of how much time does that really like eat out of your sort of year?

Yeah. It is interesting. Being just me, it can take a while. So it can vary. And I know there are times, so there are times where I've been like, okay, the game is in this state and say Pax is in three months time. So I've got three months to get it to a particular level. And then I'm making choices about what can I achieve in that time. A.V.Con was, for me, I was felt pretty.

Slightly unprepared this year. I didn't, I tried to give myself a lot of time, but I had, I agreed to do a lot of things. And they all happened to be in the same month, it turned out basically. So right before AVECon, I went on holiday. I went to Fiji for two weeks with my family. And I was like, I was like, oh, yeah, I'll do some work there, perhaps. I'm going to work in Fiji. How did that one go for you?

Well, a couple of days it rained and I did do a little bit of work and I'm glad that I did because I sat down on one day and I fixed this bug that had been bothering me for weeks and I was like, great, that bug's fixed, go back to bed. So there was a couple of long nights right before AVCon just because like I say, I'd been so deep in the weeds of all this stuff. I hadn't for a long time been approaching the game as a new player. and I'd just been sort of smashing myself in and out of it with all the debug tools and everything turned on. So it kind of became time to turn all that off and go back to a new player experience and find out what I'd actually broken doing all that

and what new features, what parts of the tutorial will now suddenly completely irrelevant and so on. So that happened. very quickly, but, you know, I mean, I'm sort of one of those people that will fill what time I've been given to some extent. So I do need to give myself deadlines for those kinds of things, which conventions can function as a good kind of deadline that's not a release deadline, but it's still like a

public thing that you've got to, you know, you've got to take it out. It's got to work in a particular way. It's getting easier for me now because the kind of the first mission, you know, and tutorial now has become a good demo example. Whereas in the past, it was more kind of like I was kind of making specific missions that would try and show off all the parts of the game in a short amount of time. But really, it's kind of like from doing those and interacting with people playing with those, I've been able to go and improve the experience overall and make a better first mission

that works well as a good introduction to the game. So, um, yeah, I mean, they definitely, they definitely take a lot of time, but yeah, you are in that position that if you are like a month out from a convention, there are just bits of the code that I would be like, do not touch. Right. Do not touch any of that stuff because if you break it, it could take, you could lose a whole week fixing it and you need that week for polishing, you need that week for polishing, you need that week for doing just doing things like making poster art and stuff like that and making sure

you've got a YouTube trailer or whatever and and posting on the socials and all those kinds of things so that if you've got a team and you've got someone to do that that's that's great I'm always envious of those people uh who come and they'll do like you know they'll be at the con for like two hours and then they're like I'm tired I'm going because there's somebody else who's going to replace me. Right, right, right, right. I was like, oh, bye. I'll still be here for three days.

Like, it's fun. I really enjoy it. But it's one of those things. I can't remember the exact, do you know, the, um, the, the, the different kinds of fun, the three different kinds of fun? I've definitely heard this phrase before, but I'm not remembering them. Uh, yeah, there's, uh, there's fun, which is enjoyable during and after. That's type one, standard fun.

Um, type two fun, which is challenging or even miserable in the moment, but appreciated in retrospect, and type three fun, which is not enjoyable at all. Um, and so cons can be a bit of the type two, a bit, there is, I would add my own one to that, which is the kind of fun that is fun in the moment and is fun afterwards, but is utterly terrifying in the immediately before. So when in the lead up, he's just like, why am I doing this? Like the whole, you know, stage riot sort of deal. Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah. I just like, you know, being exhausted and I'm so tired. Why did I say that I would do this? I'd have to do all these things to get myself there. And then eventually you get yourself there. And, you know, for 10 minutes, you're standing around thinking, oh, God, what do they get myself into? And then it's fun. Right.

Like, I'll hear from comedians who are doing, like, you know, a theatre show or, like, an arena show, right? Like, they're super nervous initially, but they know they love comedy. So as soon as they get on stage, it's amazing. But, like, that immediate beforehand, they, like, it's horrible. Yes, it is like that, yes. And it's just always the night before the con starts. I'm always like I'm up really late fixing something. I'm always like I'm never doing that again.

I'm never going to be up late fixing something again. I'm always up late fixing something or just rewriting dialogue or something. I think this time I added all this backstory stuff. I was like, I don't know if anyone even looked at it, but I was like, oh, I'll put in a little button. You can click and just kind of read entries at your own leisure. So that is, in fact, one of the other rewards is in the game is, is the law reward, where you just unlock kind of entries to read.

And I enjoy writing them. And I gather from Dark Souls and that kind of stuff is people enjoy reading them. They enjoy going through item descriptions and all that kind of stuff. So a lot of those that you can read about the world in there as you play. I think there can be some issue with games that sort of rely too heavily on that, where it's sort of unclear what's happening in the game unless you read everything. Like Darksele gets away with it because it, is, you know, so, like, the people who wrote Dark Souls, they are, like, really talented

writers, a lot of people think they are, like, you know, there's people that are, they think they're George R. Martin, right? Like, they think they're all these amazing writers, but, like, in reality, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Um, hopefully are not one of them. I don't think I'm an amazing writer, but I, uh, I just try. It's, you got to think a lot about all the time. And working with, not to get nerdy on you, but working with a monospaced font forces you to really think about how many characters are in a line, how long a line of text can be before somebody gets bored, and how big, a block of text can be before somebody's eyes go, and drift off.

because I do it too, you know, I'll be like, oh, that's too much text. It is easier to read, I think, you know, variable width times New Roman or something. So the monospace can be a bit tiring. But it's kind of a benefit because it makes you just keep everything as kind of short and sweet. And I think that that improves the writing. So even with the little text log, I've just got basic rules that are like, don't have a paragraph of text longer than the log. because I don't want them to sit there clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, all through the text.

So you do just keep it. You can have a couple of pages, but yeah, you're generally trying to keep it as short as possible. Like you don't want to feel like you're sort of this, doing this law dumping thing constantly. No, no, no, I don't want to do that. And there is law. And so it is, it is, I like to put it aside. So there's, there's two parts of the game, right? There's, there's out on a mission, um, putting my crew,

proxies through these trials and leveling them up and and killing the vandals and doing all that kind of stuff the sort of the strategy element where you're in the moment you're having fights you're dealing managing your resources and all that kind of stuff when you're not doing that you are uh in what i call an apartment simulator so you are the person in the world who's kind of behind the screen who's doing this and you can sort of interact with that world a bit. So you can actually, uh, leave your apartment and you can go to the 7-Eleven and you can like purchase items, um, a bit like monster hunter.

You can go and you can like, you can buy yourself an energy drink and a, a ramen from the vending machine, um, and then say the energy drink will give you like an extra turn in the next mission and so forth. So there are some benefits to going and doing this or if you, you know, go explore that world, you might unlock a new contact that has new and different kinds of jobs in the world for you. But the point was, but the point was, yeah, so one of the activities in that side of the world, that's like the downtime.

Because I like a game that has, like, a home base that I can downtime in. So one thing, like, I've never really, I played those, I know these are old now, the uncharted game. The first two of those. And sort of the problem that I have with that entire style of game, that entire style of game, sort of full stop, is that lack of downtime. Right. It's just kind of this constantly moving forwards, always moving forwards,

from scene to scene to scene to scene, like a movie. And, but I, for me, I like a game that, You know, if you're talking souls, I'm returning to the Nexus or the filing shrine or something like that where I've got a kind of a home base. I can go back to and chill out. It's a very different kind of game, but like racing games do this quite well as well where you have the race and then you'll go back to wherever the upgrade shop is, the paint shop, and go and customize the garage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. Yes. Yeah. And you do that. That is a bit so you're going back in this you're customizing your crew um i do want to have a bit of uh there's a

little music player in your apartment so you can cycle through the different sort of background music there um and yeah the plan is to like have yeah unlock music from the game so you can listen to it in there um and do different things i was going to do uh a couple of little games on on the PC there like Blackjack and um I should do that Star Trek one I should put that in there or something like that some of those old games yeah I do think that's cool like again I as much as these like are very scope creepy things they are really cool it's just a matter of like again do how long yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the project right yes yes well so like I mean blackjack a little card game or something would be very easy I think that'd be I'll do something

like that solitaire maybe that's a bit yeah yeah that's a bit much but uh yeah some of those little like things that you would have gotten uh if you bought a computer magazine in like 1986 and it would have had a listing in it like uh yeah type up type up your own blackjack game he's uh here's the program mm-hmm i love those things i just love them i had um these us born ones that when i was a kid that were like how to write your own role playing game for PC, you know, and they were a bit of a nightmare because they tried to write code that would work on like four different computers, like four different versions of basic, completely wildly different versions of basics.

So every now and then there would just be like this paragraph for that computer or this line needs to swap out, this line only for things triangle and this line only for things square and stuff and, uh, but they were great, they were great. They're very inspiring in those things. Even if I didn't copy the code, they were often full of. kind of really interesting design ideas and stuff, which is very cool. Kids these days,

they're in a bit of a mix somewhere. It's simultaneously, like, easier to make games and learn how to program than ever, but also there is a larger disconnect between using a device and programming. You know, so if you had a spectrum,

a 64, or something like that, you turned it on and you were in basic. You were just, that's where you were. You're immediately in basic and you could write like 10 print. I am the greatest 20 go to 10. And, um, and that's your first program. And you'd be like, hooray, it works. Yeah.

Um, if you're really fancy, you learn how to change the color to a random color for each line or the background or whatever and you'd make something sees you're inducing to show your friends, um, but now, yeah, Now these days it's like, well, you have to have a PC for a start, which a lot of kids maybe don't. And then you have to... Yeah, a lot of people only have like a phone or a tablet. Yeah.

And then you have to decide what am I going to do? Am I going to, what am I going to install? Am I going to download and install Python and learn how to use Python and get really good at Python? And then 12 months later, when I've written my game in Python, suddenly discover how hard it is to release a game that's been written in Python on... or am I going to download Godot or Unreal or something like that? And then what are licensing terms and conditions?

And how do I navigate that space? And how do I learn how to use it? And yeah, the funny thing I was thinking. Oh, gone. No, no, that's all right. That's all good. Sorry, I was going to say that I'm in like this weird sort of middle generation between. When I was like really young, like 10, 11, I didn't have an internet connection yet.

My family was like a farming background. They didn't know what the internet was, didn't care what it was. We didn't have a home computer until I was, I think we didn't have a home computer until I was 10, I want to say, something like that. And then it wasn't until I was in, like, early high school that smartphones became a common thing. Like, you know, the iPhone came down in 2007, but people didn't really have iPhones back then. They were very expensive. You weren't going to buy your kid an iPhone then. But by high school, like everybody had one.

So I sort of got to. see both of those as I was growing up. Yes. And I see my younger nephews where, you know, they started school and they had an iPad before they went to school, right? And it's

I'm happy that I got to see at least a little bit of what the world was like before every single thing was fully digital. But I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's even more the case for you where you see like such a massive shift where now like,

Like, you know, you can't really, it's sort of an expectation that you have a phone, you have a tablet, like, and all of this stuff is just done digitally. Yeah, yeah. It's, um, it's, it's, it's pretty interesting. So, uh, when I grew up, my dad was, he was kind of into electronics, I suppose, into sort of things. and he bought an Atari. So we had an Atari 2,600, and I must have been about six, I think, when we got that. And we had that for a couple of years, and then we had a Commodore 64. So I learnt to program at about 10 years old in Basic on the Commodore 64,

and I would write essentially text adventures that would say, you are in, you know, this place and, and what you want to do. Or like, I think I remember writing a guide to the planets that would like list all the planets and you could choose which one you wanted to learn about. And it would change the screen color to match the color of the planet and give you all this information. Um, and did that and so I had friends in high school, it was, it was a really funny time too because, uh, schools had not caught up.

Mm. Exactly. They'd had kind of like the first round of school. schools getting computers, um, some years prior, but they weren't really up to date with things worse. So at when I was in high school, me and my friends, we pretty much all had amegas. And the thing to do was like, not to endorse piracy, but the thing to do then was to go around to your mate's house with a big box of blank discs and copy all his games and then, you know, vice versa. Um, and we would like everyone was kind of mucking about learning to program or

learning to draw sprites. So you would. kind of like show, you know, this is what I've made, this is what I've done, or I've been doing some 3D graphics or something like that. And this is all kind of new stuff that you could do. It was amazing. You would get, you know, a copy of Lightwave for the Amiga or sculpt 4D or something and make boxy things spin around and be like, oh my God. And then we would go to school and our high school had BBC electrons, which were kind of slightly earlier than those Commodore 64s that we'd had.

So that were very old computers. And it was, yeah, really funny to have sort of most people with a computer at home at that time had a better computer than the school did. And we would go there and they would have like typing lessons on them and stuff like that. And I remember I did a computer. science course and as a project or computer science whatever they called it it was like year nine

and my project was uh funnily enough i did make a bunch of games in aski at that point in time too but um i think it's a theme without realizing i've just been doing it a long time but yeah as a project i made this like a you know not really a database but a um an address book an address book and I wanted to be able to sort and so I started implementing this like extremely naive bubble sort algorithm and and I got to the point where I didn't have enough memory for the code and the program to run at the same time and I was like oh something needs to give yeah that was really they had like 32k of RAM I think um and a year year later. No, not even a year later. That same year, the school, um, upgraded one room to

what was current at the time, which was like a 486 with four mega memory, I think was the current kind of standard. Yeah, it was an enormous upgrade. Um, and yeah, a bit of pascal. I think there, yeah, very far. They were very far behind. There was another high school and they sort amalgamated and we went off to the other high school and they all they had um uh what were they apple what was the model the mcintosh i think hmm is that what it was called L.C. which was sort of not the toaster Mac, but the next one on that had kind of color and that kind of stuff. So, but yeah, fun times, fun times. We used to crash the school computer network. Um, if you just tried to print something that was too big, that was

it. The cool thing with the BBC's was they were networked. There was a hidden folder of games that the teachers didn't tell you about, but it would be passed down by like law from student to student, hey, if you log in like this, you can get to like, um, space wars and frack and a bunch of these other things, uh, but the, they were networked and the network would occasionally crash and, uh, rebooting it was just, you would walk to the next room and you would turn it off and you would turn it back on. That was, that was it. So lots of fun, but yeah, it's interesting because some things obviously are way

better. That's why we, we, we have what we have, but yeah, other things are a bit, have been bit lost and that immediacy of of immediately being sort of connected to your computer is is very much gone like I think a lot of people now who use computers including who use desktop computers don't know where their files are that computers just put them in a place and they and they don't know where they are and they say I can't find it if it Especially if you're coming from a phone, because phones don't usually provide you, like, a proper file manager. It'll be like, oh, they're in pictures.

Where's pictures on the file system? Some, did the Discord just die again? God damn it. Okay, give me... Okay, one second. Why do I use Discord? Yeah. Okay.

It is a funny thing, Discord. I have, I had to turn off all notifications. Hmm. Because it just... so many notifications I think you join a few groups and suddenly it was it was I'm on doing constantly it was like oh my god um I'm on do not disturb all the time ah yes yes sorry what I was saying there before I cut off um what was it it was oh right phones phones usually only provide you a file system like a file manager so you only

even actually see the underlying file system anyway so no yeah like it's it's stored somewhere it's in the yeah yeah places in the video it's stored in like comd android dot user sandbox dot file store dot yeah something something something yeah um yeah um yeah which is it's it's funny so i don't know my kids have tablets um they've both got well ones it has a computer which he got at 9 and the other one is about to turn 9 and he's like I'm getting a computer when I turn 9 because I know that's why happens but they they he wants to basically

mod Minecraft okay that's his whole he wants Java edition so he can do mods it's his whole thing and that stuff is fun so yeah we he's the older one he's learned a bit of it stuff through there and he's been teaching himself like Blender. Oh, wow.

And then dropping his blender stuff into Godot and we make it move around and stuff. So that's quite exciting. That's really cool. Very cool. Which is, yeah, really, really good. Blender's a tough one. I was sort of laughing to myself about that before

because when you do go and look for a tutorial, how do we do this? You get like six tutorials and they're all video tutorials and you kind of have to watch them all just to see if you get a, about a minute through into one of them. And then you go, oh, wrong version. Wrong version of Blender.

That's in the completely different version from two years ago. Yeah. It can be a bit, Blender's very complex application. But at the same time, like, I don't have kids myself, but I've seen my younger nephews, how quickly they'll pick up something,

even if you don't give them exactly how it works. Yeah, yeah. He worked out some way to use some of the, some of the shapes in it to build what he wanted in these cool ways and I was like oh I never would have thought of doing it that way I would have been putting down points and trying to extrude stuff out and whatever and he was blobbing shapes together and doing something else I was like that's very cool I think because as a kid you're not like as worried about doing it wrong right like you don't have this no this preconceived

notion of what the correct way might be yeah there's definitely a bit of that it is it is interesting i mean i think we sometimes have a bit of a problem with tablets and that stuff in that they love rewarding you they love rewarding you for stuff straight away and you get an app and it beeps and bings and flashes in your face and it says you press the button you should feel really good and then when you go and press a button and you don't feel great immediately you might be like i should just go back to the app that made me feel good so but yeah no they are they are it is it is interesting Um, yeah, um, for me, you know, it would have, who knows?

I mean, our world was different that, that we grew up in. We didn't have that kind of stuff to worry about, but then at the same time, we're just wandering out all the time. That's, that's what we did. We just went see ya and walked off up the street and hung out with someone for the day. And our parents had no idea where we were. So I don't know how. I don't know if that was better exactly, but, uh, it was different.

Mm hmm. Mm. Mm. Going back to the. game for just a little bit um yeah since you're using like the opening mission as your demo are you this is a problem that a lot of games do end up having where they have a really polished start because a lot of people have play tested it but then sort of the experience doesn't hold up as the game goes on yeah yeah yeah that's definitely a problem um and what i have at the moment

because like i say i've been doing all this big restructuring kind of stuff um And that is, that is the most polished mission. That is like the one that that is right there. So I don't really have any specific answer on how to tackle that other than that's what I'm doing at the moment is, is making these secondary or the not secondary, but different mission types. So I would like to go into and in fact have offer as the demo. The idea, so that that's the con demo, right? That's the convention demo. and it's very different to an online demo because in a convention there are a lot of distractions

and you want someone like it is it's a it's a complex game like there's no getting around the fact that there's it's crunchy there's numbers there's stuff happening and multiple effects firing off all at once and um all this stuff going on and i'm trying to communicate as best i can all that to somebody who, you know, may just want to be left alone and do it in peace, because I know that, you know, so definitely a lot of work has gone into that. And a lot of that is, yeah, it comes out from watching people do this at multiple conventions, watching how people interact with the game, giving the same spiel. So the first thing I did with one packs was like, I just, um, it was basically three days

of teaching people how to play the game. And so by the time I was done, I was like perfectly prime. The first thing I did was I went home and I wrote the tutorial because I was like, this is what, it's all in my head now exactly what people need to know. And I still use, apart from the bits that I had to change because the game changed, I still use basically that tutorial to get people into the game, which is great. But for the demo that will go up on Steam,

um that will be different because it'll still be the same game it will still have that mission but there will be like further mission types sort of a little bit more variety because you've got more time you've got more time to kind of unwind and actually investigate the crew customization features and those kind of aspects when you're at home and you're playing with a cup of coffee and you know no distractions you're just chilling out Totally different experience. So I can then, I can have a demo that has space for you to explore those aspects there.

So, um, so that's good. That gives me somewhere where I can actually move beyond just that, that kind of upfront thing and have a deeper, it kind of experience in the demo there. But definitely like, that's what I'm working on now. So I had other missions and there are a multiple mission types and now I've kind of remapping them back into the new. format and so there are ones in there that are and I know that they're not as good they're not as fun to play as that one right but I'm just taking the lessons that I've learned getting

that happening now and propagating them back through the existing stuff so hopefully hopefully we don't end up with one good mission right and a bunch of bad things but um yeah we'll definitely see um it's going to be interesting so in terms of like the actual game and how long it is I'm yeah I'm still kind of bouncing around on that because I like an individual run first because that's something that you yeah and so an individual run is about half an hour okay I think I think 20 to 30 minutes which for me is a good time yeah I think I like that um what do I think of something like uh monster hunter monster hunter I think missions you kind of capped at 40 minutes if you haven't done it by 40 40 or 45 minutes it's game

over yeah but most of the time you're well under that you're well in about 15 to 20 minutes and that's a kind of a good time I like that I kind of like that with night rain too I like a game that I can play um for a long time in small chunks right so if I can go do a mission that's that's 20 30 minutes long um and achieve something and maybe do like two of those in a night. I have kids and everything. I don't have a lot of time anymore. So a couple of those in a night.

But still, you might, you know, if you do have time and you want to do six of those in a night, great. And you've got some in between stuff to fiddle around and do all that kind of thing. Right. When the runs get too long, it can also feel like if you have a bad run, you know, you're 40 minutes into an hour long run. It's like, I feel like I've been doing all this time. Yeah.

And sometimes you can see the ending. You can see that it's not going to pan out. very well. So, um, I have a, I do have kind of like an abort function. Um, if you need to just fail. And, uh, yeah, and the other thing is, yeah, it's to still give you some kind of little reward though to not make it entirely. If you do stick it out, even if you fail, there's still something there. And it can be worth it. Just like, see what the boss is and, and see, okay, I've never seen this kind of boss before um yeah it is a funny one because sometimes my testers will say oh i did this and it was hard and i i didn't get it on the first go and i'm like well

right you know i don't i don't want everyone to get it on the first go all the time perhaps but at the same time you don't want them to feel disappointed sure and feel like i'm going to give up because i didn't get on the first go so you want to kind of encourage them, hey, maybe you didn't get that on the first go, but you got really close. And you got something out of it. And yeah, and maybe you got something out of it that you can now apply to your characters to give you just that little bit of edge that you need to go back and get it on your second go.

Right, right, right. And then, yeah, obviously, that difficulty curve too is like something I want to think about a lot and trying to get that right, which is going to be, I think that's going to be, particularly in early access, that's going to be a bit of back and forth, getting that curve right so that the early missions are like that perhaps later ones as you're more experienced at the game i think there becomes also more of a willingness to die and try again you know like to invest more time because you know that you can achieve and you know that you enjoy playing so like um yeah and and you're trying to sort of reach for higher heights essentially once you're

doing that. I feel like there is a willingness, more of a willingness to fail. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Like once you're invested in it, then you, you know, you're invested in it, right? Like you want to, you want to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, you're like, hey, well, maybe you've, you've learned I might not get this boss in the first time. So I'm going to do kind of a run where I understand that. And I'm going to charge in. I'm going to scope everything out and check the place and grab what I can. But with the understanding that I'm probably not going to beat it this time, um, except by luck. So, yeah, we'll see.

I've got a lot of ideas for new kinds of missions. Like I was, um, like I was, um, like I was say, I want to have roaming things on the map and do sort of more sort of tracking, hunting kind of stuff, um, which I think would be interesting now, now that I can sort of play with how you move around the map a bit. Um, yeah. Yeah. look we'll see there are so many pitfalls there are so many ways it can go wrong and uh step one is just is get the game out yeah get the demo out or the new demo um

and get the game out into early access so that's basically step step one and then uh we'll see where we go from there but i'm keen i think i think it has potential and um for you know a good for me to invest some time working on it And, uh, yeah, hopefully people enjoy playing it. I mean, the plan is to have, yeah, lots of different ways to finish it as well. So hopefully you kind of like can go through different, achieve different sort of endings and things as, as you go through and, uh, unlock different, different paths or ways to tell the story. Um, yeah. Unless there's anything else you want to touch on, that's as good a point as ended to end off on.

Um, no, that's. probably it. I had a pile of books because I was like, I meant to talk about all the books that I read that were influencers. Oh, you can briefly touch with how if you want to? If you want, just because I was going to bring them to AVCon and then I ended up with not a lot of luggage space. Fair enough. And I didn't. But I've always wondered, what do I do for a display? I've had like a poster and all these kind of stuff. And then I realized, I just, a lot of my influences are books. So I should just bring piles of books. So I should just bring piles of books and puts them on the big.

So definitely, if you get a chance, read Ian Banks. Amazing Ian M Banks. The M means that he's writing science fiction. If there's no M, he's not writing. It's the same person, but not science fiction. And I was very influenced by his settings. And in fact, he wrote a book, not this one, but one called Matter, which does take place on a similar kind of world, a shell world, which is very exciting.

um you should always read old science fiction go to op shops i think the op shops have kind of had it it's getting hard to find this stuff now right but secondhand bookstores um rogers elasny very cool this one's it's like it's i don't think about how much this one influenced me a lot and then i look at it sometimes and i'm like oh of course um where they're like they keep trans every they keep transplanting their brains into new bodies and and and sort of leveling themselves up to become, they dress themselves up as the Indian pantheon and pretend to be gods, essentially.

We have classic Australian sci-fi space demons. Do you ever read this? No, I'm never been watching a sci-fying. So this is from my childhood. This is like the guy's mysterious uncle that lives in Japan, sends him a video game cartridge, and when he plays it, they all get sucked into the game. Okay, sure.

And it's amazing, and they have to shoot demons or whatever. It's very cool. What else did I bring? And I brought some tabletop RPGs. Hull Breach, mothership stuff, which is very cool. Very good sci-fi.

And often I just buy like, I buy tabletop like adventure modules and flick through them and you just be flicking through it and it will be like, oh, the players have like to meet some people and swap a suitcase or something. And I'm like, great idea. So suddenly I'm like,

I'm off writing new missions for this thing, which is very cool. and the latest one that I'm not playing either because I don't play any of these because I live out in the country I have no one to play with is death game which is like an arena battle kind of thing and it was kind of just kept looking at that got inspired to go put the arena into grist so there is an arena that you can go to and do battles for money and and different rewards which is kind of cool so that's that's all I have sitting on my desk at the moment that's what's there

but I usually keep a bunch of stuff around so I can look and things and think about stuff. Yeah, that's kind of it. Grist, the game is called Grist. It is science fiction ASCII RPG. I can put it behind myself. How do I do that? I go here. It's your text, that.

I do that. There we go. So it looks like this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't know, it's going to get squished by the codec, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be Discord codec and on top of YouTube codec and people say this. Yes, and yeah, screen down.

The funny thing for that, all the codex style, gosh, I could talk to you for an hour about the codec stuff alone, honestly. I did speak to someone at AVCon who did mention, I've got to get in touch with them because we started talking. talking about that and they they had great tips for like pixel art over I'm streaming okay awesome because they it doesn't like it but um yeah very interesting I had to come up with uh I've worked at different shaders work better or worse so I have like a scanline shader and that makes all this banding come out and yeah anyway great technical technical issues so that's the game there is a Linux native port version

of it and it runs on Steam Deck and Windows and eventually Mac once I get my hands on a Mac to compile. Yeah, publishing on a Mac is a bit more of a challenge because of... It's a pain, isn't it? You kind of need a Mac, yeah. Yeah, I don't have one. I haven't really thought about consoles yet. It would run on an Xbox and it would run on a switch.

I think the switch screen is too small, so... Right. For that, all that text and stuff. But it's all right on a Steam deck. I play it on Steam deck all the time. The problem with getting to consoles and that's a whole... Like, that's basically making a whole other game unto itself. Console porting is exactly easy.

No, no, and there's all the certification and then... Yeah, yeah. Get something out first, and then you can worry about that. Yes, yes. Lovely. Well, it's been a total pleasure to chat. If people want to go and wishlist the game, they can do so on Steam. They can do so on Steam.

It is called, yes, Grist. And you can come, there's a link there to, the Steam page will link to the Discord. Awesome. So if anyone, you can find out more info from the Steam forums, I will respond to post there or I'll reply to people on the Discord, et cetera. They're generally the places to go. Yeah, and demo up soon. hopefully yeah hopefully august so if it will be up by the time we'll chuck a link up or something

like that yeah um absolutely if it is already out i'll have the steam page linked in the description as well fantastic yeah go right to that if it's not there yet uh go wish lister and you'll get a notification what else come out of yes you will excellent uh nothing else you want to mention that's pretty much it that's pretty much it yeah okay that'll do i won't i won't keep you any longer i'll do my outro and then we can sign off great okay okay My main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there, six-ish days a week. Sometimes I also stream.

I have my gaming channel, Broody on Games. I stream on YouTube and Twitch. Right now, I'll be playing through split fiction, and I may have finished Kazan the First Berserker, in which case, I'll probably be playing Metal Gear Solid. I've never played Metal Gear Solid, so we're going to do that. And I don't know, maybe I'll play Grist on stream when the demo comes out. I honestly, I think it'd be really cool.

I think my viewers will really enjoy it. Fantastic. And if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform. Spotify, iTunes, whatever Apple, things called. There's an RSS feed as well if you want to grab that. Spotify is video, which is cool as well. And if you want to see the video version of this, not on Spotify, it is on YouTube at Tech Over T. I'll give you the final word.

How do you want to sign us off? What do you want to say? Oh. I never tell people who are doing this. It's great. That's all, folks. Okay, simple enough.