Tech Over Tea - Send The Gamers To Tasmania | Radiobush

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Today have Radiobush the developers of Light Haze World on the show, a puzzle exploration game that attempts to cover topics such as anxietyWishlist the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1747190/Lighthaze_World/==========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://radiobush.com/Twitter: https://x.com/RadiobushYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/radiobush==========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 are back for another one of the local indie game developer episodes. Today we have, are you the game director? What do you call yourself? I don't know what to call myself. So I'm the everything dude at Radio Bush. I just call me the everything dude.

That'll work. Sure, sure. I do a lot of design. I do a lot of coding. I do a lot of all the things, advertising, marketing, community things, everything. I don't make music. Right, okay. I'm not good at that.

Everything guy minus music. Yeah, but I'm very hands on with the music guy and I'm telling me exactly what I want. Right, right. Okay, okay. Maybe I'm a control freak. Just call me the control freak. That's fine. Sure, that works.

So, I guess the first place to start is what is the game? We can go from there and then expand outwards. The game is Lighthays World. It's a bit of a strange idea, but the idea is that the main character goes shopping, it's overwhelmed by the crowd, and then reimagines the mall to be Tasmania. The other big part of the game is it's only a puzzle game.

There's no combat in it. I love puzzle games, but so many puzzle games have just puzzle after puzzle after puzzle and they never have any story involved in them and I always thought why why not make a puzzle game that's got some story and something to do besides just puzzling so yeah a fair enough simple idea yeah sorry I don't know how long do you want me to tell you no no you can go on for as long as you want to um no I think that's a I think that's an interesting idea and the the first thing like when I first saw the gameplay I was like okay this is like a neat little

puzzle game. This is cool. I'm not big on puzzle games myself, but during that demo you had AvCon, there was the segment when you get to the mall for the first time. And I'm sure there are other bits later in the game that are like this, where you see like the world start to crack apart. You start to see the main character. Their name is, what would that be? Nim. Nim. You see Nim's world like break apart. And it was like this sudden change in vibe. And Honestly, for me, that was the thing that got my attention. Like, the puzzles are cool, but like that sudden change, that was really cool to me. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Like, one big thing that we wanted was puzzle. The other part was we didn't want puzzles that were, like, too hard. There's so many puzzle games I've started and I've never finished because they're way too hard. So the puzzles are kind of like the doing thing to relax your brain. And in a weird way, just doing these, they're not easy, but they're not, they're mediocre kind of puzzles. They give your brain some focusing and that helps your brain relax. And then the whole story is about anxiety and that. So it really does play to a lot of people that sometimes find the world a bit challenging.

And then they have these puzzles that they can sink their brain into for a little bit of time. And that takes the rest of the world away. So it kind of works in that way, I guess. You mentioned you don't want to make the puzzles too difficult. In the demo that was at Avcon, I don't know if that's a demo as in like a vertical slice or like a demo as in the start of the game. That was the actual start of the game. Okay, okay. Yes.

So I would assume the puzzles, like judging by just like the gameplay trailer loop you have on the website, it seems like the puzzles do get somewhat more complex. in the demo you had they were very, very easy to start it's like, oh, it's like basic block puzzles like you've got blocks arranged in a way match the pattern that you see on the thing above it there was the

wasn't the one we'd like connect wires or something Correct. Yeah, so what is the point I'm getting at here is like how difficult do you want to make them like how long would somebody who is first approaching that puzzle reasonably take on it

like do you want it to be something where someone legitimately could get stuck or do you want it to be something where it shouldn't be that much of a barrier to overcome well let's say like hardest puzzle in the game like that let's go with with that like the absolute pinnacle point of where you want to get to all the puzzles were designed with this idea of having a ah moment so in saying that the puzzles don't actually break they you know how you like to play a lot of these block pushing pushing puzzles and if you kick the boxes enough they'll actually get locked in and then you have to reset it and then you have to try and figure out what you did wrong and all that kind of stuff you can't lock in the boxes in this puzzle they they're forever kickable

so you can just keep kicking and kicking and then eventually you go ah that's what we're trying to do. And so it just probably takes people a little bit longer, but eventually if you just keep kicking stuff around, it'll sort itself out. That's the idea for those things. The other kinds of puzzles are memory-based puzzles. And so they're a little bit of memory.

So you can technically cheat if you want to, like I know I've played some games with memory-based puzzles and I'll take a screenshot or whatever. just so, because I can't remember stuff that well either. So that's a thing too, but it was all about the idea that people could do these puzzles and it's not like you had to be the smartest person, it's more of the engaging your brain to do something. So they never get to a point where I think people will get out.

What does happen in the game as you progress through the game? the puzzles change into different puzzles. So they're always, you're always trying to figure out what to do in the puzzles. And that's kind of the puzzle. Right. Instead of being stressed out, and they're getting way more overwhelming.

That's not really the case. Yeah, I do see like a laser dodging puzzle in the trailer you have. And there's one with like a, um, you got to memorize the path through like a bunch of spikes. So the idea isn't necessarily that you're going to make these core mechanics, more complicated, it's you're going to introduce different styles of puzzles, and that's

going to introduce the sort of, like, a bit of mental challenge there. Yes. Yeah, that's correct, because, I mean, I loved playing The Witness, and there's a few puzzle games that I've played Talos Principle, and I just get to a point in the game when I think, I'm not even enjoying this. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I get to a point in the game where I think I'm not even doing this now.

I'm just looking this stuff up because it's way too hard. And why was the front so satisfying? And then you almost get to this point in the puzzle game where you think maybe the puzzle is just too good for me. Maybe these game's too big for me. And I give the game credit and I think the game's amazing. but then I think I'm not all that clever where we've taken a bit more of an almost mobile game approach to the puzzles where it's it's about achieving getting through the game and enjoying being in that moment. Yeah. Like the Zelda, have you played like the new Zelda games?

And you look at the puzzles, especially in Tears of the Kingdom, you look at him and go, oh, I know what I've got to do. I've got to get that block over there. I've got to get that to there. But how do I do it? And that's the thing that I love about puzzles. Right. So you wanted to feel like there's some sort of intuitive way to approach it rather than being, I don't even know what I'm looking at right now.

Yeah. That's the way I think about it. You've got to, that's why, for example, you talked about the electrical puzzle that we did. and part of the reason that that is a puzzle is you've got two wires coming out now one wire goes one way one way one wire goes the other way so if you follow either of them wires they lead you to the next thing that you're supposed to do and then you know that those wires have to be connected you don't know why they have to be connected necessarily but you know that that's a thing and by designing the game in such a way that people look at it

go, oh, I know what I'm doing here, but I've got to figure out how to do it. Then you get these really fun moments. And you feel kind of satisfied doing the puzzles then. So, yeah. When you talked about the puzzles not being like failable, I think back to, I assume you've played like the GBA Pokemon games, like Pokemon Emerald, things like that. No, you have. No, you have.

No, have it. Okay. Okay. So in the I don't know if there's a thing they still do I don't know if it's still a mechanic But in those older games There were puzzles

And a lot of other games do this right Like look at any older older games There's like boulder puzzles Where it's like okay You have to move the boulders in a certain way To get through a path And there were ways that you could In many cases move them

Where you would push it against a wall And then you lose access to that side To be able to move it So you can't actually fix it from that position So you I did notice in the puzzles You have with those block puzzles there's always like ample space where you can access the blocks from any side of them

and that completely eliminates that problem then yeah there are some puzzles where I've designed them where you can't access them from one side but that's part of the puzzle but you can always access them from a different side to kind of move it a different way or you might move it back to where you brought it from but you're not you're not locking it in where it's a point where you go oh I can't do anything now you can't because I dislike that in a puzzle. There also is, okay, for the memory-based puzzles, the spike puzzle, for example, you can lose at that and have to do again.

Sure, sure. We had this mechanic where if you step on the spikes, you'll die, and then you'll just get respawn to the start of the puzzle. So it's kind of resetting it automatically for yourself. But when we first started off with that puzzle, we had it that you couldn't die because we wanted to make it more cozy, more friendly. And then all I did was jump across the spikes and I got to the end and I thought, well, what's the point of this? This is now it's not become a puzzle game.

Now it's become something else. So sometimes you have to have consequences in the game to make a mechanic enjoyable or intense or feel rewarding by having those things that will then take you down or change the way that you look at that puzzle. I do still think there's a place for a like amazing. like situation where you can't die, but it'll have to, my, the way I would approach that is it would need to be a bit more complex and you'd do something like an invisible maze, right? Where you would, there's a path to get through it and you're not really sure about the path, but maybe you include some sort of hints where people can get through it, but at the end of the day, you could still, you know, you can follow one wall and eventually you get to the end of a maze. That's just how

mazes work. Um, but I think there's definitely still a place for that, but for spikes, it seems like it makes like it makes a lot more sense right like if you walk under the spike something bad happens right like you that's just like an established sort of thing that happens within a game and you know in real life you step on a spike you're not going to be happy about it

yes that's correct and in one of this I think in multiple Zelda games they've had invisible mazes where you've had to go through a forest and then the same thing happens there if you take the wrong direction you respawn at the start of that maze

And you have to figure it out again. So having a consequence sometimes is important for a puzzle to have it, you know, you can't be just, oh, you just walk through and find your way out. That wouldn't be so fun. Yeah. I do agree that consequences definitely do provide value there. I think some games take the idea of a consequence like too far. You see this in a lot of games, especially a lot of like older JRPGs, right?

you know, you have long points between where you're allowed to save, so you die and then lose 30 minutes of progress, things like that, where it's a consequence, yes, but it's not a pleasant one. It, like, there is a lot of games out there where they, they have, it's sort of, it's less of a consequence for your actions and more of a punishment for not being perfect, where it doesn't feel as good when it happens. Obviously, it shouldn't feel good. great when you fail at something, but it should feel like a learning experience rather than you've just wasted a lot of time. Like with the spikes, right? Like if you die on the spikes because you accidentally stepped on a block that was in the wrong point or the spike in the wrong

point, that still helps you progress further because now you know, okay, don't step on that position. I know, like, I can, I now have that like memorized in my head that that's a dangerous point. It helps you memorize the path. Yeah, yeah, that's correct. that's true but also when it respawned you it spawned you near the button that will rise raise up the spikes so you can have another quick look and then you can oh yeah i got it to there oh that's what i did wrong okay i'll next time i'll go this way um i very much loved the idea of having people not get frustrated to the point where they want to quit the game i everyone nowadays i mean how many people watch Netflix and can't even watch the whole movie without watching their phone at the same time?

Sure. So if we're going to like punish people that hard, they're just going to quit our indie games straight up because that's what people do these days. So you've got to have some, some punishment, but it can't be so punishing that it's going to make you want to quit the game. Right, right. So yeah. Yeah. So it's a fine balancing line, I guess. So what is the general overarching gameplay loop?

What are you as the player attempting to do? What are you doing to progress and why are you trying to progress? Like where are you trying to get to? Well, you're trying to get to the end of the mall to get dog food for your beloved Chewy. So he plays a big role in the game as being. like your guide helping you go oh well i've got to get through this area he's like your strength and you're making you feel like you can do this and get over there kind of thing and so that's the the big loop is basically trying to follow chui through this big world to get to the end and

get your food and make everyone happy it's it's more of a i don't know it's it's kind of like a 2D platformer. The 2D playfellers are always about getting to the end. It's kind of in the same vein as that. It's just getting to the end, finding a way to get to the end so you can get dog food for the puppy. It's not the great, like, it's not the biggest of stories,

but that was designed in a way too. Like if you remember playing through the game, you would have seen a lot of the words fall down. and on purposely in the game we made all the thoughts really short so you would get like a sentence at a time because have you you obviously played a fair chunk of Pokemon how many times have you just spam the A button to get through all that writing text that they send at you and the weird part was when we started putting the words there that they fall down every time you get to them people would get to the words and they would read them quickly because I know they're going to

disappear. So they've got like this, this, oh, I better read what that says before I do anything else. And they start learning that that's a thing to how they learn the story. Right. But on the other hand, with little kids that don't necessarily want to read all that stuff, they can play to and go, oh, that says some stuff, whatever, I'll just keep running. I've got to get to the end, you know. So there's two levels of kind of gameplay there. depending on what audience is playing the game. Yeah, a lot of games do have a problem with law dumping, where they just throw walls and it's not even,

it's not trying to progress any character's story. It's not trying to move the plot forward. It's just, hey, you don't know what's happening right now. Blah, bra, bra, bra, blah, bra, just like throw everything at you. You'll work it out after 30 text boxes. And I think doing that more, doing it more through, sort of world design and very subtle interactions it's difficult to do well

but when it is done well it plays I think it works out considerably better oh I agree and we've kept all our cut scenes down to you know maximum of 30 seconds because I can't be bothered sitting through five minutes of cutscene especially at the start of the game nothing shits me

more than to go into a game that I don't even know if I want to play yet and you're going to give me five minutes of cut scenes and I'm like, let me play a little bit first to see if I actually care for this game before I get involved with your story. Right. You know, and yeah, so finding that balancing act has been a bit challenging too because there's so many games that are probably not giving a fair chance because they've just dumped me with so much information at the start that I feel overwhelmed. and don't want to go on anymore.

Welcome to the kingdom of you don't care yet. There are four nations fighting for leadership. You don't care about any of these people. Oh, someone just died. You don't care about them yet. Like, so many pieces of media that, again, it's the whole law dumping thing, where they tell you all of these things about these characters you don't care about yet. And then it's like, no wonder people don't really vibe with that, right?

If you're going to do I just think Yeah Sorry I just think they're trying to make you want to like this character You know like for example Some of these other games They build the story into the game After you start playing a little bit

And then all of a sudden you I want to know more about that character And then I go chasing the information Right That's the way The attitude that I've brought to it I don't want to force feed it to you, I want you to want to find that information.

So, yeah. So, sorry. No, no. It's all good. So good. I do think there is a place for that, like, long cutscene introduction. But if you're going to do it, you have to be very confident with it. You have to make it something that even though people don't know what's going on, they're going to be immediately hooked. And I think back to the opening cinematic for Final Fantasy 10, I don't know if you've played

Have you played that before? Not that one I think back to Horizon Zero Dawn the first cut scene Yeah that one there It was very I'm assuming it's on the same kind of vibe But those games

Yeah they did it well And they both Got me interested in the story They kind of They threw out breadcrumbs though They didn't dump it in your face They kind of like They threw out these breadcrums

And you got you thinking about the game before you even started playing the game and that's great but when you say oh you've got to like this character you got to like that's yeah that's not great like like in ff 10 there is this it basically the entire opening it's just playing death metal in the background you see a character with like a big cloak just slowly walk up as this giant ball of water is appearing the city just gets like blown up everything everyone is like freaking out like it's there's no dialogue during it it's just here is something really cool happening and even with no context of the game it's still a really cool sequence but then very

quickly after that you then get introduced to the characters you sort of start learning what's going on you're not really sure about the world but you're you're invested because of what you just saw and so many things want to like so many things want to do the Star Wars intro where it's, hey, let's have five minutes of strolling text. And the reason why that works in Star Wars is they were the first to do it. Anybody else who tries to approach it in the same way, what are you doing? Stop it. But if it's not there in Star Wars, there's something wrong. Yeah. No, I agree. And so that's where I think back to the original kind of question in all of this

the idea of the game the main game loop is to give people a break from their lives because everyone's so stressed in their lives but then also on top of that we wanted to have a story that was something you wanted to find not something that we jammed down your throat and said you're going to like this story damn it so yeah no i think that's a i think it's a great handler and it's sort of there is

there is sort of a even though it's not explicit a sort of how would i say it like a driving force that pushes you ahead you know like from the start it's established oh you're you're trying to collect these coins these tokens okay so i'm looking for that sign you eventually find I think the bridge is the first thing you find where it's blocked off. So you're like, okay, I need to go do the... Establish from the start, I need to do a puzzle to get these, I can unlock with the coins,

okay, I need to go find where the rest of these are in this area, and then I can progress forward. Like, it's a very basic way of handling it, but at the same time, it does what is necessary to drive that forward. Yeah, well, a big thing that I don't think enough indeed, games realize

and the reason that that is part of our game is indie games fit into the game ecosystem like this most people will play AAA games and then they might play an indie game on the side that's just how the game ecosystem at this point in time works so if I make a game

that is so complex that you can't go away and come back to it, what chances anyone got of playing my game? The idea is that I know that my game's not going to be probably the game. I mean, they're going to be some people that are just going to love it and whatever, but probably for the masses, they're going to play it on the side

after they finish playing Fortnite or Minecraft or whatever it is. And then they want to just be able to pick it up and drop it off as quickly. So when they get back to it, they're like, oh, hang on, I haven't joined that bit up. Let's go and do that and keep progressing. So that's why it's got a simplistic kind of way of approaching that game design. So people can find their way. If they potentially put the game down for a month, they can come back and go,

oh, that's what I remember. Now I just hook those things up and away we go. Right. So, yeah. Yeah, I do find there's a lot of games out there where it's, I take time off and I come back and I just kind of forget what the game is. I kind of forget what the objective is and where I'm sort of aiming to go.

Some games go a little bit too hard in trying to rectify that issue. I think of a lot of Ubisoft games where it's like, oh, let's put a thousand objective markers on the screen, here's your mission list everywhere. It's like you will never forget what you need to do because it constantly tells you every second of the day what you need to do.

But... Yes. I don't think that's the best way to handle I think you can be a bit more subtle in it and still sort of make it clear what you're trying to do and I think games like

I think it games like Hades where even if you put that game down it's very clear what the next objective is because there is one thing you can do you will go to the hub area and then you'll go do a run through like trying to go beat Hades and that is

the core get is a very simple loop you might forget control you might forget, you know, meta builds, things like that, but you never forget the thing you're aiming to do, and that is the one thing of go to this area. Yeah, and that's right. And that game's a great example, too, of,

I remember playing that game, and I'm like, oh, what is this? It's okay. And then I would come back to it a month later or two months later, and then I would get into, like, building kind of a bit of interest in the law, and it didn't force feed me all that straight away. It kind of gave me the opportunity to get that later on.

And I mean, that's what a pretty perfect indie kind of game is, you know, where you can come back and just, oh, yeah, I'm, not everyone is going to just go and play your game full time when they get an indie game. They're going to probably, they're going to have to have half interest in it. And then they'll play parts of it in between other. the games and then eventually you might win them over and they'll be a super fan or whatever. So you've got to take that into consideration somewhere along the way. So at this point, how long has the game been a work in progress for?

Four very long years. So it's been a long time and that's partly because I guess I didn't know what I was doing a little bit at the start and figuring it out has been a thing. I remember the first World One that I ever built was like 10 times bigger and then I just thought this is unachievable. One thing I soon learnt was we built this massive World One and then I had like things in similar places and to get from one thing to the next thing was just like this whole heap of

running through right nothing and it just felt so boring so now i've got like this theory that you have to have you have to look at the game as in screens so once i get once i look at once i look once i get from this part of the world i can see in the bottom corner or in the top corners something else that may interest me and then I'll go into that screen view where then if I stopped every time I moved out of screen I would find some new thing that would interest me and then move me to another area

and instead of having all this blank space between things that I would just navigating for no apparent reason I kind of hate that in game so I thought why am I doing this to people I want to keep making you I like the idea of exploring, but you've got to have a little bit of a snippet of where you're going to explore.

Like, oh, what's up there? Oh, that, there's something cool. Oh, I found this. Like, a lot of games, they have a really big world, and then they don't put anything in it. There's no, like, you know, a lot of games have a fast travel system, and you feel like you want to use it

because why am I running between these two points when there's not going to be anything of interest that happens? it's just five minutes of movement for five minutes of movement. Just to kill time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think that works, but you need to have an engaging movement system. Like, GTA4, its driving system is really floaty.

Cars are a mess to handle. You're going to crash into things. But because of that, there's like some, there's something of interest that happens when you're navigating between locations. If all you do is hold down. one button and you go forward, right? Like, that might be interesting the first time you go around the map, but what about the 10th time or the 20th time?

This is one of the things that Scarham does really well, right? Where you'll go between two towns and it's like, oh, there's a cave over there. Oh, there's a bandit there. Oh, there's a fox there. And there might be little things that aren't really that much value. But there's something happening in the world. It's not just tree, tree, tree, tree. Oh, it's a tree. yeah no that's 100% right and then having little whimsical things around the place for no reason

like i find that's kind of like why the hell is there a sandcastle on top of that rock in the middle of the lake like i don't know that there's there's no real reason for that but it it kind of it gives you some kind of weird thinking you know oh that's kind of funny you know seeing funny things in games is also a big thing. I think a lot of game developers forget that games are actually meant to be fun. They just, we're going to make these mechanics. Yeah. That's weird.

I don't do that ever. Yeah, I don't. I do streams quite often and they very rarely. Yeah. I'll work something out at some point. Anyway, it's all good. You were saying big worlds, world big for no reason, something along those lines. Yeah, and no, and then I, and then I tangent it into, I don't think enough game developers remember that games need to be fun.

Like, we have so many games that they've got really, really good mechanics in them and they're really technically spectacular or they're graphically amazing, but they're just not fun to play. like they're just missing that fun and that some you've got to find interesting things in the game you go you know that's what used to make i mean mario makes no sense at all as a game if you look at it objectively and said like what is good about marr it's just makes no sense but it's just fun because it's so weird you know a plumber doing coming out of pipes like fighting weird things you know it's just fun so yeah i think fun is something that we really look for i'm also obsessed with collecting things i when you played we played a lot of lego games before making this game and i just enjoyed collecting

coins for no apparent reason so i feel like that's something that i always wanted to add to a game and so yeah collecting and puzzling I should have said that at start probably yeah but you will get to it I think some you can definitely go too far with the whole collecting thing and a lot of games you know I think back to the whole

um Assassin's Creed games are I think a good example where they kind of feel like objective simulators where the goal is go from tower to tower to tower to tower there's not really there's no reason to go there besides oh you see more of the map and that like that that's that's the reason it's just oh there's space between them there is there's an objective marker there so go do the objective marker but it's not like an engaging

there's nothing engaging about doing that objective and then I think back to mascot platformers like the jack and aster series on the PS2 and especially the first game where getting each of the power cells, which is like the main collectible in the game, there's always some little challenge to get it. It's, oh, you have to chase down this bird. You have to enable the power to this, this generator. Oh, there's, uh, you have to collect these, like, these like little, uh, fireflies and then you get an, a power cell from that. Oh, you have to win this race. And there's always, there's always a thing that makes getting the collectible engaging rather than just, oh, here's a list of every collectible, go get every collectible.

Yeah, that's true. We put like a lot of, there's not tons and tons of coins. The coins are kind of more to, you know how some games nowadays have got like, a finding element that you can buy, get these games where there's like a still picture and then you find things. So we kind of place the coins in, some of them are in obvious spots to lead you. But then the other ones will be just in like a part where you can only just see the tiny bit of it spinning.

And it's just to make you stop and look at the environment for a second instead of kind of making you like run around too crazy. It's more just, hey, oh, I can see. that spinning thing there. I stopped for a second, you know, and getting that, like, almost like the finding Wally or Woldo, who, what, what do you even say different things, depending on where we live? Having that kind of vibe in the game as well, there's that kind of component, I guess. So, yeah.

Environment is super important, yeah. You've got to have that. And the Tasmanian thing, like, we probably haven't talked about that enough. We just briefly mentioned it and then we moved on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a Tasmanian thing in the game where you're actually invaging the world to be Tasmania. And it kind of comes from my own experience where I was having a little bit of a tough time in my life. And I moved to Tasmania.

And then I just found it to be this magical weird place. It was almost like a Wonderland. It's so surreal in so many different ways, if you've ever been there. I haven't yet. I need to at some point. It's just, and I thought, why hasn't anyone ever based a game off this environment? It's so incredible to like, some of the environments that I've been through down there are just out of this world kind of thing. like it feels like Jurassic Park meets

Animal Crossing kind of by like it goes from all extremes to other extremes so yeah I wanted to encompass that because when I would be stressed or something like that I would just take some of these hikes and I like let's put some nice scenery in between the puzzles and we could go hiking and well it's not a hike it's more

of a walk to enjoy the scenery and that was where the Tasmanian scenery came into the game was like oh that walk was so amazing let's add that in so yeah I think when you said talking about the screen

of the game in the context of screens yeah that's a really interesting thought that I hadn't like obviously you would have to think about it in the context of you know classic legend legend of Zelda where you actually are

interacting with screen, screen, screen. But once the games moved into 3D and you have a camera that seamlessly moves, or even just 2D games with a seamless camera, you don't really have to think about it in that context anymore, but there's definitely some value in there in always having something of interest within view and something that sort of draws your attention, even if it's not something that necessarily is gameplay reliant. It's not, oh, here's the next mechanic to interact with, But it's something that grabs your attention. And I like to think on games, like, I said a bit about open world games before, but I think the, you can still do an open world game, but I think you need to do like a smaller world.

And a great example of this is the, like, is the yakuza games, where you're in a very densely packed city, and every couple of steps, there's going to be a shop, there's going to be some, there's going to be an encounter you find, there's going to be something happening. that always feels like, you know, you're not too far away from the next interesting thing happening. And you can't just have interesting thing just lead into things constantly, because that does tend to get boring. There needs to be a bit of downtime there, but I do think too many games just have downtime for the sake of downtime. It's like, oh, we're still thinking in the context of an open world being exciting like it would have been when Morrowind came.

out where it's like, oh my god, how is this technically possible? How do you have a big world on a computer? But now there's so many games with massive worlds that a massive world by itself is not an engaging thing. Like the idea of an MMO by itself is not engaging because there are so many games out there. We've had World of Warcraft for 20 years now. Yeah, I agree that it took me a little bit to figure that out though because and it it was all about playing it and going okay so number one if i'm in a big world how do i know that you've got to go that way or that way or up or down or whichever way i mean the screen's only this big so how do i entice the player

to go that way unless i put like markers on and i put a map on and i'm like i don't really want to do markers and maps, it just adds a complexity level that isn't really necessary in this game. And then I thought, well, if I have, if you have like every time I stop, I look at the screen and go, hang on, over there, there's something. And all the somethings lead you to another something. Then all of a sudden, you've got something. That's how people will find all the parts. That was my way of kind of coming up with that idea. I mean, I'm sure it's not a new idea, but I guess it's something you don't really think about in a game design point of view. Yeah, I think going to games like Breath the Wild, going to games like Eldon Ring, I think

they do a good job with that, with not directly telling you where you need to go, but indicating it with the world, right? Like, you come out of somewhere and it's like, oh, there's a giant mountain there. I'm going to go towards that. Or Eldon Ring. Oh, I finished the tutorial. There is a giant glowing tree in the distance. I wonder what the giant glowing tree is and you start going towards that and it leads you down a path. You can just ignore and go somewhere else. But, or actually, Skyrim's another good example. Skyrim when you finish the tutorial, to your left, there is a river. And you would like, if you're in a, if you're in a forest, you're lost somewhere, you're always told, follow, follow the river, follow some landmark,

and it naturally guides you towards the first town, and from there you get your first quest, and then, you know, it expand, the world expands out from there. But if you don't want to do that, you don't have to, it's just there is a marker there that isn't necessarily the game telling you, you have to go here, but it's still something that most people are going to see and think, oh, that's something of note, that's something of interest. I'm going to head towards that direction. Yeah, and that's exactly right.

Like, I mean, we get so many people, or not so many, but we get some people, a small percentage, that will go and will go the completely wrong way and not the way that you expect them to go. And that's okay, but like, for example, in the, the game, of world one. We've made it so the natural progression of the puzzles, the easiest possible one is right there in front of you. And then the hardest one is actually the longest way around to get to. And so that's what, so probably 90% of the people will do that in the right order, in the order that I kind of intended them to do it. And then you get the other five or 10%

that won't do it in that order. But the beautiful part of the, The game is that if they don't do it in that particular order, then they can go and find that puzzle, that easy puzzle if they wanted to, to get them started with the process. Right, you don't have to do the puzzles in a specific order. Not in some areas. Some areas you'll have, it's linear,

and some areas it's more of an open world. At least in the opening area, it's not linear. Yeah, that's correct. The first. And so even putting in, so on the bridge, you would have noticed there's some boxes on the bridge that you have to kick to get. So that's the like the last line of defense, so to speak. And what I mean by this is that if you didn't figure out that you have to put the boxes in patterns to get the coins, when you get to the bridge, there's some boxes placed in front of you that you have to kick.

out of your way so you can learn that kick mechanism. Right. Now, most of the people have got to that point on the bridge and they know how to kick a box and that's fine. But there are some people that go and walk around the whole world and go, what do I do here? And then they get to the bridge and they kick them boxes and go, oh, maybe I have to do something with the other boxes in the rest of the world that I haven't done yet. Right.

And then they go back and do it. So it's designing it in a way that some people will do it. the wrong way, but then they'll still find their way back to getting it the right way. And I'm sure that Skyrim does a thing. If you go off the wrong way, you're probably going to find a road that lead you back to that village. Or to another one, where you'll find other quests you'll find. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, they all find a way to lead you back around.

Maybe you take the long way back around. But eventually you'll find your way back to the way where we want you to go. so yeah it does work out so you've shown the game off at avcon you've shown it off at uh packs before yes yes

what has been the sort of response you've gotten to the game and how was that evolved since when was when did you go to pack was that 2023 we went to 23 24 I went to games con in

Singapore and packs in Boston okay you've done a bunch of them. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, we've been to a few of them. But how is the, yeah, how's the response sort of evolved as, as the game has progressed? Um, the response has been, like, so the first, since the first time we went to the packs, we had a very basic build. It was a demo. It didn't really showcase any of the story component of the game at all. It only showcase the puzzles so we could see what people understood about the puzzles and stuff like that.

And so we had to hold people's hand a lot on the very first packs. I remember we're going, okay, so go up there and you'll see this and that will tell you what to do here. And we were giving him so much information and we're like, well, this is not the right. We're doing something wrong here. If people can't work out what they're supposed to do, then we're doing something wrong. Right.

You're not going to be there when they're playing them at home. Yeah, that's right. Well, I'm not going to, I can't hold their hands at home. So then the other part about it was there was not really that much story involved. So people weren't getting emotionally attached to the game or anything like that either. They thought it was a nice puzzle game, but they didn't, probably not more than that. and then the year after at packs we brought the same demo back but we changed a whole heap of stuff to make it way more intuitive to people one thing that we did notice if you're making a game

if you're a game developer watching this we did notice so we had the super easiest puzzle in our demo that was literally like one screen we're talking about screens again one screen out of the thing of the first frame that you land in and 90% of people would run past that easy puzzle and go and do the hard puzzles and the reason was that all these people were testing out the mechanics of running and jumping and doing stuff before they even thought about what they had to do in the game and so they had to get like literally about five screens before they were ready to think about what they were going to do in the game. So that's why when you played the demo or the full game at AVCon, you would have noticed

you arrive on a boat, you walk a couple of screens, you get a little cutscene, and then you got like a little bit more walking around, and then eventually you stumble across your first puzzle. And that was because our first demo that most people kind of came across and they weren't even interested in doing a puzzle, and then they get to a hard puzzle and go, what am I doing now? I'm like, well, you've missed an easy puzzle. I didn't even know there were puzzles up there

I'm like right so yeah so we're learning a lot about how interact and how people think has been a massive part of

how our games evolved right and then recently we've just been bringing the full game to conventions it's not quite finished but it's very close

and and getting some feedback on how people are playing that so and basically we we stand there and don't even

talk to people anymore. Like, are we do if they want to talk to us, but it's not like, if we don't have to explain game mechanics or anything, they just sit down and go for it, you know? So it has evolved, like the response, I guess, has been really positive, but we've spent a lot of time watching people and seeing what people do and some weird and wacky things that people do and we're like, I didn't even think to do. That doesn't even seem like a thing. Like, why would you do that?

examples of that if you're going to be got to need to hit on hand okay so in the um spike there's a spike room right and you go in there and you do you walk through the spikes the memory spikes puzzle and then you get to the other end and there's literally one box here and the power's coming from the wall and you've got to kick that box over and then it will connect to a another box and then go out of the puzzle room. Now, a couple of people walked in and walked around the boxes and went to the other box and kicked it towards the box that had the power. And then broke the puzzle because the puzzles aren't resetable, that they could get into

such a position that they had to basically restart the game again because they've just ruined my whole mechanic. And I'm just like, why did you do that? And so it's just little things like that that I didn't even think were possible. And they do it. And I'm like, I mean, this is 400 people playing the game and two people do that. So you're like, okay, so there is like a very small percentage of people that are going to make this broken. Yes. And I've got to account for those people. Yes. Yeah. Would you want to make it? So, that puzzle can't be broken or would you prefer to like implement some sort of puzzle reset mechanic where if you want to go back to the default state of that puzzle you could do so

I did think about doing that but there's something in the game that we've been working to is the rules of the game so a big thing that we've been doing and and it's made it easier and easier as we've been getting through the game, is that we go, well, what did we do in World One? We have to stick true to that. We can't have it that you can kick this box now and then in World Three, you can't kick that type of box. Right, right.

Then we've just made our rules confusing and no one understands our game anymore because everything's changed. And so all we had to do, literally in that situation, it was a bad puzzle design and we had to redesign the puzzle to make it so the people could use it

properly. Right, right. So that wasn't a big deal and the whole idea of the game was always around the rule that

you couldn't break the puzzles. If, and because if we implemented a thing where you could reset the puzzle by doing,

like, pressing a button, then all of a sudden people, A, would they know that that's a, thing unless we teach them that and then secondly to that would they would they just go around

resetting all their levels because they were getting frustrated they might be not thinking about a puzzle as much you know like they might just go oh i'll just reset these puzzles i'll just reset this and then that just takes away from the game so right everything you add to a game has another negative effect to how you want the game to be played so you You have to be careful about just changing it for one particular moment. Right. Sometimes it might be easier just to fix that particular puzzle or whatever. So, yeah.

When you talked about players going around and breaking things, I am the kind of person who will do that in a lot of games. Like, if I have, as a prime example, if a game gives me like a double jump and an air dash and maybe some attacks that will slightly raise my height. I'm going to try to find a way to get out of the map. I'm going to try to find a way to get onto something I shouldn't be getting on to. And a lot of the time you can.

And a lot of the time, you know, it's, I think it's neat to find things like that. I've said this with other things. Yeah. Oh, my God. I've been, I've been, I am never adding jump to a game ever again in my life. That's how I feel about jump. So we had so many problems with the jump mechanic Because people would just hold down the jump button

Hold down the sprint button And then they jump and do all kinds of stilly things That would break the game So the way around this that we've had I don't know if it's right or wrong You tell me But now you jump And you have to release the jump button

Before you can jump again So you can spam it over and over again If you want to keep jumping Sure sure But most people will give up and go, well, that's just annoying. I'm not going to keep sparing the jump button. Where when they can hold the jump button, that will hold it just for the fun of it. Oh, yeah, no.

So it definitely should be if to press it. Yeah. Yeah, so you have to depress it before you can jump again. And that's fixed a lot of problems in the game. Having that where you can't just continually rejump, rejump, rejump, rejump. And yeah, I think, testing a lot of things having lots of different the kick animation

when you kick in the game there's like a small 0.5 of a second before you gain control of the character again so every time you kick he stops and does his kick we did have it where you can move and kick but it didn't seem like it's a cozy game to start with

so why do you want to be able to run and kick at the same time because then you had all these slide kicks and all these weird things going on and it just it didn't make sense to the gameplay as well so we just remove that and made it so you could if you kick that's your decision but then you kick whilst you're in a position so I don't think there's as many things we've been putting up fences like around the map to stop people getting into areas that aren't designed to be getting got into so there's a lots of things like that that have come around and I don't know like I had a weird guy at a VCon actually that um

so there was a timer in the game so it was the full game but there was meant to be a timer in the game so after about 20 minutes it could come up with a screen thing and say hey you've finished playing thanks for playing next person kind of thing move along and that timer broke for some reason. I don't know what I did. And it wouldn't work in the game. And so this guy got through the whole first level. So he got through the intro and then the first level. And then he hit the rocket and the rocket blew up the world too. And he went to that bit. And then there was a part where the actual, there was a collider there. So you couldn't go through. And I hadn't coded that incorrectly, but in all fairness, if my timer had worked, you would never have got that far

into the game. So it was a kind of double-edged sword there. Anyway, he got to that bit and that bit was still blocking him from entering level two. And then he's like, why didn't you have like an end screen? I said, like, it's broken. It was broken. I'm sorry. And he's like, well, why did you have that collider there? I can't do the next thing. And he kind of got quite frustrated and annoyed with me, because I talk the game to a convention and there was a bug in it that he found. And he was like, well, he went mad on me for a few things. It was very quite aggressive. I don't know it was a passionate aggression or what kind of aggression it was.

It was very, I don't know, it was strange. It was quite in your face. Like, oh, this shouldn't do this. This should do this. And he was quite angry, but it was almost a passionate. angry so I wasn't upset at all but I was well if somebody's going to play the game like how long was he at the at the demo for

if he finished the entire first level got for like you had the 20 minutes oh it's about an hour and a half play yeah he clearly liked the game if he's that far into it yeah yeah but he was quite so passionate he was almost getting aggressive at me it was like oh my dude settle it'll be fixed by the time we've release this stuff. He's like, and that's just how it is, I guess,

but yeah. So how big is, how big is the game at this point? So as you played world one, you would have seen that each world has multiple caves in it. Right. So there's eight levels, which are the above ground,

and then all in all, there's about 38, including the caves. So about 30 caves as well. So, yeah. Obviously, being one of the people in the game, it's kind of hard to know how long a regular person would take through it because you sort of understand how every single puzzle works. But how long would you expect someone to take to finish?

the entire game if they're going into it blind they don't really you know they're they're just sort of casually going through it i'm expecting anywhere from four to six hours if i if i was to run through it i could probably get short in like two or three knowing all the things i know right right right so so yeah if you knew ever you could probably speed run it into kind of thing if you knew everything and you knew what the sequences are and stuff like that you could yeah right right but you obviously have to have that figure and out time which everyone's different on that I would say four to six kind of thing okay so like most people take at least an hour in world one to unlock all the things of that and some of those people haven't even discovered there's a there's a top

section of the the map that you don't even need to go to and probably 80% of the people don't even go up into that area to discover that part. So I think I only saw one person go up and discover that part at Avicon. So there's a whole lots of different areas that people haven't done. And then there's also in the game these little, how do I say it without giving it away? this is there's some bits that you if you discover them they will help you unlock something later on sure um so there's a lot of people that haven't even discovered any of those type of things and they and they're kind of like a little bit you know they're still out there to be

discovered and so once you start then you'll get to kind of like towards the end of the game and you'll find out oh, I didn't discover all those things and you might want to play through again to grab those bits and pieces. So that's to get, so if you want 100% it, it might take you six hours.

Okay, okay. With those areas that people haven't been going to, is that a problem you see? Would you want to make those areas feel more compelling? Or do you not see that as an issue where people are kind of just not going to them in a lot of cases? I well it's different see because whenever I see what somebody play

like say say you play I give you a copy of the game right now and you you film yourself playing and you give me a video back so with all the people that I gave that to they will probably probably 50% of them will go to their maoris okay where at conventions I think people just want to do the main bit at the convention. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's hard to judge convention people versus at home people. Also, the thinking at a convention can be a little bit harder as well because you've got

all this noise and stuff going on. And it's not your PC. You're playing on somebody else's PC. There's a whole heap of issues at conventions. So it's hard to judge that feedback at conventions versus at home time. Right. Right. Someone else I had on there, you had like a very atmospheric game, the music was a big part of it, and you can't do that at a con, right? Like, you can maybe hear the music a little bit, but then you've got the main stage music, you got all the crowds. Like, if sound is a core part of the game, that's just not going to work. And unlike, like, very few things you can really get a sort of a perfect sense for what the game is at a con, unless you give people like noise cancelling headphones. And even there, there's still some things.

Well, so if you're, again, if you're an indie dev watching this, here's some advice as well. I've seen it, been to like a few conventions, obviously, and I've seen like some games. So you see all different types of games there. For example, there was a game that just released this week as we were recording this called The Drifter. And that was at Pax back in 20,

23. It's a click and point adventure game. It looks really, it's a nice pixel. Yeah, it looks really, really cool. Don't get me wrong. However, at the convention, it had like one or two people playing it, right? It wasn't really that popular. But I think it's probably already sold quite a few copies because it's a really,

it's got like 100 reviews or something. so it's if you get a hundred positive reviews you're on your way 443 reviews now and 97 positive so that's yeah that's that's really high they're on their way but at the convention you be you could walk up and get a seat at that game at the convention and then if you go to a convention and you see one of those four player co-op or not co-op but like couch party games They've got people all around them at the convention and people are like living their best life playing this game but they sell hardly any games when people get home

so there's some games that are really really, really good for conventions at drawing a crowd and other games that aren't so good at conventions for drawing a crowd and that doesn't mean that your game won't be successful it just means it doesn't suit conventions as much as the other games So, yeah. Well, party games are realistic conventions. A lot of people find it difficult, especially, you know, $100, it's hard to get people get together to play a party game, right?

So, though at a con, like, you're in a lot of cases there with your friends. If you're not there with your friends, you can, like, drag some random person that walks by onto the table, one of the devs can join. Like, it's very easy to fill up a four person, a four person group when there's thousands of people around you. Yeah, that's right. 100% and and it gives you this really nostalgic moment in your life but then you get home and go okay would I rather buy that party game or this really cool single person game that I can

play by myself and escape my work week right you know I know which one I'm buying and it's not the party game so I think that's what happens to these games and it's just misleading at the conventions though because you see some games that just they're just got the biggest crowds and you're like oh man they're going to go really well but then they release to like not all that much and um yeah it's something i kind of didn't realize when i went to the first convention i'm like oh all these party games are going to do way better than me and then i'm like i don't know if they will though so yeah well it's also the thing with games that are like visual novels or very story-focused, that's just not, regardless of, like, I think single-player

games work, right? Like, a single-player shooter game, that will get, that'll get a crowd of the convention because it's, like, very easy to understand what's happening. But a story game, it's something where, you know, the value is you getting invested into it, and at a con, especially a busy con, you're not going to get, you know, an hour, two hours to play a game in most cases, you might get 15, 20 minutes. And it's very difficult to get really invested into a story game when there's tons of crowd around you. There's music going on. You can barely hear the game. And it's a story game. And it's, it requires you to be in a situation where you can really enjoy it. Well, and the other part is most people go to these conventions with either

their friends or their family. So I don't know. I like, If my kids started playing a game, I'm like, oh, I don't want to stand here for an hour waiting for them to finish playing this game. But if we sit down at a booth and we're playing like a party game, yeah, of course. We're going to love it, you know, because we're going to just sit there and play it at a party booth. That's kind of the way that it is. We don't have to think about it.

We just jump in. We start. We go and kill each other or whatever it is in that particular party game. and then we probably never talk about it again. So, and it's sad, it's a sad fact. It's just misleading when you're at these conventions, I guess. Yeah, I never really thought about it from that perspective because I've only been going to Avcon and, yeah,

I have noticed that Avicon, but I need to do, I want to do Pax at some point. Pax would be fun. I do have plans. I'll be at Pax this year. Come over and talk to me. I do plans to do Sage next year. That's the essay. Okay. What is it?

South Australian, whatever it is. Local South Australian game one, but definitely Pax is something I need to do for sure. Oh, you would, it's a different beast. It is 10 times the size of like AV-Con. It's a different game thing.

It's a different crowd, a different vibe. But it's definitely worth doing at least once or twice. It's good fun. But yeah. Sorry. No, no, it's a good, too. Come over. You come over and see me. It's fun.

I might have to, my, when is Pax? October, the 11th or something. We'll see. Maybe I'll go. We'll see. Yes, that's all right. You should have applied for the Pax creator thing. Yeah, I should have applied for the Avcon one, but I didn't do that either, so.

Maybe next year I'll play for that. So with the game, what have you sort of taken as inspirations for it? I remember very clearly when we started making the game. Me and Liam, who's making the 3D models for the game, we were over at my place, this was like three, four years ago.

maybe a bit longer. And I just got a PlayStation 5, I think, at the time. And we were playing Sack Boys Adventures. And we're just like, this is so fun. Like, why is this, why does not everyone play this game? It's so amazing and fun. And so that was probably the starting point of, we wanted to make a game that was kind of got that,

something that Sack Boys Adventure does is it gives, you a path to go through and there's lots of little bits and pieces to the path, but it's not, it's not necessarily, some of them are hard and jumpy and there's, there's probably a little bit faster pace in our game, but we really liked the way that the levels were constructed where they were, they were big, but they weren't too big. And you could still explore them, but they weren't over the top. And so that, that would have been the biggest one. If, I mean, if Astrobot had come out, I'd think that that would have been another

inspiration at the time, but obviously it only just recently dropped. But then, and then the more that the game developed, like, it's weird that all these kind of games from your subconscious past kind of present themselves in these games that you don't even realize they were an influence until you kind of like, oh, I may have got that idea from some other game and if you look at game like commander keen and stuff like that that's probably got like a bit of a feel to how our game has come about it it's it's kind of got a similar kind of story it's got similar kind of that that's got a bit of shooting and stuff in it but it's that and obviously zeldas the zeldas were big on the list as well for part of the

those kind of three squashed together I think is what Lighthays world best reflects so yeah as I've said before I do think the exploration of the anxiety part

is a very interesting inclusion into the game and how did that sort of make its way into what you want to do oh so the main character I remember at the time my son would have been about nine years old.

He drew this purple guy like that. And I'm like, oh, what's that? I'm like, oh, I just draw a picture of how I feel today. And I'm like, why are you purple? What's happening is like, oh, I just feel a bit alienated and kind of like a little bit of, you know, so that's why I made it a bit of an alien kind of thing and, you know, and I just thought, that's such an interesting idea for a character. Why do all our characters have to be superheroes? Like, sometimes what would it be like for a character to be anxious and a little

bit not sure about themselves, but they have to find their own strength to get through the game kind of thing. So that's where the anxiety part of the game came from, as we wanted to represent that in a way. You get things in the game like these overly big cactus or cacti, depending on who you are, in the game that things like that are way too big and way too scary than they need to be, but that's how the character's perceiving them.

so that's why it works in a way it's like you've got this this you look at it and go oh that's that no cacti is that big um but it works because it it shocks you for a moment you walk into it and you pop into some bubbles and we didn't want blood we wanted bubbles because we wanted this this kind of whimsical kind of feel to it as well okay so yeah So Let's see Oh Grant funding

I did want to talk about that one Because you guys have received grant funding for the game Which is really cool Yes So I guess This is Green Australia I guess For anyone who's curious about

Like How you would apply for that And sort of What it entails to get grant funding Like what sort of if you receive it like obviously different places are going to have different things but with screen Australia like are there some sort of requirements you have now that you've received the funding or how does that sort of work um so the easiest way to apply for it is to obviously

go to their website they have like intakes where they get funding every i think they give out funding every two times or three times a year something like that and you apply for in one of those intakes and I think you can apply two or three times with the same game and then that that's done so everyone applies differently everyone wants something different out of their funding it's not a clean answer of right are we want this or we want that um so most people say look we are making this a particular type of game for us it was a game about tasmania with the guy with anxiety and all this stuff and we would like funding to help with our own wages to make the game and that's where that's where we went with that kind of thing

um and so when you're presenting your case to screen in Australia, you've got to specify what your goals are and they could be like we want to make a vertical slice and we want the money to spend the next six months making a vertical splice. So then we can present that to a publisher and then that could be your goal. For us it was to build a whole game and at this point in time, we were already a fair chunk of the way through the game and we wanted some money to help us finish the game because we were running out of our own personal funds. kind of thing. So we had something pretty good to share with them in regards to what our game

look like. I guess if you've got no game to show and you're just saying, hey, it looks like this mix with this and it's probably going to be more challenging to kind of present that, having like a little demo of some sort is probably always a nice thing so they can understand that and and then we had and then our commitments are now to release the game obviously and depending on what goals you put in place so if you put five goals in of we're going to a by like say by the end of the year we're going to have our demo ready so then you might get your first payment after that or you might you get payments based on the goals that you put down and then as you achieve those goals you'll get payments for that side of it um so it's a they're

they're very helpful and they i mean i think it's really helped maybe light hay's world isn't going to be successful i don't know if it is it is if it isn't that's but one thing i'm sure of that screen astray has definitely helped me with is getting into the games industry a lot further it's helped me a focus on my game but then also it's kind of introduced me to some different connections and things like that that have helped me so when my next game comes when the next game comes when the next game is in development or done. I know what I'm trying to do with that game.

And I guess that's kind of a big part of it as well. It's not just about, I guess it gives you a bit more freedom. So then all of a sudden you can actually, you're not working nine to five and you're trying to build a game on the side. You've got some funding. So you've got a little bit more room to, extend yourself, I guess, as well. I've got, I mean, there are things that they,

I've got to do some, well, I don't have to do, but I've been invited to do a sign thing on how funding affects the game industry where I have to go and talk to some, like, researchers, and they're kind of trying to figure out what, if the funding is good or bad. and I don't know, all that kind of stuff. I don't know exactly. I haven't done it yet.

So that's next week. Things like that that I get invited to. G-CAP, they invited me. Last year they put us into G-CAP, the game in there. And then they let me have a ticket for G-CAP to, because I had the game in there. Little things like that that help bring your game. So it's not just, for me, it wasn't just the funding.

It was all the extra little bits as well. Like the funding was a big part, but also like the other side of it as well that really helped me grow as a developer. And all of a sudden, I don't feel like I'm just starting off as a game developer anymore. I first got funding. I felt like I was just starting off. Now I feel like I'm in the games industry.

we yeah i guess i guess is that a long winded answer of everything but yeah that's how i feel so with the funding what is that actually enabled you to do like now that is a thing now that you have that like what couldn't you do before that now that you have it is possible uh well the biggest thing was that before i was working a part-time job job. Now I'm not working a part-time job because I replace that with a wage from the funding. That's pretty much funding-wise, that was a biggest part of what happened for me. Like I said before, it's getting like meeting a lot of people that you probably necessarily they wouldn't have met it like you'll get they will help you like steer you down some

paths of hey this this event's on this weekend would you like to go to this event because they're also helping out with some funding for that particular event or something like that they're involved with an event and this is available for you if you would like to um or you might never even known about some stuff that they help you learn about so that's the other side of the funding but yeah so at this day oh sorry i forgot to say one thing you have to do as your requirement okay and this is kind of really cool um once the game is finished you have to submit it into the game database in Canberra. Right.

I didn't even know there was a game database thing in Camber. So all these games, once they are finished, especially they get screened Australian funding, that's part of the requirement, is to put these games into this kind of time capsule of Australian games. Okay. And yeah, and then they just like, I don't know if you go, the big part is if you come to like some places in Melbourne,

there's like a game, say they put a, the museum puts on a games from the 90s type thing. They might draw from this catalogue and then, you know, in 10 years time, they might put on, put Lighthays World into some gallery as a, as a, oh, remember this historical event when Lighthaz World released, but this is their drawings and this is their art. artwork from then and this is some of the old stuff of the game before way back when and yeah so yeah that I just found I get to be kind of in this time capsule which like to me that's really really cool. That is super cool. Yeah. At this stage and maybe it's hard to commit to something exactly when how much longer would you hope to be working on the game? Like when would you like

it to be... Hope or I'd like to release tomorrow. Okay. With the current plan you have, like worst case scenario, how long do you think the game is from being done? I think I put a post up yesterday saying for the first time ever,

I've built a test demo with every single level there. So we've been testing all the levels like you test them in Unity as you're building the game and we've tested them rigorously like that but for now I'm testing if you go and do all this stuff in level one

does it do what it's supposed to do when you get to level five does everything listening all those full game yeah yeah so that's I think that's right but you've got to play through the game about 400 times to see

just check it in different scenarios if I didn't do this and I get to this part was that bit do did that bit do what it's supposed to do in that part and yeah I that once we get through that then I think we'll be making a release announcement on the release date soon and that's that's something we've been working towards we've just it's just been a little bit slower than we ever anticipated every level has been made by us going into blender making a whole level then we put it into the game we test if everything one thing that i didn't want to do is have it so you have like that we'd cut out when you run behind a tree and you see like a shader around i don't love that because i feel like it takes you out of the environment like if you if we're running

through the bush together, and you run behind a tree. I'm not going to see you. I'm not going to see it cut out of you behind a tree. So I like the idea. But to do that, we have to have, you have to test playing through all the levels and imagining and like just seeing what happens when you go walk around the level. Where does the camera cut out? Where does the camera go? and that's been like a bit of a time sync as well but testing out the levels is check that the camera shows you what you we want you to see basically we've we've come the rule for the game are remembering back to my rules is that you the camera the character can go off screen for one second without being visually there but ideally you can you'll if you move

a millimeter either way you'll see part of the character. So the designing levels around that can take time because you're testing how long you're going behind items how, like you have like walls that are only like a certain height just so

you can just see his hair run behind the wall right up against the wall. And so yeah, that's been a bit of a time thing. But most of that, most of the level, the levels have been design for a long time but we're just testing all those camera angles and stuff so yeah yeah losing track of the character is something i definitely i always find annoying when it happens and i see this

sometimes in two d games where they'll put a they'll have like a foreground sprite sometimes and you usually it's fine it's only temporarily hidden but when it's in a position where you need to actually you need to be able to interact with the character it can be annoying um i think back right now i'm playing through the original FF7 and it has like it's a 3D character in a static 2D world

so you can move like it's like a fake 3D effect because the PS1 just wasn't powerful enough to do full 3D rendered how they wanted to be done but there are lots of situations

where you'll just walk a full path behind something and four five seconds trying to work out where the path actually is and you literally cannot see the character and every time

I get it was like this was graphically impressive on the PS1 but things like that have aged so terribly and it always feels annoying when I have to do a segment like that Yeah I agree

and like I said I wanted to have it so you go we've got and so at a camera perspective is that we worked with an author orthographic camera perspective instead of a perspective

camera perspective so that what that means is that um for example if he's running up a hill um away from you or towards you you can't actually see that in the game because of the camera's perspective so we have to like design also if we want to have like the illusion that he's going up hill we have to design it that he's actually going up a hill left to right or right to left just so you can feel like you're going up something and so lots of little things like that that natural like don't seem like a thing are a thing in this game that have taken some time to design just so it feels nicer it we spend a lot of time on the user experience more

more so than probably we probably had to or should have, but yeah, just to have that nice cohesion of, oh this, I'm doing this now, I'm doing that now. Yeah. And that's been a big part of our development process. Do you want to make it so the user, I guess, I guess understands what's going on. I think it's the simplest to put it, right? Like, understand what is happening in the game. Yeah. Well, also, one time, so we, we had the spikes where you die, right? And if you, if you die from these spikes, you, at one stage, we have it.

So the player, it would come up on the screen, you died from the spikes. Would you like to keep playing? And you'd have to hit the button and you'd have to keep playing. Right. And then we realized for that moment, for that split second that came up on the screen, that gave people the opportunity to think about, do I actually want to play? Right, right. So now, if you die, it just fades to black and then it fades back on and you're back at the

re, you've just insta respawn. Right, right. So just to keep you engaged in the game, it's part of it. it is like a really engagement focused idea of we want you to be engaged we want you to lose hours in this game and that's what we want to do and but enjoy that we want you to enjoy that we want you to enjoy this experience um one game that like i feel like did that nicely for me was like kendra as well that's another game i don't know if you ever played that one it's a Zelda-ish kind of thing.

You probably see a bit of Lighthays world in that as well. But it's got this really massive environment and you just keep, you just go to a next section and you just keep wanting to keep going through the game. And I think that's also an important factor of game development these days. if you just give people an easy out then they're going to go okay I guess I'll leave I guess I guess what's the advantage of me asking you a question that you don't need to answer

like of course you want to play again you didn't start playing this for no reason so yeah right so it's sort of it's removing that I guess that tension point right where there's like it's not a game where there's a

it's not a game where there is some sort of giant drawback for failing the puzzle so what's the point of asking them if they want to keep going right like this isn't something where you know you failed at some really hard boss oh are you are you giving up now right it's nothing like that it's oh you failed a puzzle that

when you work out the path to get through, it'll take you 20 seconds to do. Yeah. Well, and the other part is, hypothetically, you die in the spikes puzzle two times. What's the same? You get to the second time and go,

oh, can't be bothered doing it now. I'll do it later. Every time you get that green of saying, do you want to keep playing? And then you've got an easy out, then all of a sudden people are like, I guess where if you just keep getting presented the game again,

you're like, I'll give it one more crack. Why not? And then before they know, they've got through that section that they may have got caught on a little bit. And then they're back to like, once you get through a harder section, you feel good about yourself.

You naturally go, you know what? I actually achieved something today. I got through this part of the game. So, yeah, that's, I don't know, like I said, a lot of going to the conventions and things like that that we've figured out over the years has been about figuring out how other people are in the games. What makes people tick, what makes people understand our game, not understand our game. And if you, I don't know, I feel like if you can understand a bit of that, And you can make something that people really connect with.

Like, you've got half a chance of having a game that will be successful. So a while back, you've talked about the idea of using, and at Avcon, this is what you did. You had level one as the demo that you've been using. Is that what you've done at... So you had a separate... demo at one point, yes? Yes.

When did you swap to using level one as the demo? Was that just for Avcon or was that, have you done the previous cons as well? It was for Avcon and for Boston, so only this year. Before that, it was always the demo. Right. So, with, I've brought this up with other people as well. And it's something I've, you see in, like, a lot of games where the opening of the game is really good and really polished

because that's something that's been play tested a bunch of times how do you ensure that other parts of the game are just as engaging as the opening where that's where a lot of the play testing has been focused on so far yeah that's an interesting question because you you can well there's

there's another couple of ways of thinking about this also. If I give you the game to test level one, right? And then I come back and give you that same level one to test a week or two later with the suggestions that you've put in. You can never give me the same feedback again the same time around because you've already done that. So what a lot of the time I like to do? do is get lots of different, I get people on Discord, I get people to test this one level

for me. And I can only get them to test it once. After they've tested it once, they're done. They can only test, they can only test one, because they can only get that initial impression one time and then that's it. But I guess it's implementing things that you've, learnt from the demo. So to be clear about World One, I've only got people to play that since, like, this year, right? Now, I took that to Boston and America, and I still didn't have to explain that to any people over there. People understood that.

I talked to Avcon. I didn't have to explain it. I haven't made any changes to that. because all the information that I got from the demo I implemented into the first level of the game so all the information that I get from that demo I've implemented into all the other levels of the game and then I get

I get a few people to go through and test them only one time because that way they can give me their first initial feedback and then I can figure out what I have to change from that information that I get from them, basically. And also trying to work out if they can break bits and pieces. That's a tricky part, but... Right.

Yeah. I think it's a very good answer. Yeah, I think it's a pretty good answer. Yeah. As I was saying, there's a lot of games out there. Like, I think back on something like Diablo 4, Diablo is a great example, where the opening act, or Diablo 3 is a great example. as well, where the opening acts are

really polished, because that's what the demo was. People, they had a, I think they ran a demo for like a year before the game came out. People put, you know, collectively tens of thousands of hours into it. All the bugs got ironed out. Everything was amazing. And then people got to the second act.

It was like, oh, this is a buggy mess. Right? Red's like, um, but, okay, I'll ask, I'll ask you a question then, about But how many people, if you go on Steam, right, like you can see this in Steam libraries all over the place.

Go and have a look at all your friends on Steam or on PlayStation or whatever platform has got achievements. And they have like a game in their library. And then they've, probably most people have finished like level one. Sure. Probably 10% of people have finished level. to and probably hardly anyone has actually got through the whole game. Yes.

Okay. No, that is definitely true. There are a lot of people who will definitely not finish games for sure and even not even progress that far. Yeah. So like I, I said to people like the witness, like think of our game as a top down version of the witness, right? Because I think that that's kind of like a fair.

and they're like, oh, I love that game, all right? And I got that response back from like hundreds of people. Oh, I love the witness. And I asked them a follow-up question, did you ever finish the witness? And they said, nah, no, it was way too hard. So they probably only played the first, you know, 20% of the game. So I'm, and then the other part about this as well,

well is if I'm when I go into a game I'll muck around in the first two levels and probably see if I can break the game level one and two and then when I get to level three or four I'm just kind of focusing on getting through the game more so than breaking stuff so I don't know if people like people don't search for bugs the later they are in the game as much as they do at the start sometimes is that is that a fair example as well so i don't know if that's what game developers are playing to i guess as well like they know that they get people especially even people in the media that do like a covering of the game they'll play the first level and then go oh this is a great game go and buy it and then do they bother playing the rest of the game

you know so they even it takes too i i i think that was a really really really fun game or split fiction you look at them too i'm playing through that right now uh with a friend on stream yeah i split fiction i i played through it with my 10 year old and we loved it right but you can find heaps of bugs in the last levels because they spent their time polishing the crap out of the first 50% of the game and and then they're like well everyone's going to say it's good to their friends recommended on the first 50% of the game and then the second 50% like and I'm not saying that we're going to have bugs throughout the game sure it's not what I'm saying I'm saying that I don't know if people go searching for bugs as much later in the game as well so there's

there's two sides to that I guess sure at the same time though if they are if they are getting in the way of people's ability to play the game I obviously they're still important definitely. That's what I'm testing at the moment. I'm testing that if I play the start of the level and if you get in level one, if you get to level five, is level five as, can you break something from level five by doing something from level one? So yes, I agree. Can you lose coins by just going through the game, but they disappear magically? Like I've played many games where coins magically disappear for some unknown bug. I don't want any of that stuff to happen either.

Yeah, I'm looking at Steam achievements for a game right now. I've got the Final Fantasy 7 Steam achievements. The achievement for won the first battle, which is probably

15 minutes into the game, 87.5% of players have this achievement. Yeah. Then just using the first limit break, which maybe you use in the second or third fight,

that gets down to 75%. yeah it's it's incredible and and those people are probably recommended the game to their friends because they said oh that first battle was amazing so like i know that i with the way i think about it is that some developers really focus hard on those first couple of levels because they know that that's where people play the game the people don't necessarily go all the way through that in some ways that's what makes roguelike games good because they can you're basically playing the same game over and over so if they fix all the bugs in that you're not going to get bugs later on in the game so to speak because they're they're polishing

all of the game I guess sure sure I don't know it's It's an interesting debate, I guess. And, yeah, and yeah, like I said, I'm working on testing the last game, so I'm not shying away from that. Please don't believe that. But, yeah. So what has been your sort of history with game development and just development in general? Have you made games before this that just didn't really see the light of day?

Or is this the first, like, actual project? I made lots of mobile games. I recommend if you're going to be a game developer, make a mobile game, and then you'll see if you're actually a game developer. Because the two reasons, it's really, really hard to give away a free game. Like, if you can get people to get to buy a free game. free game, then to download a free mobile game, you're winning. Okay. Now, second to that, it's really, really hard to get people to play a free game more than one time. There's a lot of

people that will never open your free game up after they download it and played it for five seconds. And then, on top of that, it's really hard to get your instructions into a free game, because most people want to get into a free game without even thinking about it. Like, I remember this one, I made this little puzzle game up for a mobile game and it had literally two sentences, basically a small paragraph of instruction at the start of the game. Like, first sentence had moved the blocks this way, second sentence said, then you can break the blocks, you know? And I talked to my like friends and family afterwards and I said, oh, what do you think

of that new game I released? And they're like, I was all right, but I only worked at how to move the blocks. I didn't work at how to break the blocks. And I'm like, it was written at the start of the game, you know, like, and they're like, oh, yeah, but that was way too much reading. And I'm like, yeah, you're probably right. like I know that if I bought if I got that free game I probably wouldn't read two sentences like I'm not being sarcastic I'm like the real real point of it is that people just don't they just want to get in

and have a crack at it and so that's like being a big philosophy in learning game development for me is I can only teach people really small amounts of information at a time because you've got to make it not feel like you're learning and so that was a big part of like the development of our game as well is you've got to make sure that people are learning along the way yeah right and and just teaching people through text is always going to feel it's always going to feel like a kind of the worst way to teach someone, right? Like, what you would want to be able to do is show people through, like a visual demonstration, show people through the connection of actions

where it's sort of a logical connection that this is the next thing you would do, where it's not necessarily, hey, you have to read this thing. Because, as you said, a lot of people, I will see people play a game. And, you know, you see a lot of games where it's like, oh, here's the tutorial dialogue, press this button to do this thing, that button to do that thing, and it's just like, next, next, next, next, next. And then five minutes later, they're like, oh, wait, what button do I press to do this thing?

Exactly, 100%. If you sort of, I think a good way to do it is if you are going to introduce mechanics through blocks of text, it needs to be point by point, not necessarily everything at the start, but it's like, okay, hey, let's say a platform right. So, okay, you press X to, jump onto this platform. How do you do a double jump? Okay, you're at another point. Now you press

X twice. Oh, you can do an air dash. If you press circle in the air, you do this. It's not introducing it all at once. It's breaking that down into individual pieces. So you are just addressing one mechanic at a time. Well, I mean, you could see that in Lighthaze. You start off by having to put the boxes into a pattern. And then you have to work out how to put the boxes, which have now got on the top of them some electrical wires into a different like you have to connect up those wires so you've learnt the little bit and then you've learnt the bigger bit and that's exactly how I've gone about learning stuff from and a lot of it came from mobile games in the way that I could you can see you can track so much on mobile games oh my god I could I can tell you

like where what toilet you're playing in basically on a mobile game and and So by able to track that information, you can find out how quickly one person will play your game. And that's the thing. It's a free game. It's literally the freest of free thing. And you're, and you still can't get someone to engage in that. That, I mean, that's a hardest sell. And the great thing about mobile games is you get to do all the things that make games great.

like storefronts so you get you get to go and put it on Google and Apple if you want to and you get to go and put it like really like they normally you can build a mobile game in like a couple of months and then you it fails and you build another one in a couple of months and that fails and then you build another one and you can go through that process 10 times you know in a year and then all of a sudden you're like okay I learned so much in that year, where building one game, like I've been building Lighthouse World for four years, if this is my first game, I would have quit a long time ago because I've learned so much along Lighthouse World as well, but I've already kind of figured out a whole heap of stuff from making

these mobile games. So, yeah. So it sort of builds up your experience and you've learned things from that process before you went into a larger project like this one is. Yeah, correct. Another thing, here's another interesting thing you may or may not know. We talk about text before. On Steam, what percentage of the audience is English speaking?

No searching, come on. Just have a guess. I was going to look at the Steam Hardware Survey. English speaking. I know the Chinese audience is a massive audience. steam um yeah probably 50% yeah you're you're put closer most people say 70% um it's like actually like 38% or something like that the chinese speaking is like 40% and then you've got yeah 36 right now in the latest hardware survey so yeah yeah and then so you look at that and

you think if I write if I write down a paragraph of speaking in English and I don't translate to any other languages how many people can actually do my game anyway but that's only 38% of the people on Steam can play my game so that so that's another crazy kind of side to it that a lot of game developers don't even consider for the like you know I'd never really thought about that actually that does make sense to be fair there are a lot of people who do know English

as a second language so there is definitely that so their main system language might be you know might be Brazilian or might be German but you know a lot of people in those countries also do especially if you're in Germany or a lot of you're in France you're in a lot of European countries a lot of people there will know English as a second language as well.

Oh, definitely, definitely. It's probably closer to 60% will do, that probably know a bit of English as well. But having only that English and having a lot of text that makes no sense. Right, right, right. If you can get away from that, you're winning every day of the week, you know?

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, for sure. That's a big part of it. Is there anything else you want to touch on or we can start wrapping this one up because we're coming up on the two-hour mark now. Yeah, I'm fine to wrap it up it, so I didn't realize we're talking for a long time. I talk a lot of shit.

No, no, so good, this is roughly how long I like to do the episodes for. Okay, cool. That's fair enough. Is there anything else that we didn't touch on that you think is probably important that we should talk about, or is that, did we sort of touch on everything?

Not really, I think that's... about the game I think yeah there's not a whole lot of anything really to I think we talked about more than I was even thinking we're going to talk about so yeah awesome if people want to go

and wish list the game and check everything out where can they go Lighthays world is on Steam they can wish list it there and if you want to find out more about anything. I post a lot of stuff on social stuff, so you can go to Radio Bush on what, LinkedIn. No, LinkedIn. Okay, you can go to Radio Book on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it.

I don't do Blue Sky because I'm not doing any more social media. Understandable. Yeah. It's hard to manage it. I've limited myself. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm just like, oh, that's too many. And I don't even use X all that much. But, yeah, basically Radio Bush, YouTube or Instagram or TikTok is the best place. And then you can always find a disc, hit me up and you can come into Discord if you want. It's all fun and games.

It's all good. Awesome. Yeah. And I do like to, oh, sorry, I'm talking still. Yeah, I do like helping out other indie developers too. like I so so if you want to know stuff I'm more than happy to give out information I don't believe in gatekeeping all the stuff I you know like if people ask me hey how do I do this I'll tell you sometimes I don't like publishing do this kind of stuff because there's there's some

stuff that you kind of it's it's a hard road to like kind of get that point of who you're talking to, like say to the masses you should do this with your thing. Sometimes there's specific cases is easier to give a specific answer for if that makes sense. Right, right, no is there.

So if you, you're like, hey, I'm thinking about it making a game about a worm. How do you think I should present this to screen Australia? Then I could maybe give you an answer. Right. But if, like, how do I, how do I, present this to screen Australia like as a generic thing

it's it's too big of an answer right you know it's impossible to kind of categorize so yeah that's what I'm saying sometimes it's easier to do it on a more personal level kind of thing right right right and yeah anyway that that's me

okay I'm aunt nice to meet you guys well my I'll do my outro and then we can sign off there. Okay, cool. So my main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream. Check that out if you want to see that.

I've got the gaming channel, Brodie on Games. Right now, I'll be playing through split fiction with Wren. And maybe I've finished Kazan the first berserker. If I have, I'll be playing MetalGay Solid. Also, I've got the React channel of these Brody Robinson reacts where I play clips from the stream. And if you want to see the audio version of this, it is on basically every podcast platform. It is on Spotify, on Apple's stuff.

There is an RSS feed, which is cool. And if you want to watch the video version, 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? Have fun. Fair enough. Too much.

Oh, my God. Too much.