Tech Over Tea - The Odd Combo Of VR Puzzles and Space Walks | Fringe Realities

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Today we have a group of indie VR game developers on the show from a studio called Fringe Realities, currently working on a VR puzzle title that I sadly didn't get a chance to play at AVCON but it caught my eye enough that I wanted to speak with the devs. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://fringerealities.wixsite.com/my-site Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2200330/Project_Nightlight/ Twitter: https://x.com/FringeRealities YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FringeRealities ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, this is probably going to be the last of the post-Avcon indie game developer interviews. This is one of the games I sadly didn't get a chance to play. There was always people at the booth, and this was one of the biggest years for games anyway, so there was just a lot of things to go through. But it is a really cool looking project. Today we have Matt and Alex from Fringe Realities, who at Avcom were showing off a game called Project Nova. So I guess, just introduce yourselves. Whoever wants to start, go ahead.

Do you want to go first? Yeah, I'll go first. Yeah, hi. I'm Alex Goodwins. I'm the CEO and the Technical Designer at French Realities. So I'm the guy who kind of has to run the business and also make quite a lot of functionality for the games that we make. I'm Matt Bibian. I'm the environment artist, social media dude, and just general guy or french um yeah so if you get an email it's likely me i apologize so i guess before we get get into this specific game,

you guys focus on VR games, right? And that's obviously a very special niche unto itself. So I guess, how did both of you get interested in doing VR stuff in the first place? Had you done things prior to being involved in fringe realities? Or was it something where you were just like, I'm do this let's just see how it goes as as fun as let's just do this see how it goes with the um we you know both studied at aie the academy of interactive entertainment in uh adelaide and you know we studied our respective fields of art and design um and vr was the shortest module of our sort of couple years there um and being

peak covid it was severely limited what we could do with it because of like you know social distancing and like physical contact and what sort of stuff um so we had a really severely limited module which left us with that yearning of like we we could do more with this you know um plus it was just that emerging technology and you know jumping in there sounded really really awesome yeah fair enough uh alex you've been that to that um it's more my personal experience over the company's experience um like yeah like i started to get interested in vr like back in 2016 when the like htc5 like first kind of more commercial headsets became available which is actually the one that the business uses um yeah i got interested in that started playing all the vr games you know space pirate trainer job simulator

boneworks all that sort of stuff um and yeah since since that point like going through a um i had before our vr module where we were kind of forced to make a vr game i'd already kind of mucked around with it. We had a narrative module where I made a little VR game that's centered around a time-traveling investigator. But yeah, that's very much my interest in it. One of the early adopters where I was grabbing a HTC Vive headset, jumping into games um playing kind of whatever i could find get my hands on um went through went through a big phase of jumping onto vr chat to go muck around in there uh like i presume a lot of people who have a vr headset have done at one point or another but yeah so was the vive your first experience with vr i didn't that sounded like it was or

before that okay no no um i yeah i bought the like like very early htc vive um i've since upgraded to the pro just because nicer displays and a little bit of a nicer experience right um but yeah no htc vive was first experience. Matt, what was your first VR headset you tried? Was that at AIU? No, the first VR headset I tried was a Vive, but my very first experience with it was at Avcom, and it was a game that was like a platformer, but it was just a typical 2D platformer with a controller,

but you had your headset on looking up and down to see where you had to go on looking up and down to see where you had to go okay and it gave me the worst motion sickness i've ever felt because i looked down and it was just an infinite void and my brain was like that ain't for you bud and i got too sick and like too scared to say anything so i just kind of like lifted the headset up and the guy had walked off and i just kind of scurried away right um. So, yeah, I was very apprehensive about VR stuff based on that experience. But, you know, here and there at different Avcons or whatever, like Space Pirate Trainer, I played at a Supernova. I think not too long after that.

And it was like, OK, this is actually really, really cool. So the drive and passion to, like, do something with it has absolutely, like, always been there. OK. Yeah. My experience with VR is a little bit older than that um one of the teachers assistant at my high school had a oculus dev kit too so yeah which was very very rough uh it had really bad screen dooring. It was not the highest refresh rate. And the demo he used was the roller coaster demo that was really popular back then. So it was the worst of every single world.

First immediate interaction with VR. Yeah, let's make you want to throw up. Yeah, let's never do this again. So I was kind of turned off vr for a very long time after that um and my next experience was in uni where i had a vr development course and they had i think they were either vibes or five pros which was a lot better of an experience i still do experience like motion sickness from vr stuff but i think a lot of developers will still learn like what they can do and what they can't do um i like when i play

like beat saber for example beat saber i can do perfectly fine uh but a lot of the heavy heavy movement games i still do experience like, like, a lot of VR sickness. Like, if I was to play something like Gorilla Tag, for example, I'm going to be dead in five minutes. Oh, same, same. Like, I still experience motion sickness and stuff, too. Like, it's lessened because of the development and sort of getting a bit more used to it,

but absolutely, like, long-term play, it, like, the stomach flips at around an hour, and it's like, oh, joy like oh joy um so that's always a fun task to combat um with this sort of stuff and it's a unique challenge as well because typically you don't really get that experience just with non-traditional games and that kind of leads into project nova because i watched sadly i didn't get to play it at Avcom but I did see there were a couple of parts in there that definitely would have probably been an issue for me

like the part where you're climbing across the bars if I was to yeah I do want to ask like how do you go about actually dealing with these problems in a way that I guess makes people feel immersed but still

i i don't know actually like managed to deal with some of the motion sickness problem i know you can't deal with everything some of it is hardware limitation but i know there is certainly stuff that can be done from your side as well yeah i mean like through developing project nova as well as our previous project project nightlight and all of our personal experiences with VR, even myself, I was fairly resistant to motion sickness. I can never remember what the game was called. I remember at one point I was playing a game that had continuous movement, and I'd been playing for a solid half hour wasn't feeling too bad and then i just hit a wall and just went i need to stop playing i'm about to throw up but like ever since then i've been fine but yeah no it's it's definitely one one of the things that we keep

having to think about so like we i guess there's kind of three major things that we can kind of do as developers um like first one optimize the hell out of the game so it runs at 90 frames or more um just because like again personal experience as as well as definitely developing the games where they're unoptimized and you're having to play through it at like 20 frames that's not fun um but, like optimizing the hell out of it so that it will be running at 90 frames or more. That's definitely a big one. The other one is not all games do it, but a lot of games now offer different movement methods.

So like the standards are kind of continuous movement or teleportation. Like those are kind of the big two that have stood out. There are definitely a whole bunch of different methods to even those. I remember Doom VR, they kind of had teleporting, but it was like you teleport, but you just very rapidly move between those two points and things like that. So yeah, that's another thing, just giving people the ability

to change the movement methods. Continuous is definitely what we kind of develop for and prefer people playing just because it's more immersive you're not teleporting and right right blacking out all the time and all this stuff but like yeah we we do all for teleporting a lot of vr games do at this point um and then the third one which we haven't mucked around with as much but it's definitely something that we want to get into, Nova, is the vignetting. So when you start moving, you basically just bring in a vignette from the side of the screen just to help with that disassociation between what's happening in front of you and what your body is feeling. Okay.

okay um like one of the games that i know that did it quite a lot and it'll be very obvious why was like a lot of the spider-man vr games um they brought out some like nice little demo things and stuff like that and basically when you're swinging so you don't get that massive you know feeling of motion sickness because you are just flying through a city um they yeah bring in a vignette so basically it's like a kind of a gradient starting at like black from the outside going to see through in the middle okay and um basically the faster you went the more it kind of closed in so you get very tunnel vision but it helps with the disassociation between what your body is feeling and what your brain is perceiving um So that's,

it's something we want to bring into Nova and we're trying to work out the best ways of doing it, but we definitely want to do it for continuous movement. Just most people who choose continuous are like fairly resistant to motion sickness, but people like yourself, you know, you might want to try it out and just be like,

I really want that vignette to help with that disassociation. And then, yeah, as you were saying, the climbing sections, that's another area we want to have separate settings for. So if people are okay with continuous, but they get to that climbing section, they're just like, oh, I don't like, they can bring in the vignette and help with that disassociation and get through that section with um more comfort is there something that comes in with like the way that you would like lay out a level as well and maybe not having certain like as you pointed out that that game you played where there was the uh the 2d thing you're just looking up and down and if you look

straight down you see a void i would imagine there's certain things you'd want to avoid in the way that you design things with how they look as well yeah yeah um yeah i'll go for it no i i was just gonna say like um like bringing it back to like roller coaster games and stuff like that like um a lot of the stuff that you can do in vr if you do decide to go down that route of having a roller coaster and kind of not giving the player the ability to control the movement themselves um the more you can kind of fit them into an area so like even myself playing certain roller coaster games if you can't view the coaster that you're in as much that will lead you to more motion sickness meanwhile if you just like lower the camera down or make the model a bit bigger and it kind of

encapsulates your vision a bit more you will be less likely to be sick just because you kind of you kind of feel more grounded um so yeah there's some design aspects like that that you can do i think the thing that really throws me off isn't as much of the horizontal movement i'm generally pretty fine with that it's the vertical movement like i i don't get motion sickness in a car but i i cannot do elevators like more than two floors in elevator just i i need to sit down for a moment so having any sort of vertical movement where you can see you're going up and down and like like that's the really bad thing about the roller coaster like when it's going

the flat parts are fine but as soon as you're going up and down like it really to me feels like you're going up and down as well yeah yeah no that yeah there's certain things that like are just going to trigger people more than others like um one of the things that like again personal experience as well as as what we were taught, is you can rotate the camera around. Say you're standing on the spot and you're turning. That can be okay for certain people, but the second you rotate it as if you're tilting your head,

that almost immediately will trigger people. So it's very much a thing of... Unfortunately, we're the guinea pigs most of the time, but just playing the hell out of it and just being like, okay, what works? What doesn't? What can we get away with in that respect? That's also one of the reasons why playtesting is great

because unfortunately, myself and Mark, one of the other developers, we're basically immune to motion sickness at this point we play through our game at like 10 frames a second we've had the screen freeze so our entire vision is just a picture

that's rotating with us as we're going that one's a tough one yes we've got past the point so we need people, even just Matt because he doesn't he doesn't develop and like play it as much so like he's a bit more susceptible and stuff like that like yeah unfortunately kind of some of it is just play test and see what what people feel

sick with what people are okay with curiously on that as well like we we weren't anticipating it but we assumed that you know we would get people at avcon that had that sort of level of like okay wow i gotta like sort of stop but across the entire weekend even with first-time vr users only one dude kind of said that his stomach felt a little funny um which like sort of blew us away because we were expecting you know like myself with my you know first experience with it like i felt unwell so it's interesting that like first time users even like with um our other game sort of project nightlight like both times times it's been relatively decent, even with climbing parts and stuff like that.

We've not really had anyone feel that sickness. Right, right. Which, you know, massive achievement. But yeah, it's an interesting sort of thing that we weren't necessarily prepared for the lack of you know what i mean yeah right i i know you showed the game off previously have you had people who were a bit iffy of it then and is a lot of that change maybe improvements that have happened to like the game development um we've shown project nightlight previously like oh sorry did i yeah no no

it's all good but the same name effectively um was so creative the um like what was the experience different when you showed that one off then um a few i think a few more people got a little bit sort of funky with that one but i think again it's just that thing of you know it was our sort of first go through of that sort of stuff so all that was a learning experience um as you know every time you show it off is but i think definitely we had a few more people not a lot but a few more for sure like sort of give us feedback on like okay well you know i'd like to like move a bit slower or like i'd like to like turn you know differently and stuff like that um which is stuff that we've sort of brought forward into

nova which i think is actually you know making a positive impact which is cool um but yeah like being the first time that we've done any sort of zero gravity like flinging yourself around climbing stuff like that like it was really cool to see that not many people bar one you know had any sort of side effects of that motion sickness which was really really awesome well that's i guess that's a that's a look maybe you just got a bad selection of people that are all really good even like the first timers yeah no it could be like there's that you know bias of that sort of stuff that we won't ever you know really know it's not like we stopped him afterwards when hey do you get motion sick it was just i think like

thanks for playing and they scurried off um but yeah that was like yeah a very interesting thing of like so far we've only had one guy get somewhat queasy, but not to the level of, like, I need to sit down and stop completely, which is cool. Do you, like, personally know people, like, outside your team that do get, like, badly motion sick who you can test things on? My grandma gets really motion sick, but I'm not prepared to chuck her in a headset. That's fair, that's fair. my grandma gets really motion sick but i'm not prepared to chuck her in a headset like i remember like being a kid and would just sort of be sitting on her lap and looks like bouncing around or whatever and she'd be like okay i need to stop i feel like i'm on a boat um so like if there was one contender for like this is going to make it or break it it would

be her but i'm yeah not going to just no on a headset and say go nuts. Understandable. Yeah. Other than that, I'm not really certain of anyone. You just haven't done a survey of your friends. Do you get motion sick? Can I get my game on you? Yeah. I think the big problem is not many of my friends, at the very least, have headsets. Right.

So not many of them have that knowledge of whether they are or not. very least have headsets right so not many of them have that knowledge of whether they are or not um and typically they're you know gamers through and through so they'll play whatever but they feel sick or not um but yeah it's just that thing of you know like you don't know until you know sort of thing um yeah so someone and i i think i've tortured my mates too much i think i think i've like i mates too much I think I've I remember getting my headset and it was like yeah for the first six months or so it was everyone so well having a VR

day where I just had everyone over and I'm like I don't even remember any of them having any issues to begin with but yeah it's they might now like they haven't done it in a while then you kind of do kind of lose resistance to it after a bit. Yeah.

That's how I definitely feel. Every time I get kind of used to it, it's like a couple of year break and then no. But to be fair, tech is getting better. So it's not as bad as like when I first did it. And a lot of games are also like, there are now games that are very clearly set up to not even have like motion sickness

be a fact like Beat Saber. Like when I first did VR, that just didn't exist as a game. People were trying to do, like most of the stuff people were doing in VR back then was the heavy movement stuff because no one really knew what the limits were here like yeah we did have vr headsets before but you know they're either incredibly expensive or you go back even

further to things like the virtual boy where there was this very big tech limitation than what you could do in the first place yeah yeah yeah i think you know it's a lot of that thing of trial and error. It's still, you know, an emerging technology in comparison to, you know, your typical gaming sort of scene. But even that took its time to, you know, get to a point where people were comfortable playing it sort of thing. So, like you said, you know, still emerging, still evolving and, you know, new and fun, exciting ways. So we kind of skipped over it

entirely. I don't know how we did that, but what is Project Nova? Would you probably explain that? Yeah, give or take half hour to this. What are you actually doing? Do you want to give the spiel or do you want me to give the spiel? You go nuts. I did enough of it.

I mean, we both did. So, Project Nova is a kind of a vr puzzle game set aboard the nova aurora which is a ship on its maiden voyage um you play as a engineer aboard uh never aurora um and yeah basically your job is to repair the ship as needed so you know you'll, you'll start off the game, you kind of get to experience a little bit of, like, the pre-launch and stuff like that, get yourself a little accustomed to the ship. Then you get chucked into stasis under the assumption of, like, we'll pull you out when we need things fixed and anything like that.

And, yeah, basically you get pulled out and find out things have gotten a lot worse than what you were hoping. And then, yeah, throughout the game, pulled out and find out things have gotten a lot worse than what you were hoping and then yeah throughout the game it's your job to try and get it um try get the ship back up and running and back onto its mission okay so why a vr puzzle game because like the previous game that you did was a vr horror game and both of these are very of the genres that you can get involved with in VR, like these are some of the, I guess, most, some of the biggest genres, right? Like that's sort of like the main focus that people are doing here.

What is it about Project Nova that makes it stand out from the crowd? Well, yeah, definitely the space climbing sections. Like that's something that going to Avcon as well as like from kind of conception was something that we wanted to be very unique. We had a look at other VR experiences and stuff like that. And we couldn't find anyone who was doing spacewalks and like actually letting you be in zero G

and spacewalk on the exterior of a ship the next one is kind of what went where what went sorry what went very well with project nightlight in just terms of like the atmosphere um in this one it's less of a horror atmosphere and more of a astrophobia sort of atmosphere so it's just kind of a thing of like you know making you kind of hyper aware you're aboard a tin can floating through space that if there's a crack in the hull you're getting ejected and that's going to be it um and then yeah uh sort of the third one would just kind of be some of the mechanics so we've just got like the um i'm pretty sure it's in some of the previews and stuff like that so we we've got like the welder and plasma cutter.

So as you're going through doing maintenance, you know, you're going to have to cut off panels, weld things back together and kind of things like that. I'm liking on the name now, but I know there was another climb. There was a rock climbing game that came out a while back. I think that was just one that was just called like Climber VR or something.

That might be what it is. Yeah. So I know there has definitely been climbing stuff, while back um i think that was just one that was just called like climber vr or something that might be what it is yeah so i know there has definitely been climbing stuff but i don't know i certainly don't know something involving like spacewalks that i at least i can't think of it maybe there is something yeah the biggest sort of game that is similar in that regard of like you know zero g sort of flinging yourself around um and obviously space game uh would be lone echo it's a game that is sort of exclusive to the quest um and got like a lot of funding from them from you know what we can tell and what sort of stuff like promotion and that sort of thing um so yeah like we couldn't find anything just sort of on Steam or available to the masses outside of that, you know. Which, you know, isn't even on Steam.

It's, like, exclusive to the quest. So, like, we saw it as an opportunity to, like, you know, jump in and fill a gap, you know. That's fair. So, why the space? Like, obviously there's that, but, like, was there any other reason for like the space aesthetic like do you guys have like a general interest in that sort of that sort of part of sci-fi or yeah i mean yeah it's always cool to see spaceships and futuristic sort of stuff um but i think it was also just a fun sort of different challenge like the the first game we did was set sort of stuff. But I think it was also just a fun sort of different challenge. Like the first game we did was set sort of 1980s to 1990s-ish. And to then jump, you know,

100 plus years into the future, it's just a fun little creative challenge to work out how things are going to look and that sort of stuff as well as just unique storytelling opportunities for you know that sort of period of time in that genre i'm sure there are also a lot of challenges that come with the space stuff like from the programming side trying to make that feel like it makes sense like like in given an interpretation that kind of actually would be what that kind of feels like and getting that that tweaked in at a level that really it it sort of works right but it isn't so much that people lose control over the uh actually trying to play the game. Yeah, no, definitely. With the character that we have and the way it's programmed and stuff like that, I had to go through and basically

reprogram or give it a different mode to work in to be like, oh, you're now in 0G mode, so you're floating, you're a lot more of just a physics object compared to when you're walking around the ship, you have a lot more control over your movement. But even then, when you're a lot more of just a physics object compared to like when you're walking around the ship you have a lot more control over your movement um but even then like when you're in zero g from ourselves testing it we're like okay the player can't just be a physical like a physics object and get yeeted out into space um because like uh yeah it just kind of felt like you you

were suggesting where to go rather than having control right so like even when you're in space and stuff like that you kind of have like it's a very slight nudge but you can like nudge yourselves in directions and stuff like that um just purely for like playability and things like that of like if you can't you just kind of slowly floating away from the handle going oh oh no, oh damn, oh damn. And then you need to have some sort of systems like either reset you or send you back to a checkpoint or something like that. But if it was happening constantly, it would stop being fun very quickly. Yeah.

So we wanted to, well, I mean, through playtesting and stuff, we've kind of decided on like, okay, this is zero G. You're a physics object, you can throw yourselves around we've gotten to the point playtesting it where we can get to certain sections and just skip massive climbing sections because we're just like if I throw myself at roughly this angle I'll land on that ladder

and things like that that's kind of fun to do as a developer you kind of eventually get over the fear of being out there and floating in space and you're just kind of like oh no i can muck around with this that's i didn't even think of that like yeah i guess with the zero g stuff like those climbing sections if you knew the angle to like go out you could just fling across that's cool that does add something like really really cool to like because yeah those look as i said there was the vr climber game but chucking the zero g stuff in there does add a whole new dimension there that just wouldn't be possible otherwise

yeah like yeah if you if you're kind of ballsy enough or confident enough you can just skip sections and kind of throw yourself around have a little bit of fun with it but there is still definitely that underlying like if i mess this up i'm just going to be sailing past that handle i'm aiming for floating into the abyss i'm sure that does create a problem when it comes to bugs that may not have been anticipated where you can possibly throw yourself in a way that gets yourself stuck between objects that you shouldn't be able to get into and like potentially skipping into bits that you shouldn't be able to get to earlier than you should be things like that

yeah well i mean part of it is us ourselves trying to find those um like and inevitably like i'm sure someone will magically throw themselves at just the right angle to avoid everything we put in the way and skip something but yeah no we've for those particular sections there's a lot of um kind of respawn areas and things like that just so like you're semi kind of stuck to where we want you to go and where the intended experience is but like you still do have that little bit of play um so yeah it's like we try our best to make sure that you can't do anything like that and even then like those sections uh like you know if you do skip some of the climbing stuff it's not like it's not

like a big mandatory thing like it's kind of more about like look if you want to have fun and throw yourself around we'll we're kind of cool with you doing that yeah i'm more talking about like doing something that causes a puzzle to behave in a way that shouldn't have happened or you skip a certain piece of a puzzle things like that oh yeah yeah i mean in the climbing section specifically there's not really a chance of it happening i mean i saw one guy at the very last guy avcon managed to somehow push himself into the ship like while still in zero gravity i don't know how we did it like i blinked and i turned around the screen was dark and i'm like where are you and he sort of ducked slightly and i could see like the airlock i'm like how but um yeah i think it's just one of those things where it's like unless you can

repeat it and work it out and see it happen more than once and try and like sort of decode what the hell is happening in your brain like it's just one of those things where it's like sort of decode what the hell is happening in your brain like which is one of those things where it's like bugs are buggy they're like cockroaches they're like they slide in under the like the fridge and stay there until you know someone finds them yeah that definitely highlights the importance of like qa and testing it like the more people we can get it in front of before it kind of goes public you know fingers crossed the more we can find any of those sort of like skips or you know game breaking bugs and things like that yeah at the end of the day you're gonna have bugs no matter how much you try but at least trying to eliminate the ones that you can sort of accidentally fall into like yeah because it's one thing of a bug requires doing

like pixel precision movement and landing at this specific point doing these specific events before and no one like unless they're specifically going either way to look for that they're probably not going to have it happen but if it's something like you try to grab a handle and for whatever reason that handle at that like specific point isn't solid for example like stuff like like that that breaks the experience definitely which like luckily a lot of those we can find ourselves in house it is definitely like

there are a whole bunch of edge cases which like once you just give it to random people they just like sit there and go like oh what if I just do this what if I like grab a screwdriver and jam it in between here do I get yeeted out into space kind of sit there and go like oh what if i just do this what if i like grab a screwdriver and jam it in between here yeah yeah do i get yeeted out into space and yeah that's that that is kind

of one of the um disadvantages or annoyances of doing vr like uh people have a lot more freedom which like it's great like it's one of the reasons why i love playing vr games because i can kind of do whatever i want you know if i want to stand there for 20 minutes dancing i can go for it um but like yeah as a developer it's definitely one of those things of like you kind of have to especially from like our previous project and watching people stream it and put up videos and stuff like we kind of start getting a sense of like okay we know someone is going a sense of like okay we know someone is going to pick up that screwdriver we know someone is going to like try to jam it into a doorway or do this and that let's ourselves try that beforehand just in case yeah no i i you know

like i always love bugs where it's just, it's some weird setup. Like, there's a, you mentioned the screwdriver thing. It kind of reminds me of a bug that Baldur's Gate 3 had, where you could skip 90% of the game by killing one of your party members, putting them in a box, and then lighting the box on fire. And for some reason, it would launch you to the final boss oh okay because of course it would naturally that's it's the exact set of circumstances that

lead to the final boss I don't even want to think about the Baldur's Gate 3 devs and some of the stuff that they've probably had to try and reproduce or just like some of their playtesting like I will say like that game, like I want to play it so bad just because of like hearing all the stories

about people who are like, oh yeah, like I was on like this mission with Karlak. I did this, that and the other. And then someone's like, who's Karlak? I never met that person. It's like, what? Yeah, there's a good reason why they decided there were certain things in D&D

that just could not be put in that game. Like, they could not add Wish. Wish was not going to happen. Don't ask for it, because that would be too much of a nightmare. There's already enough ways to break that game. They don't need that as well. Oh, yeah.

I think that's, like, any open-world game at game at like any decent scale where you have to like venture and there's npcs and west and all that sort of stuff it's like it is physically impossible to test everything yeah and it only gets harder the bigger you go um so like it's it's funny when people like pick on betesda for their buggy experiences and chairs sticking through tables and all that sort of stuff but then you think about the scope of their games and how big and how much there is to do

and it's like I can forgive a chair being stuck in a table I get to do this quest for 12 hours and have a heart-wrenching emotional story the chair can be a bit messy skyrim is a great example of a game that has like weird bugs that you have to just be stupid to go and try like i think if you go to the the mage guild or whatever it's called and you walk up

against a wall with a plate in front of your face you can walk through some of the walls just like yeah i i remember watching someone um they weren't really speed running the game but they knew a lot of speed running tactics for skyrim and i remember watching yeah it was like i think they condensed that part of the video down but it was like three or four hours of like there is a very particular dungeon you go to for story reasons but if you go to the back of it with like a basket or a bucket or something you can like glitch yourself through the wall to pull the lever that's on the other side to then get into the dungeon to get some items or like to hit a quest marker that will

then start you and i was like oh god yeah people would often do that because the way they handled um shop or like vendor inventories is they just put a chest under the under the merchant so you could just go and take everything from the chest if you worked out how to get out of the map some of those chests were not put in a proper location and did actually stick out of the terrain as well so you could access yeah i think it was one in front of a cave somewhere that you could just access from the surface I remember doing that playing Starfield I can't remember what the planet was called

there's a very particular planet and you go there and if it's not broken why fix it so they kept the same sort of inventory systems for the vendors and I remember you walk into the middle of town there's a muddy patch and if you crouch and look at a particular angle you can get their inventory i like there is a lot of the the bigger your game gets the more challenges it's gonna have this isn't just a game thing this is a thing for just all software. The more things that you can mess around with in a program, the more ways it can break.

There's this... I don't remember if it was an XKCD or some other comic, but it was about testing a project. So if you're testing an input field, a developer is going to test it with one, ABCDEFG. They're going to test it with random symbols and all of this other stuff, and then the user is going to test it with one abcdfg they're going to test it with like random symbols and all of this other stuff and then the user is going to come along and they're just going to pour water on it yeah yeah yeah that is the perfect analogy yeah like it's definitely a thing

of like we sit there and you know we'll be like okay this system this is how you input things into it this is what we're expecting to get out we test it we're like okay this system this is how you input things into it this is what we're expecting to get out we test it we're like okay that seems to work you give it to like just anyone and then it's like i'm gonna put this into it it's like but you you can't you should only be able to put this in but like well i did and this is what i got out of it and he's like that shouldn't work but okay yeah yeah yeah yeah and having that freedom in VR, like, as you were saying before,

I imagine it just adds, like, a bunch of weird variables. Like, you wouldn't have to worry about being able to pick up an item and stick it between a door if you're not in VR. Yeah, no, that was... Like, obviously, like, when we're going through and studying a lot of it is more aimed to draw aimed towards like more traditional video games and things like that um and so like they don't spend a whole bunch of time like i think all up we had like

five weeks or something on the vr module that we went through it was very much one of those things of like developing project nightlight the like first project we made that was one of the things that we had to really get our heads around like there's a whole bunch of stuff that in traditional video games you can do like if you want to get the player's attention you just grab that camera face it towards where you want the player to look and you're done but like with vr it's like well we can't move the camera the camera is your head if we move your head you are gonna throw up so like yeah it's even just some of the stuff of like okay we want the player to pay attention here okay move the camera the camera is your head if we move your head you are gonna throw up so like yeah it's even just some of the stuff of like okay we want the player to pay attention here okay

the level is gonna have to be you know this this and this and then you get to a hallway so the player is looking forward and then we can like pull off that thing um like i like i remember for nightlight there was a particular section where we wanted to have like a ghost or a shadow kind of walk in front of the player. So we were just kind of like, well, we can't just have that happen. We can't turn the camera and make them look. So we had to put in specific hallways and stuff like that

just so we could be like, okay, let's have that little jump-scary sort of thing happen. Because we're hoping the player is looking this way. We definitely... I do remember watching a couple of people play it, and it's just one of those things of they're walking down the hallway, they just decide, oh, let's look at the wall for a second, and then it happens, and he's like, goddammit.

Or you have that one person who's like, I'm going to go through this hallway, you're looking backwards. Yeah, I... I think we actually did have someone do something like that. They were getting kind of terrified of what was going on. And they were like, I see a dark hallway. I know where this is going. And then they were just like, I'm going to walk through it backwards just to make sure. But yeah, freedom in VR is great. just to make sure but yeah

freedom in VR is great and horribly punishing as a developer because yeah it's a lot more work to just be like okay we need to like steer the player we need their attention here so like we can't just do this

now it's like a whole thing of like get some spotlights get something happening to draw their attention to it and yeah it's a lot more like just trying to get people's attention like in real life shockingly yeah like tutorialization is also just effectively it's like the same thing where it's like it's just incredibly difficult to pull off like you know traditional games you can have just like a little west system sort of up the top like you know your next mission is x like you could have that in vr but it would just be like stuck to your face and it'd kind of make you feel a little bit off i guess contextually it could make sense

if you set it up where you have some sort of like you you're're wearing a visor in the game. You can make it work. But especially for Nightlight, where it was set in the 80s slash 90s slash 70s, there was kind of a broad range of, we don't know where you are, but you're there. It was just like, how the hell do we make this... How do we tell them that they need to

pick up the walkie-talkie and pin it to their chest which shouldn't be a complicated thing and we had enough people just in testing going okay pick it up put it like pin to the chest and then like the actual game comes out and we've got people that spend 30 minutes in this room that would be me it it was it was just unbelievable to watch and like the streamers we could kind of forgive because they're like trying to keep you know like engage with their audience so they're not yeah i can guarantee that when i when when you stream the last thing you're doing is reading and paying attention to what the game wants you to do yeah we like the main sort of driving force in that game is the voice on said radio so i mean it was like a walkie talkie thing um but like we had a guy he picked it up he's like oh okay pinned it on his chest and then he was like well i'm not gonna listen to a word this

guy says and it's the it was like the only way we could tell people what we wanted them to do and we were like my guy if he's talking listen like we get it but come on it was it was just one of those like rude awakenings of like okay this is going to be harder than we were anticipating so we ended up just sticking up posters all over the walls kind of kind of telling you what to do in like a roundabout way but even then people would like just look at it and go like walk off it's like okay go throw the donut for another 20 minutes and then come back and you know scream at the fact the elevator's not working it's it's okay you'll get there eventually yeah it's also a thing of like you're fighting like the immersion of the experience.

Obviously, VR immersion is one of the really good things about it. You feel like you're in the world. So with Nightlight, it was very much the thing of we don't want text boxes and things kind of appearing. We want it to just be like, no, we want people to feel like they're in that environment. So it's like, well, we can't have a text box we can't have like glowing ghost versions of the controllers to show you the controls and stuff so like we had to kind of get inventive so we had like um for the controls we had like a whiteboard that had it all like scribbled on which we actually did do on a whiteboard and we had to take pictures and then matt photoshopped it in that that was that was a fun

few afternoons trying to like draw little cartoon hands holding like a controller and it was like i reckon i think one of them took me like an hour just to try and actually get the pose of this little cartoon glove to do what i wanted to do and then people come into the game and like oh cool a whiteboard just draw all over it and you're like and they're like now how do i grab things it's like my god again any form of spatial awareness yeah it is one of the things with um project nova that like because we are going we're going more sci-fi it's like it won't take you out as much if we like pull up a hologram or something like that like it's just very much so within the genre so it's like luckily luckily that's like a little bit nicer for us um like yeah with the tutorial that we did for nova it's just like no we just have glowing glowing

controllers to be like press this button to walk because you know it's so much nicer so much easier i was just thinking about a really stupid way that you could deal with the uh not being able to show things you just have the wind blow and it just slaps them in the face with a piece of paper and it just shows the controls even then they'd look at it go oh what's that and then chuck it like they'd scrunch it up and just lob it into a bin like it would not even cross their mind it could it could be bright red and say this is what you need to read and they'd be like hmm not if people like to criticize the idea of a lot of our triple a games using yellow paint to indicate like where you need to go what you need to grab but there's

a very good reason why a lot of games do it some games like overdo it but there are there are especially games where they just have it's especially true where games like have climbing mechanics where you can't climb on everything yeah so it's not clear what is grabbable and what is not like you need some sort of indicator some sort of consistent indicator that shows you what you need to do and i i yeah i i don't know the best way you could handle that because at the end of the day you're going to have people that choose to not interact with whatever system you provide and i don't know there there comes a certain point right where someone is not going to interact with the information given to them and you try to hold their hand

as much as possible you can't solve it for everyone right you inhibit other people's experience by trying to hand hold those that really don't want it it's the balancing act

it's definitely something with our projects that we have to like that really don't want it. It's the balancing act. It's definitely something with our projects that we have to go back and forth on, especially being indie devs. If you're a giant AAA, your game comes out, you have... Well, besides the fact that before your game comes out, you have a lot more money to do QA, so you're already in a better spot.

We put out a game I can't remember exactly how many streamers and stuff like that we had play Nightlight but I think it was like 5 to 7 so it's very much a thing so they were struggling with this is this something we actually need to worry

about or is this just them yeah is this a streamer problem yeah it's very much a pick your battle sort of thing which is like avcon was really nice for that in terms of like you know we do have like matt was saying earlier like you know you have the one guy who's getting motion sick but most people aren't so we're like okay so in terms of people getting motion sick for the game that's not going to be a big concern because whatever we're doing is working and um yeah we can with like a slightly

bigger test audience things like that like you know we can weed out those problems that are like okay no it's just like one or two people like that can that can be something we can consider and you know you know later on if we do more testing maybe it becomes a valid point and we need to do something about it but like you know we can choose our battles now we can be like okay no one was able to work out how to do this puzzle that's that's a problem yeah right you know even like at avcon we had some of that um like in terms of using your you know multi-tool like weldy cutty thingo um that the official name that that is on the actual side of the yeah it's engraved like it's um it was a thing was like uh anything that's got this symbol on it you can cut with your tool anything that's got this symbol you need to like weld it back on right and people

read okay so anything that's red i need to cut and anything that's blue i need to well but it's it's a red symbol and a blue symbol but they read just they just paid attention to red and blue and just discounted everything else right so the actual little cutting things were like glowing green so that they like you'd see them and pay attention and people were like okay i need to look for red things and just like wandered around the entire room and they're like it's right above what you're doing and the symbol was dead center on that thing and they're like uh-huh so that microchip on the other side of the thing that's got like a red light on it surely that's what i need to be doing and it's like no bud yeah it is one of those things of like developing like i mean you know as you were saying as much as

people give uh developers crap about the whole whole putting yellow everywhere to be like, climb here, that is definitely one of the things that we consider as we're going. For us, we very much came up with the language of, oh, anything that's green, that is your interaction. So any doors that the player can go through, any computers the player can interact with or just like you know things like that we're like okay that's got to be green because that means interaction which is why we did have it that like oh okay when you're cutting like that's green so it's like this is interaction but it's just one of those things of like you know through people playing it it's like okay that's not the associations people are making people are making like oh this thing is glowing red that's cutting so it's like one of those things of like we're just like okay well we'll keep green for like everything else so that way they know what computer screens they can

interact with what doors they can interact with but like yeah welding and cutting okay now we're changing that to be red and blue so you try to create a consistent design language and then not have other things overlap with that but you don't realize that people are noticing other things that seem like they shouldn't inter they shouldn't line up with that but they're not making the same connections that you made i guess that's sort of the problem with designing puzzles like puzzles and other consistent interactable systems are difficult because as you're designing it, and this is a problem with just designing

desktop software as well, as you're designing it, you have a very deep understanding of what it is that is interactable, what it is that is not. If you're designing, I don't know, take it out of game development, you're designing like an image editor, you know what each of the buttons do, so it doesn't matter if the icons that are there are just completely random.

You know what the button number five does, like you've programmed that button, but then someone who hasn't interacted with it before, they have to learn all this stuff from the ground up. And especially if you're doing things that maybe other games haven't done or you're doing things that other games have done but in a slightly different way, they might have a different idea of what it is

that you're trying to get them to do here. Yeah, precisely. No, it's definitely one of those things as we're developing. As you say, I guess No, it's definitely, it's one of those things, like, as we're developing, like, as you say, like, I guess kind of to take it to software where people might be a bit more familiar with, like, the whole reason why the save icon is a floppy disk. I was going to say the same thing. Yeah. Everyone always says that. It's just consistent design language like if we're doing if we're doing something that other people have done like we look into it and be like okay is there a consistent design language here like you know

if we're putting a save button in our game oh tons of people have done it oh lots of people use floppy disk okay we're using a floppy disk like it's kind of one of those things of um there's there's a very particular word for it but it's like symbology and things like that the associations of symbols and the meanings behind them and stuff like that, we kind of have to be aware of okay, if we're doing X, there is this symbol that's associated with it, so we should be using that symbol, because

at the very least it means if we localize the game and change the language that symbol should hopefully stay the same so if you know things bugger up then people can just go by the symbols but yeah it's it can be fun so what sort of puzzles exist in this game like what what have you played around with here uh currently a lot of them are just based around either cutting components off. So, for example, in the demo that we showed off, there's an electronic panel that malfunctions,

and basically you have to cut off the lid to it. Then a lot of the puzzles, a lot of the meat of the puzzles is currently just item interaction and item placement. So, again, that electrical panel, one of the circuits within it are fried, so you have to go up, rip the circuit out, you know, go find another one that's hidden around the room somewhere, so you've got to go look for it,

grab the new one, chuck it in to replace it. We do have plans for some of the later puzzles, like they'll be a little bit different and things like that, but, you know, generally I like to talk about stuff that is in the game 100 so um and then yeah the final thing is just welding so like you know again same puzzle electrical panel you cut it off you've replaced all the parts you need to put it back on weld it all back on so it stays together um that's kind of like the the meat of what most of the puzzles are once they understood like how the interactions work did you have people who were confused about some of the puzzles and didn't really get them or most of it like fairly straightforward

it's definitely like both yes and no like a lot of people like oh okay i gotta cut this thing off oh okay cool oh that thing's got a red light above it everything else is green okay i'll grab that cool oh i can grab it sweet oh what is it oh it's broken oh i have to replace it sweet find a replacement oh it's over there grab it bang other people but again it's just that thing of like how handholdy you want to be because you know we've already put this like microchip directly next to the thing that you got to do to then you know that first time you're doing it right make it clear so that moving forward you can you know understand that level of oh i've do this this and this which it worked much clearer

after that first initial sort of tutorial bit um but even then it was like some people just didn't get it but others picked it up straight away so it's like that it's that weird case of and it wasn't even just like first-timers weren't getting an experienced user's word. It was like, oftentimes, almost a solid mix. So it was just one of those things where I think it's just kind of dependent on

whoever's doing it. Eventually, most people got it. Some people got it straight away, others we had to nudge in the right direction, so it's just a thing of being aware of that sort of stuff um and yeah like how much you can actually help yeah like any of that sort of stuff like if it's a common thing like obviously we'll look into reworking puzzles or making things more obvious and things like that but yeah sometimes like you can't like the example that matt was kind of saying about like the circuit board it's like it's literally next to it we don't

really want to yeah it's kind of a weird awkward situation of like we want you to know what to do but we don't want to be handholdy because if we're handholdy that sets up an expectation of oh the rest of the game you're going to be handholdy right so we want to be like no we'll we'll show you how to like do this first one after that you know we'll let you go you can work things out like it's nicer for us because you know we don't have to put in a whole bunch of guides as well as like it's nicer for the player because you know they feel like they're actually like accomplishing it and like you know they're the ones that are sitting there thinking like, okay, I'm working out what I'm doing.

It's not a thing of I'm being told what to do. So it's just nicer for everyone, really. Puzzle games can be a bit of a challenge for me. People have seen me play puzzle games. Sometimes there's games that just click with me. Others, others... There's a reason I don't stream puzzle games that often, and my usual go-to is, like,

right now I'm playing through Devil May Cry 4. I just run into a room, I click buttons, things die. That's what I do. Or I'm also playing through Kingdom Hearts Birth by by sleep so i run into a room i spam thunder surge things die i don't have to think very much about what's going on yeah no no 100 it is again that sort of thing of like if it's not a genre or something that you're used to you know it will be more difficult whereas people that you know jump in and they're like oh i've done stuff like this before even just like escape roomy

type experiences like in real life like if you're super into that like okay i pull a broken thing out i'm gonna have to find a replacement to put broken thing in so it's like just that kind of vibe i guess it's like if you're familiar with it you'll get it if not it might be a bit more challenging but eventually you'll still get there it's just like it's tougher no i i even know from my own personal experience like i i do i'm not about to say i play every puzzle game ever but like you know there are i'm definitely a bit more of a puzzle gamer and stuff like that like i i love the room um i love that series but like yeah for me i'm just like i'll play through the room which is kind of point and clicky and stuff like that but if you put me in front of something like monkey

island or some other thing like that i'm just like i'm gone like i some games just like some genres or sub genres just like they just don't work for my brain. Point and clicks have always been one of those ones that I just can't because it's just like, oh, I have a towel. Ah, that must mean I break the window. It's like, what? Some of them just it's kind of down to the developer in terms of

making that clear and stuff like that. I know there have been numerous cases throughout the years of like games that have done puzzles that people didn't get like i can't remember if it was a monkey island one or another one but i remember there was um a puzzle a puzzle game from late 80s early 90s or something like that that a lot of people struggled with and it was because like a lot of the game had been very methodical and it was just i pick things up combine them do whatever but there was like a particular section we had to get past like

a bull or like some other aggressive animal and it was like a time-based thing where it was like oh no you just have to aggressively click get past to get past and i just remember watching videos everyone being like how what i don't understand this is just stupid like you spend the entire game just pointing clicking getting items putting them wherever and then this just becomes a reaction thing for some reason right which i think is the thing in general like when it comes to gameplay and payoff in like a sort of finale type situation like you spend the like majority of your game doing you know x y and z don't then just fully flip the script right at the end and expect people to

understand exactly what they have to do um as well as like try have the gameplay and sort of what you've taught them count at the end you know not like hey here's this whole puzzle game and now to win you have to do it out with a bunch of enemies it's like right right yeah like the so it's using mechanics to build up to like a climax rather than yeah getting to some big point and it's like hey now you're playing a rhythm game enjoy yeah exactly unless that becomes your game of like you know i remember playing like near uh automata i was gonna say this is this was actually a real i was referencing a real thing um yeah draconguard 2 i believe is the one i'm thinking of where the game and so the gate the rest of the game actually it's game, so Drakengard was the series before Nier.

It continues into it. I believe Drakengard 2 ended with a 30-minute rhythm game segment, where if you failed it, you had to go back to the start of the segment. Now, Yoko Taro is a psychopath and hates everyone, especially his players.

So this does not surprise me that he done, that this was the thing that happened in one of his games. Like, he's had a number of games where like nia obviously had the option spoiler for nia automata i give the option to delete your save file at the end of the game to help other players yeah if you get the super secret ending but um he's done other games where if you fail it will delete your save file um gosh that's just but like even even same sort of like yeah gaming series like near automata like the amount of times that game changes like genres or like controls and stuff like that it it does it a lot but it works because like you get used to it and you kind of get used to like oh okay we're swapping up we're doing a bullet hell section where i'm you know flying through and now i'm dodging bullets and having to take

out enemies oh okay now we're back to the more hack and slash gameplay right within the first 10 minutes of that game you have a understanding of like a lot of the range of what it does like you do i believe in the first 10 minutes you have the the bullet hell segment then you have the hack and slash and i i think a hacking segment might be very shortly after that anyway so maybe in the first like 30 minutes to an hour of that game you have like a good understanding of what's going on

yeah which again if the whole thing of changing up gameplay styles is a big part of the game then doing that towards the end in like a final climax makes sense like you make use of all of these different things that you've learned but to go from like one to just a completely different thing it's like where's the correlation sort of thing right right but some games still manage to

do it it still works oh yeah no i mean i think everyone's probably guilty of it at some point like you know you're from oh yeah this you know you've got this really cool puzzle game and I think everyone's probably guilty of it at some point. You know? You're from, oh, yeah, we've got this really cool puzzle game and you know what would be really cool is if we had guns and stuff, big fight scene. It's like, yeah, that would be cool, I agree. But.

But do we have any of that in the rest of the game? No. I'm blanking on the game. That co-op game where you escape from a prison. Yeah, no, another one. A Way Out? A Way Out, yes.

Yes, where... Once you get to the final segment, it turns into a third-person shooter. Yep. Yep. The whole rest of the game cooperative like you need each other to complete these like puzzles and stuff there's a few shooter segments throughout but it's not like the primary gameplay loop in the slightest and then it's like it was a cool twist and a like really interesting way to go about the ending so like i mean at least they had it peppered through but like yeah no it was very much a and now this is where we are it's like

have you played um it takes two i haven't i've seen okay some footage but like it was very very like little like because yeah well each chapter in that game it basically changed like you get a new ability for each chapter but some of the chapters are entirely different games like there's one part where it turns into basically diablo and there's another bit where it's like a third person shooter and like it it sets it up pretty early though things are going to change like each time you get a new ability but then as you go further it goes even more down that route like not only just new ability but like okay we're gonna take that to the extreme now now it's a whole different genre that's great yeah no like i i kind of i can't remember who i watched play it but i remember watching it and

it's like you get towards like the i think it's like towards like the space segment i don't remember one particular section i was like oh yeah like the guy he can change size and the um girl she has like magnetic or gravity boots or whatever and then it's like um now we're a side scroller for a couple of minutes i suppose correct me if i'm wrong is the nature of it not like it's kind of a story like different stories like about this sort of like paired doing different sort of things basically each like each chapter is them doing trying to do some sort of task to repair their marriage effectively um usually the the it's one of those things where it's like hey you're doing this thing that seems completely unrelated and then the the narrator who's bringing you along

the way is like and here's the lesson you learned it's just like yeah did i i sure if you say thanks for letting me know i appreciate it did i i don't know i've been spent i've spent the last 20 minutes yelling at like my partner or whoever i'm playing with because they were doing the wrong thing yeah but yeah that's a game that like sets it up fairly early on that things are gonna like change throughout rather than just being like a surprise here you go enjoy yeah yeah like um kind of to bring it back to vr and slightly dunk on valve or just kind of say a complaint um like playing through half-life alex like as you're going through you're playing through the entire game you keep finding resin you're upgrading your guns

like solid gameplay love it but then it's like last level oh we take away all of your guns and now to like do combat you're like throwing like weird organic pus balls at people to like get through the final section like everyone on this team

and stuff like that like most of us have well yeah most of us have played it like early on this team and stuff like that like most of us have well yeah most of us have played it like early on in development and stuff like that one of the things that everyone was like kind of we should be doing is like just play vr stuff and like yeah that was always one of our grievances with that game we're like dude game is solid but like that last section just kind of like takes away all of the achievement like i've gone through i've upgraded all my guns i'm expecting like a last final battle where i get to like use them and do whatever and then it's like and yeah for some reason we take away all your guns and you can't do anything except throw balls at people may or may not have been what i was

referring to but trying to keep it vague yeah no i yeah like there's some games that i play where i'm like this is an incredible game and then all of it just feels wasted because of just some weird way they want to end it and like it's sad when it is really sad when you play such a incredible game and it's just like well the last 30 hours have been good but but that last 10 minutes yeah it it's it spoils it it leaves like which i mean an ending is a hard thing to pull off it's you know trying to especially for a long game like that you know find a payoff that's worthy of all of this work and effort that you put in and all the fun and joy that you've experienced but like to then sour it is like the ultimate challenge of like okay we built it up

we built it up we built it up crap yeah yeah it's like that that cliff it's either like a bridge or it like crumbles it's even in even in films and stuff you know satisfying ending is one of the biggest challenges that there is um you know sound like an english teacher yeah it's like mastering an ending is almost impossible but trying to at least make it satisfying enough to people that have experienced what they've experienced is the goal yeah have either of you played the original god of war trilogy the ps2 ones no i want to so badly okay well i i should say i have under the caveat of i think it was god of war one i got stuck in a room okay so i couldn't it was basically it was basically like

a u-shaped room and you had to kick a box to get around but it's all under a timer i couldn't i couldn't yeah okay i got stuck there i can't remember exactly where it is i swear it's like somewhere where yeah it's somewhere during that i don't i think it was one but i remember just getting stuck there and just being like i want to finish this goddamn game but i can't do this puzzle i'm too slow well i'll say what it is without spoiling the story elements then. So at the end of the game, during the big final boss segment, there's a bit where you have to protect someone. And it is just throwing hordes and hordes and hordes of enemies at you.

And it goes for like 10, 15 minutes. And if you make a mistake, you go back to the start of the segment and the person you're protecting takes like five hits and they die so the rest of the game is so fun and then it's like oh my god can this just finally end already I've been doing this for two hours it's the ultimate insult the ultimate swaberoo haha last mission is an escort mission yeah like when a game sets itself up is like like when i'm playing like a souls game i expect i'm

gonna get to a boss it's gonna take me three hours to do but like when it suddenly changes like that's when i'm like oh my god let me stop playing already yeah especially like the god of war games there's so much fun just hacking and slashing and throwing enemies around the place and all that sort of stuff and then it's just like oh no now I have to protect this person and make sure they don't die so it's just a thing of like I can't just be over here juggling

harpies or something like that like now I have to run back to the other side of the room to go protect the person because like one guy got past me yup interestingly it's an absolute tangent we're on a tangent anyway

alright, groovy with the only God of War game that I've played so far is the first one for the PS4 like the 2018 remaster like I've wanted to play the old ones but i've never gotten around to it and they were like a bit before my time so it was just that thing of you know being too young to actually play it in my strict household um but i found that in

playing like through 2018 the bosses and like bigger enemies that like are meant to be like the big challenging ones I did in one go because a lot of it was just quick time sort of stuff whereas the actual hash pack and slash elements of like the rest of the enemies in just general traversal

and like the one little bastard like the flying guy on the water planet like he hits you and everything goes dark I was on that for like three hours it was 4am and I was like I need to go to bed I've got class in the morning

but I want to kill him and then I went to bed I came back to it the next day and I smashed it first try that's more infuriating but like I found the smaller enemies harder because it wasn't necessarily quick times it was like just learning patterns

right yeah I think the thing is like especially with that game it's the combat system is very much so developed around you kind of being more 1v1 or 1v2 so it's like the second it's like three people it's like okay no i have to annihilate this guy because otherwise i'm getting overwhelmed

and you know like you know you can swap weapons and yada yada yada but it's very much sort of thing like i just played with the axe the entire time like yeah they did so well with the combat in regards to like i mean all the weapons to be honest that's how I felt playing Sekiro as well where it's like 1v1 combat is really good the second is a second enemy it's like just how do I get you two apart how do I do it

just panic panic panic how do I like stun this guy for a moment so I can like get away and just deal with the one guy rather than having to try to deal with both of you yeah yeah i i that was a really fun game that like zekiro is basically a it's an action puzzle game like really that's what it is honestly that's the way i like to think of a lot of the souls games but there's one thing i was going to bring up earlier about um puzzle games the uh the games that really make sense to me are less of the, you wouldn't really

consider it a puzzle game, but when you think of it at like an abstract level, it kind of is. When you have like really complex platformers, like a game like Celeste, where it's like the platform is incredibly challenging, but a lot of the challenge also comes from working out how to navigate around the level. Like, it's not just a matter of getting your jump timing correctly. It's, like, where do I even start to look at this problem? Once you get to some of the, like, later areas in that game, they get really, really complex,

especially when you start doing, like, B sides and then try out C sides sides things get ridiculous very quickly yeah i i haven't personally played the game but i've seen um some gameplay from like early stages and then some from the late stages just like the late stages all i'm seeing is just the character floating because it's like just one of those things like oh i've got a dash and jump and yeah it introduced new mechanics as well to these walls yeah it's yeah by the end i'm like okay this is just like a mario maker level where the creator was like i'm gonna make everyone hate me there are like a one percent pass rate there are a lot of uh the models have gone insane with that game like there are some levels

which are basically designed to only be taz possible and some people try to do them by hand but they're like you need pixel precision movement for like 20 jumps in a row like crazy things like that yeah no i i have heard about some of like the modding and stuff like that um in i can't remember if it was the games plus discord or uh the adelaide uh the yeah adelaide game developer discord um there are a couple people there that worked on some of the mods for the games and stuff like that and like yeah they get like like modders in general general are crazy some of the stuff that they pull off that reminds me of the I think it was a couple weeks ago

there was the Fallout London yeah, yeah, yeah the Fallout 4 fan-made mod where it was like, oh yeah, we're just recreating massive sections of London and all this oh god i i want to have a shot of playing that just to see like what they've done with it but like it does seem like it's a little finicky and complicated to get going because like bethesda brought out the

next gen update and apparently that just messed everything up for them because they've spent like however many years making this mod i remember like oh we're gonna change this stuff for like five to seven years ago like when i first got my like youtube account like i was super into fallout at the time because i was playing through four so i was watching a lot of content for it and then yeah so like fallout miami was another one but like i think either it was the same people sort of working on or that same kind of vibe where it's just like a huge mod. But yeah, then London is like, oh wow, this looks

wicked. Is this like an actual thing? And it's like, no, it's just a fan-made thing. And it's like, wow. And then, yeah, I hear it's going to be released and then see articles about how they've had to push back the date because Bethesda released their next-gen update. And I think their quote was bethesda never loans which i chuckled that but it was that thing of like i don't have that same sort of understanding of it at like that level that they do but it's like i can i can see how them just jumping in and fixing up some stuff and playing with things on the back end

without sort of discussing with these people that have been working on this massive thing however many years it's going to affect them sort of thing yeah i hadn't really been following um that game but i i do occasionally pop into things like skywind and sky bolivian which for anyone who doesn't know is remaking Oblivion and Morrowind in Skyrim. And like, I can only imagine just the amount of effort something like that takes and the amount of passion you need to have to make something like that. Yeah.

I can only strive to have that much passion. I just, I just remember seeing memes and stuff like that um that was you know kind of quotes from people basically saying how like you know if people aren't being paid they'll be so lazy and then it's like oh yeah here's like that minecraft model map that's like the like library of alexandria with like all these like forbidden texts and things like that that people in other countries don't have access to and i'm like yeah it seems about right like if people are passionate enough about it they don't care about being paid or not like they will just make that thing so it's like

definitely like yeah like you got fallout london you've got like yeah the um marowind and oblivion and stuff like that being made in skyrim and it's just like, if people are passionate enough about it, they will just do that thing. Absolutely. Like, I don't know, modders are another beast. They're a different breed. Absolutely.

Especially seeing some of the stuff that they can pull off. Skyrim and Fallout 4 are definitely two of the bigger more well-known ones like especially skyrim like modding scene behind that's ridiculous but you know seeing that and it's like oh yeah i made a mod for skyrim i turned it into an 8-bit dungeon crawler and it's like first off why second off what like i there like there are other games that have this as well usually it's any game that has like a big scene around it is always gonna have at least a couple of people who

are like this this is this is my time to shine even if they don't the devs don't provide any like dev tools you'll still find people who are like i am going to spend all this time working it out and especially when it's a custom engine right like if it's a game in building unity and unreal like that gives the like the people who are doing modding at least something to work off of but if it's some like weird custom engine this is the first game using it and people still work it out i did um i think back on like the uh people who were doing like early pokemon rom hacks like nowadays there is a lot of tooling available to easily do rom hacking especially for the gba stuff there's a

lot of stuff there for ds stuff as well but if you go back to like the early stuff people were modding the like the ROM files directly they weren't using any of these fancy tools where you can just like drag and drop shit around and easily create new areas like they were writing assembly and actually building crazy shit

oh yeah recite the ancient text to me which I was there when they were written oh yeah no like i mean it's definitely one of those things like you know founding modders and stuff like that like yeah people who are taking like you know pokemon red and blue and like all this stuff and emulating it's like the amount of work that they have to do to work out like how this is working and how i'm gonna be able to do anything and this is insane like nowadays it's like you know even just modding stuff nowadays it's like a lot of people use like nexus mod manager and stuff like that and it's like you know back in the day when you first

started doing it it was like i know you need these files you need to put them in here you need to edit this so then that looks at this file and like there was so much stuff and it's like nowadays it's just like no we've made an entire custom program it'll just you just click a button the mod is in it works like i i started playing minecraft back during the uh the beta and back then there was like i think very early beta like 1.31 something like that um and there was a modding scene back there like that there was no tools for it but people were people were putting mods together and a lot of the a lot of like early mod packs coming out back then and trying to get those mods to work together when there was a lot

of overlapping like item data and the people who put together like the early like feed the beast and things like that those were crazy people yeah no i i remember i don't i don't even know when i first like when i first mucked around with minecraft but i remember yeah like watching other people play it and seeing like some of the shaders and like embs and like all that sort of mod stuff and i was like oh yeah i'll give that a shot i just remember it was like an entire day trying to get one shader to work because it's just like there's like basically no tutorials or nothing I'm following to get this to work it's just like okay this guy said in this one YouTube video to do this thing I found this online forum where this guy's saying do this thing as well excellent now some stuff's working

yeah i was at that point just trying to download a bloody texture pack back in the day of like minecraft.net or whatever it was like okay is this one going to give me a virus oh it has oh no then this is my family computer why is it screaming at me what's an ad fly i don't understand yeah we've already gone through that uh plenty by that point with our limewire so you know oh yeah those good old days i'm like oh hey i you know what this particular thing okay now let's play the gambling game. I want to download New Divide by Linkin Park. Why have I got a virus? I just like Transformers, man. Come on.

Oh, God. So we should probably talk about your games more. That's fine. Your previous title, project nightlight so what is the what was the premise with that one i'll take this one i guess yep yeah okay so in project nightlight you are a night guard on their first night on the job in this government facility called the department of blank also just known as the department it's your job to you know secure the facility and make sure that everything's you know locked up where it's meant to be all that sort of thing

you're guided through the game by the facility itself by the like other person on the walkie-talkie which you sort of get at the start of the game. And upon getting to the sort of more secure floor of the facility, you discover that things have gone awry. There's an artifact that is meant to be in containment, which various pieces are missing. So you have to go explore the different levels of the facility to then bring everything back together and ensure that it's back safely where it needs to be. And then some weird shit happens. So how long ago was the uh was that project started um that project was very early

very early concepted um sort of in through 2021 which is when we formed as a team through the graduate diploma at um a and then in that, we sort of, you know, as a team decided that we wanted to do a VR game and we had that knowledge sort of going in. And then in terms of market testing and what we thought would be best in terms of making, you know, like a narrative or making the most of VR to begin with,

we figured, you know, a narrative game would be really cool because there's not many of them out there. Because, you know, at that point, Alex had sort of blown Up and boneworks was doing really well so it was that thing of like we want to give people something to be able to play and then You know we figured okay. Well, what can we make the most of VR with and you know Immersion is the key sort of thing and we're like well, what's more immersive than a bloody horror game?

Where you know, if you're scared you can't actually look away from the screen but apparently you can just face the other way down a hallway and moonwalk down um but yeah it was like this so it just made sense like the ideas clicked um and then yeah from there we sort of spent the year doing research on it like validating it market testing it and you know looking into gaps in that sort of field in terms of like a vr sort of horror game like there's a bunch out there but it's just that thing of like what could we do that was cool we stumbled onto the liminal space sort of scene before it exploded and the backrooms went into a bajillion and five, seven thousand games like early to mid 2021

we were like this would be like a really cool thing to capitalize on because not many people are doing it and it seems like there's a demand for it so we validated it like you know got through, did a bunch of research on it and then by the time that we started active development

and through the release it had blown up and it was like well if we release it into that same sort of you know drive and thing it's going to be oversaturated so we pulled back on that a little bit um so it's not necessarily the main focus of it anymore but you definitely experience various liminal aspects to sort of what you're going through like enhanced with you know paranormal weird crap i'd never actually heard the term liminal space before like i i was aware of the concept but I've not heard someone say that before. Yeah, it's effectively, I think the literal transition, oh, sorry, the literal definition is, like, a transitional space. So, like, you know, say, like, a corridor or something like that.

But what makes it more intense and, like, sort of eerie is the, like, vibe of, like of like you know like an empty like shopping mall like an empty corridor or whatever like it's that feeling of like there should be life here but it's so devoid right it just gives that eerie feeling of like okay something could happen it's just like like that weird uncanny valley but like for a space that exists right um which like there's like subreddits on it and there's a whole discord that i was in for like a whole last year um yeah like that's when we discovered the whole thing it was like this would be really cool if we could like translate some

like either these specific environments into this sort of game and that sort of stuff and then obviously the back rooms blew up and it was like well maybe pull back on that we can design our own sort of levels and spaces with this sort of stuff in mind. So, like, the first one is, like, a giant sort of office building where, like, there's, like, a massive sort of bullpen area of desks. And the next level you sort of go through, it's, like, a different, like, an apartment building

with, like, infinite floors stretching up and down. Then the final one is just a real like we call it like the liminal nightmare because it was a nightmare to make like it was just different like aspects of those two levels but like merged in ways that just don't really make sense in terms of like traditional you know geometry or architecture i guess um so yeah it was like a just a really cool thing that we stumbled upon we were like we could we can make this work um which was yeah really cool to bring to life i guess um yeah so when you went into that game like what assumptions did you have about a VR game and VR development that maybe didn't turn out to be true when you actually got people testing it?

That it wouldn't be that hard. I will say, one of the funnier ones, well, funny for everyone else, wasn't funny for me because I had to redo massive sections of the entire game, that people funny for everyone else wasn't funny for me because i had to redo massive sections of the entire game uh the people knew how to use doors yep um we had we had a doors update that's how bad we had a doors update no um in the in the first iterations of the game and the demo and some stuff like that like the doors were just doors like they were just on a hinge joint you just push the door open and the door opens we had people play it like you know local developers things like that um unfortunately doing vr stuff it's kind of hard to get testers just because you know

uh not as many people um but yeah like you know we put it in front of people people are like oh yeah this is how it's working. Some people were perfectly fine, other people were kind of a bit weary and just being a bit weird about it. We had a whole bunch of people who would basically walk directly into the door, stop, open the door completely, and then continue. And then we have other people who will grab the door as they go in and open it. But then yeah, once of got it out to the

public it just so many issues ensued of just like people not yeah not meshing well with the mechanic or the mechanic not meshing well with people um i remember seeing quite a few times of people like um opening doors uh kind of walking away walking back and you know the doors obviously they're physical objects and stuff like that but they kind of have like infinite force and it just kind of hit the player they get shot up through the roof and then suddenly they're on the outside level and we're like well that's gotta be fixed that was one of those big ones where it was like we know how to break the game based on how we know how it's meant to work.

We never just stood in the doorway. And it hurt so bad because one guy was like, so immersed. He was like genuinely getting spooked and we were like, it's actually going well. He got like an hour and a half in and then it happened. And he was standing in the doorway and it closed on him and he just jumped through the ceiling and we were like what the hell was that yeah and then from there everything just went downhill so quick and it was like brilliant but yeah it was like just one of those crazy little things of like you expect people to know

how to do something and then they just don't so we transferred all of like every door in the game like we already had some sliding doors and like that mechanic existing but we made every door in the game a sliding door even when like it doesn't technically make sense because certain doors were designed on angles where you need a hinge door, but these sliding doors just disappear into the wall because y'all don't know how to push a door. Even then, it's just that thing of like, we tested it, it was fine with most people,

so we didn't think it would... Not even didn't think it would be an issue, just never even crossed our minds that it could be a problem, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh crap, okay, people are actually struggling with this this so we have to go back and fix it i think it was like two weeks that it took me to like go through and replace every single asset make sure it worked like yeah yeah it honestly wasn't the replacing it was the play testing because there's

a lot of functionality assigned to those doors like you know it having puzzle elements and things like that like you know it's like oh you need this key to open this door and stuff like that so now it's like a thing of okay well that was working on that door now i'm gonna make it work on this door now i've got to make sure that that's actually working and that like if you bring these 30 other objects into that door it's not gonna like glitch out and open anyway the door's not gonna like clip into the floor rotate yeah uh yeah no that that was definitely like one of the bigger ones it's just like i mean to be fair like after that you know we do we do some research into doors and like every game developer is just like doors suck like even people are making more traditional

video games like i can't i can't remember the exact article, but I remember reading one that was from Naughty Dog talking about The Last of Us, and they're like, yeah, we spent six months or some ridiculous amount of time on the doors just because they just don't work. Obviously, by the end, they work, they're fine, it's all good.

But it's just a thing of like, yeah, no, apparently that's just a thing of like yeah no apparently that's just that's just a common issue is that doors suck at video games oh i think i found uh a ign last of us ign right up about uh about yeah an ign right up about it uh putting doors in video games is a nightmare say developers developers behind games like last of us 2 star wars or republic and others weigh in on the door problem in games so yeah uh fun fact everyone that that's an issue if there's a re if there is a re you know if there's a doorway and there's no door in it that's why because developers hate doors even the act of opening doors clunk is how either a player reaches out

and puts their hand on the doorknob which feels slow and requires line of animations or doors fly open magically automatically which breaks the immersion you're probably hoping to attain this immersion breaking is really the core of the issue which breaks immersion uh or what breaks immersion when a game aspect manually draws attention to itself in a negative fashion doors even implemented well do this frequently and players don't even notice they aren't there hmm yeah i get i you know i'd never thought of this problem but thinking back on some games that i've played like in sekiro i think every door opens away from the player then when i played like final fantasy 14 they do open towards the player but the doors are just not solid objects so they just don't matter at all they just you walk towards the door like it's like a you walk towards the guild the doors just they just open for you they're just people

they're just open doors for you it doesn't matter don't think about it you can just walk straight through the door. It's fine. We're not going to deal with this problem. There's one guy there who specializes in door magic. Just open the door for you. Yeah. I had never thought of this problem, but I guess...

And then VR, you also have the issue of, like, do... Because if you're coming from, like, a traditional game, then most people are not used to having to actually physically open a door in a game either so like they might walk up to the door and be like oh the door's locked because they the door's not opening we it wasn't even that we had a dude walk up and go so how do i open it and we're like he he so far grabbed everything in this room with his hands and then walked up to the door and said how do I open it and we're like buddy how do you open a door in real life and he was like

oh yeah and just grabbed it walked straight through it was just like that mental thing of like doors yeah doors doors huh but yeah no it's definitely a thing of like VR is kind of the worst

of both worlds in that respect like you know again like you know we have to do a doors update so we start looking at what other games are doing you look at something like Boneworks all of the doors in that they're just hinges like you don't grab it

you don't do anything just you physically push the door and it'll naturally swing open um i'm trying to remember what half-life alex did so they they either like didn't have doors or yeah they have like auto opening doors and stuff like that they had doors because you could push them open to your gun oh no that was i remember that distinctly that was boneworks or was that alex alex did it too for sure yeah i remember peeking through little rooms just like just like any any headcrabs am i about to get jumped

but yeah no it was one of those things like yeah we start looking at what other people are doing and it's just like yeah you've got like a myriad of like people who are doing ultra realistic doors where they're physical objects you have other people who are just like we're not doing doors like our entire game just a whole bunch of doorways like no doors in them and then you have other people who are like oh yeah no it's all animation based so it's just like a zombie style just open it manually yeah i'm thinking like in skyrim for example the only doors that exist are loading screen doors like doors to go into a building or it's like an event trigger door

like you put the golden claw in the door and it's open if you're in like any of the castles or anything I don't think there is a single door inside those buildings except to go back outside yeah it's a pretty cool thing to like it's like like back-end like

forbidden knowledge that like once you know it you can't unknow it sort of thing there you go so now anytime you're showing games to people look look at the doors see what they did i'll definitely have to keep that in mind and i'll i'll yeah that you know what i i can probably think of some games where they just don't handle doors differently and they do treat them like physical objects and it is... Yeah, I... You know, I can think of a couple of games where I have gotten stuck in

walls because they just treated them like actual objects. Yep. Just, you know what? Don't use doors just just use just use like um cloth everything just has a cloth it has its own separate problem now you have cloth physics to deal with yeah and that getting stuck in the wall but at least at least that might be easier maybe It's funny, to combat that, because it was just such a big issue that we had, being sci-fi,

we have the luxury of space doors, where it's the future, and they open for you. Yeah. And the only difficulty with that was, A, how do we want them to shut, and B, how long do we want them to take to open? And it was like, finding the happy medium in that regard but like now you don't have to touch them most you do is scan your hand near them but like unlock them and then it just does it for you

because doors you don't want to have the player be able to walk back to the door and then stay in between it as it's closing Yeah Yeah Yeah, we very specifically engineered the doors so they don't close if the player's too close to them

Because it's just like yeah, that was a running issue with the previous thing, previous game before we had had to change it all over I don't want to go through this game again and change all the doors please don't make me hey look now you know for future games just

don't door no doors yeah just don't door come up with a reason why the doors are open already or you don't touch them that's the next game it's actually a game about a door thief and he's gone around he's stolen reason why the doors are open already, or you don't touch them. That's the next game. It's actually a game about a door thief, and he's gone around, he's stolen all of the doors. There's so many bad ideas I can think of by just

not accepting that this is a problem like you could god yeah yeah doors you know I was not expecting to learn something about doors today do you have any other

forbidden knowledge about video games that most people probably wouldn't realize do you have any other forbidden knowledge about video games that most people probably wouldn't realise oh it's all held together with sticks and spit oh that's all software if there's sticks yeah if there's sticks the amount of times programming stuff where it's just like

oh this is working why is it working oh yeah yeah that's all software though there's nothing special games there I don't know about anything specifically but like I'm just trying to think of stuff that people don't already kind of know about like people know about things like the a lot of triple-a games they have you crawling through gaps because it's just a hidden loading screen, like things like that are pretty well known now. Yeah, yeah.

Nah, I was thinking more like um, how guns work in video games, how like a lot of guns don't actually fire from where the gun is. It's all just like from the centre of the screen out, because then that way whatever you're looking at is what you're gonna hit uh yeah there's definitely a lot of trickery around that of like if you think something works the way it does it's probably just more the visuals look that way yeah like proning in in a shooter as well as always a bit wonky like if you uh because if you let a if you prone based on the actual player body you get to a point where you're actually not able to prone back as far as people would expect but it so what ends up having a lot of games you end up just clipping halfway back through the wall because it's just that's how far players sort of expect to be able to move, even though really it should not happen like that at all.

Yeah. Like you don't have any colliders on your legs, so your legs are just like half the room. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Reload animations are another one that can sometimes look really wonky. And a lot of games end up having different animations for what the player is seeing and what other people are seeing

just because the animations just do not work properly. Because again, you're often aiming from your face anyway. So if they were to do it properly, things just... There's a lot of... What you're saying, there's a lot of trickery just to make things make sense to the player, but also well, you can get away with a lot more stuff in a single player game, right?

Like, when you have a multiplayer game, you need to make it make sense to other people. In a single player game, you can do weird things that look, you don't really have legs. Like, you're you're actually just like a floating torso. Like, the legs are a whole

separate entity like just other dumb little things oh yeah i mean i mean if you want to see an example of some of the stuff like that i remember um when cyberpunk 2077 first came out uh people were trying to make like third person mods for it so like you could run around in third person and they're just seeing this horribly disfigured being like moving around but when you're in first person it's like oh this looks fine and it's just like no the arms are like horribly broken and on weird angles yeah if you can't see it it it's not doing what it's meant to be doing no that is a just a rule even in film like animation and all that sort of stuff it's like if it's off screen it's not moving

i don't care if the top of the body is over here the legs are back here and it will snap to wherever you need it to next like a lot of games especially if they have fixed camera angles a lot of games will do really especially on older consoles where you have to do a lot of weird optimization, a lot of weird culling, will have, like, oh, that clock tower over there, it actually doesn't have, like, a left-hand side because you're never going to see the left-hand side from where the camera is angled. Yeah. That kind of culling and all that sort of stuff is...

Oh, man, our whole ship does that once you're outside the ship. Actually, a really good example I was thinking of is in Kingdom Hearts 3, in the Ysora fight, there's this whole city that you can see around you and people have used fly mods to go and look around what's in the city. But a lot of the things that are off in the distance are way bigger than they actually should be.

So you have billboards that are like 20 times the size, just so at the distance they are, you can actually still see them. And buildings where things are just weirdly scaled because you're never going to be at that distance, but they want things to look a certain way. And there's a lot of games that will just use 2d images to fake something being 3d at a distance because you're never going to see it at an angle where you actually can tell that it's

not a 3d object yeah yeah yeah another one that's probably kind of pretty commonly known especially thanks to like um the the more recent spider-man games is like how people do fake interiors how it's like oh yeah you have this building it totally has an interior it's like no that's just six images pasted together to resemble a room like i'm sure that room existed at one point and some dude took some photos and then just pasted them all together so it looks like there's an interior there's there's a lot of trickery when it comes to um shaders and things like that that you can do um which like yeah shaders are basically just a way of like computing uh materials and textures and stuff like that and you can do some really cool stuff with them where you can mess with people

there's a way that fake interiors can be done well and then have you ever seen the fake interiors in the um gta remastered trilogy in especially san andreas i mean first off i just hear that i already know it's just the best thing you've ever seen yeah so the interior you see through every window is the exact same interior but it's also really scaled down so it looks like the room is like super far away it just doesn't make any sense oh that that does kind of remind me of um in uh in nightlight we wanted to have mirrors so like you go into the bathroom and like it's all reflected we tried doing that through like more traditional methods so we just use what's referred to as a reflection probe which is basically just like a point in space it just basically takes you know an image from that point looking everywhere and then that's what gets used for all the reflections for metallic things

we tried that the reflection of the room was about seven or eight times bigger than the actual room. So we had to, we ended up getting this little package thing that basically puts a camera on the other side of the mirror that's looking directly towards where the player is, just so you get an accurate representation of that. I guess that's also another thing. Yeah, the infinite elevator, that was fun.

Infinite elevator? Yeah guess i guess that's another thing uh reflections of video games are so fake oh yeah half the time it's just they put the like a copy of the room on the other side and then have a player character just mirror your movement yeah that was like early resident evils i'm pretty sure yeah i was gonna say that was a there was a silent hill game that kind of actually messed with that. Where it was like, you're in the room, and then I think the marrowed room things start growing and going all disgusting, and then it leaks into your room sort of thing. I do remember the old classic Spyro.

They did that for a lot of the ice. Where it was like, oh oh yeah you're skating along the ice it's like no no no there's just another copy of Spyro flipped upside down underneath you so it just looks like there's a reflection yep yeah the um it like it it's easier to forget that is happening in the 3D games but if you go go back to 2D games that have reflections, like in Pokemon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, there are a lot of places that have water on the ground.

It's just a sprite, like flip-flops around. It's easy to accept that with a 2D game because you kind of know they're not doing proper reflections there, but it can be easy to forget that in a 3D game, those same sort of optimizations

are going to be used because it's really only fairly recently that we've actually been able to do proper, like, real reflections. And even then, it's on really expensive and really, like, computationally difficult to, like, use. Most games have reflections that are fake. That's the thing.

Yeah. And even then, with, with like ray tracing and stuff like that to get those reflections you have to be super picky because like yeah as you say it's expensive like you can't just ray trace an entire game it's like no no anything that's like within like a couple of meters that's ray traced anything that's further away that's just fake yep yep and even then like it might still be cheaper just to do it fake like that's the thing oh it's always it's always cheaper to do it fake but it's just about like you know if it'll look as good or sure that's what you're going for like you know if you're going for a cyberpunk or a spider-man aesthetic where everything looks like super

really realistic and really nice then that's just one of those things where you're like, okay, this is going to cost a lot so we're going to have to make sure that it's not happening that often. I think for a lot of games though I get the appeal of doing really nice, crazy realistic looking graphics

but I'm of the camp that art style is always king like a game that has a good art style is going to look incredible forever like you take a game like okami on the ps2 like that game still looks amazing or shadow of the colossus or like yeah you go back even further like i've talked about like rayman one like that game especially 2d games 2d games have aged so well if they if a game had good sprite work it has good sprite work maybe like the anime like especially if you go back to like snes a lot of like animation stuff may not have been at the level of like modern sprite work but the sprites themselves still look incredible.

Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like, especially PS2 era stuff is what I grew up on. Yeah, same. And then coming from there and then looking to now, you think back to looking at some of those games and some of this stuff looks better than like some of this more realistic stuff and it's a weird it's almost like a trick of the mind in terms of like as much as it is like obviously lacking in visual fidelity

it still looks better in terms of like it holds up in a i don't know if it's nostalgia or what but it's that special sort of magic where it's like it doesn't have to look perfectly real but because it doesn't look perfectly real it ages better well i think it's the difference between aiming to be real and aiming for an art so a game that aimed to be real on the ps2 looks not great frankly like if you look at a game like um i don't on the PS2 looks not great, frankly. Like, if you look at a game like, I don't know, the early Call of Duty games, right? Like, they've aged not great.

But if you look at a game like the Jak and Daxter trilogy. Oh, yeah. Incredible. Still looks amazing. Yeah, poly count isn't as nice as it could be. Sure, whatever. But, like, the game had a style it's going for, and a good style is going to be timeless and what's even better is that they lent into it that hard that they could break it in ways that added to that visual style whereas like modern things are more limiting when it comes

to that sort of stuff um it's like looking at the early I think like the original like PS1 crash model Yes, like none of those faces and polygons were actually connected Because then they could like morph him and twist him in like all the fun little ways for him to dance without it like You know breaking in other ways, which is just really fun behind the scene the little thing of just like that's wicked And I feel like even on that note of just like games with that like fun art style like the more cartoony sort of very stylized sort of stuff is like you know it was almost easier to do that 20 30 years ago than it is now because people are expecting you know smoother more high fidelity things and it's like where's the sacrifice of you know cartoon to like the realistic mix i think toys for bob like the company that's

done like the spyro remakes and all that sort of stuff they've done an insane job at like translating that across and like they've like in my opinion they've bloody smashed it yeah um but like it's really that perfection of that like 20 year evolution in style it's like it's really really cool um there's another game that got announced recently which is going for the ps2 style with today's hardware um it's on my steam wishlist i'm gonna turn my monitor back on but like i remember sending it through to my friends and i was like this looks like it has the potential to be just like an absolute sleeper hit um because like i'd never heard of it and then i think it i think it got a publisher that might be why why I got a notification about it.

I think I wishlisted it. The big catch. Release date's still to be announced. All that sort of stuff. It is that Jack and Daxter IROC. It is that exact art style. They've hit it incredibly. It's like,

I've never heard of this game before like why haven't I heard of this like when I was a kid and it's like no it's coming out now and it's like okay that yeah right yeah that does look really cool like I'm like it's very very

intently on my wish list like there's a demo and stuff that's out for it now, which I have been meaning to get to. But, like, it's just... It looks so perfectly that art style. Like, they've nailed it. Yeah, but it's doing, like... Like, I don't know how they've done it.

It's doing things that just wouldn't have been possible. Like, levels of movement, loading zones that just... You couldn't have done on the hardware. so it's using the modern hardware but keeping that like classic art style that's so cool it's so so cool um and yeah i sent it to my friends you know sleepyhead of the decade and then not one of them replied to it and i was like you're definitely a sleepyhead yeah that's right it's sleepy here but like it's you know for sure if it doesn't do numbers i will be sad for them because my god it's hitting me exactly where the nostalgia lives of that yeah that exact era of like the you know funnily enough um like i'm on the steam pager now one of the games it's like oh similar to this was um a hat in time ah i'm just like

that's the same sort of thing like it's you know it's not your like high fidelity like ultra realistic it's still got that like kind of bit more of a nostalgic uh aesthetic but yeah just using like modern hardware and stuff like that i just noticed who one of the publishers was um exceed games who do the zenran kagura games sure okay why not i mean you know it takes money to make a game that's true that's where it comes from sometimes you just you can't be picky um i'll definitely check that one out i absolutely will yeah like it was just that like that thing of like that perfect nostalgia and it was like i like it was just the perfect chance to bring it up it was like they're making the most of today's technology and taking advantage of the nostalgia of you know 20 years ago it's like it's crazy um yeah yeah that that's really

cool i'm very happy to know about that um we're coming up on the two hour mark so it's yeah it's about time to end off the show. Fair enough. So, I guess let people know where they can find the game, where they can find all the stuff about the studio. Yeah. We're Fringe Realities, as previously mentioned. We're at Fringe Realities on, I think, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,

TikTok, technically, but we haven't posted anything there for too long and I need to get back on that. YouTube as well? Yes. Yep. YouTube. Thank you. You know, all the big ones. We've got a link tree, which you can go to and all that stuff's, you know, in there. We've got a link tree, which you can go to and all of our stuff's in there. Theme has...

We've got a developer page. So Project Nightlight, the demo for Project Nightlight and Project Nova are all there, ready for either wishlisting or purchase. Nova is currently only wishlistable, but hopefully we're going to have a demo coming out either late this year, early next year. You know, depending on how things go. If, you know, if the fates align, fingers crossed, it'll be, you know, soon-ish. Yeah, we, you know, are there. And yeah, find our linkedin as well we don't run linkedin um yeah just google us you'll find us yeah you'll find us eventually or yeah twitter is probably

the easiest one because it's got the link tree so you can follow us wherever you prefer your socials do you have any plans to demo the game at any upcoming cons or are you done for the year? I think for now we're done for the year. It's a game that is, you know, not exactly designed for convention play, which, you know, is just the nature of making a narrative, long-form VR game.

So, you know, if you want people to get enough of an experience out of it? It's you know typically kind of like we had at Avcon like you got people Waiting for like 15 minutes while other people get a decent chunk of sort of play time And PAX is just huge like we'd love to go but it's that thing of having it actually in a spot where it's convenient for people, as well as enough time for people to actually play and enjoy it. It's going to be that thing of, you know. But yeah, and then I think there's a showcase thing that we might be featured in soon-ish.

But, you know, I don't have all the details on that yet, so I won't go committing to anything. Yeah, it's uh exciting times awesome um anything else you want to mention or is that pretty much it for for you guys um play indie games fair enough play our game specifically but that one you know um as well as in thank you for having us on it's been absolutely awesome amazing meeting you guys um yeah we'll do my outro and then we'll uh we'll finish it off so uh go check out my main channel that is brody robertson i do linux videos there six ish days a week i've got my gaming channel brody on games i'm by the time this comes out i might be done with devil may cry 4 uh i don't know if i'll still be playing kingdom hearts maybe look maybe i finally start playing elden ring it's possible it'll happen eventually and if you listen to the audio version of this

you can find the video version on youtube at tech over t if you want to find the video release uh wait no i did that if you want to find the audio release I've done this like 200 times I still can't do my outro if you want to find the audio release go to your favorite podcast platforms there is an RSS feed and put it in your favorite app I'll give you guys the final word how do you want to end us off

what do you want to say is that the one what is that the one is that the word what is that I was just gonna go so long and thanks for all the fish but yeah yeah I mean good afternoon good evening and good night fair enough

I don't know