Tech Over Tea - This Is A CRPG Where You Fight Dinosaurs | Kyoti Games

Starting point is 00:00:00 Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we are back for one of the indie game episodes. So, how about you just introduce yourself and we'll go from there. All right, how you going, Brody? Yeah, absolutely pleasure. Good, good. I'm Kai, Keote Games.

Starting point is 00:00:22 I'm making a game called Scourge of the Reptiles. And I'm from South Australia. which is part of Australia. That would make sense, yeah. But not the most southern point, which I will never understand the naming of that. Yeah, well, that would be Tazzy, I guess. But, um, what's that? Sorry, just random side-town.

Starting point is 00:00:46 It was how's been it known about when Australia was first discovered? Probably not. I would imagine it probably wasn't. I think Tazzy probably would have been a secret, you know, like secret island. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't matter at all anyway. Secret loot.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Secret loot. Yeah, we'll go with that one. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah, so I've been working on scourge of reptiles for a couple of years, two and a half years now. And it's a role-playing game. It's a retro game. It's, you know, it's sort of built to look like mid-90s. So your pixel art and, you know, your kind of top-down aspect kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:01:28 with turn-based combat and role-playing elements, you know, exploring, looting, all that stuff. The theme of the game is dinosaurs, so Scourge of the Reptiles refers to the dinosaurs. So it's a prehistoric role-playing game. And, you know, it's a bit of an idea I had a while back to make something prehistoric where you could roll some dice and kill some monsters, but those monsters happen to be dinosaurs. And those, the reason why there's humans and dinosaurs, well, you know, it's fantasy, so just make it up as you go. But basically, you know, a big, big meteorite fell from the sky and crashed into the planet, which may or may not be Earth. We don't really know.

Starting point is 00:02:17 And it came with it a whole bunch of magic. And that magic sort of gave spellcasting to the humans, accelerated the progress of their sentience, such that they, were able to be in the same time zone as the dinosaurs. But it also had a number of other strange effects, you know, magical powers for various creatures, mutations. So there's, yeah, there's all sorts of weirdness going on in the timeline, but also in the biology of the creatures of the world. Yeah, I was just going through the, I got the trailer in the background.

Starting point is 00:02:52 There was giant beetles that were like, you know, seven foot tall. So it's not just dinosaurs there. You're like, hey, dinosaurs are the main focus, but if I want to add something else, that's cool. It's a bit of a bit of a hot pot, really. I just thought I wanted to put in anything that's damn cool. It's a bit inspired by Harryhausen, you know, Ray Harryhausen, who made these stop-motion movies that inspired, you know, the likes of Star Wars and things like that. And, you know, so back then that wasn't just dinosaurs like a million years BC and that kind of thing. there was giant insects as well you know you giant scorpions giant spiders they very much featured in these stop motion movies

Starting point is 00:03:34 and uh so yeah they're in the mix and uh and classical monsters as well uh you know you kind of the kind of monsters you might find in a d and d game like your dragons and your minotores and all that right right but the way i understand is it supposed to be a bit more grounded than that like it's it's mainly focused on like the the dinosaurs that prehistoric time but it's like with magic as well it's not trying to go all in on hyper fantasy if i understand correctly that's it yeah so you could call it low fantasy you know there's um it's a it's kind of a it's a vibe of of d and d type of world where the uh the magic is uh is slightly less powerful um so that gives it more of a realistic element you know a bit of a survival kind of vibe to it as well.

Starting point is 00:04:30 And yeah, the sort of the main driving, the main controlling of the countryside is done by the dinosaurs. So they're kind of, they're kind of in control of the countryside. And the humans are, you know, they're doing the best they can. You know, they're just trying to survive by getting, getting out of reach typically. I was going to say, are the dinosaurs still just like, are they just beasts or is there something more there? There is some added intelligence to them as well. Well, some of the dinosaurs have got additional magical powers. So it gives them not just a flavor that comes from this magical meteorite, but it also gives them kind of a little bit of a something different to use in combat.

Starting point is 00:05:23 you know so it being turned back to tactical combat you know if everything just has teeth it gets a little bit boring but if you if you throw in magical abilities like you know uh some dinosaurs might be able to slow you down other dinosaurs might be able to throw out some darkness into the area other dinosaurs might be able to summon uh minions you know these this kind of makes the tactical element a bit more interesting right um so yeah you never know what you're up against You might sort of run into a, you know, a dinosaur that you think, you know, it's, you know, it's just a stegosaurus, but it's going to have a magical power you didn't see coming. And that's going to be interesting. Right, because there's only so many interesting things you can do when it's like, okay, so we have a dinosaur.

Starting point is 00:06:09 What can they do? They can, they can run, so maybe you can give them a dash. They can bite. Maybe you can give the ones where they have, like, horns. They could, like, pick something up and throw it. And that's kind of the extent if you just purely go with what like a dinosaur could do. You can't really really extend it much beyond that with just trying to fully stay within that realm. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:38 And obviously you could say you could give them intelligence and that will, you know, increase their options. There is some races in the world that are that are part dinosaur or part human. they're more kind of intelligent so they have spells and they have you know abilities like intimidation and abilities they can use skills they can use in combat um you know but the the dinosaurs without the intelligence they might slam you and knock you to the ground you know they might take advantage of the of the kind of terrain around them as well but mostly they're just going to be you know biting you into pieces so but it's it's a case of using your abilities your party's abilities

Starting point is 00:07:23 in the best way to survive those difficult combats too. So when it comes to combat, at least from what I can tell, the easiest thing for most people to compare it to now would be something akin to like a Boulder's Gate. Like it's a CRPG and they're not exactly super common nowadays. You've got to go back a few years for them to

Starting point is 00:07:47 go back to the 90s and be really common, but even just go back to like, you know, 2012 or so, and you have a couple of things that are sort of hanging on around then. Yeah, things did change for a while there. And, you know, the CRP, as you said, was super popular in the 90s. And not just the Western ones, but the Eastern Japanese type ones as well. They had turn-based combat. They had a party of adventurers that you would select and you would travel around with your whole party.

Starting point is 00:08:18 And, you know, you would do quests and things like you would. would do in any other role-playing game. But, you know, you'd typically see your whole party from above, and that's the CRPG. Things, I don't know, you know, why they became less popular, but it's got to be the invention of the 3D video card, I think, because that enabled you to do a first-person perspective. So all of a sudden you had Morrillind, you had World of Warcraft, you had these kind of games where you see either over-the-shoulder or first-person perspective.

Starting point is 00:08:51 And then you're Skyrim, and, you know, that's a very immersive game. It obviously takes a lot of developers to make that kind of game too. And so the old top-down role-playing game became less popular. But I think it's great because when you look down on your party from above, you can really see everything that's happening. You know, you can tactically work out, I want my fighter over there, and I want my mage to be hiding behind that rock, you know, and all that stuff. You can't easily do that in first person, even when you've got a party.

Starting point is 00:09:31 And you can see that when you play a game like Dragon Age or you play a game like Knights of the Old Republic. The tactical element is quite different because you basically can't see the whole party at once. I think that's why. I think that Boulder's Gate 3 went back to. top-down. Yeah. Yeah, there are, I think part of what you were saying about like the invention

Starting point is 00:09:57 of like the 3D graphics cards and all this stuff. I think a big part of the reason why they were so common back in the 90s is because you could make really good looking backgrounds through pre-render graphics.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And those games were some of the best looking games in the market. And if you go back and look at them now, yes, the actual resolution of the background texture might be a bit low, but they had really clear artistic vision for what they were trying to do with those games. And most of those games, if you look at a game from the 90s that's a pre-rendered graphics versus some early 3D game from then, there is a night and day difference. The pre-render graphics, it could be an indie game that came out today. The 3D games, you're like, okay, like I know it,

Starting point is 00:10:49 It looked good for the time, but in many cases have really aged that well, especially when you start moving a bit further forward into the PS1 sort of era. Those sort of 3D games really don't age well. But when you have those beautiful 2D graphics, that would be a timeless style. Yeah, I can go back and play Boulder's Gate number one, or Fallout number one, from the late 90s. I can go back and play them now and still think they look absolutely gorgeous. You know, the hand-painted backgrounds in Boulder's Gate, and the characters are animated with, you know, rendering machines.

Starting point is 00:11:33 They're pre-rendered into sprite sheets. And they look, I think they look gorgeous. You know, they don't have the kind of modern lighting that you do in a 3D game now. But in terms of the way that the world looks and the way that the world image, immerses you. I think that hand-painted background just looks so good. And the same goes, I think, for the tile-based games, you know, like, you know, Zelda and the Final Fantasy type games where the world is made up of tiles. I think that quite often those games look really beautiful as well, because a lot of work has gone into drawing each of those elements in hand, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:13 in pixelized, pixel format. And, and they just look very artistic. very stylistic. And I think that the early 3D games in particular looked terrible in comparison. And they didn't really look good to me, to my eyes, until about 2002. And you got Never Winner Knights, mate two came along, Never Winner Knights 1.

Starting point is 00:12:36 I think it looked pretty good. Well, Final Fantasy 10 came out in 2001, and that kind of was like the benchmark for how good 3D graphics at the time could be. yeah oh absolutely and but you know before that was playstation too right yeah yeah yeah because on playstation one the the textures were so i don't know blurry uh because they didn't they didn't have the kind of um filtering that um that they picked up on the later console version so they they really looked kind of gross they were low uh low texture quality you know very small

Starting point is 00:13:16 textures. And then when you angle the texture, because they didn't have the filtering, it just looks like a blur. It did not look good at all. But obviously, you know, you just need more power in your console to handle that. Later, they've been playing through Final Fantasy 10, which was that first swap from the pixel art graphics into that 3D, but they did the sensible thing and had pre-rended backgrounds. And the backgrounds in seven, because you can frame the shot in the way where you always want the player to be focused on a certain thing, as opposed as modern games, you have a full 3D camera, you can angle it wherever you want. It's a lot harder to sort of draw someone's attention to something. But if you can't turn the camera and you can

Starting point is 00:14:00 draw the background in the way where there is a clear point of interest, you can build everything around that and create just incredibly gorgeous scenes. Yeah, absolutely. And you can get your lighting just right in that kind of, you know, single perspective. And then you can, you know, you can get the colours just how you want them because it's pre-rended and you can just do that. Yeah, I think that those pre-rendered backgrounds look really nice. And, you know, you would see quite a lot of that in the late 90s, you know, where games would pre-render their backgrounds and even render their character sprites.

Starting point is 00:14:42 You know, not just Abe's Odyssey, which was a bit. platform, a very tricky platform game, but, you know, there was Crusader no remorse where they did the rendering, you know, Donkey Kong Country, they rendered those sprites, and, you know, rendered backgrounds were pretty popular in adventure games like Mist as well, and I think they look vastly better than the 3D games of the time until the, you know, the sort of early 2000s where things changed and got better. I get people having nostalgia for those games because they might have played them as a kid.

Starting point is 00:15:20 But, like, 3D games are always going to age a lot worse than good pixel art graphics, right? Like, there's modern techniques that you can use for making the games look better, like modern lighting, modern shadows, things like that. But, you know, games that, especially games that are trying to look realistic, like you go back and look at like

Starting point is 00:15:45 Metal Gear Solid for example really good looking game for the time what like you know those early models were a little rough and I would say they looked really dull and chunky

Starting point is 00:16:02 I think the point of diminishing returns is probably I would say late PS3 after that it's just like you don't really notice any major improvement in gaming past that point? Like past that we've had ray tracing

Starting point is 00:16:19 and that's about it. Yeah, that's about it. Yeah, it's totally true. Like, you know, resolutions have been increasing and detail has been increasing, but very slowly. You know, when I look back at some of the games on, you know, from around

Starting point is 00:16:36 2010 to 2012 like Skyrim again or Grand Theft Auto 5. I look at those games and I just go, that could easily be a game that is made now. Well, in the other cases, they do re-release it on a mod. Yeah, that's right. All they do is just put a little shine of paint on the textures and re-release it. And, you know, so basically we're looking at nearly 15 years where games have barely changed at all in terms of the way they look. Whereas in that period of time, in the 90s, things changed so rapidly. You know, you went from 8-bit in the in the mid 80s to late 80s to 16 bit and you may not have been there but that was just

Starting point is 00:17:20 jaw-dropping the difference between those two generations and then you went to you know rendered technology as we've just been talking about and then you went to 3D and all of that in the space of 10 years and it was just bananas how much change took took place in the realm of graphics at the same time music was changing rapidly too you know you went from chip tunes to mods to MP3s to CD audio in 10 years. That's just so much change. But, you know, I really like this period of, this period of graphics, you know. Like, I didn't make the Scourge of the Reptiles in 2D because, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:05 because I'm like dead against 3D graphics. I think 3D graphics are great. It just takes so much time to make them. Right, right. And when you're a solo dev, you know, you could get started on a level design in 3D, and you can still be working on it a month later. You know, it's ridiculous how much time it takes. Whereas if you're doing it in a tile map, you can knock up a level that looks pretty good in a couple of days.

Starting point is 00:18:32 And, you know, your 3D level designer would still be working on the first floor of that. Right, right. So that's the main reason I went with 2D because, you know, I just don't have 10 stuff. Well, especially doing tile maps as opposed to fully, like, fully formed map design. Like, with a tile map, if you want to go and adjust it as well, you're like, okay, well, maybe I don't like the fact

Starting point is 00:18:58 that there is no cover in this point. You could very easily add cover to that position or, oh, I want to have some route to get around this rock that's here. Oh, I can just put in some tiles there. And now there's a route. Yeah. And you don't have to worry about setting up new lighting for that change of graphics because it's all done.

Starting point is 00:19:19 You know, there's really no lighting. It's kind of just a lighting hack in 2D. But, you know, in 3D, the moment you, you know, move some walls and move some trees around, you know, you've got to get the lighting person back in to redo the lighting. So, yeah, changes are much, much more time-consuming and painful in 3D. um not to mention like uh there's there's more there's more debugging to do with the 3d level design because you can quite often um make spaces that you get trapped in in 3d or that or that you can't get through or get around or it just awkward you know awkward to navigate whereas in

Starting point is 00:20:03 two d that hardly ever happens you know very uh very recent example of um of that is in the battlefield 6 beta. There is a gap in one of the rocks on a mountain and people are just climbing into the rock and you're sitting there with a sniper. They can shoot out. You can't shoot in. That's the ultimate exploit in a multiplayer. I am immortal. I love that. And like those kinds of issues, they can happen in 2D if you don't align your colliders, but it's far, far harder to miss them than it would be in, especially if you've got your collider set up correctly, there's never going to be a situation where something slips through the gaps

Starting point is 00:20:49 unless there's some issue with your physics collision engine, where in 3D, you could very easily leave a gap there and not really realize that as they, or even if it doesn't affect gameplay, you could just have a gap in the texture and people can just see through the level. Yeah, that's right. You know, and, and you've got like infinitely more problems with shaders as well in 3D.

Starting point is 00:21:14 Shaders are just materials that you wrap around, you know, various 3D objects to give them lighting properties. And, you know, like, you're talking thousands of these little guys that you have to manage and work out. And so sometimes you might have shaders in 3D that you put on there and you think they're going to act in a certain way and they just don't. so then you're then you're debugging shaders for the next six months you know yeah shades development is just like that that's that's a person by like under themselves if you really want to like hyper focus on that yeah there is developers that just do shaders and and some some teams have got multiple guys just doing shaders so this is this is one of the many reasons why making 2D and in you'll see that you know when you go to avcon and you'll see

Starting point is 00:22:03 that you know the 2d is the main format for the indie developer because you know the time commitment is so much less and you can still make something that looks quite pretty and quite interesting and it gets your message across your story and your theme gets uh gets delivered without getting stuck trying to make this artwork in tv um you know we're just talking about the late 90s and how you know they looked so ugly on the PS1 and this the same goes for PC games as well, before 3D cards came along. But, you know, the team sizes were hugely different in that period of time. So you went from in the early 90s, you had team sizes that were about 10 to 15 people for your AAA products. And by the end of the decade, those

Starting point is 00:22:56 teams were getting closer to 70, 80 people to deliver the same AAA product. And that's just because the 3D came along and they had to all, not only work it out, but they also had to do all the extra work to make the 3D look good. Well, even that is more compared to like modern AAA team sizes now where, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:16 you'll see a thousand people working on a game. Oh, your audio just died for some reason. Is that on my side? I'll just... Oh, there we go. Check one. Yep, we're good now.

Starting point is 00:23:32 Can you hear me? Check one. Hello, hello. Can you hear me now? I can hear you. Okay. So that was probably just me playing with the cable and just accidentally pulled it out. Okay.

Starting point is 00:23:51 Okay, I thought it was like an actual problem. Right. No, no, it's just, okay, just leave the cable alone. Yeah, usually a good bet. Don't worry, you can just edit that. that out. Yeah, no, that's fine. I was saying that like, sorry, yeah, I was saying that like modern AAA teams now, you're seeing games where it's like over a thousand people work on the title. It's in development for five years and the game has a $500 million budget, right? Yeah. I can't even

Starting point is 00:24:27 conceive of that amount of effort and the amount of effort involved to manage those people and make sure they're working on something that's that's that's you know going to be in the game instead of working on things that are never going to be in the game but like you know what a thousand people for five years that's five thousand man years of time going into just a video game it's just for somebody just for entertainment and the and the budget being a few hundred million dollars you know the amount of stress just to make sure that they get enough sales to you know make that money back. It just must be so, no wonder there's like, you know, closures going on because the budgets have probably gone a little too high for what they're, for what, for what, what they're trying

Starting point is 00:25:08 to do. But I also think that AAA has probably spent a lot of, a lot of time trying to take the safe route and deliver, you know, a game that they think is guaranteed to succeed, but people are a bit sick of the same game over and over. Yeah, I think you kind of hit the nail on head there, guaranteed to succeed. Like, you're seeing, you know, what's the latest Call a Duty game? Black Op 6, 7, and then we have, like, Battlefield 6, and how long's the need for speed series been going on, or the Forsa series, or, like, you've all of these very well-established AAA series, and they generally sell quite well.

Starting point is 00:25:50 But you are seeing in recent years sort of a dip down, and people kind of, like, games, like FIFA, right? Like, there are people that play FIFA, and they only play FIFA. FIFA is safe. There is no competition to FIFA. But in a market where there is, and you're kind of doing the same thing over and over. It's, you know, it's the exact same thing as the, um, the MCU, right? Where the, um, the Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four, even though they're actually relatively good movies, I think sales are down like 50% on opening weekend. And I think it's just that people are kind of getting tired of the same thing over and over. But when you have budgets that are this big, it's really difficult to correct course and really difficult to justify trying a new idea.

Starting point is 00:26:42 Whereas if you go back to the 90s of the early 2000s, these big, or these studios that are really big now, they were being run by game developers and by gamers themselves who, They had an idea and they just wanted to make a game. Like, the AAA space of the 2000s is basically the indie space or the double A space of today. Yeah, I sort of think it's maybe a little similar to the music industry in the 90s, where, you know, CDs came along and CDs sold, well, they could be made for like a few cents compared to the vinals and tapes before that. And the music industry went from, you know, making a couple of dollars profit per unit to making like $20 profit per unit. And it literally just, you know, multiplied by a factor of a hundred in size.

Starting point is 00:27:38 And then, you know, really it was just a case of let's tune out as many albums as we can with these artists we have on our roster. And then suddenly everyone realized that these artists were just releasing the same album over and over again and they stopped buying them so that you know around the sort of early 2000s there was just a huge collapse in the music industry and I had people I had friends that worked in it and it was just so sad because everybody lost their jobs but you know I'm sort of saying a similar thing now because you know they're taking the safe road with with AAA game design they're trying to they're trying to get their humongous studio budgets uh and

Starting point is 00:28:21 you know to make enough money to stay open but in doing so they're taking very safe decisions and in games you know they're supposed to be creative you know it's a creative uh you know it's a field of it's a field of art you know it's each game is a piece of is a work of art so when you add too much business to it you know you add too much pressure to make profits and returns to keep a studio open i think that that kills the creativity And you certainly see that with series like, you know, Forza Horizon, which I love. But, you know, Forza Horizon 5 was basically identical to Force Horizon 4. And then Motorsport, which was basically the tech demo for Horizon is dead now.

Starting point is 00:29:10 So. Right. Right. Even though I heard the last Motorsport was pretty good, but it like, you know, it had, it had that issue of games before it were like lacking and kind of like seamy so when you have a good one that comes along people like oh that's probably just the exact same thing again so they just don't bother going to it yeah yeah it gets to the point where you know you hear about a a new title in the series has come out and you can't remember if you've played the last one in the

Starting point is 00:29:40 series or not yeah yeah yeah because there's been so many of them you've just lost track you sometimes just miss a game entirely because you assume that you've already played it when in fact you played the prequel to it. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I know a lot of people will kind of like make fun of rock star for how long GTA 5 has been

Starting point is 00:30:03 the GTA game that has existed. It's been 12 years now. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, you didn't have 12 more GTA games in between, right? You didn't have that issue where people get burnt out on GTA because they're playing a new GTA

Starting point is 00:30:20 game every single year. They might be burnt out on GTA 5, but they want something new from that IP. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad that they've taken so many years to build a new one. And I'm glad that that, um, that, uh, that, uh, Bluvies, uh, the new Skyrim. What's it's going to be called? I don't think it's got a name yet. Yeah, I'm glad they're taking their time with it. Because in the, you know, we, we don't need to have one at like every, every, every couple of years. We just need it to be a really, really good game. So take your time. I'm fine with that. No matter how long it takes you, you can release Starfield in the meantime if you want, which I haven't played yet, so I won't make any judgment. I heard it wasn't as good, though.

Starting point is 00:31:08 Yeah, that's that's a nice way to put it, we'll say. We probably should shift back onto your game at somewhere. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So I guess one thing I didn't want to ask is, why did you want to make a game like this? Well, yeah. I mean, ever since I was a boy, uh, you know how like you play games when you're a kid and you, um, and you think, hey, this is great. This is so cool. I could make something. And so what I did was I tried to make a game when I was a teenager. And I just did not have any skills. So I just failed utterly. I did not, didn't know how to code. I didn't have any art skills. I had a bit of music skills. I played the synthesizer back then. So how did you try to approach it? What were you trying to use at the time? Well, I had an

Starting point is 00:31:55 Amiga and there was a program called Amos. So this is kind of like a like a toolkit, like a unity type of thing. But it is, it's it allows you to make games on your Amiga, but you know, not high quality games, but it's having a copy of that sort of over. opened the doors to let's make a game together. Got a couple of friends together from school. We tried to make a game. It was kind of a gauntlet type of game, you know, top-down fighting kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:32:26 Obviously, well pre-diablo. And, yeah, we just, we got barely anyway into it. And then I tried again in my 20s because I learned how to code, C++. And it was a case of, all right, well, I've got like all these friends from training. We got like 20 people together, and we're going to make an RTS in the early 2000s. And we got barely anyone because we didn't have any management skills. You know, there was no income, there's no funding. It's like, you know, running a studio is not just about ambition.

Starting point is 00:33:04 There's a lot more to it. So we failed again. So that sort of stuck with me, you know, as a personal failure for my whole life. and when I got to a point where I was able to take some time off of contracting, you know, IT work, I decided that I was going to fix that gap, I was going to fix that personal failure, and I was going to make something and finish it, because this is the hardest part about game development, finishing it. Well, starting it and finishing it, those are two massive problems.

Starting point is 00:33:34 Starting it, it was like, I have an idea, but like, you're not fully committed to actually doing the work, and then finishing it where you're like, I don't know what is done. What do I, how much do I want to add into the game? Where is the stopping point? Everything in between, that's the fun part. Absolutely. Everything about game dev is hilarious.

Starting point is 00:33:55 It's so much fun. And, you know, you can easily just get wrapped up, just building new features for your game, for the rest of your life. But you do have to, at some point, say that enough is enough and say, this is the feature set, and it's called feature freeze. And I learned a little bit

Starting point is 00:34:12 about that when I'm doing corporate projects, because if you don't feature freeze, the budget just triples. And then you end up with a canceled project because you can't afford it anymore. This is probably another reason why studios have been closing lately because of feature creek. But I decided that I would go ahead and, you know, fix that gap and finish a game. I estimated it would take me about a year. So two and a half years later, and I haven't finished it. That's okay. I'm having an absolute ball.

Starting point is 00:34:52 I'm not upset by that. And, you know, the more time you put into your game, the more polished it is, the more features it's got, the more levels it's got, you know, and playtime is actually an important part of selling an indie game. Because if you make a game that lasts for 30 minutes, nobody will buy it, whereas I'm making a game that's 35 hours long, and I'm hoping that that's a selling point, because people are looking for a role-playing game that takes up a couple of weeks or months of their time, and it doesn't get boring in the meantime.

Starting point is 00:35:29 You know, we're not talking fluff, we're talking about an actual storyline. Right, right, right. And a variety of different combats and monsters that see you through that time. actually cut it down from 45 hours because I got a lot of feedback from people saying, you know, 45's a long time. They would prefer a 35 hour game that was more focused, you know, that had a storyline that moved along at a certain pace where there was no repetition and there was no, you know, doing the same combat twice.

Starting point is 00:36:05 And I agreed with all of those points. So I cut. it was the hardest thing ever. I cut nearly a whole act of levels out of my game and cut the story to match. And I basically said, look, I'm going to have to take all of that story and I'm going to stick it into the expansion set. You know, make that a DLC.

Starting point is 00:36:27 So if the game sells well, I'll be making an expansion for it with all of those cutting room floor levels. But so 30, I think, playtime's important and polish is very, very important because if you release a game with lots of bugs, especially game-breaking bugs, you'll get very poor reviews and you'll get very poor sales. But if you, you know, if you focus on polish and a bit of a play length, I think you're in a good place if you're in your game. I forgot what the question was. Was that the question?

Starting point is 00:37:08 It's kind of related to it. When you said you want to make sure the game's polished, I do agree that game-breaking bugs are very, very important to deal with. However, bugs unto themselves aren't necessarily entirely

Starting point is 00:37:27 bad and sometimes in certain contexts can add to the experience. I think of Skyrim having all manner of weird things that happen to drag corpses when they die. Actually, just Skyrim in general, all Bethesda games have

Starting point is 00:37:42 all manner of oddities to them that probably shouldn't be there. I also think of when the Yaku's a series swap to the Dragon Engine, where they swapped from canned animations when a character dies to ragdoll physics.

Starting point is 00:37:59 And that created some interesting situations where you would kick someone and that kick could be what caused them to die, but they would retain the momentum in their ragdoll, but for some reason they deleted the weight. So they just start flying around for a couple of seconds. And it shouldn't be like that.

Starting point is 00:38:21 That's obviously not intentional. Yeah. But it can add to the experience in certain contexts. Oh, yeah, that's just so fun. And, you know, that would make some great streaming as well. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think, you know, I'll probably, it's almost,

Starting point is 00:38:39 the role-playing games are very hard to get perfect because there's so many script elements. So I will almost definitely ship with bugs, and I'm going to be relying on the community to let me know very quickly about any bugs that they encounter that prevent their progress or closing off quests and things like that. You know, so I'll test as much as I can. I've got a bunch of local testers,

Starting point is 00:39:03 and I'm even going to do a closed beta on stage. theme as well, which enables you to get a few more people to test your game. But almost certainly there'll be more bugs that we don't find. And I'm hoping that they're more of the hilarious type than the game-breaking type. I think the most important thing for a CRPG, at least from my perspective, is as what the player intends to do should be what happens if there is an action that

Starting point is 00:39:42 like let's example that was in the in the demo of flat Avcon climbing up on top of ledges and stuff like that it was really awkward at the time yes and that is obviously

Starting point is 00:39:58 like you want someone to be able to easily climb onto these ledges you want someone when they click to go up there, that is where they're going to go. And things like that, that's what ruins the experience when those things are not addressed, at least for me. Like, I'm very particular on the game feeling like I'm in control. Yeah, yeah. I think, like, that sort of falls into the area of kind of UI design, you know, like,

Starting point is 00:40:26 of just getting your game controls and your game UI to work perfectly in half. And I think that's probably the most important thing to get right. You know, it's just your core game loop. If you call game loop is got, you know, anything stopping it from being a fun experience, then you need to get back to work on that. And you're right, setting on rocks, and now I haven't fixed that yet. But it's, it was something that it, you know, the design, because it's a 2D game, and you've basically got rocks that are elevated into.

Starting point is 00:41:02 kind of a third dimension, you know, the grid has to sort of remain at floor level in order to, in order to not have hexes covering up other hexes when they're elevated, because that means that you get hexes that are blocked off. So you kind of need to have the mouse, you know, float into the, you know, the floor-based hex grid and then still be able to get onto those elevated hexes. But it needs to be really obvious. So what I've come up with is when you float over that hex, you do see the hex above, but you also see like a column, you know, like a column of elevation, like a UI element that is, that has some height to it. And that makes it very clear that you're going to be standing onto an elevated

Starting point is 00:41:54 terrain and without, you know, changing the way that the hex grid works. So yeah, that's something that I'm going to be working on as part of the part of the polishing coming pretty soon because at the moment I'm still working on content right

Starting point is 00:42:10 you know I'm doing level designs I've almost finished act two of three acts so I'm up to about 25 hours of gameplay at the moment with about 10 to go and and the act the third act is the most epic

Starting point is 00:42:26 so it has the biggest bosses the biggest dinosaurs the biggest fights the biggest magic and just is very dramatic and you know so that's going to be fun to make but at the end of that there'll just be this process of testing all the levels all the quests and testing all that you are that we just talked about making sure it's really smooth but I am happy that that you know I can take the game to a place like AvCon and you know for two days people can play this game and generally have an experience where they can get to the end of a 30-minute

Starting point is 00:43:07 play and they've either won or lost the fight. Hopefully they've won it. But it's playable, you know, like this is cool. And people generally turn to me with a smile and say, that's really fun. You know, that's a cool game. And I like that. That means that I think that it's going to do well. Well, at the very least, you've got, you're going in the right direction, right? It's like, I know that people like this. I know people are viving with this. It's just a matter of making sure that people know about it when it does actually go on sale. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, and marketing's another big thing. You know, like I started marketing about maybe nine months ago around September with the help of a local

Starting point is 00:44:03 marketing expert called Alex and you know that was when the Steam page went up and the first trailer for the game which you're probably seen it a couple times and and since then I've been in probably seven or eight on, you know, Steam festivals and a couple of YouTube, a pretty decent YouTube compilations. One called Best Indie Game, you know, Summer Fest, and the other one called Turn Based Lovers, which is a really cool channel for turn-based games. And both of those had a huge impact. We measure impact by the number of wish lists for the indie game. So we Scourge being close to 4,000 wish lists now. I'm getting put to the point

Starting point is 00:44:53 where I feel like it'll be ready for Steam Next Fest in about... I'm sorry, did you say 4,000? Yeah, 4,000. Wow, that's really impressive. Yeah, that's... Thank you. Ideally, when you launch your indie game, you know, you have to understand that your wishless

Starting point is 00:45:13 count dictates your sales. Well, not only in that, it also dictates where you are in the, like, listing on Steam. They do some, like, I think it's also how recent the wish lists are as well. They do, like, some, they, the value of the wish list is lesser if it happened a while ago. I don't know the exact formula for it, but they do degrade in, like, ranking value. So you kind of want to have, like, a big push of them somewhere close to release. Yeah, so the, um, the, the, the secret.

Starting point is 00:45:47 is it relates to not just Steam Next Fest, which is just a huge multiplier of your existing of your existing wish list count. The secret is to launch with a certain number of wish lists. It doesn't matter

Starting point is 00:46:05 the velocity of your wish list. It doesn't matter how many you made in the last week or month. I thought it did value. Maybe I'm mistaken that. There's a lot of conjecture about this. Okay, fair enough. But what I believe is is to be the correct is that it's simply your wish list count. So if you've got somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 wish lists,

Starting point is 00:46:27 you'll land onto the coming soon popular listing on Steam. And you can see it. So there's no guesswork there. You can see when you land on that page. And you'll probably appear at the bottom of it because some of the games on there have got. But once you're on the bottom of it, When you launch your game after that, you will get on the front page of Steam onto the coming soon widget.

Starting point is 00:46:55 And if you're on the front page of Steam with your game's key art, you'll get 1,000 wish lists per day, which is huge, until you disappear off of that widget. And that just, once your game launches, you're off the wishlet, you're off that widget. So what I'm hoping to do is get to 10,000 wish list before, not before, get to 10,000 by the end of that, by the end of that widget at launch. And that would be a really good result for this solo dev game. It would certainly make for, I think it would make for enough sales to justify working on a second one. or an expansion with all the ideas that I've got well I'll leave all that stuff

Starting point is 00:47:48 link down below for anyone who wants to go check the game out I've had the trailer playing a number of times throughout this and I just played the clip that was shown on the Turnbase Lovers video so yeah go check the if you like CRP's absolutely go check it out it was like UI-wise

Starting point is 00:48:06 I said there's like some polish there that still needs to be done but like the core game I do really like what is there it's just obviously the rest of the content you want to get done and then ensuring that everything feels good and feels polished

Starting point is 00:48:22 I think one of the other areas that I certainly struggle with was sort of maybe it's because of where the game sort of dumped me into because it wasn't the start of the game but understanding what the abilities I had were but I would imagine

Starting point is 00:48:38 that's probably as you develop them probably makes more sense when you actually start from the start. If you start from the start you've got a very limited number of spells and skills that you get access to and that enables you to focus on the basics.

Starting point is 00:48:55 So by the time you get, that demo at Avcon was probably 10 hours into the game. Right. By that time you would be an absolute expert in all of your skills and spells and you would know exactly what everything does. But you can right click any of it and you get a nice info panel for any of those things

Starting point is 00:49:13 just to find out what they do. But yeah, you're right. Understanding, you know, the impact of individual abilities is key. And that's why I was, you know, I need to, when people play a demo, I need to be there telling them, giving them advice, basically, try this, you know, try slamming your opponent, try casting an armor spell. They make it, it makes a big difference. If you don't do those things, you'll probably.

Starting point is 00:49:38 end up getting trounced by the enemy. So you're right. There is a learning curve, but there typically is with this type of game. And, you know, there's a tutorial at the start where it just runs you through how everything works. And then as you train your characters, you know, you'll learn a lot more because you'll be analyzing each of your skills and spells first. Have you done playtesting with this?

Starting point is 00:50:08 Are you sure it's like providing enough information with that? Not yet, no. No, okay. That'll be part of that polish, yeah. Yeah. Because that can be a big thing as well where, you know, you'll make the tutorial and you, like, you think it's good, but you're also the person who spent the past two and a half years looking at the game and understand how everything works. So you might have sort of a skewed understanding of the sort of entry point, the side. someone new to this game, especially someone new to CRPGs might have looking at this game.

Starting point is 00:50:44 Yeah, absolutely. I'll spend a lot of time working on that with my testers, because that'll be the first thing we work on is that tutorial part. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that I do actually improve the gameplay, even now, even this late in the development, I'm still finding ways to improve it. So a really good example is that facing, you know how facing is important in this game where the front of you is where you can attack, the back of you is where you can get attacked and not be able to defend it. So, you know, facing the correct way is super important, kind of like a game of XCOM or a game of battle tech, you know, where facing is a critical part of it.

Starting point is 00:51:29 And I really, really wanted that in my game, even though it's not typically a part of a CRPG. Right. But I came up with, just last week, by playing another game, Dungeon of Nahulbeck, which you may have heard of, don't know. But basically, when you move, you immediately set your facing with a second click. And I thought, that is cool because I've thought about this before, but decided against it. But having used it in a game, it's actually better because you don't get the opportunity to just not understand facing in the game. Right.

Starting point is 00:52:07 It's always part of the movement. So you move and then you face. You move and then you face. And I didn't want the extra clicks. But, you know, it's actually worse if they, if the player doesn't get familiar with facing and using it whenever they move because they're always going to get flanked and lose. Yeah, that was one of the things I immediately, it just didn't really click with me. I haven't played games like X-com

Starting point is 00:52:35 so I didn't really get the idea that he had to face people I sort of assumed that, you know, like a lot of games where the enemy would attack you and then you just suddenly start looking at them or you cast the spell and then you look at them and it's like that the idea of

Starting point is 00:52:50 facing is sort of a more automatic movement but having that be a core part of your turn you basically have to learn that there is like you may not understand initially a lot of the value in doing so. I would hope that's part of the tutorial, but

Starting point is 00:53:06 it's something where you can't avoid because it's something that you have to do. Yeah, yeah. This is why I thought it was a good thing to add and it's not difficult for me to code this in. Essentially, the moment your

Starting point is 00:53:22 movement ends, you get a UI that shows the facing immediately. And you can just, you know, click something else and cancel it. No problem, you don't have to do that second click on the map if you just want to face where you're already facing. But it's quite obvious in that system

Starting point is 00:53:42 that you've got to face immediately is, you know, your next action will be facing. And that just, you know, Rams at home, that facing is a critical part of the tactics of the combat. And if you can get facing right, you know, that's you're halfway there. because, you know, it keeps your flank and your rear from being exposed to rear attacks, which obviously is the worst.

Starting point is 00:54:12 So that was just something that came along like last week. So we're two and a half years into development. It's still working on the UI and the design. Yeah, especially being a solo dev, there's only so many things that you can do at once. right and you might be focused on working on the content and when you're doing so you're like oh well there's here's this other area that's missing something but you're the only one there right like yeah so are you doing everything did you buy assets for music and sound or is i assume sound you probably you probably bought stuff yeah assets have been bought absolutely

Starting point is 00:54:54 and uh you know uh when it comes to uh sound obviously sound effects you know it's be crazy not to buy by the sound effects because you're making your own sound effects is just not necessary um music i i had the choice of doing music myself with my synthesizer but decided that i wanted to have a huge scope of music so there's a mix of um of orchestral and sort of classic synthwave music you know synthesizer type music but also you know very very um old school synthesizer of music like you might find in a in an 80s movie um fantasy movie you know your tangerine dream kind of or you're uh evangelist so uh there's a mix of those kind of musics and there's you can purchase that kind of music uh for for your game at a very affordable price

Starting point is 00:55:51 so i went and did that um when it comes to tile sets uh yes they're all purchased and they all come from two artists that I found on itch.io. When it comes to monster and human models, they're all purchased as well. But I've done all the rendering to get all those into 2D, which has been quite a lot of work. But I think it's worth it. You know, I have seen some, you know, direct 2D to 3D kind of instant translation kind of layers, but I'm not convinced it looks good as of yet. I think it will, but at the moment, I thought that pre-rendering the 2D looked better.

Starting point is 00:56:38 Right, right. So that's what I did for this game. And apart from that, you might think, well, that's all the game, but no, I did all the coding, I did all the design, and I did all the putting it all together, which is another thing in Unity. You have to spend quite a lot of time just making. just making records and making prefabs and that all takes a lot of time and make obviously making the level design process so that was all me too so yeah no contractors just one dev and some purchased assets yeah well even with that being the case like it it one of the concerns you sometimes have with games that have a lot of purchase assets is there's not

Starting point is 00:57:29 really a coherent art style. And I don't, that doesn't feel like the case here. It feels like everything kind of just works together. Yeah, I'm glad you say that because that's been one of my concerns. Getting the 3D models to render in such a way that they look like they belong against the tile sets, it's been a real challenge. I'm not sure if I've talked to you about it, but it's not just resolution because the resolution of the tile set is 32 pixels. So if you make all of your models about 64 pixels high, then they look about two tiles high and it's about right for a human. And your monsters can be, you know, larger, obviously.

Starting point is 00:58:14 But there's more to it than that because your colour palette is really important. It needs to be a strict low amount of colour. You know, we're talking generally 32 or 64 colors. And they, the contrast needs to be correct as well. So if your blacks aren't black enough versus the tile set, it looks weird. I've still got a bit of work to do on that. But I think the colors are looking good. You know, when you reduce colors, you can also do some cool things with dithering.

Starting point is 00:58:43 Do you know what dithering is? So, yeah, it's a way of getting rid of all that shading that looks really more modern. and it turns into a speckle pattern and it looks very retro and very cool. So there's dithering in there. And animation frame rate is important as well. So most of the games back then were 10 to 12 frames a second. Not 30 frames a second.

Starting point is 00:59:11 So I've done a lot of reduction of frame counts. And, you know, particle effects as well. You need to get particle. I've built a lot of particles. effects and they are obviously just pixelated and they're built to look like they belong on the tile map and so once you put all those things together I think that this is art direction essentially you get something that looks like it all belongs together and then the still art as well so the still art is you know just appears in various dialogue panels and things and they're

Starting point is 00:59:48 They're just generally 2 to 400 pixels wide to fit the same kind of resolution. And generally, they're 256 colors because if you reduce those images down to 32 colors, they look bloody awful. Right. So it's a different kind of, it's more of a DOS PC look, you know, VGA, which still looks like it fits, but it doesn't look. terrible. Right. So I'm glad that it looks, that you think it looks like it all fits together because that's been a, that's been one of the major focuses for the art. I think the one thing that doesn't is the UI. The UI, it, like the font feels too modern. Um, the lack of borders around like the, um, the images. It just like everything else, I think it stands.

Starting point is 01:00:48 that so much because of how much everything else kind of works together. Okay. Yeah, I can definitely do some borders, borders on the panels and the images. What I was thinking, you know, the reason why the dialogue text is, is high resolution is because when you pixelate text, it becomes very hard to read. Yeah, yeah. So I've gone with high definition text. Some of the text is pixelated, some of the larger.

Starting point is 01:01:18 text and the ui text and stuff uh other bits of text are high resolution and um that just make because you know you don't want to give you readers a headache sure uh because but um yeah like there's probably still some work on on the text to make it all you know very uh fitting in with the art assets um you know and this is this is you know a known thing so there's there's definitely polish to be done in the UI. Yeah, because I think the combat UI does work. It's just like the text and the menus. Those are like kind of what stand out to me at this point.

Starting point is 01:01:58 Yeah. It sounds like you want to be a tester, so I'll sign you up. Unless you're too busy, of course, Brady. We'll see. I don't know. I have time sometimes. Yeah. Also, one thing that we hadn't really touched on

Starting point is 01:02:15 is that all of the dice rolls that, happen, those are being indicated on the screen as well. Yeah, that's right. And that idea came from a game called Celaster, Crown of the Magister. I think it was maybe one of the first modern games that did that idea. And Boulder's Gate is three just went and took it, took that idea. And what I think it does is it brings the feeling of playing a tabletop game into the, into the realm of the computer role-playing game. I think it's cool. Because, you know, I think I've always been searching for a computer game experience, role-playing game experience that matches or comes close to a tabletop game of D&D or something.

Starting point is 01:02:59 And, you know, the dice is definitely part of that. It's the sound of the dice, and it's the look of the dice and the numbers that come up on the dice. It's not just a random element, you know, like the random element is part of every role-playing game. In fact, it's part of every video game. but you know seeing the numbers come up on the dice is just a really cool thing and just knowing that it's a dice that's deciding your fate is a cool thing as well and you know and something as simple as rolling a skill check you're praying for those dice to come up under your skill number so it's that's part of the tabletop experience I think it captures it I'm really glad that

Starting point is 01:03:43 that idea came along. You know, I wish I thought of it. But it definitely came for another game. Right, when you don't have anything there to indicate what's happening, it can feel like, oh, I've just missed for no reason. But having the dice there and knowing what your role looks like, yeah. It, if not still feels bad to miss an attack,

Starting point is 01:04:08 you at least understand why the attack missed. Yeah. And it's like, I suppose a modern, a lot of modern role-playing games kind of, they want to, you know, give that constant sense of power by letting you hit every single time. Whereas a tabletop game doesn't really do that. It wants you to feel like you swung and you got a miss or you swung and they blocked it. you know, because that's, that's part of the kind of two and fro of the battle, the battlefield. So, you know, this is why in my game, you know, you can modify your attack numbers by increasing their defenses or vice versa. And that enables you to constantly hit, but you're not always going to constantly get through their defenses.

Starting point is 01:05:05 It's kind of a numbers game. You have to keep striking until you get that hit. But when you do get that hit, it will do pretty significant damage. So you're kind of working the odds. And you're kind of, you know, getting all of your team members in position to get their strikes on. So, yeah, Tabletop roleplaying does that, whereas I think a lot of modern RPGs have got a much more safer feel about them. You always hit, basically. Yeah, I think the distinction there is real-time combat versus turn-based, where there have been real-time games in the past, like Morrowind, for example.

Starting point is 01:05:45 Morrowind still felt like a 2-D game, but it was in 3-D. So you do swings, and you could still miss a swing. And in 3-D, that doesn't feel right. Just real-time in general, it doesn't feel right, because you see the sword connect. You know that sword hit. so it just it takes you out of that experience but when you're in turn-based you already you already sort of know that you're in a game right

Starting point is 01:06:12 like it's combat doesn't work like this you don't take turns swinging at each other so you can have a bit more leeway to do things like oh this attack missed or oh you know you can heal the entire party without anybody getting in the way of it like it being turn based already you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit about it

Starting point is 01:06:37 because it just doesn't really make sense. I think you're right. I think when it's in 3D, you can definitely see the blow connect or not, you know, if you've got your mouse in the right spot. And therefore having that swing be a miss, like your moral wind is going to,

Starting point is 01:06:58 you know, really be a bizarre thing to occur in your brain. Kind of like you heard the VR. sensation. I just moved forward with my feet, but I don't have, can't see my feet. Right. You know, and I can't feel my body moving what's causing nausea. That sort of reminds me that. But I think, you know, in a turn, in a turn-based game, you can have misses because they all look like hits, you know, it's just a sprite attacking another sprite. Well, if you want to have it actually miss, you can just move the sprite out of the way when the attack happens. Yeah, well, that's

Starting point is 01:07:29 part of a dodge. You know, you'll see them dodge or block with their shield or parry with their weapon. But if you physically miss, it just looks like a hit. Because, you know, the sprit has got the same attack animation with a saw hit. Yeah, I mean, you could move. You could move them. You could have them attack to the wrong hex, you know, like just a 45 degree angle.

Starting point is 01:07:49 And just that would be kind of funny because who would miss that badly? But, you know, the fact that it comes up on the screen with miss is kind of clear enough for me. That was something that came out of the last AvCon a year ago was that somebody said, had, you know, played the demo, which was a little bit different to the one you play. And they said, look, I don't know when I'm missing or hitting or damage. It's all down there in the log on the side. I want to see it where I just clicked.

Starting point is 01:08:25 I was like, geez, why didn't I think of that? It's just so obvious. People like damage numbers. Yeah. Yeah. You need to see the damage number. you need to see the miss, you need to see the critical miss, everything, because it's really important information.

Starting point is 01:08:38 And if you're forced to read that little log-down on the ground, you're going to get a headache. So, yeah, I mean, play testing from community is super important as much as testers. So what do you consider to be sort of the, I guess, main guiding principle of the game? The thing that sort of drives you forward, thing that you really want to be the focus of the game?

Starting point is 01:09:06 Oh, it's definitely dinosaurs. You know, like, I know that that's not, it's not really, you can't say that's a story, you know, dinosaurs is not a story. The story revolves around an invasion based, you know, actually I don't want to give away too many spoilers. Understand. But basically the dinosaurs are definitely a big part of this invasion. I'll say that.

Starting point is 01:09:32 Um, but the, uh, you know, the driving theme of the game and the thing I think that has made the community online on Steam respond to, you know, the, uh, the trailer and such is the fact that it's a role playing game that has dinosaurs in it. As far as I know, that's never been done, you know, like there's a work, a game called Ultimate Savage or something of Savage world or something, um, that had dinosaurs, but it also had guns. So it's kind of a lands before time kind of idea. And you know, you've had plenty of monster hunter games that have featured dinosaurs. You tour rock and monster hunter and all of those have got dinosaurs in them. But those are not role-playing games. And, you know, so why hasn't there

Starting point is 01:10:19 been a prehistoric role-playing game with cavemen and dinosaurs in? I thought there's someone that's going to list some random, obscure game that no one's ever heard of. But it's certainly, it's not a popular it's not a popular trip right like you'll get you'll get your excom style games where it's like hey you're going to fight aliens and you get like high fantasy where it's fighting dragons and goblins and stuff like that yeah i keep hearing as well that of course fall out style games yeah exactly you keep you keep you keep hearing that if you make your fantasy role playing game uh you know non standard like if you make it non-talkine style with, take out the orcs and the elves and everything,

Starting point is 01:11:02 then it's going to fail because that's what people want when they play fantasy. They expect basically Tolkien. I don't believe that at all. I think that people want all sorts of things with their role-playing games. And, you know, like, you know, one example was when Pillars of Eternity 2 came out. And people said that, well, the reason that game failed is because it, went all pirity and, you know, with age of sale kind of technology with muskets and all that. And they should have just stuck with the fantasy. But I think there was probably more

Starting point is 01:11:41 problems with Pillars of Eternity too that resulted in it selling, not as well as the first one. I wouldn't say it failed. I think it did fine. But I actually think that players, you know, RPG players out there are probably quite happy to play something that's not Tolkien because they've played that game a hundred times I think it's

Starting point is 01:12:09 certainly it is a good baseline to build off of because you you can get away without explaining a lot of things right? Like you don't need to explain what elves are and like

Starting point is 01:12:25 how general magic systems work or you can just sort of or like you base something on a D&D style system right like you can just like hand wave that away like you know what this is you like you've heard of dwarves and all of these things and it and that that works right

Starting point is 01:12:43 there's tons of amazing games that are like that but at the same time it's sort of the same problem you have with a lot of alien fiction where a lot of it is like, hey, we're going to base it on little grey men, right? Like, you're dealing with something that doesn't exist. You can be a bit more... Yeah, you can explore it a little bit more than this.

Starting point is 01:13:07 Yeah. You know, you're probably right. I mean, like, science fiction probably suffers from the same, you know, repeating tropes with everybody trying to do either the story of The Terminator or the story of Alien. Well, everything has a warp drive, right? Like, come with some other travel mechanism. Yeah, I actually was thinking about doing a science fiction game, but I literally couldn't come up with an idea that hadn't been made into a video game.

Starting point is 01:13:38 Right. You've got your punk games, plenty of those. You've got your battle tech games. You know, you've got your Star Wars types games, and you've got your Star Trek type games. And, oh, God, can you really, is it possible to think of something new in the science fiction world? It probably is. Sure, yeah. Dune's pretty original, but, uh, and that's been obviously just been made into a really

Starting point is 01:13:59 good game, which I haven't played yet. Um, but, uh, yeah, I just, I gave up on that idea of doing sci-fi and maybe I'll come back to it, but, um, you know, it would have to be something different and different is hard in science fiction. But I, I really feel like different in, in, in fantasy is underdone, you know, there's just very few examples of, of non-talkeen style fantasy. They call it high fantasy. And it's just orcs and it's, you know, huge spells and it's wizards with hats and that kind of thing. It's big spire castles and that's high fantasy. And yeah, it's it's almost like game developers don't know there's other types of fantasy that you can do. Right. Well, again, it's going back to the thing from earlier. It's, it's safe,

Starting point is 01:14:52 right? It's kind of the reason why we're seeing a lot of these Souls-like games that are coming out because people like... I enjoy my Souls-like games but at the same time can we have you know, can we have some maybe things if you want to take from things that already exist

Starting point is 01:15:08 like a DMC style game or PS2 God of War or like there are other ways that we can do this but right now it's like the safe thing to do yeah. Yeah. I feel the same about Metroidvania's. I quite like that type of game. I mean, you know, with the

Starting point is 01:15:27 dash and the bouncing off the walls, it's all pretty cool. I've played Castlevania on the Super Nintendo, and I think it's cool. And I'm yet to play the symphony. Apparently, the best one. But, you know, it's a fun type of game. But why on earth are there so many indie games that do this type of genre? Hollenade. That's why. Because Hollenade did so well. Yeah, and they're all want to do as well as that. But we might be waiting for Silk Song before that happens. Another Metroidvania does as well as that. But, you know, it's obviously better than the kind of classic platformer,

Starting point is 01:16:08 which is, I don't think sells very well anymore, because everyone is just very, very bored of it, you know, jumping on the heads of your monster. And, but, you know, I think... you know, if I was, if I was an indie game developer, thinking of what, I mean, if I was, I wasn't already, I was not yet building a game and wondering what game to make, I'd probably go with something like a simulator, you know, those are doing really well at the moment. I think there's still space for a lot of, a lot of new ideas there. You know, like really weird, like supermarket simulator and, you know, hard. space breakdown, whatever it's called. These are interesting ideas. They should make more of those.

Starting point is 01:16:58 I think there's also a very clear distinction between them when it's it's someone who just wants to make a simulator and someone who has like a real love for what they're doing. Like I've seen some of these, like a good example, mechanics simulator. Whoever made that game put a lot of, just too much detail into some areas and there's a lot of a real mechanic probably yeah and if you're going to do something where it's like a serious simulator you kind of need to put that level of detail in or you can go the whole other direction and make it like a surgeon simulator where it's intentionally yeah it's supposed

Starting point is 01:17:38 to be super arcadian weird and yeah it's not even remotely realistic but it's still a a fun core concept there yeah um i think that you know even the people that are making versions. Sorry, you cut out there when you said that. Oh, can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Even the people that are making kind of hilarious versions of

Starting point is 01:18:02 regulators, you know, like theme hospital or something, they probably are also experts in the field. Sure, sure. Like you ought to be an expert in it to make a parity of it. Yeah, absolutely. Otherwise, you're not going to be, your jokes aren't going to land. but yeah I think there's space for those type of games for more of those I don't think they're difficult to make as difficult to make as say a shooter is very difficult to make people expect a certain level of incredible quality on their shooter games play games I think people have told me that I'm crazy for making a role-playing game and that to a certain extent that is true because you could definitely make just about any other type of game faster

Starting point is 01:18:48 But at the same time, I think that, you know, there's also more of a kind of demand or hunger for this type of product versus, say, a platformer or a Metroidvania, where there's quite a lot of saturation in those genres that it's probably going to work against you when you get to marketing. And you don't want to make a game and then have no one play it. Sure. and you just wanted to like spit out games the easiest way to do it is some simple core mechanic very repeatable mobile game like that's

Starting point is 01:19:24 yeah that you know you can throw something together in a you know two or three months it's a really good game and get something out there but yeah I think also just doing something you love something that you think you can add some value to rather than just you know getting something released

Starting point is 01:19:43 like I look if you're not if you're not if you're not hurting for bills at this very moment

Starting point is 01:19:51 you need this game to succeed right very now I get it right like you want to do something that's going to take you some time

Starting point is 01:19:57 and you know two and a half years is a long time yeah maybe in the grand scheme of

Starting point is 01:20:04 game development for a lot of titles isn't crazy long but it's still a really long part of your life yeah

Starting point is 01:20:12 I I think that, you know, like if you were to make a short game, there's two good reasons to do it. One would be as a resume for your portfolio. If you want to get a job in the industry, that's absolutely the best ways to make a short game and say, look, I've built something and shipped it because they want to see that. Right. And I think the other really good reason is training. If you want to train yourself how to code, how to make games, and just be better. Making a short game is the best way to do it.

Starting point is 01:20:39 Don't try to make a role playing game. it takes a long time because the quicker that you can build it the quicker you can iterate on your training and make another one and that's going to make you really good at what you do but you know in terms of a viable business model

Starting point is 01:20:58 I don't know if making short games is better than making long games it maybe depends on your cash flow of your studio as you just said yeah well and then you make you know a flappy bird and then you are set for like. Oh, I just thought of another reason why you'd want to make short games or short development cycles is because it's a bit of a hit, uh, hit driven industry. Because, you know, some games

Starting point is 01:21:23 sell unreasonable numbers of, of units and other games sell a very unreasonable low amount of units. And it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't make any sense as to what, why the one's sold better than the other. So, and that's just kind of like the fickle nature of the gamer industry or the game of audience that likes some things and hates other things at any given moment in time. So the more games you make, the more chance you're going to have a hit. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:54 Yeah, think back on. I have something that, go on. I was going to say, I think back on. You go, finish on your thing. Yeah, it's something that trends is what I was going to say, something that's trending. Yeah. Yeah. I think back on successes like vampire survivors, for example, where if that game was any more expensive, it would not have sold like it did. But it was very cheap. It was very simple. It was very addicting. And it was sort of at a time where there was kind of like a drought in the market and people wanted, people wanted something different. And that, it came along. It was a couple dollars. And it spawned a whole genre off. of it. Yeah. Now there's sometimes like things, things do so incredibly well that you just blows the mind. Like just the other day I played loop hero. Have you ever played that? I know the name.

Starting point is 01:22:49 Yeah, it's it's a roguelike where you just kind of go around in, like you go around in a path. It's kind of like a board game in that respect. You've got a few cards that you can play to, you know, to build things. But mostly you're fighting monsters as you go round and round and round in these circles and it's so incredibly addictive I could not believe it and no wonder it sold millions of copies and it looks like it was made by you know a tiny team I don't know how many they did have devolver digital as a publisher so they did yeah that funding there as well yeah definitely but you don't get on to devolver digital as uh as your publisher without having a pretty decent idea yeah unless unless you're already with them from a previous game

Starting point is 01:23:31 But, like, even with funding, right? Like, if you have a bad idea that doesn't work, it's still a bad idea that doesn't work, right? Yeah, yeah. No amount of funding is going to, as you can see from the AAA space, no amount of funding is going to save a bad idea. Yeah, absolutely. And no amount of social media is going to say that,

Starting point is 01:23:51 no matter YouTube exposure is going to save that bad idea. And sometimes, you know, like it would be best to just, you know, like take your baby your beautiful game that you thought was the best thing in the world

Starting point is 01:24:06 and just say bye bye you know that sounds really sad but but if you you know if nobody likes it what is the point

Starting point is 01:24:14 you could make it for yourself but that's you know that's probably a wasted time um well hopefully if if you're passionate about something there's also other

Starting point is 01:24:25 like I think as long as you're not some like psycho that you cannot relate to any other people. Usually, you having interest in something, other people are going to have those interests. And if you're genuinely creating a piece of art

Starting point is 01:24:42 that you believe in, even if there's a small market there, and some ideas just have a small market because it's such a niche idea. But my hope is that when there are games that people are super passionate about and super believe in the idea, yeah my hope is over time people discover now there are so many games out there which

Starting point is 01:25:06 nobody finds out about you're like oh what is this game it has 30 reviews on steam it came out seven years ago you play like why does nobody know about this how did how did this slip under anyone's radar yeah you do is definitely find games like that and it's you know it's kind of sad because maybe maybe they were under-marketed you know like maybe they didn't have the kind of marketing exposure they needed before launch. Some Indies don't actually understand that marketing needs to be done. And that, you know, it is so sad to me that they might spend a year or two building it and then release it without the marketing because they're basically just given their

Starting point is 01:25:44 product to the world, but nobody will see it because nobody knew it existed. And that is really, really sad. But, you know, like other times you see games that were marketed well that came from strong publishers have beautiful art and really good design and they just absolutely do what they wanted to do and still nobody bought it or played it and i just you know it's that's even worse imagine the poor devs who worked on that and and they're like i don't understand but the game sold like eight copies and it should have sold 80 000 right right it actually happens all the time yeah there are so many games that come out on steam every single day that yeah

Starting point is 01:26:28 You just, you can't play every game. It's true. It's true. Like something like 20,000, 15,000 or something per year now coming out. But you don't need to play all of those because most of them are, well, they're really first-time projects from amateur developers. Sure. So they're basically trying it out. They're trying out steam.

Starting point is 01:26:51 And, you know, they've got obviously less than a thousand unit sales. And some of them have got. less than 100. A lot of them have got less than 100 unit sales. And so, you know, when people say there's 15,000 games coming out per year on Steam, they're including all of those titles. And if you take all of those ones out, it's closer to three or four thousand games coming out. At the same time, though, you still need to sort through that. And you still need to appear of like, you need to make yourself stand out with it. Like, even if a lot of the games aren't games people are going to buy, you need to find some way to not be one of those games. You need to find

Starting point is 01:27:27 some way to be a game that people are going to sort of, they know is coming out, they want to buy and they, and obviously like the art on the Steam page, that's like, sure, that's going to help to some extent. But knowing that a game exists, and I think you do have these, and a lot of other devs do these now, just putting out devlogs, right? Like, using platforms like YouTube, showing, showing people that a game is actually being made here, do I would say the dev blogs haven't been the most, the best part of the marketing. Like there haven't, there hasn't been a big response on my YouTube channel. I'd say the biggest impact for marketing for Scourge of the Reptiles has been just getting involved in the steam festivals.

Starting point is 01:28:14 You just apply to them. Sometimes you get turned away. Like I didn't get into 6-1 indie. And sometimes you get let in and it just doesn't make much of an impact. know, it's just a small festival, Steam sale. Other times, it's, you know, like with term-based lovers, for example, there was 400 game developers or games in that festival, and the response was absolutely enormous

Starting point is 01:28:42 because they combined it with front page of Steam, so they got onto the front page, and they combined it with YouTube content creators at the same time, and it was a real event. Right. and so if you can get into one of those just has way more impact than any devlog that you care to make on YouTube

Starting point is 01:29:03 Yeah, no, of course, but like all of these bits of None of this is sort of hurting the game, right? It's putting all of these things out there, showing people the game exists, getting the name out there, just simple thing that if I search for the game, I can find the game on a search

Starting point is 01:29:26 engine like yeah just that unto itself already helps so much like absolutely yeah i've had i've had some people on where their names just are not they've not really finalized the name yet and they're not really you can't really find it anywhere maybe they don't have the steam page up yet so even if they find out about the game like where do i even go to find more about the game right like just getting these basic things up yeah even that is a good start to go with Oh, yeah, you've got to start with the Steam page and then just start hitting up those Steam festivals and Steam sales and whatever you can get onto. Try getting on to various YouTube channels with their compilations they make and their events that they do. And that's really kind of the core of the Indy game marketing thing.

Starting point is 01:30:18 Socials, I haven't had a very good experience with socials. You know, like I'll make posts. I'll get a few likes, but I've got virtually no. traffic into my Steam page from my socials. So that might change if the game, if I release a game and then start working on a second one, because apparently socials do quite well if you're a known studio. But yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend spending too much of your time making content for social media.

Starting point is 01:30:45 I think what really works there is like, like the funny TikTok viral videos. You see something weird happen. Like, I don't know if you probably saw this because it went everywhere. There was a game where you could parry a nuke. And that video just like went around the entire internet. Yeah, yeah. If you can get trending on any of the socials, you'll probably notice an impact. But yeah, you might be working pretty hard to get to the point where you get noticed in that field.

Starting point is 01:31:20 Everybody's trying that. But definitely get your Steam page up. And also, I didn't even know, but until quite recently, that you can make updates on your Steam page and it gets posted out to your followers. And so if you've got not your wish listers, but your followers, which is a subset of your wishlisters, and that's actually a really good way to do your devlog because, you know, people are interested in how your game is coming along because they want to buy it. I don't think I've ever

Starting point is 01:31:53 pressed the follow button on a Steam page before I did not know what that did Yeah, well that's what it does You get notified about updates Okay, cool It's useful Yeah It's useful if you want to know when a game

Starting point is 01:32:05 Coming out Hmm Huh And I've just never even like Seeing any like devs Even talk about follows as a thing I don't know if most other people

Starting point is 01:32:17 Even know about that Yeah, it's there yeah like most games you're probably right i'd say that you know 90% of gamers probably don't know the follow button is there just like you just like you but uh but those that do uh are interested in you the your development and they want to hear your devlog that's what i've been that's what i've been doing on on there um and a second trailer i did a second trailer i might do a third one uh at launch and obviously i'll do a demo a playable demo will be coming for steam next fest Which probably, I'm aiming for the February next best, which is next year.

Starting point is 01:32:57 And you have to have a playable demo. Right. So that'll just be like a 30 minute playtime, which is approximately one battle. And hopefully, you know, people, you can actually review demos now. So hopefully some people drop some nice reviews for that, which should help, help the progress. where would you want the demo to take place that's a good question I don't even know yet but

Starting point is 01:33:26 I because you can't be over their shoulders like a con so you can't really chuck them into the middle of in the middle of the game I think you're right I think it might have to be in the starting village of the game

Starting point is 01:33:38 because you know we kind of need the players to you know be slowly exposed to some of the gameplay elements. In which case, the fight that's in the initial part of the game is with pterodactyls, which is not such a bad start because it's dinosaurs,

Starting point is 01:34:00 and that's the theme. And the village looks quite nice. So it might make a good demo, but I'm going to discuss with some people about this one because there might be other parts of the early part of the game that would make a better demo so we'll see we'll see well hopefully you get your first dinosaur mount as in one that you can ride on in the second level of the game so that might be a place to have the demo but that does they introduce extra complexity which might not be appreciated by a by a first time player we don't I don't know yet yeah I don't I do think making

Starting point is 01:34:46 sure people understand what they are playing. Because if, again, if you just chuck them into it, then I could see people immediately bouncing off when it's like, I don't know what any of these abilities do. Why are there like 12 buttons to press? What do I? Like, you, yeah, like, without giving anyone's sort of guidance, I don't see that initially going well for them.

Starting point is 01:35:12 Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's definitely the kind of game where you need the tutorial, even in the demo, absolutely. Yeah, which is going to be annoying because the tutorial takes a fair while and you kind of want a demo to go for less than 30 minutes. Sure.

Starting point is 01:35:25 So, yeah, I suppose it could go for longer. We'll see. We'll see. Well, before you get to that point, I need to go to the bathroom. Oh, yeah, we can take a short break. Take a quick break. Two seconds, won't be long.

Starting point is 01:35:46 Thank you. Thank you. Hello. welcome back I kept the recording going so I just cut that yeah yeah cool tar what was the question I forgot

Starting point is 01:37:29 I was going to go into a new question so you're all good so you've talked about sort of the length of the game but when it comes to like player abilities what sort of

Starting point is 01:37:44 what sort of scope are you looking for there like what sort of range of things are characters going to be able to do yeah so you've got your uh you got your main kind of warrior abilities um you know things like uh you can do disarms you can do sweeps you know sweep sweep the feet that knocks a knocking it over you can do slams which knocks an opponent over after a move um um what else you can do intimidation and uh which you know prevents units from coming at you and you can do a taunt which makes units come towards you um you can do throne weapon attacks and obviously bows and missile attacks um and reloading of those uh what else is there there's with the modify

Starting point is 01:38:35 there was the magic system yes and there was like tears of the magic which didn't really understand as i was playing the game yeah so But when you learn, when you're training in spells, they've got prerequisites. So you've kind of learned them in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, you start out with your basic spells and you can branch out to your more, to your more powerful spells. When you cast a spell, um, you've got different types. There's, there's 200 odd different spells that, uh, have each got their own

Starting point is 01:39:05 functionality. Uh-huh. Um, and when you cast one, typically, you'll be targeting either an area, or, um, or, you'll be targeting an enemy or you'll be targeting yourself. Yourself might be, or one of your allies, yourself might be, you might be casting a buff or a heel type of spell. If you're targeting an enemy, you might be doing a blast type attack

Starting point is 01:39:32 or you might be doing a missile attack or you might be doing a spell that attacks the mind or body, you know, like an influencing kind of spell. and an area is something that, you know, is something that affects multiple hexes on the map. So when you select the spell, the next thing you have to select is the level of the spell. So the power level of the spell, sometimes, you know, it might be one through four, you know, so four being the highest power level. And in the example of, say, a healing spell, the power level, One heals one hit point of damage, and the power level four heals four hit points of damage.

Starting point is 01:40:16 So you've just got this ability to dictate how much you want to heal versus how much stamina you want to use up. And other times the power level will do radically different things, like the power level one of a create animal spell makes a small animal. Power level four makes a mammoth. you know so there's a big range of different animals that you cast onto the battlefield um so power level is set and sometimes there's another selection where you might need to target the ground or flying units because they can be on the same hex basically so if you've got a target you've got if

Starting point is 01:41:02 you've got flying targets in on the map sometimes you have to select which of those two you're going to go for and then you're target so you select the hex that you're firing the spell at and typically you want to be at a fairly short range that'll reduce your penalties and you know you'll want to have nothing in between penalty there'll be penalties for missile attacks if you're firing through a unit or you're firing through a bush there's a penalty to hit and there's a there's a percentage chance that you might that you'll succeed in your spell and the more spells you have the lower the chance that you can cast more spells.

Starting point is 01:41:44 So there's a bunch of different factors there. So yeah, it's casting a spell is, there's quite a lot to it. And there's so many spells that you'll probably be, your party will probably contain multiple spellcasters. You might have a cleric for healing. You might have a mage that has got a variety of spells across the elemental spell colleges. or you might have another mage who's got a variety of spells in necromancy or, you know, gait and movement, and these kind of colleges.

Starting point is 01:42:18 So it's up to you how many mages you want to have. Sometimes it's worth having a druid in the party because they have this ability to summon animals they can ride on, and they can also shape shift into animals. So that's a pretty cool power to have. There's also bards, and bards have... special powers to do with their instruments where they can they can control people and charm people with their music and they've also got a few spells to cast as well and what else have we got there's you've got your scouts and thieves and they're kind of there's two different ways you can

Starting point is 01:42:59 build those but basically they're experts with things like survival and stealth and picking locks, finding traps. And finding traps is absolutely critical skill to have in this game because there's so many traps everywhere. It's so annoying when you walk into them. And if, for example, you find a snake trap, which is basically a snake hiding in the grass, you get the option to disarm that trap by killing the snake. And then if you do kill the snake, you can, with the poison skill, you can milk the poison out of it and put that onto an arrow, make it into a poison arrow. Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:43:41 So that's cool. And there's also poisonous scorpions and things like that you can get poisons from. All right. Yeah, so those are some of the different kind of classes, you know, it sort of falls into the, you know, warrior, cleric, mage, thief kind of thing, but I'm actually not really, um, explaining how everything is fully modifiable. So you don't, there's no classes. Right.

Starting point is 01:44:11 When you go to a trainer, the trainer will teach you whatever you need to learn for them. But you can go to another trainer and, well, it all just comes down to how many points you've got. So there's an infinite variety of character builds. So any ability and any skill and any spell, given the right correct. can be learned by any character. And so that means that you might end up with a mage warrior, or you might end up with a cleric mage or a thief mage. And some of those combos are really cool.

Starting point is 01:44:49 Like a thief mage, for example, some of the spells can make you a really good thief. You know, so you don't select the classes when you really just, your main character is the one you start with so you design them from scratch completely and all the other companion characters that you add to your group they start with basically 80% of their character is created for you and the other 20% you design at the start of the game and then all of the character points that you accumulate as you as you go through the game which are like experience points

Starting point is 01:45:32 you can allocate them yourself. So you're building all six or five characters are being built by you in whatever way you want. So each of the characters sort of have an intended direction, but you can just say no. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like, for example, you take the warrior-type companion, Cahindi,

Starting point is 01:45:53 you encounter it straight away in the village. And you can absolutely just go, nah, he's going to be a scout. Right. He'd obviously be quite a strong scout because he starts with a bit of strength, which is fine because, you know, he might be just really good with a longbow, which is a pretty tough weapon. And you might just put all of his points into scouting and survivaling and fishing and camouflaging

Starting point is 01:46:19 and those kind of things and just completely forget about all the warrior skills that you might get like jumping and athletics and acrobatics and all that. Just forget about those. And, you know, you could take one of the characters that's obviously meant to be a mage. You don't start with any spells. You just start with some intelligence. And just going, no, you're going to be a cleric. And just make them a cleric instead.

Starting point is 01:46:44 Or make them a thief, if you want. No problem at all. Some of the thieves have got high intelligence too. Right. No, actually, that's not really fun. Yeah. How do you handle... Because you did say there's quite a few abilities.

Starting point is 01:47:02 So how do you handle displaying that information to the player? So on your character sheet, you've got tabs. And the first, on the left of your character sheet, you've got your traits. And, you know, that's kind of your strength and your intelligence, those kind of thing. And then on the right side, you've got your various lists. And the first set of lists, first list is the abilities. And the second list is your skills. third is your spells and the fourth are your tricks and the tricks are kind of like things like

Starting point is 01:47:36 disarm and sweep because they're built off of other skills you know so if you've got quarter staff skill you can get sweep for quarter staff and that enables you to sweep people off their feet with staff that's a trick and um so those four tabs to navigate through your uh through your which is a full screen kind of display and and then when you get certain items they can add to your skills or traits or abilities give you fresh ones or increase what you already got and when you go into a trainer those lists split down the middle so you basically you've got a left and right and the left is you and right as the trainer.

Starting point is 01:48:29 So then you can basically just click items on the right side and learn them. So you can learn new skills, abilities, et cetera. And you can also upgrade the ones you've got, the number of points you've got in each of those skills and make them more skilled and spells as well. You can make them more powerful. And then when you get to, if you're not near a trainer, you can spend your character points anyway, upgrading your abilities, sorry, your traits, because, you know, quite often you might be like, well, I really need additional stealth skill right now, but I'm not near

Starting point is 01:49:10 a trainer, so I'll upgrade my agility, which upgrades my stealth. Because it's based on agility, yeah. Right. And the same goes for all your other agility-based skills. They'll all go up. So that's just a way that you can upgrade on the. fly and I find it's quite useful to upgrade your manor reserves as you play through the wilderness because you'll end up with quite a few experience points you'll be accrued from quests but

Starting point is 01:49:40 what would be useful right now is more manner to cast spells more often one thing I didn't really ask you properly earlier and this is kind of the last major thing I did want to talk about, the inspiration for the game. Obviously, there are like clear, obvious things that people can look at, like, oh, you know, any boldest game, things like that. But I do want to hear about those, but if there's anything sort of out of the ordinary that someone maybe wouldn't expect, I always like to hear about those as well. Yeah. Well, firstly, I would say that there's some of the aspects of the game are influenced by movies. So if you look at, I've often I said that as the pitch for my game, that it is Conan the Barbarian meets Jurassic Park.

Starting point is 01:50:29 So Conan the Barbarian being a really fascinating movie based on a series of books, it actually has a mix of technology levels in the world of Hyboria. So that's a real influence because a lot of the areas of Hyboria are primitive, prehistoric. And the other thing is that Jurassic Park is just the most well-known movie that features dinosaurs eating people. And that's a big part of this game too. So that's two big influences. Going back to video games, yeah, I can definitely go further back than...

Starting point is 01:51:08 I usually use Boulder's Gate 1 and Fallout as obvious, as things that people recognize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'll go back further. really the main influence for this game is the gold box games from from the dos time so we're talking about all of radiance and the crin games champions of crin etc so those those games had turn-based combat and they had an adventuring d&D type of feel and and you would level up your characters and you would go to the shops in the city and you sell your loot and it's all that kind of stuff you know I was a big fan of those type

Starting point is 01:51:51 of games and I are the beholder as well um but uh you know people would often talk about classic role playing games like ultima bard's tail um those are less of an influence on my game but there's certainly on later games later role playing games um Xcom is a really big influence because of its turn-based combat. It's very detailed. That was 1994. But before Julian Gallup made X-Com, he made a couple of other really cool games. One was called Laser Squad, 1990, and the other was called Lords of Chaos.

Starting point is 01:52:29 And that's a fantasy game with turn-based combat. And that's a real influence, too, because you would summon creatures in that game. So a lot of the game was based around these animals. And I sort of felt I took a lot from that and from and from those two games in their turn-based combat because their action events, very few games had action points before Julian Gallup came along. He basically invented it. I'm trying to think what else was a big influence, just looking at my shelf, these old games on there. Dungeon Master. So, 1987 is one of the first dungeon crawler games.

Starting point is 01:53:20 So you spent a lot, basically your whole time was spent in a dungeon. It's all about the monsters and traps. It had real-time combat, but it had a four-player party. So there was quite a lot of tactics involved in keeping all of your party members alive. In that respect, it was pretty similar to Paws of Radiance, which had a six-player party. And I'd say that you could throw in Diablo into that mix. Because when Diablo came along, it really gave a finger to 3D games. It was 1996.

Starting point is 01:53:55 And everybody else was making 3D. But Blizzard said, nah. We're still really good at our 2D games. They made Diablo. And it sold so many copies. It was an absolute work of art that game. But it's not very similar to my game, except in. terms of the osmestric aspect, I guess.

Starting point is 01:54:14 Sure, sure. But that's more of an action. Yeah. I think, you know, you probably wouldn't recognize this game, but in 2004, Cure made a game, Temple of Elemental Evil. Temple of Elemental Evil. Oh, I've definitely seen the game before. I've not played it.

Starting point is 01:54:38 Okay. It's based on a classic. d and d set of modules from the early 80s and it um it's basically boulder's gate with turn based combat in a dungeon it's absolutely awesome and i love it and it's one of the biggest influences on my game so yeah i hope that's enough uh to um tell you where this game's coming from yeah i think it's a pretty solid idea and i hope the game goes well like You've clearly got something there if you've already got 4,000 wish lists. You're two and a half years in.

Starting point is 01:55:17 You've still got quite a bit of work to do with the content you still want to add. But what you have there is already really good. Oh, thank you. You know, I do find that people enjoy the experience when they play it. And that's the main thing is I just want to make sure that I feel that the game loop is fun. and, you know, fun in the respect that a nerd like myself likes to enjoy a turn-based combat is fun because, you know, some people love their action games,

Starting point is 01:55:50 but this is not an action game. Every turn is deliberately thought through, like a game of chess against monsters. And I think that people respond to that. Even though there is, yes, I agree there's still work to be done and there's still ours of content to be built, there's um there's an element there that is solid you know this uh this this this this call loop is um it's performance so there's no basically it'll run on a potato at 60

Starting point is 01:56:19 frames a second and like a seriously a potato like four gig lights um and it will um it will provide players with a sense of enjoyment if they're into that kind of thing and it is it is a niche. I'll say that. There's, you know, there's some games that are too niche, but I think the niche for role-playing games has gotten quite a lot bigger since Boulder's Three came out. And I think people are looking for more of the same and hopefully they won't, they won't mind the retro graphics. Yeah, I do agree that. Like, it's, for a long time, this genre was kind of, Kind of dead. Like, you had these, you have the games that people were a fan of for a long time.

Starting point is 01:57:11 You have people modifying divinity, for example. But, like, a new game, Boulder's Gate 3 was kind of, like, the last one that was, I didn't even know if anything else has been released since Boulder's Gate 3 that was a CRPG that anyone even talked about. And clearly, there is still desire for this kind of game. So... Yeah, check it out, I guess. I think if you wanted to look back to the last 10 years, it's been pretty quiet,

Starting point is 01:57:43 but you've got Shadow Run, the trilogy, which is very similar in style to this game. You've got Pillars of Eternity, which is real time, but very similar. What else is there? You've got Divinity Original Sin, obviously, which sort of set the new standard for this type of game. and very few others, very few others. It's kind of like RTS at this point. Wasteland, Wasteland 2 and 3. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:58:16 Yeah, it's kind of like RTS at this point where there are games that exist and maybe every so often one thing comes out, but it's definitely not like the heyday of these genres. Yeah. I'm hoping that it comes back in a big way. But it doesn't, I mean, from my perspective, you know, like, I don't need this genre to be huge. Because I'm only aiming for, you know, 10 or 20,000 unit sales. Like, it doesn't need, it's a, that's a tiny amount.

Starting point is 01:58:47 There's 250 million users on Steam. So, you know, this is as niche as it gets, really. So I don't need it to be the genre to come back. I just need that niche to agree for that type of player. And I know that type of player exists because. You know, if you go onto the tabletop gaming on Reddit, there's a million users. So that genre is there. Well, as I said a couple of times, I hope it goes well.

Starting point is 01:59:15 Thank you. Yeah. So if people want to wishlist the game or follow development, where can they head to? I would just go straight to Steam and type in Scourge the Reptiles. It seems to be the way that people are finding it. They're typing in there. You can also find it on YouTube. If you search out Scourge the Reptiles, you'll find it.

Starting point is 01:59:38 You can even just type it straight into Google, and you'll find it as the first entry will be the Steam entry, I believe. Yeah, that's probably the easiest way. Just Google, Steam, or YouTube. YouTube will get you to the trailer. Yep, first one is the Steam page. Second one is the Steam page. Yep.

Starting point is 02:00:04 That works. It works. That's nice that when you search for the game, you find the game. Yeah, I know. And I didn't have to do anything for that search engine optimization. It is basically Steam has done that for me. So I've done a lot for me, actually. Like, when I first started marketing, I was getting about one to two wish lists per day on average,

Starting point is 02:00:27 and now it's up to past 10 per day. So Steam is doing something that I don't have to pay them for, so I'm very happy. I'm very happy to... That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. And hopefully any upcoming fests you're involved in, those go well as well.

Starting point is 02:00:42 Do you have any plans to take the game to any cons before release, or is Avcon the last one you're going to do? I'll do Sage again. Sage is SA Film Corp in Adelaide. That's in February. I have no plans to go to Pax. It's kind of expensive for a tiny team. Sure. But I've heard that it's really...

Starting point is 02:01:05 And I don't currently have any... But they're always coming all the time. So, yeah. If you follow me on Blue Sky, that's where the biggest amount of stuff is on the social media. You'll see any festivals that I get into post on there. Awesome.

Starting point is 02:01:31 Nothing else you will. want to mention or is... No, that's it. That's it? We've covered a fair bit. Awesome. I'll do my outro and then we will sign off. Sure. Thanks, Brody. Thanks for having me. And it's been a pleasure and I've loved it.

Starting point is 02:01:46 Yeah, absolutely pleasure to have you on. Okay, my main channel is Broody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I streamed there as well, not lately recently, but I need to get back to it. I've got the gaming channel, Brodyon Games. Right now I'll be playing through probably a finish Kazan by the time you guys are seeing this, so Metal Gear Solid

Starting point is 02:02:07 Baby and also Yakuza 6. And if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed, it's on iTunes, all of this stuff. Search Tech for T and you will find it. To find the video version is on YouTube, Tech Over

Starting point is 02:02:23 Tea. So, how do you want to sign us off? What do you want to say? Just say, check out Scourge of the Reptiles on Steam, watch the trailer. And I hope you like dinosaurs. That's, uh, that's what you're going to get. I think you're the first person I've had on that actually promotes their game in the outro. Isn't that what you're supposed?

Starting point is 02:02:47 Apparently not.

Tech Over Tea - This Is A CRPG Where You Fight Dinosaurs | Kyoti Games

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