Tech Over Tea - This Upcoming Metroidvania Looks Incredible | Lantern Jump

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Today we have members of Lantern Jump the developers of up coming indie metroidvania game called Goldstained, I got a chance to play it at a recent con and it was a ton of fun.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Today we have members of Lantern Jump the developers of up coming indie metroidvania game called Goldstained, I got a chance to play it at a recent con and it was a ton of fun.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4007110/Goldstained/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as well as your host, Rudy Robertson, and there's a hair in my mouth. Lovely. Yeah. We're not restarting that. Welcome back to the show. Today, we have developer. What are your actually roles in the project?

So I'm the programmer and the composer. Mm-hmm. And I do all the animation, everything business-related, and level design, game design type things. Okay. of the upcoming, we'll talk about maybe when at some point throughout the show, indie game Goldstained. So I guess, yeah, you already kind of introduced yourselves, but if you want to do a bit more of an introduction, go right ahead.

Yeah, sure. I'm Tommy. I'm the programmer from the team, and I've mostly just a self-taught programmer. I've been doing it since I was a kid. Worked on lots of sort of hobby projects over the years, but never really taken it to actually making a full game. Sort of the typical, you know, indie dev never finishes any projects.

But now we've got a team and now we're actually finishing something, is the dream. Yeah, my name's Justin. I didn't really do much animation before working on games and such. But when Tommy and I reconnected after high school, we worked on game jams. And so I just continued forward. And after doing the game jams, and we did well with those. we were like, let's do something bigger. So we started working on GoldStand.

So how many projects have you two done together? There's another member of the team, if I'm correct, yes? Yeah. How many projects have you done together before this one started? So we worked on two game jams before this together. One was us two and another friend. And then the one after that was a project with the three of us who are currently developing Goldstained. It was a game gem.

And then we realized, oh, we work really well together. We're housemates. Let's do propaganda. That does make it really convenient. And I, you know, I said when we met, it's kind of like you can go and get blame people in person. If somebody's not like pulling their way, you can be like, hey, knock on their door. Like, we need this thing kind of done. Well, you know, like, yeah, yeah, definitely.

But also, in the same way that it is the biggest blessing in the world, it is also a fine line to walk. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've got to keep in mind at all times that we're friends first. And yeah, we just have to be careful about that. And this is to anyone that works on projects with their friends. You're going to hear stories all the time, all the time about working on something and then caring a lot about it and then that straining your friendships or relationships.

So just really keep that in mind. Yeah, yeah. I think even if it's not something super important, even something like a university project, that can already be, especially like a really, big project. Like, for example, with my final year, I had like an entire semester project. Something like that, if you're doing it with a friend, it can really start to like, sort of strain that if either one person is not pulling their way, one person is going down a route you don't really understand, or all of these things can sort of create a bit of tension. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

It's just something that happens. Just keeping open communication about that kind of thing. and just even just being like after sage when you came up to us after that event there's no way that a team is going to do a crazy amount of work straight after doing a big grind to be prepped for you know the first in-person event um so we all knew that it was going to it was going to uh that production would slow down a bit merely after sage but let's say that we weren't aware of that and you know two members of the team one member of the team isn't pulling their weight immediately after a big event, then if we didn't have communication,

if we didn't understand those type of things, yeah, it would have been a bit of a disaster. What does the third member of the theme do? He's the environmental artist and the concept artist. So he does all the environments, everything you walk around, and he does, like, character designs, enemy designs.

And so he'll draw them up, maybe do like a rotation of them or draw a couple of keyframes and then apply it to Justin, who does all the other anime, all the rest of the animation for it. Right, right. So I guess we probably should explain what the actual game is, and we'll go from there. Yeah, so Goldstein is a top-down 2D action-adventure game inspired by things like Hyperlight Drifter,

Dark Souls, Legend of Zelda, old like 2D Zelda games, in which your main form of progression is by unlocking new weapons and exploring new areas of the map using the abilities for those weapons grant. and the gameplay is yeah all revolve around boss fights fighting difficult enemies exploration when I got a chance to play the game at Sage I thought it was really fun

I like when you when you play a game at a con there's like sort of a mixed bag you sometimes have these like very early tech demos where they don't really have the game sort of fully realized yet they maybe have like a core mechanic

but it doesn't really it doesn't really all fit together yet and from what I can see, maybe correct me from wrong here, from what I can see here, you've built out a very small part of the game, but that small part of the game does work quite well. Yeah. I said, do you want to... Yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you for, you know, kind words about it.

Yeah, I'd say for Sage, we had a vertical slice of just the basic, your first weapon. and when we say that the weapon forms will allow you to progress forward in the game, none of that was shown at Sage. Yeah, yeah. It's like there's a whole core mechanic of the game that we haven't, you know, shown pretty much publicly, really. So it's very nice of you to say that, you know,

it looks good or it feels good when it is truly like, truly just the tiniest nugget of the actual, what the experience is. What I can say for sure is, that the art itself is really good. Like, even if nothing else was there, the art itself is really, really good. No, thank you. Yeah, yeah, thanks.

That's Phoenix. That's, we'll pass along the words. So, yeah, if I recall correctly, the build you had, it had the sword, and then you could use that as a thrown weapon. That's basically the mechanics you had. Yeah, so that is sort of the main, It's actually sort of what started the game was the thought of that. It was from like a little

prototype that I had made of, yeah, like top down sword combat, but you could throw the weapon and then like suck it back to you. And so that is sort of the main mechanic that every weapon will do, but in like a different way, and hopefully a different interesting way. What's a, do you have any of the other, do you have any of the other weapons implemented or are those just like paper ideas right now? We've got a couple of them semi implemented, not completely, but we've been working on just some animations for some ideas of them and the rest of them

we've got a lot of ideas written down on paper but not implemented yet. Sure, sure, sure. What's another one of the weapons and how is that going to differ from the main one? Can we give the example? I think we can give the most obvious one.

So, for example, one of the other weapons you unlock is like a big hammer, heavy weapon, slow attack, and when you throw it, it lands on the ground, and then when you retract it back to you, instead of it coming to you, you will get retracted to it because it's so heavy. is an example of how, you know, we do it differently.

And so then that can open up lots of different interesting ideas for exploration and, like, puzzle use. I'd say that, that weapon is like the equivalent of unlocking a double jump. It's like the most obvious iteration of the idea. On the Steam page, it does mention hot swaffle weapons. So is the idea sort of like, you know, in like a DMC game where you can frequently switch between weapons during combat? Or is it more switching out of combat to? solve puzzles. No.

Flick, flick the, like weapon wheel on the right stick, flick the direction, changed. Yep. Make up your own combo, do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that, yeah, I can definitely see how that can very quickly start to, like, really, sort of open up a skill ceiling. Yeah, we really want to design for that sort of thing, letting people discover their own preferences of how they want to switch between him and discovering, like, advanced way to use the weapons

and switching between them is, yeah, definitely a core part of the game we want to, let players do. Okay, okay. That does sound... Again, what I said before, I think the base that you have here is already cool. And a lot of games where they do have these sort of expanding combat mechanics, it doesn't feel realized early on.

Like, you... A lot of games, the combat itself doesn't start to fit together until you start having a lot of those pieces. I think, at least with the... vertical slash you had available, it already felt fun to play as it already was. So, hopefully that as you add more things continues to add onto that. That's my hope with it. Yeah, I think, I think that's just a really important thing is each weapon should also just feel really fun on its own because there'll be a lot of players who will pick their favorite

weapon and then use that like 95% of the time, which is, you know, we kind of like hope to hope that, you know, people have their favorite weapon and, you know, they should all be fun to just use it on their and whenever you can. There's a great thing that we have. We have some pretty nice examples to draw from just within the genres. Obviously, it's said inspired by Hyperlidrifter. You know, the attacking feels great in that game. And then for people picking their favorite weapon and sticking with that,

we love Monster Hunter. That's just, it's, there are so many amazing examples that we can draw from to just make sure that the player experience, no matter kind of their play style or how they do it. We hope, at least in the end, everyone's going to have fun playing. So what actually, this might be sort of an interesting way to approach is what actually goes into making a weapon feel fun. I know this, you're like very early in the project, but you've already clearly got something there. So like, what are you actually doing that may not be immediately obvious when you just swing the sword?

Yeah. Maybe some animation stuff that you've worked on. It's a bit of everything. It's, it is really truly like a bit of everything as far as how far the hitbox is. The frame data of the weapon is such a huge one. And then the extremes of the animation is also a huge one. An example that we can give is the sword right now is in a pretty nice sweet spot. It comes out on frame 4 at 60 FPS, right?

A lot of games actually those type of weapons come out on frame 1. So it just, it's just like instant. As soon as you attack, it instantly comes out. And that feels great. But for our type of game, because we have different weapons with different speeds and such, we wanted to give it even just the tiniest bit of wiggle room. It didn't always come out on frame 4. I think at the start, it was like frame 8.

Like, it was way late. Like the start of the game, we were going full like Dark Souls. It was like, whoa, swing. Right, right. And then we've made it faster. And then we've made it faster twice. since then as we've sort of gone more towards the fast pace, like, um, pipe light style.

Yeah. Yeah. So it really is, um, I guess a lot of experimentation and just keeping in mind the frame data, like just really, really thinking and, and just testing, testing out, just always testing. That's what I say about anything, about game feel for, for anything. You will have, you will have an idea about how something should be. You need to test it.

Like you need to test it and then change it. And then it will change your mind. because you need to test it. Right. I think also not just testing it, because you can sort of get yourself into a mindset of how it feels. I think we'll talk more about this in a bit,

but actually getting other people to test it as well, because you can, especially with any of the rough edges, you can kind of forget that those are there as you've done a bunch of testing and sort of you play, you maybe subconsciously play in a way that sort of avoids those problems, whereas someone who's new to it, someone who's just picking up the controls,

especially if they're coming from other similar sorts of games, you're going to have some expectations about the way something should feel. And that's going to immediately tell you that something, something is either really good or maybe something's a little off. Like when I brought up that the animation locking, This is like a There's debate about whether

animation locking is a good or a bad thing. Personally I like being able to dodge out of an attack combo but it sort of depends on the way you want to build it and what sort of feel you're going for there. Yeah, I think

with animation locking it's quite interesting because we actually technically do let you cancel attacks early. It's just not as fast as I think some games are. Sure. Because yeah, I definitely picture that more. It's like a sliding scale and all like you have it or you don't. Because we do, but it's like maybe the last six to eight frames

of an attack. You can cancel out of it. And so it's something that we can like sort of slide around earlier or later. Because I don't think any game would like you would just like cancel a swing and then like frame two just cancel out of it. Like they would always do something out of the swing first. I'm sure there's some games which are like

full animation cancel whenever but yeah, no, I do see what you mean there. Yeah, it also goes with just even the feeling of the animation in general. Because you can feel like your animation locked if the, I guess, the full swipe of the attack has finished. And maybe there's like a really large reset period where the character is actually resetting from their swing. And your brain will immediately pick up that you'll finish the swing and your character is resetting. and if 80% of the time you're spending

resetting from that swing, you can feel like you're locked in place as well. So there's so many things that go into just the basic, basic game feel of a sword swipe and making it feel really good. Yeah, animation's an area which I have very little knowledge.

I can sort of see the obvious things, but how I would turn an idea into something that actually works is something I just have never really explored. Yeah. Turning an idea into something is if it's in your head, I would say, and it's a bit arbitrary in nature, and maybe you're not comfortable with taking something from your head and putting it onto, like, you know, we use a Sprite for pixel art, but putting onto paper, whatever, getting out of your head and putting it somewhere, then

references your best friend. If it's close enough, it's good enough. I guess you can always iterate on it as you go anyway. Yep. So, earlier you said that this was your first experience taking this to a con.

Have you showed it off to, like, your friends before this? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, plenty. Kind of about the Woodville Yeah, so I guess we technically have, we've shown it off to people once before not to play but

I'm in a local community concert band called the Woodville Concert Band and we our big show each year is that we play video game music we play a bunch of video game music and with a big screen behind us that has like footage of and we play in sync with it so it's all it's sort of like a multimedia experience and

our director arranges most of the pieces for it himself and so last year when we had it on I was thinking well last year the theme was it was all Australian games that was sort of the catch for that year and so I was like well let's We've got a bit of a game here. Can we chuck ours in there?

He's like, yeah, yeah, sure. So, write up some music for that. So that was technically the first, like, public showing of the game, like a two and a half minute trailer sort of thing with music. And that was pretty cool. That does sound pretty cool. But, yeah, Sage was the first public, like, playtest of any sort. So what was the response Sage like?

And I guess... It was really good. Just straight up, like, just very, very, very good. We had a really big fear that because the game is harder, that it just wouldn't mesh well. Right. You know, it's, and also we have a, we had a longer demo. I think we had one of the longest demos that was like in the room for sure. Because it was two separate bosses you could fight through.

Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was, it was areas, a bunch of enemies and two bosses. And it's also a harder game. So people on average died like five times to each boss. So it's, you know, it was, it was a bit of an experience. So, you know, that was a fear going in, that people wouldn't like it because it might not be the optimal conditions in which you've sat down to play a Souls game. Right, right. But in general, people really, really liked it.

The feedback form shows some really validating data on just how people rated their experience on the game. You know, it's majority five out of fives, which is awesome. And, and yeah, it was just, it was a great, great experience. And our fear of it being too hard wasn't really necessary at all, especially on the second day. Because we did some, we did a little bit of a hot fix. Between the two days. Yeah. But yeah, it didn't end up to being a fear that was realized because people felt like the difficulty was fair, which is really what you want.

What did you go to the con with sort of, what were the intention? of going to the con. Like, was it just for playtesting, or were you trying to do something else? I think, yeah, it was mostly for playtesting. I mean, there's always a bit of, you know, just getting some public, like,

not like awareness of the game out there, but mostly for playtesting. You know, we have, throughout development, we always have sort of things who are wondering about, like, oh, is this mechanic good? Is this one good?

How, what's the difficulty? Like, what's the pacing like? And we can speculate as much as we want and we can test it in the studio. But really, until you get a lot of people who've never played the game before to play it, you can't, know for sure. So, yeah, I think that was the biggest thing we got from it was just getting validation

or just good information on a lot of the questions we had about design. Mm-hmm. You mentioned, you mentioned difficulty. Were a lot of people finishing the demo? Were people getting stuck on one of the bosses? I think the feedback form shows that a majority of people beat the first boss and went on and like didn't. So what the feedback? What the feedback former shows is did you be any of the bosses? Sorry, no. Did you be the first boss? Did you be the second boss? I think from memory, majority goes from they beat the first boss. Right. But yeah, it was a really, it was a really mixed bag because you sometimes get people

that would, you know, walk up, they play it for a bit, they realize it's not for them, and then they hop off. And it's like, that is just kind of data that you can't, that you just, you just internalize and you take in and you can't sort of see later. Right. Right. It sort of depends on why they're bouncing off as well. If it's a game they don't vibe with, or is there something that you've done that is sort of confusing about the initial startup? I think our start, for Sage was pretty on the money. Like, you kind of know what you're doing. I think it's just, it's just not for them. And that's perfectly okay. Yeah, I think I definitely found, at least from my experience of what people were saying, that people, who liked this sort of game seems to enjoy it and they would play it for a while at least get past the first boss.

It's hard for me to really like really judge the difficulty of the fight because this is the kind of game that I play. So I like, you know, I've got like a hundred plus hours in a game like Hades, right? So it's hard for me. Are the bosses actually hard? The controls made sense. So as like with that in mind, I can't really fully. judged the difficulty of the... It took me like one or two attempts on the second boss, so it at least was that, but it's really hard to sort of

tweak that. It's really hard. I think, honestly, I think in terms of like the boss's like a move set difficulty, pretty good, honestly. Most people were taking a few tries to beat the boss but then would beat it. But I think the biggest thing we found after find the bosses on the,

or after watching people play on the first day, is that they just all had too much health. because, you know, when you've designed the boss, you play at a bunch, you feel like, oh, how long does it feel? Does it feel too long? Does it feel too short? And we know, we know obviously developing it that we are better than most players because we're the developers, we can beat the bosses faster.

But like, to the extent that, like, we were probably getting, like, twice as many hits on on every boss. And look, we knew all the gaps to get them in. We knew how to dodge aggressively. And so we realized it was feeling good for us, but it was just taking, it was such a war of attrition for regular players who could dodge the moves enough, but it was just taking way too long. So we like cut a third of the health off of both of the bosses on the second day. Yeah, we realize, no, we are, we are, we are, we are,

us as developers are closer to like someone speed running the game. Yeah. Just a good player, a player who's familiar with this sort of game. So we should feel like we are blitzing through them. Yeah, that's, that's like a really key realization is if you've got a game where your enemies have, have health bar, you know, it had the health bars. It's not like Tyen Souls where, which is an amaz game. I recommend people to really play that way where it's one shot you kill them, one shot you die. You know, if it's not, that if there has health bars and you know, you're actually really good at the game or you're developing the game, then you are way closer to a speed runner than a normal player.

Like, you are pretty much a speed runner. So the timing should feel like that. Like, from my experience, everything, like, visually made sense. I think that's a problem that a lot of games have where attacks don't have tells. and when it's like that, anytime you get hit, it just feels, like it feels like the game is screwing you, right?

I think what you've done, from what I recall, everything made sense. The different attacks were clearly differentiated with the wind-up animations. And whilst you're going to get hit a couple of times, you might die a couple of times. I think everything

made sense. And that, I think, is the sort of like, first initial thing that should be there. Does it make sense? Because if it doesn't make sense, anything else you do after that point, like, it kind of just feels like artificial difficulty. Yeah, no, I think that's, yeah, absolutely just one of the cornerstones

of these sort of games is difficult, but it should feel fair. Like, you shouldn't feel cheated by anything. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's just really something that comes from playing those sort of games a lot. You know, you, and then when you playtest your game, you'll be able to get a better feeling of, does this move have a good windup? Does it look distinct from the other ones? You just think about those things,

whatever you're designing them. And then as well, just little things in the game, like, you know, always biasing hitboxes a bit in the players' favor, so the players hitbox is a bit smaller. Enemies are slightly bigger. So, you know, if it looks like, oh, you just might have hit, no, it doesn't hit.

Right, right, right. It's much better to feel like, oh, I just dodged that, then, oh, I should have just dodged that, but I got hit. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, the, I think, like, use of colour is very important as well, making sure that your attacks are distinct from the enemy attacks, and especially the enemy attacks are distinct from the background, which is a problem

that a lot of games do have. Great example, actually. It's a really good game, but the final, the very final boss in Silk Song, it is a black enemy with a black... Hold on. Hold on. That's all I'll say. Hold on. Black enemy. Black enemy, black background, black attacks. That's all we need to know. I haven't finished Silk Song yet. I haven't finished it either.

I won't say what the fight is. That's all I will say. Yeah, no, absolutely. We've thought about that a lot and we've actually, specifically, I think, some art stuff has been revised several times over the course of the games. Like, like, contrast is high enough. Like, we can't distinguish it enough. I think, like, the gold example of that is like enter the gungeon where, like,

bullets are bright, white with a fully red outline, always, like, all the time. and obviously if we go to that fight might change the art style again but we do definitely really focus on like yeah backgrounds and environmental stuff more towards the midtones and then characters and enemies and important things more contrasty dark and light yeah yeah yeah yeah

there was a good point brought up where we talk about the difference between allied and enemy rather projectiles or attacks because we are kind of using obviously gold stain we're using gold quite a bit

within our palais even for projectiles and attacks. Someone had commented that they thought that they could reflect the projectiles because they were the same color as the sword. And it's little things like that, which is, honestly, it's an assumption that I never thought of. But it's little things like that that are, well, you can't, firstly, that's not something in the game. And is it something we want to put in the game? I mean, maybe in the future.

But if players are thinking that, then it's actually an issue. And it's an issue to do with color choice of project. Right. Well, I could imagine, like, one of the later weapons you unlock be a counter weapon, for example, where the throw attack is, if you, you know, parry an enemy, then it doesn't attack back. Like, that could seem like a cool idea. Yep. Yep. Yeah. There's, there, there are lots of, like, the list goes on and on about so many crazy ideas that are fun and cool. And, and yeah, it's just, it's a very expandable. It's very expandable, like, system. So. When you mentioned Enter the Gungeon there, that's a really fun game. And that's one of those games where readability is incredibly important.

Because for anyone who hasn't played Enter the Gungeon, it's a bullet-held game, basically. It's a bullet-held game with rooms the size of, like, binding of Isaac. So it can get very, very chaotic. And that's a problem that a lot of games have, trying to, like, read what the fight is doing. especially this becomes a problem in a lot of realistic games where they have a lot of particle effects, a lot of attacks and so much going on where it becomes very easy to lose track of the player, lose track of the enemy,

and then obviously if you get hit from that, that's when, again, like I was saying before, it starts to feel kind of unfair. Yeah, no, absolutely, and that's why I think that's probably why Enter the Gundron decided to go with such a contrasty board but because it is just, it is a pure bullet-held, like really, really dense bullet-held game. House is probably more like bullet heck.

You have to go to name. It's like, because it has a bit more of like the melee combat dodging and getting, weaving in and out, but there will be some like, you know, bullet pattern dodging stuff as well. So yeah, it's definitely important for our game as well. Probably don't need to go to the extent of enter the gun, just because the screen will not be filled with bullets like enter the gun.

Sure, sure. But yeah, it's absolutely still something to keep in mind. Yeah, yeah. We will definitely be iterating on. like our language of that specifically, of like, of projectiles and such. Even on the next boss that will be working on, definitely needs some very, very clear, clear colours going on with the projectiles. The second boss, I believe was mainly a melee boss,

but also it had the like the spikes that came out of the ground. The first one did have some of that bullet aspect where it made like the circle that like went out and then like came back in. I don't remember the other attacks, but that one's sticking out of my mind. Yeah, the first boss was completely designed as purely like a, pretty much a bullet-held boss dodging, because at that point, like, you got the throwing and retracting ability from that, so we really wanted to, like, kind of show that in the boss,

have the boss be using that same sort of ability. So the bosses that you have right now, are those intended to be, like, early-game bosses? Do you not really know what you're doing with them? At the time we did it, yeah, they were intended to be, like, boss number one, number two. From feedback, you know, things can shift around. We're probably not just going to get rid of them.

Sure. It just feels like a waste. It's a waste of resources to do that. But, you know, bosses can be shifted around. They might get shifted around. Yeah, that's the great part about developing these kind of games, is that as long as the patterns and the designs aren't absolutely completely rigid, there's absolutely nothing from stopping us from moving it to a different spot on the map

and making it harder or making it easier. You know, it's, these kinds of things are fun to do. And it's, it's fun to, you know, just shift things around, shift boss around, shift things around, shift things around where it's on the map. And I think it's, it's something that you don't really realize until you work on a game like this. Like, you don't realize just how many things get completely moved from where they were at the start. Hmm. Hmm. Okay, that's fair.

That's fair. what was what was a lot of the feedback you got on the game what did people kind of feel like was good what did they think needed a bit of work I think the main things

that I noticed I won't say everything so you can say someone as well but like things that people liked obviously I think just the general combat and game field people were pretty receptive too I think the things that were the most needed some work was just lots of little polished things like navigating around the world

dashing across gaps you know it was easy to just getting the spacing of like dashing across gaps right it was pretty easy if you're a bit off angle to just fall into the void and die or you know some tutorialization things not being quite clear enough um i think yeah it was a lot of just the little um the little like bumps in the road as you're walking along yeah yeah i mean i i i think that's that really just summarizes it from my understanding of reading through the responses and thank you to everyone that played and gave responses and feedback like it's it's the best thing you could possibly do to support projects like this when they're when they're early um uh is is really just that and it bodes well because the level design and a lot of these layouts um aren't finalized you can't finalize

your tutorial area of the game until you've actually gone through a large majority of production, because you don't know what things you need to tutorialize yet. If you know the basics, but you don't actually know what skills of player needs to learn. So, really, the

issue of the current demo being that burns well, because we know what's going to change. Right, actually you're not really sure about how many mechanics are you going to add, how much you need to sort of like, also introducing the I guess

how mechanics can sort of mix together like do you have to tutorialize the fact that you can swap weapons and then combo stuff together yeah stuff like that I think even probably a slightly more accurate thing isn't the addition of mechanics it's really adjusting or taking out stuff

because that's kind of the approach that we're more we're more fond of is saying is this mechanic doesn't have the depth that we want it to have. And if it doesn't have the depth that we want it to have, just kill it. Just kill it. It's not adding enough.

Just kill it. The game will be fine without it. Right. You don't want to have sort of mechanic bulk where you're adding things and then they don't really add anything to the game. It's just kind of adding it for the sake of that. Yeah, like a big one that we noticed from the play test

was like we had a stamina bar in the play test and it would drain down when you sprint and it would use like half a bit when you did a dash. And the idea, like, you know, reason behind that was, you know, just add a bit more strategic depth to the combat. But we found that was probably one of the biggest things that people pointed out when they were playing. It's like, I don't really like the stamina by it feels like it, you know, it's either not, it's not integrated enough. It doesn't do enough. And it's just kind of a bit annoying.

So we've like, yeah, been rethinking that. And that's like, you know, do we really need it? Is it really adding that much to the game and like swapping that around something more intuitive? Yeah, yeah. The answer was it didn't actually have the depths. It didn't have the mechanical depths. It wasn't that kind of game. So just kill it.

When you got something like Dark Souls where attacks use stamina and everything uses stamina, basically, then it becomes an integral part. But for hours, it was really just for movement. And especially outside of combat, it was just kind of annoying because you dashed couple of times. And then you have to wait for your stamina recharge before you can do it again. Yeah, right. Because, like, the point of the stamina bar was to stop players just spamming dash as much they wanted. Yeah, basically. Because it was a combination of like, we really like the feeling of going like dash, dash, dash, really quickly in a row.

But we don't want the play to obviously just be able to do that. forever so we were like, all right, we'll stamina it so you can only do it a couple of times in a row and the potential, you know, give players upgrades later so they can do it more times in a row. But yeah, we found it just, in the end, it just didn't have, it didn't provide enough extra depth of the gameplay to warrant having an extra mental, a bit of mental load for the player to keep track of. Right, right. And when you tie into the tutorialization of these mechanics, where we're going for the

approach of trying to, uh, have encounters or rooms within your tutorial, say, within your first area that make these mechanics necessary or make them really, really important to use. And it just goes to show that we had a mechanic, we removed it. But having that mechanic in, if we had fully done our whole tutorial section and now we've removed it, well, we'd have to remove that section of it. Then it changes the flow of your first section of the game. It's stuff like that. At least from my perspective, I don't think the stamina, the stamina was

necessarily bad. I do think it was, it felt weirdly tuned. It felt like the timing of it didn't really make much sense. There were a number of times I went to dodge and then realized that I couldn't because the stamina bar was still recovering. Yeah, I think there's, there's certainly like things we, like it was implemented functionally, but we definitely could have like, you know, post that I've added, like, indicated close to the character instead of up into UI of like, you've run a stamina or your stamina bar, so you have a better sense of what you, what, like, how much you have left. Like, that probably would have changed people's perception a bit of a bit.

Right, even like a visual indicator on the player, something like that. Yeah, 100%. Something changes color. Breath of the Wild style. Yeah. Yeah. We went through all these iterations. Like, you know, when you're going through these mechanics and these ideas,

you go through a lot of this stuff and seeing what works and what doesn't. And what is what, like, fits the art style of the game and the feeling of the game is, like, the most important. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it sounds like you're putting a lot of thought in. into sort of the individual aspects of the game. You don't really have...

Do you have sort of a general outline of what the game is? Yes, yes. But you're not really sure how the individual mechanics sort of fit together to make the outline happen. I'd say you can't... It's like...

It is more similar to... We know how the full jigsaw, like if there's like a thousand piece puzzle. We know what that thousand piece. piece puzzle is going to look like at the end. Right. But we don't know how to cut up all the Jigsaw pieces just yet. But we know how it is.

And we have a good, we have a good, a good amount of pieces as well. It's just that there's a whole chunk left. And we, our job is to, um, to cut up those pieces into the shapes that we think are the more satisfying to put together. Hmm. Okay. Okay. I can see what you're saying there.

So one of the things mentioned on the Steam page is, a dual narrative, experience the past, in a little of the fight in the future. And obviously in the demo, that wasn't really a thing, because there wasn't really story aspects in the demo, besides obviously fighting two bosses, which I'm sure will have law attached to them in the full game. What does that mean? What can you say that you don't, like, it's not too much?

I think you might just have to just buy the game and find out. Yeah, I think this is something that is, um, is, is a bit intense. to your first experience when you play the game. So I think it's a card we want to keep close. Okay, okay. Well, I guess what can you say about sort of the scope of the game and what you're sort of, I guess what can you say about the overall vision with it? I'd say the scope is, so we've done adjustments to the scope to make everything modular.

every mechanic, every idea that we do boils down to making more content for the game. That's really what a boils down to. It's just making more bosses or more weapons or more areas. The scope doesn't increase in more cinematic cutscenes or like this crazy idea where something else happens where we need to learn this new skill. So I think that's where we're at with Scope is extremely modular.

We know what it would look like if we could put in every weapon idea that we really want, every boss that we really want, and that is that going to happen? I mean, hopefully. But if it doesn't, that's okay because it just means we'll have less areas, less weapons, less bosses. And all that really means as well is it's just a bit less game. And that's not a big deal in the slightest. It's like, Eldon Ring would still be an amazing game if you didn't have the snow on the north.

And snow in the north is a great time. You know, it's a great area. But it would still be an amazing game without that area. Right. Okay. At this point, how long has the game been in development for? About nine months. Since May of late May of last year. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So, yeah, eight, nine months. Maybe this is a hard one to answer. How long do you want to spend on the game? Because at some point the game has to be released. Our general outline is, like, later this year, we want to release a demo of some sort, publicly, and then ideally two years after that for release. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yep.

Are you thinking of doing early access with that, or... No, no, no, yeah, so the... For the public demo, the idea currently is to just put out, like, a really, really solid, a demo and then get more feedback. Just get like a massive amount of way more feedback. And have it go across pretty much all the mechanics that we want in the final game. And then take that on board. A true vertical slice.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. A true vertical slice. Take that all on board and then spend the next two years making the rest of the game. Without you considering doing any sort of funding route? Kickstarter, getting grants. Yeah, we have looked at a grant.

We did one grant application before, and we didn't get it in the end. What I found with doing these grants is it takes quite a bit of effort, and it takes quite a bit of getting help from people as well. And it was time that was spent that I just really wanted to spend working on the game. and yeah yeah thankfully we're in the position where we're working on it

in our free time and we're okay with continuing to do that so I think it pretty much is just going to be a passion project if the demo turns out really really well for some reason and it seems like Kickstarter might be a good avenue

that's that's something that may be open to yeah okay how much I guess how much a week do you spend on the game? It can vary. We don't have like a strict work schedule I think that we stick to.

I would say try, like geez. I'm like an average way. I can tell you a spry on Steam. I got it on Steam to track my hours working on the game. I'm well over 600 hours on a Sprite since May and that doesn't include hours that I've spent in other software like Pixel Composer or

writing in the Obsidian document or just purely in Godot. So I can tell you that since May probably easily over 800 hours. Yeah, I'll tell. That's pretty accurate. Because, yeah, I wish I could try. I wish I started using Goddard on Steam from the start

so I could just track all my hours for it. But, yeah, it's been a lot. I would say I try to do at least something every day on it. Obviously, you know, you've got to have break days. But I think, yeah, I try to do something every day, at least. And there will be, I'd say, at least like, there'll be a couple of days a week where I'm working on for, like, several hours in a usually we're in the studio here, maybe all afternoon.

So the thing. When we first started, like, for the first month or two of development, because, you know, initially, like, motivation, it was, like, every free moment of our lives. Yep. For, like, eight plus hours a day, most days of the week were just, like, in the studio, just working on the game. So much.

It was crazy. And then you realize games take a lot longer to make than you thought. Yeah, and you realize, yeah, I can't keep that up. Like, that doesn't work. Some people can, you know. Team Cherry can keep that up. But they're freaks. Well, they also...

They also had like, what, $100 million to spend to like... Oh, I'm talking about Holland. I'm talking about Holland. Oh, yeah, Holiday. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because from one of the third, they just kind of grind on that game for like how two or three

is and it didn't do basically anything else. Yeah. You know, when you're in high-pressure environments, you know, that's just how it works. we are not quite in that of a high pressure environment, which is, you know, which is a blessing in itself. Yeah, as long as you can find sort of external motivation, some people are kind of, people are very different about how they handle getting work done, right?

A lot of people need that sort of external stimulus that can push them forward. Some people are really good at self-motivation. What about you guys? Yeah, I feel like you can't. for any sort of large project you can't rely on motivation forever because whatever it is

there's going to be times when you just don't want to work on it. So you have to figure out ways to just make yourself do it anyway even when you don't feel like it and just push through those times because it'll happen. There's times that I don't really want to work. I'm like, I'd rather do something else but it's like just get it over with.

It's a thing you do. Right. Yeah. I think for me it boils down to skill development. It's I I hate practicing just to practice. that makes sense. Yeah, I just don't, I just don't like it. I need to have a project or I need to have a goal in order to keep at the skill development.

And that's why when we, when we do the game, when I'm animating or when we're doing, doing whatever it is, it's, it's like that's, that's my motivator. Because in the end, I want to get really good at all the stuff that we're doing to make the game. That's fair. That's fair. You've mentioned Godot in there a couple. Why does that hell? Godot. Yeah, there we go. Godot. Go Dot. Yes, that one. I guess, yeah, we hadn't really talked about that side of it. Why was that the engine you went with? And what has the experience been like? Also, did you use Godot in those previous game jams? Or is this like a new thing for the project? So fundamentally, we used Godot because I use Godot and I'm the programmer. So that's what we're starting. with. But yes, we used Godot for the previous things. I've been using it since about

2020 since I think Goodo 3.1 came out. Before that, I used Game Maker. So used that throughout my teens. Before that, use Scratch. If anyone knows, Scratch, like, the educational, you're like coding Dragon Drop, like block by stuff. Yeah. But, you know, I, yeah, started using Godot in about 2020 because there was just things that I at the time couldn't do in Game Maker and, or at least couldn't do in a way that I could imagine. And as soon as I, as I, sort of looked up a little bit about Godot, it just kind of made sense. The way it structures, its scenes, the way it just organizes all the information. It's made sense to me. And also, you know, we just like open source software. So I guess from the animation perspective,

what has that been like in Godot? It is, it's pretty simple. It's got an animation player or anime spryd spryd and it just has a graph, a graph, no, sorry, not a graph, a keyframe-based system at the bottom. It's not anything that I would say is different than many other things. And also, I'm not very experienced in many other game-making softwares. I used RPG Maker for a game jam. And also, I love RPG Maker. I should love RPG-Maker games.

Those are some of my favorites ever. But the engine sucks. And doing animations in that engine, sucks. It's really, really bad. So, you know, anything that isn't restricted to three frames for walk cycles, I'm happy with. Well, I guess what is the tooling like compared to, like, dedicated animation tooling? I think it's... Yeah.

Well, we're working with a 2D game, 2D pixel art game that uses like sprites, right? So my first step is taking a concept that Phoenix did of a character or... an enemy and I'd open it in a spry and I do all the frame by frame in a sprite and in a sprite as well I changed the frame data like with the amount of milliseconds each frame plays for to just kind of be a bit bit similar to how I think it would be in the game export it out into into Godot and then put all those frames into the animation player in Godot and kind of match roughly what I did in a sprite and then and then it gets changed a bunch because once you go it in game it's different Sure, sure, sure.

But it is as simple as you have frames 1 to 10, and you put frames 1 to 10 in the thing, and then you drag them around for the timing. Yeah, because it's a 2D game, we don't really need to use any advanced animation features, like tweaning and animation blending and all that sort of stuff that you would use for a 3D game. So really, I think, you know, any animation tool

would be able to achieve what we need for our game. It is really nice. Obviously, having like a timeline sort of keyframe thing is really nice in Godot because you can do more than just, you can affect any property of any thing in the scene. You can call functions. You can do any of that. So it makes it very easy to add like logic tied to animations in the engine. From the development side, how has Godot been?

Because you've got quite a bit more experience with it. Yeah, I think it's been really, really great to work with. I haven't really worked it much in 3D at all. I've only really done 2D stuff. And for that, I think it's fantastic. Not without flaws, but definitely the easiest to work with that I found of any game engine. It has all the, in terms of like coding and syntax and features like that, it has pretty much everything that I need for it.

I just use the built-in language. Yeah, I was going to ask, are you using G-Script or C-sharp? Yeah, no, I don't use C-sharp because there is a C-sharp version as well. But it just, one, I've just not used C-sharp before. But it always, to me, it feels still like it doesn't have quite the same support an integration into the engine as GDScript is. And I personally, I really don't like having to switch between different windows and tabs and stuff

when I'm working on something. Like, even when we try to organize stuff on like Trello for things, like I hate having to open when I want to work on the game, I have to open two different things. I just want everything to be in the one. And I really like that I, the coding, GDScript, you just edit it in the engine. I find it, yeah, helps my workflow a lot.

I have a little bit of experience with Godot. I did like, what's the Unity guy? that did all the tutorials. Yeah, I went through his Godot stuff. Yeah, so he started that a couple years ago. That's pretty much the extent of the Godot stuff I've done. Yeah. As you said before, you sometimes start projects and then give up on projects.

That was exactly the state that I was in. But. Yeah, I think that's a universal feeling that any hobbyist developer can relate to. Before that, I'd done a little bit of Unity stuff back in university, and Godot, it, from, again, I'm no professional with the get over from my experience with it. It all basically just made sense. Yeah, I find it really nice.

It's just, it's very lightweight compared to a lot of the other popular engines like Unity or especially Unreal. Like it just, it's a small install, the games export small. It just kind of does everything. It has the right level of abstraction for me that it just does the things that I need to do that. I don't want to have to program myself, but it also just gets out of my way when I need to get out of my way as well. Yeah, it's just very comfortable. It's not perfect. Like there's a couple of things that I would like them to improve on, which, for example, like, shaders.

2D shaders and the 2D lighting system can be a bit of a pain to work with something. Like you can't, for instance, like you can't put multiple shaders on a single material in Godot. You have to just combine the shader code for them both into one. So you can't do. There's no multipathed shaders. And like there's some weird, like, lighting restrictions on dynamic lights in the game that can make it very hard to add it, make more detailed lighting scenarios in 2D. so we've ended up just programming our own lighting system for the game, which is still not perfect because it's just,

part of it's definitely just my lack of experience working in GLSL, I think it's called. But yeah, it's certainly been the bit that I've, like, gotten the most like, about is just trying to get shaders to work the way I want them to. Yeah, Shader Math is, I've watched a little bit of Shader Math videos, and it's just like, that, I can see how this makes sense. I can't wrap my... I need to work through some of the examples to really...

It seems to just be a big thing right here from anyone. Like, I've got friends who do a lot of, like, Shader and GPU-based programming. It's a program for the GPU just sucks. It's just bad. Like, who invented that stuff? So you mentioned that you guys like sort of open-source stuff, and I did, obviously, we talk about this when we're at Sage. You do have the Linux version here as well.

So I guess talk a bit about that. Well, in terms of like making the game on Linux, Godot itself is open source, so it's been developed. A lot of it has been developed on Linux, so it's not really any problems there in terms of using Godot, and it just natively exports to PCMac and Linux. So in terms of that, it's not hard to get your game on Linux. I kind of just switched to it because, like, a lot of people, I'm a pretty casual Linux user, but I switch over just because Windows will piss me off. So just download Linux Mint use that now, and it hasn't really caused any issues. But yeah, I don't. I'm not as much on the technical side of it.

I just kind of use it to achieve my own goals. Right, right. It's a tool for you rather than sort of interest in Linux itself. Yeah, pretty much. I think for me, like I have like a home media setup with proxmarks. Yeah, I'm going down the rabbit hole. I've gone down the Raba Hull. I really do like using Linux.

But the computer that we're on right now is Windows because I use it for audio. And that's really, that's just the one part. Like, I cannot fully switch to Linux, no matter how much I want to, just because I love Ableton. I love Ableton. It's just, it's my,

it's my favorite door by far. Reaper is great, but I just love Ableton. And until there's something similar on, on Linux, I will always have to have a Windows machine. Right, right. Yeah, this is, like, especially from audio people, there's something I hear quite often. If you get, if your experience learning is with one tool,

and that's the tool you know, going to something else is just going to be a pain. Like, I know, I know Mac people, or I know those people who have a Mac, specifically because there is one tool they need that is only on Mac, and they could bring things over but then how long is that going to slow them down for?

How long is it going to take them to relearn everything they could do before? Can the new tool do everything they could do before? And then if it can't, then you just find your workarounds. And I get why that's like a pain to do stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's just very specifically in the audio world. And yeah, specific plugins, whether whether they're supported and whatnot. But I am hopeful as far as our Linux support.

for audio just because Linux is very much, obviously in recent years way, way, way more adopters. And the more people involved just means that there's more more value in that market, so companies will start supporting it.

Random little side tangent, but did you hear that Valve basically had to put like a hold on the steam deck because of ram shortages? Really? No, I didn't hear that. Yeah, like it's basically, The Steam deck is basically just sold out in a bunch of regions. And the Steam machine, we don't really know what is coming.

We don't really know what pricing is going to be like because of the RAM price issue. Damn, that sucks. Yeah, well, I'm lucky. I got a, I got a Steamback. Obviously, you saw it at the booths. I'm lucky that I've got one. But that's a whole other topic that is fully connected to, like, obviously, the hardware software. We're very much on the software side of everything.

but yeah, hardware is super, super connected to it. And I'm just not liking, really, really not liking the situation going on. Because if it's harder to get hardware, then it's harder for people to access the cool software that we love, whether it's tools to make games or the games themselves or DAWs to make music. Like, it just makes everything harder. Yeah, I think it's CPU sales like 65% down last quarter. So, yeah. But hey, at least this game is probably going to run on basically anything.

Yeah, we run on a mini-peak, like a little Windows mini-PC. It's fine. Yeah, yeah. It's a pixel-ar game. And although it does run, like, full res, it still, it's pixel-ar. Like, you're, unless you're running heaps and heaps of, like, complicated shaders, we'll be fine. You do have, like, a minimum specs, really. written on the Steam page? Are those just like

nonsense? Because it's like you've got like a 4870 an 8800 GT like what are these specs? All right so I will say I'm I'm the person that you know does does the export to the Steam build and and the Steam page and whatnot

and I think I think I just went to unsighted and Hyperlight Drifter because those are two similar games to ours they just went to those and I just I just I just copied it. It's just like... Because what am I supposed to do?

It's supposed to go out and test it on random, random your really, really bad hardware? I don't know. It's also like, our game should run better than, than some other stuff that's similar, just because we've done some specific things

that should be optimising it just a tiny bit more. So, yeah, it's all made up. Okay, well, you don't have like a demo or anything published anyway, so, you know. Yeah, I guess I was going to, because I was just thinking like, how do people actually make this minimum requirements? But I guess yeah, demos, getting people to report what their systems are and how performance was. Steam is, I don't think it's been added just yet, but they are adding reviews that include hardware specs. Oh, that's pretty good.

That's very useful. I don't know if that was like available in like the developer side beforehand, like the, the, develop could see that, but now it's actually going to be on the public review. Okay. That's cool. Yeah. That's always useful. I think in general for us, I know that I'd like, we probably haven't had specifically

talked about it, but I for sure have been on the, on the side of making your game as accessible as possible as far as what hardware it can run on within reason. Just the fact that one of my favorite games of all time, out of wild, struggles a bit on, like struggles on the Steam deck and you've got to change the change the settings. Like that's a bit unfortunate. But it is also like, you know, that's a whole different thing because without the things that made it struggle, it would detract from the experience of the game.

Sure. But then I think about another game that I love that runs perfect on the Steam deck, Tunic. So, you know, and Tunic is beautiful, but it's Lloyd Polly. But, you know, it's absolutely gorgeous. So I think just in general kind of have a trend of. really wanting to make sure that the games are accessible. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is like such a problem you see with a lot of big AAA stuff now

where it's like, oh, the minimum specs are a 40-70. It's like, is it really a 40-70 or are there optimization problems with the game? Yeah, it's definitely become a big issue as, yeah, I think just top specs have become higher and high. you can, it just means, oh, cool, we can be twice as lazy with the optimization of the game. Right, right. When you look back to the, like, you know, like, PS3 games or PS2 games, like, how little specs they had to work with, and they just squeeze every, like, little morsel of performance out of those things they can.

Well, the, the PS3 had 512 megs of RAM. Yeah. And that ran GTA-5. Yeah, like, Rang J-T-5. Or like you look at, or like on the Xbox 3. You see like Haderle-4, like, that game looks, like, brilliant. No comment on the actual game itself, but it looks amazing. I don't know how they made that thing run on the Xbox 360.

Yeah, I've said it before, but like limitation breathed creativity. Now that computers are so powerful and there is so much that you can do with them, it sort of lets you, it lets you write games quicker. right? You don't have to hyper focus on how your particle system work and how your projectile system work. You can like, you can kind of sort of let some bad design get through there. But it does mean then that the specs of the system sort of raise up. And as also we have these game engines that do more and more and more, it also by definition means that a more general feature is going to be less optimized because it needs to be able to do more things. Yeah. Yeah. I usually try to keep a bit of a middle-of-the-road approach when I'm developing the game. You know, if something seems obviously unoptimized, I'll try and fix it early. Right.

But, you know, there's stuff in the game that's, you know, probably not as optimal as it could be. But when we run into the issue, we'll fix it. Because luckily, I also developed the game sometimes on a MacBook, which currently, like, it can just about run the game at 60 FPS. But, like, if a scene gets more complex, it'll probably start. lagging, so I think it's good that mark to have. If it starts lagging on that laptop, maybe we need to check things out. You said that you guys had like about an hour or slot to do this.

We've just passed the hour mark, so I'm not really sure how much time you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine. We'll go on for another 15 to 20. Okay, cool. It's easy. Yeah, okay, easy, easy, easy. I just forgot what I was going to say then. Optimization.

Yeah, optimization. old games MacBook something I don't remember doesn't matter we had the funniest bit of optimisation remember the loading with the particles yeah yeah yeah this is a hyper-specific gadoe nonsense just a hyper-specific good or just like just general like ticking a box

in a game engine that we forgot about we were having really big issues with like loading times but going between like just different rooms in the game it was sometimes you know taking like up to like a second or so to just like fade to black weight and it was like it just feels bad how do we how do we improve this and it took like i spent days and days like i like wrote in like a like multi-thread like parallel like like loading the next zone as you approach it before you get to it so like decrease the loading times and all this stuff and it still wasn't really fixing it until i realized that all the every single

tree which make up like you know the borders of the whole forest area they all had several particle like leaf falling particles and meeting on them and they had i had ticked them to like pre-price process like four or five seconds of particle emissions when they first loaded. So there was like 500 trees all pre-processing several seconds of particles. So probably like 2,000 or so particle emitters. And so it was just that, onto that done, like no loading time at all. But that was like after three days of struggling. And it was like, oh my God.

I don't even need this whole, I've kept the asynchronous loading system in anyway, because it's one step closer to open world game. This guy wants it to be an open world game. One step closer to open world game. I love when they say, hey Tommy, here's a cool idea. I added it. I'm like, oh, boy. Make it open world.

Make it 3D. We tried that as well at one point. That's another thing actually that Godot can't really do the way we want is some games, enter the Gundam, for example, are 2D games, but they're actually running in 3D. Not in the way that Unity is just like technically always in 3D, but in the way that they actually have like the ground and, characters and stuff actually be 2D sprites but like in

three dimensional space and they use a certain camera perspective to make it look two dimensional. I did not know that. Yeah, if you look at the ender the guns behind the scenes it's actually fully 3D and it uses a certain camera's perspective called an oblique perspective which is similar to like an isometric view where there's no

like there's no perspective warping but it also sort of stretches the view out vertically a certain amount so that horizontal and vertical faces both are like square. So if you were to look at a cube from a 45-degree angle, it would be like a full square and then another full square. So it looks like what 2D pixel art top-down games actually do. And that's just not a thing you can do it, unfortunately. But it really makes it a lot of developers do it because it makes it easier to deal with like depth.

Depth tools and like sorting like sorting sprites in front and behind each other because they're actually just existing in 3D space. So it just kind of works or like if you want like 3D lighting, like nice, like shadows in your game. You can just do that. Yeah. But it's unfortunately something that you just can't do and go. I will 100% look out for that the next time I played the game. Yeah, you can't tell. You cannot tell it in the game.

But I think the developers, for example, gave the one of the reasons they did it. Like, it makes it easier to do, say, a long laser attack. Because in 2D, you have to sort of figure out how you want to sort sprites in front and behind each other to make it look three dimensional. So the general way it's done is in a fully proper two game to get 2D game like ours is if a sprite is like higher up on the screen. That means it's behind the sprite that's lower down on the screen. So you draw it behind, draw it in front. And that generally works. But if you have, say, a long sprite, like a long stretch sprite of a laser,

if it's going like a diagonal, it might be in front of certain things and behind other things. And if it's just one sprite, it has one origin point that it determines it's like height from. And so you just can't do it. But if the game's 3D, it just kind of works because it's just 3D. So yeah, it's, yeah, things like that. If anyone, if there's any good old contributors, add oblique camera perspective to go. I'm sure it's an easy two-line fix. Godot contributions are actually going through an issue right now because of, because of AI.

Yeah, there's a lot of AI slop requests going on. Oh, damn. Yeah. So this is, this is, it's a whole, yeah, it's, I wish someone, someone, some stranger contributed to Godor and fix all of our issues. Oh, yeah, if someone could just, yeah, fix all the things we do because I don't want to have to learn how to learn C++. and do it myself. So, from your perspective as the developer, have you ever worked with other people outside of the game jams?

Like, had you ever worked with the people? No. No. So what is it, what is it like from your perspective to have members of the team who are not programmers who are like, here's an idea? Can we do this? Like, what is that like?

I wish everyone to get out of my way. Let me make my vision. No. Make it open world. No, it's good. Overall, experience of work and other people is really, really good. It's so nice being able to just

have other bits of the game taking care of and I open it up and there's new things and I just get to write the code to make it work. What was the question? I forgot the question. What was it like? I can add a bit. Something that is good because for me as a programmer is

concepts of bosses or enemies or stuff need to actually, they need to be funneled through him because he's the one that implements it. So he has to go, so he has to think about it in a way of how does this work in the game. And for example, on like a recent boss, I went through about three iterations before I even brought it to him. Because iteration number one, I was like, okay, this is cool,

but it doesn't work in this style of game because it requires too many, too many animations of rotations of the characters. So something along those lines. iteration number two, okay, how does that work with these floating parts? Oh, they're not omnidirectional enough. iteration number three blah blah and okay now I think it's ready to kind of now I think it sort of has aspects of it taken care of

so it can be implemented in the game I show up to Tommy then he looks at it and then he goes oh yes I see you I see your iteration number three but still we need to go to iteration number four because it's not there yet and that's that's a gap that I don't I don't cross because I haven't implemented any of that stuff before it's like that only the programmer can do yeah there are obviously going to be things where people suggest stuff and I'm like look that if we want to take a four month detour and

maybe it'll work then sure but for the most part I think we all sort of to an extent we we all do bits of every section of the game villain like we all do some level design some story stuff like there's definitely overlap and stuff right I think we all are able to understand like when one person has like the expertise in an area and just be like all right you get the like if there's like you know disagreement or stuff at some point all right you get the final call on that because it's your aspect. Like, you know, there's been boss designs where, you know, I'm like, I don't really feel it, but the artist feels it.

And we go back and forth and eventually like, oh, well, you're the artist. Right. You get to design it. Like, this is what it is. And so same with programming stuff. Like, you know, we'll be like, oh, can you get this? Can we make it do this? Or can we make it do that?

And open world, can we make it an open world game? Can we make the lighting be a billion times better? But, you know, something's just. Right. Yeah. I can see that sort of, it's like, can we do this thing with the lighting, have this emit this certain thing?

You're like, okay, how do I do this with Shader Effects? Like, what can I actually do here? Yeah. What do I know, not just what can be done? What do I know how to do? And what is feasible to work out how to do? Because it's something like, you could do anything you wanted with this game,

but it's a matter of, do I know what to do with that? And do I even know what we can begin to break down that problem? Yeah, like how easily does it slot into existing systems versus how much does it require making new systems versus how much does it require completely rewriting existing

like systems in the game. Mm-hmm. So it sounds like there's sort of, it sounds like there have been these cases where it's like someone has to just make a call like this is what we're doing like we can't just do everything.

Yeah, that happens sometimes I think for the most part usually we're able to like reach an agreement on something. We're none of us we're not like unreasonable people. We can come to those sort of

It has to be open world Another thing I'll say as well Just I'm circling back to like just how is it working with other people On a project It's been really fun in the sense that I have to Create tools for the others to work within the engine That don't require them to like go into the code Like making stuff in the inspector

And it's been really fun actually designing tools And things that are intuitive for the others to use Like the lighting system or I can't think of any else right now, but there's others. Like, whether something has shadow or not. Yeah, whether something has shadow or not. Or just, yeah, like, making it easy for the artist to go around and do environmental art and adding lots of, like, it's fun. It feels like I'm almost like expanding on the engine just, you know, doing good old things with export variables and adding buttons and stuff that make it feel like, oh yeah, it's like almost makes it feel like a library, like a, forget the word for, like a code library sort of thing.

Like you add your own extra functionality of the game. It's really fun. It's not something that I would usually do if I'm developing something myself because I'm most comfortable just kind of doing it in the code. Right, right, right. Yeah. But yeah, it's really fun with like, hey, can we have like this system so I can do this? I'm like, oh, yes. It's quite fun.

It's very fun to think out how to make it work well for the others. Okay, fair enough. Right now there isn't like a trailer or anything on the Steam page. Is that going to come when you guys get the demo ready? What is the plan there? We're thinking we probably just won't do a trailer for the game. I think we have the minimum five screenshots on the store page and have the minimum five of other games. If the minimum five screen.

If that can't sell the game, then the game's not good enough. No. Now, yeah. There will be a trailer. I don't think we're really, I don't think we're super settled on the timing of when, of when that trailer will come about and such. But we want to be at other local conventions and things like that. it's obviously just helpful to have a solid trailer. We just have gameplay footage on the Steam page.

Yeah. Gameplay footage, you have your gifts in the About, in the About page. We don't have that. There's an endless, an endless list. Yeah, I've seen the resources that Steam asks you for if you want to make a game page. Yeah, yeah. There's an endless list of things that are like, can be, it can be done as far as. as like the marketing essentially of the game.

And it'll never end. It's just kind of, I think realistically what will happen is when we have a deadline for an event or something like that, and we go, oh, we really want a trailer before we get to this event, that's when, that's when it'll happen. Okay. I don't think the list has been announced, so maybe you can't say if you are. But are you hoping to do AvCon? Yeah, yeah. Well, we're hoping to do AvCon. I don't even think the applications are really open.

Currently, it's just an expression of interest. Yeah, but yeah, we're hoping to do AvCon. And we've been asked about packs as well. And that's a whole other thing where if, apparently, there's a possibility of getting funding, like travel funding for PACs. If that comes about, then that's awesome and we'll do that. If not, we won't and we'll just continue working on the game. It's just, it's a lot of stuff like that.

Okay. Yeah, I, I keep going as long as we need to, but like, you guys did say it was like another 15 or so minute. So maybe it's probably best to wrap up now, if you reckon. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Okay. I wish you both the best luck with the project. I wish the other one of the best luck as well. and what I got to play was really good.

So hopefully if you end up at AvCon, I will get a chance to play it then. And yeah, I think the game is really good, at least from what I got to play. Maybe, I don't know, maybe things changed later, but at least what I got to play, you're on like a really good path and it's really fun. So I assume that you guys have a good idea for the rest of the game. So hopefully it goes well. and hopefully it sort of, hopefully gets the attention

I think it kind of deserves. Like, if you keep going down the route, you're going. I think this is going to be a really, really good game. Sweet. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And thanks for having us on the show as well.

Yeah, absolutely pleasure. You don't have like your website for the game or any social media for the game yet, do you? Lanternjump is a studio name, and Lanternjump.com, that's a other website. Oh, it's not linked on the Steam page. sadly not but you know

lanternjump dot com all the social media is lanternjump that's the studio name that's what we're releasing Gold Stand Under and yeah check it out

what a very basic Steam page this is it works it is a web presence it is it is the ability for people to wishlist it at the moment that's all that matters

the only thing matters is that they look at the sting page and they wish list it that's the only thing matters for before before the the performance when we had like the music playing for the game. We were like, you know, it'd be good to just have a Steam page. So if people see that, they can look it up and wish lists it.

So we created it, like, Justin created, like, a couple of days before that, that event. So that was literally why we created it at the time we did. And it hasn't been touched since. Okay. Well, maybe just go and add, like, the social media links and the website link onto the Steam page. And, yeah. I don't know the process to do that is, but, yeah. I would be there somewhere.

Yeah, somewhere. Um, nothing else you want to mention. No, I, we're kind of already touched on demo and stuff. Like nothing you, it's coming up. Do you want to mention? Look, nothing specifically about, about our game or our project, because we're not that's crazy along. But just, just in general, for people that make stuff, um, uh, I think there's, there's a huge thing that happens where you, you, you get stuck in, like, watching tutorials or, or consuming content about, about making the thing. Hopefully, if anyone is watching this on the second monitor or whatever, or, you, you, you, you, you get stuck in,

or they're paying close attention to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, come on. But hopefully, just make a thing, make a cool thing, and show it to someone, don't show it to someone. I don't care. I don't care what you do with it, but just make stuff. Making a thing is like the best way to learn a skill.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Well, it was pleasure to have both you here. I'll do my outro and then we'll sign off. Sweet, awesome. Okay, so my main channel, is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream there as well, testing out

various things. I've been lazy with streaming, but, you know, I stream on the gaming channel as well. That is Brodio on Games. Right now I'm playing through Shenmoo and also DMC5. If you're watching the video version, this you find the audio version on basically every podcast platform at Tech Over T. There is an RSS feed.

Check that out if you like that. And the video is YouTube Tech of a T. Also, there is Spotify video if you like Spotify. video for some reason. I'll give you both the final word, what do you want to say? How do you want to sign us off? This is my favorite part. I never tell anyone they're doing this. Do you have an idea? My name's Justin Risholi. I'm the animator and one of the three people working on Goldstein and thank you very much for having me. And I'm excited to release the game eventually

and also see what people make. What he said. But your name as well. I'm Tommy what he said Incredible You don't get with the third guy There's another guy Doesn't matter And the third member

Who you can imagine Is between us here Phoenix Yeah perfect Phoenix our artist A beautiful man Amazing artist Incredible

Okay I'm just gonna stop the call