The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Chasing Carrots, Paul Lawitzki, Video Game Designers

Episode Date: March 3, 2019

Chasing Carrots, Paul Lawitzki, Video Game Designers Chasing-carrots.com

Hi, Luke Sifas here from thechrisfasshow.com, thechrisfasshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys joining us. We have a gaming podcast that we're going to have today on the Chris Foss Show, and we'll also be having this on our sister podcast, chrisfossgaming.com. So you can be sure to see that on either one of the channels, whichever one you subscribe to, and we certainly appreciate you guys doing that. You can go to youtube.com forward slash chrvossgaming.com so you can be sure to see that on either one of the channels whichever one you subscribe to and we certainly appreciate you guys doing that uh you can go to youtube.com for us that's chris voss hit that bell notification button so you can see all the wonderful shows we do on the chris voss show and the other podcast channels you go to chris voss podcast network to see all seven podcasts that we have and be able to tune into some of the different ones that you like. Today we are joined by a German game development studio called Chasing Carrots and we have today with us Paul Lewicki. Did I say that right Paul? Yes that's correct. All right well welcome to the show man and what's

your title there? You're the programmer and lead game designer is that correct there? Yes that's correct yeah. Awesome all the way from Germany game designer. Is that correct there? Yes, that's correct. Yeah. Awesome. All the way from Germany. And this is really cool. We've been interviewing a lot of gaming companies that are small. I'm, you know, I don't just call you small, but you know, they're, they're these, they're these niche sort of small gaming companies. You guys have been around for a long time since 2011, I guess. Yeah, we have been founded for a long time, since 2011 I guess? Yeah, we have been founded in 2011. First of all, thanks for having me.

I'm very excited to be here. And yes, the company is quite... We had a seven-year anniversary last year, that was, yes. I remember that. And I've not been in the company since the beginning, but I was involved in the pressure overdrive project. So I started as a freelancer and then they hired me. They wanted to hire me from the start. I was a little bit reluctant and they just convinced me because it's an awesome place to work. And I'm very happy to be here. And my title is mainly, yeah, it's 50-50 programming and game design for me. So I'm a game designer and a software programmer. And yeah, I'm pretty involved in the game design part.

I'm sharing the lead designer role with our co-founder, Dominic, who is also the lead coder. And that's, yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We are pretty small and we like to stay small because it's somehow, it's like a small family

and it's fun to make projects like this. So you guys are working right now on a 70s to 80s inspired business simulation game where you start as a hands-on entrepreneur in your garage i thought this was really interesting i was watching the video on it and you grow your business to a large robot manufacturing company um and you've launched three titles so far pressure a top-down shooter cosmonautica a space training simulation with a focus on crew management, and Pressure Overdrive, a complete overhaul of the first Pressure game,

turning it into a twin-stick shooter. Pretty amazing. I mean, for eight people in a company, you guys are pumped out almost four games now. Well, yes, it was pretty turbulent also. I mean, our prior titles, they weren't as successful as good companies promising to be. And that's why we are kind of like in a phase where success is kind of in reach. Before that, it was a little bit mothered. We kind of had to accept contract work to get money

and to be able to progress with our game development. But still, yeah, we gathered a lot of experience from that. And yeah, slowly it's getting much better. Yeah, and your games are self-funded i mean this is pretty cool this this shows that people can take and build um you know gaming projects and i imagine with the success of steam and other platforms that are out there it makes it really easy for you guys to sell the game, get it distributed, get it promoted, and all that good stuff. And that's probably how we came across you guys. And make it so that everybody can make games,

so you don't have to be a billion-dollar company to make your own games. Yeah, that's true. I mean, the whole... Someone said, I think it was Rami Ismail, today is the time in which it's... it never was easier to make games like today and that's why so many games are popping up and we kind of went into the whole tycoon simulation genre because we love this genre, we love this game, we love this genre we love this game we love complexity we love to have this

intricate systems and and interaction um and b we kind of have gathered the experience to be able to actually uh produce something that that works in this way because it's not very easy to set up those systems so they are fun. And we are still working on that to get the whole complexity in there and also at the same time making it accessible. That's quite an interesting challenge. Yeah, I mean, in the old days, you had to have a fairly big company, fairly big backing. You see some of these powerhouse games like Destiny from Bungie

or other games like Red Dawn Redemption 2, which they almost have to go into underground development for like eight to ten years and have to have billions of dollars in funding. And here you guys are able to, with know platforms like steam be able to put these games together and launch them and have fun and and then also be close to your community uh which i find is true with a lot of these small game producers uh that they're they're they're much closer they're able to build their community and and listen to it and adjust the games and adopt them, where it seems like with a large lot of companies like Bungie, they don't listen very well.

Or by the time they can listen and actually steer, decide where to go with their ship, it's just a huge mammoth company. So it probably makes for much better gaming when it comes down to interaction with your gaming community, doesn't it? Yes, I hope so. We try to be as open as possible, which was in the past. We neglected that part in the past. We just recently started to kind of be accessible.

We are on Discord. We have a Discord server where we can talk one-on-one with the most engaged people from our community. We also are very active on the Steam platform. The early access release is already announced, and we are planning to have it in the middle

of the year. And before that, we want to have a closed beta. I'd like to call it a closed alpha, because a beta is usually always something that's feature complete, which we won't be because the most features will be introduced during the early access phase. And that's something I'm very excited about. For us, it's things like multiplayer gameplay. So you can start, you can kind of start up your company with your friends.

You start in a garage and you have like multiple people you can interact with. But the thing is, I mean, the unique selling point in this game is you're not like an omnipresent manager who's hovering above the whole thing.

It's still an isometric game, but you're still controlling one person. You have a character creator. You're starting by creating like a guy or a girl. And you walk around with this one character. And that's what we mean with hands-on entrepreneur. And yeah, the same goes for the multiplayer part. We also are planning for modding support. So you already gave the hint that you're building up

your company to a robot manufacturing empire. So the initial idea was to have a company simulation in general, but then we had to settle on some sort of product. You couldn't just do like the Acme thing, produce everything, because then you would go down a rabbit hole, and that would kind of be very difficult to realize. So we kind of thought about, what's the most interesting product we can come up with? And somehow, robots are cool.

Why not robots? I mean, you can do so many things with robots. They're so versatile. And so they can be very simple or very complex. And so that's why we started with that and said maybe with modeling you can add other things like food, for example, or many different things, cars or stuff like that. Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny. You can play CEO and you can build your own business and you can go through the whole thing where you have to develop your products and then hire other people and build a team around you and and uh just like just like you with the company um if i start the if i start the company in my garage with my multiplayer friends and i

decide that i don't like them anymore can we have a big friendship uh breakout partnership fallout and then giant lawsuits and stuff with each other as we fight over the company. That would be cool, but I don't think that will be a feature in the beginning. I made the mistake in the past to overpromise in

terms of features and I'm kind of cautious because you heard probably about the story behind Norman Sky, for example. But on the other hand, you know, we all are big fans of Peter Molyneux, for example. This guy is really an inspiration to us. And there was once an interview with him and I was kind of, I was shocked because the first question in this interview was, Peter, are you a compulsive liar? And because Peter Mullaney is

known for, or was known for over-promising on his games. And I wouldn't say he's a liar because I fell in the same trap I was there. I was on a big show and I was talking about the game. And I found myself promising things that I couldn't really guarantee. Because it just shows your passion about the game. You're so passionate about things. You want these things that you promise. You want them in the game. And you take them as facts, kind of. And that's very dangerous. That's why I try to keep back a little

bit and not... And then later you're like, well, we gotta scrap that because we gotta do this other thing and that's gotta go. You're like, I already promised that. Oh yes, the amount of things we already scrapped from the game or we completely, 100% we done is astonishing and shocking but it is necessary to get a very uh you know good good result good product that is fun to play yeah that's definitely true so how much is an impact of the this democratization of games being able to put stuff on steam being able to sell titles directly you don't have to have a distributor like Activision or somebody have to go have a offer relationship with and I mean how does how does how does that work for game designers now because I mean you go on Steam now and like holy crap I know

just discord now has games and then there's one or two other titles that have games. I forget what they're called, but they have some games you just pay monthly, and you can play all these freaking games they have on their platforms. Well, yeah, it's safe to say that the market is quite saturated, and it's hard to get a foot in there. I mean, seven or six years ago, it was like a gold mine. It was like the indie game renaissance. Everybody was jumping on the train.

And I was still in college while that happened. And no, I wasn't in college, actually. I was just finishing. I was right out of college. And it was scary for me, because I was kind of feeling like I'm missing out, because I wasn't making games back then. I wanted to make games from the beginning, since I played the first game, I wanted to make games.

And I went into engineering, and I realized, oh my God, I want to be part of that. And that was justified, it turned out. Because, yeah, that happened. The game market has grown, but also there's a lot of competition and you have to find your niche. And that's what we, I believe, found. We found our niche. We found this tycoon genre,

which is still kind of... There aren't so many tycoon games out there, and particularly not that many that look great. And we have very, very talented artists I always I'm always in all when I saw something and see something what what they come up with and what they do and and that's that's also quite a good selling point I guess for good company and I'm looking forward to see people play the game. Do you find that the community builds pretty good around you where when somebody likes one of your first games that you guys have launched, they're buying the next games that you guys are putting out?

I'm not sure about that, because the didn't know what we did in the past. We had a little bit of issues, for example, with Cosmonautica. Cosmonautica was actually a very interesting concept, and it was very fun. But we had technical troubles, and we also launched it in early access. But yeah, the main premise of the game was very, very cool. But we ended up having to just push it out, finish the game. And that kind of wasn't very well received with the community. So there were a couple of people who weren't very satisfied with it, how it went down.

And we learned from that mistake. We relied on technology that has been discontinued after the fact when we used it. And we couldn't fix bugs later in development. And that's why now we go down the road to be a little bit more independent on that part. Most of our code bases consists of libraries that are open source that we can access and can change. The visualization of the game is made in Unity, which has a very big community. It's very well

distributed and it's here to stay, I guess. So that's a much safer foundation for technological foundation for us. And yeah, all these factors combined kind of make a very good starting point for a successful game, I guess. And using Discord, Discord is such a great community builder and being able to interact with the community, talk to people and share with people and get feedback and interaction and stuff. I just discovered Discord last year because I'm kind of new to the whole Discord.

I don't know why I never found it before. And then I built my own Discord server. I think there's like a thousand people in it now. because i'm kind of new to the whole describe i don't know why i never found it before and i built my own discord server i think there's like a thousand people in it now um and uh it's just amazing how people interact and engage with that it gives them a community where they can take and build and do all the stuff they want to do and i meant it is great for game developers as well yes discord is is very very uh a very good place to us as well i mean a thousand uh a thousand people is a lot on discord because they have they are active they're they're kind of in real time you can communicate with them this is something very different to twitter or facebook or something because this is kind of these social media

channels are kind of passive. You're dropping a message in and somebody will read it or they just scroll by while on Discord. You can just talk directly to the people and get their opinion on things. We went so far. We wanted to... There is a British guy, he has a publisher label, his name is Mike Rose, and he has a publishing thing called No Bone Robots, and he's very good at this Discord thing, and we kind of tried to learn from his take on Discord and we implemented a Discord bot

which allows you to play a game in Discord. So you kind of found a company in Discord, there's a market simulation and you can sell and buy products in there. So people who join our Discord they can just join a company or found their their own ones wow and yeah you see like you can see the market state or graphs and stuff like that and it's pretty exciting the stuff you can do is amazing yeah it's it's so good i mean one thing brands have to learn nowadays is you you know for for years of social media when i first started out i really focused on building an audience. And I'm like, I got to build an audience. I got to build an audience.

And then I realized along the path somewhere that I not only build an audience, but I needed to build a community forum for that audience. So they could sit around and talk about me and whatever the hell crap I was talking about all day long. And I really struggled with different forums and trying to put a forum on the Chris Voss show. That was a nightmare and a mess and just ended up screwing up the site. And then finally we just had to shelve it. And people like forums for a while and then they don't like forums anymore. And then trying to find different places for this facebook groups

were kind of good for a while i think they're still kind of good in some sequences but they seem to be have tapered off and the discord has just been so great people can choose which channels they want to have notification uh like on our discord we have uh xbox pc and PS4 and so being able to mute certain areas of the of the Discord depend upon roles so that the people that just you know the most the Xbox people don't want to see the PC people and the PS4 people chatting so they're just like you know they don't have to deal with that so they can just focus on that um it's really rich when it comes to being able to build stuff and then of course recently they you know for an extra five bucks above nitro which which i think is 10 bucks a month if you don't have nitro on discord uh they have games that you can go play

bioware 2 remastered and um and i'm sure they're gonna it looks like what they're planning on doing is becoming kind of like a miniature steam where they're offering games and stuff like that. And it might be a good distribution channel for companies like yours in the future, maybe. I don't know. Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I remember, I think Discord even reached out to us. They saw a good company and then they talked to our producer and turned out we were too early

because we weren't finished with the game and it's okay, I mean, it's fine. But yeah, they kind of, I looked at it and I realized, okay, this whole interaction, Discord and Steam, This is quite interesting because Steam introduced better chatting functions to their Steam client right kind of one week before Discord announced their store. It was interesting to see that they predicted what's going on.

Or somebody spilled the beans. I don't know. It's fun. Yeah, but for us, it's also very, very useful for the company, for the development. And I'm looking forward to talk to people who will mod our games. So modding is kind of a thing I would like to see and kind of enable us to see which features or which interfaces people need another channel we are using as well as twitch so we are streaming twice a week we have a monday talk stream so it's our producer mark and me talking about the game and awfully awfully sidetracking at the same time. And on

Thursday evenings we have, or evenings Central European time, of course, we have like a create stream so people can kind of look on our screen what's happening when we are modeling new

assets or coding stuff. Some people like to look over your shoulder and do a little bit backseat programming. That's quite fun to have people around. And that probably gives some great connection to the game, some great connection to what you guys are doing, gives you guys some focus group sort of feedback. That's the one thing I've liked about different communities

and audiences that I have is being able to have that focus group where I can go, hey the one thing I've liked about different communities and audiences that I have is being able to have that focus group where I can go, Hey, well, you know, we're thinking about doing this. What do you guys think about that? Or you can show people beta work. I know some of my friends who are authors, they actually have private groups where they literally publish the book and share the chapters with like this private focus group.

And they, they build out the people uh to join it and it becomes its own community and then of course when they launch the book the people still buy it even though they read the damn thing already and you're just like but but creating this uh play space for uh your community and then and then building it so surrounds your community and then building it so it surrounds your company and then it's ready to roll as soon as you go to market is a great pre-marketing technique and being able to really sell stuff these days. Yes, absolutely. I agree.

But we also have a lot of help from our publisher. So we kind of, yeah, that's a very exciting thing. They approached us. They wanted to talk. They wanted to kind of see what's possible with the game. And then we decided to sign with them. It was very exciting. And actually, we have been approached from different publishers.

And so they are called the Irregular Corporation. They are UK-based, and they have a lot of other simulation games out there. And yeah, it's quite an awesome partnership. They help us a lot, and they also help us with the whole promotion thing, which we used to be very bad at. But I think it's kind of also due to the nature of our product, of the company, that kind of helped a lot. And how the impetus of the game is kind of surreal to me

when I think about it, because the story, how it came to being is very, yeah, it's kind of surreal to me when I think about it because the story how uh how it came to being is is very yeah it's quite quite a funny if you don't mind I would tell you the funny anecdote because we finished pressure overdrive and um I kind of I kind of you could have predicted that pressure overdrive wouldn't sell so many copies. And it kind of was like we hit reality, kind of. It was okay-ish, but it could have been better. And then we have to come up with some plan what to do next.

So we started to brainstorm and think about different things we could do maybe with Cosmonautica and so on. And our two founders, Patrick and Dominic, they were also in... We used Slack back then, before I switched to Discord. And so we were like arguing about... Or not arguing, but discussing different pitches. And Dominik, he was pitching all the time. He was so into this pitching ideas thing that he one night started to dream about pitching games. That's how much he was into pitching games uh uh and he he dreamt he he has he had a dream that he pitched to patrick the idea for good company which is kind of weird if you think about it dream within a dream yes it was it was crazy and he so uh the idea was was so enticing to him

that he wrote it down like like a short paragraph and he sent it in the channel. And I read it, or all of us read it, and I saw it and I thought, huh, that's pretty boring and generic. So it was titled The Company and then the paragraph. But then I thought, maybe there is something. I mean, he must't have, he must see something in it. So I read it again, and it clicked somehow because the idea that you're one person starting a thing, growing it, and then you have this whole working clockwork that you set up with one guy, you know,

that's kind of fascinating to me it's kind of yeah the the whole idea of building something up and seeing it work that's that's that caught on and then we have we have every day we have lunch here we're cooking here in the studio and then we started to talk about this idea and it didn't stop. We couldn't stop talking about the idea. And it was a sign that this is going to be our next project. And we were so hyped. And to be frank with you, I'm still hyped about the game. It does look really cool.

The artwork looks really nice. Thank you. I was watching the guy wander around. There's a video on YouTube and stuff. Where can people look at this, by the way? Let's give a plug out to you. Oh, yes, of course. Well, the main site, we have a microsite that's goodcompanygame.com without any dashes, just

everything. That's our microsite. It's a little bit artsy because you scroll diagonally because the world is isometric. And the main place where you should go is on Steam. Just search for Good Company and you'll find it and you can wishlist it there. So yeah, that's the most important link. And our Discord server is discord.gg slash goodcompany.

So you can join us there. And if you want to see us on Twitch, it's also twitch.tv slash chasing carrots. Twitch has just been something else. It's so funny. I was at E3, I think back in 2013, 2014. And I have my YouTube channel. We're making lots of money doing reviews and stuff and phones

and things. I ended up sitting next to one of the early Twitch VPs. She says to me, she found out a YouTube channel. She's like, what do you do? I got a YouTube channel. We do games and stuff.

She goes, oh, we're this Twitch company. We have channel and you know we do games stuff and and she goes oh you know we're this twitch company and and we uh you know we have we have people making like 20 grand a month over here playing video games on tv and i'm like what what the hell is twitch what does that do and you know it was just barely people are starting to really learn about the community. And she goes, yeah, it's people that watch other people play games. And I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Why would anybody want to watch other people play games when you can just go play games yourself, right?

That's like, and really, logically, I should have went, well, people do that with football and every other sport. But I just thought it was dumb because I just was like, you know, I was thinking as an adult, too, because a lot of kids can't buy every single game. Whereas an adult, you can. And I was just like, no, I'm not bringing my channel over there. I don't know what the hell you guys are talking about. Man, talk about one of the few things i've been super wrong about in life um and twitch is now you know almost getting

to be bigger than youtube the way it's going the way gaming's going the way gaming's going uh i'm just waiting for the olympics now to have you know e-gaming on the olympics and uh and it's a great platform in fact it's becoming great for podcasts we're uploading podcast episodes to it now um and uh yeah if you want to build a community interact with your community stuff it's a great place to do that i think it's i think it's probably better for gaming than youtube ever it is even though youtube's tried to step into the gaming sphere. Yes, that's true, absolutely. The difference is, in our case,

that we are making a game on stream while others play it, and that's a little bit different. I mean, there are people who are interested in game development, of course, but I think the people who play games are much more interesting for our audience. And that's why we try to reach out to different streamers and we also had contact with them and we try to get them into our community. Because for us, those people who stream games, they are basically expert players. They are those people.

You want to have their opinion on the game. And it helped a lot. We reached out to different streamers who stream tycoon games in particular. And that helped us a lot. And we want to have more contact with them. Of course, it's always a time thing. We spend so much time developing it,

sometimes we forget that there is this whole PR thing. And sometimes there's silence for a week, and, oh, we should tweet something again. And it's a little bit hard to balance. But now, since we have a routine, we stream twice a week, it's okay. For us, the Twitch thing is not very... It doesn't have the reach, for example, like Twitter for us. But it helps us to get the most engaged people to interact with them, to have them. Because those people who are vocal in your community,

those are the most important ones. You want to have them as your friends. And they are incredible. They are so accommodating and they help us out and they give us ideas or feedback. That's really, really a precious thing. Well, you got gotta start somewhere like i talked to so many people that they're like well i i you know i went online and just got a few

people listening or watching it's like you gotta start from zero man you gotta build it and uh but it's such a great way to interact with stuff, especially when you've got product launches or DLC updates. It's really cool. I love it now even more, Twitch, even more now that I can upload videos. And I've been seeing other people starting to use Twitch for podcasting and just being able to communicate with different people. It's going to be interesting to see what's going to happen in the next few years between twitch and youtube youtube seems to be turning more and more to be wanting to do tv and tv channels they're even now producing their own tvs and shows and and they they tried to compete with twitch and it just failed miserably it seems

so uh i think i think twitch is going to be a great space for gaming discord is a great interaction with that um there's so much software now taking broadcasts and share with stuff but that's really what it comes down to is building that community building a place where you can community can talk about the stuff even when you're not around you know they're sitting you know you don't you don't always have to be sitting there proselyting your game or product or whatever you're doing you can uh you know the community interacts with itself and you're just like okay well whatever and it starts to take a life on its own where you're just like yeah i i don't i can't even control this thing anymore it's's just running amok. But thank God somebody cares about the game or product

or whatever we're building. Yeah, that's true, yes. We also considered trying other streaming platforms. I mean, for us, it's a little bit more also kind of because all of us are a little bit, each of us is a little bit compared to the average streamer, I guess, a little bit more timid. And it's kind of an exercise for us to get out of ourselves and be more open to people.

So when you're on a show, you're not like, oh, maybe like this losing this awkwardness. It's very helpful. Also, yeah, practicing your English language skills, because it's very helpful also um yeah practicing your english language skills because that's very useful for you uh because yeah it's yeah it's uh it's something that's the other cool thing with that i found with steam is there's just really cool game development teams all over the world and in this democratization of gaming to where you know small crews can build great games and they can have their teams either you know in in this like part of the world or they can have them across the world where they you know they're all working

out of different places and build great games it's really cool it just makes it so that there's a lot more really neat variety out there. Yes, the diversity of games, that's something that we never had before, like today. Even solo, I'm very fond of the whole solo developers like Lucas Pope, for example, who make really awesome games. I'm stunned. I always wanted to make a game as a solo dev, but then I realized it's much more fun

in a team for me. It's awesome. And it has to be a small team. If you're in a big office with a hundred people, that's a different experience. But for us, it works quite well this way. I think it makes sense to tell you a little bit about how we work internally, because that's also something I never experienced before. I've seen many companies from the inside when I was in engineering. And here, you come in into this office, and you cannot tell if there is like a boss or something. You come in, and you spend like a week here, and you don't know, okay, who's in charge. Everybody is in charge, because people are kind of, they communicate constantly. Everybody is kept in the loop and nobody's left out. And that feels like a hyper-functional anarchy, kind of.

I like to call it that way. I don't know if the others agree. Yeah, I don't know. It's what I call it. It's my personal take on what's happening here. I don't know if the others agree. I can't speak for them. But yeah, it's very, very interesting. And yeah, you know it's it's very equally and everybody's treated the same everybody people care for each other and that's something that I that I'm that I really missed in other companies kind of I never I never knew that I needed it or I wanted it and now that I have it I don't want miss it anymore and that's's something that I never thought that this would be so efficient, you know? Yeah, it's funny. Yeah. Yeah, I remember when I was starting my companies, it was a whole lot easier when everyone was in a

small office and you could just yell across the hall and everyone could talk to each other. But then once you got spread out with multiple wings and this person is in that wing over there and this person's over there that person's way over there and you're like emailing and going hey answer your email and you know you're trying to communicate so probably makes for a much more efficient sort of workflow getting stuff done communication things where you're not having to uh fight with all these things that can really start getting away as the company gets large more employees and more distant from each other yeah that's true and i see you guys have a pretty

open environment there so you're not working in little cubicles yes that's that's kind of this i mean this office that used to be a bowling alley. Serious? Yeah. It's not the American bowling, the German bowling, the boring, prudent German bowling thing. It's called Kegel. It's not so cool. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, bowling isn't cool either, so they're not on their side.

Oh, it's cool. I mean, American bowling is cooler than the German counterpart, I think. Is it really? Yeah, I think so. If you would try it, you would say, what's that? It sounds like the Canadian curling or something. I'll have to check out what that is. I didn't even know there was a German version of bowling. Oh my god, we also have, there's also

like a German or European version of baseball. It's called a brennball or burning ball. It's played without a bat. Yes, you throw the ball and you throw it in the field and there are also bases and stuff. No wonder you guys

started two world wars jesus um i'm actually germany my family came from germany in the late 1800s oh so uh i fortunately i don't have to deal with all that world war ii or world war one and two guilt but uh i tried all my german friends about that i'm'm like, hey, you guys are always starting wars. I have my eye on you folks. No, it's everybody else in the world that's a jerk, and you guys are the sane ones. I think the Germans have learned a lesson for a couple of generations at least. Yeah, I'm actually from Poland.

I was born in Danzig, which used to be German also. It's a little bit convoluted. Things get mixed up in Europe because everything is so close. So yeah, that's where the name comes from also. The name isn't the typical German name, Lewicki. Oh, definitely. Yeah, ski. There you Yeah, it's it's all over the place. Anything more we need to know about what you guys are doing, how you're doing it, maybe give us some launch dates for what you guys are planning on doing? Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, so the launch date for Well, I can give you ranges, I can give you can

kind of give you distinct a hold you to it. Sure. Sure. So it's scheduled for Q2 of this year. It's the early access launch. Before that, like two months maybe, we want to have like a closed beta. I'll like to call it alpha, i said and uh so it's it will be the early early access launch launch will be somewhere in the middle of the year pretty pretty exact in the middle of the year i hope so i hope it doesn't get delayed uh as you know how things go and um after that uh our expectation is that we will be for in early, in the early access phase, where we will be constantly adding features for about, let me guess, eight months-ish,

kind of. We don't know. Maybe a little bit longer. And then there will be a final release. And I hope, my hope is that we will work on that much longer after that, that we will expand on it, that we can add more content to it. Because I see a lot of potential there. Because when we started talking about the game, so many ideas popped up because you

can get inspiration from the real world and incorporate it into the system. And yeah, I would like to add more stuff to it. For me, it's like a platform of a game, like a thing that usually games, when you throw the game, you throw it out and then people buy it in the first week. And after that, you have like a long tail and you sell a couple of copies up after that.

And that's a lifetime. But I would like to go for longevity of the whole project. That would be very... I would be grateful if that would turn out that way. Do you guys launch DLCs to keep the community going and active and stuff like that? I hope so that we will

get there. It's hard to tell now because it's very early. The release will be next year, the final release somewhere next year. I cannot tell exactly when because it depends on how long the early access phase will go. But yes, I would like to have DLCs that are worth their money. So you get some DLCs a little bit, you little bit you pay 5 bucks and you get the skin that's nothing that I would like to buy, I would like to have

really new game mechanics new systems, more content and stuff like that per DLC that's worth it that does expand the game you know what I mean I would like to have more gameplay for for the dollar

you you're paying for it so uh yeah i would i would love to have that sure do you know what you guys could be charging for good company yet or do you ever you launch it free and then sell dlcs or or how do you guys usually launch i think we think we will be in the typical ballpark of between $20 and $30, something like that. But, yeah, no promises there. It's also we will talk to our publisher. They're kind of also like in this region. So, yeah, $20 to $30.

And that's a good average for a lot of Steam games that I see. There are some people that launch the free games, and then if you really want the good stuff, you've got to pay the DLC, which is usually about that price. But I think it's great. I think there's this wonderful democratization of games, gaming companies. There's all sorts of different places you can play these things now.

It just seems like every day someone's popping up like, hey, you can play games over here. And I'm just like, in fact, there was another company, I was trying to remember what it was, that now offers games. You pay like a monthly fee. It's mostly older games. Utomic. Utomic.

Oh, yes. I know those guys. They are Dutch. Oh, I actually know a couple of people from there and we meet always on shows, on Gangscom, for example. And I also was in Utrecht on an Indigo show.

And those are very nice people. They are really cool. Oh, hi, Frank, how are you? They asked us to. Oh, hi, Frank, how are you? They asked us to release on Utomic, but it depends on what the publisher sees and how it looks.

Yeah, they are great, but you still have to evaluate the thing. But yeah, they are great guys. But certainly more places they can have to distribute your stuff. I mean, some of these companies like Discord and

EA of course has their thing where you pay $15 a month, you can access all the EA games. And then Utomic, they just have a flat monthly fee. It's probably not good for maybe some of your newer games you're coming out with maybe maybe some of your older games that are at the end of

the life cycle might be good for those uh to to get extra money but i think it's great there's just these different platforms that are launching expanding it's just not steam anymore and it probably gives you guys a lot more opportunities, especially in the future for different revenue streams. Oh, absolutely. As a matter of fact, Pressure Overdrive is on Utomic, I think. Yes. I'm pretty sure it's on Utomic. And also, this was breaking news, that Epic started their store and I had a look at it and it's yeah they have they they went to route that they kind of accumulated like a set of exclusives for their platform so that's kind of also a

strategy so you have to be on the Epic store to get those games over. That's also quite interesting. So I think Steam is still the major player there. And I think these platforms that are popping up, they need to have a long breath to compete with Steam at some point because the community is so big. So let's see how things turn out. Maybe in 10 years, how things will look.

It's going to be quite interesting. Yeah, it'll be interesting. In fact, we saw that with Origin recently, where Origin launching an Anthem, they gave it to their platform for Origin and their standalone thing that they have. You could get it a week ahead of time uh before you could get on xbox and ps4 and basically the whole concept was just get people to to subscribe to the origins model you know 15 16 bucks a month or whatever it is that i have and uh um and then that way they you know they have that containment system and they have their own uh platform i guess if you will you know yeah and so you know there it is on pc but they control it and you know it's not you know they're not they're

not quite at the mercy of ps4 and and xbox anymore so the real real uh democratization of of these platforms and to me competition is good i love seeing lots of stuff for this because it just means that consumers have more options they have more availability more competition these lower prices and and better things for everything and then of course for small people like you guys you know people that are willing to work with you guys as opposed to like sony going i don't know you, that sort of thing. And so I think it's going to be great. So give us the plugs one more time before we round out the show.

And everyone check you guys out on Steam. Sure, of course. Yeah. Just search for Good Company on Steam and you can wishlist the game there. There will be also a closed beta or closed alpha. When you join our Discord, you will have the opportunity to join the closed beta. The Discord is discord.gg slash goodcompany. We are also on Twitch, which is twitch.tv slash chasingcarrots. And we're also on Twitter.

You can follow us on Twitter and get updates on the development and there is a mini site which is www.goodcompanygame.com www.goodcompanygame.com Alright, sounds good then. Well, awesome guys. Be sure to check it out. Support these folks that are the up and coming things, if you will. Every one of these game

producers starts from ground zero and builds up. I remember Bungie used to be a small game developer in the day so be sure to support these guys check out their games i like the graphics on them uh in fact i'm going to go over to i have the subscription to you tell me is that one atomic atomic i have a subscription there so i'm going to go look for under pressure is it pressure or drive pressure overdrive that's it yeah uh so i'll go look for that and then and give it some kick the tires and all that good stuff so anyway i appreciate my audience for tuning in be

sure to give us a like subscribe to youtube hit that bell notification button for all the different updates we do be sure to go to uh chrisfossgaming.com you can see this interview and other interviews we're doing with game developers and game codes they'll be giving away and all that fun stuff and then the chris fosh show dot com uh podcast you can see these on all the channels spotify google play itunes you can find us anywhere on those channels and we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks to everyone and we'll see you next time