The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – GTFO Video Game Developer 10 Chambers Collective Interview

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

GTFO Video Game Developer 10 Chambers Collective Interview GTFOthegame.com

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com and chrissvossgaming.com. We're coming here with a wonderful podcast. We're going to be interviewing game developers today. It's going to be really cool. There's a new fun game that we've had out that we've been playing with. We've gotten involved in the Discord and everything. We invited the developers to come on the show and tell us more about the game, what their plans are are it's in alpha mode right now it's called g t f o that's gtfo and you can go to gtfo the game.com to see it uh the developer on it is 10 chambers.com and we want to welcome to the show today uh simon vickland simon how you doing i'm good good good it's glad to have you here where you where you coming to us from, by the way, in the world?

Stockholm. Stockholm. And are you guys largely based in Stockholm, Ten Chambers? Yeah. We're all in Stockholm, yes. All right. That's good. So you guys are developing this game, and me and my crew, we spent, I don't know, about

three or four hours playing this thing. And it's a really cool game setup and everything else that goes into it. The graphics are awesome. The gameplay is fun. Do you want to give us a lowdown? Tell us about what the game is about. Yeah, it's a four-player cooperative PvE first-person shooter game leaning heavily into you know horror with a lot of exploration and stealth but also intense you know occasionally you get into intense combat as well definitely

and there's a strategic aspect too it's not just running and gunning and shooting which is kind of something that appealed to me even though I I love to run, gun, and shoot. There's kind of a strategic, logical thing where sometimes instead of running, gunning, and shooting, you've got to disable enemies that are asleep or you've got to work around them. There's an engagement format in some cases. There's a non-engagement sort of format in other cases. And that's one of the things I love about the game because it wasn't just run and shoot, go through a bunch of levels, shoot up a bunch of stuff, have fun.

There you go. And there's plenty of games in that competitive sphere. But the thing that really drew me to GTFO was the graphics are great, the gameplay is great, the guns are really cool um the the aspect of and the other things too is you're you're kind of um what's the right word you're kind of leaned down on ammo so you've got to use clubs you can't you can't just cheat your way running gunning through the thing you've got to use strategy you've got to use clubs uh you've got a your ammo's on a on a lean sort of system so if you blow your ammo in certain areas that are easy

when you get to hard areas where you need ammo you're in trouble they become even harder because you don't have any ammo yeah oh do they really because you can't sell i mean you can't stop you just you start out with a little bit of ammo you can find some ammo you know throughout the expeditions but you're not rewarded with resources by killing the monsters you don't get any ammunition or health or anything from killing the monsters it's very you know by design made so that there is no upside to aggravating the monsters if they're sleeping yeah and and uh you can creep around you can kill them it's it's kind of interesting the aspect of the sleeping where if you make too

much noise around them they start to wake up you can see this heart beating and everybody has to be like nobody move don't move don't it gets tense and i love it i it reminds me it reminded me a lot of the movie alien where you're running around the ship, you don't know where anything is, and the aliens in it are scary as hell. And some of it's a little bit of horror and gross. Yeah, definitely. I think that adds to the factor of shock and the factor of like, i don't want to die by these guys yeah exactly i think once we decided that we wanted to make a you know pure co-op game and really push the boundaries of you know cooperative gameplay uh it was sort of a perfect fit to to go into the horror territory because if the game has a scary setting and a scary atmosphere it becomes natural to try

to move together and and think more about you know more deliberately you know moving through the environment rather than just running through it and running and gunning sort of so the the atmosphere itself sort of compels you to to think as a team and and what's the storyline i mean why are we sent in here uh what's the storyline i mean why are we sent in here uh what's the storyline and why this uh why this is happening to us and why we're participating in this thing as the characters in the game it is uh mostly um mysteries as you start the game and we will reveal you know details and backstory uh throughout the updates that we will release post you know after the game has been released,

we'll keep, you know, supporting it and keep, uh, expanding the game. Um, so as you start out, it's mostly mysteries,

really. Uh, our job is to go down there and solve the mysteries and figure stuff out and find out. It's sort of a labor camp sort of setup where you're kept, you know, prisoners. And then you, you're sent down, forced down into this underground complex because your captors obviously don't want to go down there because, you know, this dark, you know, abandoned underground complex is filled with these flesh-eating monsters and uh they'd rather send you down there than then go down themselves that's that's pretty evil man and that just makes you yeah so you don't know who's holding you captive or what their agenda

is you don't know what you know where the monsters came from or even what the underground complex was used for before it was abandoned and run you know overrun by these monsters so there's a lot of like uh yeah yarn to untangle and i like the mixture of like um how the monsters are semi i don't know if they're human but they appear to be semi-human like one of the kind of assumptions i made and i don't i don't know if they're human but they appear to be semi-human like one of the kind of assumptions i made no i don't know that's we're giving away anything in the game i don't i don't know this for a fact i'm just my assumption my assumption it was like is these are people who used to work in this area and they they broke open this this uh area or hid into this area of aliens and then you know all shit broke loose and now they're suffering from the disease of becoming these aliens i don't know if that's i don't know if that's what what it

is but that's kind of how i assume it is it is designed to be sort of uh ambiguous like are they are they aliens are they you know is it humans that have been effect infected by something was it something that was you know buried in the in the underground uh you know yeah it could be it could be several different things but at this point we don't want to really reveal anything and then i and then i'm not sure what they call this sort of game mode but basically you go down as a four op for a four player co-op and if you all wipe you all die you go back to the beginning like it's completely like reset yeah yeah for longer expeditions there will be some sort of a checkpoint that'll be good working on on that so that we can

i mean it's it's supposed to be unforgiving but there's a limit you know to where yeah we we start rage-quitting i think we did it about 20 times and we kept getting deeper every time but yeah it was starting to be it was starting to grind a little bit and you guys do move stuff around so that when you go back through it's not the same exact experience again which is cool but yeah it was becoming frustrating it was fun up until about the 20th time and the 20th time we're like uh you know we need checkpoint and it would be great if you made two versions of the game maybe that's your intent uh you know to make like a hard mode that that has a you know total death wipe and then you made one for you know weak crappy players there will be there will be a difficulty options

and that'll be cool that'll be cool so you guys once, but yeah, we're going to explore that because we realize that the game is going to be quite narrow and we might want to have a little bit more of a width to the potential user base. Yeah, I mean, any game that I've ever played, there are certain aspects or certain things in the game that I get tired of repeating and just make me want to leave the game. Um, I won't name any, well, yeah, I won't beat up on anybody. Um, but, uh, the cool thing about the game is it starts out and like you say, you're,

you're captors or slaves and you're being forced onto this drop machine, this elevator sort of drop machine that lowers you into this pit and you're greeted by seeing that there's different levels of this underground facility that appear to have been built by humans or or us and uh our job is to go down and and uh explore those levels uh kill enemies uh try and find stuff there's different lockers that you've got to scrounge through or scavenge through, find. You get ammo, different packs that can help you with your thing. And the whole time you were really lean on ammo and you've got these special clubs that you can have that are pretty cool looking. And so a lot of times you try and club as much

as you can. And then when you get to the shit storms, and then what's really cool too, that I loved is not only there's darkness. And so you've got to kind of find your way around. And, and sometimes you can have enemies like standing right beside you and they're just, and you don't know they're there until their heart starts glowing.

Yeah. You're like, yeah. And then I like also there's a suspense factor where when you reach certain doors that you've got to open um there's one person on the team who can look inside the room with i guess a scanner or radar and know what's in the room and that just that just adds level suspense and and crap your pants sort of thing because you're like, oh, God, there's a whole lot of them. Yeah, exactly.

And you got to rely on that person also to give you the, you know, paint the picture of what's inside and where the monsters are because uh yeah and then you don't got to work the room in a sort of you almost sometimes have to crawl around the room slowly kill outside guys without waking up the other guys and then if you do then it just gets really crazy and i'm not sure what the correct term of this i heard some people calling them scouts uh we used to call him the tentacle dude or the octopus and he's got these tentacles that are constantly reaching around and i guess if you uh he accidentally touches you he becomes immune i guess and yeah for a few seconds you can't at that point you can't stop it from screaming yeah and then just the whole thing goes off the rails yeah it attracts it wakes up all the monsters in the room but also there would be

you know we spawn new monsters basically well thanks for that running thanks for that's it it's a cool monster because it visualizes the view cone of the monster in a nice way instead of you know in some stealth games you get the problem when you're supposed to sneak around uh you know guards and stuff, because you don't know exactly where they're looking. And we wanted to create something where you can see, like there's a reason why you can see exactly where that monster is looking.

So we replaced the eyes with those tentacles and they become sort of the view cone. They go in all directions but i mean if you're standing behind a pillar or something you will see these these noodley tendrils you know coming on the sides uh of the the pillar that you're standing behind and it's it becomes really you know clear to you that if you step out on this either side of this pillar that you're standing behind you will touch one of those tendrils and then the monster will will detect you so yeah it's a nice uh it's it's really just the result of that thought process like how do we do we visualize

the view cone of this of this enemy it it does keep you on the edge of your seat i mean it's a puzzle solving high intensity combat when the combat comes. I mean, you've got a, your team not only has to be able to sneak around, solve puzzles, be strategic. But it also,

there's some times where you're just like, everyone just fucking shoot shit. And, you know, at that point you have to pick that point. Yeah. When, when, when shit, you know, inevitably hits the have to pick that point yeah when when when she you know inevitably hits the fan every once in a while it's good to know have known in advance that that was going to

happen so that you have uh you know agreed upon within the team what is the fullback plan you know what is um where's the choke point or the kill zone that you want to create. And maybe you've already placed a few trip mines around that part of the room or of the general area. Sentry guns, you foam the doors to reinforce them so that it takes longer for the monsters to claw their way through the doors to buy you some time so there's a lot of uh strategy involved in in um anticipating combat situations and preparing for them before they start you know i remember the first time we're like just run back through the door and close it

we close it we're like mother of god they're going through the fucking door and we're like and it's like holy shit there's no oh man i mean it is just a scare fest but it's fun it's suspenseful uh we i mean we just got hooked right away um the graphics are excellent for an alpha game i mean we played some we usually try and play a lot of alpha games and some are really bad ghost recon um and uh not to mention names and probably a much larger budget which is surprising than maybe what you guys have i'm assuming your budgets but uh but you know uh some of the recent alphas i mean we just kind of like seriously but um the game almost plays like a finished game which is pretty amazing when do you guys have an anticipated date of release for this at all?

Well, we are, you know, there's a lot of features that need to be added before we can call it a finished game. And we're super happy, obviously, that people enjoyed this alpha, even though it contained only one expedition. Yeah, people are just grinding the hell out of it. You guys have a ton of people on your Discord. How many people are on your Discord now? now like 50 000 or something like that yeah something yeah it grew from like what was it 12 11 something like that and then during the alpha it just you

know i think it's brilliant too how you guys are spreading the word every time you give someone an alpha code uh they can give away three which is smart because it's a four-player co-op so you want your three best friends exactly and i i you know i have a discord for uh for what we do with gaming and it's largely a destiny bungee uh discord group but we talk about all games and one of my friends got an invite from somebody who started playing gt. And I was like, well, what is this game? And I started looking at the thing. I'm like, this looks really cool. And so, yeah, so we got some more codes.

We got our whole crew that's on it. Thankfully, one of our crew is in the military. So he's really great for games like this because, you know, he knows how to, you know, pinch zones. He knows, like, all this stuff of, you know, okay, well, it's set up so this because you know he knows how to you know pinch zones he knows like all this stuff of you know okay well it's set up so that you know he kind of knows the military sort of way of of smartly going around and you know clearing rooms and things of that nature so he comes he comes in real handy for games like this yeah it sounds like a good fit for for for

someone in oh yeah squad yeah if you're gonna play gtfo get a military guy who's done basic training at the very least to come help you out because yeah he was like you know you guys need to play the pinch zone and you know fall back and then and then of course you guys uh provide the foam and then there's uh trip mines and then there's a also i think it's a gun it's a a turn, I think, isn't it? Sentry gun, yeah. Yeah, the sentry gun. Wow, that thing really came in handy when we got it.

What we try to think of is also to create tools, because there will be more tools than those four. We want to have a whole bunch of different tools. And I think it's a testament that the game is interesting in other ways than just shooting. Once you start, you know, feeling the need for things that aren't just, you know, larger mags for your guns or, you know, larger calibers for your weapons. But actually, you know, things that help you anticipate the combat and know things that are otherwise uh you know have kept secret from you sort of uh so yeah it'll it'll be interesting to to um increase or like widen the set of of tools in the game and see how people really like it'll be angst already in the loadout menu because uh you know whatever tool you choose to

bring uh you know that you're leaving all these other tools behind that you can't have because and you know in a four-player team you can only bring four tools uh and in order to be a good you know swiss army knife sort of within the team uh as a team you want to be a swiss army knife and in order for that to happen you need to be a swiss army knife and in order for that to happen you need to choose weapons or yeah weapons as well of course but yeah the tools are super important they're they're sort of the class for your character we don't have a class system but whatever tool you choose will be sort of uh deciding what sort of a character you are in the squad uh and we're what I was beginning to say

in the beginning of this wordy answer is that we're trying to think of ways for the tools to be symbiotic as well so that, you know, the sentry gun can be placed and then you shoot a little bit of foam in front of the sentry gun

and then the monsters will stick in the foam and they will be sitting ducks. Yeah. Wow. We always foam the doors and they will be sitting ducks. Wow. We always foam the doors and then we put the sentry gun on. But I never thought about putting that right in front of the... Yeah. Foaming the doors or even just closing the doors and then putting a trip mine on the inside of the door allows the monsters to sort of crowd on the other side of the door.

And then as they come through, there like five six of them maybe and then they're all they're all killed by that trip mine rather than just setting a mine and just you know the first monster that runs through the doorway will blow up the mine and only that monster dies you know there's a lot of like tactical depth to to just you know the the few things we have in the game now. And we have a lot of ideas for how to expand upon it. Between the terror of the monsters, and there's some that just have fucking teeth coming out of their freaking head, and some are just utterly gross

before or after you kill them. Some look like they really have had their acne pimple problem get out of hand. But between that and just, okay, we're going to open this door. And it's just going to break loose. And then you clear a room. And you're like, oh, all right. We cleared the room.

And then you're just like, oh, fuck this. Yeah, there's the next room. You know, you go through these waves of relief and then shock and horror and then suspense and then sometimes you go in a room and you're just like is there something here it's really dark in here

oh there's nothing here oh thank god there's nothing here wow three other team members worked on including me worked on the payday games. Payday 2, I worked on that game. Actually, as a freelancer or a consultant or whatever, adding music and some voice acting to that game for all the way up until a year ago when they when they officially uh stopped supporting the game but anyway uh we

worked on that game and that has you know a little bit of what we're doing in in DTFO you know it's a four-player co-op PVE game purely PVE you know no versus mode or anything and there's a lot it's a lot about cooperative you know cooperation and stuff uh you have some stealth in that game as well but it's a little bit less uh sophisticated in that you can start in stealth but once you go out of stealth you never you can never go back to sneaking again and what i think is nice in gtfo is that it can have that you know drama curve of going up in intensity and then you can actually sort of contain the combat within that room and then as you move on to the next room, once you've killed all the monsters,

you've reset everything and you can go back to stealth again. And it pays off to really, you know, even in one room, once you hear a couple of monsters wake up around you, don't resort to firearms immediately. If everyone in the team just runs up to one monster each and kills them with the hammers, maybe you can contain everyone in the team just runs up to one monster each and and kills them with the hammers maybe you can contain even within the room and all the other monsters that are like further away in that same room still haven't woken up so there's a lot of yeah just you know

keep your head straight and keep your tongue in your mouth you know everything is like uh yeah don't don't go don't resort to to firearms too quickly you know yeah it you learn that you learn that very quickly when you run out when you're you know first two rooms you're out of ammo and you're like fuck yeah uh and uh but no that that up and down of what you were talking about the suspense and then being able to go back to sneaking and suspense, that just makes it worse. The suspense and horror and terror. But it's also thrilling at the same time.

We're just like, oh, this is so crazy. Let's try it again. And to me, we all got hooked on it right away within a short time of playing it. I mean, right away, we were just hooked. Like, what is this? This is really cool. The gameplay is really nice. I mean, for an alpha, it looks really sweet.

It almost comes across like a finished product. What's the best way people can get access to this game if they want to play the alpha? It's pretty open, isn't it? Yeah, we will beta test the game a little bit until we go into early access, which we're planning to do in December. So there's not a lot of time, but between now and when we're going into early access, we hope to have a few beta tests.

And if you want to be part of that, you should sign up to become a Ten Chambers ambassador either on tenchambers.com or gtfofthegame.com. There will be a pop-up on the website that asks for your email and you just sign up. It doesn't cost anything. It's basically our mailing list where we email you every once in a while, assuming that you're interested in this game. A few updates on what's happening, and then you'll get instructions on how to acquire beta keys.

You guys are doing a really great job building a community, I must say. If you go into the Discord for you guys, you guys have updates on there. You're totally transparent on just about everything that people would need to know. And then there's even different groups that are currently running that you can either interact with or, I think, join. There's other groups that are in format and crews going and doing the stuff. You can almost kind of LFG out of it, if I recall rightly. But yeah, I mean, it's basically every time one of your friends gets an alpha code,

they have access to three invites. They can send three invites, and I think that's brilliant. It's almost like multi-level marketing. Well, yeah. I mean, we're self-funded, and we have to be really clever with how we use our money. And we just, this is one of the reasons why the alpha looks and plays so good is at first we thought like, let's just make an alpha and, you know, for testing the network, which is still what it was mainly for. But as we started thinking like, okay, this is actually going to be the first time a lot of people play the game. We're not going to be able to... We can prevent... We can't say that people can't

put up videos of it on YouTube or stream it on Twitch and make certain stuff. But we can't prevent that. We can't actually enforce that ban if people would start doing it. So let's just actually polish the alpha until it plays so well

and looks so good that it becomes sort of a marketing event. I think that's freaking brilliant because I test a lot of games and reviewed a lot of games, and there's nothing more annoying than when you've got to – and i don't mind ndas uh you know i'm used to after 10 years ndas and stuff and and and things but there's nothing worse than when you're trying to test the game and you can either see your name on the screen so they know you broadcast it yeah or you know it's got like codes and stuff and you're like i can't even see what the hell is going on this stupid game but i think it's brilliant what you guys are doing you guys are creating a loyal um a loyal base of of um of really committed core

people to your vision they're sharing it out like i said i i was part of the multiple marketing spread out of of like hey here's a here's uh my thing fact, I didn't get a code from my friends. I heard from my friends. My friends had got one. And I was like, whoa, you guys got a code? What? And then I looked it up in the gameplay, and I was like, whoa, I want to play this game. And so fortunately, you know, we have a thing. And I wrote to one of your guys in the Discord and hunted down someone to talk to there, and they gave me a code.

I don't know. It might have been you um but uh and they were really great and responsive to both both on i think on twitter your so whoever's running your social did a good job too i got answers back from a lot of different sources all at once but then i gave mine and then i got my crew in it and i think it's just brilliant it's a brilliant way to go it looks better than most alpha games it almost looks like a finished game um in fact i you if you would have told me that was a finished game i'd have been fine i would have been like yeah yeah probably um the um other factors on checkpoints for me okay just for me yeah it's noted but most of my friends they we i mean we we we went just we immediately were hooked playing the thing and we didn't care oh we wiped okay all right we got to

be smarter we gotta work this through okay yeah we gotta resolve our mistakes we're used to doing that with raids uh you know on different games like destiny and stuff so we're used we're used to you know piling out the crew and going okay who's doing what i'm doing this and you're doing that and um but it's it's just so damn addictive and i'm i'm not big into horror games because i hate the suspense um one of the problems i used to have with doom back in the day and i used to play doom a lot was yeah i would get that fight-or-flight chemical pumped into my stomach so much that i would start getting violently ill and i'd have to quit playing because it would just uh just overwhelm me and this game's really

different because there's a yin and yang the suspense and drama and and horror and challenge of where you can have moments like let's just all take a breather before you open the next door we got the room cleared let's just all like calm down yeah and take a break and then you know it's just ramping up yeah so so you guys have been at this for how long you guys been building this game 10 chambers uh three and a half, four years. Wow, man. That's a lot of time. Four years, yeah.

I mean, that's one of the reasons why it looks so polished because we've been working on it for such a long time before people got to play it. And as you said, we have a nice community going and they're really, you know, loyal, we hope. Well, we know that we've been keeping them from playing the game for a long time. They've been very patient, which we're happy about. They've been waiting.

Well, you guys are doing good updates. I mean, I've been a person who's built community in my years of being on social. And so you guys are doing just a great job on social. I mean, in my Destiny Discord, we have your news pumped in. So whenever you guys put out a news thing, it pumps in. So we're exposing our clans and our Discord to it. That's lovely. And it's just a bloody riot, really.

Are you going to keep it set up kind of the format it is, or will there maybe be a story mode in the future, or does that kind of go against the grain of the design of the game? Well, when you start thinking about it, you'll realize how difficult it would be to actually have a story mode in a game where you can play four people together. Because maybe one or two players in a team of you can play four people together yeah uh because like maybe one or two players in a team of four are interested in the story and then they you know stop to read

some sort of a i don't know a log book or watching a cut scene or something not that we have the budget to make cut scenes or anything like that but uh yeah the story there there is a story we have a backstory for the entire universe sort of you know who's holding keeping you captive and who are you and and where did the monsters come from and everything we have answers to those questions and we're going to reveal them through you know log books and log entries and like sort of recordings and stuff like that uh but it'll be on a interested in it basis sort of so you'll collect these things throughout the uh you know as you play the game and you can you can read those logs in the menu later on in between

sort of your play sessions rather than stop you know stopping the team yeah you don't want to be the one you know reading a log entry while three the three other players are just you know jumping up and down waiting for you yeah or cut scenes are good you know you can skip through those a lot of times uh with any given game but i i i don't know i think the game's perfect the way it is i mean it's unlike anything you know i know a lot of times when we have cut scenes we really get tired of them i know on a lot of games that i play i shut off the narrative because i'm just like shut the fuck up just let me play the game i don't want to see your cut scene um what what if one person wants to see the cut scene and the others skip there i mean there's people that there's people that you know they're into

the story i've seen people bashing i mean i remember when vanilla destiny came out there are people bashing the story and they're like uh you have to tell me a story to make me feel this. And in this, I don't, you know, I've just never been that sort of same way. I like to run a gun. The, the lore of some things is cool for story, but no, man. I mean, the graphics are awesome. The gameplay is awesome.

There's so much involved with cerebrally. Cerebrally? Is that a word? Clearly, I went to public school. There's a cerebral. It's not just run and gun. It's cerebral strategy. It's a chess match in space, basically, with nasty-ass aliens.

Yeah. basically with nasty ass aliens um yeah and i think it you know there there are there are you know things that you can do when a game is scripted like you know dead space games you know and and uh other horror games like uh you know the the latest resident evil you know every time you go behind this door this thing happens or you know everything is like decided in beforehand with custom animation and it's nice uh you know the music can build up towards something that you know is going to happen uh and that's cool but it's the same every time you play it more or less uh in gtfo we're trying to do something different where it's like totally random we don't know anything like we we randomize where the monsters are even you know

where the where the uh the key that you're looking for is and stuff like that so the combat took place in this room last attempt but this time you go there there's not even monsters in that room uh and if you you succeed in sneaking past the monsters you know one attempt next attempt maybe you fail and then that that room becomes you know the place where that huge battle takes place because you accidentally triggered the scout and now you got you know 30 monsters running into that room and stuff like that so replayability becomes great just from the fact that it's sort of i mean a sandbox would be the wrong term but you know it's more like uh open-ended in that you know regard and

that makes it fun that makes it when you keep when you wipe and you go back in you know that it's not gonna be the same exact crap because that would get old quick yeah oh yeah absolutely i think we're striking a nice balance where enough stuff is new for you to you know need to be on your toes at all times but at the same time you can learn from past mistakes because you know sort of what what it's all about in that part of the of the map uh and uh yeah so so it's it's uh it's a balance there we don't we didn't want to change too much because then then it becomes you know if you can't learn from past mistakes you're making so little progress every attempt yeah we want people to to be able to play it for

like you know six eight ten attempts and then actually make the progress as you said i'm flattered that you played for 20 attempts uh and and didn't grow tired of it uh until no in fact the only thing we're growing tired of is just being at the edge of our suspense seats we're just like i gotta take a break and feel my legs and to kind of unwind from all this horror of these crazy monsters that are going to be bad nightmares later. Well, that's nice to hear. That's what we hear from a lot of people, that it's fun even in failure.

Like even when you fail, you're having a lot of fun. And the fact that it takes so long, it's a rather long expedition, the Alpha expedition that we released. We wanted to kick the door in and really show the community when we've said that the game is hardcore, that it's going to be difficult

and it's going to put a lot of pressure on you as a team to actually coordinate and communicate and move as a unit and really play together and cooperate rather than as we i'd like to say that a lot of games that claim to be cooperative are really only games where you play alongside one another but you don't really need to cooperate you know one player can carry the team that's not the the case in gtfo and anyway when my team's sorry go ahead uh yeah when we uh unleashed the game we wanted to really show that the game can be really hard so we released this

we left we allowed this alpha expedition there's one expedition that people got to play during the alpha to be very challenging so that people could you know really uh appreciate it and what we got from a lot of people is that you know even failing is fun because it's yeah not a lot of games put this sort of pressure on you and it's fun to be challenged like this yeah see a lot of games that we'll play especially with my crews uh between raiding or dungeons you know three-man raids six-man or six-man raids three-man dungeons um you know there's aman raids, six-man, or six-man raids, three-man dungeons, you know, there's a lot of this that goes on. There's some games that make the mechanics so incredibly stupid, painful, and just, they

overdo it because I guess they lack the creative concept to do anything else. That you just want to quit some of those games, and sometimes we do. The interesting thing about what you guys did with the mechanics of it, the mechanics are very simple, at least from what we've seen so far. I mean, you have a club. You have a limited amount of ammo. You can't just run around and club everything because then shit gets out of hand quick.

And not everything, unless you do a full club hit, kills it. So you want to be strategic in what you're doing. So what's really cool is there's not too many mechanics, but there are mechanics there, and they're unforgiving. And that just makes them all the more, like you're like okay well we've got to stick with the mechanics but you know it's not like we're you know oh you have to stand on a plate over there and i gotta hold up my arm someone's gonna scratch their fucking belly and you know we gotta pull a rubber band and you know it's just stupid shit that you're just like for fuck's

i just want to kill stuff i'm just here to deal with my issues from childhood. And, you know, it's one of the complaints I have with some of my favorite game makers that, you know, they're taking the game mechanics just way too far for like a raid or a dungeon. You're just like, look, man, there just becomes a point where it reaches level stupidity. And you guys, guys i mean it's

really simple it's not like i gotta go to college or or read encyclopedia to figure out how to beat the game you know i mean we we learn mostly through failure and and we're used to doing this a little bit i think most gamers are they're hardcore gamers we're used to problem solving and and crew i don't know what the right word is crewmanship where you you know okay you do that you do this you get that tool you know so it's a lot of fun i was super impressed the game and it's like i said as far as i was concerned if you were to tell me it was a finished product i would have believed it uh graphics are cool the aliens are just freaky as i mean if it's not bad enough that the aliens, you know, are going to kill you and crap, they're horror to look at. They're very ugly.

They're just like, oh, man, look who that dude is. Oh, my God, he's just as open. What the hell is going on? And so it's just fun. So 10 Chambers, tell us about who 10 Chambers is, what you guys did, how you got here, and all that stuff. 10 Chambers was founded by Ulf Andersen, who was the brain behind the Payday games, the entire franchise, actually.

So he was a founding member of Overkill Software, which created and developed the first Pay to Game, Pay to the Heist, as was I actually, one of the founding members. But yeah, he went on to create this new company and he named it 10 Chambers because he wanted to, you know, in the name sort of indicate that we're not supposed to grow beyond 10 people because

he thinks and i agree with him fully that you know the best parts of our both our careers in gaming which have i think we've he's been working in games since late 90s and i worked in professionally in games since 2000 so both of our careers we've we've been on larger companies and we've been in smaller ones and it's always been more fun to be in the smaller ones because you can really put your your you know your mark or your thumbprint on the on the product and you can become sort of more uh integral to the development rather than being a small cogwheel in a larger machinery. So, yeah, we're keeping it small. Right now we're nine people, so we have room for one more.

We're all, you know, friends or past colleagues from other companies, so we all know one another from before. And, yeah, that creates a certain culture within the company, and we have a nice, you know, shorthand and a rapport. And, yeah. That's pretty awesome, man. Ten people building this game, man. That's crazy. Yeah, and that includes, you know, biz dev and, yeah.

That is crazy, man. Economy and everything. But it probably makes it better because, like, I've yelled at different game developers, usually on my YouTube videos being like and i'll be like who the hell is the one that signs off on this because i want to find them and beat them shitless um i don't condone violence i mean that is a joke in every way out in all times but still i'm just like whoever keeps making these decisions that xyz developer needs to get fired and i want to find who that is and then you realize that some of these developers you know

have tens of thousands of people or thousands of people and there's probably not one guy but there's some of them where i'm just like i could you could sit me in your meeting and you you would have float that idea that you did that ruined the game drove people from it uh and i would have told you as a player that's the dumbest fucking thing you could do and uh and you kind of realize you know especially if you work in a lot of corporations that the group think from sometimes contributes to an incredible amount of stupid um because there's a group think of people and and it just kind of spreads to it like either peer pressure or like well let's just all do that and you know you get 100 people that decide they

want to do that and then you're yeah or once you know there's too many million dollars invested in the product it becomes you know decisions are made what's the word decision by division decision by the uh distributors no no no decision by sorry i'm blacking out here what decision by committee committee exactly yeah and that's that kills creativity really because at that point you're you're starting to to listen to too many people and you can't have a vision. Yeah. Bungie was rumored to have some of those relationships with Activision and some of the tussle about the demands of the game

and how it was laid out, how it was played out, and what they wanted. Nowadays, where we live in this world where everything's a loot box and you've got to pay to play of uh enhancements of the game you know it becomes really you start moving away from like are you a casino machine or are you a are we playing games here what's going on yeah and so yeah no i love the game 10 people holy crap man does that does that create extra pressure though though, for you guys? Or extra workload? Are you guys able to manage it?

I mean, we have to be really clever with how we manage our time and money because we can't do what the AAA developers and publishers do. We don't have that sort of capacity. But we can do other things. We can do GTFO, basically, because I don't think that sort of a capacity uh but we can do other things like uh we can do gtfo basically because uh i don't think that this is a game that you would ever see from a a larger you know publisher or game developer because they they wouldn't dare to to uh invest their money and time into something that is so niche yeah they'd be like they'd be like

where the loot boxes the uh and and probably keeping the cost down will add to the profitability i mean i launched a lot of companies in my younger days where we uh launched them with a lot of blood sweat and tears sweat equity if you will and uh once we finally you know started selling the crap out of it we became immediately profitable and can best reinvest our profits um and that that makes a whole big of a difference um and then of course you know i mean you guys are doing a great job listening to the community keeping your ear to ground you guys built a good community um some of the big problems that we have with some of the big developers is they get lost in the community or they only peel the streamers or they only listen to streamers they don't listen to everybody that's in the game you know it's like oh you don't have a twitch channel fuck you we're not listening to you um and one of the problems

that i've had with some of the games that i've had is they listen to the twitch streamers who pretty much will you know be yes men to anything that people say i mean there's some of them that are critical but they're they're not as critical as they should be because they're you know bs men to anything that people say i mean there's some of them that are critical but they're they're not as critical as they should be because they're you know making money off the game and getting people to watch it so they don't want to you know you don't want to shoot the uh the the the golden goose in the head by declaring it's it's a crappy build but uh sometimes they listen to developers and or the the twitch people and they tell them you know twitch guys make it harder and it's like dude not everyone's a professional game player

and once you drive away the casual players um i don't know if you got 10 twitch players that will play the game yeah and then everyone leaves and i run a lot of clans in just about any game that we play. I build a clan and try and run clans. And so I really am affected and get to see when a game turns a corner and alienates the casual player base and they move to another game. Sometimes it's game launch that does that. You know, everyone's always like what's the news game uh but there are other times where they do something that the whole audience just goes um no we're out of here um anthem didn't sign up for this you know uh and it's important to maintain to have a vision and and and go for it you know because then your audience knows what you're all about

and then you can you find the people that want what you're what you're prepared to deliver yeah and so i think it's good because with 10 people you can keep your ear to the ground you can listen to what's going on you know you don't have to like you say get lost in community where you know some boardroom guy comes in and goes what the the hell are we doing? And the sales marketing comes in and goes, we need to get this game on. You're like, it's not ready. Yeah. You know, and you guys can just make the probably better decisions, but it sounds like you guys are in your own kind of like, you know,

10 player suspense drama. Yes. You're in your own 10 co-op, you will how do we build this game this thing launched and uh we're living on top ramen who's the tank but no it's cool it sounds like you guys got some really good developers there uh they worked on a lot of other games and can bring that collective knowledge this stuff um definitely yeah are you guys gonna stick with 10 people until you launch this game or do you do you see a ramping up uh no we're gonna be we're nine now we can go up to 10 so we we got one more maybe does that include a pr agent to do the marketing yeah we have we have a little bit of uh like peripheral uh members

and uh oh there you go so your peripheral members. Oh, there you go. So you're peripheral members, ambassadors and stuff. Yeah, consultants that we use for certain aspects of the development. But yeah, the core team is the nine of us. Nice. This is brilliant. This is amazing, man. And I've interviewed a lot of different uh independent makers and they're usually like you know 12 players 15 people and of course they have the constraints of the the budget

but a lot of times you make some you make better project products uh having that gun to your head uh even in movies you know uh yeah under your head sometimes creates some of the best work as opposed to uh you know i i remember back in the creates some of the best work as opposed to uh you know i i remember back in the day when i used to build my companies we had a gun to our head because it was our money it was our sweat equity and then once we got money and started building other companies we just blow all sorts of stupid money and we're like why are we losing fifty thousand dollars in the first year oh yeah that's because we're just being sloppy and stupid and lazy and so sometimes you do your best work with that gun to your head it's kind of funny how life works

yeah you gotta you gotta have the right amount of money like you can't have zero but you can't have too much because then you start yes you said like i mean what matrix movie is the best one the first one because after that the i'm sure the movie studio is like you have stupid or every movie you can do whatever you want now you have all the money because we know it's a hit and then the second of the third one my personal opinion is that they're yeah they just get worse i agree with you they just got more worse and more uh cg cgi and to the point where just like this is just like i don't know what this is because everything is cgi it's i don't even know what's real anymore um we hope that we we have that sort of a balanced yeah yeah we're yeah i think it's great i can't think of any game that's

like it that i've ever played um but uh i think it's cool we were addicted from the start and even though we had early failures we're like let's get back the fuck in there uh it is it is in the pedigree i mean when you say that it's nothing they're out there like it i agree it isn't the pedigree of you know left for dead obviously you know sort of founded the entire genre of the four-player co-op first-person shooter. And as I mentioned, we've worked on the Payday games, but we want to take it further and make it harder and more demanding for the team to really communicate and coordinate

and not get away with playing sloppy or absentmindedly. So it is a game that it's taxing. I can totally understand that as a player, you're not going to be playing this for, it's not an eight-hour straight sort of experience because it's taxing on you. It's a layer cake, and it doesn't contain a lot of relief. Other games can have that. and it doesn't contain a lot of relief. Yeah. You know, that's,

other games can have that, you know, when the bright colors or the bright, you know, the bright lit, you know, surroundings and, and yeah,

even, you know, cut scenes and stuff, you know, versus modes. There's a lot of things that we're excluding in this, in this game

in order to be i think i i think it's smart i think it's smart and you could have a sidebar of you know hey if you want to watch this stupid video over here this you know lower trailer or something like that or whatever um you know it'd be kind of cool but but yeah i think if you had too many cut scenes in the game it would be it would kind of blow it because you you would you would be just you it would be disengaging you from your interest and stuff you know and here's the funny thing when when when we're doing like a raid or a dungeon or like uh different other events in a game because the repetitive nature of it not the randomization where the enemies are all the same everything is the same and you're doing

it repetitively you're not completing it then you just want to quit but with this thing everything was so different and you go through different paths if i recall correctly right there's different paths you can go through depend upon the randomization of the game and so you're not in the same place and so you know just create you're like wow, we came through here and there was a shitload of enemies. Now there's not. Okay, great. Um,

that just means the next room is a shit storm. Um, but yeah, it's just, it's great game. If you guys want to check it out, you can go to a steam. Uh,

you can, uh, sign up to, uh, I forget what the name of the marker is on the game that you can take and do. Uh, you can add it to your wishlist on steam. Uh, be lovely you could try and find uh hit that button so they know they got a great game um people that will buy the game uh you can try and find the discord i guess that

people want uh for you guys uh i took and hunted down your discord and then i hunted down your uh twitter and stuff like that and started reaching out to people but uh that or you know you know ask somebody who has the game uh for a code and then invite three of your friends and and you got a team yeah you gotta have a team so i i love the game i still love it uh i think we're gonna go back and play around with it um some more as you guys develop some more stuff on it and uh yeah the only thing i think i the only thing i was missing is uh you know a weak mode for the weak checkpoint player and you know a lot of my friends they were like we don't give a fuck we're just what because every time we would go deeper so we you know the thing we always say

to ourselves in that case is we're like, well, we're making progress. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as we're making progress, it's, yeah. But yeah, the horror and the suspense after a while, it does, after a few hours of playing, it was grinding us. We're just like, okay. You've got to be a little bit of a masochist. Yeah, it's like, it is masochistic. It definitely is. But it's fun. It's thrilling. I mean, it's only suspenseful and horror, but it's like yeah it is masochistic it is it definitely is where but it's fun it's thrilling

i mean it's only suspenseful and horror but it's a thrill and it just gives you that drug where you're just like oh yeah we gotta play there's room and uh yeah just a lot of fun is there anything more we need to know about you guys what you guys are building here gtfo etc no i mean basically we've said it like we we this is a game aimed towards uh people who like playing games in cooperative you know squad uh you know players uh you know rainbow six sort of people more than uh left for dead i'd say because there's more of a strategic and a tactical aspect to the game than most other games that you would compare it to. And yeah, so you will be able to play with random people, but it's not recommended because, you know, it's so easy to fail when you're not communicating and you don't have you

know the shorthand and everything and it starts even in the in the loadout screen like choosing the gear really you know committing see what they have to i like that aspect yeah you can see what everyone else is carrying and you should you should discuss you know what should i bring in order to complement what everyone else has and that works really good on that load screen because um anytime i'm in any sort of raid or dungeon or anything like that where we always have to ask us what do you what do you what are you wearing what are you running there's ways you can go look it up but it's a real pain in the ass you gotta go through a couple screens uh so i like the way you guys

build it up but yeah this is one of those games i was just hugely addictive to addicted to from the get-go and most of my friends were too and uh you know anybody who's been a raider dungeon runner um who likes the cerebral effect of a game as opposed to just shooting killing things but you don't really love shooting killing things um it's it's great the graphics are awesome as well yeah i think my friend had it jacked up to i think 2k i think he did and it was running pretty good for him um the graphics are awesome i mean it really looks like a polished finished game as far as i'm concerned but uh uh i just loved it so if you can get a chance guys check it out you can go to gtfo the game.com uh you can also sign up to be ambassador with them at

10chambers.com or if you want more background thing on the company, you can add them to your wish list on Steam. Please do, yes. I definitely highly would recommend it. You can apply to be an ambassador if you want. Share the message. Look for the Discord. Look for their stuff on Twitter.

Anything more we need to cover there? No. Alright, we got to cover there? No. All right. We got it all. Check it out, guys. I highly recommend it. I had a lot of fun with it, and I think you will too. And I think once the game is like fully finished,

it's just going to be freaking amazing. And it's so different than any other game that's out there in the marketplace, at least in my opinion. So that's what I'm saying to stick it through it. All right. Well, thanks for being with me on the show, Simon. We certainly appreciate it. Tell all the guys there at GTFO, it's awesome.

Thanks for having me. Seeing the finished part of the game. Maybe having you guys back on at that time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We'd be happy to come back. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in.

We certainly appreciate you. And we'll see you next time.