The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Tabletop Gods by Ghost Fish Games, Jim Bottomley Interview

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Tabletop Gods by Ghost Fish Games, Jim Bottomley Interview

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com thechrissvossshow.com Hey, we're coming to you live on the podcast here on YouTube. Be sure to hit the buttons on YouTube to subscribe to the show at youtube.com, for just Chris Voss, hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications of everything we do. You can also go to chrissisfossshow.com and subscribe there. Of course, we're on iTunes, The Chris Foss Show, Google Play, Spotify, iHeartRadio,

all the syndication plays so you can get all the podcasts there. And also, we are part of the CBPN. You can go to Chris Foss Podcast Network and see seven of the different podcasts we have, one for gaming gaming one for the general of course chris voss show flagship uh geez spatial computing startup unicorn podcast uh geez there's a whole mess of them over there go see there's book author podcasts etc this will be a podcast that's appearing today on two of our channels for podcasts one for uh chris voss gaming and uh podcast and the chris voss show so

be sure to subscribe to either of those if you want to hear more of both uh today we have jim bottomley of ghost fish games they're launching their new game on steam and ps4 uh called tabletop gods i believe it is tabletop gods welcome to the show. How you doing bud? Not so bad. Thank you for having me Chris Sauce so we're gonna have you guys on the gaming podcast right now As well as Chris Voss show so you guys be on two podcasts for the price of one if you will But we didn't charge it for it First the audience it's a dollar for everyone uh so i'm painting on that uh anyway jim uh so

uh give us tonight give us a sense of who you are what your background is what brought you to this point in time and then let's talk about the company after that okay um so as you said my name is jim bottomley i am the design director at ghostfish games. Ghostfish Games, we are currently developing a PC stroke VR game, but let's go back in time a little bit to where I come from, just to kind of put you in the picture. I started in games back in the very early 90s, so I am rather old school. Started back doing the kind of, even the 8-bit and 16-bit stuff, a core design for the creators of Tomb Raider. I famously told Toby Gard, the creator of Lara Croft, that he would never get that damn game made at this company

just before I left, which is when I figured I was incorrect. After that, so I started as a programmer. I left university with a degree in computer systems engineering and therefore naturally moved into programming, which I really, really wasn't very good at. And after spending three months porting my first game, so we were developing a game called Universe, which was a point-and-click adventure.

We were developing that on the Amiga, but they wanted a PC version as well, so I started a porting job on that. It wasn't doing very well, but fortunately, I spent a lot of time messing around in deep paint. I'd never really messed with deep paint before. And actually, most of the time when I was at university, I spent more time drawing underground comics for a comic back home than I did actually doing computer systems engineering stuff.

So my boss basically said, Jim, you're obviously no good at programming. Do you want to be an artist? Now, this wouldn't happen nowadays. But back in the day, that wasn't massively uncommon. I made the switch to art and I stayed in art for a long time. Probably let me think, eight years or so, eventually working to art director through various companies.

After co-design, we started a small indie development team. I don't know if some of you guys remember Eighth Day. We changed our name to Aliens from Outer Space. We did a game called heimdall on the atarius yeah that wasn't me i can't take credit for that i joined the team after that um we did a few games on pc and console then went to software creations which did a lot of early game boy stuff we did a whole the whole raft of things playstation one um ds stuff uh so i became eventually art director there at that point.

And then shortly after that, sorry, you want to have a question, Chris? No, I was just saying, uh-huh. Oh, okay. And then shortly after that, I kind of made the shift into design when we needed a designer on a game that we started developing called Gladiator Sword of Vengeance, which was a third-person kind of hack-and-slash roaming game that was on PlayStation and

PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox So short after that software creations When our business we were all bought by a claim so I worked at a claim for years and a claim went out of business Eventually My career is a litany of companies going out of business. I don't know whether it's them or me. And then I spent a short time, that was my first stint in mobile after that, very early mobile, not like smartphone stuff.

That was interesting. Design-wise, just as challenging, if not more so, than working on console and PC. Then I went to work for Vivendi Universal. Have I skipped a few years yeah no i went to work for a small company called um swordfish which was part of event universal and there i worked with the guys at massive on um we worked we did a game actually first called interview with the made man and then we went to work on the world in conflict which was

a pc game uh pcrts which they were wanting to get onto console so we were covering the console side of that for them unfortunately that never saw the light of day because towards the end of my time with that company vivendi bought activision and activision closed a few studios let's put it that way it was at that point that i kind of had enough of losing my job or being put out of work. And my wife and myself said, we'd always talked about moving countries. So we said, let's try Canada. So we moved to Canada. Literally within three months, I had an interview with a crowd here called Other Ocean.

They were looking for a design director. I had an interview with them. And three months later, I'd left England for good. We'd sold our house. And I've been here for 11 years since then. So Other Ocean, we're around. Well, they're still around. I mean, Ghostfish Games is part of the Other Ocean group.

Oh, wow. I was with Other Ocean for how many years? It had been seven years, six years, when we were bought by Electronic Arts. Charlottetown, I don't know if anybody knows, we're based in Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island, which is in Atlantic Canada. And it's quite a hub for game development. You wouldn't think it, but it is.

And if anybody's familiar with the mobile game, The Simpsons, Tapped Out, which was phenomenally successful, that started here in Charlottetown. And it was actually started by a development company called Byte, who got bought by Electronic Arts and they were desperate to staff up and at Other Ocean we had a lot of people so it made sense that they essentially acquired the studio but not Other Ocean itself. Other Ocean continued to exist as a separate entity. Other Ocean's headquarters is in Emeryville on the west coast down there in the States. So we worked at Electronic Arts for about three years,

which is during that time, myself and two of the other guys, we kind of flirted with the idea of doing our own thing. It never really became a reality for about three years when I decided to leave. I kind of had enough of doing mobile and the free-to-play thing. Some people love it, some people hate it. It's not my cup of tea, design-wise. So we'd actually approached Other Ocean again to ask whether they'd consider setting up another studio.

And they said, yeah, sure. And we were like, oh, okay. So I was the first to leave. And then the two guys that came on board, they left afterwards, having decided to leave for their own reasons, leaving here. And the three of us basically head up Ghostfish Games for Other Ocean under the purview of Deirdre Eyre, who is the head of Canadian operations, who basically runs all the Canadian studios. We have a studio here and we have a studio in St. John's in Newfoundland, as well as the headquarters, which is down in San Francisco in Amarillo.

Awesome. So we are, like I said, Ghostfish Games. We've been around now for a couple of years. And in that time, when I first left, I was the employee of Ghostfish Games before we were even called Ghostfish Games. We only named ourselves fairly recently. We procrastinated for ages and we came up of Ghostfish Games before we were even called Ghostfish Games. We only named ourselves fairly recently. We procrastinated for ages and we came up with Ghostfish Games. I helped out on Giant Cop, which is a VR title on the Rift and on Vive.

I helped out on that on the latter stages of that when I first left. While I was getting the early design work down for what was to become Tabletop Gods. We also worked on, our team also worked on Minecraft on the 3DS. So we brought Minecraft to the 3DS, a task which most people thought was impossible, which our tech director has literally lost hairdoing, but we did it, which was quite an incredible feat. We also worked on bringing Rick and Morty, virtual Rickality, from PC to the PlayStation VR.

And we got an Emmy nomination for that, which was nice. We didn't win. We got the Emmy nomination. Not just ourselves. Obviously, Alchemy, they're the ones who, I suppose, can really take the credit. They designed the game. But it is nice to be kind of associated with that.

Cool, thanks. And during that time, we were developing Tabletop Gods, which is our first original IP. One of the things we were interested in, obviously, in founding Ghostfish Games was to create our own IP. The masters of our own destiny as much as we can, obviously.

So, yeah, that brings us up to date, I suppose. So you guys have built this Tabletop Gods. I think it's interesting that you have it available both on desktop PC and VR, which is, was it hard to do both? Yes and no.

Hard in the sense, technically hard, yes. It wasn't a hard decision to make, though. Okay. When we started off, we obviously were talking about the types of games. Obviously, you do. in the sense technically hard yes uh it wasn't a hard decision to make though okay when we when we started off we we obviously was talking about the types of games obviously you do you know you're sitting around either in a pub or i think it was during summer so we were probably out on the deck here enjoying maybe one or two but think about the types of games we'd love to make uh we obviously knew that vr was a thing um um vr kind of i've always been interested in virtual reality. I was interested in back in the 90s when there was like,

arguably some people call it Wave 1, it's more like Wave 2 or 3 really, when Jonathan Walden was around and Gerard Lanier was first touting all his ideas about virtual reality. I was big into it as a concept then. The hardware just wasn't up to it back then and I've always kind of, always

been interested in doing you know a game based in like a VR media medium and so we discussed that as well, but we also said well look, you know VR is It's a small market. It's really difficult You've got to be incredibly successful if you want to make money in that market and you know We've got to be realistic and we have to make money So we designed tabletop gods from the offset to be both um we're kind of avid board game players we love board games and card games and what we love especially about those formats is the social

aspect and we love like players actually being you know we call it co-location you know being in the same place as normal people call it where you actually can talk to people you can laugh together um it's there's a real great and you know obviously there's online gaming but it's not quite the same um so we wanted to bring that experience into the video game world um vr obviously makes that possible because like you know in vr you have this this sense of being this sense of being in a place with other people, which is much stronger than it is in Numbia. But we still wanted to give that experience to everybody. So we talked about various ideas.

Tabletop Gods is the one that kind of came through. A kind of an RTS light. We describe it as a cross between Clash Royale and the old Atari Classic Rampart just because it steals ideas from both. We wanted to make a game that was a little bit more in-depth than something like Clash Royale, but also very approachable and quick to play. Google had done some research a few years ago now, probably, so I'm not sure how out of date it is now,

but they've done some research where they said that people's experience of VR tends to be around the 30 to 40 minute for interactive vr experiences longer people watching movies or doing other kind of non-interactive stuff so we very much took that to heart and it was kind of in line with what we wanted to do have these nice quick experiences that you could have an entire game loop within you know 15 minutes you could hop, have a game, and go and do your business elsewhere. Or you could stay around and you could play multiple games. So what we came up with, like I said, was Tabletop Gods.

Tabletop Gods is a game where players play the role of gods vying for control in the heavens. The Elder Gods is just the law. It really has a little bearing on the game. It's just the conceit for the game. The Elder God has disappeared, and the gods have decided to hold this tournament to compete for who should be the elder god and they're doing this by obviously as gods do in a kind of a ray harry housing kind of clash of the titans kind of way is that they're using their minions to do their dirty work for them so players can choose a faction to bring to a table and literally it's almost like a coffee table.

The tables are not very big at all, and that's so that it heightens the sense of the gameplay. The gameplay is very fast-paced. It's not slow like typical RTSs because we borrowed from Clash Royale, which has that kind of choose a troop, deploy a troop, and then the troops are autonomous. Once they hit the table, they do their own thing.

The real trick in both Clash Royale and Tabletop Gods is that you're managing your mana, which is basically how much you can spend to deploy troops. You're managing where to place them, because placement is incredibly important, and then the combinations of which troops you deploy on the table. Give us the website

people can look up. You can find it on Steam, Tabletop Gods. There's also a website that you can look on to get more information. Give us the website for that. Yeah, it's www.tabletopgods.com You can go there and you can find out all about the game there.

Just look up Tabletop Gods on Steam and you'll find it there immediately. You can also follow us on Twitter, at Tabletop Gods. And if you just do a search on Facebook or on Instagram, you'll find us there as well. Just look for us on Twitter, at Tabletop Gods. And if you just do a search on Facebook or on Instagram, you'll find us there as well. Just look for Tabletop Gods, all one word. And then we regularly update all the social channels and stuff with regular videos

and teasers and things like that. Yeah. And then how soon do you guys see it coming out on... Now, can I get it on VR, on Steam too? Right, okay. So, the PlayStation VR that you're coming out soon. No on steam The when you buy it on steam and it's a 1999 USD when you buy on steam you get the PC version And if you also own the VR rig you can play in VR as well

You don't have to you see you can play it just pancake mode is what I've heard of what people refer to it as nowadays Describe you know you've got a 3d game, but it's on a 2D. In the old days, you had three games. Now you've got a 3D game, but it's on a flat screen. Wow. Very confusing. So that's the new VR shaming for people. I know, I know. But most of our players... Wow.

Now every time I'm going to play a game, I'm just a pancake gamer. Why am I hungry? I need breakfast. Most of our players actually play pancake. We're playing on VR. We designed it from the ground up

with both in mind. We absolutely did. Obviously, players can play together. They're not segregated in anyway So when you're in VR you can play against people who plan in on VR mode, so So now I'm gonna go out to buy a VR system so that I can go around bullying and shaming people Oh, oh, pancake. Yeah, just pancake, dude. Yeah. I should have known that was coming eventually. Yeah. Sorry, go on. So you guys have it on VR now.

In tabletop games, I just got the code, so I haven't gotten a chance to play the game. But we'll definitely be playing it, of course, we'll have a review on the Chris Voss Show and Chris Voss Gaming.com How soon do you guys see it coming out on PlayStation? We're currently developing it on PlayStation

it's been in development for a while so we don't have any firm dates within I don't we're making great progress and we're not years away we're a few months away Yeah, I don't want to... We're making great progress. And we're not years away, we're a few months away. So, you know, take that as you will.

A few months could mean, you know, three to five or whatever. As for the game is currently, you know, as I said, it's currently in early access on Steam. And again, just to reiterate, non-VR and VR, it's the same build. You buy the game, you can play it either way you want. And we're coming out of early access imminently, within a couple of months. So it was important to us that when we hit early access,

it was to try and get a player base together. One of the things that we set out to do in our company was to create fun games. I know it sounds a bit cliche, but, you know, the fun comes first and kind. Build it and there will come, Field of Dreams. We built it. They're a bit slow to come. It's Steam. There is a massive amount of competition and getting

visibility is the tricky part. Hence, it's great to be invited on shows such as yours. But we have the arena aspect of our game where multiple players come into an arena and there's a table in the middle of that arena and two players step up and fight out against each other.

It's really great. We have regular meetups on Thursdays where we have, which is usually the biggest gathering, and it's just a laugh. It's a riot. It's kind of akin to the old kind of people putting down their 25 cents on the pool table, you know, and people just stood around chatting and talking while there's a game going on in front of you that's the way the

game works uh it's a it's a very social game and going back to how i was talking about we wanted to mimic that social aspect that you get from board games and that kind of camaraderie and and uh you know and being a friendly grief people first thefirst kind of thing is always great fun. I don't know if you want me to describe the game a little bit better. I probably didn't describe the game very well. Yeah, tell us about the game, man. You can, of course, see it on Tabletop Gods, the Steam, tabletopgods.com and Steam.

It looks like a really cool game. What would you call these sort of... What type of game would you call it? It's tricky. I can say it's... I do describe it as RTS Lite. The only reason I describe it as that is because we don't have

micromanagement, so that once troops are on the table, they do their own thing, and it's up to you to decide where to pull the troops to best effect whereas traditional RTS is you know you can deploy troops and you can select them you can give them orders we wanted a very fast visceral arcade experience and in early builds we had experimented with being able guide troops around once they're on the table but quite honestly honestly, there was such cognitive overload, it slowed down the game.

In order for players to make meaningful decisions, we had to slow things down a lot. And that went away from our desire to have this kind of fun, in-your-face arcade experience. It was amazing the difference it made. So we very quickly kind of decided that you would choose a troop, deploy a troop, choose a spell, deploy a spell, just to keep the pace of the game going.

The game itself is played over three rounds. Each round is three minutes of war, and each war phase has a precursor prepare for war, where players place down defenses. They can place down towers and traps, and they do that in secret so the other player can't see what they're doing. We find that that basically upsets the game most of all because it's really good fun, especially in the second or third round. You're reacting to what your opponent did in the first round or the second round. Now, you know, defensive towers and traps.

And you have a very limited amount of time to do that. And also during that time, you get to switch out troops. So if you're not surprised that, you know, your opponent yet again, you can switch out a troop and they won't time, you get to switch out troops. So if you're not surprised that your opponent, yet again, you can switch out a troop and they won't know what you're bringing to the table this round. And basically every round has these two phases. A game lasts no longer than 15 minutes is the absolute, unless you go into a really extended sudden death.

The aim of the game is quite simple. You have a certain number of towers on your side of the board. There are a certain number of towers on the enemy side of the board and you have to destroy as many of their towers as you Can in the time given and the side that destroys most hours wins Sorry go the goal of the battle is simple destroy more of your opponent strongholds and they doing yours Yeah, you can push for the destroying towers, and that gives you a little bit of territory. Coming for you guys'

website, in Tabletop Gods, you play the role of a god vying for power in the heavens. Lead your troops in explosive real-time battles that rage across tabletop battlefields. Customize your armies, build defenses, cast spells, command your troops, set traps for your enemy troops,

and deploy your own troops to fight to destroy your opponent as you compete for power in the heavens. Single player, head-to-head, and spectator modes. Pretty cool. I mean, it looks like kind of like a multifaceted game as opposed to just being like, you know, one sort of genre. It is a bit of a mash-up like i said i mean gameplay wise the fact that we've got these two phases we've got this prepare for war phase

and the war phase and that's where we kind of say well the prepare for war phase that's similar to i don't know if you remember rampart back in the day well you know it's an old game now and that game run in a very similar manner you could build walls and set defenses and then you would have a phase whereby you had to defend your defenses and then you would get to rebuild them so uh when we initially made the game we we had no prepare for war phase and we just have this straightforward three minutes of carnage or 15 minutes of carnage and wow it's it was insane so it was our creative director actually down in mike micah down in emeryville suggested oh guys you want to you want to do the rampart thing, you want to split up into phases

and we were like, I'm not sure, and we implemented it and we went, yeah, that's it, that's what we're doing, that's exactly the thing we need to do. So that's what we do, we have, you know, like I say each of the rounds has the prepare for war phase and a war phase. And it works out really well, it creates a great

sense of kind of, you get to strategise in the prepare for phase, but the war phase itself is more tactical. And it works out really well. What can I say? Awesome, man. The screenshots look pretty awesome. The gameplay looks pretty awesome. Yeah, it's a mishmash of just like everything that's in there. And I think it's cool.

And you, I think i think mention me in the pre-show that you guys are going to make it so that it will it will transcend uh you'll be able to co-play on both steam and uh playstation at the same time with that's right currently as i as i kind of mentioned before whether you play it pancake mode we all about to know must find out who actually created that term. They need to... I just made it up. Maybe I just made it up. Maybe I dreamt it. Who knows? They can play

against VR players currently, obviously. So if you're playing on Vive or the Rift, you can play against... And like I said, most of our players are non-VR. But when the PlayStation comes out, you will also be able to play from that ecosystem. You better play against the existing PC players and any other system that we move it to. Again, all that is we want to create this social network of players. That is our big aim. We don't

want to segregate players. That's why, for example, in the future, we're considering in the future different game modes and things like this, but we haven't done them yet on purpose because we don't want to segregate the player base. As I alluded to earlier on, it's difficult getting noticed in Steam. The player base is fairly small right now. We don't want to split the player base up by having some of them play one mode, some of them play another mode. So we all play the same mode right now mode, some of them play another mode.

So we all play the same mode right now, which is what we call war mode. That said, that's in the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is kind of, it really is the kind of the core of our game, but we also have single player as well for people who don't particularly like multiplayer or kind of want to get used to the game before they

go online. Sometimes it's very intimidating, although I would say that our Discord community, they're non-toxic at this point in time, which is rare for a multiplayer community. It's quite nice to see. I mean, usually gaming communities are pretty salty. Yes, they are salty. But I mean, the beautiful part about them,

and I have this conversation with a lot of game developers that we have on the show, the beautiful part about them and i have this conversation with a lot of uh game developers that we have on the show uh the beautiful part about them and and uh you know i've seen bungie talk about this a lot is that uh it's better to have uh fans that are are really passionate about your game now sometimes it's very angry passionate sometimes it's very loving passion uh sometimes it's a mixture of both it's a hate and love and hate relationship uh you can't make everyone happy which is the biggest challenge i think game developers have to face um trying to balance what points do we what pain points do we really uh solve for the community and what pain points are just not really either resolvable or not really indicative of the whole community.

Like one of the challenges that we have with the Bungie community is you have all the slackers that go, I don't want to work as hard for stuff and I don't want to grind, but I want all the cool stuff that the grinders get. And they seem to be constantly in this toss-up and so i i can see it'd be really hard um to to do customer service and make communities happy but you know hey as long as people are fired up about your game and they're so committed to it you know i've had games that i quit and i'm like should i complain about this game

and i'm like uh i'm like no just screw it anthem excuse me um just you know just give up and move on um and uh then i've had games that i love but you know half the time i'm hating on the game devs and the other time i'm telling you how much i love them want to have their child um which is how big EVE Online player for many, many years. EVE Online was literally my second job. And the amount of people, whenever there was an update, it was EVE is dead. And you still see those same players now years later.

EVE is dead. You're still playing it. I'm still playing and you're not. I think it's the same as some of you. This game's dead. Now it's over. It's over. They've killed it.

But it is interesting. Like I said, I think it's the lead designer of Magic the Gathering. He basically talks about it's best to have a few people who really love your game than have a game that most people think is okay, because people don't play okay games. Yeah. They're the games they love, so, you know. Yeah, I mean, I think Anthem might be falling into that sphere right now,

where it's like, okay, it's kind of like a half-drooling idiot game that's riding the short bus or something. No offense to people who ride short buses, I should probably say. They're nice people. I'm not sure about the game though. You've got to have a game that really captures you, really hooks you. It's got to

be intuitive from the start. There's a lot of stuff that goes into game developing and gamification, of course, is an important part in developing the storyline getting people interested in playing through it and everything else so anything more we need to know about the game as we wrap up i'm going to get a chance to play it and review it soon on the chris voss show and the chris watch uh gaming.com so be sure to watch

for that but uh anything more we need to know about the game and i would say that you hit on there the game's gonna be easy to play and that was you know we wanted this game to be very accessible um we didn't want to confuse things uh we didn't want to confuse players we wanted to basically have players hit the ground running so our you know we talked many many times about should we have this kind of feature that kind of feature there's nothing wrong with those features that would but the trouble is whenever a feature comes up as an idea from either our players or internally, if it overcomplicates the game,

overcomplicates the interface, the controls, we kind of have to question whether that's the right thing for the game. So we try to keep everything as simple to understand as possible. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to have kind of, it doesn't seem to have affected the depth of the strategy. It's great to see our players come up with new strategies one of the great things about making games especially tactical games you know rts's or strategy games is seeing emergent kind of dynamics and emergent strategies that players come up with stuff that we've never even thought that we either kind of

it's great or maybe we've got to look out for degenerate strategies that players create um so but you know our discord community has been great we meet up every thursday if anybody's it's great or maybe we've got to look out for degenerate strategies that players create. But our Discord community has been great. We meet up every Thursday if anybody's interested in Tabletop Gods. We meet up every Thursday as an official meet-up. Obviously, players play all week. You can find our Discord. You can find where that lives on Steam.

You can find it from www.tabletopgods.com. You can jump into the Discord. You can ask people what they think about the game before you've even bought it. We've got a lot of players there that will answer questions. We're on there all day. We'll ask any questions anybody has. And I would just say

give us a try. You'll be... Cool. And you guys have the Twitch stream I just checked into. Sometimes you're doing that. I'm going to join you guys in Discord right now. I've got a giant Discord of my own of about a thousand people. And

I'm going to join yours right now. I love Discord. Isn't Discord just a great app for community building and stuff? It's amazing, yeah. Admittedly, I'm very new to Discord. We create Discord for this game. I work with Discord for this game. My eyes have been opened. I'm old school, you see, so

I still send emails and things. To see things like Discord is an eye-opener. It's a fantastic way of keeping in touch with players, getting their feedback. After all, we make games for players, not for ourselves. You have

multiplayer, single-player, and trials in practice mode. So that's pretty cool. So yeah, practice has just been renamed skirmish because it's more of a skirmish really. So yes, you can go in there, you can decide which faction to play against, which faction you're going to play as, and then you can battle it out against the AI.

The trials mode, we actually changed up the rules for trials. So we have several trials arcs. Each arc is eight matches long with an increasing difficulty ramp. Players can basically make their way through those. So we have the normal war mode, which is the war mode you play in multiplayer. We also have kill the king mode where you have to find the enemy's king. He's hiding out in one of the strongholds. So you have to find out is and then you've got kind of hammering before before he manages to escape at the end of the round

Oh, wow And we have an orderly destruction where you have to destroy the strongholds in a specific order Otherwise you you fail and then we have like an insane war mode whereby it's it's kind of war mode But for people who think they're really good at the game, they can have a go at that. Honestly, the last two levels of that, our designer who basically does most of the balancing is amazing at this game. I can't finish the last two on that mode, but he can.

He showed me. I know it's possible. I've always thought it was funny sometimes when I meet game developers and some of the folks that work at the place. They can't. They can't. Oh, man.

You know what? On Thursday, we have this meetup, and some of the players they're just i don't i honestly it's my game i'm the first person who started on this game i the seed came from me from a you know i mean obviously like i said myself and the founders we came up the idea together but i've worked on this probably like the longest in terms of any of us and i am quite possibly one of the worst at playing it terrible terrible well you know i mean i think that's good because i think if everybody at the gaming place uh can

play the game really well um i don't think that builds a good game in my opinion you can correct me if i'm wrong because i don't i've never been a game developer i don't work at a game developer thing but but i've kind of analyzed this uh as i watch different game developers and interviewed them and seen interviews of them um to me if i i want game developers working in a game developer shop that can't beat the game and struggle with it so they understand what players that struggle go through you know what i mean and so they have that they have that uh customer service or that customer awareness of what the struggle is like you know what i mean and so they have that they have that uh customer service or that customer awareness of what the struggle is like you know because if everyone can beat the game

um it might not be challenging enough for your high level players you're right one of the problems as a designer that you fall into is that you get you get very very familiar with your own game you get very your own game so when you're actually doing the difficulty balancing, you can bet your first pass on difficulty balancing is way, way too difficult. I think that's what happened with Anthem. People got drinking their own Kool-Aid way too much. They got higher in their own supply too much.

And I've seen that in business with companies where people are just operating in their own private Idaho and they skip a lot of what they... And they've spent... I mean, honestly, when you guys build games,

I mean, sometimes you guys are building games where you're spending years and years. And some companies, 8 to 10 years to build a game. And you get so deep in... Like, we know everything about this. And it's so second nature to us but they don't realize when they deliver it to the consumer the consumer is like you know it's it's a stranger in a strange land yeah yeah it's hard to see things with a fresh perspective yeah

like recently i i like to watch when i go games, I like to watch for intuitiveness. That's a real big thing for me. Even when we do product reviews of like solid products, we like to review based on intuitiveness, like how easy it is to assimilate. Like I don't like a product or game where I got to go read a damn manual to figure out how to play the game. And so I like it when there's those breadcrumbs, those gamification breadcrumbs that are put into a game especially the start that's teaching you about stuff it used

to be i was an impatient player i'm like wow screw this guys i'm gonna be trained but now i realized how important some of that stuff is um and and and it is frustrating when companies they don't know how to do the training properly when they like, you're going to go through a forced training. Don't put me through a forced training. Put me through some sort of breadcrumb steps or I don't know what you guys call it, but some sort of process that okay, here's a step in the game.

Here's the big thing. Like I just, like one of the games I'm reviewing right now is Metro Exodus and they do a really good job of going, here's another step, here's another teaching mode for you, and you don't really think about it until afterwards. You're like,

oh, that was a teaching moment. Okay. So this is something I need to learn. So it's really cool what you guys do with game development and the challenges you guys have to overcome. It is tricky. That onboarding or first-time user experience,

the two-e, as they sometimes refer to, is important. It's also incredibly demanding, development-wise. Our game is, although it's easy to play, we've had feedback from players like, well, okay, I know how to place

troops in the field, but I don't know which troops to place when they first play. I don't know why I should have put this one as opposed to this. So actually one of the features that we're implementing right now is a help tooltip system

so that they can turn it on. And as they look through the roster, it gives them some hints as this troop is good at this. It does these kinds of things. It's something that I'll agree we can do better at in Tabletop Gods and in many other games, but I won't speak for them. So it's something we're very mindful of.

We just have to place it kind of... We have to kind of value it amongst other demands and in development. But I agree with you. I totally agree with you. It's very important. And how we segued off this, I mean, that's what I like about when there's people at a game developer community that can't They can't totally master game or they struggle with it is because they kind of get to see the the front end steps You know, they're not so deep in the game that they can't see the forest for the trees if you will I guess

I've put down to my old slow reactions nowadays so well i do you guys discord i followed you guys on twitch and it'd be really cool uh we'll be in uh we'll be introducing uh our audiences to it of course and we'll be doing our full review of tabletop gods on the chris voss uh show and chris boss gaming.com so be sure to watch for the full review on that and chrisvossgaming.com. So be sure to watch for the full review on that and all that good stuff. Any last thing you want to give us as we part here, bud? I would just say if anybody's interested,

join the Discord, ask questions. Like I said, the community is very, very friendly right now. Nice. All the reviews on Steam have been great so far. We just need more. We'll give you some reviews if you get. Be sure to check it out, guys. I think it's a good-looking game.

Go check out their website. I believe it's tabletopgods.com, isn't it? That's the one. There you go. Anyway, folks, we appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube. Hit that bell notification button.

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