Two's Complement - Building Games Two Ways

Episode Date: January 2, 2022

Matt and Ben talk about their experiences creating games, both digital and analog. Matt recalls building games for the XBox, Dreamcast, and PS2. Ben talks about what makes board games fun, and how to lose your friends through playtesting.

I'm Matt Godbolt. And I'm Ben Rady. And this is Two's Compliment, a programming podcast. Hey, Ben. Hey, Matt. How are you doing? Great. Good.

Good to hear. So we started this podcast because we kind of realized that we had the same dreams as kids. And then something changed and you didn't go into the games industry. Yes. And I did. Yes. And then we have 10 odd years after that sort of met up and you know our careers have converged since but i'm interested in talking to you about what led you to want to be in the games industry uh yeah i know for me it was just like it was what i always did right you know you're a kid

that's what you want to make you want to make games but i don't know if that's true of you and so have you ever written your own game so i i have written some computer games none of them are notable in any way um i have made some board games that i have produced and sold which has its own sort of interesting aspects to it. It's not quite as techie, but maybe a little bit in some ways that you wouldn't expect. I mean, yeah, no, that sounds very techie. I mean, there's a lot of things. Like the mechanics of the game are a technology all to themselves, right? Like, you know, if you're doing like a side-scroller game,

like, you know, the way in which you jump and how you land and how much control you have over as you're floating through the air can sort of make a huge difference and obviously if you hold the jump key down longer do you jump higher even though that's irrational and doesn't make any sense but it's kind of needs to be there how many pixels off the edge of the the platform can you actually go before you start to fall those kinds of tweakables yeah okay and then obviously for like strategy games you know there's the whole like mechanics of the economy you know some 4x space game where you're like oh you're trading iron for hydrogen across the galaxy and you know the mechanics of that and the economics of that can be really nerdy too right i was going to say

that's where you need a sort of degree in economics to be able to vaguely understand how everything fits together and not leave yourself open right right right because the worst thing in the world is you put your heart and soul into a game and then some nerd on the internet in like five hours because like yeah if you just trade hydrogen for iron you can make an infinite amount of money and then win the game in three hours right like that's just like oh god what have i done what am i yeah yeah yeah yeah but so so did you actually i mean obviously we can talk about your board games and i'd love to hear about what the process is and that, but before we get there, what made you want to make games? Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I played a lot of video games as a kid. I played video games on my Commodore 64, which I enjoyed a lot, played a lot of Defender. That was a fantastic thing. I had a Genesis, a Sega Genesis system,. I played a lot of games on that. Eventually I got into PCs and played, you know, Heroes Quest and Space Quest and a bunch of other games in that era that I really liked a lot. We were just talking the other day about, well, earlier today, I think about how I'm super jealous of my oldest child who can just pull out her debit card and go onto Steam and buy any game at any time, whenever she wants, whenever they

want, and instantly get gratification for that. And when I was that age, I had to take a trip down to the mall and go into you know babbage's uh software shop where they sold software in boxes in on floppy disks and i still i still have this memory to this day of that store and going in and i don't remember what game i was buying but i went in and sitting on the counter at Babbage's was a demo disc for Wolfenstein 3D. And it had like an in-game image of the game. And my initial reaction was, it can't possibly be that cool. This has got to be a mock-up. There's no way that that is actually what the game looks like. There's no way.

Around about that time, like there were so many liberties with the covers of games. There would be these ridiculous mock-ups and you were like you get so disappointed when you got home and you just got like a black and white like blocky thing and yeah so but so i didn't take the disc i was like i didn't find out about wolfenstein until weeks and weeks and weeks later when all my friends were talking about it i was like wait that's real oh you missed it i missed it and i had to go back to the mall. It was terrible. Your inner cynic prevented you from enjoying a few weeks of shooting Nazis, which is one of the main attractions of Wolfenstein 3D. Yes, yes.

Amongst the technical brilliance of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was really a question of you being an avid game player and then wanting to go into the um the games industry to make games right because that's what makes sense right you know it's if you're going to do any kind of tech job it's certainly as a kid it's more glamorous to want to to make games than it is to you know have a dream to be writing a database i don't think there are many many 15 year olds that are sat there going like

i yeah i just got a passion a passion for yeah the asset properties really really speak to me as a human being that's not to say that those people don't exist and i'm glad that there are people like that that find it so exciting i mean one, one can only wonder what, oh, what's the chap's name? Afeer, the person who takes apart the databases at the lowest possible level. He's a very interesting person in so many dimensions. Definitely not safe for work Twitter account for those who are thinking of following him. But very interesting nonetheless. But yeah, so there are obviously people who find that stuff so interesting that they will do it but but games i think have that much more of a universal

kid appeal for certain yeah yeah that was and we kind of talked earlier about like when i got into college i was more in ai and you know i really like i did some graphic stuff but it was more ai for me but yeah that was kind of my it was kind of my arc do you have like that moment where you're like this is what i want to do when you sort of realize it's like this was the moment no I think I I kept hanging on to the idea that I was going to get a PhD in physics and do like research in physics that was my life that was what my plan was I loved games and i love making games so i made a number of games some of which i believe still survive um the not very nothing very good either right nothing worth really talking about although i'm sure i will because that's me and i can't help myself

but um that was always the hobby thing that i was doing i never really thought it was a sensible thing to do when i finished school i went sorry school as in like high school to americans and went to university which is college to you uh i know i know come on it just confuses me when americans say school and they mean oh well yeah that's a thing what we definitely do that but you know i picked physics because that was what i thought was my my passion but i ended up spending my entire time in the computer lab writing multi-user dungeons and doing silly things you know with that and then ultimately got a job in the games industry not because i wanted necessarily to go into the games industry exactly but because i was chatting on irc and about having

to get a job and somebody who worked have you ever thought about getting a job here i'm like no i don't think i ever really thought this was a serious thing that i could do i mean i've yeah exactly yes exactly i mean yeah for at least you know five years after i got a um a job and i got published games and i was doing okay my mother would still say to me when are you going to get a real job and you know i to an extent i think i i i uh i felt that myself it's like yeah well i get paid to do this it seems too too good i mean not very much admittedly i didn't get paid very much at all for a long time but um but that was the games industry at the back back then certainly in north london so yeah i mean i had written a few games because that was what you did. Those are the most interesting tech things to do.

Around that time, in the UK at least, the market was, there were a lot of black market floppy disks going around that you could get games with. But there were also a number of magazines that you could buy from the newsagent and they would have type-in games. And so you would sit for many hours and then you would type in a somewhat decent game and some of them were pretty good actually and that's mostly where i learned the tricks right was was debugging other people's code not necessarily it was a

problem their problem but because i typed it in wrong and then there's like they printed where you went wrong or they printed it wrong right they were actually pretty good about that that wasn't such a big deal but the the first programs professionally published um that i had professionally you know my first professional programming work was writing type in programs for these magazines like they didn't know that you know me and my mate richard were 13 and 14 at the time uh sending in stuff and it was like, you know, 10 pounds here, five pounds here, 50 pounds for the,

you know, like the star one. And that's a lot of money when you are, when you are 14 or 15. Right. And towards the end, we got a deal to do a multi-part type in game for one of the, um,

um, uh, main publishers, Acorn user. But, um, it was right at the end of the lifetime of the computer that was writing on and so they they actually dropped support for that computer before we completed it

so we have most of it written still down somewhere and uh it was it was a lot of fun but yeah it's i i don't know why games were the draw i think it was that tech challenge you know the same reason that all the hacking groups wrote demos. Oh, yeah. It's like, well, what's the most impressive thing? Well, okay, you can compute pi to 100 decimal places. That's not very exciting. But if I can make a cool thing happen on the screen, that's interesting. And so you want to show off, you write something with cool.

You know, how many more stars can I get in my star field? How many more sprites can I get on the screen at once? And so that was definitely what appealed to me. Did you read 2600 Magazine as a kid? I did not, no. That was, are you familiar with it? Do you know what it is? Is this, it's more of a hacking magazine, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was in old 2600 later on Usenet, which was, you know, 2600 hertz being the frequency at which the phone system used as its kind of like escape character yeah yeah wasn't it that i feel like or is that i feel like there was a tone where it was like for pay phones where when you like everything was in increments of nickels and so when you dropped in a i'm probably botching this it was this is literally like 30 years ago but like you would drop in a quarter and it would

you get five of these beeps right and so you could you could build something that just made that tone and play it into a telephone and each beep was a nickel right so if you wanted to make so you could get free phone calls basically basically yeah and i i have this memory that's where it came from but i'm probably it could be it could be. I know there were different other tones. The one that I remember were the freaking tones, which were once you could get a switchboard to put the phone down, the line was still open, and essentially it was dead, waiting for you to put the phone down.

But as far as the exchange was concerned, like the telephone exchange was concerned, it was an empty line. And then as long as you knew the magic code to the exchange used itself to like communicate lines you could like dial out long distance and say and it was built to either the person who just put the phone down or it was not built at all it got lost inside the cracks and again i'm also probably butchering this but like these were simpler times when literally the frequency of a tone down a line was the only communication channel that was available to you. And then, you know, there's no cryptographic signature on that.

There's no private key involved here. There's nothing like that. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, you know, what was it? Captain Crunch, the hacker, was so named because he found that the whistle that you got out of a box of Captain Crunch cereal happened to be that 2600 hertz. And so that was it you just got your Captain Crunch and then off you go whatever you were doing with it yeah the reason

I don't get into this well the reason I bring it up is because you're talking about like the type in games and magazines and they had similar things in 2600 they had type in it was it was the first memory that I have I have this memory this is this is the stroll down memory lane for me, this podcast. I remember getting the magazine, and I remember being super fascinated by everything that was going on, and I remember seeing these programs in the back, and I had used BASIC, and I had used Pascal at

the time, but I had never used C, and I was like, what is this language? And then a friend of mine started talking about he had gotten a license for the Borland Turbo C compiler. And I'm like, oh, is that the same language from the 2600? And he's like, yeah, why do you think I got it? And that was, I have that memory of like,

that was when I first learned that C was a programming language. And I was probably, oh, I don't know, I was probably around the age of my oldest child right now, around 13, 14 or so. That's really quite something. And it also shows up how much older I am than you, which is not much older, but significantly older. Or just more into C, right?

Right. When I was 14, I was programming ARM assembly because we couldn't afford the compilers. And I don't know that I don't, my memory was just before going to to university so 17 18 um i was becoming aware that there was c because the magazine again was publishing it but from like looking through it i had dismissed it as just a crappy macro assembler and i mean that's not actually the worst um that's not the worst thing i could say about you know

it's not the worst characterization of c is that it's a macro assembly because that's actually its strength right you look back and you're like yeah because you can reason as you're writing down the c code at least with the you know 30 year old now c c programmers so c compilers of the time you were writing out stuff that could pretty much map line by line to a set of instructions there was nothing else more sophisticated going on and the language didn't allow you to do many more sophisticated things and that was absolutely fine. It was just a great way of getting almost portable assembly. Certainly, you know, that's what you're doing when you're manipulating strings and Unix calls and things like that for writing Unix. It makes sense, although I think we've discussed before it's like the worst language

to be doing any kind of string processing in. Yeah. So the shop that you worked for was called argonaut is that right oh so when my first job was argonaut games yes argonaut games north london um so i started there in 1996 um in between my final my my penultimate my final university i did the interview and they said yeah come work for us now and i'm like uh i haven't actually finished my degree and they're like do you have to you could start now and i'm like uh i think my parents would kill me if i didn't finish my degree although you know it has had literally no effect on my life so i don't

regret it but it's it's i have not really used very much of my knowledge of quantum mechanics in my day job, it turns out. Nor can I remember most of it. Yeah, right. But yeah, Argonaut Games, I've started out actually as a play tester because they didn't know what to do with me. Right. For the PlayStation game Croc. So, you know, we talk about testing a lot. And I think I may have even mentioned this before on the podcast about you know the vhs recorder being the most important thing you know

that was one of the things i was doing was just you know eight or nine hours a day playing very buggy playstation one croc um and having it videoed and if there was a problem i could call over the the people say hey this is what happened they're like no you know could call over the people and say, hey, this is what happened. They're like, no. And I'd rewind the tape and go, look, see? See, I'm not making it up. And they're like, oh, whoops. Yeah. And they'd go off and change something.

And then latterly, I worked on the PC port of Croc. And so I got to actually write. They let me write the front end to that, which was kind of them. And then I got a huge break actually i was i was uh big bigging myself up enough that um somebody took a punt on me right in the engine like the 3d engine for a new game for a dreamcast title this is pre-dreamcast being even announced and before it was even called dreamcast it was just called kamui back in the day but uh um uh one of the producers at argonaut was like we need somebody to write a new engine and it's going to be for a new console so we can't use anything that's already there we just need someone who who we reckon can do it and i was like hey i'll do it

and they were like you sure i'm like yeah absolutely you know got my fingers crossed behind my back you know this should be i've doddled done this before um that was i i look back and the that producer nick clark taking a punt on a an unproven pretty much unproven programmer was uh was a was pivotal really that was what got me really going in the in the industry and uh that was a lot of fun i think i've said before that the dreamcast is my favorite console to have worked on just really nicely put together um just the right lowish level like access to the hardware um we were uh they called it a one and a half party so normally they're a first party title or a third party title right you know like if you're a first party title then you're actually just working as if you are sega or sony or whatever and then you're you're a developer but you're like white label like i forget which color label it would be but like the label that says like no

one will ever know that they contracted somebody to do this it's going to be a sony game or a sega it's published by nintendo or sony exactly and yeah maybe there's just a tiny credit somewhere and then a third party obviously is you know, you're a separate company altogether. You're, you know, Psygnosis, or actually, they were bought by Sony, so that's confusing. That's a terrible example. You know, you're Rockstar, and you're like, yep, we just make the game, and then we're going to make it

for whichever platform. But in this instance, they wanted to be sort of somewhere in between. So we had really good access to the tech people at Sega. And I'm still Facebook friends with a half dozen of them, which is great fun to sort of see what's happened to the sort of diaspora of Sega employees. But it meant that we had some great inroads

into the tech side of things. And that meant, you know, I could ask any question. A lot of it was still over in Japan and the European people didn't necessarily know as low level the stuff that was going on on inside the system but it was fairly straightforward and um yeah it's just it was just a lot of fun it was a lot of fun i learned a whole ton of things and i'm so lucky that i was someone who took that that gamble on me so what games did you make after that gosh now we're now i have to think uh so after that we

we had this idea there were a bunch of us towards the end of um red dog which was the dreamcast title which was a uh sort of first not first but third person tank shooting game are there youtube videos of these games that i can there are there are if you look for exercise for later that is yeah if you go look for uh red dog superior firepower with it was its terrible um tagline it's it actually plays okay we've got it on the dreamcast i'm obviously our listener can't see this but i'm gesturing behind me to the dreamcast on the floor and the kids have played it and it's it it holds up okay it's not earth-chattering but it was it was good at the time and yeah i despair of some of the things we

took out um but nonetheless i'm i'm really proud of it and you know the engine was mine there was there were three of us doing the programming so i wrote the engine and i wrote all the 3d studio plugins all the map nonsense and then there was uh like the lead programmer who also did all the ai and the strat programming language which was like a separate language that we could give snippets of to the designers and the level layout folks so that they could actually script what was going to go on without having to actually write c right and it was mostly c with a little bit of c++ and some actually quite a reasonable amount of assembly for the triangle rasterizing type stuff, for the triangle submitting stuff.

And then we had another person who did the collision and the physics. You know, collision is actually really difficult, right? There's one thing, you know, you've got hardware support for like drawing triangles. That's what the system is designed to do. But like, you know, does the sphere of this tire intersect with any of the thousands and thousands of of triangles that's a tough thing to do yeah and so sav uh sav is um did a fantastic job with that you know nowadays that's outsourced so both the engine gets outsourced

usually yeah in games like unity or uh you know yeah um unreal that kind of stuff and then but even towards the end of my time in the games industry havoc was the name of the system which was a physics and collision system and there you know there's a lot of smarts you know you mentioned wolfenstein part of the rendering system that made wolfenstein super super amazing could also be used for collision detection which was clever and the same was true of both doom and quake as they went on down that you know that was a big problem is like if you've got ai's running around and you've got people shooting all the way you really want to have decent line of sight calculation that doesn't take forever that's accurate so that you can actually hide behind a barrel and then they can't see you that kind of stuff so it's a really

important part of the game as well as the more obvious if i shoot and it hits a wall i can see where the the bullet hole is in the right place it's not like three inches up and to the right which you know is obviously a problem um yeah so at the end of red dog we then um we decided um there's a bunch of us who are a little bit disaffected with stuff but we had our own game idea and so we were a couple like very subterfuge meetings around a friend's house where we kind of fleshed out an idea and the idea was for a top down uh what sort of three quarters down view kind of like oh gosh what was the name of those strategy turn by turn strategy games like alien attack type things on the pc around the time yes thank you oh i'm so glad you could remember that so yeah there was xcom and a whole bunch of

things so sort of like that but imagine yeah no but we were trying to make it so that it was sort of partly real time and partly turn based and so the idea was you know you were like some squad about to like bust into a building and so you could sort of queue up the next few moves and then like pull the trigger and have your four or five teammates all jumping through the window at the same time and then they'll then do some level of autonomous attack as well as you being able to do a more real-time strategy. So a bit more like a Command & Conquery type real-time aspect but with the other XCOM-y feel.

So that was the idea, and we mocked out some graphics using the Red Dog engine on the Dreamcast, which was a lot of fun because once you take the game out and you've only just got the rendering engine, you've got a lot more time budget to spend on really pretty things. So I remember us having a very polished floor where we just literally inverted the geometry

and drew it again underneath it with a transparent floor instead and it looked like it was a beautifully shiny reflect-y thing, which was very pleasant. And it ran at 60 frames a second instead of the terrible 30 frames a second the red dog ran out and it was great and um we basically got the go-ahead to start investigating that was going to be that game was going to be called cleaners with a with a k because you apparently like some contract killer cleaner you know like leon thing was out around about this time it was very much that thought and to this day um the even the the sequel to the game that came out of cleaners was still in a directory called cleaners because it's hard to rename software that's so funny i i mean yeah it's possible that there's some amount of that

source code still exists uh somewhere that i have access to so i speak from recent recollection there's some good there's some good gems in that code base um the company folded as far as i'm aware um nobody really owns that anymore um obviously i can't publish it but it would be really interesting so it's such a time capsule of all these things that happened back then yeah had you seen a game like that before that mixed the sort of like tactical turn-based stuff and the live stuff? I don't remember that we had or did, and certainly nothing springs to mind now. Because there are games like that, like Divinity Original Sin has that mechanic in it. Oh, really?

I think there's another one that I played that has that mechanic in it. And I wonder if the lineage of that, you know, it and i wonder if the lineage of that you know you say like you asked the designers of that game like where'd you get the idea to do this they're like oh it was this game and you ask those designers which gets the idea to do this i wonder if that goes all the way back right i mean it didn't come back so the game changed a lot for us that was our idea and like so many things the tale grows in the telling and this is the telling was very different because uh we did work on it for a while and then um uh oh i can't remember who had the the the the person who had the ip of the swat games the special weapons and

tactics yeah uh approached us and said can you do us a SWAT game for xbox and we're like well we have a dreamcast engine running a sort of vaguely the same type of game and they wanted it to be different anyway because if because xbox it would be their first console attempt at a SWAT franchise game and so somebody three or four rungs up in the in the company went oh yeah we can definitely do that with the cleaners engine and so somebody three or four rungs up in the in the company went oh yeah we can definitely do that with the cleaners engine and so you know very quickly cleaners got pushed to one side then it became swat yeah i got it and it's it very quickly became a first person we kept the team mechanic and um obviously and it moved to xbox as well which is another great console for what it's

worth there's a lot of good things going on in particular the tooling was amazing microsoft did a great great job of um putting together a tool suite and really understanding that developers will developers are lazy and if you give them really good tools they do a lot of good things with them yeah the the equivalent i mean eventually we had to port it to ps2 as well so i have a lot of experience of taking a very in my opinion obviously my very biased opinion a very capable high-tech xbox rendering engine which had dynamic lighting which had bump mapping which had uh depth of field which had like light blurring and so like you know you'd be blinded by flashbang grenades with blind you couldn't see we like actually resampled the screen and we used it as like a virtual iris so if you happen to look up at the sun which was actually brighter than the screen could go

we would we would notice that and start dialing back like the gamma correction on the tables until eventually the sun was like bright and then everything else was actually look black and then if you looked away from it everything was pitch black until it redid the other way. So there's all these cool effects like that. And they said, can you make this work in the PS2? We're like, no, no. PS2 is amazing. What it has is fill rate in spades.

The ability to put pixels on the screen was unparalleled. It could really write faster memory um i my understanding actually is that the some of the units that could do like the per pixel operations were in the ram cells or very close to the ram cells which let them do these clever things like you know fill the screen really fast and like blend with what was already there but it meant you were extremely limited in what you could do because it was like that was the functionality that the hardware had and it was nothing else. Whereas the Xbox, we had eight instructions that could run per pixel, and we could do a limited amount of maths in that,

and that's how we were able to do bump mapping and some of the other crazy effects that we had going. And we also had vertex shaders, which would allow us to do a few hundred assembly instructions worth of processing on each vertex. And the PlayStation 2 has, effectively, a general purpose um cpu for that vertex processing but it was really awkward to use and you're forever like

dealing with like why didn't this work oh the dma hadn't quite finished before the next thing needed to happen and so you've a lot of embedded like plate passing of memory around and being very very careful plus the fact that there was a different cpu from the main cpu which meant that you were cross compiling for it if you were going to try and write any kind of c code but because it was so limited you usually just ended up writing in assembly directly and if you were writing directly in assembly it had no architectural hazards so if you did add the equivalent of add register one to register two and saw the result in register three and then you said okay now app store register three somewhere else it would let you do that but the thing is the result

for register three wasn't ready yet so you would just store whatever the previous result of register three was there was you know it's fully pipelined and had all these levels of pipeline so our primary ide for writing um vu code as they were called was was was excel and we would write the instructions in excel and then we would use color coding to sort of show when register 3 would become ready and therefore you could use it and of course the real way of getting the speed out of it was to abuse that and go well okay i i actually need the old version of the thing of register 3 and so if i do that the cycle before it completes i get the old version and. And on the next cycle, it's... Pipelining by hand, basically?

By hand, yeah. Oh, my God. Sony eventually developed a tool that allowed you to write normal code, and it would do some of that stuff for you. But, you know, just those were the fun days. Anyway, so we were able to do, with some interesting trickery, we were able to do most of what the swap Xbox engine did. Not all of it.

We were never able to get the dynamic lighting going but we're my my co-engine writer on that Nick Hemmings who I later ran the C++ tools company with which I think we've talked a little bit about before he and I were able to work out most of the things and in particular our lighting system was very amenable to be imported to the PS2 so we were very lucky. It was just a fluke. One of those things like, oh, that's cool. So anyway, SWAT was the next game I worked on. And in fact, during that process, we made a general purpose game engine,

which was used in a couple of other titles. Oh, cool. So I've got a bunch of credits in games that I don't even remember them being around. But it was, yeah, it was a lot of lot of fun but as i say it all came out of someone taking a punt on on me and so i'm you know forever thankful and the the sad thing is um there were there are a number of reasons um why um so nick ended up leaving argan or under a bit of a cloud i don't know that he was cut out for the job that he had. And it just, it came up against him. And eventually I think he may have decided to go, whatever.

And I've never been able to, you know, and it took me years afterwards to realize, you know, retrospectively how lucky I had been because he was like, yeah, sure. Go on, Matt, you give it a go. Right. And there was, you know, it was, it was definitely one of those career page turning moments

where it could have gone either way. And, and so I'm very grateful to him, but he's vanished off the face of the earth and then you know about every two or three years i'll he's got a very generic name unfortunately and he seemed to have left the industry so i couldn't i've not been able to find him so if by some miracle he's listening to this podcast thank you nick you you really did send me on the right path in the in the games industry and i think as a result of the confidence i picked up from that it snowballed on to where i am now so so yeah so xbox uh ps2 and then um there were some other bits and pieces i'm forgetting a few things in between there i

know but the most the last game i worked on was actually one i worked on after i had left argonaut after argonaut had folded and Nick and I had set up ProFactor, our C++ consultancy and tooling company. We still love games so much that we were still making them in our spare time and we made a little Xbox Live community edition thing, which meant we had to write the whole thing in C Sharp because we weren't able to get a dev kit from Microsoft. Oh, wow. Okay. And they kind of released this, hey to get a, a, um, a dev kit from Microsoft. Okay.

And they kind of released this, Hey, you know, as an experiment, if you write it in C sharp and you use these, these, uh, facilities, you can like upload it unsigned onto a con, you know, you put this, you download this game. That's not really a game. It just interprets C sharp. Right. And it's, it was, it was a good thing, but we tried to use it to get far enough down the line to actually

get a publisher interested and um so i had to put my business hat on them which was really interesting interacting with the publishers and spending all time on the telephone trying to tell sell things to people and then hearing what their rates were and they were like yeah yeah we were quite interested in your game these are just standard just standard terms. And you look at them, you're like, it's 75% you, 25% us. You're going to give us an advance of like 50 grand, a hundred grand, you know, that, I forget, right? It's a long time, but give me that amount. And then effectively you recoup your costs first

out of the revenue of the game. And then after that, we get 25 out of the revenue of the game and then after that we get 25 of the remaining yes amount this is this is the worst loan i have ever been offered i why would i even need you what are you doing for us oh but you know we we advertise your game we put we put it on the store for you and like no no you're doing nothing right this is this is the beginning of the the sort of app store revolution yes yes this is this is why these things were created it's because publishers doing that exactly but now of course apple and the like are in that position of like well we take this amount and you're like what do you do exactly you host my file on your download server

and you sign it with your key 75 anymore% anymore though. No, that's true. But it's still more than the very little it needs to be. I think probably the exemplars of people who have worked out the exact right amount to take is this credit card companies

who just about sit at the bottom end trying to scrape as much as they can out of the stores admittedly. Not me. And it's like it bounces around

about 5%-ish. And that's just low enough that people grumble about it pause admittedly not not the not me right and it's like you know bounces around about five percent ish yeah and that's just low enough that people grumble about it but it's not actually well right maybe it would be a different world if it was zero i don't know right anyway that's not the question they've hit the efficient frontier of how much you can take before someone really cares yeah maybe so yeah all right so i've talked a lot for the last 20 odd minutes maybe more than that which you know, I know is kind of your MO. You poked me with a,

with a thing. You said, I can just wind Matt up. We do that to each other all the time. I want to hear about your games. I want to hear about your board game. Or do you want to do that? Another,

another one? I can, I could talk about it. Let's talk about it. I'd like to hear it. It's, there's not a ton to tell. So I don't think this is going to take up too much,

too much time, but basically um i love first of all i love in addition to video games i love board games um i really like co-op board games um that's sort of my favorite thing is you know like games where you can get together with a group of people and sort of share the same objective and so i don't know that i've ever played a cooperative board game oh really i mean we uh not even the pandemic because that was sort of like on brand for the last couple of years yeah no no not that no i know you brought one in once and i think i hovered around the edge of it like a drinks evening um where you explained it but i don't think i've sat down to do it and it sounds like a great family thing because you know there's the one child that you have that wants to win and then

gets very disappointed when they don't and then the other child doesn't care at all and it would be nice to say well how if we all care about it together maybe we'll get somewhere but so yeah you like cooperative games yeah yeah yeah and i mean great for for friends and you know beer and pretzels too like if there there's lots of um ways in which those games can be super fun but i i love uh uh strategy games i love cooperative games and so i made a uh a game called earth is dead uh and the premise of this game was that uh earth had been destroyed by a giant meteor. And in the years leading up to it, humanity had sort of rallied to build some, you know, sort of colony ships to send off to another world. The A-Arc, the B-Arc, and the C-Arc. Exactly.

Except for real. Yep. And had developed this faster than light jump drive to propel them to this new world. But the problem was that in humanity's haste, the jump drive didn't actually work. And it basically took you to a random location in space. And so the way this game worked is each of the players would play a captain of one of these ships.

And your goal was to basically jump around to various random parts of the universe and collect enough data to where you could fix the navigation system and the jump drive and go to where you're actually trying to go so you could set up your colony. Right? Oh, interesting. And it was sort of like a

dice pool mechanic game. So you would have officers on your ships that when you jump to a new location you're like okay where are we you draw a card it would give you some location and the cool thing is is that uh these were real locations in space like all the stuff is like you know um i want to say open source but various name stars and things you know alpha centauri or yeah but it's like there's all this material and like pictures in public domain. I'm sorry.

Oh, I see. Right. Yeah. These are all public domain pictures, you know, that have been created by NASA or other things. And so, you know, I took the art from that and I took the actual places from that. And, you know, there's some crazy things in the universe. It's like, here's a planet that's entirely made of molten lead. And it rains lead on this planet.

And that's sort of crazy stuff. A magnetar. The magnetic fields are so strong that if you got within 1,000 kilometers of it, the atoms in your body would literally be ripped apart. That kind of stuff. So it made for sort of interesting things. And so the basic turn in this game would be you would jump to a new location. Everybody on the ships would kind of scramble to figure out what the heck was going on.

They would make various skill checks. You'd try to collect some data. Maybe you succeeded, maybe you didn't, and then you jumped again, right? And when you collected enough, you could finally jump to the final location and win the game. And designing this game, I read this book. I read this really great book by this guy that designed rides at Disneyland. And he talked about the emotional experiences that you go through when you're playing a game.

And it's a little bit like that you get with a story story like a like a narrative wow but um the arc of the the hero and right right yeah um but he talked he talked a lot about like you know how you have to like a little bit sort of like that sort of you know that hero's journey where you like you need to give people abilities and you let them use those abilities and have successes um but then increase the challenges so that the old abilities don't work anymore and they need to adapt and then you sort of you know build it up to this this this climax and and you know there's lots of details in this book that i'm not doing it justice by describing it right now but but one of the one of the like this guy that wrote this book um his views and sid meyer's views on games is kind of what entirely shaped my view of games and game design where

sid meyer um obviously prolific just amazing game designer um you know uh and him had very different views on it but i really liked his take on it where where he said that like the purpose of a game is to elicit an emotional response right like you're trying to make people feel scared or happy or sad just like a movie just like a book and so when you're designing the game you can never lose sight of that and i and i and i went and as i worked on this game that was always my struggle is i would get enamored with the statistics i would like be figuring out like the dice rolls and try to figure out like the algorithms how do i balance the programmer and you couldn't help like coming out and the mathematician and like how's this gonna happen exactly like i was like how do i balance this game and make sure that it all works and

then every once in a while you have to stop and be like, is this fun? Is this actually fun? Or am I just creating a math problem for someone to solve? And I'd be like, no, this is... Which you and I know people for whom that would be the perfect game. Well, it's true. So, you know, we should probably talk about it. It's true.

But yeah, if you're trying to apply what you've learned from this book, then yeah you're trying to to elicit an emotional response you're trying to say this is where your despair you're like well surely we're going to die now because x has just happened you're like ah but if you and you want you want people to go on that right that journey that roller coaster ride exactly exactly and and the cool thing about co-op games is that if you do it right everyone's feeling that together right so you have a group of people that are simultaneously like oh man we're're screwed. This is going to be bad, right? And then, you know, they overcome it and then it's, oh my God, we made it, right? So it's all that kind of thing. But that was always my struggle with this. And from that experience, and I think you and I have kind of talked about this, but if

I was ever going to go back into game design, I think the way that I would do it, even if I was going to do board games, which I love board games and would definitely do that, but the way that I would do it is that I would build a, let's just call it digital version of the game first. It might be like just a straight up video game version of it, maybe for like a mobile device. It might also just be like a

very bare bones sort of just simulation of the game that you could click around with but the getting the the mechanics and the play testing right um in that would be so much easier than having to like print out cards which is what i did like i had like you know google docs with like all the card layouts in one page and I would print them all out on a color printer and then I would cut them all up and slide them into sleeves

and then I had a deck of fake cards that I would use and I would gather whatever remaining friends could tolerate this process and say, hey guys, you want to play another round

of Earth is Dead? And they'd be like, all right, fine. I imagine that's a real problem. Yeah, yeah. It's fun the first five times, maybe, and then it's like all right fine i imagine that's a real problem yeah yeah is that like it's fun the first yeah five times maybe and then it's like okay day 27 playtesting playtesting yes especially because the early versions aren't that good so you're just you're really you're really punishing them by doing this um and so like having that feedback cycle where you can play test

and like are am i creating these emotional situations am i creating this sort of like this sense of of dread am i creating this this like sense of victory it's a really hard thing to to to get right and to sort of measure and so you only have so many cracks at this and so what i would do if i were to do this over again is i would separate those two processes entirely. I would have a simulation of the game, some sort of digital version, where I work out all the mechanics, I make sure everything's balanced,

and then I go and I play test it and I see if it's fun. And if it's not, then I can go back and tweak the rules only in the dimension of funness, and have the system there to tell me whether or not... The phonometer suggests that we need to tweak the fun up a little. We there to tell me whether or not the phonometer suggests that we need to tweak the fun up a little we need to increase the the happy quotient here this is

this is not good um but that sounds like you know yeah developing it entirely in like a mock form yes in a you know web browser or whatever so you can play it with your pals and not even necessarily have to be in the same room kind of thing. But surely these kind of kits exist, right? There must be like generic rule engine based stuff where you can prototype. Yeah, yeah. There are, and I think you can actually borrow a lot. There are a lot of generic tabletop systems that you can get. And if I were to design a game today,

I would look really hard at one of those to be like, I'm just going to take this basically rules engine for this tabletop game, and I'm going to adapt it to whatever my game is to make sure that I have game mechanics that kind of make sense and are coherent with each other. But a mutual friend of ours, Lyle, has a great description of sort of some of these aspects and how they come together, right? You have the rules of the game, and then you have the sort of style of the game. And the way that Lyle describes this to me, and I'm sure he got this from someone else, I don't know who, is it's the crunch and the fluff. So, like, a game like chess is all crunch.

There's no fluff. It's just mechanics, rules. You follow the rules of the game, you play the game, right? There are other games, like, have you ever played the game you play the game right there are other games like have you ever played the game exploding kittens i have yes yeah so it's almost all fluff because it's all about the stupid cars almost all fluff the art is cool and the ideas are cool but like the actual the giggling children have just discovered that we've got the nsfw pack out by accident you know that's all the game's about for them yes yes which which you can have games that that are all one or the other right like chess is all crunch and you know uh exploding kittens is 90 fluff but really great games find ways to combine these things symbiotically

and one of my litmus tests for this is if you look at the like the art of a game or the style of a board or the design of a character and you can intuit just from looking at it what the rules probably are, that's when you've really meshed the synergy between those two things because now they're like informing each other.

When the crunch and the fluff sort of like balance out and you're like i bet that ranger can shoot an arrow what do i need to do it's like oh yes on page three it says that the ranger can shoot an arrow who would you like to shoot it at right that sort of thing yeah yeah but yeah that was sort of my experience with that and and and is that the only game that you you've made or have you done more than that so i made some calculator games in school on my TI-85. I made a bunch of demos in college when I was applying to companies. Oh, to companies.

You're like, hey, here's my demo and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, I made those kinds of things. But I don't know that I've ever really made any sort of video games that are worth... But is your board game still in print? It is. What's the right... Oh, it is. So I published it, speaking of publishers.

Yeah, how does that even work? I mean, how do you go from, like, I have an idea and a Google Docs with pictures to here is my laminated joyous thing without printing out yourself. So if you go to earthisdead.com, you can buy it. The way it works is it's a publisher called The Game Crafter that does single print games. So when you buy a game,

they will print it up and they will mail it out. That means it is... Like on-demand printing. That means it is much more expensive than a traditional book. Wow. So my game is, it's not that complicated.

There's a couple of decks of cards. There's, I don't know, maybe 24 very small dice. Dear listener, Ben is gesturing like a sort of like a six inch by four inch cube-ish. Yeah, yeah. It's like maybe six inches by eight inches by two inch box right and so if you were to buy a game like that in a typical uh game store you might expect to pay like 20 bucks right yeah if you if you buy earth is dead i think it's like 35 right i see and that's mostly because of the on-demand cost of quite reasonably whatever i only can only guess at how they

magically print something like that on demand which seems very bespoke right very very bespoke i mean i'm amazed enough when i order some of the more obscure books that i order and they are on demand printed and it's you know look in the back cover it's like printed three days ago and you're like what oh yeah this is they made this whole book for me just then. That's crazy. And you can do that with a board game. Did you have to conform to particular sizes? Did you have to compromise your design for that? Or did they adapt to you?

Oh no, absolutely you have to conform. And not only do you have to conform, but there are many, many, many different choices and they all have different price points. And that greatly informed the design of the game where you're just like, if I have this rule mechanic, then I'm going to need these pieces. And those pieces cost 78 cents each. And I would need 12 of them.

And that would increase the cost of the game by this. So maybe I can do this mechanic and that whole permutation of like the rules and the parts and the infinite array of parts that the game crafter would offer you and how much they cost. And, and all of that was all part of the calculus of figuring out the design that the game crafter would offer you and how much they cost and and all of that was all part of the calculus of figuring out the design of the game that's how interesting that that's so similar to like your day job where you're saying this trade-off it'd be really great

if we had this and you're like yeah but it's like a six week build yeah how much do i really need that thing well we'll just maybe we'll limp on a bit longer with just cat and r-sync rather than building our own like process or whatever i mean it does seem that way yeah no it's absolutely that it's absolutely that yeah that's so cool though i i i don't think i realized quite how smart these these uh these on-demand things could be you could actually make an on-demand yes board and this was like four or five years ago when i did this so it's probably even cooler these on-demand things could be. You could actually make an on-demand board game. And this was like four or five years ago when I did this, so it's probably even cooler these days.

Right, if you were to go back to it now, maybe even savings and changes and whatever. That sounds really cool. But did you find any bugs? How did you test this? Obviously, you did play testing, which is more like acceptance testing. But did you actually have like test? I mean, what could what could you so one of the things that i did very intentionally

is make sure that you could play it with one player because then i could play test it for myself and i didn't have to inflict it on all my friends all the time that made it all the time you could wait till it was like yeah it got like a good 70 of the way there before so that was kind of your unit test right exactly the exactly. The unit test was... You ran the more expensive test that would actually be more... That's exactly right. We can make any episode about testing, Ben.

Yep. Yeah, yeah. So I would, you know, change the spreadsheets that updated all of the cards automatically in Google Docs and I would print it all out. Because of course they did, yeah. And then I would go and I would print out the cards and I would sit down

and I would play three or four games by myself to just make sure that the mechanic that I thought was good was good. I would arrange different scenarios and be like, what if this player had this card and this and this? How would that all work? And then once I was pretty happy with the result, usually I would bring it to work

and I would be like, hey, who wants to play Earth is Dead over lunch? And I would get a few people that would be like, yeah, you know, Ben, that's cool. Begrudgingly, all right, it's better than my real job. Yes, that's when you find out who your real friends are, when they're playing the half-finished game that isn't quite all that fun yet, and they're just like, yeah, that's cool, we'll play.

Dodgily printed out. Dodgily printed out. Into, like, plastic laminated card type thing yeah exactly that's cool it now the more that we think about this and this is the worst thing to be doing live in voted commas on a podcast is to be solutioning all these kinds of things but i am now interested in how a rule engine based system could work for like developing board games where you can set up scenarios save them and just keep restoring the state of the game to like hey let's go back to when yes you know like checkpoint here and then we're going to play it through as if this happened

and then we're going to come back and see how it would have worked panned out if we'd have gone another way and then writing tests and say can you exhaustively try all things and make sure this doesn't happen yep even to the point where you know if if it if the like options are relatively limited and there's not like a lot of interperson banter you know like i'm thinking like monopolies the classic example where you know like the rules of one thing but nobody plays by the rules because i was like no no no wait a second what if i but can you tell you but sell me that for this yeah yeah you know all the horse training that goes on the side that's difficult to do but if it's a rule system you could say point like the alpha go kind of like ai system and say play it until you're really good at it

and then you can say okay and now i'm going to play again it's like oh my god all it ever does is play this card over and over and over and over again because it's discovered that that is the way you solve the game right this must be i have to fix the game now because the ai just does it just it just broke it and yeah and bringing this full circle like this is sort of my my my dream of like maybe one day when i ride off into the sunset and i get to you know make board games when your uh cryptocurrency goes high enough that's right cryptocurrency risk we talked about the other week yeah yeah yeah uh then i can finally you know achieve my dream of going into game design or going into games and doing ai it'll just be for

writing the ais that play the board games that i design to try to figure out if there are broken optimal strategies and how to simulate various scenarios so that I don't have to inflict that pain on my friends when I'm still designing the game. So you can still go to the pub with your friends and still be a game designer. That's amazing.

Well, that sounds brilliant. Where do I sign up for your AI company I'll let you know that seems like a good place to finish up this has been super fun I had no idea about the depths of

the things you could do in board game design and I like nothing more than pontificating about the good old days of my game development career. So this has been beautiful. Yeah, wonderful. Wonderful times, my friend. Okay. Well, until next time.

You've been listening to Two's Compliment, a programming podcast by Ben Rady and Matt Godbolt. Find the show transcript and notes at twoscompliment.org. Contact us on Twitter at twoscp. That's at T-W-O-S-C-P. Theme music by Inverse Phase. Inversephase.com.