00:00SPEAKERI was just going to give a, give a PSA to your, your users. Oh, you got to,
00:04SPEAKERyou got to call it, you got called up a material if they do not have an ass set up at home. Yeah.
00:10SPEAKERIf they do not store every piece of digital data they've ever produced, if they do not know where
00:17SPEAKERtheir pictures from their phone from 2008 and 2009 are it's okay. That's normal. You guys are freaks.
00:26SPEAKERI appreciate it, but no guests are entitled to their own opinions.
00:31SPEAKERWow. Wow. This is not an official, not an official tech pod statement.
00:40SPEAKERI feel really attacked right now. Brad, I don't know about you.
00:42SPEAKERYou know, I just let it roll off my back at this point. I know what I like.
00:46SPEAKERI've never gone back and looked for an image from pre 2010. What people in my life look like before
00:53SPEAKERthe iPhone. I kind of remember, I like to remember in my head. That's good enough.
00:57SPEAKERI just, I ripped a whole bunch of old home movies off of VHS last week. And
01:03SPEAKERbecause like, it's fun to like, my kid is like, she doesn't believe what the world used to be like.
01:07SPEAKERAnd I can show her a time where everybody just wasn't walking around with hunched over looking
01:11SPEAKERat a little glowy screen in their hand. Do you want to hear a clip of me at seven years
01:14SPEAKERold getting extremely excited to open sound wave on Christmas day? Cause I can give you that right
01:18SPEAKERnow in pretty, pretty extreme Southern drawl also. Oh, wow. Wow. Brad wins.
01:48SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a TechPod. I'm Will.
01:55SPEAKERI'm Brad.
01:55SPEAKERBrad, I'm really excited about our guest today. Not just because I work with him every day and
02:00SPEAKERtake, you know, a modicum of abuse from the world's laziest blogger slash, you know,
02:08SPEAKERgame developers slash studio head slash Twitch streamer. But yeah, we're, we're here today with
02:14SPEAKERmy boss at my day job, Chet Valasek, who is the, well, he's done a lot of stuff. He was one of the,
02:21SPEAKERhe was the lead writer and the lead at valve on left for dead and left for dead too.
02:26SPEAKERHe wrote the portal to co-op and a lot of portal to stuff. He worked on different episodes of
02:32SPEAKERhalf-life, half-life too. And like TF two, all sorts of stuff over the years while he was at
02:39SPEAKERvalve. But yeah, Chet Valasek's here and we're, we're going to talk to him today about making
02:45SPEAKERthe game that I work on the Anacrusis. Today, everybody we're here with, with my
02:53SPEAKERworlds are colliding. It's I don't, I got Brad on one side and Chet on the other. It's the two,
02:59SPEAKERtwo, two most important men in my life. It turns out.
03:01SPEAKERThe yin and yang of Will's professional career.
03:04SPEAKERYeah, exactly. But our guest today is Chet Valasek, who is my boss at stray Bombay,
03:09SPEAKERthe founder of the studio. And we're actually recording this. I didn't realize this when we
03:14SPEAKERset the recording date for this, but this is actually the first anniversary of the early access
03:19SPEAKERlaunch of the Anacrusis. And we'd been talking for a while about getting Chet to come out and
03:23SPEAKERtalk about the game because people ask about the game a lot and comments and questions and stuff
03:26SPEAKERlike that. And, and like what better way to have a like Frank and kind of open conversation about
03:34SPEAKERmaking games in, in here in 2022, 2023 then for the three of us to sit down and talk about it and
03:42SPEAKERkind of, kind of run through what it's like to make a game and make an indie game as a small
03:47SPEAKERstudio in, in in, in this, the, the, the late days of steam and Xbox and all that. So welcome
03:54SPEAKERChet to the show. Hello. Oh, thank you for having me. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I listen every, like I
03:59SPEAKERwas saying, I listen every Sunday. And so this is a, this is weird for me of there's the official
04:03SPEAKERwill during the week. And then there's the unofficial will on Sunday mornings as I go
04:07SPEAKERfor a walk. It makes me, it makes me so nervous every time I'm reminded that you listen to the
04:10SPEAKERshow because like you're Chet, you've done actual real stuff before. I'm just some dipshit. Oh my
04:16SPEAKERGod. That's all right. That's a myth we could kick down right away. Important people are listening to
04:21SPEAKERthe show. But, but yeah, so for folks who don't know at Stray Bomb Bay, we released a game called
04:27SPEAKERThe Anacrusis last January. We launched it in early access on steam. We will launch it in game
04:32SPEAKERpreview on the Xbox and the Microsoft store. And, and it's a, it's a four player co-op kind of left
04:40SPEAKERfor dead. Like, you know, you, you, you, you play as four survivors stuck on a, on a crumbling
04:47SPEAKERspaceship fighting hordes of aliens who have inexplicably come out of nowhere. And, and
04:53SPEAKERlike the idea, the idea behind the game, the thing when, when Chet called me was like, Hey,
04:56SPEAKERdo you want to come, you should come play this thing. And then asked me if you wanted to go,
05:00SPEAKERif I wanted to come work there was, Hey, we're making a game that is about having fun and hanging
05:04SPEAKERout. And like, that's like, that's what I do. That's what I, I like games that I can play with
05:09SPEAKERmy friends and hang out with my friends and, and, and goof around and they're kind of sandboxes for,
05:16SPEAKERfor that kind of environment. So I said, sure. And I've been there for a year and a half now,
05:20SPEAKERa little more than that even. But yeah, I I'm kind of curious, Chet. I mean, I'm actually,
05:25SPEAKERBrad, you should drive this cause I'm on both sides of the fence here.
05:28SPEAKERYou're, you're in a position to both ask and answer the same questions, I guess. So I'll.
05:32SPEAKERYes. What are both our greatest strengths and weaknesses? My, my intense honesty, Will.
05:37SPEAKERWhy are you so good at your job? It's you recap, you recap that beautifully, Will.
05:41SPEAKERNicely done. So I feel like the conversation that's about to happen is kind of an embarrassment
05:47SPEAKERof riches for me because there are so many things I would love to ask about and probably will from
05:51SPEAKERbackend tools on these different platforms to like business deals around game pass to
05:56SPEAKERthe state of various engines and middleware. But anyway, yeah, I got really excited when I
06:01SPEAKERlooked at the steam page right before this, like literally 20 minutes ago and said, Oh my God, it's
06:05SPEAKERa year or two the day that we're recording this since you guys launched into early access. So like
06:10SPEAKERthe obvious question to start, but also to mark this occasion, like where do things stand today?
06:15SPEAKERHow do you, how are you guys feeling a year in, you know, you're still technically in early access,
06:18SPEAKERso you're still iterating on the game. Just kind of what's the, what's the state of the union here?
06:23SPEAKERSo still not finished. I mean, it's kind of game you'll never be finished in, but it finally,
06:27SPEAKERI think is at the place where it's the game we wanted to release. Little, little rough start
06:33SPEAKERthere on the early access launches. I think you kind of want to be, you want to get that feedback,
06:37SPEAKERbut we always knew, you know, when you make a first person shooter, it's a really broad world
06:42SPEAKERyou're working in. Right. And there's this like want to be competitive or want to be like really
06:48SPEAKERhard and difficult. And there's this fine line where our game is more just like, Hey, it's
06:53SPEAKERintense. It's fun, but it's not hard. There's modes. You can play that are hard, but you want
06:59SPEAKERto have it be where you're hanging out with your friends and you're having a good time and you're
07:02SPEAKERhaving this experience shared experience together. And it's a little bit of funny and it's a little
07:07SPEAKERbit goofy. And now that the workshops really come online and people started making some really
07:11SPEAKERoutlandish mods and goofy stuff, like I feel like people look at the game now and they understand
07:15SPEAKERwhat it is. Oh, this isn't some hardcore space shooter. This isn't some horror game. This is
07:20SPEAKERthis funny kind of goofy game that I just hang out with my friends. And so it really, and it's
07:25SPEAKERreacted. I think the community has reacted that way with it. They understand now, like our reviews
07:29SPEAKERare, we're very positive and like all of that. So it's just like, we're just in a really good
07:34SPEAKERspot now. So it's like, it's fun now where the reviews match the expectations, which match
07:39SPEAKERwhat we originally designed and what we were going for. And it just took a while to get there. So
07:44SPEAKERyeah, this is, this is like the first time it's just like, okay, now this is really hitting it.
07:48SPEAKERAnd this is really, this is really going well. It's the early access thing is tough, right?
07:52SPEAKERCause like when you release a game early, when you, when you're doing this, you want to do it
07:57SPEAKERearly enough that you can actually make changes. Like, like there's two ways to do early access,
08:00SPEAKERright? You can, you can either say, okay, here's our roadmap and we're going to do this over this
08:05SPEAKERperiod of time. And we're going to put it out now because we want maybe a little bit of feedback,
08:08SPEAKERbut probably we also ran out of money. The other way is to do, and the things that I think of is
08:15SPEAKERlike the great early access titles are the, Hey, we came out and we put the game out and the
08:22SPEAKERcommunity behind the game was like, Hey, I there's stuff here that we don't like. And it's maybe even
08:26SPEAKERcore parts of the design. And we came into this with the open idea that like we were willing,
08:31SPEAKERlike our core pillars are, it should be fun to play with friends. You should always be able to
08:35SPEAKERplay with somebody regardless of how much they've played. We shouldn't let the game get in the way
08:40SPEAKERof you having fun. And you know, the community, the game needs to foster inclusion and people
08:49SPEAKERworking together and not create a bunch of like busy work for players. And there's a couple of
08:54SPEAKERothers that I almost certainly forgot there, so Chad will tell, I'm sure remind me, but outside
09:01SPEAKERof that stuff, everything's on the table, right? Like we're not going to, obviously we're not going
09:05SPEAKERto make, we're not going to change aliens to zombies or something like that. Cause it's an
09:08SPEAKERalien game. It's a science fiction game, but like we wanted to be able to make changes when we
09:13SPEAKERlaunched. And I think, I mean, we've made some pretty kind of enormous changes since then, but
09:18SPEAKERalso it's just continuing to work on the core. Yeah. But it's also interesting because of early
09:23SPEAKERaccess, it's the expectations of what needs to be finished and what doesn't need to be finished.
09:28SPEAKERSo I'd never done early access storytelling before. And I mean, traditionally like in the
09:34SPEAKERleft for deads, as Project Lean Left for Dead writer in the Left for Dead series, they they're
09:40SPEAKERdone, right? We're done. We're the story. Here's the story. Go at it. We're here. I'm like, okay,
09:44SPEAKERwe want to first pass on it, but how much do we need for people to have a first pass on it now?
09:50SPEAKERIt's the, Hey, we want more story in here. Why isn't there more story in here? And I'm like,
09:54SPEAKERwell, cause that's comes later. A lot of that comes from when the game is quote unquote finished
10:00SPEAKERand I play the game and then I write to what's there versus making guesses of what's going to
10:04SPEAKERbe there. Do you, have you gotten much grief from any players that you're, that it's not
10:08SPEAKERquote unquote done? Like does it rile people to see that it's still in early access a year later? I
10:12SPEAKERmean, does anybody care? I mean, anybody on the internet get mad about something? Yes. Yes. That
10:19SPEAKERhappened. But the community that actually plays the game, I think gets it. They get how reactive
10:26SPEAKERwe've been in listening, or at least, you know, we'll explain to them, Hey, maybe you're not going
10:30SPEAKERto get that, but here's why. Right. So yeah, I am now two decades on the conversation that you
10:37SPEAKERshould never have a creature in your game in cap you where you can't rescue yourself. Right. We
10:42SPEAKERhad that in love for dead. We have that in here. The reason you have that is so someone can't just
10:46SPEAKERrun off and leave everybody behind. If you don't have that someone will run off and leave everybody
10:51SPEAKERbehind. So now are there going to be people in the community that say, Hey, I don't like that
10:55SPEAKERmechanic. Yes. Those are the lone wolves that will always exist. Right. So I will, I will give them
10:59SPEAKERan explanation why, and we'll do some of that kind. So sure. There's some things like that,
11:04SPEAKERor people are really want versus mode, but we first wanted to get co-op mode nailed down and then
11:08SPEAKERbring versus to it. So sure. There's people who want things sooner than later, or they want
11:14SPEAKERsomething different. But I think if you, especially if they're in our discord where we're
11:20SPEAKERhaving a different kind of communication with them in a different kind of level of discourse,
11:23SPEAKERthe conversation that happens around there are really helpful. And often it's like,
11:28SPEAKERwhat I really want to know is why you're saying the thing you're saying, what don't you like,
11:33SPEAKEROh, the bots didn't save you when that happened. And you like to play solo with bots. Okay.
11:37SPEAKERThat's a bug we can fix. Um, you know, in versus the, Hey, we're going to break this core design
11:42SPEAKERpillar. The, the, um, the other thing on a larger scale, not to pit platforms against platforms,
11:48SPEAKERbut, uh, early access is really well established on steam and people understand it and steam
11:53SPEAKERlike steam promotes early access a little bit differently than they do fully released titles,
11:57SPEAKERwhich, which actually I think is a, is probably a good thing. I mean, it's a little bit challenging
12:01SPEAKERfor early access titles, but it means we don't get like, you don't get a big broad push on steam.
12:05SPEAKERIt's hard to get a good, big broad push on steam as an early access title on Xbox. The game preview
12:11SPEAKERside is a little bit newer and I don't think the audience is quite as familiar with it.
12:15SPEAKERSo there are a lot of people over there that are like, Hey, this game is, this game is,
12:18SPEAKERis broken and janky. I can't believe they put this on the store. And that's a, like,
12:23SPEAKERthat is a thing. If you're making a game, you should probably, and you're thinking about game
12:26SPEAKERpreview versus early access, whatever. It's something to be aware of. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
12:30SPEAKERWhen we released last year, this time we were on the front page of Xbox. I was like, Hey,
12:37SPEAKERthis is the hot new thing to play it. Not, Hey, this is an early access title. You know,
12:42SPEAKERgo in with that. It, but to be fair, also Xbox has X cloud, which works amazingly well. And so
12:50SPEAKERyou had a lot of people who could just try it without even downloading it and just jump in,
12:53SPEAKERwhich is good, but also bad because when you have that little friction going in,
12:58SPEAKERhow you approach the game and how you stick with the game is different.
13:01SPEAKERAnd so what we learned over time was we need to build in a game that stays sticky to those people
13:06SPEAKERwho just want to just jump in and like our bounce rate, those early days were super high because of
13:12SPEAKERthat. Cause we just didn't, Oh, we thought we, you bought the game. You're going to try it for
13:15SPEAKERa little bit. You're going to play it for a little bit. And so that, you know, we, we changed that.
13:19SPEAKERAnd then that became very sticky for us where those players would, would come in and they
13:23SPEAKERwould stay. Yeah. It's it kind of makes X cloud. And that the bounce rate is when people leave,
13:29SPEAKERlike it's a, it's a period of time that the percentage of people that leave in a certain
13:32SPEAKERperiod of time and like, it like checks out our number was high. It, it, it meant that we had to
13:36SPEAKERthe first, it actually ended up being a good thing for all players. Cause it meant that we had to get
13:40SPEAKERreally good with our onboarding, right? We had to teach people to play the game in a really quick
13:44SPEAKERand clear and precise way. So that, so that more of those people would be, would be willing to hang
13:49SPEAKERout and, and, and keep at the game, which, which like I said, benefits everybody. Yeah.
13:54SPEAKERSo, so you launched into game pass and for sale on the same day. So, so you were on Steam for money,
13:59SPEAKERyou were on Xbox, you were selling on Xbox at the same time you were on game pass, right? But
14:03SPEAKERyou were in on game. So how did the game pass launch go? How did, what was the interplay
14:08SPEAKERbetween people paying money versus. So I'll just say when we originally signed the contract many
14:13SPEAKERyears ago, game pass on the PC was not a thing really. It was a very small thing. When we
14:18SPEAKERlaunched game pass on the PC was a very big thing. They are in fact, we're giving out free three
14:24SPEAKERmonths during our period. So we saw gigantic numbers. That was nice. But those gigantic
14:32SPEAKERnumbers were a lot of looky-loos that were bouncing. And obviously if we had made this
14:37SPEAKERthing that just grabbed hold of you at the very second you started playing it, it was amazing.
14:41SPEAKERThough it wouldn't have been looky-loos. That's our fault, but it was just a lot more traffic
14:45SPEAKERincoming than our little early access title was ready for. And that's like, I really wish we could
14:53SPEAKERredo that now and have this game because this game could hold up and they would enjoy it and they
14:57SPEAKERwould dig in on it. And so that was a, that was a little hard. And then we had, we had some stumbles
15:02SPEAKERaround, you know, we're small studio, so we outsource some parts of it, like the Q and A,
15:06SPEAKERuh, and localization and definitely the Q and A around, uh, win GDK and, uh, DX 12, uh,
15:14SPEAKERnot win GDK is the PC version of the window store thing in DX 12 was not a good combination.
15:21SPEAKERDid not get a lot of testing, uh, and it showed. And so that was kind of upsetting that, uh, we
15:27SPEAKERthought we had at least knew we were stable and had that covered. And then we had those players
15:32SPEAKERcoming in and being like, Hey, this thing crashes or this happens, you know, and we jumped on it and
15:36SPEAKERwe fixed those, those issues, but still that, that out of the gate kind of experience was,
15:40SPEAKERwas eyeopening. Is it safe, safe to assume, you know, you talk about the game pass contract being
15:45SPEAKERsigned years ago, and then circumstances on the ground changed in the interim safe to assume none
15:50SPEAKERof that is reflected in the business arrangement, unless you go renegotiate the contract in terms
15:54SPEAKERof like, Oh yeah, PC version is way bigger now that that doesn't matter to the business people.
16:00SPEAKERRight? No, no, no. And it's still the whole idea of why we liked game pass early on. And this still
16:07SPEAKERrang true as while we were getting our feet under us of finding what the game was, we thought game
16:12SPEAKERpass would bring us this set of players that would come in with low friction and try the game and be
16:18SPEAKERable to then support and be part of the community and help us grow the people who actually purchased
16:23SPEAKERthe game. Right. And I think that's still mainly true. I think we would have just approached it a
16:28SPEAKERlittle bit differently and probably held back a little bit more if we had known kind of some of
16:32SPEAKERthose, that stuff, you know, I still think game game pass an amazing deal. X cloud works amazingly
16:37SPEAKERwell. The people at Microsoft were super supportive. You know, it just, it just, that was
16:42SPEAKERjust way bigger than we had realized at that time. Okay. So do you think that it was the deal still
16:47SPEAKERworth it in your mind ultimately? Depends what day you ask me. I think if I think about anything in
16:54SPEAKERthe past long enough, I have regret about it, which maybe is why I get rid of all my stuff.
17:00SPEAKERActually, it might be something to that. Yeah. I think overall it helped us and it helped us
17:05SPEAKERthink about our players and it helped help drive a lot of like, Oh, we've got to fix this right away
17:11SPEAKERbecause we have this big group of people playing and they're being very vocal about this and
17:16SPEAKERthey're giving us feedback. So yeah, I think that way it helped us. I think I would have maybe
17:21SPEAKERapproached some elements of it differently or I'd want to go in to it differently knowing that now.
17:27SPEAKERBut still I think overall it was the right, it was, it was in theory, the right way to think
17:32SPEAKERabout it. Just some of the execution of it was, I think doing it over again, knowing how our
17:37SPEAKERinfrastructure held up in retrospect, I think I probably would have staggered the launch and done
17:42SPEAKERa steam. Like if it was possible from, from a contractual sense, I would have staggered
17:48SPEAKERand launched on steam and given us a month to fix like backend issues and, and network performance
17:53SPEAKERand stuff like that. So that when that big, big game pass crush hits, then we would have been
17:58SPEAKERbetter able to weather that. But I mean, sometimes that's not possible. Is that more like you say for
18:04SPEAKERtechnical reasons? I mean, is there any concern about, you know, game pass downloads, cannibalizing
18:08SPEAKERpotential sales and that sort of thing? Well, I mean, that, that's always the fear, right?
18:12SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Well, I think the people who buy game pass are probably your hardcore players,
18:20SPEAKERright? Think about it. If, if you play a lot of games, game passes such a deal, there's no way
18:24SPEAKERyou're not going to buy it, right? There's that mythical person who buys one game a year. I don't
18:28SPEAKERknow how you market to them. I, I know how you people play more than one game a year, and then
18:33SPEAKERyou're probably on game pass. And so you are probably looking at an early access title and
18:37SPEAKERgoing, I don't know if this is ready yet. I don't know if I'm ready to commit, but once it is then
18:43SPEAKERyou, then we, you know, we get to see in our discord, we can hear people like, Hey, I got this
18:46SPEAKERon game pass and now I bought it. I'm like, right. We saw a lot of those conversions. So it's on the
18:51SPEAKERteam. It's on the, it's on the game. Now, if you were making a single player game, that was two
18:55SPEAKERhours long and you only played once that's a dicey situation, but for a game like ours that you go
19:01SPEAKERback to and you play again and again, and it continuously gets new content added to it.
19:06SPEAKERI think it's the job of the developer. It's our job, right? It's to win them over. And so then
19:12SPEAKERit becomes, that's gotta be our, our concentration of making sure we're doing that. Yeah. I mean,
19:18SPEAKERin our case, it was a year. I think everybody has different deals, but it gave us a year to engage
19:23SPEAKERthis, this large group of people that we normally wouldn't have access to. So yeah, I think,
19:26SPEAKERI think I would do it again. Absolutely. Was the game in a position to further monetize players on
19:32SPEAKERday one? I can't remember. Are there any hooks for microtransactions? Shortly afterwards, we did an
19:37SPEAKERexperiment on the Xbox side of having, we have a game pass that's really about engagement more than
19:41SPEAKERmonetization. We also offer that outside of the normal game pass version of the game. It was like
19:48SPEAKERa $7 upgrade, I think. But really it quickly became clear, like that's not the right approach
19:54SPEAKERreally for us. The right approach is still using that for engagement. I don't know. I like to play
19:59SPEAKERa lot of games. I play Battlefield 5 still sometimes. And I'll play it just because they
20:04SPEAKERgive me a weekly set of challenges to complete. And I'm stupid enough that I just want to complete
20:09SPEAKERthese challenges and I earn something that I never cash in. I've never cashed in one single thing
20:14SPEAKERI've earned in Battlefield 5, but I've earned a bunch of them. I enjoy that part of the loop.
20:19SPEAKERYou know, maybe I'm alone on that or stupid or, but I think a lot of people like that engagement.
20:24SPEAKERAnd so I really like the battle pass as that way of engagement. That's how it is on Steam. That's
20:29SPEAKERhow it is going forward. It's free. It just really gives you little challenges to do. And then you
20:33SPEAKERunlock some stuff like dances and cosmetics. Yeah. Talking about a season pass, not like a
20:40SPEAKERgame pass specific thing. And yeah, Microsoft actively encouraged us to do monetization inside
20:47SPEAKERthe game. It turns out building battle passes is fairly time consuming and expensive when you're
20:51SPEAKERa studio of like 15 or 20 people. So not to talk about game pass business stuff incessantly,
20:57SPEAKERalthough that's something that industry pundits speculate about a lot. I know you said your deal
21:02SPEAKERwas like years in the past when you signed the contract and everything, but like, I'm just kind
21:06SPEAKERof curious what that picture looks like when you go to the table with them. I mean, are there
21:09SPEAKERstandard terms that they offer developers these days or is everybody's deal completely bespoke?
21:14SPEAKERI have no idea anymore. We were kind of, again, the early of the starting to think about the PC
21:22SPEAKERside of it and really leaning into game pass. And so I think back then I had talked to other people
21:28SPEAKERwho were on it and their deals were different than our deals. I'm sure two and a half or three
21:33SPEAKERyears later, the deals are different now. Right. I think it's become way more mature. And I think
21:39SPEAKERpublishers and developers have a lot better sense of what they're entering into, especially after
21:43SPEAKERthis year. I think this was a year of learning. This was the kind of the year game pass really
21:46SPEAKERtook off. So I imagine that they're all different, right? I mean, they're all, they're all different
21:51SPEAKERfrom what we sign. Maybe they're standardized, maybe not. I don't know. I'm curious about,
21:55SPEAKERyou know, the ins and outs of running the studio. You know, we don't have to get into your budgets
21:59SPEAKERand cashflow and all that stuff too much, but like just, just as an example that comes to mind,
22:03SPEAKERand I want to make sure I've got the details right. Did the game launch with only dedicated
22:06SPEAKERserver support? Could you play peer to peer at launch or was it purely you guys running servers?
22:11SPEAKERWe were running servers at launch. We are now peer to peer. Right. So, so I didn't,
22:17SPEAKERyeah, I knew that talking to Will. And so I was wondering like what the burn rate was like,
22:20SPEAKERor like if that's a lot of overhead just as an example, that's a lot of overhead dedicated
22:25SPEAKERservers, but the bigger problem that I don't think we so, so first of all, there's, there's,
22:31SPEAKERthere's, there's, there's, there's two weird things of making a game as with a senior team. One,
22:37SPEAKERyou're often solving for past mistakes, not current mistakes. And that's a trap you fall
22:42SPEAKERinto all the time. You could tell yourself that and you still fall into that trap all the time.
22:46SPEAKERAnd then the other is just making sure that you're stepping back and understanding of like,
22:50SPEAKERwhat the implications are at our size. So for instance, dedicated servers, we could afford
22:56SPEAKERto co local locations on AWS, right? AWS isn't like, Hey, servers everywhere. It's this weird
23:03SPEAKERbilling where it's really fractionalized in each area. It's, it's super complicated and a mess.
23:09SPEAKERI've said that to them directly. Don't worry. Yeah. But so what happened though was, is then
23:15SPEAKERall of a sudden, what it means is if we're not, let's say in Australia, because we're not
23:19SPEAKERAustralian players are having this really bad experience because they're connecting to West
23:22SPEAKERcoast servers. And it's just not a good experience where if we would've done peer to peer, they could
23:28SPEAKERhave just connected locally and had a way better experience. Some days you guys do a show on what
23:33SPEAKERnapping looks like in Australia. It's a nightmare. It's a mess. The major ISPs at least 10 years ago,
23:38SPEAKERdidn't talk to each other. I don't know what they're doing now. Oh, but it's just like a mess.
23:42SPEAKERSo the realization was that peer to peer would actually be a better experience for almost
23:46SPEAKEReverybody. And still wanting though, to have that matchmaking still wanting to have like,
23:54SPEAKERI don't want to put people to server browser, like that feels very 2004 or something, but so how do
23:59SPEAKERyou do all these things and have peer to peer? And that's something, you know, we've been working on
24:03SPEAKERand expanding out. And so we've moved off of dedicated servers in September. And I think
24:10SPEAKERit has been a constant series of updates since then to improve what that experience looks like.
24:15SPEAKERBut it ends up that users today have a better experience because we're not on a dedicated
24:20SPEAKERserver than if we were, which is super backwards in my head from I'm used to, Hey, for love for
24:27SPEAKERdead, we just spin up servers around the world everywhere. Cause valve has a super crazy network
24:31SPEAKERof servers. They can spin up. Right. So the other thing that the peer to peer allows us to do is we
24:36SPEAKERalready had mod modders working, but originally our first set of modders how's this for terrifying.
24:42SPEAKERWe just gave them per force access because we had all the code in the game, just to be clear,
24:50SPEAKERthey had our entire source control because it was the only way that we could get them to be able to
24:54SPEAKERtest was to be on our servers and be testing that way, which is terrifying even for a small studio,
24:59SPEAKERbut we're like, okay, we're small studio. We can do this. And they're people I kind of knew. So
25:04SPEAKERwe just gave them full access, but they could only test by if we included it in our build.
25:10SPEAKERAnd that's just not a good way for modders to be able to test. So we wanted them to be able
25:14SPEAKERto test. We'd always had this plan to offer peer to peer on the side. And it just really came to
25:18SPEAKERthe forefront. And now it is the default way to play. You can see modders are able to test and
25:24SPEAKERthey'll be able to do private betas and they can have other people testing their stuff. And it's
25:28SPEAKERjust a really better interaction for everybody. You probably knew I was going to get around to
25:32SPEAKERsteam at some point. I mean, you've got a long history with valve. First of all, how long has
25:36SPEAKERit been since you were there? I don't know while I was there for 12, 12 years. I started in 2004,
25:43SPEAKERso I left in 2016. Yeah. So has, has, has working with steam a has working with steam changed, like
25:50SPEAKERbetween being on the inside and being on the outside and also just in the time that's elapsed
25:54SPEAKERsince you left, like, was it kind of very familiar coming back to working with, I mean, I'm somebody
25:59SPEAKERI'm the kind of nerd who like is more interested in the backend tools about how you like build.
26:04SPEAKERBrad has literally asked me if I'll screen share the backend tools, like I would, I, somebody wants
26:09SPEAKERto give me a job, just like programming, like promotional units on a storefront. I would be
26:14SPEAKERsuper into it. The monkey's paw just curled on that one, man. Don't like, and part of that is
26:18SPEAKERlike, I've worked at websites over the years that also have bespoke hand-built back ends with their
26:23SPEAKERown weird idiosyncrasies and stuff. So like, I'm super curious about like game distribution back
26:28SPEAKERends, like storefront back ends, all that stuff. Like, so first, if you are a developer and you
26:33SPEAKERare only shipping on sand PlayStation till still sign up for steam and say, you're shipping on
26:38SPEAKERsteam because the tools that it affords you as a developer are the best in the world by far.
26:45SPEAKERSo we could push up and a build there, distribute it as a private beta to a group of people
26:51SPEAKERand get feedback on it. Like the backend, like a couple of hours, just to be clear. Yeah. It's
26:57SPEAKERlike instantaneous. As soon as the build's done, there's no search. There's no anything. And that
27:04SPEAKERability to do that kind of stuff is just insanely great. And so those tools are great. Yeah. Some of
27:11SPEAKERthe tools I just was really not familiar with that side of it, but I understood them all well. Right.
27:16SPEAKERThen actually working with valve. I mean, I still have a bunch of friends over there. Our account
27:22SPEAKERrep is a really good friend, Gus, who when we were promoting VR, her and I worked together
27:29SPEAKERon, I was a public facing part of it, but if you ever wondered how things got organized and set,
27:34SPEAKERand we did all the events around places and set it up, it was all Gus. It was all her work.
27:41SPEAKERWe played softball together. She actually, I was, I was the pitcher and she caught,
27:46SPEAKERlike, she's a really good friend. She's, she's really great. I ate mushroom, banana and shrimp
27:53SPEAKERpizza with her in Sweden. So like working with her is just great. Right. Like it's super great. And
28:01SPEAKERwe have a good conversation about stuff, but it's also steam and there's a bunch of stuff.
28:04SPEAKERThat's just like, Hey, you're an early access title. You don't get this or you get this. Right.
28:08SPEAKERAnd so there's, they're fair that way. It's not like we just get a bunch of free stuff because
28:12SPEAKERit's me. But yeah, it's been great. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I just, it's always weird just to clear,
28:20SPEAKERlike I left steam on totally friendly terms. I was me leaving. I was just like, Hey, I love it here,
28:25SPEAKERbut I want to go back to making games and I want to go back to making a certain kind of game. We're
28:30SPEAKERnot going to be making here. So Hey, thanks. And then, you know, I feel like valve is a little
28:36SPEAKERmore, anything goes, I don't know if maybe it's a little dicier to dig into the console back ends.
28:40SPEAKERFirst of all, forgive me. Did you guys end up shipping later on PlayStation or no, no, no,
28:45SPEAKERstill just X-Box. Okay. So, I mean, I don't know if you want to talk about the X-Box experience as
28:50SPEAKERa developer. So just as a history of doing this is so I think every developer probably wished they
28:56SPEAKERcould ship cross-platform play back in the day between like X-Box and PC, like when we did the
29:01SPEAKERLeft 4 Deads, but you couldn't because Microsoft had this long, laborious certification process
29:07SPEAKERfor every update. And that meant weeks and you just can't wait. We, you can't, it's a really hard
29:14SPEAKERway to work where you have to submit something, sit on it for two weeks and then go, they are
29:18SPEAKERgreat. Now, the reason why you're seeing so much cross-platform stuff is we submit it the night
29:24SPEAKERbefore the next day it's ready. And that ability to do that. And that kind of turnaround is let us
29:31SPEAKERjust be able to update and keep the two versions in sync. Cause it used to be, you didn't want to
29:35SPEAKERdo cross-platform because that meant you were actually harming one of the platforms cause you
29:38SPEAKERwere making choices or you're doing delays because of the one platform that doesn't exist anymore.
29:43SPEAKERMicrosoft has been absolutely great about that. And they also have private beta testings as well.
29:48SPEAKERAnd everything else like that Steam has, it's just, there's always a little bit of a delay in
29:52SPEAKERit versus the instantaneousness of Steam. And that's the only reason why, but Microsoft has
29:57SPEAKERreally gotten their tools head and shoulders above what they used to be and really great.
30:01SPEAKER- I was gonna say the cross-play thing is the other, we talked about dedicated servers a minute
30:05SPEAKERago, but the cross-play is the other part of why dedicated servers, why we have to do dedicated
30:09SPEAKERservers at launch is cause I don't think anybody was like the backend provider we use Excel byte
30:15SPEAKERand the other, I don't think any of their competitors had a P2P
30:21SPEAKERlisten server based cross-play solution last October when we would have needed to implement
30:28SPEAKERit or June, whatever. Yeah. Or October of 2021, not October of 2022.
30:33SPEAKER- Sure. And then financially as a developer working on Xbox, I mean,
30:38SPEAKERthis information is 10, 15 years old, so it could, I'm sure it's changed dramatically,
30:42SPEAKERbut like back in the day, you would hear stories about smaller developers on Xbox,
30:46SPEAKERlike XBLA titles. I think what I heard was like your first patch was free, but then subsequent
30:52SPEAKERpatches that were like five figure certification fees attached to various things like.
30:56SPEAKER- God, we would, we would have, we would do super, not just broke, super broke.
31:00SPEAKER- Yeah. We're at 28 updates.
31:03SPEAKER- 28 updates last year for rapid iteration that you're doing. So yeah, are those,
31:07SPEAKERthose roadblocks just kind of thing.
31:08SPEAKER- Those are gone. Yeah. So just to be clear since last year, we've done 28 updates
31:14SPEAKERand all of those on both platforms. So yeah, that would have, that would have sunk us again.
31:20SPEAKERI think how they running that side of it and thinking about the future is just way better
31:25SPEAKERthan it used to be. And it's really helpful.
31:27SPEAKER- Yeah. So, so, so, so people understand there's like, Microsoft has, I think we can talk about
31:33SPEAKERthis. They have big certs and little certs, like the launch cert, the one before your game goes out
31:39SPEAKERon sale. They look at everything from like, from like how the game works, people load it up and go
31:44SPEAKERthrough it. They, they, they, they test it in the way that you think of a cert. They also do things
31:48SPEAKERlike look at your descriptions in the store and your screenshots and your videos and your ratings
31:53SPEAKERand all the 70 million territories that they, that they have ratings. And they look at your
31:59SPEAKERcertificates for the ESRB and all that stuff. And, and like, they, they tick all the boxes
32:04SPEAKERand they look at that. Then after you do a few of those and you do them well, then they say, okay,
32:10SPEAKERyou're trustworthy. We're going to put you in the fast one. And that's, that's a lighter touch.
32:15SPEAKERSo they don't look at all the store stuff and they don't look at all the, they look at what changes
32:18SPEAKERand they look at the builds, but they don't, they don't dig super deep until you make a mistake and
32:23SPEAKERthen you get yeeted back out into the, into the slow, into the slow tree again, which hasn't
32:27SPEAKERhappened to us. Thankfully, as far as engine tech goes, you guys are on unreal four, correct?
32:33SPEAKERCorrect. Unreal 4.27. And then one of the things we did that I think helped us a lot was you
32:44SPEAKERweren't a lot of make engine changes, right? Because a classic thing in small developers is
32:49SPEAKERyou make a bunch of bespoke engine changes. And then every time there's a new update,
32:54SPEAKERyou have this month of integration and all of that goes on. I think we made some very minor changes
33:00SPEAKERand our editor itself has changed. So we have a, like we have our own version of the unreal editor
33:04SPEAKERthat we edited so that we can do our thing, but we were very careful about not making these big
33:10SPEAKERchanges to unreal itself. We just were like, Hey, if this is the way it is, we got to figure out how
33:15SPEAKERto work with it. Because trying to do the integration of all those changes, cause you know,
33:20SPEAKERcause with unreal, you get the source code, you could, you could change anything you want. It's
33:23SPEAKERjust, you're going to have to live with integrating all the updates then after that. Where, where do
33:27SPEAKERthings stand with unreal four support at this point? I mean, epic is like pretty visibly full
33:31SPEAKERspeed ahead with moving to unreal five at this point. Like, I mean, there are so many licensees,
33:36SPEAKERI have to assume like they're not exactly dropping the ball. They said, they said 4.27 would be the
33:41SPEAKERlast update and they did another update after that. They just didn't give it a number or something. I
33:45SPEAKERdon't know. It was weird. Uh, so it's pretty, it's really nice and stable. It's really great. Right.
33:49SPEAKERUm, and we're also looking at five, um, as well, which is fun. Um, there's some different things,
33:55SPEAKERbut we'll, it's like that the anacrusis will stay at 4.27 forever. Um, but they've, they've
34:02SPEAKERchanged. They've updated some stuff as well as they've updated some of the stuff around it,
34:06SPEAKERwhich is like their, their EOS, which is their epic online systems and like other things. So
34:11SPEAKERit's just not all the core game, um, itself. Right. So, but yeah. Well, and the nice thing
34:18SPEAKERabout using the stock, you know, the, the stock thing is that when Nvidia or Intel or AMD release
34:24SPEAKERa plugin for, you know, DLSS or FSR or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever crazy new technology
34:30SPEAKERthe graphics people come up with, we just slot it in and it works, which is, which is, um,
34:35SPEAKERit makes a lot of that stuff a lot easier. So. Uh, are there any, I, this is, I assume the answer
34:41SPEAKERof this question is no putting on my, my amateur game developer hat, but like, there are basically
34:46SPEAKERno circumstances where you would ever rebase a game like this on say the next unreal. Right. Like,
34:51SPEAKERI feel like there is a perception out there among some kind of hardcore gamers. It's like, oh,
34:56SPEAKERyou should move up to the next engine. Like that's got way better graphics. Why wouldn't you do that?
34:59SPEAKERBut like that, that is completely ludicrous. Correct. For this game. No, we wouldn't do that.
35:04SPEAKERBut like, let's say if we were doing an open world game and I think five does some of that stuff
35:09SPEAKERbetter. There may be a inkling, but really for the most part, you don't see people do that. The only
35:15SPEAKERpeople who ever changed their engines and upgrade it are the people who actually make the engines
35:19SPEAKERthemselves. Right. Um, because otherwise it's just a lot of overhead and you've built all of this
35:24SPEAKERtools. You've got all of this content for this version and to have to sit there and go back
35:30SPEAKERthrough it. I don't think there's just a lot of value to it. And also 4.27 does everything we
35:33SPEAKERneed. So check the right answer. There is if somebody wrote us a really large check,
35:37SPEAKERwe would love to do that work. Is there anything you want to say about the studios dabbling with
35:42SPEAKERyou? We five so far, like in terms of just fun stuff, you've, you know, we're not seeing a lot
35:47SPEAKERof shipping games yet. So I think people are still hungry to just hear like, Hey, what can this thing
35:50SPEAKERdo? I think so. It's always just, you know, I think you always need to check a little bit. And
35:54SPEAKERso over winter break, like I was playing around some of the five and just, it's really easy to
35:59SPEAKERmake something really big and beautiful. That is just like, Oh my God, this would have been,
36:03SPEAKERthis would have been a E3 demo, uh, you know, five years ago and would have blown everybody away. Um,
36:10SPEAKERso it's just, it's just fun to see how much that's increasing in and all the character stuff as well
36:16SPEAKERis crazy. I think everyone can play with the character stuff. I don't know if you need to be,
36:19SPEAKERuh, I don't know, but it's the, you know, the, no, the, the meta human stuff is all just out.
36:25SPEAKERYeah. Just download it. Yeah. It's just crazy of how much this is going forward. Uh, and
36:32SPEAKERjust watch it, you know, it's just not us, but it just like, I think if you look at this indie
36:36SPEAKERgames today, so many indie games using either unity or unreal, but the latest versions of them
36:43SPEAKERare just like, Oh my God, these would have been AAA titles in 2008 or 2012, which I guess sounds
36:49SPEAKERold now, but it does to me in my game years, they don't because they're not nineties, but, uh,
36:53SPEAKERit's still just crazy if like the tools just keep getting better and better and better. So sure.
36:56SPEAKERLike there's, there's some jealousy of like, Oh, I wish we had this, but we're fine.
37:00SPEAKERLike if people are curious, they should like spend a little time looking at Fortnite,
37:03SPEAKERlike Fortnite, the last Fortnite update when they moved to 5.1 is the stake in the ground for when
37:10SPEAKERthe last generation ended and the next generation starts from where I sit.
37:14SPEAKERYeah. That's, that's kind of been my feeling too. I mean, you're still seeing UE4 games
37:17SPEAKERshipping on like Clisto protocol, I believe is UE4, but like it's got, for example,
37:21SPEAKERa bunch of ray tracing stuff in it that I assume they did all themselves kind of like,
37:25SPEAKERto your point about taking the engine off the shelf and then modifying the hell out of it.
37:29SPEAKERYeah. I mean, look, the engine that it's, one of the things I didn't understand until I started
37:34SPEAKERworking here is, I mean, I did, but I guess I did, I don't know if I did or not, but like the
37:39SPEAKERgame engine and the game, like the, at the end of the day, the engine's just a tool, right? Like,
37:45SPEAKERlike it's, it's, it's a fancy shovel and like, it depends on, it's the people, it's the people
37:51SPEAKERthat you dig and what you do with the dirt that matters, not the, not the, not the, not the shovel.
37:57SPEAKEROnce you have the pile made, the dirt's done and the shovel's work is done. This is a terrible
38:01SPEAKERmetaphor. You really take this metaphor back. I was like, I was like, I thought I had a good
38:04SPEAKERone there and then I was like, I'm going to lean into this and it just kept getting worse and worse.
38:08SPEAKERWe're picking it up. Let's see. So you like, Chet touched on this. I was going to ask,
38:13SPEAKERbut you, I think you kind of answered the question already. Like, are there even credible
38:17SPEAKERalternatives to Unreal and Unity for developers at your scale these days? Or are those basically
38:22SPEAKERthe two? Those are the two, those are the two. Like, I mean, I know some crazy people license
38:29SPEAKERthe source engine, but they, they modify the living hell out of it. That source engine,
38:35SPEAKERsource engine 2 is fine, but, yeah, that, that, that's really it. I think, you know,
38:38SPEAKERI think a lot of people talk about Godot and if you're talking like the super indie people making
38:42SPEAKERsome smaller games, you know, you're pro you may want to play in that space, or at least look at
38:46SPEAKERthat as well. Or game maker is another one. If you're making some kind of 2d thing, but if you're
38:51SPEAKERmaking a full on 3d game, you're looking at Unity or Unreal, I think. I mean, I mean, it's, it's
38:57SPEAKERthe question with a small studio is always, I mean, with any studio really is you're turning
39:01SPEAKERmoney into time, right? So whichever one lets you turn the most, the most money into the,
39:06SPEAKERinto the least time that makes the most content is the winner. Is anybody like, oh, you know,
39:12SPEAKERI grew up, I cut my teeth in the kind of early, like the doom quake era. Like everybody was just
39:17SPEAKERdoing their own thing. Is anybody just doing their own tech from the ground up these days
39:21SPEAKERoutside? I obviously there are giant studios, like, you know, the big publisher teams that
39:25SPEAKERhave their own in-house engines across the whole company, but like in the, in the smaller indie
39:30SPEAKERspace, like there are no, there are no quake engines these days, right. That are just fully
39:34SPEAKERclean sheet of paper. Well, I mean, there's, there's people doing their own bespoke stuff
39:38SPEAKERlike tear down definitely did their own. Right. And they could not have made that game without
39:44SPEAKERdoing their own. That was the, oh yeah. Oh, shoot. We thought we should call tear down. It's just a
39:48SPEAKERtech demo for their engine, man. No, sorry. But right. Like that's, that's a good example. I think
39:55SPEAKERof making something that really leaned into what the underlying tech was well in like like Brendan
40:03SPEAKERBrendan Chung does uses ed tech old, old, well, there's a fair number. There's a fair amount of
40:08SPEAKERindie stuff built on old open source ed tech stuff at this point. That's that's like pretty bananas,
40:14SPEAKERright? Like a wide range in quality and then style. Someone, someone on our discord linked
40:19SPEAKERthe blendo games, get hub repo this very morning that I didn't, I mean, I should have known that
40:23SPEAKERexisted, but didn't, I mean, do you guys have a lot of open source stuff going on? Like that's
40:27SPEAKERsomething that I feel like we don't see as much of in games as we could. I mean, Godot, I believe
40:32SPEAKERis open source, right? Godot is open source, I believe. I don't think really we have a lot.
40:39SPEAKERAnd then the stuff that we build out is stuff that is somebody's licensed tendrils inside of it
40:45SPEAKERin so many different ways. Like we were talking about wanting to give access to our
40:50SPEAKERcharacter models to the modders and ends up, we can't give them the heads because of the licensing
40:55SPEAKERdeal for the heads. Yeah, I know. Exactly right. Mod mod, the modern world. Well, give them the bodies,
41:02SPEAKERthe bodies we made, they're ours and you don't really need the heads. You can just stick stuff
41:06SPEAKERon the heads. There's stuff that I wish we could or could open or at least make available. Like,
41:12SPEAKERI think the thing that we use to build the nav mesh is a really neat piece of tech that is useful,
41:18SPEAKERlike that is broadly useful and applicable, but also I don't want to take on the overhead of
41:23SPEAKERsupporting it and maintaining it. Just to be clear, it doesn't build the nav mesh. We use
41:27SPEAKERthe unreal nav mesh. What it does is interpret the nav mesh and the space. So it does this really
41:32SPEAKERcool thing, our AI director, which is our technical piece that kind of populates the levels as well as
41:38SPEAKERmake the game dynamic, right? So you have the intensity flow. It analyzes the entire map ahead
41:43SPEAKERof time. And this means modders as well can just put this in and you'll get hints to say, go this
41:50SPEAKERway, even on a modded map that, you know, it has no markup on it. It just, the piece of technology
41:56SPEAKERkind of analyze everything and figures out what the golden path is through that. It'll spawn
42:01SPEAKERenemies. It'll spawn drops. It does all that stuff without the modders having to place anything.
42:04SPEAKERYeah. Like speaking of the, the kind of unique tech that you've developed for the game, like
42:09SPEAKERhas anything come online in the year since early access started? Like, like the game director stuff
42:13SPEAKERobviously was like there at least in a nascent form on day one, but like, have there been
42:18SPEAKERmassive under the hood changes or any like clever new tech that has emerged once people were playing
42:24SPEAKERit? Well, this was the game director would again, which is that central piece that's controlling
42:27SPEAKEReverything that got a lot of updates where we want to make sure that the intensity isn't overwhelming,
42:35SPEAKERright? So there was a point where I, at release, we only had one flavor of intensity and that was,
42:41SPEAKERyou could play maybe one, two games and you're kind of exhausted because you're always at the
42:45SPEAKERedge of your seats. One of our play testers said, we made it through, we barely made it through,
42:51SPEAKERbut a lesser group wouldn't. They were actually really bad players. But that was like, that kind
42:56SPEAKERof stuck with us. It's like a good line of how people should feel when they played. But the
43:00SPEAKERproblem is that's almost too tense to have conversations with sometimes, or it was just
43:04SPEAKERlike too edge of your seat. So now we've made that intense mode so you can still have that flavor,
43:09SPEAKERbut we work to make a lesser version of it because it's a really hard do the,
43:13SPEAKERhey, we're not going to keep you at the edges of your seat, but we're going to still keep you
43:16SPEAKERengaged and what that looks like. It turns out it's really easy to kill everyone and it's really
43:21SPEAKEReasy to give everybody no challenge at all. The hard part is giving them the kind of ebb and flow
43:27SPEAKERof making them feel like they're right on the cusp of losing and then pull back from that without it
43:34SPEAKERfeeling like it's cooked. And so we kind of work through that one live. And then while we always
43:41SPEAKERhad the game instructor behind the scenes doing a little bit of stuff, when the stuff we mentioned
43:46SPEAKERabout that first 15 minutes, it really came to the forefront. The idea of the game instructor is,
43:51SPEAKERif you've never done something, tell me what to do. And then once I do it a couple times,
43:56SPEAKERfade away because hey, I know how to do it. So if I've never healed somebody and somebody is injured,
44:00SPEAKERit's going to say, hey, take out your health pack. Once you take out your health pack, it's gonna be
44:04SPEAKERlike, go buy that person, you go buy that person. So be like, right click on them, and now you can
44:07SPEAKERheal them. And having kind of that tutorial in the flow versus tutorial levels was important. And we
44:13SPEAKERdid a lot of work to really bring that all the way through. And I think that's one of the reasons that
44:18SPEAKERreally helped the bounce rate of like, there's nothing worse than starting a game and being like,
44:21SPEAKERI have no idea what to do. Or even worse is probably doing that, you know, 30 minute tutorial
44:27SPEAKERwhile your friends are waiting to play the co-op game, and then you get out of it and you don't
44:31SPEAKERremember anything that actually you learned in that tutorial and you're just as lost. And so we
44:35SPEAKERwanted to have that be part of the flow. That's one of the things, Chet, before we didn't even
44:42SPEAKERannounce the game, it started a discord for the studio and just invited people who liked playing
44:48SPEAKERco-op games and like playing weird mods and kind of brought all these people together and started
44:54SPEAKERplaying a bunch of co-op games. And as a result, we avoided a lot of the pitfalls of playing games
45:02SPEAKERwith your friends hard. Like we have friend codes, so you don't like, you can play with somebody
45:05SPEAKERwho's not on your friends list. We have the game instructor so that you can learn. So that when
45:11SPEAKERyou're like, Hey, you should come try this game. They don't have to go do an hour of work in a
45:15SPEAKERlong tutorial mission before they can jump in and play the game with you that you invited them to
45:19SPEAKERcome play. And there's a million little things like that, that like you learn just by playing
45:25SPEAKERa buttload of games. Yeah. I was just going to ask, do you formally block out time as a studio
45:31SPEAKERto play other games as kind of research and is there anything in particular you've learned from
45:35SPEAKERany specific games? So we, this really stands out. We kind of Friday afternoons is we're going to,
45:40SPEAKERin fact, when we're done with this, we're going to play some, some games today. But I think to Will's
45:45SPEAKERpoint, it's even more valuable. The best thing, the smartest thing I've done in this entire studio
45:49SPEAKERis starting that discord and just jumping in and playing co-op games. Cause boy, you know, when
45:54SPEAKERsomething doesn't work, you know, when, Hey, if somebody can just go run ahead and gobble up the
45:58SPEAKERstuff and you're behind them and you do, you play that game once or twice. You're like, I never want
46:03SPEAKERto play that game again. And here's the reason why. Okay. We should never have that in our game.
46:08SPEAKERThat kind of experience with just random people playing like real people is always way more
46:14SPEAKERvaluable than even just the inner studio one. We can try to play like normal people, but we all
46:18SPEAKERknow each other really well. We all have deferences to each other and we're generally decently nice
46:23SPEAKERhuman beings. You need to go out and play with more wild variety of people and see what that's
46:30SPEAKERreally like. And that changes kind of the experience and kind of not just from getting
46:34SPEAKERinto the game, but just the moment to moment and things you have to worry about. Like,
46:39SPEAKERis anybody going to ever heal me? I'm down. Oh God, what's going on here? Like,
46:44SPEAKERso that's been really valuable. The game serves both audiences, right? Like the game serves
46:48SPEAKERpeople who load out, who download it from game pass and hit the quick play button and just jump
46:51SPEAKERinto a game with three people they've never met and will probably never see again. But then it
46:55SPEAKERalso serves the people who play every Tuesday night because that's the night that they play
46:58SPEAKERgames with their friends. And like, we're now part of the rotation with Deep Rock and Left 4 Dead and
47:04SPEAKERthe other kinds of games that they like. Are those the types of games you mostly
47:07SPEAKERstick to as a studio for quote unquote research, or do you kind of play some of everything? Like,
47:11SPEAKERis there anything like any really out of left field game that has like no resemblance to the
47:16SPEAKERanacursis that you've learned anything valuable from? Do you play Double Action Boogaloo a lot?
47:21SPEAKERYes. Yes. Is that a real game? Double Action Boogaloo, your Discord should get a night and
47:29SPEAKERplay some Double Action Boogaloo. I cannot say that enough. It is a game that is just goofy
47:33SPEAKERaction hero shooter on the source engine. So it's free if you have any source game. But the thing
47:41SPEAKERthat it does really well is it doesn't reward you for your kill death ratio. It rewards you for
47:47SPEAKERstyle. So it's how you kill people. So you can do John Woo sliding jumps and there's even doves
47:53SPEAKERflying at some points and like, it's just so good. It's just so dumb. And it's that thing of like,
48:00SPEAKERplayers online just don't want to get all sweaty and be all like military. They want to have fun.
48:06SPEAKERThey want to have that joy of that kind of goofiness. And so that's definitely something
48:11SPEAKERthat we lean into. And in fact, the dev of that plays a lot of other games with us now as well.
48:18SPEAKERIt's kind of the thing of, we always try to find the person who made the mod and get them on our
48:22SPEAKERstream. So every Tuesday and Wednesday, we stream what we're playing with the community. And we try
48:28SPEAKERto get the people who made it so we can ask them questions and kind of dive into it. And especially
48:32SPEAKERthe early source ones are almost always like, well, this is what the engine could do. That's
48:35SPEAKERwhy we did it that way. Like, okay, fair, fair, fair. But that is a really good one. We played
48:41SPEAKERa lot of horror stuff which has really kind of helped me inform. Jump scares are stupid in games.
48:48SPEAKERThe fear of jump scares is amazing. If you are scared of that jump scare coming and you just
48:54SPEAKERturn and start running, that is a really good moment. The jump scare itself, maybe not, but
48:59SPEAKERthat moment, that's really good. And this is a whole bunch of stuff. We'll try almost anything
49:04SPEAKERwe were playing. Actually, we went back and played Valhalla or Valheim. We were playing some
49:15SPEAKERProject Zomboid the other day. We played a bunch of old Left 4 Dead mods, like the Helms Deep Left
49:22SPEAKER4 Dead mod. We played Warframe and I think I downloaded Arc, but I don't know if I ever
49:29SPEAKERactually played Arc because anyway, but all the way up to stuff like Destiny and Fortnite,
49:36SPEAKERjust to see what people are doing in games where people play together on the same team.
49:41SPEAKERChad, big question. What do you wish you had known before founding and running your own studio?
49:53SPEAKERSo there's this really weird thing that happens is we hire a bunch of senior people.
49:58SPEAKERWe want to all kind of work together and not have this boss on top dictating down.
50:07SPEAKERAnd current me would go back to past me and try to explain, there's a time when you need to put
50:14SPEAKERyour foot down a little bit and you need to learn how to do that in a way where you're not a jerk.
50:18SPEAKERI don't think I was, I have a, I don't yell. I wish I could yell a lot.
50:23SPEAKERHe just cries usually. If he gets really upset, he just bursts into tears.
50:26SPEAKERThey want to cry a little. Did you try crying? No. All right, try that. But what really happens
50:31SPEAKERis right. So we have these really, really great engineers and I will see in the sheet of paper for
50:36SPEAKERthe original creature design. I did a one pager. Like I don't believe in big giant design documents.
50:42SPEAKERI believe in you do the core of kind of the idea of it. You put it in the game and you get feedback
50:47SPEAKERon it and you iterate on it. And that's how you really get the right thing. But I have like this,
50:50SPEAKERsay, this is the creatures that we need to put in. So now the engineer jumps to that. And I think
50:56SPEAKERthey're pretty close to what that original design was, but there's variations of it where this is
51:01SPEAKERlike, Oh, this is actually not as fun as it should be crap. Okay. But Hey, this person has a really
51:07SPEAKERgood idea on this. I'm just gonna let them run with this. Let's try that versus, Hey, no, no,
51:11SPEAKERno. Here's the reason why let's stop everything. Let's sit down and talk about why this is the
51:16SPEAKERrule on this one. Right. And so there's a lot of rules like right now in our weapons, we have
51:21SPEAKERweapons in the game where we took this system where there's a bunch of different elements that
51:27SPEAKERinfluence and change the weapons. So there's a bunch of variations. There's I don't know,
51:30SPEAKERlike 100 variations of the weapons. But it breaks a cardinal rule of mine of if you can pick something
51:35SPEAKERup and nobody else can have that it needs to be something that you understand what it is that
51:41SPEAKERyou're picking up so that you don't do the thing where you pick it up and you throw it down. So I
51:44SPEAKERdon't want that. And then you also need to be able to not be able to pick up another one because you
51:49SPEAKERpicked up this one. And our weapons break that rule. But they break it where you're making a
51:53SPEAKERcomplex decision in real time. And you may throw it back down because you prefer your old one.
51:58SPEAKERWe're going to change that we're going to work on it. We wanted to put the weapons in to start
52:01SPEAKERtesting and get iteration. But that's a good example. Like that's a rule that we should have
52:05SPEAKERbeen firmer about. But everybody on that team was really excited. And they were really just wanting
52:09SPEAKERto get them in the game and testing them. And honestly, they're fine that way for now is a test,
52:15SPEAKERright? There's enough of them. It doesn't break anything. I think it doesn't bring anything bad,
52:19SPEAKERbut so it's always that it's always that hard line of when do I put my foot down and say no,
52:24SPEAKERno, no, this is a core element. This is like not a hardcore shooter. We want to have this happiness
52:28SPEAKERaround it. And when is it wrong? Because sometimes I get it wrong, right? I'm not infallible. I
52:33SPEAKERremember when we were originally showing VR back at valve stays just for a minute here. Let me
52:38SPEAKERgo back. If you remember the very first time anybody saw the Vive, they had to put a belt on
52:44SPEAKERthat held a USB adapter on their side. We called it the full Monty. I remember as we realized,
52:52SPEAKERthat's what we were going to have to do because you had to plug in the controllers. I remember
52:56SPEAKERthinking this is all any reviewer is going to talk about that. We made you put a belt on. It
53:00SPEAKERlooks like a diaper. This is going to be a disaster. It was really big and uncomfortable.
53:04SPEAKERI didn't remember it. I immediately forgot it within about 10 seconds of bringing that.
53:08SPEAKERExactly. And so like, so there's a bunch of things I'm thinking about, like, cause I'm
53:12SPEAKERthinking about how to mitigate that and whatever, but like in my head, I'm like, Oh my God,
53:15SPEAKERwe can't do this. This is gonna be horrible. Yeah. And then nobody talked about it. Right.
53:19SPEAKERSo there are things that are like that though, in the game that you got to let go. And so it's
53:24SPEAKERlearning when to put your foot down and be like, Hey, right. Cause it's really bad though. If you
53:30SPEAKERdon't want to have the, Hey, Hey, past self, the, uh, the advice I want to give you is be a big jerk
53:36SPEAKERor like put your foot down or be that guy on top who knows better than anybody else. Cause that's
53:41SPEAKERnot what it is. It's like stepping back and making sure and thinking about like, is this one of those
53:46SPEAKERpaths that we go down? That's a bad idea. Cause it's often like people are brainstorming. They're
53:49SPEAKERcoming up with a bunch of cool stuff and you want to say, Oh, we should never do that. That's work.
53:53SPEAKERLike there's this thing of work and play, and you never want to cross into work. You don't want to
53:57SPEAKERmake people doing spreadsheets. You want them having fun and joy. And how do you separate
54:00SPEAKERthose two and think about those two? Well, it's a really fine line that a lot of even senior
54:04SPEAKERdevelopers probably don't think about because they've never, or either they've never been
54:09SPEAKERgiven this much design control or they've just never thought about it that way because there's
54:13SPEAKERsome design document that's thinking about that for them, or they make a game that's more work
54:17SPEAKERthan play or they're really good at math and they like doing math and they don't think that doing a
54:21SPEAKERbunch of percentages to figure out what the best weapon Burke loadout is, is actually not fun for
54:27SPEAKERthe vast majority anyway. So there's a bunch of that. And so it's like, I wish I would have gone
54:31SPEAKERback and said, Hey, sometimes it is worth sitting everything down and stopping everything for some
54:36SPEAKERof these things. Cause it ends up, we spent a lot of times on things we shouldn't have spent time on
54:40SPEAKERor we tried things. And because part of iteration processes, you are going to put things in that
54:45SPEAKERyou're going to rip back out and change, or you're going to just, they don't work like our iteration
54:50SPEAKERprocess on, we have a holdout mode that's gone through a bunch of radically different iterations.
54:55SPEAKERWe first kind of stood it up like the left for dead one. And the left for dead one was done
54:59SPEAKERin two weeks or a month. Like it was, it was a super one engineer, one artist,
55:05SPEAKERas quick as we can make this thing, let's make it kind of thing. It's fine. It's fun, but Hey,
55:10SPEAKERthat's not right for our game. So what can we do? That's different. How can we think about it? We
55:16SPEAKERkept going back and really that drew that inspiration from playing killing floor some and
55:20SPEAKERhow they do it. And with the boss at the end, it's okay. So like that, that iteration, that was really
55:25SPEAKERgood because we just kept throwing stuff out and we weren't precious about it. But every so often
55:29SPEAKERduring the process, somebody has become precious about something. And maybe even me have like,
55:33SPEAKERthat just isn't working and you got to just put it in the game. You got to iterate on it and
55:37SPEAKERiterations gotta be, Hey, I'm willing to pull this out and say that didn't work. I'm willing
55:41SPEAKERto revert back or I'm willing to say, yeah, we got to concentrate on this. And I think now as
55:45SPEAKERa studio, we are in a really good spot that we are all focused. We all have the same vision for
55:51SPEAKERthe game. We're all understanding what we're making and we're executing on it. And that's
55:55SPEAKERhappening really well, but it took a while to get there. It was a long, long slog. And I mean,
55:59SPEAKERsome of that's, you know, bad leadership by me. I will, I will, I will bite that bullet and say,
56:05SPEAKERI through various times, the, the, the making the game it's been hard or it's been easy, right? I
56:12SPEAKERmean, it's three years, uh, uh, not to get weird, but my mom died during the middle of this, right?
56:17SPEAKERLike during the pandemic, there was a pandemic during all of this too. Like there was a lot of
56:21SPEAKERthings happening. We went from a studio that everyone was in the same room that we would go
56:24SPEAKERfor design walks and talk about the game during walks to, Hey, I've got to call you on a zoom
56:30SPEAKERcall and also on this feel super serious and it's super weird and there's poison. And I don't know,
56:34SPEAKERit's like, it's weird. Right. And so like during those ups and downs, trying to be that kind of a
56:41SPEAKERfluid studio, you often have this problem where things do get a little off to the side and just
56:49SPEAKERhow you correct that. I think that like realization of that's my job. That's my only job.
56:56SPEAKERAnd, and also like we did a pretty good job of hiring people with a lot of empathy that
57:00SPEAKERare like good at working together. And the downside of that is people don't want to make
57:05SPEAKERother people feel bad. So if somebody has worked hard on something and like they clearly have put,
57:10SPEAKERput a lot into it, you don't want to, you don't want to, like, it, it, it takes some,
57:15SPEAKERit takes help. Everybody has to be thoughtful. And some people just don't like being in the situation
57:19SPEAKERwhere they have to give feedback that no, I did. This wasn't my, I don't think this is good for the
57:23SPEAKERgame. Right. I think so. Yeah. I think almost every artist should take one programming class
57:29SPEAKERso they get some logical thinking and they can have some understanding about that. Not to say
57:32SPEAKERthat now they have logical thinking they do, but you know what I'm saying? I'm like, they can just
57:35SPEAKERsee the kind of the Christmas around that cause that's helpful. And then I think every engineer
57:39SPEAKERshould take some art classes so they can be in an art critique and understand that you can give
57:45SPEAKERnegative feedback in a positive way. Yeah. And granted some art critiques aren't that way in
57:50SPEAKERthere. I'll just mean a nasty, but like in my creative writing classes and stuff, they're
57:54SPEAKERreally good about like, Hey, this is how I'm going to try to talk about this and, and, and
58:00SPEAKERreally be like, no, this is not the right thing, but I'm not going to beat you up about it. I'm
58:05SPEAKERnot going to make it personal. And this is something like for me, it's a constant thing
58:09SPEAKERto work on. I look to other people. Harvey Smith just had a really good podcast where he talks
58:14SPEAKERabout, like he's had ups and downs in his career. Right. But you listen to that. He's never blaming.
58:19SPEAKERHe's just talking about here's the problem. Here's this like how we thought about it and being open
58:23SPEAKERabout that and being thoughtful about that. And like, I strive to be that way, but I know
58:27SPEAKERsometimes I'm not right. Sometimes I just get excited or whatever and babble comes out of my
58:32SPEAKERmouth. Who knows? But it's that weight of that. And knowing that, especially when the babble
58:38SPEAKERcomes out of my mouth and I am the quote unquote boss, I am the boss. Like it's a weird feeling,
58:43SPEAKERright. And understanding that that has weight to it and how I have to be careful about talking
58:48SPEAKERabout that. And then, you know, especially then it's bad to Will's point of then if I'm the only
58:52SPEAKERnegative one, then, Oh my God, this is just like, so how do you encourage that? It's not
58:58SPEAKERto encourage negative. Yeah. Yeah. So be a jerk and be negative is the two things that I learned.
59:03SPEAKERNo, no, no, no, no. But like, but right. But like, you have to have a way to be honest with
59:08SPEAKEReach other in that. And I think, you know, again, the studios now gotten to the point where
59:12SPEAKERthe group that's here is like really good about that and really honest about that and being an
59:17SPEAKERunderstanding of what that is, but also that some of that is we have a shared vision of what the
59:21SPEAKERgame is now in an understandable way, right? You can't say, Hey, we're going to make these
59:25SPEAKERgun mods and the goal we're going for it. They're cool. Right. Almost always when somebody comes up
59:31SPEAKERwith a new idea, it's my, my question is what's the goal because that's the goal. We, we can't
59:37SPEAKERknow if something successful or a failure unless we know the goal.
59:40SPEAKERWe specifically talked about this the other day. I said, I pitched something.
59:45SPEAKERI'll pick on myself cause I'm willing to do that. But I said, Hey, we need something. We need a
59:49SPEAKERmonster that chases the, the, the, the survivors. Chad was like, why the hell do we need a monster
59:55SPEAKERthat chases the survivors? And I, and I said, well, because new players need some sort of
1:00:00SPEAKERpressure that pushes them forward. So they don't just get stuck in one particular area. And there's
1:00:05SPEAKERthat's actually, there's actually two problems there, right? One is that there's no pressure
1:00:08SPEAKERpushing players forward. But the other thing is, is actually that we have a couple of areas
1:00:12SPEAKERin the early levels of the game where people can tend to get twisted around and lost because the,
1:00:17SPEAKERthe path branches out and doesn't show an obvious, obvious next, you know, next direction. So like,
1:00:23SPEAKERthere's, there's two, like the process of taking the problem and then challenging it until you
1:00:31SPEAKERfigure out what the actual problems are and break it down into individual, into individual issues.
1:00:36SPEAKERThat makes it easier for us to solve. And then let's everybody also contribute to the solve
1:00:40SPEAKERrather than just me saying, Hey, we need to have, look, I think we should put a, I think we should
1:00:44SPEAKERput a battle royale wall in the back of the level that just, just slowly chasing everybody
1:00:48SPEAKERthroughout the levels. It's perfect solves everything. Yeah. Will Smith, battle royale
1:00:54SPEAKERaficionado. Sure. Yes. It's your claim to fame. Yes. Just to backfill just a little bit of context
1:01:00SPEAKERabout you talking about, you know, kind of being a constructive jerk or whatever in the early days,
1:01:05SPEAKERwhen you were setting up the studio, like what was the kind of guiding principle for like,
1:01:08SPEAKERwhat is the management structure, how much management structure, how flat is it? Like,
1:01:12SPEAKERwhere is the decision-making power concentrated? Like what, like where did you end up with,
1:01:16SPEAKERwith all that stuff? And like, what, how consensus driven was kind of decision-making early on?
1:01:22SPEAKERI hate to say the word flat because that has all these connotations and weight to it. And in fact,
1:01:27SPEAKERat one point I think it got weaponized internally in a weird way. So I don't like to use that. What
1:01:34SPEAKERI like to say is we like to empower the person closest to the problem to solve and understand
1:01:39SPEAKERthe problem. And so that means a lot of the design documents are kind of vague in the sense of like,
1:01:46SPEAKERHey, when you're there, at some point you need to enter some number in a field. I don't want to
1:01:50SPEAKERdictate that number to you. You probably have a better sense because like, Oh, this is a little
1:01:55SPEAKERbit more bouncy than we thought. So I'm going to like make this faster or whatever, like whatever,
1:02:00SPEAKERright? There's a bunch of nuance around there. And so trying to have those people go to it.
1:02:06SPEAKERI think the idea was that we would create a box of like, Hey, we're making this 60s,
1:02:13SPEAKER70s sci-fi shooter. So here's some of the rules around that. And so like art is like,
1:02:18SPEAKERwhat does it mean to be a 70s sci-fi shooter? That's kind of vague. So let's just keep talking
1:02:25SPEAKERabout it and let's just do some exploration of what that looks like. Let's create mood boards,
1:02:30SPEAKERlook at some references, you know, same kind of with the music around it. Let's bring up a bunch
1:02:35SPEAKERof stuff of that was the influence and thoughts around it. And then you go run. And there's
1:02:40SPEAKERnothing more fun for me as studio head to be surprised by something, be surprised by like a
1:02:46SPEAKERpiece of music that just cracks me up that it's like amazingly perfect for what it is. On episode
1:02:52SPEAKERthree, our sound designer decided to do a very serious somber, slow song in the finale, which
1:02:58SPEAKERI'm like that doesn't wait. Oh my God, this is the perfect bad action hero ending kind of song
1:03:05SPEAKERlike perfect, perfect. And so it's trying to do that and defining those walls. And I think
1:03:12SPEAKERpersonally, I can tell where I failed to define those walls or that box clearly is where we got
1:03:18SPEAKERinto some trouble. And so I think, you know, I think I think about like future projects and
1:03:23SPEAKERhow I would approach it differently. And it would probably be document more. Because sometimes,
1:03:28SPEAKERespecially early on, we would actually do a lot of design, talking as a studio altogether and just
1:03:34SPEAKERdocument kind of the endpoints of it and not all of it. And that left people coming behind not
1:03:40SPEAKERunderstanding quite the reasoning behind some of this, right. So we had kind of come up with these
1:03:44SPEAKERcore pillars. Hey, this is what the game is about. And this is how you can cut your teeth on the
1:03:49SPEAKERdecisions. But really, you can't create enough pillars for all the design decisions that are
1:03:55SPEAKERgoing to happen, right? Like the biggest one always is co-op. So does this make players work
1:04:00SPEAKERagainst each other? Does this mean they're going to fight for something or that they're going to
1:04:06SPEAKERlet other someone get harm because they benefit from it? Okay, so that's an easy one. So as you're
1:04:11SPEAKERdoing design, you can balance against that. But there's a lot of other minutia around that,
1:04:16SPEAKERthat probably could have used some more guidance. Obviously, there's still work to do in the game
1:04:21SPEAKERbecause you're still in early access so that, you know, you still have to kind of reach the
1:04:24SPEAKER1.0 milestone. But beyond that, how do you know when it's time to stop supporting the Anacrusis
1:04:31SPEAKERand start moving on to the next project? Or is there a dividing line there? Or is that kind of a
1:04:37SPEAKERsituation of balancing both for kind of a long time to come? Like with a game that is kind of
1:04:44SPEAKERalways being iterated on, like when is it done? When do you think about something new?
1:04:49SPEAKERWell, in my head, like this is like the perfect, hey, this is how I think about it is,
1:04:54SPEAKERyou know, like Love for Dead taught me of if you give people tools and you keep supporting
1:04:59SPEAKERit and making sure that it could run that, the game could go on for decades, right? I think
1:05:04SPEAKERif it holds up. So, you know, I think we have a season one we want to finish. We have the mod
1:05:12SPEAKERtools up and running. What does season two look like? What the future updates look like? I think
1:05:16SPEAKERI want to live in this space longer and there's still some more things I want to do. And there's
1:05:20SPEAKERat least a lot more story to add. There's a lot more world to build, like all of that's still
1:05:24SPEAKERhappening. But I think it's always just, you know, I think the guide guided by the community
1:05:29SPEAKERand what the community is saying that they're, they're looking for and what they're excited
1:05:32SPEAKERabout and what they're playing and how they engage with it. You know, I don't think you can have a
1:05:38SPEAKERhard and fast answer. It's not a box copy that we, January 15th is the ship date and it's done and
1:05:45SPEAKERit's out and we're never going to see it again. So, you know, I think.
1:05:49SPEAKERMultiplayer games don't work that way, right? Like multiplayer games last as long as people play
1:05:53SPEAKERthem. But also the fun thing is, so originally we knew we were always going to launch rough,
1:05:57SPEAKERright? That was kind of the okay thing. I, it just, the reality is if you want to get real
1:06:03SPEAKERfeedback at the core level on some systems, some things have to be a little, little rough.
1:06:08SPEAKERAnd the whole idea was we would just keep grinding out and keep updating it so that when people look
1:06:13SPEAKERback six months, a year later, they'd be like, Oh my God, there's so much in this game. This
1:06:17SPEAKERgame is so great. And I, I had jokingly called it the rainbow six siege method of development
1:06:22SPEAKERthat had a very rocky start. And then one day people were like, this is a really good game. We
1:06:27SPEAKERreally liked this. Right. And I think like that's where the stride we are now at. And so then it
1:06:32SPEAKERbecomes then, okay, what more do people want? Like versus is a big thing so that we can have
1:06:36SPEAKERthe competitive side, but it's the fun competitive side because versus isn't a sport. It's a chance
1:06:43SPEAKERto be a jerk. Will has a phrase. It's sanctioned griefing, which is a good way to think about it.
1:06:50SPEAKERLike we want to bring that there. And then, you know, how long does that extend the life of the
1:06:54SPEAKERgame or whatever. And so for us, it's, it's head down, grinding on making sure we're fixing things.
1:07:01SPEAKERWhat are we happy with? We know what our goals are. We know what we're working for. And then the
1:07:06SPEAKERamount of content that goes in is the question. And then, you know, I think we still have some
1:07:09SPEAKERspecials we want to put in so that we have something more for versus mode. And so it's for
1:07:16SPEAKERthe foreseeable future, this is what we're working on and having fun doing so. Any tips for other
1:07:22SPEAKERdevelopers working in this ongoing kind of iterative space with supporting a live game
1:07:26SPEAKERor an early access game in terms of specifically, I'm thinking about, you know, like lifting
1:07:31SPEAKERawareness with free weekends and sales, like how to strategize, like when to do things like that
1:07:36SPEAKERand how to do them and like community. I mean, you've touched on discord. Like you've, you've
1:07:40SPEAKERgot, obviously you've got communication with your community, but kind of like any, any tips around
1:07:45SPEAKERlike, Hey, kind of boosting your profile on a regular basis. Start your discord as soon as you
1:07:49SPEAKERcan. And then who knows it changes every week. Like Twitter is a good example of, I don't think
1:07:58SPEAKERTwitter does anything for our game. I think what it does is it informs people who will then go do
1:08:03SPEAKERthings for our game. So I guess it does do something for our game, but it's just not
1:08:07SPEAKERdirectly. But like streamers sure. But everyone's kind of caught onto that. So the competition for
1:08:14SPEAKERstreamers is really high. And so, you know, what does that look like? So like for me, I just look
1:08:21SPEAKERat who's playing things I like or who's playing, if they're not playing our game, if they are,
1:08:26SPEAKERthey playing something that I like and then I'll just ping them and be like, Hey, you want to play
1:08:29SPEAKERour game together sometime? Right. And we actually had a streamer who was playing some left for dead
1:08:34SPEAKERone day and some back for blood. And she just mentioned on stream. She was like, Oh, I'd like
1:08:38SPEAKERto try the anacrusis someday. Someone told me, so I pinged her and I'm like, Hey, do you want to
1:08:42SPEAKERplay? And so then we played one week. And then the next week when we played, we actually went
1:08:46SPEAKERinto the workshop and we made her a version of her dog is a charm for her gun that you could put on.
1:08:52SPEAKERAnd so the gun charm of the Husky is hers, Hannah's dog. And just have fun like that, like embrace
1:08:59SPEAKERthat part of the community and listen to the community in the ways that they're talking about
1:09:04SPEAKERit and how they're finding out about games. But more and more, I think with the big outlets not
1:09:11SPEAKERbeing what they were and streaming being so competitive, there's this real word of mouth
1:09:18SPEAKERthing that happens that is hard to nail down that I think we are, we are in the part of, we are in
1:09:25SPEAKERthe throes of right now with the anacrusis. Like we, we have a lot of traction. Now we're getting
1:09:29SPEAKERa lot of coverage. We're getting a lot of players coming in and discovering the game. You cannot,
1:09:34SPEAKERnobody knows your game. That's true. Like just, you cannot say it enough. Nobody knows your game.
1:09:39SPEAKERNobody knows your game's out. Nobody knows what you're talking about. Like you can't talk about
1:09:43SPEAKERit enough, but where you talk about it more, you know, originally we were hoping to go to PAX.
1:09:50SPEAKERPAX East is where we were going to announce our game and we were going to get it by letting people
1:09:54SPEAKERgo hands on and have some fun playing it. And as a way to start building the community around it.
1:10:00SPEAKERAnd then they, then the little pandemic came and canceled that idea. So we did E3, our trailer at
1:10:06SPEAKERE3 was a bit rough. I thought it felt stiff. That helped and didn't help. The VGAs. Jeff Keighley
1:10:16SPEAKERgets a lot of crap from people, but Jeff Keighley actually cares about games and cares about indies
1:10:22SPEAKERa ton. If you have something interesting and exciting, he is more than willing to show that
1:10:28SPEAKERtrailer and promote it and give you a spot and do that. Like there's people try to tell me like,
1:10:32SPEAKERoh, it costs $250,000 to get on the VGAs. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. If you're an indie
1:10:37SPEAKERdeveloper working, Jeff will put you on there. If you've got something that he, that that's good to
1:10:41SPEAKERshow. He's really good about that. So it's just, you know, it's looking for those looking for like
1:10:47SPEAKERminded people and talking with them, spending the time, like spending just time making that
1:10:53SPEAKERinvestment. And then where you make that. We're, you know, I I'll go here. I'll use the example.
1:11:00SPEAKERIt's not us. Slay the Spire. Good game. I play it way too much. I got like 4,000 hours in it,
1:11:05SPEAKERbut it took off because like a Chinese streamer found it one day and started playing it.
1:11:11SPEAKERAnd then everyone else started watching that and started climbing up the charts. Like
1:11:15SPEAKERit's a who knows some days, right? I mean, you could go with a publisher and he's going to spend
1:11:19SPEAKERmoney and they're going to buy ads on PC gamer or whatever. Sure. But outside of that, it really is
1:11:26SPEAKERjust keep doing the work, keep promoting it, keep talking to people, keep working with people. And
1:11:31SPEAKERthen one of those hits. Well, and, and, and there's nobody that's too small. Like if you have a
1:11:36SPEAKERstreamer that loves your game and they have 15 people watching them or five, you know, like spend
1:11:40SPEAKERtime like the, like, like the, the, the, the path on that is, is like the, the rising tide lifts
1:11:48SPEAKERall ships. Right. So, yeah, it's, it's, you never know. Like one of those 15 viewers might know some
1:11:53SPEAKERother medium-sized streamer and then they start playing it. And I'm like this, this game, Goose,
1:11:58SPEAKERGoose Duck, that's like two years old, just like exploded because a member of BTS started streaming.
1:12:04SPEAKERYeah. The Among Us story is well known. That game was years old by the time, you know, yeah.
1:12:08SPEAKERYeah. Rocket League, Rocket League is the second rev of that game. Right? Like, yeah, there's,
1:12:14SPEAKERthere's, it's not it's, but that's part of the job I think is what Chet's trying to say is like,
1:12:18SPEAKERthat's like, the job is not just making the game. The job is also, you got to tell people about
1:12:22SPEAKERyour game. I look at, I look at like what Megan Fox did with Skatebird and, and, and how, how like
1:12:29SPEAKERpeople became aware of that because there were just a buttload of good bird gifs on the, on,
1:12:34SPEAKERon Twitter every day. Like, like you just got to figure out your thing and lean into it and,
1:12:39SPEAKERand make a game that's different than what other people are making.
1:12:42SPEAKERYeah. And that's actually the fun part of the workshop because then we get to, I, somebody made
1:12:47SPEAKERa mod the other day where Lance just piggybacks rides, whatever character you are. Like we would
1:12:53SPEAKERnever make that. That is just stupid. It's a, it's a terrible idea. It's, it's amazing though.
1:12:58SPEAKERYeah. So, but like posting pictures of that, all of a sudden people are like, wait, wait, what?
1:13:01SPEAKERWhat? What is your game? Let me check this out. Right. And so you got to do the work. You got to
1:13:06SPEAKERkeep, it's, it's a grind though, right? Like, I think grind sounds negative. I don't mean grind
1:13:11SPEAKERnegative. Thankfully we made a game that's fun to play. And so when I play it with streamers,
1:13:14SPEAKERI'm still having fun and still laughing and still seeing things I've never seen before,
1:13:18SPEAKERbut it's just like, you got to just keep putting in the work. You got to keep updating it. You
1:13:21SPEAKERgot to keep being out there and promoting it and talking with people and having fun with it. And
1:13:25SPEAKERthen, you know, hopefully it hits interesting times to be a game developer. It seems this would
1:13:30SPEAKERhave been a lot easier 10 years ago. I think there's a lot of content out there. There is just
1:13:35SPEAKERso much content out there. And I think it's, it's, it's easy to get people to say yes in the sense
1:13:41SPEAKERthat they'll try it, but to stick with it is hard. And it's so easy to say no. Like I was watching
1:13:48SPEAKERthe TV show, slow horses on Apple TV. So fine series and I'm watching it. And then all of a
1:13:55SPEAKERsudden the lead actor makes a lot of noise while eating. And I turned it off because I'm like,
1:13:59SPEAKERI got like Gary Ullman, but I really don't like eating noises. It really just something that
1:14:03SPEAKERdrives me nuts. Maybe I'll go back to the show, but also there's like 50 other shows I could
1:14:07SPEAKERwatch. So maybe I won't go back to the show. Maybe that killed it. Like maybe we have something that's
1:14:11SPEAKERlike Gary Ullman eating in our game and we just don't know it. Like, I don't know. It's just
1:14:16SPEAKERreally easy to get nos out of people because there's so much other alternative. Essentially,
1:14:21SPEAKEReverybody right now is cursed with the thing that every Valve employee knows. When you get,
1:14:25SPEAKERwhen you're at Valve and you have a Valve account and you just play every single game that comes out
1:14:28SPEAKERon Steam, it's really easy to say no and bounce off of something. And so developers, you've really
1:14:34SPEAKERgot to think like, how do we get people to just be sticky? Because you've got Game Pass out there
1:14:38SPEAKERcompeting for people's time. You have Netflix, you have Apple streaming, you have like everything's
1:14:42SPEAKERcompeting for people's time. So how do you get sticky with that? And for me, the reason why I
1:14:48SPEAKERmake co-op games is because it connects people together in a way that no other medium does.
1:14:54SPEAKERIt sounds highfalutinin weird, but I truly believe like there's a moment you have of a shared
1:15:01SPEAKERexperience with other people playing games that only the real world interaction you have with
1:15:07SPEAKERpeople replicates it. That it's that experience of having that. And to me, that is like so powerful
1:15:14SPEAKERand so great that if you could get people to have that experience where it's just not your friends
1:15:19SPEAKERplaying the game, but you meet some stranger playing Anacrusis and you become friends with
1:15:23SPEAKERthem. Like that is the thing then, that is the other medium I can beat. I can beat Netflix because
1:15:28SPEAKERyou can't do that with Netflix, right? You can't do that with a single player game. So that's the
1:15:32SPEAKERspace that we can play in and that we've got to make sure that we're doing that we can really lean
1:15:37SPEAKERinto. And so we've got to do that. And that's our job, right? And to bring that. And so it's a lot
1:15:43SPEAKERto competition out there, man. Do you have any idea how many times I heard about slow horses
1:15:48SPEAKERchewing in teams? It's been a lot. That's a good example though. It's been a lot. I resist the urge
1:15:54SPEAKERto ask about you guys being a Microsoft shop. Look, they let us add our own, you can pick an
1:15:59SPEAKERemoji from the list of all emoji, except for a couple of ones that they deem offensive rather
1:16:04SPEAKERthan just the five they limited you to for reactions. That's poor game design. Cause before
1:16:09SPEAKERI knew when someone gave me thumbs up or heart, I understood what the reaction was. But now if
1:16:13SPEAKERsomebody puts pizza after a post, I don't know what that means. I just put something after one
1:16:18SPEAKERof your posts. You know what that means? And put a lot of broccoli. So that means you like that.
1:16:25SPEAKERThat makes sense. Every I see, I see a pizza emoji. I assume that person is ready to party.
1:16:31SPEAKERYeah. All right. There you go. I was saying it's open to interpretation.
1:16:34SPEAKERFinally, we have, we have the complex worth of choices that we've always needed. Look before,
1:16:42SPEAKERbut when you, when you got before you got thumbs up, heart, smile, and surprise, you can't express,
1:16:48SPEAKERI think this is a bad idea with any of those, which is an important, maybe that's part of,
1:16:52SPEAKERanyway, maybe it's teams, his fault petition, Microsoft to put a Gary Oldman eating emoji in
1:16:56SPEAKERthere and everything. There you go. Jeff, thank you for stopping by. We'll also thank you. I've
1:17:01SPEAKERbeen trying to get you on the podcast for ages. It's been great to be here, Brad. I'm a big fan.
1:17:04SPEAKERListen to show every week. Really love me to work for a long time. It was, I mean,
1:17:08SPEAKERit was getting really dull talking to myself every week for the last three years. So yeah.
1:17:11SPEAKERWell, I'm just here to keep chatting the line. It turns out, but but yeah, he did great this week.
1:17:17SPEAKERAnd I guess, yeah. Oh, go ahead. Do you have stuff to plug jet? We usually do a plugs, man.
1:17:23SPEAKERI can plug it too. After, after, after we let you go, I've got, I've got my stream. I'm a big
1:17:28SPEAKERstreamer now. Now. So Ana Cruces is on steam. It's on X-Box. Hey, guess what? Both have returned
1:17:36SPEAKERpolicies. If you don't like it, so you can give it a try, but I think you'll like it. Join or it's
1:17:41SPEAKERon sale. If you're listening now it's on sale. Join our discord, discord.gg/straybombay. That's
1:17:45SPEAKERdiscord.gg/straybombay. But no, seriously, it's a fun community where we need to play a whole bunch
1:17:50SPEAKERof games, not just our game. But it's a really good place. If you're out playing our game to
1:17:54SPEAKERlearn about it and dig in on it and feel free to give us feedback on that. Yeah, I don't. So
1:18:01SPEAKERit's weird. Cause I walked into this with this weird feeling of like, I hear your listeners
1:18:05SPEAKERquestions and I hear like everything around it. And I think of like that we're talking to a group
1:18:10SPEAKERof people out there that I can envision more than I normally can when I talk to two people on a
1:18:16SPEAKERzoom call. And it's a crowd that I like. And I try to be like, wow, would they be interested in
1:18:22SPEAKERthis? I'm like, or is this a super boring? Should I say something really crazy about Will? I got a
1:18:27SPEAKERbunch of secrets now. It's just unleash. Could you leave us with one if you will? Will knows. I'll
1:18:34SPEAKERjust go into dad jokes. But it's terrible. Don't encourage him. I wanted to make sure like I told
1:18:40SPEAKERWill and Brad that like, let's be honest, we can talk about things. I mean, it's a small studio.
1:18:46SPEAKERIt's rough, right? It's hard. Oh, definitely. We've made mistakes along the way, but I think where we
1:18:51SPEAKERare now, like I seriously is, it sounds like a cliche, but I am more excited than ever for where
1:18:56SPEAKERwe are on the anacrusis in particular. And then the studio and the fun that we're having and that
1:19:01SPEAKERevery day, everybody in the studio, we actually start with just excitedly chatting about what's
1:19:06SPEAKERgoing on in the world and ourselves. And one of our employees bought a house just recently and
1:19:12SPEAKERscaring her off on all the horrible things that happens when you own a house.
1:19:16SPEAKERBut like, it's just, this has been really fun. And it's like that captures kind of where the
1:19:20SPEAKERanacrusis is of like the fun that it's having and people going back to it. And I'm going to play it
1:19:23SPEAKERtonight with some friends that I made on discord. So yeah, check it out. Let us know. And yeah,
1:19:31SPEAKERlet me know if I was boring in this. I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't travel
1:19:34SPEAKERback in time. Well, you've, you've, you've achieved the guest mantle now. So now we have to
1:19:39SPEAKERlet you bring you onto the discord so you can ask them yourself. Or I can come back in a year and
1:19:43SPEAKERwe can talk about the second year update and that could be better. The only time we've done that so
1:19:48SPEAKERfar is with Kishore and that was for the Rona. So I, as long as you don't kill a few million people,
1:19:52SPEAKERyou're welcome back next year chat. And that'll, that'll wrap it up for us this week. Thanks to
1:20:01SPEAKERchat for coming by. Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, didn't get into it on there, but big fan of chat
1:20:06SPEAKERfrom way back. Yeah. Perhaps in the old man Murray days, one might say so. Yeah. I remember,
1:20:12SPEAKERI remember reading old man Murray and thinking, Oh man, people on the internet are really angry
1:20:18SPEAKERall the time. And then they just kept getting angrier and angrier as time went on. Who knew
1:20:22SPEAKERparody somehow became reality. Yeah. It's it's people read all memory now and don't realize
1:20:27SPEAKERthat it was a parody site back then. But more than I'd like to think, Chad, I'd like to thank
1:20:32SPEAKERour patrons because this is a listener sponsored show. We wouldn't be here without you all.
1:20:36SPEAKERIt is true. So as always, if you would like to support the show, you can go to
1:20:40SPEAKERpatrion.com/techbot. Again, that's patrion.com/techbot. Brad, I did some experimenting with
1:20:46SPEAKERghost by the way, over the break. Oh yes. Ghost seems cool. It's ghost open source.
1:20:51SPEAKERGhost is I believe, huh? Is ghost open source? It might be. I can tell you ghost seems pretty
1:20:59SPEAKERopen in general, I guess I would say. I mean, I look, I was, I was experimenting with a hosted
1:21:03SPEAKERfree trial of ghosts to see if I wanted to move my shitty blog to it. I don't think I do, but I do
1:21:09SPEAKERthink that if people were interested and wanted to not be part of the Patreon community, it would be
1:21:13SPEAKERvery easy for us to spin up a parallel Patreon that has exactly the same rewards and benefits
1:21:18SPEAKERusing ghost. If that is a thing that people would be interested in. Yeah, I've, I've had my eye on
1:21:23SPEAKERghost. I looked at it before we launched Nextlander. It's, it's, it's kind of a more open, somewhat
1:21:29SPEAKERmore, I don't know, egalitarian, you might say, Patreon competitor. They just charge you for
1:21:34SPEAKERcredit card processing fees and they don't take a percentage. I like that a lot. It turns out.
1:21:38SPEAKERThey are quite a bit friendlier to creators, you might say, and also a publishing platform as well.
1:21:44SPEAKERYeah. Anyway, go on. But, but so if people are interested in that, please let us know in the
1:21:49SPEAKERdiscord. Cause it's something we're open to. If you, if people don't like Patreon for whatever
1:21:52SPEAKERreason. Hey, alternatives are good. Yeah. But as always, we would like to thank our executive
1:21:57SPEAKERproducer tier patrons, including Nick Johnston, Paddle Creek Games makers of Fractured Veil,
1:22:03SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, hashtag, sorry, Octothorpe Bunny Crimes brought to plus eight, pretending to be a
1:22:10SPEAKERduck. This is a bit from my Twitch discord now. Okay. I didn't know the names could be that long.
1:22:15SPEAKERWe've gone through the looking glass here. Just Wedge, Joel Krowska, Twinkle Twinkie,
1:22:20SPEAKERand James Cammack. Thank you all so, so much. We appreciate everybody who supports the tech
1:22:24SPEAKERpod Patreon. And yeah, I hope everybody enjoyed this episode. If you didn't, please let us know
1:22:32SPEAKERin the discord. We do appreciate that feedback. And you know, I'm going to start doing something
1:22:35SPEAKERthat our friend Rob Zachney over at what is a civilized age does at the end. He says, you know,
1:22:42SPEAKERif you liked the podcast, consider leaving a review, but especially if you listen to it on
1:22:46SPEAKERiTunes, cause it turns out that's the only place that podcast reviews really matter. So, you know,
1:22:52SPEAKERif you, if you want to leave a review, reviews are one of the ways that help new people find our
1:22:56SPEAKERpodcast. We do really appreciate those algorithms. You got to make them work for you. Yeah. It's
1:23:01SPEAKERlike, it's like Alexander Hamilton said algorithms. You got to make them work for you. Of course.
1:23:07SPEAKERSee you all next week.