303: Spaceships Built for Cats

00:00SPEAKERDo you ever think about what words mean sometimes, Brad?

00:03SPEAKER- I try, as someone who talks for a living, I try not to.

00:06SPEAKER- So the other day I told my daughter

00:10SPEAKERshe was having a problem with something.

00:11SPEAKERI was like, well, here's another way to do it.

00:12SPEAKERThere's more than one way to skin a cat.

00:14SPEAKER- Mm-hmm.

00:16SPEAKER- And she was like, wait, what the hell did you just say?

00:18SPEAKERWhy are you skinning cats?

00:20SPEAKER- Here we go.

00:21SPEAKERAll right, here's the gen alpha crusade

00:23SPEAKERagainst animal cruelty, I guess we're doing now.

00:25SPEAKERAll right, go ahead.

00:26SPEAKER- And then I thought about it for a minute.

00:27SPEAKERI was like, wow, that is truly a horrifying thing to say.

00:29SPEAKER- Yes, I'm done.

00:30SPEAKER- Like really and truly, why would you skin a cat, Brad?

00:33SPEAKER- Never really thought about

00:34SPEAKERwhere it came from before, actually.

00:36SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't want to skin a cat.

00:37SPEAKERI don't, like, I think this is a country thing probably.

00:41SPEAKER- Probably, I mean, that's pretty universally used

00:43SPEAKERor understood, right?

00:44SPEAKERI mean, like, you know, young people notwithstanding

00:46SPEAKERwho have just never heard it before,

00:47SPEAKERbut I always thought that was a pretty universal

00:50SPEAKERkind of idiom, right?

00:51SPEAKER- Okay, so I'm going to the Bellevue News Democrat,

00:55SPEAKERwhich is a newspaper from I don't know where,

00:58SPEAKERand it says that it's a centuries old thing

01:02SPEAKERthat people used to say.

01:04SPEAKER- Okay.

01:05SPEAKER- So from 1840 and earlier, 1678 is the first time

01:08SPEAKERthat they found a recorded version of this,

01:11SPEAKERwhich was there are more ways to kill a dog than hanging.

01:14SPEAKER- Whoa.

01:15SPEAKER- This is-

01:15SPEAKER- Good God, man.

01:17SPEAKERI'm not going to make any more flip jokes

01:18SPEAKERabout animal cruelty, actually.

01:21SPEAKER- Well, I wonder if they were talking about

01:22SPEAKERlike a scurvy sea dog at that point in 1678.

01:26SPEAKER- Okay, well, those guys just have it coming.

01:27SPEAKER- Yeah, look, this is, there's a lot going on here.

01:32SPEAKERI feel like this is dangerously close

01:34SPEAKERto an old Saturday Night Live bit from like 1977 or '78.

01:37SPEAKER- Sure.

01:38SPEAKER- But yeah, so anyway, I'm not allowed to say

01:41SPEAKERthere's more than one way to skin a cat now.

01:43SPEAKER- That's probably for the best.

01:44SPEAKERAlso, especially given the nature and the star and roles

01:47SPEAKERof the game that we're about to talk about on this podcast.

01:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

01:51SPEAKER- Maybe we should be nice to cats.

01:53SPEAKER- I think the cats are okay, man.

01:57SPEAKER(upbeat music)

02:23SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

02:25SPEAKERI'm Will.

02:26SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

02:27SPEAKER- Hello, Brad.

02:28SPEAKER- Hi, thanks for having me.

02:30SPEAKER- No, no, you're the host.

02:32SPEAKERWe do this every week.

02:33SPEAKERThis is the 303rd episode of the show.

02:35SPEAKER- So much pressure, so much pressure.

02:37SPEAKER- I'm super stoked about this episode of the show.

02:39SPEAKERIt has been in the works for months at this point.

02:44SPEAKER- Since before the game in question came out, actually.

02:46SPEAKERI think I went back and looked and late March

02:48SPEAKERwas the first email that arrived in my inbox

02:50SPEAKERabout this possibility.

02:52SPEAKER- And then you served your civic duty

02:55SPEAKERand some of them served their civic duty.

02:57SPEAKER- There were two other instances of near jury duty

02:59SPEAKERin the middle of this and multiple instances

03:01SPEAKERof people being out of town.

03:02SPEAKERSo modern scheduling is hard.

03:05SPEAKERPeople are busy.

03:06SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

03:07SPEAKER- But we finally, finally got all four of us together

03:09SPEAKERto do this podcast and I'm very happy we did.

03:12SPEAKER- Yeah, so we are talking to the folks from Blendo Games,

03:16SPEAKERtwo of the folks from Blendo Games who made "Skin Deep".

03:19SPEAKER"Skin Deep", if you don't know, is a game

03:21SPEAKERabout rescuing cats from pirates on spaceships.

03:25SPEAKER- Space pirates and space cats.

03:26SPEAKER- I mean, some of the cats are scuba diving cats.

03:28SPEAKERThe cats are, there's a variety of different types of cats.

03:30SPEAKERThey are in space, but they, I think they would identify

03:34SPEAKERas other types of cats.

03:35SPEAKER- Yes, probably so.

03:36SPEAKERNow, the real claim to fame to me about Blendo Games

03:39SPEAKERis that the last, I think, four games in a row

03:41SPEAKERthat they have shipped have been on open source

03:43SPEAKERid software engines.

03:45SPEAKERThey did, I think it was "30 Flights of Loving"

03:47SPEAKERand "Gravity Bone" shipped on the Quake 2 engine.

03:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

03:50SPEAKER- They were recently "Quadrilateral Cowboy"

03:52SPEAKERand now "Skin Deep" shipped on Doom 3.

03:54SPEAKERSo perfect fire, you might say, for a tech pod episode.

03:59SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, this was the podcast episode

04:01SPEAKERwe were born to record, baby.

04:04SPEAKERNo, it's, I interviewed Brendan years ago

04:06SPEAKERat XOXO in VR for the "Fu" show,

04:10SPEAKERand we talked about "Quadcow" when it was coming out,

04:12SPEAKERwhich tells you how long ago "Quadcow" came out.

04:16SPEAKERAnd they have a fascinating approach

04:18SPEAKERto game development at Blendo.

04:19SPEAKERSo we were stoked to bring them in here

04:21SPEAKERand have a chat about, well, I guess "Skin Deep"

04:26SPEAKERopen source engines, id tech.

04:29SPEAKER- Working at EA in the 2000s.

04:32SPEAKER- Yeah, shout out to this habitor, man.

04:33SPEAKERI was so stoked about that game, and it got done dirty, but-

04:37SPEAKER- Video game toilets, all kinds of stuff in here.

04:39SPEAKER- So we're joined today by Brendan Chung

04:41SPEAKERand Sanjay Madhav from, well, who worked on "Skin Deep"

04:45SPEAKERfor Blendo Games.

04:46SPEAKERWelcome to the show, guys.

04:47SPEAKER(upbeat music)

04:50SPEAKERSo I guess let's start with the broadest question,

04:51SPEAKERand I guess I'm gonna split this into two questions,

04:54SPEAKERbut really it's why open source as a game development model?

04:58SPEAKERBut before we get to why id tech,

04:59SPEAKERwhy don't we just start with the broad open source part?

05:03SPEAKERAre there financial, creative, technical considerations,

05:06SPEAKERall of the above?

05:07SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a little bit of everything.

05:10SPEAKERYeah, so I'll use id tech four for "Skin Deep,"

05:12SPEAKERand there's different elements of it.

05:16SPEAKERPart of it is just like,

05:17SPEAKERI personally have been using id software engines

05:21SPEAKERsince like the mid '90s with like "Doom" and "Quake"

05:24SPEAKERand "Half-Life," things like that.

05:27SPEAKERAnd like all the engines kind of build on top of each other,

05:30SPEAKERso it just can make sense to just use

05:32SPEAKERwhat you've been using for a while and know really well.

05:37SPEAKERBut also like the engine is built

05:42SPEAKERjust for first-person shooters.

05:45SPEAKERLike it doesn't do anything else.

05:47SPEAKERIt does first-person shooters and does a great job at it.

05:51SPEAKERAnd so there's something really nice about using tech

05:55SPEAKERthat's just like laser focused,

05:56SPEAKERdoing one specific thing and doing it well, which is great.

06:03SPEAKERBut yeah, for the open source specifically,

06:05SPEAKERwe did use a source port called D-H-E-W-M-3,

06:10SPEAKERD-H-E-W-M-3, and it has like a billion fantastic fixes

06:16SPEAKERand improvements and like quality of life stuff in it

06:19SPEAKERthat we benefited hugely from.

06:22SPEAKER- So is it a, if you had to specify,

06:26SPEAKERit seems like it's an artistic choice at this point.

06:29SPEAKERThere's benefits to using the open source engine

06:31SPEAKERthat you're not paying royalties to Epic or Unity

06:33SPEAKERor whoever, right?

06:34SPEAKERBut it seems like it's much more about,

06:37SPEAKER"Hey, this is the kind of stripped down Camaro

06:42SPEAKERof first-person shooter,

06:44SPEAKERthe 60s era Camaro of first-person shooter engines."

06:47SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a very lean piece of tech.

06:50SPEAKERI mean, Sanjay messed around with the guts

06:51SPEAKERway more than I did,

06:52SPEAKERbut like it's built to do a specific thing,

06:55SPEAKERwhich is make first-person shooter environments

06:58SPEAKERfor you to walk around in and do first-person stuff.

07:02SPEAKERAnd there's something nice about that,

07:03SPEAKERjust being like really good at doing that

07:05SPEAKERas opposed to just being like kind of generally good

07:07SPEAKERat a wide variety of different games.

07:10SPEAKER- Longtime listeners from before this podcast,

07:13SPEAKERBrendan, you and I talked a decade ago

07:17SPEAKERin my VR talk show about your last game,

07:20SPEAKERQuadrilateral Cowboy.

07:22SPEAKERAnd part of that process was you sending over

07:24SPEAKERa bunch of assets from the game for us

07:26SPEAKERto build an environment so that we could talk in VR

07:28SPEAKERabout the game and pick up stuff and look at it.

07:31SPEAKERAnd it was shocking to us coming from moving Unity games

07:37SPEAKERand Unreal games and all that stuff,

07:38SPEAKERhow straightforward and simple like the actual assets were,

07:42SPEAKERlike the models, the assets, the materials,

07:44SPEAKERall of that just kind of, you know, there wasn't,

07:48SPEAKERwe didn't have to port a bunch of shaders over to Unity

07:50SPEAKERto get this to work, it was really nice.

07:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so id Software historically in the past

07:58SPEAKERhas been very adamant about making their games

08:01SPEAKERextremely moddable and about being editable

08:04SPEAKERby normal people.

08:07SPEAKERAnd I feel Doom 3 is kind of like, at least in my opinion,

08:11SPEAKERkind of like the culmination of all of those efforts,

08:12SPEAKER'cause like all their files are text files,

08:16SPEAKERyou just open them up and it's just human readable files.

08:19SPEAKERAll their map files are just things you can open up

08:22SPEAKERand just edit and peek at how id Software implemented

08:26SPEAKERtheir stuff and their levels.

08:29SPEAKERIt's just built to be edited.

08:31SPEAKERLike they have a bunch of modding tools inside the engine

08:36SPEAKERfor people to make content like very easily

08:39SPEAKERand quickly with it.

08:41SPEAKERAnd so there's just something really nice about, you know,

08:43SPEAKERtech that's built for people to open up and explore

08:46SPEAKERand dig around the guts.

08:49SPEAKERAnd like it kind of follows with their open source

08:52SPEAKERphilosophy of releasing their engines

08:55SPEAKERand making them available for people to mess with

08:58SPEAKERand release commercial projects with

09:00SPEAKERand something like beautiful about that, I think.

09:04SPEAKER- I think your path through id engines

09:06SPEAKERfor commercial releases in particular was,

09:08SPEAKERI think you shipped two games on Quake 2

09:10SPEAKERbefore you moved to Doom 3 and you've now got,

09:12SPEAKERand also I apologize,

09:13SPEAKERI'm just going to use the id Software names

09:15SPEAKERand not the id Tech 3 and 4

09:17SPEAKERbecause I can't keep all that stuff straight.

09:19SPEAKERAs somebody who played a lot of Quake in the nineties,

09:21SPEAKERbut what triggered the switch from Quake 2 to Doom 3?

09:24SPEAKERBecause I think Doom 3 opened source already at that point,

09:28SPEAKERor maybe it was actually,

09:29SPEAKERmaybe that open source release was just around that time.

09:32SPEAKERBut like what finally made you say, all right,

09:34SPEAKERI'm going to move on to kind of the next big milestone

09:36SPEAKERin their tech progression.

09:37SPEAKER- Yeah, so Doom 3, the Doom 3 engine

09:40SPEAKERhas a bunch of things inside it

09:44SPEAKERthat are extremely suitable for like sci-fi stuff.

09:51SPEAKEROne of the big things in Doom 3 was their GUI system,

09:55SPEAKERwhich was these computer screens where you can-

09:59SPEAKER- Yes, immediately, as a big Doom 3 defender

10:04SPEAKERat the time of release, the diegetic computer interfaces,

10:07SPEAKERlike they just walk up and use a computer in the world stuff

10:10SPEAKERimmediately leapt out at me in skin deep.

10:13SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

10:14SPEAKERAnd when I saw that back when Doom 3 first came out,

10:18SPEAKERI thought, oh my God, this is an incredible feature.

10:20SPEAKEREvery game is going to copy this.

10:21SPEAKERAnd then not, I don't know,

10:23SPEAKERit didn't take off as I thought it would.

10:26SPEAKERBut you still see it here and there.

10:27SPEAKERLike I think Prey most recently had a interface

10:30SPEAKERthat was extremely similar to it.

10:31SPEAKERBut yeah, there's just like certain sci-fi stuff

10:33SPEAKERthat Doom 3 had, like they also had like the vacuum

10:36SPEAKERof outer space in that game when you walk outside.

10:41SPEAKERSo they had a bunch of like built-in tech.

10:44SPEAKER- I guess there were kind of external sequences

10:46SPEAKERlike on Mars, right, in that game?

10:47SPEAKEROh, so were you guys building the vacuum system

10:49SPEAKERin skin deep on what was already there

10:51SPEAKERor for those Mars sequences?

10:52SPEAKERInteresting, I had forgotten about that.

10:53SPEAKER- Yeah, so Doom 3 could walk on the surface of Mars.

10:56SPEAKERAnd during that time there's a vacuum of no oxygen

10:58SPEAKERand your oxygen meter goes down.

11:00SPEAKERAnd so it kind of piggybacked on top of that technology

11:03SPEAKERfor skin deep to be outer space.

11:06SPEAKER- One of the, you added zero G though, right?

11:08SPEAKERI don't remember, I didn't remember zero G.

11:09SPEAKERIt's been a long time since I played Doom 3,

11:11SPEAKERso I could be wrong.

11:13SPEAKERBut like zero G movement is kind of one of those third rails

11:18SPEAKERfor every studio I've ever worked at.

11:21SPEAKEREverybody's like, man, we gotta do a zero G level.

11:23SPEAKERAnd then you prototype the zero G level

11:26SPEAKERand you're like, oh God, no, we can't do this.

11:28SPEAKERThis is a nightmare.

11:29SPEAKERNobody's gonna know how to control this.

11:30SPEAKERAnd even games that do it very well,

11:32SPEAKERlike Outer Wilds comes to mind as something

11:34SPEAKERthat is like a really good implementation of that

11:36SPEAKERor Kerbal or whatever.

11:38SPEAKERIt still is a high barrier to entry.

11:40SPEAKERHow did you all get to the system that you have in the game

11:43SPEAKERand like what was the process like getting that,

11:47SPEAKERlike building that out?

11:48SPEAKERYeah, it was, so Skindeep is kind of intended

11:52SPEAKERto be an immersive sim, which is like, you know,

11:56SPEAKERthe nerdiest first person shooter genre you can think of,

11:59SPEAKERbut we also want it to be like more accessible

12:03SPEAKERand not as like difficult to get into

12:07SPEAKERas some other more like more complex games.

12:10SPEAKERSo for zero G, that was like one of the big questions,

12:12SPEAKERlike how do we, we're doing a space game,

12:14SPEAKERtakes place in outer space.

12:14SPEAKERSo we feel like we need to let the player

12:17SPEAKERlike go to outer space, but how do we make that

12:19SPEAKERsomething accessible and, you know,

12:21SPEAKERnot a shelf moment for people.

12:25SPEAKERSo we looked at a bunch of different games

12:27SPEAKERto see how they did it.

12:28SPEAKERAnd we chose to just try to go with the approach

12:31SPEAKERthat got like the spirit of it

12:34SPEAKERand the energy of going to outer space,

12:36SPEAKERbut kept it as, you know, simple

12:40SPEAKERand easy to get into as possible.

12:45SPEAKERSo we made some intentional choices to like,

12:47SPEAKERto not roll the camera ever.

12:51SPEAKERYou're just always ramrod straight up

12:54SPEAKERand just kind of like levitating around.

12:57SPEAKERWe control like how,

13:03SPEAKERI think for a while we had,

13:05SPEAKERwe simulated the player just like moving forever

13:08SPEAKERin outer space, like real logic does.

13:11SPEAKERAnd that kind of like felt difficult to get into.

13:13SPEAKERIt's such a alien experience to just like

13:17SPEAKERshoot forward like a bullet all the time.

13:19SPEAKERAnd so we kind of kept iterating and tweaking it,

13:22SPEAKERdo play tests until we found something

13:24SPEAKERthat was pretty accessible that we felt players could enjoy.

13:27SPEAKER- I think also it was helpful that we kind of set it up

13:31SPEAKERso that you can't run out of oxygen.

13:34SPEAKER'Cause I think a lot of times, like either

13:36SPEAKERthere's like some sort of like space suit

13:38SPEAKERand you have like an oxygen tank

13:40SPEAKERand you're like worried about that.

13:41SPEAKERAnd we made like the choice of like,

13:43SPEAKERwell, you have an iron lung, so it just works.

13:45SPEAKERAnd I think that also just makes it more accessible

13:49SPEAKERfor the players.

13:50SPEAKERAnd we kind of spent a good chunk of time

13:52SPEAKERlike making it fun when like the enemies

13:55SPEAKERget sucked down into space and stuff like that.

13:57SPEAKERAnd then we had other problems like, well, okay,

13:59SPEAKERwell then what happens if an important key

14:01SPEAKERgets sucked down into the space?

14:03SPEAKERAnd that's why we incorporated like that lost

14:05SPEAKERand found machine and stuff like that.

14:07SPEAKER- Yeah.

14:08SPEAKER- There are a lot of concessions to playability

14:10SPEAKERI find in this game.

14:11SPEAKER- I mean, you guys put out this mod museum

14:13SPEAKERthat gets into not just technical stuff,

14:16SPEAKERyou show off scripting and lighting and so forth,

14:18SPEAKERbut also a lot of design decisions you made

14:20SPEAKERabout like the clamor system and what height can you

14:23SPEAKERand can you not waste yourself up onto?

14:25SPEAKERLike, should we standardize those and everything?

14:27SPEAKERAnd like, it seems like you guys really

14:29SPEAKERin just about every case lean toward

14:31SPEAKERwhat is going to be more fun and playable

14:33SPEAKERversus what's gonna be more realistic

14:34SPEAKEReven though this genre has the word simulation in it.

14:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

14:39SPEAKERIt's always a matter of like, what are players

14:42SPEAKERfinding challenging in the game?

14:44SPEAKERAnd is that thing supposed to be challenging

14:46SPEAKERor was it accidentally challenging?

14:48SPEAKERAnd like, it'll all play test from like,

14:50SPEAKERoh, players are getting stuck in this thing.

14:51SPEAKERAnd like, that's not really meant to be a point of friction.

14:54SPEAKERSo we just kind of keep honing it down

14:57SPEAKERif anything that works.

14:59SPEAKER- I was just saying, you mentioned in one of,

15:01SPEAKEReither in an interview or blog post,

15:02SPEAKERI don't remember which, Mark of the Ninja,

15:03SPEAKERwhich is one of my all time favorite example games

15:07SPEAKERbecause it is like, I was bad at playing stealth games.

15:10SPEAKERSo, you know, I had bounced off of all those 90s

15:12SPEAKERstealth games like Thief and the early Deus Ex even

15:15SPEAKERbecause I didn't understand how stealth worked

15:18SPEAKERin video games.

15:18SPEAKERI was trying to play them like real life

15:20SPEAKERand having a game that visualized those systems

15:23SPEAKERwas really like, opened that whole genre up for me.

15:27SPEAKERLike, was that an inspiration here for this

15:30SPEAKERto kind of open up in Sims a little bit?

15:32SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely.

15:33SPEAKERIt was inspiration on multiple levels, Mark of the Ninja.

15:38SPEAKERThey are, in my opinion, the best in the biz

15:42SPEAKERat like making it clear what is going on right now.

15:46SPEAKERLike you said, like they visualize every view cone.

15:48SPEAKERThey visualize every like sound you make.

15:50SPEAKERThere is no like ambiguity of what's going on.

15:53SPEAKERSo when something happens, you know exactly

15:56SPEAKERwhy that happened.

15:58SPEAKERI think it's really, you know, world-class stuff.

16:01SPEAKERThe other thing that we borrowed from Mark of the Ninja

16:06SPEAKERwas their AI system or their approach to AI.

16:13SPEAKERThey released a write-up on how their AI system works.

16:19SPEAKERAnd we took that same approach for Skin Deep.

16:23SPEAKERIt's a concept of kind of like

16:25SPEAKERwhen something happens in the world,

16:27SPEAKERit kind of drops a little like invisible node

16:30SPEAKERand that node will be like a point of interest for bad guys.

16:34SPEAKERLet's say you sneeze, a door opens, you flush a toilet.

16:39SPEAKERAnd then it's all about kind of managing

16:42SPEAKERa bad guy notices a node.

16:44SPEAKERThey see it or they hear it or they're close to it

16:47SPEAKERand they'll go investigate it.

16:49SPEAKERAnd then after some timer expires, the node will disappear.

16:52SPEAKERAnd so it's a very like elegant, clean approach to doing AI.

16:57SPEAKERAnd it's what they did for Mark of the Ninja.

16:59SPEAKERAnd when I read the write-up, I thought,

17:01SPEAKERoh, this is like a very clean way to do it of a very complex,

17:06SPEAKERkind of like creates a lot of interesting,

17:08SPEAKERcomplex behaviors through a very simple system.

17:11SPEAKER- It makes the game really readable,

17:12SPEAKERlike that plus the UI elements you pop up.

17:14SPEAKER'Cause like, unlike a lot of games where you make a noise

17:17SPEAKERand then a bunch of people come over and investigate it

17:19SPEAKERand you're like, why are all these guys here?

17:21SPEAKERThere's a thing that says, you know,

17:23SPEAKERa sound object pops up in the world

17:26SPEAKERthat you can actually see and understand what's happening,

17:29SPEAKERwhich I think is really helpful.

17:31SPEAKER- Yeah, like I grew up playing thief

17:33SPEAKERand I love thief so much,

17:35SPEAKERbut there is like definitely this ambiguity that it has.

17:38SPEAKERThat's part of the challenge that we kind of did not intend

17:40SPEAKERto be a challenge for skin deep.

17:43SPEAKER- So back to the engine, I know, you know,

17:46SPEAKERDoom 3 obviously had a lot of functionality

17:49SPEAKERbuilt into it already.

17:50SPEAKERAnd then Doom 3, obviously, like you said,

17:52SPEAKERhas a lot of fixes and stuff too,

17:53SPEAKERbut how much, how many enhancements did you guys add

17:56SPEAKERin terms of either brand new features or systems

17:59SPEAKERor like enhancements to, I know,

18:00SPEAKERI think the mod museum mentioned some changes

18:02SPEAKERto the renderer and stuff.

18:03SPEAKERLike what were some, what were some of the bigger things

18:05SPEAKERthat you guys added yourselves?

18:07SPEAKER- So there was, there was a lot.

18:10SPEAKERI think one thing also I wanted to mention is like,

18:12SPEAKERbig shout out definitely to Daniel and the Doom 3 people,

18:16SPEAKERbecause one of the great benefits of open source,

18:19SPEAKERI think is like, you have a great community of like people

18:21SPEAKERwilling to like help out and pitch in and stuff,

18:24SPEAKERwhether it's the editor we use, Dark Radiant,

18:29SPEAKERwas open source, right?

18:31SPEAKERAnd then also Doom 3, like one of the fun things

18:33SPEAKERwas just that we released the demo

18:35SPEAKERand we released the source code for the demo.

18:37SPEAKERAnd then like within a day, Daniel from Doom 3 was like,

18:40SPEAKERokay, I got it working on Linux.

18:42SPEAKERIt's like, okay, cool.

18:43SPEAKERLike we don't have the bandwidth

18:44SPEAKERto support officially a Linux version,

18:46SPEAKERbut there's a community supported Linux version.

18:50SPEAKERThey actually found bugs in the code

18:52SPEAKERthat we actually integrated

18:54SPEAKERbecause there were actually bugs on all the platforms,

18:56SPEAKERnot just on our platform PC, right?

19:00SPEAKERSo definitely like there's that great,

19:01SPEAKERlike sort of support, I think that, you know,

19:05SPEAKERit's going to be harder to get,

19:06SPEAKERlike if you're doing Unity or Unreal or something like that.

19:10SPEAKERAnd then in terms of the changes we made,

19:12SPEAKERso before I got into the project,

19:16SPEAKERSuzanne, who's a great designer and programmer as well,

19:20SPEAKERdid a lot of work with the lighting system,

19:24SPEAKERspecifically like our light meter and things like that

19:27SPEAKERto detect whether we're in the shadow or the light.

19:30SPEAKERSo there were a lot of changes like early on even, I think,

19:33SPEAKERthat just support like kind of the design that we wanted.

19:37SPEAKERAnd then later it kind of,

19:40SPEAKERwe reached a point where we sort of ran into limitations

19:44SPEAKERwith like what we could do visually

19:46SPEAKERwith the built-in original Doom 3 graphics system.

19:52SPEAKERYou know, it's so old that it's like

19:53SPEAKERthe shaders are written in assembly language, right?

19:57SPEAKERWhich was, that was a fun like day one or week one

20:00SPEAKERwhen Brendan was like,

20:01SPEAKERoh, like we want a desaturation effect,

20:03SPEAKERwhich I don't even know

20:04SPEAKERif we actually use that in the game anymore, really, but.

20:07SPEAKER- A little bit. - A little bit.

20:09SPEAKERAnd we want a desaturation but I was like,

20:10SPEAKERokay, I'll open up some shaders.

20:12SPEAKERAnd then I was like, where are the shaders?

20:14SPEAKERLike, oh, they're these assembly files, like, okay.

20:17SPEAKERThis will be interesting.

20:18SPEAKERAnd I found some just random,

20:20SPEAKERluckily someone had made like a one page PDF cheat sheet

20:23SPEAKERfor shader assembly, shader ARB.

20:26SPEAKERAnd I was like, okay, this is helpful.

20:27SPEAKERAnd then I kind of just had to work through like,

20:30SPEAKERokay, how do I actually like do this desaturation?

20:34SPEAKERSo eventually we reached a point

20:35SPEAKERwhere we wanted something just like,

20:37SPEAKERso a modern game, very simple.

20:39SPEAKERI mean, it's the outline effect

20:41SPEAKERwhen you move your reticle over

20:45SPEAKERsomething you can interact with, right?

20:46SPEAKERIt shows an outline.

20:47SPEAKERAnd that basically was going to be impossible to do

20:53SPEAKERin the existing Doom 3 graphics system

20:56SPEAKERbecause of limitations of how like that whole,

20:59SPEAKERlike older shader assembly model worked.

21:03SPEAKERSo at some point we kind of decided

21:06SPEAKERthat really to be able to implement the stuff

21:08SPEAKERthat we wanted to implement,

21:09SPEAKERwe would need to update or modernize the rendering system.

21:14SPEAKERSo by modernizing,

21:16SPEAKERwe kind of went from like a circa 2003 rendering

21:19SPEAKERto like circa 2015, let's say, rendering.

21:24SPEAKERSo maybe we added 10 years on.

21:25SPEAKERSo the big thing was we switched to GLSL,

21:28SPEAKERwhich is like the newer OpenGL shaders.

21:32SPEAKERAnd so that required quite a bit of work

21:36SPEAKERto sort of port over getting all the existing systems

21:40SPEAKERto work, to render properly.

21:43SPEAKERI actually wrote like a script

21:45SPEAKERthat just like converted the assembly

21:47SPEAKERinto the equivalent GLSL.

21:52SPEAKERAnd so we kind of worked through that and got that working.

21:56SPEAKERAnd that was kind of unlocked the ability

21:59SPEAKERto do a lot more post-process effects

22:01SPEAKERthat we couldn't do before.

22:03SPEAKERAnd then also an unexpected bonus

22:05SPEAKERwas that we suddenly had Steam Deck support

22:08SPEAKERbecause prior to that, when you ran the game on Steam Deck,

22:13SPEAKERyou could hear the game running

22:14SPEAKERand you could quote unquote play the game,

22:16SPEAKERbut the screen was black

22:17SPEAKERbecause the Steam Deck's drivers don't support

22:23SPEAKER25 year old shader assembly, right?

22:26SPEAKERSo it turned out, we're like,

22:27SPEAKERoh, the Steam Deck works now, this is great.

22:29SPEAKERAnd then we were able to get Steam Deck verified

22:31SPEAKERand all that, right?

22:32SPEAKERSo that was a great bonus from that.

22:35SPEAKERSo that's like one example.

22:36SPEAKERAnother example is, we wanted to localize

22:40SPEAKERto other languages with like Chinese, Japanese, et cetera.

22:45SPEAKERThe original Doom 3 was only designed

22:47SPEAKERto support basically Western languages.

22:50SPEAKERSo you could support like the romance languages,

22:54SPEAKERGerman, English, and a couple of others,

22:57SPEAKERbut like you were limited to only what's extended ASCII.

23:02SPEAKERSo you couldn't do like Polish or Turkish or Chinese

23:05SPEAKERor all those other languages that we did.

23:07SPEAKERAnd for that, what we ended up doing

23:10SPEAKERwas actually because the Doom 3 BFG engine

23:14SPEAKERis also open source.

23:16SPEAKERAnd we were actually able to bring over

23:18SPEAKERtheir support for Unicode

23:21SPEAKERand the new font system that they used to BFG,

23:25SPEAKERwhich turned out was the same font system as Rage.

23:28SPEAKERAnd we actually got from the Rage mod tools,

23:31SPEAKERthe program that lets you like import a true type font

23:35SPEAKERinto the Doom or like into the BFG, the EdTech 4,

23:40SPEAKERI think probably technically font format.

23:43SPEAKERSo those are like some examples of things

23:45SPEAKERthat we had to sort of modernize.

23:47SPEAKERAlso adding like a controller support,

23:49SPEAKERwhich we in part took just from quad cow

23:52SPEAKER'cause we had controller support on that as well.

23:54SPEAKERSo there were a lot of things that we actually had to fix

23:58SPEAKERor improve or advance.

24:01SPEAKERAnd I guess, yeah, maybe it also leads to another question,

24:04SPEAKERwhich is like, well, why did you decide to do Doom 3

24:07SPEAKERand not Doom 3 BFG?

24:10SPEAKERAnd I think the main reason is,

24:14SPEAKERBrian, you can correct me if I'm wrong,

24:15SPEAKERbut the main reason is that in Doom 3 BFG,

24:18SPEAKERthe user interfaces, instead of being these nice

24:22SPEAKERlike text files that are human readable,

24:24SPEAKERyou can edit them, mod them.

24:26SPEAKERThey were all based on Scaleform,

24:28SPEAKERwhich was like, you might remember it was like popular

24:31SPEAKERabout 10, 15 years ago.

24:32SPEAKERIt was like a way to get flash-based UIs into your game.

24:36SPEAKERWell, it turns out like Autodesk bought them

24:38SPEAKERand they don't release Scaleform anymore.

24:41SPEAKERAnd so there wasn't actually even a way for us

24:43SPEAKERto like make new UIs or anything like that.

24:46SPEAKERThat was, I think the main limitation.

24:48SPEAKERThere were other things too, I think,

24:49SPEAKERwhere in BFG stuff wasn't as easy to mod.

24:55SPEAKERThere would have been a benefit of that,

24:56SPEAKERwhich is BFG does have a much more updated renderer.

24:59SPEAKERLike it's a circa 2015 one,

25:02SPEAKERbut because we had made so many other changes,

25:06SPEAKERlike it wasn't viable for us to just be like,

25:07SPEAKERlet's bring that over.

25:09SPEAKERAnd it was better to just like kind of build from what we have.

25:12SPEAKER- The Doom 3 BFG was the commercial re-release

25:14SPEAKERthat Bethesda did, right?

25:16SPEAKERIs that open source as well?

25:17SPEAKERI didn't realize.

25:18SPEAKER- Yeah, it is.

25:19SPEAKER- Okay.

25:20SPEAKERIs that because the original game was released GPL'd

25:24SPEAKERand so they had to also open source BFG.

25:26SPEAKERDo you have any idea if that was mandatory on their part?

25:29SPEAKER- No, it wouldn't be mandatory

25:32SPEAKERbecause they're the license holders

25:33SPEAKERso they can choose to release it.

25:36SPEAKERLike they could choose to like do whatever they want

25:41SPEAKERto do with it.

25:43SPEAKERSo yeah, so it was, I think it was just id software

25:48SPEAKERat the time still wanted to open source things

25:51SPEAKERas opposed to like they were legally required to.

25:53SPEAKERUnfortunately, it doesn't seem like they're really

25:57SPEAKERdoing that anymore.

25:57SPEAKERI don't even know if they really support mod tools much

26:00SPEAKERfor like, let's say Doom Dark Ages

26:02SPEAKERand stuff like that, unfortunately.

26:04SPEAKER- I mean, it sounds like you guys did a lot of foundational

26:06SPEAKERor pretty low level work though

26:07SPEAKERon the code base you were working with.

26:09SPEAKERAre you aware of any of that functionality

26:10SPEAKERthat was backported into the Doom 3 source port

26:13SPEAKERand have they taken any of your stuff back in?

26:16SPEAKER- Oh.

26:17SPEAKER- So I think generally they don't accept changes.

26:21SPEAKERLike id does not accept changes on that repo.

26:24SPEAKERIt's kind of just--

26:25SPEAKER- Oh sorry, I'm sorry.

26:26SPEAKERI'm in, but this is where the name of the source port

26:28SPEAKERgets confusing.

26:29SPEAKERI'm in Doom 3.

26:31SPEAKER- I think there were a few.

26:32SPEAKERLike we did go back and forth.

26:33SPEAKERWe actually, you know, I think there's some things

26:36SPEAKERthat they kind of did incorporate to some extent,

26:42SPEAKERbut we made also so many just like changes

26:45SPEAKERwhere it's like, it's not really necessary

26:48SPEAKERfor what they're trying to do,

26:49SPEAKERwhich is just trying to make like a, you know,

26:52SPEAKERbeing able to play Doom 3 on modern hardware

26:56SPEAKERis kind of their intent, right?

26:58SPEAKERSo I don't know that there was a lot that we put in.

27:04SPEAKERThere were definitely some things that they added

27:07SPEAKERto their port that was very useful for us though, for sure.

27:11SPEAKER- One of the big questions I have looking at a game

27:13SPEAKERthat's, you know, an engine that's 20 years old essentially

27:17SPEAKERis how does this interact with modern tool chain stuff?

27:21SPEAKERLike, you know, are you using Perforce

27:23SPEAKERand do you have like, do you have build servers

27:27SPEAKERthat are running on modern cloud infrastructures

27:29SPEAKERand stuff like that?

27:30SPEAKEROr is one of the benefits of using old tech

27:32SPEAKERthat a lot of that stuff is just a lot easier these days?

27:35SPEAKER- So for source control, I mean,

27:39SPEAKERwe could have used Perforce,

27:40SPEAKERbut we use SVN just because it's free, right?

27:45SPEAKEROr, and it doesn't, like Perforce is expensive,

27:49SPEAKERbut in terms of like, I guess,

27:52SPEAKERso we use like Blender, I think to make all the art.

27:55SPEAKERSo it's not like we had to use some special

27:58SPEAKERlike Doom 3 era art tool.

28:01SPEAKERSo, you know, people have made exporters for Blender.

28:03SPEAKERSo we had to make maybe some modifications

28:06SPEAKERand Brendan's also really good about writing tools

28:09SPEAKERfor things, so like in the question of like,

28:11SPEAKERhow do you make new builds?

28:12SPEAKERLike Brendan has this Blendo build machine

28:15SPEAKERthat has been used on prior projects.

28:17SPEAKERThere's actually a blog write-up,

28:18SPEAKERI think you did about it too.

28:21SPEAKERSo, we kind of had an infrastructure

28:23SPEAKERfor building generally in development

28:26SPEAKERbecause, you know, compared to let's say Unreal Engine,

28:30SPEAKERwhere if you need to build the engine from source,

28:32SPEAKERit's like 45 minutes to an hour on a good machine

28:35SPEAKERand on a weaker machine, it can take a really long time.

28:39SPEAKERLike our game maybe took like five to 10 minutes

28:41SPEAKERto rebuild all.

28:43SPEAKERSo we actually, in development, most of the developers

28:46SPEAKERjust built locally.

28:47SPEAKERSo we didn't have to worry about like,

28:49SPEAKERso that is like sort of an advantage in that sense

28:53SPEAKERthat, you know, and also I think it's also

28:55SPEAKERjust worth mentioning is one of the benefits

28:58SPEAKERof using older tech was just that, like we didn't,

29:01SPEAKERlike the developers didn't need some insane,

29:04SPEAKERpowerful machine to be able to run the engine.

29:06SPEAKERWhereas if you make the game in Unreal,

29:08SPEAKERit can be painful unless like you have a lot of RAM

29:11SPEAKERand SSD space and all this other stuff.

29:15SPEAKERSo there is sort of the benefit in that sense,

29:18SPEAKERbut yeah, I mean, we were largely able to use

29:21SPEAKERlike more modern tools and in many cases,

29:24SPEAKERright tooling as needed.

29:26SPEAKERLike I think Brandon also wrote one

29:28SPEAKERto like handle the localization and all these other things.

29:32SPEAKERSo I think also just like getting back

29:35SPEAKERto the tech space format means that it's not

29:38SPEAKERlike intractable to write more tools

29:41SPEAKERbecause you don't have to like read in some random

29:44SPEAKERproprietary binary file and start working from it.

29:47SPEAKERIt's just text, so you can write Python or C#

29:50SPEAKERor whatever you want to do and mess with it.

29:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

29:54SPEAKER- When you're talking like, oh, sorry, Brandon, go ahead.

29:56SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say that like,

29:58SPEAKERI built a bunch of small, tiny C# tools

30:01SPEAKERfor the game development for Loak and for building the game.

30:05SPEAKERAnd just whenever there's any kind of like,

30:11SPEAKERprocess we need to do that required a bunch of clicks,

30:14SPEAKERyou could just make a small tool to just automate it,

30:17SPEAKERto do the same thing reliably every single time.

30:20SPEAKERAnd for our skin deep, it was just, you know,

30:22SPEAKERmaking a bunch of bespoke tools that does one small,

30:26SPEAKERspecific task over and over again

30:28SPEAKERwas pretty helpful for us.

30:31SPEAKER- So one of the things I saw that's interesting

30:33SPEAKERis you have, like you talk about one button tools a lot

30:36SPEAKERand the build tool is one of those in your blog.

30:39SPEAKERAnd I don't think people understand

30:41SPEAKERhow much of a kind of gate,

30:43SPEAKERhow fast and how easy it is to make builds is

30:46SPEAKERfor a lot of studios.

30:48SPEAKERSo, you know, if, like, would you say you did a full build,

30:52SPEAKERwas that like light maps for levels and the whole deal

30:54SPEAKERor are you doing the light, like,

30:56SPEAKER'cause I remember back in the day,

30:57SPEAKERthere was a lot of conversation in the,

30:58SPEAKERespecially in the early in tech days about how much work,

31:01SPEAKERhow much computer time it took, rather,

31:07SPEAKERto build light maps for Quake and Quake 2 and Quake 3

31:09SPEAKERand those types of games.

31:10SPEAKERIs it still, like, is this just a situation

31:12SPEAKERwhere hardware has advanced and all of a sudden,

31:14SPEAKERwhat used to be a really complicated computer problem

31:17SPEAKERis pretty straightforward on a modern eight core machine?

31:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so in this specific case,

31:21SPEAKERthe build machine just built an executable

31:25SPEAKERfor the game to run, just compile all the code.

31:28SPEAKER'Cause like you're saying, the light maps,

31:30SPEAKERyeah, so for Quake and Quake 2 and Quake 3

31:34SPEAKERand for Half-Life, to compile a map,

31:37SPEAKERit required, like, a lot of time to build a light map

31:41SPEAKER'cause it's all baked into the world.

31:43SPEAKERMake it look really beautiful and, like,

31:45SPEAKERsimulate the light bouncing on a color surface

31:47SPEAKERand making it look all gorgeous.

31:50SPEAKERSo Doom 3, every single light is always dynamic,

31:58SPEAKERwhich means there is, like, zero light maps in the game.

32:02SPEAKERSo it has its pluses and minuses,

32:05SPEAKERthe plus is that there's, like, zero map compilation time.

32:09SPEAKERIt's just generated dynamically every single frame.

32:15SPEAKERBut the downside is that you kind of don't,

32:18SPEAKERit kind of make the world look very cold and very sci-fi.

32:22SPEAKERSo if you want, like, a nice, warm, golden hour look,

32:26SPEAKERit's very, very challenging to do it

32:28SPEAKER'cause you got to very manually do a bunch of

32:32SPEAKERyou got to trick the engine into doing it,

32:33SPEAKERas opposed to Quake 2 or Quake 3,

32:34SPEAKERwhere it's kind of, perhaps, more naturally.

32:39SPEAKER- Did that impact, like, I guess on Modern hardware,

32:42SPEAKERyou don't have performance implications

32:43SPEAKERfor having multiple dynamic lights in these days?

32:49SPEAKER- So because of the way that the engine was written

32:54SPEAKERback in the day, there were some,

32:56SPEAKERstill some, like, light limitations that we had to adhere by

33:02SPEAKERI think it was, like, it was more than,

33:06SPEAKERso if you, we actually went through

33:07SPEAKERand looked through Doom 3's retail maps

33:10SPEAKERfrom back in the day,

33:12SPEAKERand they generally had one light affecting a thing

33:17SPEAKERat a given time, maybe two, if you're pushing it.

33:21SPEAKER- That was the big controversy, if you remember,

33:23SPEAKERabout why they claimed you couldn't use your flashlight

33:26SPEAKERon the gun at the same time,

33:27SPEAKER'cause there were too many light sources interacting, right?

33:29SPEAKERIf you were firing a gun, room lights and a flashlight,

33:33SPEAKERand so it sounds like there's actually

33:34SPEAKERsome legitimacy to that.

33:35SPEAKERI mean, I think you call that out

33:37SPEAKERin the mod museum as well,

33:38SPEAKERthere's a bit in there that's in the rendering section

33:40SPEAKERthat shows, like, too many overlapping light sources,

33:42SPEAKEReven in this game, even 20 plus years later,

33:45SPEAKERis still somewhat problematic, right?

33:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:48SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, so Suzanne and Tynan,

33:51SPEAKERour little designers, had to do a lot of work

33:53SPEAKERto work around that.

33:55SPEAKER- Oh, I was just gonna say,

33:56SPEAKERthe thing that's, like, surprising about it

33:57SPEAKERis actually, like, because of the very weird way

34:00SPEAKERthey do the dynamic lighting in the game,

34:03SPEAKERit's not actually the GPU that is the bottleneck.

34:09SPEAKERAnd so, especially when we were trying to, like,

34:12SPEAKERwork on, let's say, getting it to work on a netbook

34:14SPEAKERor a mid-spec machine that doesn't have as good of a CPU,

34:18SPEAKERthat's actually where we ran into

34:20SPEAKERmost of the performance problems.

34:23SPEAKERAnd so Eric, one of the other programmers on the project,

34:26SPEAKERspent a lot of time, like, optimizing the CPU performance

34:29SPEAKERof the rendering, 'cause that really was the bottleneck.

34:34SPEAKERAnd so, yeah, because, like,

34:37SPEAKERthe way that they do the lighting in Doom 3

34:39SPEAKERis, like, very different from, like,

34:42SPEAKERhow a modern game does, like, dynamic lights.

34:45SPEAKERWhere in a modern game, everything's, like,

34:47SPEAKERdeferred rendering, and, like,

34:49SPEAKEReverything is running on the GPU.

34:53SPEAKERThat's not, sort of, how they do it.

34:56SPEAKERIt's basically, like, each light, essentially,

35:00SPEAKERgets its own rendering pass, almost,

35:04SPEAKERwhen it's doing the lighting phase.

35:05SPEAKERSo it ends up being a lot of,

35:08SPEAKERlike, they're doing a lot of stuff on the CPU

35:10SPEAKERthat, in a modern game, you would do on the GPU.

35:13SPEAKERAnd so that's why, like, especially, like,

35:14SPEAKERlet's say, getting it to run well on Steam Deck

35:17SPEAKERand stuff like that,

35:19SPEAKERit was really focused on optimizing, like, the CPU.

35:22SPEAKERAnd there were some crazy things.

35:23SPEAKERLike, I think at one point, like,

35:25SPEAKERwith the rocket launcher, when the missile exploded,

35:29SPEAKERlike, the frame rate would just die.

35:31SPEAKERAnd it was because, like, or I'll say,

35:33SPEAKERoh, like, Brendan, like,

35:35SPEAKERI think the light radius on this is, like, too big.

35:38SPEAKERIt's, like, affecting too many objects in the scene.

35:40SPEAKERSo just, like, so that was, like,

35:42SPEAKERone area, like, on weaker machines.

35:44SPEAKERBut even on a good machine, like,

35:46SPEAKERyou were still getting noticeable frame rate drops.

35:48SPEAKERSo there definitely are limitations on, like,

35:52SPEAKERhow many lights can affect each object in their system.

35:57SPEAKERBut luckily, you know, hardware's a little bit better now

36:00SPEAKERthan 20 years ago.

36:01SPEAKERSo we could have more than one light, at least.

36:05SPEAKER(laughing)

36:07SPEAKER- On the CPU side, I don't remember,

36:09SPEAKERwas the original game, like, multi-threaded at all?

36:11SPEAKERI'm trying to remember, I think, I mean,

36:13SPEAKERobviously most CPUs were still single core at the time.

36:15SPEAKERI think we were, like,

36:16SPEAKERjust kind of starting to see the first dual core.

36:18SPEAKER- So, yeah, the engine does have support

36:20SPEAKERfor multi-threading, like multi-threaded renderer,

36:24SPEAKERbut we turned that off, and I'm not,

36:28SPEAKERI'm not actually sure if it's off by default

36:30SPEAKERin "To Whom 3," also.

36:32SPEAKERD-H-E-W. (laughing)

36:35SPEAKER- The mod version. - The mod version.

36:37SPEAKER- The "To Whom 3," yeah.

36:38SPEAKER- Yeah, and also to just point out,

36:42SPEAKERthere actually are a lot of other interesting

36:44SPEAKERsource ports of it as well.

36:46SPEAKERHow, yeah, when you're looking at this,

36:48SPEAKERand you're kind of doing, you're planning out the game,

36:51SPEAKERhow do you decide what stuff stays stock

36:55SPEAKERand what gets fancied up, right?

36:56SPEAKERLike, what gets another pass?

36:58SPEAKERIs it just based on the needs of the game?

37:00SPEAKERIs it who has time and is interested in changing the way,

37:05SPEAKERlike, you could have theoretically ripped out the renderer

37:07SPEAKERand put a full modern ray tracing engine in there

37:09SPEAKERif you wanted to go crazy,

37:11SPEAKERbut that seems like a lot of work for probably not,

37:14SPEAKERit's probably easier to just make sure

37:15SPEAKERthere's only a few lights in each scene, right?

37:17SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

37:19SPEAKERI mean, generally speaking, it's like,

37:21SPEAKERwhatever serves the gameplay and what do we need

37:25SPEAKERto make the game fun and readable to the player?

37:29SPEAKERBut the other aspect is just like,

37:30SPEAKERwe were taking an engine from the year 2006

37:34SPEAKERand trying to make it playable,

37:38SPEAKERor give it the things that people expect

37:41SPEAKERfrom a game from the year 2025.

37:43SPEAKERSo like, we didn't have any subtitles,

37:45SPEAKERwe need to add a whole new subtitle system.

37:47SPEAKERLike Conjay said,

37:48SPEAKERwe need to add different languages for localization.

37:52SPEAKERSo just a whole bunch of like,

37:54SPEAKERsuper expected stuff from players

38:00SPEAKERthat are just normal for games

38:01SPEAKERthat we just did not exist in the old version.

38:05SPEAKERSo a little bit of what makes a game fun,

38:07SPEAKERbut also what's just normal stuff

38:09SPEAKERthat people need in this day and age.

38:13SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think some of it also just comes down

38:15SPEAKERto like resources because like,

38:18SPEAKERso let's say my project to rewrite the renderer

38:21SPEAKERto use GLSL, it was like,

38:24SPEAKERlet's say a couple of weeks or something, right?

38:27SPEAKERAnd if we were like, okay, let's really modern it up,

38:29SPEAKERlike I would be working on that

38:31SPEAKERfor probably a couple of months.

38:32SPEAKERAnd then it's like, we only have limited resources.

38:35SPEAKERAnd then it's like, if I spend time on that,

38:37SPEAKERlike that takes away from all the other stuff I'm working on

38:40SPEAKERwhether it's gameplay or bug fixing

38:43SPEAKERor the subtitle system and stuff like that, right?

38:48SPEAKER- And I remember like, if I remember correctly, Sanjay,

38:50SPEAKERthere was a pretty big question mark

38:53SPEAKERof like what to do with the renderer.

38:54SPEAKERLike, do we port in Doom 3 BFG and how they did it?

39:00SPEAKERDo we do something else completely?

39:04SPEAKERDo we just kind of like patch up

39:05SPEAKERwhat we currently have right now?

39:08SPEAKERSo there's a lot of questions there.

39:10SPEAKER- Yeah, and unfortunately it ended up being

39:12SPEAKERbigger changes than I had hoped

39:14SPEAKERbecause I thought I could get away

39:16SPEAKERwith converting less of the system,

39:18SPEAKERbut it turned out I had to convert

39:20SPEAKERlike almost all of the rendering to use GLSL.

39:26SPEAKERBut yeah, I mean, I think it's just like,

39:29SPEAKERwe had to balance like, okay, well, what do we need?

39:31SPEAKERLike, we need these like effects

39:34SPEAKERand the player expects these effects like in a modern game.

39:38SPEAKERAnd so trying to make the changes that were required

39:43SPEAKERto get what we wanted without like spending so much time

39:47SPEAKERon just like basically rewriting the engine

39:50SPEAKERor something like that.

39:51SPEAKERAnd there were some parts of the engine where like,

39:52SPEAKERokay, we don't need to really mess with this.

39:54SPEAKERIt works fine and let's never touch it.

39:56SPEAKERAnd I think like the physics system,

39:58SPEAKERlike largely we stayed away from changing it too much

40:03SPEAKERbecause like we didn't need to, right?

40:05SPEAKER- Keeping Nina vertical in the zero G segments

40:07SPEAKERmakes that a lot easier, right?

40:10SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

40:12SPEAKER- I felt like I was listening to kind of like an echo

40:14SPEAKERfrom history when you were talking about like,

40:15SPEAKERoh, you know, the previous Quake engine games we did,

40:17SPEAKERyou had to bake light maps,

40:18SPEAKERbut Doom 3, everything is real time,

40:21SPEAKERwhich is like directly parallels what's going on right now

40:24SPEAKERwith most games still needing to bake light maps.

40:26SPEAKERBut then like doing the dark ages, ironically,

40:28SPEAKERwas one of the first games to require ray tracing hardware.

40:31SPEAKERThat's not such an issue for them.

40:33SPEAKERLike, was there anything as you guys dug into this engine,

40:35SPEAKEReven though it is 20 something years old at this point,

40:38SPEAKERlike computer interfaces aside,

40:40SPEAKERlike the gooey stuff aside, which we talked about,

40:42SPEAKERlike, is there anything else in there that you saw

40:43SPEAKERthat was just like, like, man,

40:45SPEAKERI wish the industry had pursued this path further

40:48SPEAKERor like those like, oh, this is a really clever way

40:50SPEAKERto do this.

40:51SPEAKERLike just anything else that jumped out at you

40:53SPEAKERas being like impressive tech.

40:55SPEAKER- I think I would say one thing that was funny

40:58SPEAKERwas there's the backstory of the so-called Karmak reverse,

41:03SPEAKERwhich is like a fancy faster-

41:06SPEAKER- Fast inverse square root, right?

41:07SPEAKER- It's not the fast inverse square root.

41:09SPEAKERIt's the- - Oh, that's a different one,

41:11SPEAKERsorry, that's a different one, I'm sorry.

41:12SPEAKER- It's the one for, basically it's a trick

41:15SPEAKERwith the stencil buffer, the way that they do the shadows

41:17SPEAKERand it's like more efficient.

41:20SPEAKERAnd so one of the big controversies was that,

41:23SPEAKERlike, so that was patented by creative,

41:26SPEAKERlike makers of the Sound Blaster.

41:28SPEAKERI don't know why they had patents on graphics techniques,

41:30SPEAKERbut they did.

41:32SPEAKERAnd so in the open source release of the code for Doom 3,

41:38SPEAKERthey had to remove the Karmak reverse.

41:40SPEAKERAnd so the one that's the open source,

41:42SPEAKERlike official Doom 3 open source release,

41:46SPEAKERthey didn't have that code.

41:48SPEAKERAnd, but then we did some digging and it turned out well,

41:53SPEAKERthe patent for that actually expired a few years ago.

41:57SPEAKERSo we implemented the Karmak reverse

42:01SPEAKERin our code base and turns out we actually got

42:04SPEAKERlike a pretty noticeable performance boost,

42:06SPEAKERespecially on a lower end hardware.

42:09SPEAKERSo like the trick still works.

42:11SPEAKERSo that was pretty funny.

42:11SPEAKERI was like, we're like, oh,

42:13SPEAKERit's probably doesn't matter, right?

42:14SPEAKERBut it actually still made a big difference.

42:16SPEAKERSo, you know, shout out to John Karmak for that one,

42:20SPEAKERthat was a great idea.

42:24SPEAKER- Tried and true.

42:26SPEAKERDid you guys have any insight into why that style

42:28SPEAKERof real time lighting didn't catch on

42:30SPEAKERand nobody really pursued it from that point?

42:32SPEAKER- I mean, my guess would just be like,

42:33SPEAKERlike Brendan was saying, like, you know,

42:35SPEAKERespecially the hardware at the time,

42:37SPEAKERthe limitation was that, well,

42:38SPEAKERyou can't really do that many lights

42:40SPEAKERand doing certain types of, you know, lighting,

42:42SPEAKERlike let's say as an example,

42:45SPEAKERif I want to do Grand Theft Auto Vice City or something,

42:48SPEAKERlike you can't do it with just like dynamic lights, right?

42:53SPEAKERAnd so I think it's just,

42:55SPEAKERthere's really the limitation of that.

42:57SPEAKERAnd then let's say,

43:00SPEAKERso that's why I think we still sell light maps a lot

43:02SPEAKERand we're seeing some games now, you know,

43:05SPEAKERthey're going like fully dynamic.

43:06SPEAKERI think it's pretty common in Unreal 5 games

43:09SPEAKERthat like everything's dynamic,

43:11SPEAKERwhether or not they're using ray tracing, right?

43:14SPEAKERAnd so, yeah, I mean, I think it was just like,

43:17SPEAKERthere is like a aesthetic that like, you know,

43:20SPEAKERif you're making a very dark, scary space corridor game,

43:25SPEAKERlike dynamic lighting made a lot of sense,

43:27SPEAKERbut like, I think for other games,

43:30SPEAKERlike I worked on, let's say some Tony Hawk skateboarding

43:33SPEAKERgames, like we couldn't do dynamic,

43:34SPEAKERlike that was all light maps, right?

43:36SPEAKER'Cause it doesn't make sense.

43:36SPEAKERYou're out in the world and there's sun and all that, right?

43:40SPEAKER- It kind of feels like Doom 3 kind of feels

43:42SPEAKERlike a path not traveled though, right?

43:44SPEAKERI think to Brad's point, it feels like,

43:46SPEAKERif people had, if it had blown up

43:48SPEAKERand it had been like the biggest corridor shooter success

43:50SPEAKERof all time, we wouldn't have seen 20 years

43:52SPEAKERof open world games and we'd be like,

43:56SPEAKERlook, man, you can have three dynamic lights now.

43:58SPEAKERHere you go.

44:00SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I mean, so I've worked in Quake 2

44:06SPEAKERand Quake 1 and Doom 3 engine

44:08SPEAKERand like the lighting systems are very different

44:10SPEAKERand I think there are definitely like pluses and minuses

44:13SPEAKERwith both of them.

44:14SPEAKERLike there are things that you can do in Doom 3

44:17SPEAKERthat are really special with the lights

44:20SPEAKERand the fact that everything is dynamic

44:22SPEAKERand you have no choice about making everything dynamic.

44:23SPEAKERLike it forces you to make you do

44:28SPEAKERsome interesting light effects that you can't do

44:31SPEAKERwith like traditional fake light maps.

44:35SPEAKERBut to your earlier question of like,

44:37SPEAKERwhat are some interesting tech that Doom 3 has as a,

44:41SPEAKERso I got my start doing level design.

44:44SPEAKERAnd so for me, I'm still a huge fan

44:48SPEAKERof how ID Software did their map level design tech,

44:54SPEAKERwhich is BSP mapping.

44:57SPEAKERThis is where you kind of like let the level designer

45:00SPEAKERplace down giant blocks in the level editor

45:03SPEAKERand kind of create the geometry that creates the level.

45:07SPEAKERAnd it gives the level designer a lot of control

45:10SPEAKERover sight lines and experience

45:13SPEAKERand like the specificities of the room

45:18SPEAKERand lets them iterate very, very quickly

45:20SPEAKERand like not need to wait for an artist

45:23SPEAKERto put something into the level.

45:25SPEAKERThey can just do it themselves

45:26SPEAKERwith the modifying the geometry themselves.

45:30SPEAKERAnd it's a kind of a little design

45:32SPEAKERthat I think is really, really special.

45:33SPEAKERAnd as a level designer, I love it and I love how much,

45:39SPEAKERit lets the level designer to like be very creative

45:43SPEAKERwith how they do things

45:44SPEAKER'cause of how quickly they can iterate on things.

45:46SPEAKER- Did you do anything to dark radiant

45:47SPEAKERto make it work for skin deep or are you just using it?

45:49SPEAKERI think on the mod kit, it said,

45:51SPEAKERjust download dark radiant and let it rip.

45:53SPEAKERBut that seems amazing to me

45:56SPEAKERthat it's just that open ended tool.

45:58SPEAKER- We did do, so Suzanne made some code changes to it

46:04SPEAKERand Sanjay also made some code changes to it too.

46:08SPEAKERI kind of don't remember the specifics now,

46:09SPEAKERit's been a while,

46:10SPEAKERbut there's a lot of workflow stuff inside of it.

46:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think we did make some changes

46:15SPEAKERand we actually were able to like, we made pull requests.

46:19SPEAKERSo those, the major changes that we made, not all of them,

46:23SPEAKERbut most of the changes are actually upstream

46:26SPEAKERand in the main dark radiant now.

46:29SPEAKERBut yeah, I mean, we did like,

46:30SPEAKERI think the other thing too is like configurable.

46:32SPEAKERSo like we had different like Python scripts

46:35SPEAKERthat you can set up to run and stuff.

46:38SPEAKERSo like any skin deep specific configuration stuff

46:41SPEAKERcould be done through that.

46:43SPEAKERBut yeah, it, you know,

46:45SPEAKERthere were some small things that we added and fixed

46:47SPEAKERand luckily we were able to get at least some of those in

46:50SPEAKERfor everyone else who's using it.

46:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

46:53SPEAKER- Did you have to do some sort of scripting

46:55SPEAKERtype of environment to set up the things

46:57SPEAKERlike the one-off events and things like that?

46:59SPEAKEROr is that all just handled in game code?

47:02SPEAKER- Oh yeah, so Doom 3 has a pretty robust scripting language

47:06SPEAKERinside it that they use also for a retail Doom 3.

47:11SPEAKERIt's like their own, it's just called Doom script.

47:14SPEAKERIt's like their own little proprietary thing.

47:18SPEAKERBut yeah, it's pretty flexible.

47:19SPEAKERWe used it, Suzanne and Tynan used it

47:22SPEAKERfor all the level logic for detecting any,

47:26SPEAKERfor doing all the scripting levels

47:28SPEAKERfor like the special scripted stuff

47:29SPEAKERthat we have going on, the objectives.

47:35SPEAKERBut yeah, it's pretty well thought out, I think.

47:37SPEAKER- So the level scripts were off to do that.

47:39SPEAKERYou could also do a lot of the core gameplay

47:42SPEAKERin that if you wanted to,

47:43SPEAKERbut we tried as much as possible to just do that

47:46SPEAKERin the C++ code, just because it's a lot easier to debug,

47:50SPEAKERbut for all the level triggers and stuff like that

47:53SPEAKERare done in the level specific script files.

47:56SPEAKER- Yeah, for Quadrada Cowboy,

47:58SPEAKERa lot of gameplay was done

47:59SPEAKERthrough the Doom 3 scripting language.

48:01SPEAKERAnd it lets you iterate quickly,

48:05SPEAKERbut if you want to, if something goes wrong,

48:08SPEAKERif you want to debug it,

48:09SPEAKERthere wasn't really a good way to do that.

48:12SPEAKERWe didn't really have like a script debugger

48:14SPEAKERfor Quadrada Cowboy.

48:16SPEAKERAnd so first we made the conscious choice

48:18SPEAKERto make gameplay be as code driven as possible

48:22SPEAKERand to keep the scripting stuff as minimal as possible.

48:25SPEAKER- It makes a ton of sense.

48:26SPEAKER- I've got one more question

48:27SPEAKERdigging into the kind of core Doom 3 tech.

48:29SPEAKERAnd I promise I'm not trying to like feed

48:31SPEAKERany Steam community forum threads here or anything,

48:34SPEAKERbut the game like Doom 3 and every other derivative of it

48:37SPEAKERis capped at 60 frames a second,

48:38SPEAKERwhich I assume is tied to some internal simulation rate

48:42SPEAKERor something.

48:44SPEAKERWas there ever any discussion about ripping that stuff out

48:46SPEAKERand trying to engineer a higher frame rate?

48:49SPEAKERAnd also, I clearly decided not to do that.

48:51SPEAKERHow much work would that have been?

48:53SPEAKERBecause I assume it's a lot.

48:55SPEAKER- We talked about it for a while, right Shonda?

48:56SPEAKER- Really?

48:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, we talked about it for a while.

48:58SPEAKERWe actually did some tests and it was just going to

49:02SPEAKERrequire so many changes to actually get to work correctly

49:07SPEAKERthat it was just like, you know, given our team size,

49:10SPEAKERlike because yeah, like the whole physics system is written

49:13SPEAKERassuming this like fixed time step.

49:17SPEAKERAnd so yeah, like we did experiment with it a bit,

49:22SPEAKERbut it just was going to be a lot of work.

49:25SPEAKERIt just didn't seem like, you know, I feel, you know,

49:29SPEAKERI understand the people that want higher frame rates,

49:32SPEAKERyou know, like I'm actually planning on playing

49:35SPEAKERSoap Song tonight.

49:36SPEAKERI'm like, I got to get it.

49:37SPEAKERIt's 120 FPS on PS5 or something.

49:40SPEAKERSo I'm gonna try it on that maybe.

49:42SPEAKERBut it's like, I totally get that, but it's just like,

49:45SPEAKERyou know, we have a really small dev team

49:49SPEAKERand it just like, we did look at it

49:51SPEAKERand it just seemed like it was going to be so much work

49:54SPEAKERto change that it just didn't seem like, you know,

49:59SPEAKERit would be a good use of our resources

50:02SPEAKERto spend a lot of time on that

50:04SPEAKERwhen there were all these other things

50:05SPEAKERthat we could make better and improve.

50:07SPEAKER- Then we also looked at, there was a,

50:10SPEAKERthere's a game called the Dark Mod,

50:13SPEAKERwhich is a Doom 3 based game

50:15SPEAKERthat is kind of like based on the Thief franchise.

50:18SPEAKERReally wonderful stuff.

50:19SPEAKERLike we use, Dark Radiant was made from the Dark Mod

50:22SPEAKERand we are super grateful that they, you know,

50:25SPEAKERlet the tools be available for them to use.

50:29SPEAKERAnd I think that they, their team also tried to,

50:32SPEAKERhas done some work to push past the 60 frames per second

50:36SPEAKERlimit.

50:37SPEAKERAnd I think they like got it mostly working,

50:41SPEAKERbut I think there's still like some quirks here and there

50:44SPEAKERthat they're still getting,

50:45SPEAKERlike after all this time of trying to do it.

50:47SPEAKERSo we figured like, well, they're also trying to do it.

50:50SPEAKERThey're still having these issues after all this time.

50:52SPEAKERSo for us to release a game would,

50:55SPEAKERwould with trying to break this limit would be,

50:58SPEAKERwould be pretty tricky to do.

51:00SPEAKER- Yeah, that totally makes sense.

51:01SPEAKERI'd swear it was the Doom 3 source port.

51:03SPEAKERI looked at the changelog at some point they had very

51:06SPEAKERbriefly rolled out experimental support for it,

51:08SPEAKERbut there was literally like strike through text

51:10SPEAKERin the changelog where they immediately pulled it

51:13SPEAKERbecause it just broke everything.

51:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I think we actually might've just like briefly,

51:17SPEAKERlike kind of just messaged Daniel about it too.

51:20SPEAKERJust like, yeah, like what happened with that?

51:22SPEAKERAnd it was kind of like, well, we tried,

51:25SPEAKERbut like it says because, so in their case, right?

51:28SPEAKERLike they want to make sure that base Doom 3 works still.

51:33SPEAKERAnd so they tried doing a base Doom 3 uncapped.

51:35SPEAKERAnd I think it just had a lot of, like it sort of worked,

51:38SPEAKERbut there were a lot of issues.

51:40SPEAKERAnd, and the other thing too, is I think just like,

51:42SPEAKEReven if we had gotten it working mostly,

51:45SPEAKERthe concern was that we were spending like QA time.

51:48SPEAKERI'm like, oh, well this bug is only reproducible

51:51SPEAKERif you're running at a hundred FPS or something, right?

51:53SPEAKEROr the throw arc, right?

51:55SPEAKERThe throw arc doesn't work properly now because the,

51:59SPEAKERwe're assuming a certain time step, et cetera.

52:02SPEAKERSo I think it just, yeah,

52:03SPEAKERit was going to be this like big can of worms

52:07SPEAKERthat like we probably could have gotten like 70% there

52:10SPEAKERwithout too much time,

52:12SPEAKERbut then that last like 30% would have just been crazy.

52:14SPEAKER- One of the questions I, so your broken glasses,

52:17SPEAKERI love a good broken glass in a game

52:19SPEAKERand you all have real good broken glass.

52:22SPEAKERFor folks who don't know if the window,

52:24SPEAKERyou can break windows, you can break, I guess, glass items,

52:27SPEAKERlike the soap dispenser or something maybe.

52:30SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

52:31SPEAKER- And then there's shards of glass on the floor

52:34SPEAKERthat your character walks through

52:35SPEAKERand gets glass in her feet.

52:37SPEAKERAnd so I have a couple of questions about that.

52:39SPEAKEROne is, are the physics deterministic

52:41SPEAKERor is it non-deterministic for the game

52:44SPEAKERso that like there's predictable outcomes

52:46SPEAKERof where the glass is going to end up and stuff like that?

52:49SPEAKER'Cause there's a lot of throwing stuff in an emcee.

52:52SPEAKER- I think it's non-deterministic.

52:55SPEAKERDoes that sound correct, Sanjay?

52:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I think the, when it breaks,

52:59SPEAKERit just decides shatter aligns.

53:03SPEAKERI don't think it's deterministic, but,

53:07SPEAKERand also like we don't, I think it doesn't,

53:10SPEAKERlike some of the shards of glass just like go away.

53:12SPEAKER'Cause like, if it was actually like

53:15SPEAKERthe correct amount of glass would be a lot more

53:17SPEAKERthan I think that we drop.

53:19SPEAKERBut yeah, I think it's, I don't think there's,

53:23SPEAKERthe breaks are just like generated.

53:26SPEAKERSo it's a little bit non-deterministic.

53:29SPEAKER- So then I guess my next question is,

53:30SPEAKERwas Nina barefoot before the glass was in

53:33SPEAKERor was that a choice for after?

53:35SPEAKEROr was that an original design thing, Brendan?

53:37SPEAKER- Or a diehard homage.

53:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's the diehard thing.

53:40SPEAKERIt was a day one choice, I believe.

53:42SPEAKERI think if you go back to like

53:43SPEAKERthe very, very first announcement trailer from 2018

53:46SPEAKERor something, like she still had no shoes on

53:49SPEAKERjust because we had to make the diehard thing stick.

53:53SPEAKERThat was the only way to do it.

53:55SPEAKER- Well, and you also do the thing,

53:58SPEAKERone of the things I didn't understand

53:59SPEAKERbefore I worked on a shooter was that

54:01SPEAKERpeople feel really strongly about

54:03SPEAKERwhether you could see your character or not

54:04SPEAKERwhen you look down.

54:06SPEAKERLike there's two really entrenched camps on the internet of,

54:10SPEAKERyo, I should be able to see my feet

54:12SPEAKERand no, I never want to see my feet.

54:13SPEAKERAnd you all are clearly in the show me the feet category.

54:20SPEAKERHow did you end up there, I guess?

54:21SPEAKER- I think for this specifically,

54:23SPEAKERbecause like healing your glass,

54:26SPEAKERcharging your feet was going to be a component.

54:28SPEAKERThere was kind of an obligation like,

54:30SPEAKERwell, we got to show the player body in this case,

54:32SPEAKER'cause you can't, that's the only way to do it.

54:37SPEAKERHaving said that, I'll say that making your body visible

54:40SPEAKERis a insane amount of work for a first person shooter game.

54:44SPEAKERSo I completely understand when people,

54:46SPEAKERwhen games don't do it.

54:48SPEAKER'Cause like it added a tremendous amount of more bugs

54:53SPEAKERand work and art assets and all that stuff to the game.

54:57SPEAKER- The nightmare of a first person look down rig,

55:00SPEAKERwhen you look at it, not in the first person mode

55:02SPEAKERis something that just sticks with you.

55:03SPEAKEREverybody should go look those up if they haven't seen them

55:06SPEAKERso that you know what you're asking for.

55:08SPEAKER- Horror monster, yeah.

55:10SPEAKER- We talked about toilets 10 years ago

55:13SPEAKERat XOXO fairly extensively.

55:16SPEAKERI know you're a bit of a video game toilet aficionado.

55:19SPEAKERAnd I think at the time you listed the Soma toilets

55:23SPEAKERas the high watermark because they had on controllers,

55:27SPEAKERthey did some magical one-to-one movements

55:29SPEAKERwith like the lid lift and the trigger pulls

55:31SPEAKERand stuff like that.

55:33SPEAKERHas anything hit that high mark since in the last 10 years?

55:36SPEAKER- Ooh, good question.

55:39SPEAKERYou know, no other toilet has really stuck out in my mind.

55:42SPEAKER(laughing)

55:45SPEAKER- Okay, I also have to ask about the squatty potties

55:49SPEAKERon spaceships that are built for cats.

55:52SPEAKERLike that seems like a choice.

55:55SPEAKERI'm not sure about it.

55:56SPEAKER(laughing)

55:58SPEAKERIt raised a lot of questions.

55:59SPEAKERI'm not sure I'm comfortable asking here if I'm being honest.

56:01SPEAKER- So the fiction that we have is that the ships

56:04SPEAKERwere originally made for humans

56:07SPEAKERand then were retrofitted for cats later.

56:10SPEAKERSo they weren't really thinking about the cats

56:12SPEAKERwhen they designed them in the first place.

56:14SPEAKERIt was their backstory.

56:15SPEAKER- That makes perfect sense.

56:16SPEAKERI'm back in.

56:18SPEAKER(laughing)

56:21SPEAKERSo how much of the AI is really responsive?

56:27SPEAKERWe talked a little bit about "Market of the Ninja"

56:29SPEAKERand how that kind of was where you started,

56:31SPEAKERbut there's also like the AI have senses

56:36SPEAKERthat go beyond most first-person shooters

56:38SPEAKERand sims that I've played,

56:41SPEAKERwhere if you go down the trash chute

56:43SPEAKERor you get something stinky on you, they'll smell you.

56:47SPEAKERI think I kind of got the feeling that they would pick up

56:49SPEAKERwhen Nina's barefoot, when you step in class,

56:52SPEAKERyou leave blood trails on the floor.

56:54SPEAKERAnd I feel like they saw that too, but I'm not 100%.

56:56SPEAKERThey definitely see broken stuff and things around.

57:00SPEAKERLike how much of that was stuff that Doom did

57:02SPEAKERand how much of it was stuff you tacked on?

57:04SPEAKERAnd like, it feels really good in practice.

57:08SPEAKERI don't know how complex it is,

57:10SPEAKERbut it feels incredible when you're playing.

57:12SPEAKER- Cool, yeah.

57:13SPEAKERSo yeah, the blood trails was something we wanted to put in,

57:16SPEAKERbut we couldn't find the, couldn't quite make it go.

57:22SPEAKERIn terms of AI, we did a lot of work to make it go.

57:29SPEAKERThe Doom 3 built-in AI generally doesn't handle states.

57:35SPEAKERLike I'm partially where the player, I am fully aware.

57:38SPEAKERI am going back from combat to suspicious mode.

57:44SPEAKERSo we did a lot of work to make them be playable

57:48SPEAKERin an immersive sim game

57:49SPEAKERand do the things that kind of players expect them to do.

57:52SPEAKER- Let me follow on by asking about the mod museum.

57:56SPEAKER'Cause the mod museum for folks who don't know

57:57SPEAKERis a Steam Workshop download for the game

58:00SPEAKERthat just has a mod campaign

58:02SPEAKERthat you can load up from the main menu.

58:03SPEAKERAnd it kind of gives you behind the scenes

58:05SPEAKERof how large chunks of the game work.

58:08SPEAKERYou know, it shows you how the pathing works

58:09SPEAKERand how the AI works and how the,

58:11SPEAKERBrad had talked about the clambering and mantling

58:14SPEAKERand jumping and all that, the movement in the game works.

58:17SPEAKERAnd it seems like a ton of work to put together.

58:20SPEAKERLike I love that it's there

58:21SPEAKERand I'm really grateful that you all did it,

58:22SPEAKERbut it seems like a really huge undertaking

58:27SPEAKERfor not a whole lot of return, I guess.

58:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so part of that

58:35SPEAKERis just due to how game development schedules work.

58:41SPEAKERSo prior to shipping, maybe like a few weeks beforehand,

58:48SPEAKERwe continually start locking things down

58:50SPEAKERmore and more of the game until we're at a point

58:52SPEAKERwhere like no one's allowed to change the game anymore.

58:55SPEAKERWe just got to let QA bash on it for a bit.

58:59SPEAKERAnd so during this time,

59:02SPEAKERsome people have a lot of things to do,

59:04SPEAKERlike programmers still have to fix a lot of things

59:08SPEAKERand figure out how, why a certain bug is happening.

59:13SPEAKERDesigners kind of have less tasks to do at some point,

59:19SPEAKERjust because like content is one of things

59:22SPEAKERthat gets locked sooner than later.

59:26SPEAKERAnd so during this time,

59:27SPEAKERwe thought it will be like a fun thing

59:29SPEAKERfor the designers to make and work on during this time

59:33SPEAKERwhere we're kind of like waiting for the game to ship

59:35SPEAKERso that they can stay on the project long enough

59:37SPEAKERto fix bugs after release.

59:40SPEAKERAnd so we built the mod museum,

59:43SPEAKERwhich was kind of like a behind the scenes tour

59:44SPEAKERof how things work and was kind of our compromise

59:48SPEAKER'cause like we wanted to do a developer commentary mode,

59:51SPEAKERbut just schedule wise and budget wise,

59:54SPEAKERwe just couldn't make it work.

59:55SPEAKERSo making this free mod museum that people can download

59:59SPEAKERfor the Steam Workshop was kind of our way around that.

1:00:03SPEAKER- It's really phenomenal for people who want to see

1:00:05SPEAKERhow stuff works in the background.

1:00:06SPEAKER'Cause it's like the setup for most of the exhibits is

1:00:11SPEAKERhere's the thing in the game, here's how we did it.

1:00:14SPEAKERThere's some texts usually smacked up on the wall

1:00:16SPEAKERthat explains what's going on.

1:00:17SPEAKERAnd like, for example, on the windows,

1:00:19SPEAKERyou kind of exploded out all of the different elements

1:00:23SPEAKERthat are in the editor that make the glass windows

1:00:26SPEAKERthat break and then have pull down seals

1:00:29SPEAKERto keep the air in work.

1:00:31SPEAKERAnd it's like, I've never seen anybody

1:00:33SPEAKERreally do anything quite like that before.

1:00:34SPEAKERSo it's pretty rad.

1:00:35SPEAKER- There's some really incredible visual representations

1:00:38SPEAKERof what's going on, like the scripting section.

1:00:39SPEAKERYou know, like not only is the script you're about to

1:00:41SPEAKERactivate with an in-game button plastered on the wall

1:00:43SPEAKERin front of you, but it actually highlights line by line

1:00:46SPEAKEReach step as it's executing.

1:00:47SPEAKERLike that stuff is just fantastic for visualizing

1:00:49SPEAKERwhat's going on under the hood.

1:00:50SPEAKERI loved it.

1:00:51SPEAKER- Yeah, it's all Suzanne and Tynan.

1:00:53SPEAKERThey're really good at making this stuff work.

1:00:56SPEAKER- Do you think that building games in ancient,

1:00:59SPEAKERlike 20 year old engines is a good way for folks

1:01:01SPEAKERwho want to learn how to make games?

1:01:02SPEAKEROr do you think there's, is the older tech more approachable

1:01:05SPEAKERjust 'cause the art fidelity and the kind of everything's

1:01:09SPEAKERa little bit easier 20 years ago?

1:01:11SPEAKEROr is it easier 20 years ago, I guess is the other question.

1:01:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it depends.

1:01:16SPEAKERLike, I personally like how lean the engine is.

1:01:20SPEAKERLike it's a very small download.

1:01:23SPEAKERThe entire source code is like much more compact

1:01:26SPEAKERthan you'd see from like a more robust game engine.

1:01:32SPEAKERThe downside though, is that the amount of documentation

1:01:38SPEAKERand communities around these things are more limited

1:01:42SPEAKERthan say Unity or Unreal.

1:01:45SPEAKERSo getting over that hump of like, I'm just getting started.

1:01:50SPEAKERI don't know anything.

1:01:51SPEAKERAnd getting going with that can be pretty challenging

1:01:53SPEAKERjust 'cause like there's just less,

1:01:55SPEAKERlike the websites that talk about how to make stuff

1:01:57SPEAKERin Doom 3, a lot of them just are not

1:02:00SPEAKERon the internet anymore.

1:02:03SPEAKERThere's still like some you can find,

1:02:04SPEAKERbut just compared to more modern stuff,

1:02:08SPEAKERit can be difficult.

1:02:09SPEAKER- Those message boards are gone now, huh?

1:02:11SPEAKER- It's, you know, yeah.

1:02:14SPEAKER- Chat GPT can't help you with Doom 3, right?

1:02:19SPEAKER- No Doom 3 vibe coding, I guess.

1:02:21SPEAKER- They didn't train it on a lot of plan files today.

1:02:25SPEAKER- Yeah, I think also just like, I mean, so I do a lot of,

1:02:28SPEAKERI mean, my day job is I teach at USC game development,

1:02:33SPEAKERgame programming, and I think it would,

1:02:35SPEAKERlike certainly there is the advantage

1:02:37SPEAKERof like the code base is a lot smaller than Unreal Engine,

1:02:39SPEAKERbut like I think it'd be difficult for someone

1:02:41SPEAKERthat doesn't know, like, you know,

1:02:45SPEAKERBrennan is kind of a unique case in that he can code

1:02:49SPEAKERand he can design and he can do art.

1:02:51SPEAKERAnd I think unless you know how to code C++ already,

1:02:56SPEAKERlike it's gonna be hard to just like jump into Doom 3

1:03:00SPEAKERand just like make a game.

1:03:01SPEAKERWhereas I think it's probably a lot more approachable

1:03:04SPEAKERfor like, if you're learning to use something like Game Maker

1:03:07SPEAKERor Unity, right, as like your first, or RPG Maker even,

1:03:12SPEAKERright, like those are probably way more approachable

1:03:15SPEAKERthan jumping into Doom 3.

1:03:18SPEAKER- Bloating up dark radiant and making,

1:03:19SPEAKERand starting it up, carving out, I don't know,

1:03:22SPEAKERbut they called them brushes, I guess, is that, yeah.

1:03:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I think also too, just like in general,

1:03:27SPEAKERif you're starting out like 2D is way easier

1:03:29SPEAKERto start out in than 3D.

1:03:32SPEAKER- Make a side scroll or a top-down twin stick shooter

1:03:34SPEAKERor something, not a first person shooter, right?

1:03:37SPEAKERHave you looked at some of the other,

1:03:39SPEAKERI mean, there's a lot of stuff happening

1:03:40SPEAKERin open source game engines now.

1:03:42SPEAKERHave you looked at Godot and FNA and some of the,

1:03:44SPEAKERI mean, I see ship stuff without FNA,

1:03:46SPEAKERso that's a bad question, but.

1:03:48SPEAKER- I love FNA, big FNA fan here.

1:03:49SPEAKER(laughs)

1:03:51SPEAKER- FNA is the open source version of XNA slash--

1:03:55SPEAKER- Mono game.

1:03:56SPEAKER- Mono, yeah, thank you, yeah, yeah.

1:03:59SPEAKERWhich was what was used for a lot of Xbox arcade games

1:04:02SPEAKERback in the like Xbox 360 era.

1:04:05SPEAKER- Like Bastion.

1:04:07SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, Supergiant, still on it, I think.

1:04:10SPEAKER- No, so for Hades, they actually switched to their own.

1:04:13SPEAKER- Oh, did they?

1:04:14SPEAKER- They're using the Forge, which is like,

1:04:15SPEAKERit is an open source C++ engine,

1:04:20SPEAKERor it's at least a game framework.

1:04:22SPEAKERSo they switched to that on Hades.

1:04:23SPEAKERI think they were using the mono game,

1:04:25SPEAKERlike tech stack until the first Hades.

1:04:29SPEAKER- So yeah, what do you think about the other,

1:04:31SPEAKERlike is the next Blendo game gonna be a Godot game, Brendan,

1:04:35SPEAKERor is it gonna stick within tech?

1:04:38SPEAKER- I'm looking at, I think Godot is next on my thing,

1:04:41SPEAKERnext to my list to investigate.

1:04:43SPEAKERRight now I am messing around

1:04:45SPEAKERwith making a small FNA thing of some kind.

1:04:51SPEAKERSo going back to previous tech that I've used

1:04:53SPEAKERand trying it out again.

1:04:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm a big fan of SDL,

1:04:58SPEAKERand we actually use SDL on Skin Deep,

1:05:00SPEAKERalso it's not a game engine,

1:05:02SPEAKERbut it's like such a foundational library.

1:05:06SPEAKERAnd I think both Brendan and I know a lot of the core,

1:05:09SPEAKERlike FNA folks and the SDL folks and stuff.

1:05:15SPEAKERI think in terms, it's not a game engine,

1:05:18SPEAKERbut it's a great like framework.

1:05:20SPEAKERIf you want to learn like the basics of game programming,

1:05:23SPEAKERand that's actually like what I use

1:05:25SPEAKERwhen I start out in my first game pairing class.

1:05:27SPEAKEROh, let's just make a window in SDL,

1:05:29SPEAKERand then let's draw some sprites and do all that.

1:05:32SPEAKERSo I really liked that because I think it's like,

1:05:35SPEAKERit really forces you to learn the fundamentals

1:05:38SPEAKERin a way that if you try to start programming in Unity

1:05:43SPEAKERor Unreal, it does so much for you.

1:05:44SPEAKERIt's very powerful,

1:05:45SPEAKERbut I think there's something good

1:05:47SPEAKERabout learning those core things.

1:05:50SPEAKERI haven't really looked at Godot too much

1:05:53SPEAKERother than occasionally helping people debug stuff

1:05:56SPEAKERin their games.

1:05:58SPEAKERBut yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of options

1:06:04SPEAKERout there.

1:06:06SPEAKERI am big fan of Unreal Engine.

1:06:10SPEAKERI think the main drawback or limitation is just like how

1:06:14SPEAKERyou need a good computer to really use it.

1:06:17SPEAKERBut I do like how,

1:06:21SPEAKEReven though there is the royalty system and everything,

1:06:26SPEAKERthey give you all the source code, right?

1:06:27SPEAKERSo you can really dive into it.

1:06:31SPEAKERAnd some of the Unreal games I've worked on,

1:06:33SPEAKERwe've made pretty significant changes.

1:06:35SPEAKERSo being a programmer,

1:06:38SPEAKERI really liked that control of we have the source code.

1:06:42SPEAKERI think one thing that's really interesting

1:06:43SPEAKERabout Doom 3 is just that the code base is small enough

1:06:46SPEAKERthat you can mostly understand most of it,

1:06:49SPEAKERwhereas something like Unreal is so big

1:06:51SPEAKERthat even Tim Sweeney doesn't know what all of it does.

1:06:54SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and there's also the danger of pulling,

1:06:59SPEAKERof making your own changes to Unreal in that,

1:07:02SPEAKERyou know, when they roll a new version out,

1:07:04SPEAKERyou're gonna then have to port your changes

1:07:06SPEAKERover to the new version.

1:07:07SPEAKERThere's a lot of time involved with that.

1:07:09SPEAKERI guess it's not a problem you have with Doom so much.

1:07:12SPEAKER(laughing)

1:07:13SPEAKERDoom 3.

1:07:15SPEAKER- Yeah, we've avoided that problem.

1:07:16SPEAKER- Yeah, you dodged that bullet, I guess.

1:07:18SPEAKER- Not a lot of upstream activity

1:07:19SPEAKERon that one at this point.

1:07:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:23SPEAKER- I'm curious if there was any, if any of the,

1:07:26SPEAKERlike you added controller support to this, for this game,

1:07:29SPEAKERwhich is something that they probably,

1:07:31SPEAKERI mean, maybe, I guess at some point

1:07:33SPEAKERthey released Doom 3 on consoles,

1:07:34SPEAKERbut I always feel like the,

1:07:36SPEAKERmy expectation for controller feel back then,

1:07:38SPEAKERand my expectation for controller feel now

1:07:41SPEAKERare pretty wildly different.

1:07:42SPEAKERAnd I wondered like how challenging that kind of,

1:07:45SPEAKERthat kind of, like was working in the old engine,

1:07:47SPEAKERdid that make that super difficult?

1:07:49SPEAKEROr was it just, you know,

1:07:52SPEAKERare you up to recreate Call of Duty controller feel

1:07:55SPEAKERin 2025 in a 2004 engine,

1:07:58SPEAKERor is it just getting good enough and ship it?

1:08:02SPEAKER- If I remember correctly, Sanjay,

1:08:04SPEAKERI think the game pad code was from Quadrilao Cowboy.

1:08:09SPEAKER- Yes, I think we brought it over to the game pad code

1:08:11SPEAKERfrom Quadrilao Cowboy.

1:08:14SPEAKERAnd then we did a little bit with like the acceleration here.

1:08:16SPEAKERI think Eric also did some stuff towards the end

1:08:20SPEAKERto kind of help get it to feel better.

1:08:24SPEAKERYou know, I think, I would say generally,

1:08:27SPEAKERlike we kind of really focused on keyboard and mouse

1:08:30SPEAKERfor the game, because that was expectation for most players,

1:08:35SPEAKERbut you know, some players obviously prefer the controller,

1:08:37SPEAKERand I think we got it in a, you know,

1:08:40SPEAKERa pretty good place like the last few months of development.

1:08:45SPEAKERI remember when we demoed the game at Day of the Devs,

1:08:48SPEAKERit was like my first time seeing people play

1:08:51SPEAKERwith the controller, and I was like,

1:08:52SPEAKERBrendan, we have some things that we need to fix

1:08:55SPEAKERwith this controller, it's not quite up there.

1:08:59SPEAKERSo we were able to get, I think,

1:09:00SPEAKERa pretty reasonable feel on it,

1:09:04SPEAKERbut like, we're not doing anything crazy with like,

1:09:07SPEAKERaim assist or anything like that,

1:09:09SPEAKERlike you might do in Call of Duty,

1:09:11SPEAKERbecause we don't, because I think like the, you know,

1:09:14SPEAKERthe shooting isn't really like a big component

1:09:17SPEAKERof our game really, so it didn't make sense

1:09:20SPEAKERto kind of do all the stuff that they do in like,

1:09:22SPEAKERCall of Duty, where like when you aim down sight,

1:09:25SPEAKERit'll like lock onto the head and stuff a little bit, right,

1:09:29SPEAKERand stuff like that, so we didn't really need

1:09:31SPEAKERto implement that for our game.

1:09:34SPEAKER- It seems like if you're shooting,

1:09:35SPEAKERyou've kind of made a mistake in Skin Deep.

1:09:37SPEAKER(laughing)

1:09:38SPEAKER- You're already dead.

1:09:40SPEAKER- It is interesting, like in earlier versions of the game,

1:09:43SPEAKERlike the rifle was so overpowered, right?

1:09:46SPEAKERLike, and we really had to figure out like, okay,

1:09:49SPEAKER'cause it really felt like at one point in development,

1:09:51SPEAKERlike the best strategy was just like,

1:09:54SPEAKERfind a rifle and start shooting.

1:09:55SPEAKERPeople are like, well, that's not really the vibe

1:09:57SPEAKERthat we want for this game, right?

1:09:59SPEAKERSo I think that Brendan and Suzanne and Tana

1:10:02SPEAKERspent a lot of time like brainstorming,

1:10:04SPEAKERhow do we make it so there's not just like one,

1:10:07SPEAKERlike best way to do everything,

1:10:09SPEAKERwhether it was shooting with the rifle or yeah,

1:10:11SPEAKERat some point it was just like, yeah,

1:10:13SPEAKERlike there was one clear way that's like the easiest way

1:10:16SPEAKERto get rid of every enemy.

1:10:18SPEAKERI was like bashing them in like random objects, right?

1:10:22SPEAKERAnd so I think there was a lot of time spent to like,

1:10:24SPEAKERwell, how do we encourage players

1:10:27SPEAKERto explore all the different ways

1:10:29SPEAKERthat they can interact with the enemies

1:10:30SPEAKERwithout making it feel like you're forced to do it

1:10:32SPEAKERin some specific way?

1:10:34SPEAKER- We removed the win button,

1:10:35SPEAKERbut just, you know, made the game more fun.

1:10:38SPEAKER- Well, I mean, the level progression, that happens, right?

1:10:41SPEAKER'Cause like the first couple of levels

1:10:42SPEAKERI was pouncing at everybody

1:10:43SPEAKERand then smashing their heads against walls

1:10:45SPEAKERand whatever was around.

1:10:46SPEAKERAnd then that stops being an option later on

1:10:49SPEAKERfor reasons we don't need to get into,

1:10:50SPEAKERbut it ends up doing,

1:10:53SPEAKERit prevents you from min-maxing the MSim nature of the game,

1:10:56SPEAKERwhich is, I thought, quite fun.

1:10:58SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think the other thing too

1:11:00SPEAKERthat worked out well was I think originally like,

1:11:03SPEAKEReven the early levels were much more like open-ended

1:11:06SPEAKERwhere you could just like kind of go

1:11:08SPEAKERand do whatever you wanted to,

1:11:09SPEAKERwhich just felt very overwhelming for the new players

1:11:13SPEAKER'cause they're like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.

1:11:16SPEAKERAnd so I think like adding all the barricades

1:11:19SPEAKERand key locking system and all the codes

1:11:21SPEAKERand stuff like that to sort of, at least early on,

1:11:24SPEAKERmake it so that we can both teach you things

1:11:27SPEAKERand also just like not just overwhelm you

1:11:30SPEAKERwith like sort of the analysis paralysis

1:11:33SPEAKERof like, I have too many choices, I don't know what to do.

1:11:36SPEAKER- Yeah, like our inspiration was Die Hard and in Die Hard,

1:11:39SPEAKERyou know, John McClane just is able to roam

1:11:41SPEAKERaround the building as he pleases.

1:11:43SPEAKERAnd so that was kind of our initial version

1:11:46SPEAKERfor quite a while.

1:11:48SPEAKERBut like Sanjay would say, it's pretty overwhelming

1:11:50SPEAKERto just have like a bazillion possibilities

1:11:55SPEAKERfor you to interact with.

1:11:57SPEAKERIt doesn't feel very, it felt kind of overwhelming,

1:12:00SPEAKERkind of like not in a fun way.

1:12:02SPEAKERAnd so we added the locks and keys

1:12:04SPEAKERto kind of give the player more of a structured experience.

1:12:08SPEAKER- We're kind of in the leftovers portion of the show

1:12:10SPEAKER'cause I'm just thinking of stuff I forgot to ask earlier

1:12:12SPEAKERthat I should have thought of.

1:12:13SPEAKERBut real quick about your source release of your engine,

1:12:18SPEAKERyou know, that you've built on top of Doom 3.

1:12:20SPEAKERUnder the terms of that source code license,

1:12:23SPEAKERwhen exactly are you obligated to put yours out?

1:12:25SPEAKERIs it only after you like ship binaries

1:12:28SPEAKERthat you have to, that you're, you know,

1:12:31SPEAKERI mean, obviously you're gonna do it either way,

1:12:32SPEAKERbut I'm just kind of curious what the nuts and bolts

1:12:34SPEAKERof the license are.

1:12:35SPEAKERLike, what is it that triggers your obligation

1:12:38SPEAKERto do your own release?

1:12:39SPEAKERIs it because you have shipped binaries for money?

1:12:42SPEAKERIs that what it is?

1:12:43SPEAKER- My understanding is once the thing is available

1:12:46SPEAKERfor like public consumption, that's when the activation.

1:12:50SPEAKERDoes that sound?

1:12:51SPEAKER- I think it's, and it doesn't matter

1:12:52SPEAKERwhether you're selling it or it's free.

1:12:55SPEAKERIt's basically once your project is publicly available

1:12:59SPEAKERin binary form, like you have to release

1:13:01SPEAKERthe source code as well.

1:13:03SPEAKER- 'Cause it's GPL 2, right?

1:13:05SPEAKERThe Doom 3 stuff?

1:13:07SPEAKER- I think 3, but I don't quite remember.

1:13:11SPEAKER- I should've looked this up before.

1:13:12SPEAKERI'm sorry, yeah.

1:13:13SPEAKER- We probably need a lawyer when you're actually talking.

1:13:15SPEAKER- It is a GPL license, and you need a lawyer

1:13:18SPEAKERto tell you what's the difference between all of it.

1:13:21SPEAKER- Sure.

1:13:22SPEAKERYeah, it is GPL 3, and it's absolutely the,

1:13:26SPEAKERit's the one that everybody I've ever worked with

1:13:28SPEAKERsays under no circumstances should you license your stuff

1:13:30SPEAKERwith this one if you don't have to.

1:13:32SPEAKERBut I don't know why.

1:13:33SPEAKERWe'll have to get Chris DiBona back on here

1:13:36SPEAKERto talk about licenses at some point.

1:13:38SPEAKER- So is that the one that kind of infects

1:13:39SPEAKERevery other piece of code that touches?

1:13:41SPEAKER- Well, yeah, GPL is copy left in general.

1:13:44SPEAKERSo yeah, so you have to basically,

1:13:49SPEAKERand that's a big reason why especially big companies

1:13:54SPEAKERreally stay away from GPL, right?

1:13:58SPEAKERWhereas there's other licenses like BSD or MIT, et cetera,

1:14:01SPEAKERthat Apache that are much more permissive, right?

1:14:07SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:14:07SPEAKER- In my personal stuff, I just, I like using BSD

1:14:11SPEAKER'cause I don't mind people using the code.

1:14:14SPEAKERAnd then I just want my attribution,

1:14:17SPEAKERwhich unfortunately none of the AIs respect.

1:14:21SPEAKERSo, yeah.

1:14:23SPEAKER- So I took a quick look at your, both of your backgrounds

1:14:26SPEAKERand like, did you guys really seem to have paid your dues

1:14:28SPEAKERwith like 2000s era EA and pandemic and stuff?

1:14:32SPEAKERI mean, like having covered games through that period,

1:14:35SPEAKERit sounds like that was really the,

1:14:36SPEAKERlike in the trenches era.

1:14:39SPEAKERI don't have a fully formed question here,

1:14:41SPEAKERbut I guess I'm kind of like, I'm kind of curious,

1:14:43SPEAKERlike, is there anything from that way of working

1:14:45SPEAKERthat you actually miss and like is kind of open source

1:14:49SPEAKERdevelopment like your preferred way of working from now on?

1:14:51SPEAKERLike, would you ever go back to a big team

1:14:54SPEAKERor like not ship on an open source engine at this point?

1:14:57SPEAKERLike, are you just sort of philosophically

1:15:00SPEAKERlike fully bought in on the way you're doing things now

1:15:02SPEAKERat this point, having had that experience

1:15:05SPEAKERof an extremely much more corporate type of development?

1:15:07SPEAKER- Yeah, so Pandemic Studios is where Sanjay and I first met

1:15:11SPEAKERback in like 2007 or so, sort of around-

1:15:14SPEAKER- Yeah, 2007, I think.

1:15:16SPEAKER- We're working on the Lord of the Rings conquest video game.

1:15:21SPEAKERYeah, I mean, so Pandemic was actually kind of interesting

1:15:24SPEAKERin that the tech that they used

1:15:27SPEAKERwas all proprietary, right, Sanjay?

1:15:30SPEAKERLike, I think even each team had their own variation

1:15:34SPEAKERof the tech or even, I think in Lord of the Rings,

1:15:37SPEAKERyou all built the engine from the ground up, right?

1:15:39SPEAKER- So I think Lord of the Rings was built

1:15:41SPEAKERon the full Spectrum Warrior 2 engine,

1:15:45SPEAKERbut yeah, like the Mercenaries team had their own engine

1:15:48SPEAKERand the Saboteur team had their own engine.

1:15:51SPEAKERI don't know if I'm actually allowed to say what the games

1:15:53SPEAKERthat we were working on in Australia, which got canceled,

1:15:57SPEAKERwere on different engines and even, yeah,

1:16:02SPEAKERsome other unannounced titles had their own engines,

1:16:04SPEAKERwhich it turned out like that model was very expensive,

1:16:08SPEAKERespecially when you're like, oh, now we're making games

1:16:11SPEAKERfor like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3,

1:16:14SPEAKERso now these code bases are getting bigger and bigger.

1:16:18SPEAKERAnd I mean, I guess I would say for me,

1:16:20SPEAKERso in recent years I've been doing,

1:16:23SPEAKERI've been kind of working with indie teams

1:16:26SPEAKERon various projects, working with Brendan

1:16:30SPEAKERand then before that with the Giant Squid folks

1:16:33SPEAKERand the Beethoven and Dinosaur folks, a few of their games.

1:16:37SPEAKERAnd I think one of the things that I think I like

1:16:42SPEAKERabout the old era, which I think is difficult

1:16:45SPEAKERto get back now, is that pre-COVID,

1:16:48SPEAKERlike this being in the office, developing this camaraderie

1:16:53SPEAKERwith your colleagues.

1:16:55SPEAKERAnd I think that's really difficult to do now,

1:16:59SPEAKERespecially on a lot of,

1:17:00SPEAKERbecause most indie teams are fully remote

1:17:03SPEAKERand you can still do that to some extent,

1:17:05SPEAKERbut there is something about that era

1:17:08SPEAKERof just going over to someone's desk

1:17:10SPEAKERand having a conversation, right?

1:17:13SPEAKERBut I think both Brendan and I also experienced,

1:17:18SPEAKERthere's this huge bureaucracy, right?

1:17:21SPEAKERThe funny thing about pandemic was I actually,

1:17:23SPEAKERso Brendan was at, or started at pandemic

1:17:26SPEAKERbefore EA had purchased us.

1:17:29SPEAKERI actually accepted my offer.

1:17:31SPEAKERAnd then the week before I was to start,

1:17:34SPEAKERthat was when they announced EA was buying it.

1:17:36SPEAKERAnd I was like, I thought I had escaped.

1:17:38SPEAKERI escaped EA, escaped Activision,

1:17:42SPEAKERand then like, nope, I'm back in.

1:17:44SPEAKER- Pulling you back.

1:17:45SPEAKER- So there's sort of this like, yeah, I mean like,

1:17:48SPEAKERobviously it's like, and if you look at AAA now,

1:17:51SPEAKERlike it's very much like huge, huge teams, right?

1:17:56SPEAKERWhere you're like, you're one,

1:17:58SPEAKERlike you're like, you could spend two years working

1:18:01SPEAKERon one very, very specific thing.

1:18:04SPEAKEROr even like, let's say in the case of Grand Theft Auto,

1:18:06SPEAKERyou could spend like six years or however long

1:18:08SPEAKERthey've been working on it now on just like that one thing,

1:18:11SPEAKERlike you're the sound programmer

1:18:12SPEAKERand all you're doing for the next five years

1:18:15SPEAKERis programming sounds.

1:18:16SPEAKEROne thing that's really fulfilling and fun,

1:18:18SPEAKERI think about working on in small teams

1:18:21SPEAKERis being able to wear lots of hats, right?

1:18:25SPEAKERLike, you know, I'm not good at art,

1:18:27SPEAKERbut you know, just being able to like go between,

1:18:30SPEAKERlike some week I'm doing gameplay,

1:18:32SPEAKERsome week I'm rewriting the renderer,

1:18:34SPEAKERlike some weekend, you know,

1:18:36SPEAKERso just being able to jump around a lot.

1:18:38SPEAKERI think that's really fun.

1:18:40SPEAKERAnd it's difficult to get that in a huge AAA studio

1:18:45SPEAKERbecause it's like, because you know,

1:18:48SPEAKERthere's a person that's all,

1:18:50SPEAKERlike there's a whole team of like 20 people

1:18:52SPEAKERthat are doing the graphics or whatever, right?

1:18:55SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a shout out to the generalist, right?

1:18:57SPEAKER(laughs)

1:19:00SPEAKER- Yeah, by pandemic, we were kind of lucky

1:19:01SPEAKERthat the team was still small enough that,

1:19:05SPEAKERat least on the design side,

1:19:06SPEAKERwe were able to like wear some multiple hats.

1:19:08SPEAKERLike I did camera design, plus level design,

1:19:12SPEAKERand you know, did some cinematics.

1:19:14SPEAKERSo it was fun to be able to work in an environment

1:19:17SPEAKERwhere I'm learning a lot from other people,

1:19:18SPEAKERbut also being able to kind of go beyond

1:19:21SPEAKERjust what I was, from what I was specifically hired to do.

1:19:25SPEAKER- Guys, thank you all so much for taking the time

1:19:27SPEAKERto come and chat with us.

1:19:27SPEAKERIt's always fun to talk with you, Brendan.

1:19:30SPEAKERIt was great to meet you, Sanjay.

1:19:31SPEAKERAnd I'm excited to see what's next

1:19:34SPEAKERand to spend some more time with Skin Deep.

1:19:36SPEAKERWhere can people find the game

1:19:37SPEAKERand what else, are there future plays?

1:19:40SPEAKERYou know, is it gonna come to consoles

1:19:41SPEAKERand other stuff as well, or is it Steam for Life?

1:19:46SPEAKER- Yeah, so right now, Skin Deep is on PC

1:19:48SPEAKERand you can find it on the Steam store

1:19:50SPEAKERand on the Epic Games store.

1:19:52SPEAKER- Okay, well, awesome.

1:19:53SPEAKERThank you guys.

1:19:53SPEAKERAnd any Twitter, well, Blue Sky post Twitter socials

1:19:57SPEAKERto plug for people to find out more information?

1:20:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm on Blue Sky as Blendo Games, B-L-E-N-D-O.

1:20:05SPEAKERI don't really use social media, but you can find me.

1:20:10SPEAKER- Awesome, well, thank you guys so, so much.

1:20:12SPEAKER(upbeat music)

1:20:15SPEAKERThank you so much to Brendan and Sanjay.

1:20:17SPEAKERThat was always fascinating to talk about indie games.

1:20:21SPEAKER- Yeah, honestly, like the things I've done

1:20:24SPEAKERin the game press, like it has always remained

1:20:26SPEAKERmy greatest privilege to get to talk to the people

1:20:28SPEAKERwho make games about how they make games

1:20:30SPEAKERbecause it is just so endlessly fascinating.

1:20:32SPEAKERI just cannot get enough of availing myself

1:20:35SPEAKERof the knowledge of people that do that kind of work.

1:20:37SPEAKER- It's indie games, man.

1:20:39SPEAKERYou get to do everything.

1:20:40SPEAKERAnd it's interesting to me because like,

1:20:42SPEAKERDoom 3 existed in a time before we really recognized

1:20:46SPEAKERa lot of what are like established jobs in games now, right?

1:20:50SPEAKERLike you didn't really have technical artists

1:20:52SPEAKERin the Doom 3, you know, early 2000s.

1:20:55SPEAKERThat's a relatively new invention.

1:20:57SPEAKERWe had the people doing that work.

1:20:58SPEAKERThey were making rigs and building skeletons

1:21:00SPEAKERand making models move and stuff like that.

1:21:02SPEAKERBut it wasn't something that was, it was just somebody

1:21:05SPEAKERon the art team knew how to do that.

1:21:06SPEAKERIt wasn't like it was a separate,

1:21:08SPEAKERa whole separate specialty.

1:21:10SPEAKERSo yeah, it's fascinating looking at how they kind of work

1:21:15SPEAKERwith this old technology in a modern era.

1:21:17SPEAKERAnd Brendan is always great to talk to about games anyway.

1:21:22SPEAKERHe's a very thoughtful designer, I think.

1:21:25SPEAKERSo one of my faves.

1:21:27SPEAKER- And we should reiterate, if you have skin deeps,

1:21:29SPEAKERyou should really go download that mod museum.

1:21:31SPEAKERFirst off, you should go get skin deep

1:21:32SPEAKER'cause it's like, it's a rad game.

1:21:35SPEAKERIt will teach you how to play immersive sims,

1:21:38SPEAKERlike Dishonored and Prey and all.

1:21:40SPEAKERLike, have you ever tried those games and been like,

1:21:41SPEAKERI don't care what the fuss is about.

1:21:43SPEAKERI don't understand what's happening here.

1:21:45SPEAKERThose games are really dense and difficult

1:21:47SPEAKERto kind of break into an understanding of

1:21:49SPEAKERand playing skin deep will make it easier

1:21:52SPEAKERfor you to understand something like Prey.

1:21:55SPEAKER- The way it's broken up into small bite-sized levels

1:21:57SPEAKERmakes it much more digestible, I found.

1:21:59SPEAKERAlso, if those guys happen to listen to this,

1:22:01SPEAKERI meant to bring this up during the interview and did not,

1:22:04SPEAKERbut shout out to, okay, the game really is like good

1:22:07SPEAKERabout obeying its own rules.

1:22:09SPEAKERShout out to whoever on the team decided

1:22:10SPEAKERto allow the duplicator to work on literally everything.

1:22:13SPEAKER- Oh, that's my favorite part of the game, yeah.

1:22:15SPEAKER- There's a duplicator item that just literally duplicates

1:22:19SPEAKERwhatever you're holding and gives you a second one.

1:22:21SPEAKER- But whatever you aim it at, yeah.

1:22:22SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

1:22:23SPEAKERBut the objective of every level is to get

1:22:26SPEAKERthese special keys to unlock the cat cages

1:22:28SPEAKERand let out the cats.

1:22:29SPEAKERIf you have a duplicator and you find one key,

1:22:31SPEAKERyou can just duplicate the key and finish the level.

1:22:34SPEAKER- Brad, you don't even have to have the key.

1:22:35SPEAKERYou can just aim it at the key on somebody's belt

1:22:38SPEAKERand duplicate it off their belt.

1:22:40SPEAKER- Right, like I just, I love a game that is so devoted

1:22:43SPEAKERto its own rule set that it lets you

1:22:45SPEAKERjust completely trivialize 90% of the gameplay.

1:22:47SPEAKERIt's pretty rad.

1:22:48SPEAKER- Have you duplicated a duplicator yet?

1:22:50SPEAKER- I don't think it lets you, actually.

1:22:54SPEAKERThere's some kind of quantum overlap

1:22:56SPEAKERor folding of space going on there.

1:22:58SPEAKERIt's probably impossible.

1:23:00SPEAKER- Probably fine.

1:23:02SPEAKERBut yeah, so definitely check it out.

1:23:04SPEAKERWhen you have the game, check out the mod museum

1:23:06SPEAKER'cause it really, like one of the things

1:23:08SPEAKERthat every studio I've ever worked with does

1:23:11SPEAKERis they have a playground level, basically,

1:23:14SPEAKERwhere they have AI spawn, enemy spawners,

1:23:17SPEAKERand they have the height blocks so you have a reference

1:23:19SPEAKERthat you can copy and paste in to know how tall

1:23:21SPEAKERyour stuff should be in the world and all that.

1:23:23SPEAKERAnd turning that into a thing that's a user-playable

1:23:26SPEAKERexperience where you can see, where they have essentially

1:23:30SPEAKERexhibits that show how vacuum works in the game

1:23:32SPEAKERor how vacuum kind of spreads, how it propagates

1:23:36SPEAKERthrough the world in the game is really, really, really cool.

1:23:39SPEAKER- Yeah, ever since Valve built one of those

1:23:41SPEAKERfor the Half-Life 2 promotional cycle, if you remember,

1:23:44SPEAKERI don't think they ever put out that level,

1:23:45SPEAKERbut they put out video of it.

1:23:47SPEAKERIt was just like, hey, here's every material in the game.

1:23:49SPEAKERHere's a big physics playground.

1:23:51SPEAKERLike, here's how the facial animation works.

1:23:54SPEAKERLike, one of the coolest things a developer can do.

1:23:56SPEAKER- It's really cool.

1:23:58SPEAKERSo yeah, it's on Steam, it's on Epic.

1:23:59SPEAKERYou can get at both of those places,

1:24:01SPEAKERand it's eminently worth your time.

1:24:04SPEAKERBut you know what else is worth your time?

1:24:08SPEAKER- What's that?

1:24:09SPEAKER- Supporting the tech pod, Brad.

1:24:10SPEAKER- That's a bold claim, but I guess I'll go with it.

1:24:13SPEAKER- I think if they made it this far, they'd probably agree.

1:24:15SPEAKER- Maybe.

1:24:15SPEAKER- This is, I hope so at least.

1:24:17SPEAKERI hope you're not just asleep and you wake up to this.

1:24:20SPEAKERThis is a listener-supported show,

1:24:21SPEAKERso we wouldn't be here without you, the listener.

1:24:24SPEAKERAnd you can find out how you can support the show

1:24:27SPEAKERby going to patreon.com/techpod.

1:24:30SPEAKERAgain, that's patreon.com/techpod,

1:24:33SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month,

1:24:34SPEAKERyou get access to the Discord,

1:24:36SPEAKERyou get our monthly patron-exclusive episodes,

1:24:38SPEAKERyou get access to the Discord, that's it.

1:24:41SPEAKERThat's actually the two things you get.

1:24:43SPEAKERBut the Discord is full of wonderful nerds

1:24:45SPEAKERwho talk about all sorts of interesting stuff all the time.

1:24:49SPEAKERThe conversations around the Windows 95 episode

1:24:52SPEAKERfrom a couple weeks ago have been unbelievable.

1:24:55SPEAKERThe number of people who wrote in in the Discord

1:24:58SPEAKERand via email to let me know that yes,

1:25:01SPEAKERwhen you use a snack with a zapper on a CRT, it works.

1:25:05SPEAKERThank you, we got it.

1:25:07SPEAKERI thought, I was thinking when you use a snack with a zapper,

1:25:10SPEAKERit won't work on PlayStation or other light gun-type cores,

1:25:13SPEAKERwhich is absolutely true, it does not do that.

1:25:15SPEAKERI confirmed that.

1:25:16SPEAKERBut yeah, the original games will work with the zapper

1:25:19SPEAKERon the original platform.

1:25:20SPEAKERThank you for writing in, everyone, we appreciate you.

1:25:23SPEAKERAgain, you can find out how to write in

1:25:25SPEAKERby going to patreon.com/techpod

1:25:27SPEAKERand get access to the Discord

1:25:29SPEAKERand get the patron-exclusive episodes.

1:25:30SPEAKERWe appreciate the support from everybody very, very much.

1:25:33SPEAKER- We do.

1:25:35SPEAKER- But we especially appreciate our executive producer

1:25:37SPEAKERtier patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky,

1:25:41SPEAKERJordan Lippett, Bunny Money, Twinkle Twinkie,

1:25:45SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon,

1:25:47SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.

1:25:50SPEAKERThank you also so much.

1:25:51SPEAKER- Thank you very much.

1:25:52SPEAKERDo you think this is a good month in the Bunnyverse?

1:25:54SPEAKER- I hope so, I, you know, I heard some stuff

1:25:58SPEAKERthat was going on in the Bunnyverse that sounded pretty good

1:26:00SPEAKERso I don't know for sure.

1:26:02SPEAKER- Okay, that's good to hear, very mysterious but positive.

1:26:05SPEAKER- Well, it's like, let the bunnies tell their own stories,

1:26:07SPEAKERI'm not gonna tell bunny stories.

1:26:09SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this month, this week rather.

1:26:12SPEAKERThanks everybody for listening and as always,

1:26:14SPEAKERplease consider the environment

1:26:16SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.

1:26:18SPEAKER(upbeat music)