Confession Time: I Owe John Romero $30!

I hope I cannot get in jail because of this. But that was a pirate copy of Doom. And I said I said Malta, you need to tell John Romero that I owe him 30 bucks because I I remember that Doom was 60 bucks back then. It's like, okay, 34 John Romero 34 karmarmac probably, right? So So I was like, you need to tell him that I owe him 30 bucks. And one day, correct me if I'm wrong, but near Christmas,
yes, it was Christmas. a a box comes to my to my to my home uh from from Malt and what I receive is this basically I don't know if you know if it can be seen but
that's John Romero's signature that says
I owe you you know you owe me 30 bucks and the signature of John Rome
that was like so he knows.
Yeah, that's great. I mean like um I mean you guys are touching up a bunch of different points here that I want to kind of mention. Um like in in in this

period, right? Uh what your games uh Project Grail really stuck out to me is there is kind of like I would call kind of this period the nostalgia period, right? There's a lot of remakes going on. Uh you know, Metal Gear just came out. I I I I caved. I had to buy it. Even though I know Kajjima is not attached, I was like, I gotta play this. But then uh uh you know there are more uh more callbacks to simpler times like I mentioned before at the beginning of the episode. Um you're you're the the the style and the retro gaming is really coming back in a big way right in this period. And um not just that, the development teams that that you guys are representing where like John Carmarmac and John Romero, right, back in those good old days where it was just smaller team, quicker development, let's do what we can time box this, right? Two, three

year development if we can. uh which is kind of like the sweet spot for I think uh when the game industry was healthy, right? Where it was manageable and communication was better. Uh and I think every soul uh counted in a way, right? Everyone is uh voice is heard when they're brainstorming and working and you see feedback and you feel really a part of the team. And even though we all have a background in AAA and there are great things about AAA and I I don't think it should ever disappear. I think I think we can all agree that this is uh this overcorrection uh is too much, right? Hopefully, you know, we bring back that part of the industry uh very soon and maybe a couple years. But uh it also uh is lending or or or uh paving the road for for this type of development to come back to

remind uh game developers the passion of making games which I think is in danger right now. I think a lot of game developers are very down for good reason and uh the passion is kind of like dwindling uh in in in in a crazy time like this. So my question uh after that intro right there is to ask you guys you know in in in a time where it does feel impossible right to ship anything right there's just so much uncertainty. Uh, what did you guys employ here to make grinding on side projects work? I mean, you guys have full-time gigs. You guys are obviously doing this into the midnight, two years straight, right? Um, maybe past midnight in a lot of the cases. Uh, just grinding away. Uh, how how did you guys cope with that? I mean obviously

you guys have other things uh distracting you kids, marriage, whatever, right? Girlfriends, whatever, right? And that is the the the kind of uh like the recurring theme when it comes to side project. It's just like you basically have to shut off everything for a little bit, right? Or there's phases of it. Would love you guys to kind of highlight some of those to make this work, you know, getting to alpha basically in two years.
Who wants to take interesting.
You first multi you.
Yeah, I first. Okay. Um, yeah. So, I can only speak for me personally and I will let Rafino talk um about like his um experience about that. But for me personally, um, I'm a very, yeah, structured guy, I'd say, because, um, like leading a team or being like the associate art director, um, with a team of 35 people, um, there's a lot lot of things to do and I need to structure my days like properly to make sure that everybody gets like the same attention,

you know, like for feedback or for looking at things or even having meetings and things like that. And um yeah, I had to build like a structure. I knew um I wanted to push this project and I wanted to um at least one time in my life make a demo uh release a demo uh of my own game. And um I needed structure. So I I came from a place where I have been like a starting artist and um I I was horrible at dealing with time, managing my time. But it it got better um the more experience I I got. So um I started actually to track my times you know to um provide me like one or two hour to make like some beautiful artwork and that's it. Um and I I tried to stick to those times. So you know your estimation, you know what you can do in those times. And um this method actually helped me um right now to um yeah schedule my