Design Club: Exploring The Tidy Up Genre!

[music] [music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet where we talk about our cats for like 10 minutes right before we start. So, we're all thinking about cats right now. And now you're thinking about cats and how wonderful they are and how they're probably ourselves as cats have come and left and
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, uh, I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeffoff, and by two illustrious guests who whose faces may be familiar to you if you've watched some of our previous episodes. Jeff, say hi, introduce yourself, then throw to our guests.
Hello everybody. I am Jeffrey Atkins, studio director of Extra Credits and Hexter History, and more importantly for this longtime game designer and friend of Codename Entertainment. Actually, I've known Eric for a while now, and I will toss it over to both of you guys.

But, um, I am very excited today because we get to talk about something pretty special. Both a new game, but also the emergence of a new genre near the beginning of it, which is something we don't get to talk about a lot.
Yeah.
But we'll come back to that. But, um, Eric, why don't you introduce yourself and then pass left? Wait, is it you're you're me right [laughter] that way. You're right. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I'm Eric Jordan and I am long term longtime friend of Jeff's. I guess we've known each other for at least a decade now. And when I'm not busy being Jeff's friend. I am the CEO of Codename Entertainment and uh since April of this year uh a deep fan of Tidyup Games. And joining me,
uh, I'm David Whitaker. I'm one of the co-founders here at Codeame Entertainment. I am lead of all things technical and our new project game director, which includes this lovely game we're about to share with you.

It just sort of like we pulled out of the ether so yeah, we we did have a question uh from chat, which is, "Aren't these the car game guys?" And the answer is yes, and so much more than that. Uh, but it is true that you all have turned a new game for a new genre around in remarkably short order. Um, and I'm sure we'll get to that when we get to talk about the game uh, in specific.
You want to know some stats? Do you want to know some stats on [laughter] that first, Will?
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
Okay. So, it was literally 13 weeks to the day that we went from the meeting with there's three of us that own the company, Dave, myself, and Justin. And we had had a meeting. We have two standing meetings every week. We had our Tuesday meeting and I had said, "Guys, I think we should make a tidy up game 13 weeks to the day we launch the store page and it'll be 15 weeks and three days when we go have the game go live.

That's wild. [laughter] It's been a ride."
And it still took us longer than we thought it would.
That's true. That's true. We we could talk about kind of some of those pieces, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it has been it has been a blur that my summer has been a blur. I still think that it's supposed to be warm outside because I've been waiting to take my summer holidays.
You should be down in San Diego or we have a heat wave going on right now. It could be warm outside for you as well.
Yes. Not so much in the Pacific Northwest. [laughter]
Yeah. Nor here. It was It was in the 50s last night. Um, so
well this is actually before we get to that, one of the things we've talked about on previous episodes is um basically design constraint and kind of how much of a game do you need to build between kind of big sprawling games, the Grand Theft Autos or very focused games.
And one of the things we're going to get to, spoiler alert, is that these kinds of games can be very focused games. And one of the nice parts about focused games is that often means there are less and less, you know, as you expand out in

systems, there's more stuff that has to work together. There's more stuff that has to interoperate. There's more technical challenges because you're putting all these together. If you can constrain off a really strong notion and really go for it, in some cases, the game doesn't have to be huge to be really fun,
right? And I think that's one of the things I'm also excited to talk about is, you know, design through constraint restraint to really focus on the core principle.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, so
what I think is like, oh, I was just going to say building on that, Jeeoff, I think is a it's like making games or I think any creative pursuit, whether it's games or not, you you want to try to feel that you could have some control on the outcome of the thing, you know, that people like it and that it is fun in the games or entertaining, I guess, you're doing YouTube videos. And so you kind of it's easy to sort of trick yourself thinking the more time I spend on it polishing it and doing this and that and the other the better it will clearly be

the more fun it will be all of those kind of things which is like just not true actually unfortunately there is not you don't have that kind of control
there is a there is a a a degree of um of fun which is achieved by polishing out rough edges but the core concept will not be made more fun with more polish. uh
makes it worse sometimes.
Yeah.
Yeah. I think it's polish in the right areas. Like there's and there's definitely obviously we'll chat about it, but things that we were like super focused on with this game. We're like these things have to be super polished for the store page, but
you know, other stuff we were less worried about.
Yeah.
You want to make a ladder to the ceiling and paintings? Go for it.
So So let's Yeah, I I think this is a really good way of putting it. Uh Demon Works in chat says, "Polish removes unfun things. It doesn't add fun things.
Yeah,
I think that's a really good way of putting it. So,
and it is worth really quickly noting the difference between iteration and polish. A lot of games have to iterate

to find the parts that are the most interesting and then you could polish those.
Yeah.
But you iterate usually before you polish, otherwise it's odd. And the more you have a game figured out, often the less you have to iterate, though not always.
Yeah. Um, so let's let's back up real quick. What is
a tidyup game? And and and let let's let's define what a tidyup game is and then we need to issue some clarification cuz I got a bunch of questions about this second related but distinct genre of game. So Eric, could you tell us in you are you are the the devote of this of this genre as to can you give us in your words what you think a tidy up game is?
Yeah, sure. I I mean I think a tidyup game is very much a sort of distillation of a lot of the kind of core loops and

aspects of like a cleaning kind of simulator game like Powerwash Simulator or something like that. So, I think it it sits within that broader bucket of kind of cozy games on sort of the maybe the the broadest and then you've got kind of cleaning simulation games or shop simulation games, you know, where you're running like a tea shop or a fantasy in or something like that. And it really distills it down to this core experience where you are the entire game experience is you are finding things, you are putting them in places where they need to go, you go doing some level of progression. The progression can be optional and you can play it and have a lot of fun without it. And I think from a an emotional experience as someone who really started the librarian being the OG game in the space launched all of in October or all of in April I should say of this year. Um but someone who I just deeply love librarian and to me the experience of doing it is very much like

the experience of doing a jigsaw puzzle. It's kind of like this flow state. It's not high cognitive load but it has some cognitive load. I can kind of put on a podcast and kind of listen to that while I'm doing it and it just it's just this really relaxing, lovely space to be in. It just makes me very happy. I
I I will I will tell you that I also play the librarian on release because everyone was talking about it. Um, and uh, it is the memory of that is inextricably linked to the uh, memory of my last re rewatch of Stargate SG1 because that was one of the things that I was doing while I was playing Librarian is re-watching Stargate SG1 as I was, you know, putting away books about necromancy or whatever. So,
you know, I am literally re-watching Stargate SG1 right now. We're in season 3, right? Yeah. It holds up like weirdly well for a game for a for a show that was made when it was.
It's absolutely one of my favorites.
Yeah.
So, for people who haven't played the

librarian, can someone give me the 30 secondond pitch of what the game is?
Sure. You are a librarian in a great big library full of magical books. All of them have been removed from the shelves and thrown about the floor all willy-nilly. Your job is to return every book to its proper place. That's it. That's the whole concept is there are hundreds I think it's 528
there are there are 3,072 books. Yes.
They're divided over 400 different bookshelves. They are in sets between one to three like sorry uh three books, five books or 10 book sets. And when you complete a set, um, then you end up getting a point that you can then spend to have magical powers that allow you to basically find books and complete sets faster.
So, for instance, one of the magical powers might be if I'm holding a book, I can I can use a magical power to find

all of the other books in that set and highlight them. It won't bring them to me. That's a different spell. But I can highlight all of the books in that set and go get them.
Yeah. Which becomes super important because progression particularly in librarian is tied to completing sets. So you don't really progress at all by just putting a book on the bookshelf. You only progress by completing sets.
Which is very interesting because it's sort of antithetical to the way that I would naturally clean. Well, I would like in real life approach a project like that, which is I would start at one end of the room and begin just putting all of the books away wherever they belonged and when I got to the other end, it would be done. But that's not how a librarian works. And if you try it that way, it's difficult.
It I was going to say it depends [clears throat] because there are four different achievements in Librarian. And as someone who just I guess kind of like you will felt fell I fell madly in love with the game and I completed it four different times to achieve get all of the different achievements and one of

them the hardest is the essentially the IRL version of it the no magic run which is like that you don't get any magic or you actually get the points you just can't spend them and so you don't have any magic spells and you kind of just go through and you just put the books up. It took me 24 hours to put all of the books away. And I kind of did that where I just sort of started on one side and kind of just slowly
It also It also helps if you do it last because then you already know where all of the shelves are. Um, which is very important because one of the most useful spells is I'm holding a book. Where does this go?
Yeah. I think I think one of the really interesting things about the genre is as much as I deeply loved librarian and I kind of finished it the four times myself and then was kind of like oh looking for more games in the genre which you know we'll get to the absence of games and now of the mini games. Um

but it was the first kind of exploration of those sort of mechanics. Uh and I think it did some things well on those and some things I think you know could be improved. One of the pieces that is like, "Oh my god, no library would do it this way." Is there there signs that say like 1 A, 2B or whatever. Um, there's a top floor and a bottom floor, but they don't have the name of the thing. Like this is where Monology is, and like what library wouldn't actually say the type of thing in there? Uh, and basically the tidy up games that have all followed have been much clearer in showing like this shelf has this kind of thing in it and this shelf has this kind of thing in it. So you don't have to like kind of play as much of a guess. It plays some of guessing game but not to the extent of librarian
and that that is something we often see on new genres or emerging genres is somebody will make kind of the proto thing that people will go oh this feels different and new. But it's usually the

second round of games who look at that and get inspired that come out and do the refinement.
And I will uh plant plant my flag on top of this hill and prepare to defend it till my dying breath. That is why Vampire Survivors isn't very fun.
I'll fight Chad on that. I'll fight anybody on that. I'll fight on that hill. I don't think Vampire Survivors is very fun. I like the Bullet Heaven genre, right? as distinct from the bullet hell genre, right? Bullet hell, bullets at you. Bullet heaven, you are the one who bullets. Great. Um, but Vampire Survivors is like the least refined version of it. It just got really popular.
Yeah. Well, and I think that's for me that was the interesting thing because like I say, I deeply loved Librarian. I finished it for when the first time I finished it and these doors open and you're like get the kind of like, hey, you did well blah blah blah screen. I was hoping that the doors would open and there would be another library for me to

do like another room and there wasn't and I'm like oh I guess I'll go back and so then I did it four times and then after the no magic run I think I had logged god like 3540 hours in the game just to totally just as a fan and I was like oh I wonder what I could do kind of um you know what could I do next and I was like searching searching couldn't find anything and then a couple months later Supermarket Chaos came out which was a second game in the genre. And um and when I played it, like it you're in this supermarket. They do a good job of the ambiance of a supermarket filled with neon lights. And it's just it's the totally opposite vibe of Librarian,
which was interesting because it stripped away a lot of the emotive things that I was enjoying about Librarian and just being in the space and the magical blah blah blah blah and all that kind of coolness. And it was like just the mechanics and I felt I could kind of get my head around the mechanics a lot more. And it was the weekend of playing that that then the

Monday I'm like, "Oh, these mechanics are well on the by Sunday night I was like, "These mechanics are super powerful. I think there's something really cool here." Monday I put together some thoughts and then Tuesday I pitched it to David and said, "I think we should think about this."
Yeah. So, uh I I saw I saw a great question about um this or a cleanup detail. And I did want to I did want to um sort of uh draw a distinction here because I think it is a really important one when we're talking about this.
Cleanup games and tidy up games are related but distinct. I would say as someone who's watched uh Powerwash Sim is not my jam. Not my jam. I have watched a fair amount of Powerwash Sim because my partner loves Powerwash Sim and she has watched Warhammer 40k mechs and and X-Wing and Spongebob's House and and and right and I've watched all of these. Um, the satisfaction

of finding all the little dirty things is very different in its drive and its contrivances and its gameplay loop than the tidy up genre which is all put it away, right? The organization aspect and the satisfaction of getting to like put the thing away is very different. And also from a very ick perspective, some people don't like all of the dirt from cleanup games cuz it's icky, right? There's like goo everywhere and you're like, "Right." But tidy up games are can be
messy, but they're clean. They're not dirty. They're just
They're disordered. They're cluttered. They're not messy or they're
dirty and or messy.
No, you're taking the chaos and turning it into order. You're getting order from chaos as opposed to
dirt clean from dirt.
And I I I think that's absolutely the key difference is that it's not when you enter the space, you don't go, "Oh, this

looks really dirty and needs to get cleaned." You go, "Oh, this is actually still a beautiful space. I could just hang out in this space as it is, but I can bring order to this space as well."
Yeah, it's interesting. Both states end up in I'll call it the immaculate state. you know the clean library or excuse me the or well-ordered library or the clean car you know from them. So you know the thing is ending up in its pristine condition but it's a very different sequence of events on how you get
to that. Yes
because one is removing things the other is basically putting things back.
Yeah. Um I I
basically one is putting things back. I like Troll Foul's comment that um if you've ever played a little to the left. I would consider it the Warriorware version of a tidy up game um in that it is a tidy up series of micro games, right? Each of which, by the way, has a number of beautiful, wonderful solutions. If you've never played a little to the left, it is a puzzle game

uh where each scene is presented to you in a state of disorder and you are to get it to an immaculate state. However, there are several different immaculate states for many of the levels. So, you are rewarded for thinking nonlinearly about it, right? You might uh arrange things from biggest to smallest. But you might also notice that there's a pattern that goes between the objects and if you arrange them such that the pattern lines up pleasingly, that will also be a a legitimate completion, right? So, I would agree that that's that's one of the forerunners of it, but it's not quite the same and that it's not expanded out, right? It's it's sort of like a a bite-size like or or like a morselsized version of it.
And and these aren't new mechanics in a lot of places like we've seen other games where you put things away or things like that.
You know what kind of the breakout similar to like you know slay the spire. We'd seen games like that but it was the intention and you know cards as moves.

There had been cards as moves before but it was the way Spire did it.
Yeah. that kind of did that combination of features that people are like, "Oh, this is a new way we can do things and it's a lot of fun, right?"
And that's often how new genres start. They're not, you know, taken out of the ether and created from nothing. They're evolutions of things that came before.
Yes. But
oh, I was just gonna say I think I think one of the pieces like a little to the left are other games because you know that sort of sit in there versus tidy up games to me like the line is that tidy up games don't have really there's one puzzle basically which is like where does this thing go? There aren't multiple puzzles. There isn't like when you're doing it, you're not sitting there, you know, kind of it's not it's not like like I say, it's more like the equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle than like a cross word puzzle, if you will, you know, like it's, you know, you're not kind of solving all of these different little things. You're like,

there it is. Here's the thing. I do the one thing. And in that way, it reminds me a lot uh and just because Jeff and I go way back of the birth of Idol Games, which we also got to participate in as a studio, and how Idol Games had a lot of very similar pieces that had been in a whole bunch of other genres, but distilled them down. And it was about the removing of features and structures and kind of really distilling down to create kind of this new sort of space and genre around idol incremental games. Did you uh when when when you were beginning I have to ask because I remember this game this I'm gonna put air cursor on game quite fondly. Uh did did you look at progress quest?
Oh yeah. Progress Quest is like the OG non-game. Progress Quest is literally a little widget that you install on your computer and it plays itself. It is literally just like a little visual toy. It's like not even a Tamagotchi game,

right? Where like it largely is its own thing, but you have to interact with occasionally. It literally requires zero interaction. You boot it up and you level up because you do. And that's just how it works. Uh it's definitely the OG. Um
it came out a long I feel like that came out while I was still working on EverQuest like a couple years into it. Yeah, it was a long
we were fascinated because you know building an MMO you build a lot of the mechanics of ongoing progress and seeing somebody strip away all of the everything except the systems.
Yeah.
You know, all of the art, all of the context, all of the story, all of the interaction like here you go. But it still felt oddly satisfying. Like human brains are weird. Yeah,
they're cool, but they're weird.
Yes, humans brain weirdly all the time. Yes, 100%. It turns out that when you make lightning bacon, sometimes it

program weird like and then lightning bacon make rock lightning and rock lightning for lightning bacon. And some of you understood every word that I just said, which is another proof that human brains are weird. Um, and some of you didn't, which means that you're shockingly normal, and for that you have my condolences. Um, [laughter]
so,
so yeah. So, you Eric, I know you'd seen this, you were fascinated with the library, um, and David, when Eric pitched this to you, was this like, oh, yeah. Or was this like, wait, what? When I said, I mean, I had been trying to get Dave and Justin and literally anyone else who would talk to me um to play Librarian because I was loving it so much and I'm like, "This is just incredible. You got to play it. You got to play it. You got to play it." Uh I was not successful necessarily in getting a lot of people to [laughter]

play it. A lot of people did play Librarian, but not really through my evangelism efforts. Uh and then yeah, when I pitched it to you.
Yeah. I mean, I think the the interesting thing was that when when that pitch came, it was just right on the cusp of a we just about mid end of July, early August. It was right about then.
Um, and we'd already been spent, we'd been spending um the last like two months or so, sort of going over new ideas, trying to figure out what we were going to be working on next. And um the idea that we'd sort of landed on at that point um already had a number of sort of uh tidy up kind of mechanics in it. It was sort of a um putting things in their right place kind of game where you had you know you have a picture of a scene and things were out of place and you'd go in and try and match the picture to where things were going to go. And so we were kind of in that mindset. So I think maybe coming in cold to that of like would have been a bit more of a shock of like um what do you mean we're just going to pick up the items and put them on the shelf? Like what's where's the game in that? Um but I think coming from

that I was like well I can see it's it's a pretty similar idea and and so um it actually made a lot of sense. Uh we were looking for something that was going to be sort of in a scope that that we could do in a short period of time and I think it made sense in that front too and so you know we tried all the games or we tried the two games at the time.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We played 100% of all the games in the space which was two
um and thought yeah this makes sense. It's fun. Um it's got an oddly satisfying and core loop or something in your brain that ticks when you when you put those things in place and you create that order from the chaos.
Um,
and we could reuse a lot of the stuff that we had developed without a hitch, which was also one of the things that we've been kind of looking for as we developed this whole tech stack, which was really brand new for without a hitch.
Yeah. I mean, we spent a large portion of the time in the development of Without a Hitch, creating that tech stack, creating the multiplayer stack. Um, getting things in there that you, you know, you take for granted when you come into a game, like being able to have like settings that work and

localization that works and sound systems that work. And all of those now built, um, were something that we could take and just build on top of that for the new game.
And the ability to pick up and put something down, which was a core part of without a hitch.
That's that's true. And the crane system without a hitch was significantly more sophisticated than just being able to pick up an item and carry it around. So yeah.
Well, and a little bit of the physics like um on my first playthrough as I went upstairs and was like sorting putting swords and spears um and maces down. I was actually like hucking other things over the wall downstairs so I'd be able to get them better later. Like I was just watching the physics and the bouncing and like sure there's packages for those but you know all of that stuff is things that you also worked with on the previous game. You know playing with some of the physics and the objects and the collection or is to my mind like I see some similarity there on systems you

would have already had in place that could be repurposed off of a thing you already had a beginning with.
Yeah, for sure. And I think also particularly because it's a multiplayer game, just having all the systems that interact with the physics over the network and that sort of stuff is things we worked out during Hitch that now we're just like, "Oh yeah, we know how to do that." So
yeah,
also also the the other piece I was going to say is without a hitch as a studio that's done, you know, came and our origins are in 2D flash games. Without a hitch was the first 3D game also that we shipped. We've been working on 3D for a while, but it was the first one that we shipped. So, you know, there's also the whole like infrastructure we built around having a 3D game and doing all the assets in 3D and all that stuff that we kind of ironed out to the shipping shippable point in without a hitch. Um, as well because it was it's hard to remember like, oh yeah, that was the first 3D game. And I think that's a big part of the enjoyment of Fold the Fables is moving around this 3D space. Also, uh, Eric, are you a firm believer

that the second floor and the ability specifically to huck things off the second floor to the ground floor is a major part of the genre? Cuz I find that that is like a very satisfying part of librarian, right? So, in librarian, there are two floors as there are in Fold of Fables, which you can see behind uh uh our friends here. Um,
actually, I think there are three. We picked it up. actually 50% more floors now. [laughter] 50% more floors.
Let me get let me get you like one of those uh corner badges that they put on cereal, right? Just like put that right. Okay, great. Um, but that idea that like part of the game, part of the tidying is you will find things like there are intentionally a number of things on the topmost floor that go on the bottom floor specifically so you can get the enjoyment of hucking a thing off the top floor to where it belongs on the bottom floor. And I think that that is like actually part of the charm. uh genuinely

um
having not played any before that was one of the very fir I was doing that within 10 minutes.
Yeah.
So
it was a natural part. I was going to say I think I mean you could do the throwing. I know for myself when I'm playing one of the things that I think is really that moves the game from seeming simplicity to actual like this really engaging kind of complexity is the core loop is fundamentally like I pick up a thing like in our game it's a sword. Okay, swords go up there. I can carry only so many things. I pick up this sword. I'm walking up and then I see like oh there's this magic wand. I know where magic wands go, but I've got too many swords in my hand. So, I better make sure I know that one. And then I put some swords down and oh, I see a statue. I know where statues go. So, I'm picking up a statue. So, it's this core loop is like pick up a thing, go to the place, place the thing, get a little bit of power, pick up another thing, go to the place, place it. So, the core loop is

really simple, but it's actually a whole bunch of nesting core loops that you keep in your brain because you're like, "Oh, I'm doing this with the swords. Oh, there's a spear and that goes over here and oh, there's this. And so you, it kind of reminds me of Civ in that way where you have these like I just want to play one more turn because then this one thing I've been working on for a while will finally complete. And so you've got all these different chords and idol games also have very a lot of that.
It's an optimization loops that all come to bear at different with different intervals and different um times when they come in so that there's always a cool thing about to happen.
Yeah. based on even if you're trying to line them up, the fact that they never do. You finish a turn, you get a couple things, you finish another turn, a couple more things, and then they add other things one more turn away. So, you're like, "Oh, I might as well do that."
And then it's suddenly there's three more. But yeah,
and then it's morning. Yeah.
Yeah. Right.
Um but I also think that one of the things that that compels um continued play in the tidy up genre is the

optimization is one of the things that is quite satisfying, right? that like the moment of I pick up a sword. Oh, I remember there's a sword over there in that pile on that table over there. I'm going to go grab that. And then I see another sword and like now I've got a handful of swords and it just like Bo and his two knives. It feels great to just like carry those around and like put them put them down like all at the same time. And that like reward for having a mental map of the space and for optimizing right in the form of I get to do a whole bunch of things all at once is a thing that I think is also um like not unique but it it scratches the same itch in a weird way as like factory builders do like that that optimization itch I guess uh feels like it's it's scratched in the same way.
[laughter]
Uh,
I think it does like I think it does a good job of not having a lot of kind of

intellectual complexity while at the same time still having a fair amount of feeling of mastery. You're like, "Oh, I know where this goes and I know where this goes and I know where this goes." So, you can feel mastery of the space,
but you can express that mastery in a bunch of different ways. You're like, "I want to do it without any magic or I want to do it this way. I want to do it this way.
I want to throw items over the balcony intellectual complexity." Over it goes, you know. Exactly. [laughter] Exactly. So,
well, and like for me, part of the throwing items like in this one, this is my very first tidy up game of any sort, I was like, "Oh, I'm I'm slowly clearing out an area I won't have to come back to to search for things."
Yes. Having an area that is designated as clean is very nice.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, we got a few a few play test
reduces the possibility space of thing places I have to look.
Yes.
But again like that was my beginning. So as you guys were thinking about this you'd kind of identified this is an area

we think we can build in. We have somebody at the studio who has expertise in this. And that's actually often a thing that um drives a studio to do a game is there will be one or more people in a studio that have expertise in something that they're looking to build. And I've seen a couple of studios do it where they don't have that and it's almost never successful if they don't hire that expertise in
because obvious.
Well, there's a lot that just kind of somebody who's played a lot of those kinds of games knows that just should be happening that aren't necessarily as obvious if you haven't done that before. And what that often means is you find features or systems late in development that should have been a core or fundamental part of the what you were building.
Yeah.
And trying to shoehorn those in later is never as clean as saying, "Oh, here's the couple things we know we're going to need. Let's make sure we're addressing these from the beginning."

Like just from a development and a tech standpoint.
But I also think that that's true of um in a broader sense of like the subject matter, right? So in this case, right, it's more than just a tidy-up game, right? It's a paper craft tidy up game. And there's additional expertise that goes with that, right? So like
if you have something that's an impossible paper craft or a paper craft that isn't right, it won't ring true in the same way. And I find that that is also true in a lot of uh in a lot of places. I was going to get to that, but um so when I first heard about this was at PAX, I think
because Eric or actually, excuse me, Slice the Indie Game Conference two days before the start of PAX
where Eric and I were both at it. Um because I was like, "Oh, cool. I can hit two conferences off one plane ticket." All right. Um, and Eric was showing me this fantastic handmade paper craft that he'd made to show

basically I think one of his somebody there the tensile strength of paper and how it unfolded. Um, and the speed on actually Eric you don't have that with you around do you?
I I do. I have I have props physical props here.
Yes. Yeah. Eric, by the way, has been making physical props for his Dungeons and Dragons games and other things for longer than I have known him.
Oh, yeah. I've I've been doing it really my whole life. Like, and you know, at various points kind of thinking about it as I get older and more gray, like how long have I been doing this? And it's like I I don't know why, but from the my early memories of like pop-up books and stuff like that of just like the the way that you can take just plain paper and do stuff to it that it now sits in this space between an imaginary world and your real world to me is like magic.

Like I just I love that. And so I've used that a lot in D and D games. And Jeff, you've seen a lot of my props and stuff, but I just it's always felt like magic to me.
It's like pulling something from the void that doesn't exist and bringing it a little bit into our world so we can touch it. I just absolutely love it.
Um, so yes. So, um, we Dave, Justin, and I talked about kind of theming as like a key thing and what we could do. We also had the when we were thinking about doing a tidy-up game, one of the one of the constraints for tidy up games is uh from a tech perspective, they're relatively low lift. I mean, not to diminish Dave and the team, um but you know, in comparison to like the physics system within without a hitch and kind of all of that. It was just it was and the levels being randomly generated, all that kind of stuff. So, a whole bunch of stuff and without a hitch that was much easier, but um you need a lot of objects and so they need a lot of art assets and

uh you know our OG game there of librarian had 400 unique book types that then had you know had different volumes and stuff like that. So, they had 400 item types. Um, and if you're starting to see all of these games coming out, of which then now there's like well over a hundred between released and announced, like just it went from zero in March to well over a hundred now. Um, and so you're like, okay, we want to do something here. We're going to need a minimum of like 300 350 unique art assets. Um, and so developers are doing one of two things. are either using AI um and so Supermarket Chaos um used AI for all the textures. Basically, every visual thing you see in that game essentially comes from AI. Um they they point out that they handmade the 3D box that the serial label goes on uh and they just just use AI for the the

textures on it. Um and or they're buying asset packs. Um, and one we saw like about a week after we had made our decision to go, "Oh, hey, let's do something in space." We had initially been thinking maybe we do something with an asset pack. We saw two games launched, both fantasy department store games, both with the same asset pack because they both asset pack.
Um, and it was [snorts] like, oh,
we can't do that. How do we do something in this space that is going to not have someone else announce like a day before or a day after us that's going to use the same asset pack and all those things. And so we looked and we thought a lot about it and one of the things is we've been liveing Crusaders of Lost Idols and Bushwhacker 2, two of the games before the D&D game that we made, Idol Champions. Uh we've been live servicing those for Bushwackers like 14 years. We have over 20,000 2D assets. So, how can

we create 2D assets into a 3D world? Oh, Eric also happens to love paper craft. What if we do it through papercraftraft? It was like my dreams. It was like a genre I deeply love combined with a hobby that I have that I've been doing as long as I can remember. Um, and so that kind of came together. And then to set it all like, okay, so it's going to be like Paper Mario meets librarian. How do we make that make sense? We're like, "Well, what if we set it in a popup book?" Which actually, shout out to my lovely wife, Peter, when I came home and was describing like, "Wait, what do we do? What do we do? Blah, blah, blah." And she's like, "Put it in a pop-up book. That'd be great." I'm like, "Ah, perfect." I have avoided making popups forever because it looked like such a pain in the ass. And And it is. It is really annoying. So, I have So, Jeff, you saw the final version. So this little guy is the first version I did. It was a long weekend and on Saturday I was like, "Okay, how

hard can it be to make a popup?" Poor poor idea there. And I went and went on Google or YouTube, watched some trailers or some bits, some tutorials, and made this. It's got a It's an orange crush box that I found out of recycling that then opens up and creates this little guy. Can you hold it a little closer to the camera?
Uh, never mind. [laughter]
Over there. Uh, anyways, this this little thing. Um,
and then yeah, I don't know how this works. So, anyway, so I made this. Do you want me to go closer?
I will get up. It'll work.
I will meander closer to the camera. We will see how this works.
It'll work.
Keep focus.
Dave assures me. [laughter]
Hello. I wouldn't uh you know.
Yeah.
No, that doesn't work. Okay, I will just Never mind. Never mind. Hold it up. Here we'll do it. Just hold it up.
The first one.
Boom. Where's the first one?

Yeah.
Not autofocusing. Autofocus.
It does autofocus
on you.
No, it's blurry. Okay.
It's saying blurry. Well, it's supposed to autofocus. Well, all right.
Okay. Well, maybe I go we'll go midway like here. There we go. Maybe not quite as terrible. Anyways, so that was the first one. I have a Cricut at home which is a paper CNC cutter effectively. And so I then took that design and went through several iterations to kind of figure out how I could kind of make that on my Cricut so I could reproduce it.
The first thing I did was I created this one which is um essentially the amount of space that I would have for each of the the leaves that are on my kind of popup. And I could also kind of figure out these are all at the same angle and kind of how that works because a pop-up has to work this way and look good. But it also when it's closed has to fit within the the book.
Yeah. [clears throat]
And doesn't come out the side. So it has

to kind of exist in these two different ways. So I made that one. And then I did several iterations after that. And then the final version that Jeff got to see in person at Slice was this version
which is chroma key
which is chroma keying up [laughter]
just a little bit.
Sorry, I did not select it based on would it work and the chroma key but yeah
um and so we had this version that then I brought into the office and showed Dave and Dave did not heed my warnings of how difficult all this was and looked at it. I mean, we were sitting this meeting. He's looking at opening and closing going, "That can't be that hard to make, right?"
Yeah, that's true.
No, we were looking at it and we were just from a standpoint of like thinking about how would we make this digitally before we gave it to, you know, to an artist to look at. And I was looking at it and thinking, well, when we've got, you know, two surfaces that are rotating and attached to those surfaces are the individual pieces that are, you know, then rotating with the surface. And I thought, well, I could probably set that hierarchy up in in uh in Unity and see what that would look like. And I think

that, you know, the the motion of that's got to be tied to the angle of the pages. And so, lo and behold, I set it up and I set the angle and the pieces didn't line up with each other. And they didn't line up because it turns out that uh the the relationship between the angle of the fold and the rate at which the things pop up is nonlinear and it comes up very quickly at the very end. And that relationship is something that um I ended up actually just writing a solver for to get it to work in in the editor, not uh being able to just get the math right for it. So, but um
yeah, it wasn't as easy as I thought.
Solver
for our audience.
What's a solver?
Uh so a solver is it's a it's like a mathematical um iteration that checks a solution over a large space. So, it has a solution and it checks for a solution or the set of options that are going to have a solution and finds the solution that is the closest to the solution that you're looking for. So, for the purpose of the uh the popup, I was looking for a solution of the angles that had the

tips, the points that were right in the center of the seam uh touching each other for the two pieces because was in the
Yeah, because I guess actually the first one you built was really based around the this version because that gave the artist then the canvas that space that they had and they knew as long as they stayed within each of those it would work. And so it was this point right here, this tip of each one of these because in the um in the 3D setup in the computer, the each one of these panels was these rotate uh separately from each other. So this was an independent object and this was an independent object, but they still needed to stay connected as they folded. Um so the solver basically took all the angles, found where those tips touched the closest and then used that as the positional angle um for for each uh position of the opening of the book. And and the thing that I thought was really interesting going through this process and watching Dave kind of do it and and particularly Dave's point that popup books move in a nonlinear way

in the sense that the speed with which you're opening the book and that stays constant but the speed with which the leaves pop up is different and nonlinear to that. And so it pops up like that. And and this is just my little theory, but
one of the things I find really interesting is that our brains, coming back to Will your discussion earlier, our brains are terrible at understanding nonlinear things. It's like a mental blind spot for us, right? And if you ask someone about nonlinear things, we just always get it wrong unless we're, you know, using Google Sheets or Excel or something like that to figure it out. like it just always surprises us because our brain just doesn't calculate it. And pop-up books because they move in a nonlinear way even though it is completely predictive and you can go like of course this will pop up at this point and it'll do it are always surprising because they play to that mental blind spot that we have around

nonlinear movement.
Yeah.
Yeah. 100%. So, and as sorry, as a final wrap on that, idle games also play to nonlinear progression, which is one of the reasons idol games, even though they're mathematically predictable, because of course that's what's underneath all of it, are still surprising because they rely on [snorts] nonlinear.
Yeah. Uh it I um my incremental game of choice is a little more active than an idle game, but it it has the same principle of like the uh the nonlinearity being like the big reward, right? Is when you get something to compound exponentially and then you feel so clever because it's so much more than you could have thought even though you could have done the math.
Like you could have done the math but you didn't because it's more difficult than like linearity. So anyway, um I think this is probably a good opportunity for us to slide into and take a look at Folded Fables if if we if we think that that is a uh a good place

in our conversation.
So yeah, let's take this then. So you guys figured out the aesthetic. You figured out you had a whole bunch of assets. You guys have obviously been working on a Dungeons and Dragons game for a while. So I'm sure dragons are always somewhat top of mind um for this. So, is that kind of the combination of how you were like, let's make a dragon's horde and then clean it up?
Yeah. Well, we knew we needed a space that would have a lot of items that you would need to clean up and you sort of have this task where you're trapped to do the piece. And so, the framing of like, oh, you've been trapped by a dragon, instead of eating you, you must clean up the dragon's horde. So, that sort of that that fell into place relatively quickly. Uh the we spent three weeks of that the total which will be 15 weeks or of the kind of you know 13 weeks at the beginning there we spent three weeks trying to figure out what Nintendo had done so effortlessly in Paper Mario.
That's what they did effortlessly.

Well effortlessly to me as a player when I played it I'm like oh look Paper Mario. It's a digital thing that's paper. Like hey how hard can that be? That's that was what we thought uh in earlier in that process. But taking a digital thing that is pretending to be paper that is pretending to be a dragon is far more complicated than we initially thought. So that it's if you make the dragon to dragon, it becomes a digital thing just being a dragon and it skips that paper step.
Whereas pop-up books when you see them, you're not like, "Oh, I think that's actually a mountain." and you're like, I know it's paper. And so it's, you know, paper pretending to be something else. There's just kind of one step, but now we add this second step of paper or digital pretending to be paper pretending to be something else. And it took us three weeks to kind of get the aesthetic and dial that in and figure out how the objects will how many how many versions of the object textures did we do?
Um, for the actual the iname item,

there's probably three or four different textures on that.
Get it just to feel right.
Yeah, there certainly. It was more more so that the actual environment, I think, than the objects being the tricky part, but that you we'd go into the into the game world and we'd look at things and they wouldn't ring as paper. You wouldn't look at it and think, I'm in a paper world. This thing is made of paper. Um, it all had very much that sort of well looked like it was a 3D object that someone had put a texture on it.
Um, and and I think sort of as as Eric mentioned that from a from the paper side of things, when you're looking at a popup, you know, it's paper. It's paper pretending to be the thing, pretending to be the mountain, pretending to be the the the diarama you're looking at. And it actually comes with a lot of little imperfections and edges and you can see it all and you can see that it's paper. Um, and then when you look at the digital one, which of course is now polygons pretending to be something that hopefully is looks like paper that then is pretending to be the thing. Um, you have to actually add in those little imperfections, add in those folds, add in those colored edges that are that

stand out, add in the little phrase. Otherwise, it just looks too perfect and it just looks like it's just polygons being the thing that okay, it's got a bit of a rough bumpy texture on it. It might be papery, but it doesn't read that way.
And and one of the things about paper is our our our single biggest connection to paper and understanding of paper is that it is flat. We exist in a 3D world, but the paper that we interact with is flat. And so one of the things that we did in that 3-week iteration to get the space to feel right was to take things that had been built out as like pillars or something and we did a bunch of work to make sure they look like they were folded paper but because they were threedimensional they didn't read and we kind of turned we replaced them with things that were flat. So you've been like oh it's flat.
Yeah. particularly at a distance. Anything that even we'd gone out of our way to make look like, hey, this is how it might have been folded. If you'd made the thing out of paper and had it as as a prop, uh, at a distance, you couldn't see the fold. You didn't see the bends. You didn't see the little details. And so, it's like, oh, it just looks like a 3D pillar or 3D stairs or whatever the

piece was. So,
and I think um, we'll talk about this when we get into game. I think your solution for the edges of the actual objects is ideal for that. um because I think it does a really good job of conveying that organicness, right? Making things feel authentically organic
out of an inorganic substance like polygons is so much harder than most of chat thinks it is. By the way, that is incredibly difficult because it doesn't you are lent um you are are you are borrowing a assets from the material or the uh the medium that you're working in. When you do that physically that you have to add all of that back in, uh it's much harder than I think a lot of people think.
Yeah. By the way, um has anybody here read um Dealing with Dragons? Was published in the '9s, part of the first book in Enchanted [snorts] Forest Chronicles.

It's about a prince. It's by Patricia Reed, and it's about a princess who ends up either running running away living and lives with a dragon and ends up tidying up the dragon's layer and decides that that is now her basically becomes the the dragon's chief of staff for a while.
Okay. and um because that among other things, the Draven keeps away all the knights and princes who were wanting to marry her. [laughter]
But it very much has the organizing the dragon's horde as a central early theme.
Oh, interesting. I have not read that. No,
for some reason it just as we were talking that like resurfaced from a thing I'd read. Hold on. I found it on Goodreads. I'll throw it into chat.
Yeah. Um
uh while just doing that, Will, one of the things you were mentioning was, you know, like recreating the paperness. We've been talking about that. So when we were designing the logo, that was a

another kind of getting the feel right. Another very painful experience of my life. Um [clears throat] kind of many iterations kind of do it. And we we wanted it to feel like paper. And previously every single logo that we have ever done for every game is done in Illustrator because then we can you know it's vectors we make it whatever size do all the things. Um but for this recreating paper with vector images ended up being like it just looked like it was airbrushed or something like it looked too clean. Yep. And so another one of my lost weekends to this project um on Friday I've been working on for a while and Friday night I'm like I don't know if I can swear. Anyways imagine lots of swearing in there. I have a folder on my my [laughter] thing called logo [laughter] because I was so frustrated with it. And anyways on a Friday night I'm like we've got to and we want to get

the score page up. need a logo. And so going going and um I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna figure out how to do this out of paper." And so I got like physical strips of paper. And then I folded all of the letters and figured out how to fold the letters, which is an origami fold, which I'm also not familiar with. And so I kind of figured all that out. this O. I bled for this O actually quite literally because I got paper cuts. But also it was so frustrating to get it to wrap back around and make a perfect circle.
And then I did all those. I brought them into the office on Monday and I had folded fables there all done as that. And my idea had been the artist could use that as reference to make the illustrator file work more like paper. And then I I when I'm super into something, I put it always as my desktop or my wallpaper on my phone. So I had that as my wallpaper and I just took a picture of it and put it on my phone. I

said to Dave like, "Hey, could we just take photographs of it?" And Dave's like, "Well, it opens up as bitmap anyways. Sure, why don't we?" Our art director was less thrilled with the idea, Adam, but Dave's like, "Yeah, sure. Fine." And so what's actually the logo in the game is the physically folded paper. And of all the games we worked on, it was the first time that my personal art has ever appeared in one of our games. It's actually just physical paper. So, it's easier just to have pictures of paper in the game.
Yeah. And I think that's a really great uh illustration, unfully intended, of how um the constraints that inspire a game and may originally seem like boons, right? All right. We need to do 2D stuff, so we'll do it out of papercraft. That's like a a boon, right? We don't have to model additional 3D stuff or whatever. Slowly forces you into weirder and weirder solutions like I'm going to build the whole logo out of paper craft

and then take pictures of it and that'll just be our logo is a uh is a thing. So, uh Chad's asking to see it. So, let's let's get let's get on into the game. Uh so, the the the guys are going away for a little bit and then we'll uh
you'll still hear them. You'll still hear them. place them on screen with a picture of the background of what is behind them because that is actually the opening.
Yeah.
Well, you'll see.
But opening shot. Whoa.
All right. So, this is folded tables. And this this logo up here at the top is is what Eric was talking about that this is this is actually folded paper.
Um so, uh I'm going to go ahead and start a new game. Uh and I'm going to
Yeah. Y and I'm going to allow my friends to join cuz this is a multiplayer tidy up game. I have not played a multiplayer tidy up game. Very interested in that. Uh also, um I did I did see I did want to call this out. Uh you have multiple you have room for multiple levels and multiple game modes.

Spoilers. I mean, we put it in. [laughter] I
was going to say, bro, you put the drop down menu in. I don't know. You're allowed to be upset with me for calling out a drop down.
I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Um, so, uh, all right. So, let's let's start and and we get this.
There's that fold.
And we have some some some lovely music.
Uh, and I'm glad it loaded this time because the first time I tried this, it didn't. I didn't mention that bit. All right. Welcome to my horde. You think you're brave adventurers, but no, you're merely petty thieves. I should simply eat you and be done with it. And I would. Then full to the brim on the last group of adventurers that dared attempt to pill for my lair. This is quite a display. They made a terrible mess attempting to escape. Little good it did them. You might be in luck, however. Clean up this mess they made. Count every last item of the fall. My precious treasure is still here. I might just let you live. Plus, that dwarf really upset my stomach.

All right, so we have uh we are in the game and uh I I see I have friends, but um I am missing a Jeff. Oh, that's cool. Uh, Eric, could you could you turn to the side? Yeah. Yeah. So, we are Papercraft.
I think, by the way, I'm gonna let the three of you do it. Um, I get I tend to get motion sick in a lot of 3D games, and having played an hour of it. I'm going to watch for this part.
Okay. All right.
You You can be the commentary, Jeff.
Absolutely.
You'd be like, "No, don't pick that up, Will."
Oh, boy. I can't wait for that. as you're looking around like first impressions. Let's get first impressions here.
So, one of the things that I really like I really really like is the cardboard edges of all of the items. I think that that sells like the paper craft thing super well. And I know that's like not

the first thing that a lot of people notice, but as someone who's done like a lot of building and making of stuff, like the edges of everything being cardboard and it having like an edge texture instead of being like actually two-dimensional is so good and cool. Um, and then the second one is
this is so colorful. This is so
isn't it great?
Yeah. Like
actually back up. Go back up the stairs behind you a second and look down um behind there. Go. Turn around. Go up. Turn around. Now look down again.
Yeah.
Part of this is the lighting. And you'll notice there's a little bit of like ambient fog
or steam going across it. So you're getting both lighting and little bits of movement going off of 2D.
And because this is kind of that paper cardboard cutout, they have an excuse to be extra colorful.
Mhm. And all of that together makes for a very satisfying first first and ongoing visual

visualization.
Yep.
One one of the things when we were doing that three three-week iteration on the space is we would do just that position you were in Will of that starting position looking at the space and going does the space reads papercraft. And we found that we kind of divided the paper craft feel into two different tiers. There were things that would read his paper craft if you were really close to them and you like studying them. You're like, "Oh, okay. I can see the fold in this or some of the imperfections about
um and then other things that um didn't read uh as papercraft when you were far away." And so we were like, we needed to read his paper craft from that far away looking into the space and then we also needed to read and hold up his papercraft when you're really close and moving through the space.
Mhm.
And and it the far away was the hard part. It the close we actually that came together relatively quickly and it we

iterated over and over again on the uh the far away. Okay,
this, by the way, will is where I ended up starting. And I um put those up. Actually, look behind you over the edge there.
Behind.
Remember, you're you're lagging slightly.
Oh, whoops. Sorry. Didn't mean jump. Um
Yeah.
Oh, yeah. That that is where I was yeeting things over down to here so I could like start that corner.
Yeah.
Yeah. Spears go up on your right there. Yeah. There you go.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah.
By the way, Eric, I got far but not in any way very far into it.
Um, does the order in which things are arranged later get need to be changed? Like does the dragon say please categorize from common to mythical?
No. No. Actually, so all the items have a value and the the they're all indicated by the color, the outline. I

noticed that it's very MMO or RPGesque.
Well, or if you've, you know, made Crusaders Lost Idols and Idol Champions, which have all the gear has tiers in it. Yep.
Um, and the way that it works is when you complete a shelf,
um, you get a different value depending on the value of the items on that shelf. And those things allow you to earn Dragon's Favor, which is one of the progression systems. And so will if you follow me I'm over here. Hello. Let's go up here
up to So the dragon's name is Ivy. That's the common name because of course you wouldn't want to actually know the true name. Ivy wouldn't want you to know the true name. So she's a forest dragon and also drawn by one of our artists named Iivevy.
So yes, that is the that's a set of progression with the dragon alter that is buffs for everyone in the group. Okay. And then if you hit tab, you'll see the set of progression. Uh yeah,

there you go. That's a skill trees. Everyone earns points together, but you spend them individually. Okay.
And so we're all progressing together, but you one person could be like, I'm going to put all my stuff into utility, another person in collection, another person in placement, kind of depending on how you want to play. And then well if you come around if you close that and then you come around behind there are six dragon eggs.
So those yes please place that
dragon eggs. Dragon eggs are tucked away across these folded lands. Find them among the paper peaks and hidden crannies. Then return them to the nest to unfold magical powers for all adventurers.
Okay.
So you have raised our carry capacity from five to seven by doing that. will.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, I yeated the spear over here because I needed room for the thing.
Uh, yes.
Uh, okay. So, uh, yeah, this is So, it's
it's kind of fascinating. Uh,

you can jump. So,
yeah. Well, I was I was I was trying to stay on top of the thing. Um, I have So, uh, to explain, I I have streamer brain. Uh, and streamer brain compels me to be in motion when playing a game at all times, even for even if for no reason. Uh, and in fact, especially if for no reason. Um, so
now will if you look at some of the flames that are in those kind of the tops of the stairs like a wall and stuff, you can see the it's some of the things I love the most where it's like this 2D quality to the flame,
you know, sort of like what papercraft would do in your mind, if you will. So it kind of maintains that papercraft quality while at the same time clearly um actually being this cool imaginary flame moving around. Yeah,
hammer's down. Oh, we have three skill points. I got to spend some skill points.
You have three skill points.

I have not been spending my skill points.
I need Okay, I need an ember point spear. There is only one left. [snorts]
If you if you pick up an ember point spear and have the right skill, it will point you towards where the other one is.
True. I can get item sense. highlight all items you're currently uh watching or you're you're currently holding. So that is
Yeah, it's for the one that you're the one that's in your like in front of you, it highlights everything similar to that.
So if I press one Ah, okay. They're all down there.
You'll also notice something that kind of freaked me out, which is
there there's more than
one. There's more than a rack full.
Yeah.
Yeah. Sometimes there's more than a rack
except for swords. Every single sword there's only there's 10 of each swords and each each um shelf holds 10. So yeah, the sword
yeah kind of a funny one because the you know some of the other a lot of the

other games had duplicate items and some of the abilities that we designed actually intended to help with having duplicate items. Uh, and then as we were progressing through, we started to find more and more cases where we had uh, the ability to not need duplicate items because we had so many graphics from from Bushwhacker and from Crusaders. And so we methodically went through and tried to make, you know, as much of the unique as possible and then realized after doing that that we kind of made some of those abilities kind of redundant. Um,
and we made it all slightly harder because you had you when you're doing like you've got your inventory maxes out at 15 and if you're using pull,
uh, but there's only like 10 of an item, you only get nine. You have one in your hand, you get nine more at most. Whereas in another game, you you'll get the full 15. So yeah.
Uh, so I I guess my my next question uh is uh I'm just going to run around and grab spears, by the way, because I've decided that that's what I'm doing. Uh,

and that's the plan. Um, uh, what made you decide you wanted this to be multiplayer? Like what what about this experience were you like, "Oh, well, obviously it's got to be multiplayer." Was that born out of like a multiplayer first mindset or was there something specific or did you think that that was like a missing part of the genre? Like why why multiplayer? because a lot of these are very uh solo meditative sort of experiences. Um I will say
yeah I the genre okay so the genre has changed a lot in the very brief time that it has existed. So when we were having that discussion we had the multiplayer tech from without a hitch. So it wasn't like oh this is a heavy lift we'll just use the stuff we've got so that would be pretty easy. Um, and at the time there was a total of two games. There was a librarian and Supermarket Chaos, both of which are single player. And my first,

so I had the idea, you know, kind of playing Supermarket Chaos on the weekend. Then kind of put together my thoughts for Dave and Justin on the Monday. Tuesday, we made the decision to do it. Wednesday, we talked to everyone at the company and we said, "Hey, maybe we could be the first multiplayer version of these. that might be kind of cool. Um and uh and that was not the case because there's actually several multiplayer games in the space now. Sure.
Um so yeah, I think I do think that it's a different experience having done both um multiplayer and single player and they're both fun in different kinds of ways.
Um in some ways it is like friendlop adjacent. Um there's Oh, I think you guys had the flock around folks on, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So, if lock around, you're taking pictures of birds for anyone who doesn't know it. Kind of like Pokemon Snap, and you can play by yourself, which is mostly that's how I finished the game

personally. Um, and I played a little bit of multiplayer.
Well, it's cuz your friends can scare the birds.
Yes. Yeah. Actually, well, I find it similarly to me. It's like kind of meditative like you know I have a steam deck and so I just kind of you know put it on my steam deck on my lap and have some tea have Ursa nuzzling into my face of course as we well established and um and then I can kind of play the game um and I but I think it's sort of it's a hangout space so people who like playing that are just like oh I can just hang out in this space and this one coming back to what we were talking about earlier having fallen in love with tidy up games and having a very felt sense of what emotional experience I looked for in a tidy up game and really being able to go back to that. So, when we were talking about things and Justin, the other co-owner who's uh not here with us, I'm doing a lot of the design, Justin would throw out a thing and I'd be like, I don't I won't want to do that in a tidy

up game. Like, it makes it too complex, you know? I don't I don't want that experience. um or that sounds really awesome and I and some of the stuff he added I just you essentially later in the game you end up with rotations kind of like back in MMO WoW or whichever um that I just deeply love all the rotation stuff that we added um but uh yeah you kind of had that and it was like oh what what emotional experience do we want to create in this game? So a very clear idea of that and I think you have the space is a big part of that. Just having this cool space you can hang out in.
Yeah.
Hang out with your friends, hang out on your own. So in that way I think it's it's friend slop adjacent in the way that um uh a flockound is friend slop adjacent.
Okay. Yeah. I can definitely I can definitely vibe with that. Um, one of the other things that uh I I wanted to comment on is um librarian obviously has all of the books and all

of them are the same size, [laughter]
right? They're all they're all the same size, right? And here we have like this undersea gem, right? Is is in the same game as Hey, the white dragon egg, which I just found. That's pretty cool. and also this Ninefold Grace idol, right? These are both items that you need to categorize and they're rather differently sized from one another. Um, what made you decide to like embrace the different sizes rather than um rather than scaling everything to be of a similar size at the end? Um, I say I think just from a I guess there's a couple of factors there and certainly it adds um quite a degree of variety to it, but I think that um just getting the items of even different

shapes regardless of the size to to have a place that they would fit um turned into quite an undertaking. And that's why a lot of the different um um the shelves, the what we call the fixtures um are are designed specifically for a type of item.
Um so I I think we just had to embrace the fact that there were so many different shapes and sizes uh in order to actually use the assets that we had because they came in so many shapes and sizes.
Sure. Um, additionally the art itself uh because it's uh it is vector art which was great because it meant that we could take it from its original form which was you know in animate uh and exported at a much larger size so that we had you know nice crisp lines and textures. Um it it also meant that if you scaled up those items what you ended up with was was line work that didn't match. So you end up with big thick lines or really small lines depending on what you had done. And so that sort of inconsistent look

was also something that dictated that we really couldn't change the size of things too much before they started to look like they didn't cohesively belong together.
Yeah. So, so that's really a a um uh an accommodation to that limitation that you're
well and I think so like a lot of times in the process of putting this game together you know Dave would be like well we need to do ABC or XYZ and you know my role because obviously Dave is technical and overseeing that team and understands those limits in a way but I don't know I don't understand all speaking Greek to me um And for me, it would be like, well, did that make the game more fun or less fun as a result of those decisions? And one of the difference between Librarian Supermarket Chaos, Supermarket Chaos, because you're in a supermarket, you have a bunch of different shaped objects. And having also finished that game multiple times, I really enjoyed the variety of objects.

I didn't so much enjoy it being, you know, a supermarket and being under neon lights and all that kind of stuff, but I enjoyed the variety. And so as a player, I was like, "Oh, I know that I'm going to want that variety in my play." And so when Dave's like, "Hey, we're gonna all be a bunch of different sizes." I'm like, "Perfect. That's exactly what I want as a player."
Okay.
Um I I did have a
It also actually makes the horde feel more like a horde.
Uh definitely agree with that. Um I also had a a sort of organic question that I hadn't planned on asking, but but came up. Um, so, uh, you have two kinds of stairs. You got the stairs, uh, to the east and west, and then the stairs up in front of the dragon. Um, that you can't go out to the side to get to swords and spears, and you have to jump it. Uh,
yes.
Did Did you leave it in because it's fun to jump it?
Uh, we left it in because we spent three weeks trying to figure out all the space

and we kept going, "Oh, well, we'll move that. We'll move that." And then it was like, "Oh, we have no time to move that. Maybe maybe we'll just leave it as it is."
I I apologize for accidentally calling you out on a thing that remain undone.
Totally fair. It was actually the original stairs uh were they were the the railing for them and the stair placement itself was a little bit lower and you could just actually uh jump up from like this side over. And we'd had a discussion with uh with our art director who was working on those pieces and he was like and we'd said, "Listen, we want to go back and forth across this section. Uh and he was like, "Oh, I'll have to redo the whole stair section." And we looked at it and we were like, "Oh, we can jump it. You know what? It's fine. You can jump it."
And then he went back in and added these little sides to it. And then you couldn't make the jump anymore. And I know we had we came and talked to him. He's like, "Oh, you told me just to leave it." And I was like, "Yeah, but you could jump it."
Um anyway, this is how it ended up the way it is. Uh you can jump it still. uh once you got the jump upgrades um and you can jump down. Um but uh definitely

uh if we weren't completely time constrained, we might go back and and adjust the look and feel of that. But
well, initially we thought, oh well, we can just kind of leave it in for the trailer. We'll shoot the trailer and get the store page up and then we can go back and do it. But I have to say like I was playing like last night with Metra and I'm like one of my thoughts was actually I'm kind of enjoying the jumping over this. So,
plus it makes for a nice hiding spot.
True. Oh, what would be hidden there? Oh, no. Spoilers. Spoilers.
Spoilers. We didn't hide anything inside the stairs.
Nah, that's impossible.
I wouldn't do that.
Chat, I'm getting a premonition that I should go and check the stairs on my next trip back towards the the the uh the spears. Uh for like no particular reason whatsoever. Boy, I sure am an intuitive gamer. Um,
well, and and actually just what you said there, Will. Oh, I think okay, the next time I'm doing this thing over here

and in this part of the map, I should do this thing. And you're kind of storing that in your head. I think that's such a big part of these games.
I agree.
Is that whole loop?
Yeah.
I like kind of the casual, you know, we're doing this in Will's casually like combing through hordes of treasure. Yeah.
And the dragon is watching you.
Oops.
Dragon is a really good excuse for a a lot of loot.
Well, and I love So, there's the dragon will track to How does How do they work again, Dave? To the closest person or
Yeah, the dragon picks the nearest person every 10 seconds and uh follows them around, watches them, watches what you're doing. So, uh I I am I am unfortunately uh sad to report that the interact option is broken on the interactable in the stairs.
Oh, you can hold hold it. Hold it.

Okay.
Yeah. You know what? The message is wrong. It says push, but it should be hold.
Yeah, it should be hold. [snorts] Uh chat, we are of course not playing on the on the full version uh or on the on the release version. we're playing on the beta branch with all of the up tothe- minute, you know, everything uh adjustments and such. Um so do keep that in mind. Are the waterfall Are there any waterfalls with gray colored swords? No, there are no waterfalls with graycolored swords because most people aren't sadistic. One of my mods has this idea that in every uh circumstance, I am a firm believer that if you're going to put a waterfall or waterfalls in your game, there should be something nifty around behind near them.
100 100%.
Right. Yeah, it's a rule, right? Okay, cool. Great. Awesome. The thing he wants to put behind it is a sword made out of a metal that reacts rather violently. And by violently, I mean explosively

when exposed to water. Um uh and all of those metals are a a grayish sort of hue. Uh and that that's his ongoing bit is that I'm going to I'm going to find a a sword that explodes when I take it through the waterfall. Yeah, the sodium sword.
What I put behind them is nifty. No, it's not. It's just
we we do have a lava falling down. And if chat if you go by the lava on the either top left or top right or the front there. Yeah. The audio for that is crumpled paper that is slowed down. So if chat hears that, that's what's going on there.
That's very cool.
Now we have some dragon favor. Will, do you want to spend some of the dragon favor that we have? You have to spend it
over at the dragon uh pillar. And whatever things you buy,
this one is for everyone. So yeah. So, choose wisely and Dave and I will judge you for your choices.

Wait, there's an option that's called wisely. Um, anyway, uh, give me one second to finish putting away stuff cuz I might uh, okay, I did not get us more favor. How will I Wallace the William without a Francium sword? I don't I don't know. All right, let's go. We have seven dragons favor. Uh, so let's go auto sword and global cool down because that affects what everyone's doing. Um, everyone gets a skill point and uh, everything lasts a little longer, I think, is good. So, we'll just buy out most of the first route. Uh, and everyone can have Oh, those are two dragon points. Interesting. I could have gone down one tree, but I chose to spread it around. I am now ready to be judged for my choices.
Oh, you you did choose the thing that in my mind is the right thing, which is the global cool down cuz you're sort of pulling items. so often at this point in the game that global cooldown is uh is definitely good.

Yep. Like I'm so close to finishing spears. I just want to finish spears. Like that's my goal. Need you all to understand that my goal is to just simply finish spears. Hey, uh Dave, years and years ago, um when we were working on EverQuest, one of the things we did that just freaked players out um was, you know, you were just talking about the dragon turning to watch the closest. We just had locally on everybody's client, any NPC you were with within X distance of would just turn its head and look at you. And so our MMO people were telling us how immersive and like realistic our MMO felt because it was one of the first times in games that like walk through cities or dungeons and had like NPCs track them
interact with you. It it is a very big part of uh what makes uh some MMOs feel immersive. I will say uh is is that like tracking of players because it makes it feel like you're not

I don't know the guard's not staring straight ahead ignoring you until you interact with them. Like they're aware of your presence, right? It makes
it makes things seem aware.
They turn and watch you go by. And we did it all locally because um we just didn't want to send that much network code in a busy city. Right. Right.
Well, and and that way it's always personal, right? Everyone gets to be the hero of their own story because Right. In that way, hey, uh if there isn't one, I would love and this is such a terrible idea. I would love a displace everything in front of me. Like I just want to like scatter the the big pile of stuff like so I can get to everything inside of it. That's
You want like a force push ability? Yeah, that's what I want. Cuz I'm I'm evil that way. Don't mind me.

Roda. Yeah, exactly. Chad, I need what? Several Rose Guard spears. I'm mostly missing silver thorn spears, which is weird cuz they kind of do stand out. I guess there aren't as many of them. Or I could just be standing on top of one and have totally missed it. Don't mind me, chat. I'm observant. All right, I'm missing one honed elven sword. Where is it? It's put here on the wrong shelf. There we go.
Don't look at me. I didn't do it. I didn't touch anything. It's not a [laughter] spear.
Oh, yes. Putting all the making sure you're putting things on the right shelves there.
It's like I got nine of them here. There's a 10th one here somewhere.
Oh, yes. Want that one. What I find interesting, so several

people in the office have been really enjoying the game and playing a lot um in their spare time, including myself. And what I find interesting is how people start developing their strategies of how they want to do things.
Um, and so I have like very specific ways in which I buy all my upgrades now in which I kind of go through and progress in the game and I'm like, "Oh, this is the way to do it."
I I I I do think it's also kind of interesting that it has that sandbox element to it, right? It has that sandbox like um organic free form build your own strategy kind of thing to it with no downside. Um by the way I figured out why I'm having so much trouble finding silver thorn spears. It's cuz my eye thinks that they're trident.
Ah there we go.
Yeah. It definitely like choosing items and then putting them in categories and like having a good amount of each of the

categories and getting all that to work was boy it was so much and Elisa the producer on the game um who is actually on holidays right now but um she spent and there was like not a lot of time and a million items and it was like quick figure out which of these million items we want [laughter] boy and she her and Dave did such a great job of everything that they chose.
Yeah, that was it's when you when you take a well, as Eric said earlier, we have over 20,000 items and 20,000 graphics from Bushwhacker and Crusaders. And so the process involved looking through all of the files, all of the source files that we had for those, collecting the ones that look like they would make sense into one big master file, and then going through that master file and selecting, you know, hundreds of those that we thought would make sense for the items that were going to be in the actual game. And then taking those hundreds and grouping them together into sets that made sense. Um,

yeah, was a it was a long process.
Yeah. So, we've got a really great question. It was short. It was a short process. Uh but it was a lot of time done in a short period of time.
Took a lot of time. Yes.
Yes. Several straight days.
Yeah. Sorry, Will. You were going to say
uh we had a great question from chat, which is uh and and one that I think uh alludes to something that you talked about earlier, Eric, which was one of the problems with Librarian is that um the only ways that the game changes are self-directed, right? Um, how, if at all, does this game change between playthroughs? Uh, I don't know how much you want to talk about that, but we did call out that there's a drop- down menu for um, you know, multiple uh, different play modes and maps and options. What What kind of What kind of ideas do you have on that front if you want to share any? Yeah, I think I mean I'm fine sharing uh

recognizing that sharing is not commitment. Um
right good one. um that so the early draft of the Steam store page we had had uh a bunch of modes in as a concept [music] because we thought like one of the things so I did it took me 24 hours to do my no magic run of librarian which I deeply enjoyed like I enjoyed just kind of moving through it but as I got further and further into it I became more and more paranoid that I would mistakenly trick uh uh trigger one of the magic spells. Um, which I didn't, you know, make sure I didn't buy and all this stuff because I was like, "Oh god, you know, I'm like I'm I'm 20 hours into this. I've still got several hours to go." Um, and and so one of the shifts in the genre has been to have modes. So, if you're doing a no magic run, you can be like, I just want a no magic run, so just turn off the things that would, you

know, basically in the 20th hour of my 24-hour run kind of screw with my no magic run. And so, we thought about doing modes. We have modes kind of drawn up as a thing, but then uh in the world of getting all this done, we thought, you know, maybe we don't launch with modes. Maybe we can add that later. So, they're designed things like no magic run and stop and some other ideas, but [music] um they're probably not going to be in for next Thursday at 10:00 a.m. Pacific when we're planning on going live. So,
not that you're counting down to a specific time or anything.
Yeah. Well, my entire life is counting down to the particular time right now.
Yeah. Um I do think I will say I know I know it's I'm not saying it should be in at launch. I'm just saying if anyone out there is like, I'm going to make a clean up a tidy up game, fuss row dawning piles of items around. Yes, please. Like the amount that that would help with some of this, right, where I'm like

digging for a specific thing and I've got empty space on the floor and like I'm down to like waste time cuz I I I don't know. I think for me the idea of I could finish this one particular project at the expense of making future projects more difficult for myself is fine. like I'm okay with like, you know, uh making it a little more difficult to to finish future stuff if if what I'm doing is just like grabbing spears right now. Right.
Right.
Um
I think that's one of the really interesting things about the genre for me is in its simp simplicity arises a whole bunch of different ways for players to kind of express what they want to do. Mhm.
Which you wouldn't think I I certainly when like when I saw Librarian and I just saw the like I saw the video clip of it like the trailer and I I just thought like oh that looks like super pretty. I would like to be in that world and then I was playing it. I'm like, "Oh, wait a minute. This is like

actually really fun. It's not just sort of pretty. It's actually like a lot of fun." Um, and there's a lot of things you can do in that space as a player and just as sort of ways of expression that I hadn't I was like I I was really surprised. I kept well like I was saying to everyone around me like, "Oh my god, this game is so great. I love this. Look at this. Who would have ever thought this would be so fun? It just sounds like the most boring thing in the world." One of my kids actually walked in on me playing and was like, "You enjoy this, right, Dad? like you're actually you're you're having fun doing this, Dad. Question mark.
Yeah. Yeah. He's like, you really you really like you're not just doing this for work, you're enjoying this. I'm like, I love it.
And those two things can overlap, right? like um keeping up with with gaming news for for like my work here is a thing that I enjoy doing um but that I also do like need to do.

Yeah, it's a funny balance and I think one of the things that I'm very happy about for myself is I came to librarian just not I we weren't thinking about making this or any of those pieces. I I came to it because I [music] just I was like, "Oh, that looks pretty. I would like to be in that world. Maybe I'll play this game." Um, and that was kind of my so some total of kind of thought around it. And then I played it and was like, I really love this just as a player. I didn't come to it as like, oh, this is a genre and we should make something in this genre and, you know, we could do paper. Like none of those thoughts like that running a business or doing any of those things. I just came to it because I was like, this is a lot of fun. I'm really having a great time. I just really enjoyed it. And then as we've moved into thinking about it as a thing that we would do and what would we do and what could we do in the time, all these other things kind of kick into your brain that sort of pull you out of just that raw

experience of just playing. And I often think back to my experience of just sitting on my chair with Ursa in my lap on my Steam Deck just playing Librarian going, "Okay, that's the emotion that we're trying to capture." Make sure we're everything we're doing is capturing and delivering on that emotion. Yeah. Um, someone in chat quite correctly pointed out, "I find it very interesting how this game looks super relaxing and interesting, and I have no interest in cleaning my own helm." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Call. Yeah. Mhm. Yep. No, that's uh that's full volume there. Um Well, I think I think so. I think that that is one of the pieces that it looks like it's similar to, but it's actually different. So, at least for me in my house when I'm cleaning things, the things that I find difficult isn't like just kind of cleaning. A we talked about, you know, they're not actually dirty. It's just disorganized and you're bringing order. But also, you are guaranteed walking into this constructed experience, everything has a spot.

Yeah.
Whereas in my home, I'm like, "Oh, I got a new popup thing or I got some new paper other paper ephmera and or I got a new typewriter." Uh, and my wife's like, "Where are you going to put that?" And I'm like, "Oh, I didn't really think about that part." [laughter] So, so here, you know, everything's got a spot. Everything goes somewhere. And at the end of it, it'll all be put away. And that feels really satisfying.
It is a world designed specifically to fit that.
Yes. In a way that my house with the absence of spots for me to put typewriters was clearly not designed that way. What a very specific absence. [snorts]
That's an absence in a lot of houses. I'm going to point out.
Sure.
I'm sure Tom Tom Hanks would agree with me.
Just want to throw that out there. [laughter]
And that's how all the typewriters ended up at the office.
No, I only have I only have two typewriters in the office. They're a very specific set. One of them in particular was bought in Victoria and

still has its sales receipt. They're both Underwoods and they're off it.
They're off. Oh, that u and they're they're um offset by only like 20 years and it's like a huge difference in the tech. And those ones do not count towards the quota of typewriters I have at home because they're in the office,
but they count towards the quota of typewriters you have at the office.
I have no no quota here. I just have limited space. And actually, all the space in my office is filled up with pop-up books and like a million different pieces of paper things and folded letters. It's funny. My quota is on espresso machines.
Oh, okay.
Which is neither here nor there. Just mentioning
that's that's the quota you have. You live in an oppressive regime that limits the number of espresso reg uh machines you should have.
Yeah.
All right. So, I need what is this? One pennant, one py blade,

two iron point, two rose guard. Uh, can I offer just the smallest piece of constructive feedback?
The numbers in the yellow text on the progress bars is a touch on the hard side to read.
Oh, yes. Yellow uh yellow text or white text on the yellow background is in fact a terrible, terrible choice and it is on my list to change. I didn't say it anywhere near that harshly. I was being nice to you.
You were very nice. Yes, [laughter] I put that in my feedback. We have the feedback docs. I think that's been my feedback consistently for the last couple weeks. Hey, I still can't read this.
No, I went and looked for like a a for contrasting colors for that because I know I needed to change it. And I found like a table that shows what colors contrast nicely on each [laughter] other. And the the white on yellow was up there as like this is a terrible like was up there on the red section of don't do this.
I think it was a co-op that did that.

Can we blame the co-op?
Uh Moors did that. He's not a co-op anymore, but uh he's a part-time student. I think it's kind of like a co-op, but
kind of like a co-op.
He's no longer part of the co-op program for that. So, it's technically different.
Mhm.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, I'm just gonna go back.
Yes, we can throw him under the bus.
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's all Mo's fault. [laughter]
Actually, [snorts] a piece of feedback that we'd also received, there's someone who's on YouTube, uh, just playing the whole game, but doing it first time through as a no magic run, which I thought, wow, okay, I'm impressed. Um, and he's doing it. Uh, so no magic to him is he can have passive things like increased carry capacity, jump speed, and stuff like that, but none of the active abilities like summon all of a certain type of thing.
Um, and so yeah, so he's doing that and uh and kind of talking it through. And one of the pieces of feedback he had for

me was he was like, you know, it'd be really great if you could have a zoom function. So, you kind of zoom in on some of the signs and stuff like that. Especially if you're trying to do things quickly, you want to be like, I want to get dragon favor as quickly as possible, which means I want to select items that are going to give me the highest shelf bonus when I finish the shelf. And so, I'm selecting partially based on color, but then also partially just based on how much I get when that shelf is filled.
I'm on a mission, chat. I'm gonna finish this shelf. That's
So, has it been surprising to you guys how many different ways people play or have like been surfacing to you that they play it differently than you would have thought or is it within an expected range?
Um, I think for me having spent so like I finished Librarian and the first time I did it, I didn't I didn't read anything about it. I knew nothing about it. I just knew, oh, this space looks

fun. I want to be in the space. And then I I didn't watch any tutorials. I played very suboptimally my first time through. Um, and when I finished it, I was very sad that there wasn't like a second room and I thought, "Oh, well, maybe maybe I'll read some stuff about it." And so I read online a little bit about it and it was like, "Oh, there's these achievements. You can do it multiple times." Um, and so then I did each of the achievements. And I think the achievements did kind of map out the ways in which people sort of engage with these type of games. Like I could do it with no magic. I can do it you I could try to speedrun it. I can just kind of slowly move through the space. Like so it did map that out. And so far my I've always been a little surprised at which one people choose but not surprised at the set within which they're choosing if that makes sense.
Yeah. I was just kind of curious on like kind of how that how that had turned out and how it was going in ways whether you

thought or did not think it would go that way. I think the one thing that is different from my my personal play experience had been that um uh sorry I just want to put these away um is I had played single player games and there weren't multiplayer games. And honestly, I mostly play single player games at home because I kind of I just wouldn't want to be left to my own devices when I'm at home.
Um, and uh, as a result of that and not playing multiplayer. And so I think that is a place that like people kind of like the flockound of like, oh, I just kind of want to hang out with my friends in this shared hangout space.
Um, that's something that I hadn't kind of explored. or the other side which is um we've done these company play tests and those are all multiplayer and one of the groups uh was like oh you want to do it as fast as possible and develop this strategy where one person their sole job was to run around the top pick

everything up throw it down into the middle and then the other folks were taking stuff from the middle and putting it out which worked pretty well as a strategy for um uh for sorry ah now I'm get distracted by your game [laughter] uh were They they were pretty quick in their ability to get through things. So
Mhm.
There is a pretty active um speed running scene for librarian.
Yeah.
Um about how fast you can get through it.
And uh and I assume that the categories are degree of accuracy. Um because you can do it you can do it where everything's just on the right shelf but not in the right order. that that is an option.
So, one of the things librarian has that I um that doesn't really fit this one because of the way the shelves are. One of the achievements is every book in the wrong spot. And when I did that, I kind of just put them all over the place. And

it looked like a used bookstore. It's actually one of the ones that I like the look of the most.
And at the time, Librarian didn't support multiple saves, which I assume it does now. Um, and so I was always sad when I deleted that save to go do another another run. Um, because I really just love the look. Looks so much like a used store. A magical used bookstore.
Um, I will say another small piece of feedback. Uh, in uh, actually maybe it's here. Maybe it's here. Let's go to settings. Let's poke your settings with a stick. Camera, display, graphics. I would like an accessibility menu for the glow of items. The ability
make them
glow more will
uh make them glow more and also to set a color that isn't green because uh there are enough warm surfaces that if uh it's entirely possible if someone's red green color blind that it won't show up very well.

Right. I'm sure one of the folks in the office is red green color blind. Right. um on the team.
Yes. Yes.
Are you red green color blind girl?
No, it's just it is it is a thing that has come up repeatedly uh throughout um like the my my the big things for me when I'm like checking a game for like how well does this stream are uh because I'm presenting it visually, right, and auditorially are subtitles. How good are your subtitles? Does your game have subtitles? I am firmly in the every game that has any information that is conveyed primarily by audio should also have subtitles of that information without exception camp.
Um, and the other one is uh color blindness settings and things like visual aberration. So like can I turn off your bloom? Can I turn off your lens flare? Can I turn off your
nausea effects? Can I turn off
you know all of these different things to make the experience palatable for

people who are watching me? So, um, that's one of the the things that I tend to pay attention to because it is of a professional interest to me in that way.
Fair.
Yeah.
Oh, you got lots of time, Dave.
What?
You have lots of time to get all that in.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Well, those are also things that can continue to be added.
Yes.
Um, and expand upon.
Yep. That's I have to say one of the lovely things about the time that we are in with video games in video game development is you can you don't have to like you know in your world Jeff where it was like okay it's pushed to disc
it's done gold okay
and so you can be like oh hey like what if we added this
oh I've just got my favorite set of combos yay very happy
spears are Oo.

Oh, and it does the thing. Oh, it does the do the thing. All right, that's very nice.
Th This is actually really important, chat. Um, both for a sense of progression and to convey information in multiplayer setting that the sign changes color when a section is done is huge. This is very important. Um
so uh one of So I in my play tests on the weekend have uh finished the game uh uh three different times and the one of the times the tech that highlighted the sign was broken.
Don't you tell them that. [laughter]
I'm not going to tell them because it's it's a scar on my soul. And and even though I knew that, oh yes, this could be fixed and stuff like this. It was like a Saturday night at 11 or 11:30 or something. And like I had everything up and I knew that I was missing something, but I couldn't see it immediately. And

some of the stuff can kind of noclipip out. And this is before we have it now setting now that you can summon all the things into the middle of the room when you have
50 remaining. Yeah,
50 remaining. So that didn't exist yet. and the the signs weren't lighting up and so I knew I was missing and I could tell how many I think it was like four items spent two hours um going through cuz I was like I have to find these before Monday which was silly but I don't know I wanted to do it. I guess I was happy. Oh, yeah. The the the um and I also love that because you're in a place where you get to do all of these like uh references that you get to do things like the limit breaking sword or like you know um the the the windbearing spear or like what what's it called? The the wind Yeah, the wind banner spear. If I if I held it and said some words, nothing would happen. Anyway, um

uh chat chat and I are both very big on Sanderson. Um
who isn't who isn't?
Uh some people don't like it. Uh mostly because they they I we've had we've had some lively discussions about his world building methods and not everyone is as big a fan, but those people are allowed to be wrong. So
now some of those item names are going to be changing, right, Eric?
True. Oh, spoilers again. So,
don't get too attached.
Yeah, because a lot of those names came from uh some of the original names from Bushwhacker and Crusaders. And I know Eric,
well, some of them weren't quite as overt on Bushwhacker and Crusaders. So, like calling out the particular crusader that they're from. So this this game uh takes place in sort of from a lore perspective in Bushwakia um which is our our name for the world of both Bushwhacker and Crusaders which

is really not very logical as a space uh
let's say a lot of possibility space to do a lot of different things in it. So, but yes, lots the references to both Bushwhacker and Crusaders.
I'm being a menace making a giant pile of swords in front of the sword shelf and not putting them away. Um,
you monster. [laughter]
Okay, I know this isn't a competition, but I just want to point out that one of us has 424 items put away and some other people don't.
[laughter]
All right, Eric.
I did all of one kind of item, which I think is its own virtue. Also, you know where all of the items are. This isn't fair.
Uh, no, I don't because the items are randomly placed. I do know where placement goes. Actually, the bigger thing is I know how to stack my buffs together, which I deeply enjoy. And so

what you can do is you can get the um you get item sense. You then get a buff on item sense that allows you to pick things up when you um are close to something and then you get another buff and this is this this was Justin completely and so fun. Um you get another buff that when you pick up an item with item sense, you just have to mouse over it and be close to it and you pick it up. it increases the duration of item sense which then stacks with and so [music] you can then be trying to keep that duration up as long as possible.
Um and then I love to do the shurikens um because the shurikens provide a lot of gold value and then that gold value gives us dragon points quicker.
Okay.
So
So you have the strat.
Yeah. But at least it makes me happy.
Okay. But and I I think that that's one of the the charms of this is the um is the overall like flex like it's the flexibility, right?

like it provides as as someone who's played an awful lot of MMOs uh or a specific MMO I should say recently um there's not as much flexibility there because like you know players will optimize the fun out of absolutely everything if given the opportunity right like
that and that's one of the things actually particularly going back to Crusaders [music] and then Idol Champions that we talked a lot about in the design process is we don't want to design something that just is math says you must do X. Yeah, that is and that is a real that's a real problem that occurs in a lot of spaces is like you're being mathematically inefficient if you don't do X
right and and you know players um will then be like well I have to do this and sometimes you know if if you do end up

with designs that that go that way I don't know that we're always successful in that way but if you end up with designs that way then players will be like you're forcing me to do this thing I don't want to do and you're like, you know, it's a it's a game. You don't have to do the thing. But I totally get it as a player. It's like, oh, I now the game is telling me I should play in this way.
Yes, there is information that's being communicated to me. Also, uh, whoever made the Tideland sword and the crosswind sword look so similar, I see you. I see you. Why won't this go there? because it's not the same sword. Will,
one of the things that I do when playing um another strategy Eric does is to um put things that are similar that I know are going to be similar, like some of the swords, some of the shields, like there's one set of shields that there's three types to um and I try to make sure that I'm placing them all close so that

I can be like, is it this one, this one, this one? And I can kind of go through them all quickly. Mhm.
Oh, that's a Dawn steel katana. This is a moon steel katana. It's like a dawn steel katana except at night.
Oh, so question then maybe for chat. Um, one of my So, my my sons are all grown, but one of my sons was like, given the ratio of blade to handle on the katanas that we have, they're technically not katanas.
Mhm. And you know, I don't know if chat would agree with that assessment or not.
Part of the problem is it's difficult to establish like
scale
scale, right?
Oh, that that'll be my defense then. I'll be like, we meant it this way. It is a katana. It's just the scale is different.
The scale is off. Yeah.
Well, his actually no, I even tried that now that I think about it. And he was like, "Well, sure, Dad, but you it's the

ratio between the two. It's not the scale." So, it would hold true at any scale.
Well, right. But then you deal with the fact that you're dealing with cartoonish proportions, right? Like um it's sort of like the heroic scale thing in um
DND minis.
Yeah. In Dn D and Warhammer minis, uh which is um like the scale throws everything off, right? like hands and um such are not actually that chunky.
Uh
or shoulder pads in WoW fall over.
Yeah. If uh you know if you're in WoW and it's raining, just shrug and you'll be dry. Like it's fine, right? Like
True, true. Well, I'll use that as my defense next time it is mentioned.
Yeah. Where does this go? Uh, I give up. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. All right. Anyway, um,

are all Wait, hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I have a question. Are all blades not swords?
Uh, no, that's a sword.
There may be a duplicate row.
Yeah, if there's not a spot for
Yeah, there's two tid lands.
Yeah, one thing got put away in the wrong spot. the swords because they're all unique and there's so many of them. It's the spot where that's the most likely to occur.
Yep. We had two piles of witchland sword or witch steel blades and that means there's no room for the violet gem sword. And yeah. Uh and it happened again with another sword. All right. Where is it?
You have to talk to that sword categorizer.
Yeah, it wasn't me. I just I just picked up the job in progress. Oh, look at me.
Yeah, we actually we did talk about having an ability that would like take like items and put them together, but we

found like really other than swords, it was a pretty limited kind of set of things. So, I don't Yeah, it kind of ended up on the cutting room floor.
Yeah, it is. I mean there is I I think one of my my only concern is that it does feel difficult to like have a how do how do I put this um how do you resolve it if someone's just not seeing it right like that that becomes the problem, right? Like
uh and and and the answer can be just stare at it until you figure it out. That that is a valid answer, right? It's just not always a satisfying one.
I think between here and Thursday of next week, that probably will be the

answer.
Okay. All right. Uh speaking of Thursday of next week,
uh you all have much to do but Twix now and then and and we are at the end of our run. Uh but so we should we should let you all get back to it. But uh rest assured uh you have officially eaten one of my evenings as I uh as I play this game. Um
uh will before we sign off one thing. Oh. Oh. Do you want to show the game again for a quick sec?
Yeah.
And this is this is very cool. This is not going to be in the final game. Uh hit zero. This is because we have the dev thing. put place all items
and then hit escape. Oh no, that does it.
Yeah, it doesn't do it anymore.
And then hopefully the frame rate isn't terrible. If you look around, everything where most things are moving up.
Yeah.
Face the face the center.
Yeah, look in the center. You know, by the way, chat, the the

incredible thing with this is that the frame rate is crapping itself and my graphics card isn't. Like, this is self-limiting. It's very impressive. Actually, as someone who who's seen games do this, um, my graphics card is fine. It's And so is my processor. Now, granted, both of them are kind of beefy. Oh, there it goes.
There it go. Not everything went away, but most things.
Yeah. And that's because the items are going back to where they originated from with that feature. Uh, and because we've placed items in places they didn't originate from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's really nifty.
They don't have a home.
Oh, hammers are homeless. Um, [laughter] all right. Well, that's that's
So, let's see. So, this goes live, you said, next Thursday. Mhm.
People can find it right now on Steam.
Yeah, you can wishlist it on Steam. You

just search Folded Fables. Folded Fables Tidy Up the Dragon Horde, but Folded Fables will get you there to the Steam store page. And you can see some Actually, there's a a little um technically not a GIF, a web [clears throat] of
You say it's a little video, Eric.
A little video of the of the uh page opening that I was showing. So, that's on the Steam store page. You can kind of see the physical version, the final version. Uh there you can wishlist it there. I have a discord that I have shared a lot of behind the scenes stuff and pictures of all the paper craft and popup cards, all sorts of things that inspired it. So you can join the Discord. Link to that is from the Steam store page. And then yeah, wish list now and then it'll come out next Thursday.
All right. Well, thanks thanks so much for coming on, Jensen, and for talking with us about this nent genre and for showing us your entry into it. Um, yeah. Uh, chat,
uh, there is no breakfast this week. Very important. There is no breakfast

this week. You all must go breakfastless until next week. However, Matt and I will have a triumphant return then. Um, and uh, yeah,
there will be a design club, however, again next Tuesday.
That is correct. There will be
topic TBD.
Yes. Um, but yeah, uh, I think that all that's left for us is for Jeff to say bye to the people.
Bye to the people. Have a great week, everybody.
Bye
bye.