Designing Third Spaces | Design Club

[music] [music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that now has four hosts. Apparently, three people and one very confused orange cat. I am one of those humble hosts. Will uh joined as always by my pal Jeff and our special guest today, Toby. I'll let them introduce themselves momentarily. Thank you so much for joining us everyone uh for design club. Uh Jeff, say hi to the people.
Hi to the people. Hey everybody, I am Jeffrey Zach in the studio director of Extra Credits, but more importantly for this longtime game designer joined as always by my friend, co-host and voice of the people, Will.
Hello.
Yeah, I was going to say a last name, but I think just Will is fine.
Yeah. No, no, no. I'm becoming like Prince, right? Exactly. Well, also
I I can't say Will Crunkle, but it's just it's much more interesting just to say Will.
Well, okay. So, I I'll tell you actually Toby, introduce yourself and then I'll

explain why that's funny.
Oh, and joined this time by special limited engagement run by
Hi, I'm Toby. Uh I am one of the co-founders of Secret Plan Games who are making a game called Flock Around which is all about bird watching with your friends.
Cool.
Excellent.
And Toby, have you done anything else of note that we you want to talk about? Like are you is this your first game? Have you done other games?
Yes. Uh I also made a game called Ram Random Access Mayhem. I see a couple Rammers in the chat actually.
Uh which was an action rogike. It won an IGF award a couple years ago, Z Independent Game Festival. So that was my first foray into games. Uh and then since then I have started a new studio with some amazing people. I'm going to I'm going to
Well, you're looking puzzled
now. I'm just I'm just going to put random access mayhem uh on my wish list cuz that's a Okay, look. Toby mentioned the context for that is it's body swapping rogike. So, we basically took Hades and we were like, what if you could play with all the weapons at once?

So, you you actually inhabit the bodies of the enemies and they all have unique kits and you swap between them
and uh people seem to like it.
I run a show every Tuesday here on Twitch called The Rogue Review where every week I review a new roguish game. uh maybe expert in the field and yeah it's it's I am always pleasantly surprised when I find out about new games. Anyway, uh it's funny, Jeff,
thanks for having me.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's great. It's great to have you here. Um Jeff, it's funny because I'll have you know that about half of Twitch chat thinks that my name is Will E credits. Um so, you know, like that's that's just where we're at right now. Uh, speaking of Twitch chat, actually
today we're going to be talking about third spaces because that's really Toby what you and sort of intend Flock Around to be. Um,
and so let's let's start off with something with like a real like solid baseline.

What the heck is in this? Oh, different.
Do you [snorts] want me to take that or do you like just so you know, you're in for a couple hours today?
Oh, I'm I'm I'm down. This is This is great.
The the puns are always uh Yeah.
Actually, Toby and I have hung out in person a couple of times at GDC and PAX. Yeah.
So, he has at least had some minor exposure and built up a little bit of an immunity already.
Okay, that's No, I feel like it's not an immunity. It's more just like I've now got the virus and I'm into it. Like I'm like [laughter] let's let's literally go.
Don't Don't tell uh don't tell Brad that. Brad has a thing for licking odd interdimensional mold.
Um so they're if if they find out that they're disease that they could get
they're they're like all about it.
Um actually will you may have to introduce Brad, Janet, and Rocky really quickly and then we'll jump into I did that before you joined. Brad, for those of you who are uh unaware, are is Twitch chat, Janet, that's YouTube chat, and Rocky is our friends over on Nebula, the

silent observers of all of this. Uh those will go up on Nebula tomorrow. So, hello Rockies, if you're there in the future.
Yes, in the future. This is a time capsule of yesterday for you tomorrow.
Speaking of which, today is day after tax day in the year of 2026. So, April 16th uh to date this because occasionally we do say things that are topical or andor time related.
Yeah.
For example, Toby's game is not yet out. If you're watching this in the future, it will be out.
Oo, excellent.
Actually, Toby, really quick, um
tell us what you're making and because that will tie back into
Yeah, I can lean into the third space.
Yeah, the third spaces kind of thing. So, I'm I'm working on a game with a couple of friends called Flock Around, which is a multiplayer co-op bird watching game. It's been called Friend Slop. I like the word Friend Slop. I think it's really funny. Um, but it's more like Friendlop adjacent. I would say it's more like web fishing meets

Pokemon Snap. So, you go, you take pictures of birds, you fill out a guide book. It's kind of a collectathon. Uh, [snorts] and it comes out on April 24th. So, that's next Friday. And, uh, we're really excited. It's actually Earth week next week, so it's kind of feels a little fitting.
Um, but yeah, it's it's really it was originally designed to be a third space. And I think it's really what we've been able to do. And so for those that don't know, a third space, traditionally in life, humans have had workplace, home, and a third place. Whether that's, you know, a sports center, uh, the gym, a bar, a place where they were socializing with other people, hobby spaces, stuff like that. Your local game store might be Um,
funny thing jumping in, the word pub,
which is where a lot of people hung out for mill or centuries was uh is short for public house, which was a third space in your village or other places where you could go between work and home to get a meal, get a drink, but more importantly, socialize with all of those

around you. So, the actual word pub comes from public house and specifically addresses this need that humans have had for a very long time. Yeah. Yeah. And I think video games have really No, I think that's I mean that's a great point. And I think video games have started to take on the role for a lot of people of a third space. And I think you saw that way back. I mean Jeff with your providence from like EQ and starting like you know MMOs becoming
like a place where people were gathering and having like you know second life and and and places where they're actually making new friends and spending time socially. And we've seen, I think, a resurgence of that recently with these kind of more couch co-op online games. So like Peak, Repo, Lethal Company, and our game flock around where I think people want a place to spend time together, but they want to they need a like a mechanism or a thing that supports that kind of socializing.
It's hard to just hang out in a discard call and chat, but it's easy to do it while you're playing a game. And I just

that's exactly the point I wanted to make is that traditionally for physical versions of these there is like getting the people together is not quite enough like it's not like anybody like everybody just hangs out on a street corner and that's why something like a public house where you could get a meal and a drink or Starbucks for a long time under CEO Howard Schwarz I can't quite remember the last name like their mantra was we are going to build a third case and that was a lot of why especially early to middle level Starbucks you saw they would actually make their coffee houses nicer than a traditional chain that they put in the couches and the benches and they didn't kick people out for studying or other things that a lot of other coffee shops that wanted high turnover did was they said our phil philosophically we were trying to build a space where people can come and meet and have a book club or study or do other things and chat with people which is something the indie coffee shop vibe

always had like that was kind of an indie coffee house thing but you never saw it in corporate coffee houses because their whole thing was get people in get people out they want turnover so
they can you're getting a coffee on the way to work not that people are going to work at the coffee shop
and that was considered a revolutionary change but it's also kind of shows that and that's because we've lost a lot of our traditional third spaces in the modern life and that kind of brings us to digital in a second but that's Why you do see things like that being a novel but successful thing for Starbucks because for a lot of people there isn't the local bar. The city's sprawl. People live in suburbs. They go to work. They you know they're busy and it's hard to find
starts to get really expensive now. I think that's [snorts]
actually we could get into that as a whole other thing. But that's also I think in a lot of cases too why you do see you've seen a resurgence in like hobby shops or other places like for a long time. I'm from San Diego. There's a

game shop here called Game Empire and the store owner Cliff was really good at kind of looking at what the community needed. Got a really large store especially by like urban San Diego standards where it's expensive. And half of his store was just dedicated to free play. There were tables, there was checkout, there was a ton of train, so when you wanted to go play Warhammer or D&D, you could pull it down and use it. And he did incredibly brisk business because people just came into a shop to play. And he organized like Monday Magic, Tuesday Warhammer, there was a thing, you know, Pokemon Wednesday, there was a thing every night. It brought people in. They'd buy stuff, but they'd come for community. They'd hang out, they'd meet friends, they'd play more games because they now had friends to play them with, or they'd meet new friends. And it really was and continues to be one of the social spots if you like geeky things in San Diego because it supports it and it builds the community and it's also good for business. So like it was a true win to

the point that multiple of his employees left and started their own competing ones because they realized how successful it was.
Yeah. I I think it's also we would be remiss if we didn't mention [clears throat] that um the the topic of the the gaming store, the the nerd store, the hobby shop. Um is two very we're having two very different conversations. Uh the one that we would have had in like oh I don't know 2019 and the one that we're having now. Um, and how uh, one of it would be very difficult for us to have a conversation about third spaces, especially in nerd hobbies, if we didn't address that like the pandemic also changed a lot of the ways that people interact with third spaces and sort of promoted the digital third space uh, pretty significantly because uh, a
it wasn't safe to go to to physical third spaces for a while and b because of a a lot of them closed or transformed their business model. My local games

store closed all its tables, stopped running events and just became a get your crap and get out store and so I lost a third space there even though the business remains, right? And so that that is a a big part of this conversation when we talk about the transition from those more traditional places like Game Empire to a uh to a digital space as well. It's interesting too. I think it accelerated the pace of adoption on it, but again going back to the pandemic, it wasn't just Game Empire like coffee shops and I actually you two tell me for your cities in San Diego coffee shops used to stay open to say 9 or 10. You can maybe find one that was 11. Post pandemic. You're lucky to find a shop that's open past 8:00 p.m. and in a lot of cases they close earlier.
Yeah.
Like
I mean I'm from a small town anyway. I mean relatively speaking small. I mean, Victoria is still the capital city, but it's relatively small. You don't get many restaurants or things open past 10 p.m. You certainly are getting coffee shops open late.
Yeah. And same thing for you, Will.

Yeah. More or less.
And that Yeah. It's just like even then, like some of the third spaces we have because of the changing way that businesses now run because in some cases it's harder to get employees to work the longer shifts and other things that they're just not doing it. So we've also lost some of those third spaces and again that's accelerated the adaptation of virtual or digital ones. I think along with the tech like if the pandemic had happened 10 years earlier we wouldn't have had meaningfully things like Discord and Slack.
Yeah. in the same way, you know, it would have still been Skype as opposed to Zoom or I mean there's a whole bunch of stuff that we got really lucky from a technological perspective, not from a pandemic wiping out lots of people perspective, but like a decade earlier or two decades earlier would have been a radically different thing.
Yeah. I think you also find with like people during the pandemic it was it

eliminated a lot of travel so that the friends that you would see more regularly you couldn't see them because they might be stuck in a different city from you and then you know having
as your friend group kind of spreads out over a a wider space being able to connect with them digitally became more and more important and then like I think the pandemic obviously was awful for so many reasons but I I've never played so many video games with my friends and had such a consistent time having fun with them and I do miss parts of that sometimes where I'm like, "Oh, I miss when everyone was around and we could get a full lobby of Among Us or we had a full lobby of or we could raid on Destiny every night and it was just, you know, having a huge group of people all available." I think the the costs definitely don't weigh the the joy, but um I think games really came in to save a lot of people's social mentality and battery. And um I think
people have kind of adopted that now. Like I certainly have a friend group that I see regularly but only online.
Yeah. Actually, let's let's address the

big one of the biggest examples of the third space enabled by the pandemic and how I think in a lot of ways it became a lot of people's introduction to a digital third space. Let's talk about Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing was absolutely Yeah, there we go. Right on time, right? Like the the days of Animal Crossing were big, right? I know people had birthday parties and celebrations and Elijah Wood might visit your island,
right? Yeah. There there was this um there was this ongoing uh introduction where like plenty of people who would not and still don't consider themselves to be gamers would, you know, everyone would hop in a voice call on pick your service. I've seen it done with like Google Hangouts or you know a voice call on Skype or Mumble or whatever, right? And they just like everyone has
Yeah, Discord. Yeah, I remember being on Skype back in the day.

Yeah, right. Team
speak.
Um that um you're [laughter] going to make someone think it's rigging. uh and then just play like they would get everyone would get in Animal Crossing and travel around to each other's islands and that was the space that was the backdrop for the conversation because Animal Crossing while it has a large number of things to do and does have um a knowledge base and is a game is fundamentally a place right where you are designing a space that you can inhabit with other people and it served as the backdrop for a whole lot of things. There were talk shows in Animal Crossing. People ran D&D games in Animal Crossing. Like these were things that happened because it was an accessible low bar to entry space at a time when people needed it, right? I I think that was definitely one of the
the big ones. I think the geographic the loosing of geographic constraints like during the pandemic I ended up getting

into a D and D campaign with college buddies all of whom were on the east coast like before that we always were just playing in person but suddenly with the pandemic where it didn't matter if my friend was 10 minutes away or you know a 6-hour plane flight away like we weren't getting together anyway so suddenly all the East Coast friends was like oh yeah why shouldn't we be doing a D and campaign on Discord. Like it's
that's where we want ours right now still.
Mhm. Yeah. Ours is still going. Like it started and it didn't stop. I have a game in two days where we're about to see if we wipe half the party.
Right. So So let's talk um
let's talk Discord as distinct from because because we've got we've kind of got these two I would say categories of space, right? So we have categories that come with something to do inherently, right? Um, a pub is a place to go and drink and eat. A coffee shop, you get a coffee, you might work, but there is an activity to be performed there,
right? Um, in addition to talking and

socializing, um, Animal Crossing has all of the various tasks. You can, you know, turn up futures or gold flowers or collect fish or whatever. Um,
or get chased by bees, whatever your floats your boat. Um, but D discord is a little different in that it is purely a platform for socialization that at the time did not include an activity in and of itself beyond the socialization. Right now it does, which is interesting because they've added apps that like let you play games in Discord. They stink. They've added
I was going to say, does anyone actually use those? I feel like I've never games on Netflix. [laughter]
Yeah, they're terrible.
I I think actually
Jackbox on Netflix. That's a pretty good get for Netflix.
Oh, yeah. I think there's three levels actually. Okay. I think there's [snorts] [clears throat] like messenger, line, WhatsApp, whatever your choice is. There's hey, it's an area of communication. I can be talking with

people, but there's no Yeah, it's a group chat. There is we can send pictures, stickers, emoji, but there's no real expectation around that. Uh, and it's asynchronous, meaning when you send a message, you're not expecting an immediate reply. For those unfamiliar, asynchronous and synchronous chat, synchronous is something where like this where the three of us are talking and we are synchronizing. We're expecting to be able to talk to each other in real time. Asynchronous are more things like messenger, email where you send it and you're not
sure forums, you're not expecting an im the immediiacy of the reply that you would with something else. I think the step up from that, the mid level is like Discord, Slack, which basically is threaded channels, meaning it's not one big mess where everybody talks to the same thing. You know, you can hop into your flock around server on Discord or the join the extra credits Discord or one of

many other things, have private chats with friends or a friends group you put together. But it's basically it's the same app, but there's a lot of different conversations and there's kind of upgraded ability of what you can more easily share and you can for most of them see people typing in real time. And so the step up from that are actual virtual experiences which is what we're going to kind of get to.
Yeah.
But that midlevel of kind of Discord and SL is there anything other than really Discord and Slack?
No. And the reason I confidently say no is that remember when Discord did the whole thing? They were going to do age verification in a way that a lot of people didn't like and they wanted like a lot of people wanted to express their displeasure and leave Discord and everyone went we're all going to leave Discord and a bunch of people went
to where and everyone went we're going to be very upset with Discord and stop

and [laughter] stop you know using our Turbo stop subscribing to to
Nitro Nitro
I think
Discord is like it's a more of a facilitator for third spaces where you know during pandemic, we had a a server for our friends where you could be like, "Oh, who's gonna be around tonight?" Or, "Oh, what are we going to do tonight?" And you could hang out in the channel and rarely was it like just hanging out in the channel. It was always odd if you're just hanging out and everyone's doing their own thing. It didn't really feel that congruent because you can't really talk at the same time. You're not able to have kind of like multiple conversations going on. But if you're all doing an activity like, "Oh, we're going to play Destiny or we're going to play Animal Crossing or we're going to play a game or watch a movie together," it was a great place to facilitate that connection.
And then I feel like now what's happened is that games that have more uh like presence and and more ability to express yourself. So I think one of the early ones for us was Walkabout Miniolf VR. We played a lot of
mini golf together and it was like, "Wow, you could see each other. you could see your friends mannerisms and

the way that they move their hands and their their head even though they were just kind of a you know a blocky avatar. And more and more games have, I think, embraced that with proximity chat and moving you out of Discord into an actual space where you're no longer restricted to talking through just your voice chat and you can collide with each other, but you can actually have spaces where as you move around, you can talk to different people and everyone can have their own conversations concurrently, which I think is really uh was is a huge step up for the presence of feeling like you're with your friends.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah. And I think there's like a bunch of killer app features in that, but I think that that's um that that third level is really
what I would call the closest digital analog to a physical third space, right? Because like the phone line like the the the group chat, right? The the lowest level of communication is sort of uniquely digital in a lot of ways, right? That mid level um is sort of just like a facilitating medium where like it

can be a lot of things but like Discord is just the facilitator. And then the top level is we are trying to approximate the experience of doing this um of providing the same kind of experience as you would have in a physical space. It's just a digital one. And it's there have been some really interesting implementations of that, you know, going all the way back to early MMOs and not just things like EverQuest and UO and Ashon's Call, but moving into things like Second Life, whose kind of goal was to be a Second Life was looking to be a third space.
Yes.
Um, and was really pioneering in a lot of cases for that. They were cool, but I'll say they were too early. just but it was still you could see the promise for it and it really just charmed a lot of people.
Yeah.
And that's kind of what you know Zach

had really been trying to go after with the metaverse.
I was I was literally about to say like I think that people have tried to do it in VR and in other kind of general spaces but I think the problem with those tends to be kind of what we talking about earlier is that there's an aimlessness to it and you need a thing that you're doing together to facilitate spending time together. Like I think you need an activity even if it's something as like in the place of flock around which I know we're going to talk about more but
I've played with big lobbies of people and flock around like you get 10 people in there and half the people aren't bird watching they're just talking but they need the ability to decide to go bird watching at a moment's notice to to when they maybe get a little bit bored to facilitate the socialization. Matt, our showrunner, still swears by Walkabout Miniolf. And funny story, like so most people, like the most famous game I'll ever have worked on was EverQuest. Like it will be hard for me to ever do a thing that just based on the time and the team and what happened. But one of the games, one of the last games that I did before actually coming on to Studio

Direct here was I had a VR studio named Experiment 7. And our third game was a licensed version of Settlers of Katon, Katon VR. And actually, fun story, I got to work with the sons of the Klaus Tuber, the guy who wrote Katon um or made Katon when we were working on it. And they used to sit around the kitchen table when they were young, basically being testers for their dad on this. [snorts] So that they like grew up learning this. And our whole thing for our company experiment 7 was VR games. We were actually venture funded. We landed enough we landed VC capital a little bit to do this when VR was taking off and this was like 201617 18 so this is we were too early but our whole premise was we're going to make board games well that VR's big killer app wasn't a lot a lot of people thought that it was presence and that our whole thing was we were going to design beautiful rooms and environments with a magic table in the middle where you

could play different board games and it was sit around with your friends with avatars and facial audio and everything else in beautiful environments that felt nice to give you an excuse, you know, while you were playing the board game to sit around and chat. And funny story, I think it's been eight seven or eight years since we've updated Katon VR. It is still, it has never left the top 20 streaming game, excuse me, top 20 played games in meta for their whole VR ecosystem ever and has often been in the top 10. And not that it's still selling a lot. It sells decently, but it's that people who play it still hop in and use it specifically for that third space that we did where they'll be playing, you know, their families spread out. They want to get together for board game night and our game is nice enough and I did. so much design work on how to make a third space. And I think it really goes to show you the power of what these

are because that game shouldn't be in the top like x played by hours and other things still. It's a great game, but like we should do some updates and other things, but
well, I think what's interesting about that is people start to feel like it's home. Like I think you see that with MMOs, like
one of the things that people are like, "Oh, when's the new MMO? Where's the new MMO? like I want to play a new big MMO, but people have their home MMO and for some people that's EQ, for some people that's WoW, people like, you know, classic or, you know, they have their own even their own flavor, right? Like it's like, oh, I want to play on a progression server because I want to have that same experience.
And and it feels nostalgic. It feels well known. And so you have these, you know, your friend groups, friend groups start to have their their own version of what home feels like online. And that's like, you know, that's your public house. And that just becomes what you guys do. Yep. I I think it's also um uh of of note uh to Jeff's point about VR uh VR's killer app being present. Um VR

Chat is one of the weirdest things in gaming. No, no. And and I mean this from like a statistical perspective. VR Chat had a day one peak of uh like 20 20,320 when it launched on Steam on the 13th of January 2018 and it had its all-time peak two months ago.
Wow. at 79,593 and has steadily grown over its lifespan on Steam in concurrent user count.
If you've never looked at Steam charts, that is a weird phenomena. That is not the way those charts normally look. This is a trend line going up. It like
What does VR chat though is it's not even VR. You can play it on flat screens. Like that was the best thing. That was the smartest thing they ever did was not just tie it to headsets.
Yeah, 100%. Well, part of it like having

been in the early VR ecosystem, like we mothalled our studio because we were the bestselling when Katon came out. We were the bestselling game on the platform. We'd been in their like at GDC. We were in the Oculus cuz it's called Oculus in booth in the center. Like we were their prime demo thing, number one seller. We looked at our first couple days sales and we're like, time to shut the studio down. And it was because they'd said, "Oh, we'll have this much hardware." and they'd sold this much. So when you think about sales, if you're expecting to sell based on this many people using it and you have this many people, you're too worried.
Attach rate's going to be even smaller than that. And yeah,
yeah, it's it's called a hardware install base problem. But it's still like it's such a weird thing how popular these are because people are digging and really looking for that kind of presence and VR chat deciding, oh crap, there's not enough hardware. How do we solve this? Screw it. It's you. We'll keep

calling it VR chat, but you know, we're going to connect this. You can be on a tablet, you know, a computer, whatever. It's a social thing. That was an amazing pivot that they did. Like props to whoever decided that's pivot like save the studio.
Yeah. So I also want to bring up um another another killer feature thing. So we were talking about presence. So let's just break down presence real quick. Uh cuz like we we've used it as like a term and I think we should probably unpack that a little bit because I think it might be useful when we're talking about these particularly when we start talking about flock.
I have a question and I know it's a last minute tech thing. Do you have the ability to run a video?
No.
Oh. Oh. Well,
I could, but I would be distracted for like 10 to 15 minutes and I wouldn't be able to check the sound before.
Okay. So, no.
Never mind. I sent it I sent Will one at the last minute. As I was prepping for this, Toby, I found our old launch trailer for Katon. And it's really funny that in the 30 seconds you run it, you completely understand just from watching

that the presence aspect of it. And it's
I think I remember watching that trailer because I think when we were
uncanny on that we shot that on such a low budget. Everybody in there is one of our employees or a family member.
That's how we shoot our trailers. We literally just get our friends to hang out and play the game with us for an hour and then I just edit it to be like, "Okay, this is this what the game's like."
Yep. OBS capture is amazing.
Um Yeah. So, okay. So, there there there are a couple of there are a couple of I would say key elements, right, to presence. Um, one of them, and we've had this for how as long as people have been making characters in digital spaces, customizing your appearance, customizing your avatar, huge to presence.
Um, being you, being a thing that is identifiably you. MMOs got this on lock, right? Like I have a singular character in Final Fantasy 14 that I made and that is my avatar and that avatar represents

me, right? Right. And you can think about this in any number of these other games we've talked about, right? You get cosmetics in Among Us or um Goose Goose Duck or Warframe or um Repo or you know, whatever.
Walk around.
Yeah. Right. Or flock around, right? That's that's like a big part of the progression is not only do you get to see new birds, but you get money that you can spend on cosmetics so you can look cooler than your friends. And that's
Trip yourself out. Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. Um
so that's like one part of it. And the other part of it is I think the number one thing that all of these things have in common, let's talk about proximity voice.
Oh yes.
I think I think before we go to proxy chat because I think there is another layer there because I agree I agree with you but I think because I think proxy chat is the most recent innovation.
Sure. or not innovation but the most recent kind of like enriching of presence but I think emotes and uh movement are the other huge things about

presence because I think you know if you think about uh like walkabout mini golf for example now that has you know some sort of proximity chat but actually I don't think it did when it first came out maybe it doesn't even have it now but what it had was with VR you could see your friend's head where they're looking where their hands are and I could identify my friend that I've known for years in the way that he like he would take a putt and go and I'd see his little hand move and I go that's my friend Lee like I know
and movement.
Yeah. And so I think in a lot of games like I think even in these games that are proxy chat you have just the way that people move. It's like, you know, comes down to like crouching in a game like, oh, like I'm friendly. I'm going to crouch in front of you, you know, in in, you know, Halo or whatever.
Or, you know, you you're talking about in Peak or or Fortnite dancing or different different like, you know, put your hand out in in Peak to you can
express yourself physically before you even talk. Um, and in our game, we have just like the face of the character in

the body is like on this tube. It just slides up and down when you're looking around. So you can really well we'll get in the game and you'll see it but you can really express yourself through your movement. So beyond talking I think that's the second layer. It's like expression customization expression of movement and then expression in in voice.
One of the things we found by the way that was really interesting from when we did our VR stuff.
We found that hands and a face was enough to do that. Like your mind filled in the rest that because we had the you know the hands going around.
We're all Rayman. We're all Rayman. I don't I have no idea what you're talking about, Jeff. There couldn't possibly be any references to the fact that I don't know, a weird shaped blob with two hands and a head is a if you're listening, I am pointing at a bean in the background of our of our coffee shop. That is exactly that is two stick legs and a body. It's two hands that are reasonably detailed in comparison to the rest and a face that a face and head that is much more detailed than the rest. And that's a person like

Yep. the same with the lady, you know, playing Hectomancer game or the girl reading the book. Like there's a lot that gets conveyed with a very small amount of movement that's recognizable.
Yes.
And it was one of the things that was really surprising to me doing that kind of development was how sticky that was. Like combining that with spatial audio gave such a sense of presence that it was almost overwhelming for a lot of people initially.
Yeah. And that's one of the things that's really cool and that makes me excited to see the new toys that come out in the future is saying, "Woo, if we can do this now, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, what else are we going to get?"
Right. Well, and people are getting so creative like and and to go back to what you're saying, well, like bringing up because I agree. I think that proxy chat is is what is a really important thing? But already in the in the games that have started to embrace it, we're already seeing innovation. Like I think you know you start with something like you know Thasmophobia or or you know Lethal Company and the way that they're using radios or just talking you know at

distance and using filters to make things sound really interesting but then you get into something like Peak which is using that like the humor of the proximity chat. If someone falls you hear their voice get quieter or it's echoing and cave adds to this
this kind of the humor of friend slop if you will. But then I think more recently we see like Yap Yap using voice chat and proximity chat as a mechanic. So you're saying your spells, you're saying, you know, dog upd.
Yeah. Unpack Yap Yap real quick because not everyone may have heard of that one.
Okay. So Yap Yap is a is another kind of social co-op friend slop game that came out um in February, I think. And you're a bunch of wizards and you're supposed to go into this wizard tower and destroy as much stuff as you can. So it's kind of like Repo, but instead of extracting, you're just trying to break everything. And there's monsters and stuff and you have wands that are voice activated. So you actually say things like so if you want to try and shoot yourself up you have to say up dog and so you're playing with your friends and you're literally just yelling at each other up dog up dog

or you know you know all sorts of you know there's different ones. There's one where you can like pee on people and like it's gross. It's really funny. It's friend slop.
Um but it uses that proximity chat in such a unique way and it's really interesting talking to other devs about it. Like we're friends with the aggro team who were one part of the the peak developers and just in chatting with them about what we're doing with proxy chat and flock around and explaining gap yap to them they're like oh my god you could do so much with these ideas that they hadn't even considered and we get to share how proximity chat can be used um because in flock around if you yell or you're too loud you'll scare the birds like they will fly away if you're yelling or being too noisy and so you can kind of screw with your friends mess with your friends by yelling at the bird they're trying to take a of and it'll fly away and you can annoy them. But I think we're going to see more and more and more innovation using that because it's such a it's almost like a new control method
in a weird way. Like it's it's like a new button, but it's your voice. And as as people get better at writing

algorithms and writing code to identify specific sounds,
you know, the app is just the beginning, I think, but it's it's a real innovation in my opinion. Um, uh, Repo has a has a has a enemy that will, um, get you if he hears you, right? He's a blind huntsman. He wanders around and has a has a shotgun and will just immediately swivel and shoot at any noise he hears. Um, and he it was it was annoying. You know, he's a scary enemy, so you have to like crouch down and walk very slowly and whisper and like get behind him. But you can also, if you're behind your friend, yell and get him to shoot at you and hit your friend instead, which is great. But the other thing is that now they've made it so that if you're dead, you can for a limited period of time still use proximity chat as a disembodied head, which is hilarious, right? It's like it lets you back into the most fun part of the game by just yelling, "Hey, I'm over here, idiot. Come get me. I'm under the shelf." and like maybe accidentally

triggering a huntsman or something, right? Like that those that those uh the more um ways we find to innovate with that and bring that back in because recognizing that it's the most fun part for a lot of people is like a huge deal,
right?
And that by the way is a huge part of just early testing your game just from a development standpoint is there every game I've ever worked on there are places we get in we're doing something we're like oh this is a lot more fun than we thought we should do more of this.
Yeah. Like that's part of the iteration.
Yeah, we're we're pretty sure that there are uh there are a bunch of iterations in in Slay the Spire 2, for instance, that came out of the testing phase. There's a relic that plays your cards for you. Um like that's a cost is that it plays your cards for you. And a whole bunch of us are like,
"Oh, they they had to do this for testing and they're like, "Ha, this is kind of fun. Let's make it into a relic." Like there's no
100%. Like looking at the order of that, it plays your cards from left to right until it runs out of energy. Like that is an automated testing feature you do

is like hey this will check five or six different things to see if any of them broke.
I mean that's literally what we're doing in block with items that we're adding which we have a bunch of dev tools for stuff like you know warping around the map opening shop wherever you are you know developing your photos wherever those are just like hey that makes for a great item because we're already we already have it. to tie it to an object that someone can use. And it's just, you know, it's it's relatively low effort in terms of what the work we put in, but it just feels so natural because it's like, hey, it's what we want to use while we're playing and developing. It makes so much sense.
Um, and we're actually lucky. We're very good friends with the Slay the Spire team and we, you know, one of our um, one of our developers was in the early access testing for a long time before that came out. And it's, I think that's totally right. And you just see it in their in their the way that they're even doing the early access now, the way that they're responding to people and and patching things and it's it's such a
the stuff they're adding is playful and it's fun and it's just like it's just a fun game and it's so authentically you know
that that makesense. It's also one of

the things that like just speaking as a developer who's been doing it a long time like you use the tools you've got like very early on at EverQuest when we suddenly realized like we we were putting in our guide program which was basically the people that could help players out not customer support or technical support but like in-game help like I'm stuck in an area because early you know early game or early MMOs had that problem. We didn't have time to build tools. So, as the person who designed the entire magic system, I made I'd already been making spells like teleport, turn invisible, invulnerability, like all these things. So, I coded the guide tools that all of our guides used out of spells that I already had the tools for, assigned them to items, and so the the guide powers you got given as like an employee or a whole bunch of items I'd made that you'd put on your character, and that gave you all of your powers like summon player to me, teleport to soand so, invisibility, like that's because that's what we got.

Like, it's this is [clears throat] a part of game development. I will give all of you in chat a freebie right now.
Lit RPG novel, the fundamental conceit of which is that a level one character who knows nothing accidentally kills a GM and steals all of their GM powers by putting on their outfit. You're welcome. You can send me a copy when you're done writing it.
Um the uh
I think it's just more on like devs iterate all the time. Sorry. They use what's available to make what they got because especially when you're doing small to midsize, nobody has the budget for No game ever got everything they wanted in.
Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Point me point me at a game that launched way too late cuz they were trying to uh you know get everything they wanted into the game and I'll show you a portrait of Silkong.
I was literally going to say, yeah, there's like a couple teams that allow are allowed to do that.
Yeah.

Um, so let's let's let's refocus a little bit on on third space stuff. So because we got we got a little in the weeds, but that's normal for us. Hi, we do this.
Carry on. I hear my cat shredding something. I'll be right back.
Okay, great. Excellent. Yeah. Oh, No Man's Sky is another great example. Yes, No Man's Sky evolved from Actually, I think that's I don't think No Man's Sky would still be getting updates if they'd stuck with the the single player.
Yeah.
Right. They're there. Like for anyone who doesn't know, No Man's Sky on launch did not have multiplayer,
but they said it did.
They said it was going to and
Well, they said you find each other, but it was such a big universe, you'd never do it. And then two people on the first day were like, "We're both in the same place and we can't see each other."
Yeah, it was it was not great. So, um, the the and even now it has some problems with layering people on different copies of the same planet because the way No Man's Sky works is that the entire all of the galaxies
are independently generated by each copy

of the game from the same seed to save you having to download the whole galaxy. So, basically, the entire game runs on a seed system and all the randomness is generated. So like
um that if it had if it had never become multiplayer, I don't think it would have survived because the key parts about No Man's Sky that make it interesting and um uh like that that say with it are all uh things that we've been talking about, right? The the ability to interact with each other, the ability to go on missions together, the ability to have that presence, right? That's why so many
I think you can see the direct lineage of that in in Light No Fire. Like I think that's going to be a huge game because of all the lessons they've learned.
If if Sean will stop updating No Man's Sky.
Sean, Sean, buddy, I know you're watching this obviously. Um, you put Pokemon in No Man's Sky. Stop it. Go make lightning fires. We'll pay you more

money. Anyway, um, [clears throat]
yeah. So that's that's another interesting thing I think we could talk about too about third space games in terms of you know you're saying they're adding they added Pokemon battling and stuff and something I've been talking and thinking a lot about recently in terms of game design is what I call like orthogonal features. So like a feature that is just completely at an ang like a totally different than your core game. Yeah. So with flock around everything we put in the game is related to the central feature of bird watching or expressing yourself because of the the third space nature. But there isn't a fishing mini game. Could there be a fishing mini game? Yeah, but that would be a different game.
Like it would be be completely orthogonal to the main gameplay loop. And now lockown could use something like that if it is a third space and and if it is a a place that people are spending time. the actual core mechanic doesn't matter as much, but we focused in on bird watching as being the most important [clears throat] element. And our development time as a small team is

best served trying to support or gameplay feature. And when you're making a game like this, I think like you see it with Peak too. Peak's a climbing game.
They're not adding a bunch of mini games. They have items and stuff like that, but it's main its main gameplay is everything is focused around making you laugh with your friends and climbing the mountain. And the best things are those together, right? But you I think you see a lot of games try and add all these orthogonal features that are just extra stuff because oh well the devs got bored while they were making it and now they're bored of their own game. So okay, let's work on this feature and add it in. It's fun, but it's people aren't playing your game for that reason.
Right.
And in some cases it becomes bloat and distracting.
Yes. Like it's funny when we were making katon um one of the programmers once spent a day without telling us putting a virtual cat in. They were like hang out with you and it was cool but it was just it was so distracting from what we were doing that it got removed and there was

just
same thing but like fishing especially for a game which is like walk around with your friends. Fishing anchors you to one spot. So in some cases it works against the style of thing you want which is a group of friends kind of moving around especially when there's proximity chat.
Yeah.
That you need to be able to hear them. And so you're working against the nature walk around and find birds by tying some geo geoixing somebody to a spot.
If you want to do that you play web fishing because that exists already and they did it better. And I think that this is one of the big differences between um a lot of the things that we've been talking about is like more modern third spaces and some of like the classic MMO stuff, right? Because um I think a modern third space uh like flockound or web fishing or the sledding game. I don't know if you've seen the
I love sledding. I'm I'm friends with Max the developer and so that's I'm a huge fan. I think sledding game is
it's great. Jeff, if you've never if you've never played sledding game, you should. It's amazing. Um,

it literally is what it says on the tin.
Yeah, it's a game about sledding. That's all it does. You're sledding with your friends. I watched a bunch of people play for hours on end just like running around a mountain and going sledding. Um,
speaking of which, my one of my standouts from PAX East
was I was walking by, I saw there's a VR, it's VR, it's VR Bowling as Batro.
Oh,
say and then send me a link to the name of the thing so I can put that on my
I need to find it again. like bowling alley suddenly changing like the alley how the pins are set etc in a blotra style way
it was just like cool it's going to be another like
but again the people building in things that support support the core premise is part of what keeps it tight enough
and focused enough to end up being a gathering space
totally right
and not working against the premise of what they want to do
right so I just want to see that there was a thing in the chat about what engine we use I just want to say it's good before we miss it So, cool. Great. Excellent. Uh, so you are in excellent company with the with the host of

growing indie devs using GDAU. Um,
I've been in a good a GDO fan for years. Like I used it before 4.0.
Before it was cool.
Yeah. Before it was cool.
Yeah. Right. Okay. I got you.
Sorry. Not to not to derail, but I Yeah.
Yeah. I I totally agree. Like I think that there is something too to this to this new methodology and this new idea that um instead of okay if MMOs are Starbucks right that each MMO is its own competing brand of Starbucks it is large you know what you are getting from what is on the tin right you you have a lot of different weird drink options and um you can you know you can do work in those spaces And there is um like 14 or WoW or ESO or Guild Wars or whatever. They all have a lot of different things that are all bolted together that makes sense in the gameplay systems of it, right? I would say that a lot of the games that are coming out now like Flock Around are like the ultra specific indie coffee house where they're like all of

our coffee has raspberry in it. And you're like I don't I don't understand. and you're like, "No, everything is based around this one specific premise," right? And it might not be for everyone, but for the people who really like raspberry in their coffee, it's like it slaps. It hits, it's straight on. And I think that that's another trend too is that very um is that very focused design into creating a niche third space rather than trying to build like this catchall MMO.
And I think I think you have to I think what's really interesting about modern Steam and it's kind of almost going back to what we talked about at the pre-show with the democratization of gamedev is that you start to see smaller teams be able to hit niches and there's enough volume of players. I mean, there are effectively infinite players on Steam. Like, obviously, there's a number of players, but for all intents and purposes, you'll never be able to reach them all. Like, even Silkong, which was

like the number one release ever, it was like,
you know, a small tiny, it was like 5% of all Steam players are playing Silkong. Like, there's literally just an unfathomable amount of people. So, if you can find the people that want your raspberry flavored coffee,
you can support a small team of three to five people on that audience. And in our case, like we have the birding audience, which is amazing. And there's so many people that have come out of the woodworker who like, "Oh, I've always wanted a bird watching game that we're hopefully going to be able to support our studio with, you know, this game and whatever we do next and finding another kind of underserved raspberry coffee enjoyer, you know, coffee shop energy." But I I do believe that the ability for small teams to survive is really like a huge change and a huge pivot in the way that games are sold. Because I think growing up, we didn't really talk about like, you know, our favorite video games, but you know, I grew up playing Zelda games. I were playing these massive side quests and there's like mini games and
we grew up thinking like, oh, I want to

make a game like that. And my first game was like that. We had a hub world. We had side quest mini games. And I love RAM and I'm so proud of it. But like it was so much more work that the core loop of the game probably could have been even better had we spent the year plus working on all the extra stuff on the core loop of the game that we I really learned that lesson of like no this game is about bird watching. It's going to be as accurate as we can make it. It's going to all support the fun for that and it's not going to be for everyone. There are people that play the game and they're like yeah it's okay. It kind of gets boring just bird watching and it's like yep
that's exactly right. And that is the small team thing like
one of the whole parts about small team is focus and
but and the studios that can pull it off though
because again like you take soong with that 5%. And that really is a good thing to talk about the industry because there are video games mean so many things to so many people. I know people who for video games that means Madden.
Yeah.
I know for people that video I mean literally that's just it.
Or Candy Crush on their iPad. Candy

Crush or Bejeweled or Farmville or Stardew Valley. There's a lot of people that have like three games they know or you know they buy the same NBA game every year and there's other like there's a range of people in it and even something as big as Silkong. I think if I walked into Target and I asked the first hundred people in there if they'd ever seen heard of Silkong or Hollow Night or like I could go through a list of like things that we
I have that with Hades. I always use Hades as the example. It's like gamers think that everyone in the world knows Hades.
It's everybody's myopic that way.
Super niche.
Yeah.
And I
Yeah.
Go ahead.
No, go ahead.
I I often give um like you know talks to the local gamedev club or I've given guest lectures at the local university about gamedev and something I always say is like your perspective as an individual is not representative of the reality of the industry. And it's so hard to wrap your head around the fact that like as enthusiasts we're like you know rogue likes. I was like, "Oh, I love rogue likes. Everyone loves rogue

likes. I'm gonna make a rogike." Turns out rogue likes are really actually not that popular on Steam. Now, as gamers, we overindex their popularity because of things like Slay the Spire, Hades, and stuff like that. But if you look at the actual breakdown of how many people play them,
it's like less than a percent of all rogue likes get 10,000 reviews on Steam, which is like a measure of how successful they are, whereas like 5% of all sandbox games do. There's just like more people playing other genres.
But here's a question. What's the number of sandbox games versus rogue likes? Like because that's as a percentage.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I have a breakdown of Steam tags of doing like genre analysis I've done before where it's like, you know what what is the reality of this? But people don't realize that like most people like if you look at the Steam end ofear Steam rap stuff, the average Steam user plays three games a year.
Yep.
It's like that's no game for 20 years. Yeah. [laughter]
Across not just Steam but the whole industry is like most consumers
Yeah. So just so I can establish some

credibility on this subject. Toby, we did not talk about this ahead of time, right?
No.
Okay, cool. Chad. So Toby has just told you everything that I've told you every time this has come up. And I love that we're getting outside verification of this cuz one of my most repeated lines when we're talking, particularly in design club, when people are like, "Oh, doesn't everyone know you?" Right? Remember remember you listening to
Give the spiel. Give the spiel.
Right. You are watching three people in a virtual coffee shop in the middle of a Thursday talk about designing a specific kind of video game. You are not the average gamer. You're probably not even close. You are so invested that you are watching this as a form of entertainment. You're not average, right? And I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, but you are not near the the mythical average gamer, right? Because you're already here and you're already invested and you're already thinking about this in a way that a lot

of gamers don't,
right? I think you see a lot of like uh almost like prejudice against certain games for hardcore gamers where I remember having conversations in the game dev club with people and they're like, "Oh, like who like sports games aren't real games." I'm like like Madden like it's one of the biggest games in the world and you might not like that as your personal game but you're super niche you're going to play this JRPG that's like a visual novel plus a thing it's so cool and it's groundbreaking but no one in the grand scheme of games is playing that because they're thinking of their cool Madden NFL Call of Duty game and you might hate it as a you know there's this interesting prejudice against certain games that as a game developer I think you almost have to remove yourself from because you're like, okay, what do people actually want to play? Because I want my games to be played. And I think that there's a great question in chat here, which is, do you struggle balancing your own desires for what games you want to develop and what you think will be successfully financial or financially successful? And I think this is something that our team talks

about a lot and I talked to uh students a lot and other devs a lot about is I don't think these two things are mutually exclusive and I think that there is a narrative that they are. I think there's a narrative that people are like, I'm going to make my art game and it's going to be exactly my, you know, I'm going to suffer for my art. I'm going to make this thing and it's going to find an audience.
And that can be true, but it's one in 20,000. Like, you're not making probably not going to make Bellatro randomly, right?
But I think you can make a game in a genre that is successfully uh financial or financially successful, sorry. Uh that is still creatively fulfilling. If you're a game developer and you're an artist and you're someone who thinks about design and thinks about how these things come together,
it is not selling out and is not creatively bankrupt to make something because inevitably you will be putting your art and yourself into the game. And so I think about it more like a game jam where it's like I have a theme that I need to fulfill. I might not even like the theme of the game jam, but I'm going

to go in and I'm going to make my version of that theme and I will shine through that game. So for us it was like we need to make a third space. We need to make a friend slop game because I want to make something that people are going to play. But it doesn't mean that making a bird watching game is selling out because it's friend slop. I think it means it's like oh no it's amazing because we get to share with this community. We have burers on our team and yeah not everyone on the team is probably super stoked every day to make a bird watching game because they want to make their indie art game. And that's like that's the total balance is they can find parts and aspects and meaning in the nuance of the game de development process that is just so joyful and creative that I think it just it it it means that the two are no longer mutually exclusive if you change your perspective and
that's why that thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Yeah. And part of that too is also the size of the team you're on. Like if you're doing small team or mid-team game, it's a lot easier to be on the exact kind of game or making the kind of thing you want or finding the joy in the parts of figuring out like how to make

bird watching into something that is fun. But like different devs have different motivations. I have friends that work at Rockstar. like they're going to be working on you honestly rigging for 5 years or on you know skin textures or you know certain other things like that but for them the joy is I want to make a game that millions of people play.
Yeah.
Like they're in it. They're kind of the people want to like go work in movies to make a blockbuster. Like they might have been you know best boy on the project but they help make Avengers Endgame and to them that's what makes them happy. Like there's that's the cool part about how big the industry is now too
is that you can fulfill different kinds of motivation
based on the team and the kind you're joining.
I also think that there's often times a uh a thing that needs to be reentered in the conversation. We talk about what it means to be financially successful, right? Because a reminder that financially successful or flockound and financially successful for GTA 6

are in [laughter] different universes. those are in different galaxies of number right simply because the size of the team is different right so it's easier to uh not easier it is a very different marker to have financial success as a small team right you still need to sell it's it's a number of copies per person on the team that you need to move
person per year worked on the game right like the math actually isn't that hard for rough scale development like I can tell you off the top of my head I can already tell you grant the next Grand Theft Auto will have cost more than a billion dollars to develop.
Yes.
Likely for them it's going to make two.
Oh, it it'll make it'll probably make five or 10.
Yeah.
If it sells 5 million copies a year like GTA 5 has for the past,
By the way, reminder, GTA V still sells millions of copies per year.
Mhm.
Like, and for anyone who like I never I've never played Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto is irrelevant. Wrong. Incorrect. Try again. It sells millions of copies a year. Still,
what what I think is interesting, like you get a lot of push back. I think there was a thing that happened recently with the triple eye initiative that they did like the triple i indie showcase and there was a dev that's like I made this like horror game because I wanted to make something that streamers would play and it was successful and people were like, "Oh, why don't you just make a game that you actually want to make?" And I'm like,
is this what they want to do?
Those aren't that could be the same thing. You find something you enjoy about it. But I I [snorts] think as someone who made my like art game, if you will, I think RAM was that for me. It was like, okay, this is a game that is it wasn't our dream game because there were think lots of things that changed about it during development, but it really was like a four-year long process. We we put ourselves into the game. There's like a whole story. There's like a mini games, a hub world, all these things. And we had an audience and we had a really passionate audience that still loves playing the game. We're going to try and put another patch for it. And like I'm so grateful to all those people that played it. It's a different ballgame working on Flock Around. It's just like night and day like oh

like this is going viral regularly. This is having people who are finding it and are passionate about it in a in a way that is so different. But it doesn't make it any less valid of a project to work on because it's not my like artistic dream if that makes sense.
Yeah. Uh
it's actually really hard just then then let's move on to make your absolute artistic dream because feedback and like cho all all game design and game construction is making choices and like it can be really trying when you're making the exact thing you want and you realize that you know five people are want who actually want that exact thing.
Yeah. And I want to make it clear too like on our team, Flock Around is someone's dream game. Like our artist is her dream game.
Oh, you were talking about that. Yeah.
Yeah. And like and I I I love Flock Around in the context of like I really enjoy getting to talk about it on every day on social media and and doing stuff like this. And it's made my life better because now I go outside and I see birds

and I can identify them. And I love the fact that it's brought me closer to my local nature and like connecting to people who are just so passionate about you know this this you know everyday phenomenon. You go outside, you hear bird calls. And you know, I don't think I would have considered myself a burer before making flock around. And maybe that's heresy heresy to all the people. It's like, how could you dare make a birding game if you're not a burer? But I think burers like you you find it at different times and we had a burer on our team that's like it's exposed me to this amazing hobby and now I love it. And so it it it has become an amazing game to work on for me.
Speaking of that, Will,
yeah. [snorts]
Should we go check the game out?
Yeah, let's let's let's check out some flock around. So, I have I have sent I've sent you uh gentlemen a lobby code.
Um and then I'm gonna Oh, I have to
let me rearrange some windows. Hold on. So,
yeah. Uh [laughter]
so, uh by the way, I will put in I will put the
Make sure you turn off your voice chat and game off because otherwise we're going to have duplicated audio. Put it on push to talk

options. Audio
and you can customize your burger in the options menu. So,
already did.
Perfect. Um,
voice.
I'm not seeing it in voice mode. Is that in somewhere else?
It'll be under audio and then the top of voice mode. If you click on push to talk, there'll be a drop down or sorry, always on. There'll be a drop.
Never mind. I'm Thank you.
All right. Uh, and, uh, while I'm doing this, uh, if this looks interesting to you, um, you all can check it out. I will put it in both chats real quick. Um the the the link to wish list flockound which again comes out in
this is uh next week.
This will be the full version. We're going to be playing the full version. Oo exciting.
Ah special.
Has Steam Deck compatibility. It's acceptable. We're we're not I don't think we're going to get uh verified, but we're definitely playable, but we're going to work on verified. Um so yeah, check it out. Uh, we're also gonna say

say goodbye to Toby's face ever so briefly because Toby uh as sort of a demonstration uh Toby's got a real arvitar in game and Jeff and I have starter avatars. So, uh we're going to we're going to get on in uh and I'm going to get back in the game and I'm going to get out of this thing.
I don't think I'd realized until I just looked behind me that we walk out of restrooms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you come out of the the outhouse at the local birding park. Um, the tutorial is very free form. You just kind of look at these signs and it'll tell you. It's very, uh, you know, hands off. I feel like tutorials are always hard to get right, so we just tried to do it at your own pace.
Come here, kitty [snorts] cat. My cat wants to see the birds.
I We've had lots of comments that people's birds uh bird people's cats hear the birds and they get excited.
Yeah. I I would also like to to say just by the way uh to to everyone here that we're um we're doing a great job. Uh, we received a comment. The level of how interesting is this design club? I put two copies of the same card in my

commander deck cuz I was hyperfocused. Thank you.
I saw you were shuffling cards earlier. What What deck is that?
Uh, this is I am uh that was a that was a comment for someone else. This is Popper uh Mardu Synth.
Oh, nice. Okay, cool. I'm going to Strict Haven pre I'm getting some I'm doing an at home pre-release with my girlfriend this weekend, so I'm excited.
I'm going to a pre-release tomorrow night. I'm super excited. Anyway, uh Oh my god. That's That's how it looks when you crouch. It's so cute.
So, this is what I was talking about with expressing yourself. So, looking up and down. I'm looking up and down right now. You can see that my body is sliding and your your face is sliding up and down as well. You can't really tell, but so I can really look down here. I can go, "Oh, what what is over here?" Um, just for a moment, I'm going to put it on uh voice chat. So, this is what it looks like. Was it going to work? Oh, it's not going to take my audio.
Oh, do we get to see your mouth talking? you. Yeah, the the mouths do move when you talk in proximity chat, but it's it's not working because I have my mic set up differently for the stream. And I'm wearing my drip is uh this is the

supporter pack drip. So, if you want to toss us an extra couple bucks on Steam when it comes out, you get an extra special dapper set to say thank you.
Yeah.
Um so, this is an exclusive
get that. I mean, I play Gentleman Cho in League of Legends, so
Ah, there you go. So I I also wanted to call out something very interesting which I think really illustrates that you are doing a um uh a a third space first experience rather than something like a repo a peak like a like a game um that is challenging, right? that this is meant to be like a chill, cozy game where hanging out and doing things with your friends is the point. Um, chat, I just spun up this game with uh my friends and I have all of the progress from when I was testing the game out last night.
Yes,
because my progress is not part of the game that I'm playing. My progress is my progress and I can play with anyone. And

I feel like that is a phenomenal um I feel like that is a phenomenal indicator of like the focus of the game when it comes to what is important, right? Cuz like in repo you reset everything to zero every time you play, right? Ditto Lethal Company, Among Us, you get cosmetics, but your progress is sort of round based. And this is you are playing flock around to take pictures of the birds. And of course, when you go and play with different friends, you're going to take pictures of your birds with them, your like. And I like it. Yeah. Also, Chad loves that the the map is a bird.
Yeah. So, I was about to ask about that.
It's called Goose Lake. Um it's actually based on a local nature reserve, loosely based on a local nature reserve called Swan Lake, uh where I'm from in Victoria. And so, we were like, what if it was called Goose Lake and what if it looked like a goose? Um so, this is the map of the game. And so, we have different biomes. And actually, this is a a brand new feature we're going to be showing off today on stream for the first time. Wow. Is uh we have progression. So, a lot of the comments

we got um from people playing the demo were like, "It's fun, but it feels a little aimless after a little while."
And we kind of agreed with that and we found that people were getting kind of spread out with their friends across the map and it was really kind of overwhelming because there's so many biomes. So, now uh you unlock the biomes based on how many stars you have in your guide book. So, if you come over here, I can show you. When you take pictures of the birds, you get stars. So, you'll develop your photos and uh oh, there's a shiny that just spawned if you heard that. Um, when you take photos, you get rated in your stars and then in your guide book, which you can see I'm holding in game, my little character, I have a certain number of stars. So, to unlock, you know, the fall or the the bluffs or the marsh area, I need to have a certain number of stars. And that scales with the number of players we have. And it's not in a crazy amount. It's just a a number to keep you kind of together and exploring new areas. And we just that's a new thing with is progression. So, it's a bit more gy.
Cool. So, like
I think I just got a picture of the thing. [snorts]

Oh man, the zoom in didn't get it that well. Oh well.
Yeah. So, we can go outside here into the into the woodland area and start to look for some birds.
Um, there's lots of little parkour you can do. You can run around and jump around.
I I did notice that the the jump is very floaty and forgiving.
Yes.
Okay, hold on. I was in my guide book. Where'd you guys go?
Just down the path.
Yeah, normally this would be a problem because you could hear the direction for proxy voice. We have we have turned off proxy chat because uh the sound quality for stream is important here. Uh and getting proxy chat without a whole bunch of setup to sound good on stream is somewhat difficult. So, we're not going to be doing that.
Well, there's some birds up ahead of up in the sky if you want to get some pictures. And I have a upgrade for my binoculars that actually highlights the birds. So we can actually see over here. Oh, there's there's a robin right here.
Oh yeah.
Zoom in and try and get Oh, at the back of your head.

So they'll hop around and do stuff. So you can also buy whistles and bird seeds to try and uh pull them in and bring them in and um get some better photos.
Mhm.
But generally the game is just exploring with your friends. Oh, there's a red breasted nuthatch here. I love that you rattled that off.
Yeah, look for the breast, not the nuthatch.
Um, there's a question in chat about does anything fun happen if you take pictures of your companions? We actually have just added a scrapbook feature. So, um, you can take pictures and add them to your scrapbook and, uh, keep track of, um, your friends if you want to. And you can save any photo in there. And if you hear that sound, there's a shiny nearby. Where is it? So, yeah, I've learned a lot about birds. And in fact, most of the bird calls in the game are actually made with my voice because
Oh, yeah.
We talked about that. That's a good story.
Yeah. So, it's really difficult to get

Oh, we're not getting any in in-game sounds on the stream.
Uh, we we are they're just below us.
Oh, okay. Um, yeah. So we getting commercial licenses for bird calls is really tough. Most of the time they're either educational use only or or they're just hard to get licenses for. Um so we've ended up making most of them uh on our own. Uh so I actually take bird calls. I slow down the bird call, you know, potentially five 10 times more. And uh then it turns from a whistle into like a wa and then I can record myself going. and then uh speed it back up and it becomes a bird call. So, actually a majority of the birds in the game are are me, which is crazy. So, if you guys want to see
my first photo back here, by the way, that got me uh a star.
Oh, you got a star. Nice.
I have a total of seven from last night. I uh I I I played enough once I figured

out the progression. I played enough to get uh through the five star core. Um,
excellent
because Oh, there's the up
there's a yellow something.
Yellow warbler. It's beautiful. Look at that little wobbler.
And I also upgraded my camera so I have 15 pictures.
15 pictures.
Yeah, you can normally only take 10 pictures. Um Oh,
there's that sound. So, we can actually climb up here. I don't know if it'll be progressed from your save. It might be. The bio might be already unlocked. Have to see. Yep.
Hold on. Developing pictures to see if I can get stars.
Open the credits. You get something simple but vague. Birds, Toby. [laughter]
Oh, yeah. We do have this biome open up here as well. So, we can go to this blossom biome, which is another nice little spot. Um

what's interesting too is all the areas have different uh ambiances and sound design going on. So we worked with a really amazing sound designer named Vtor who one of the interesting problems we had to deal with sound design is most kind of ambient sounds of an area include bird calls in the ambience. So oh that's
I actually can't follow you guys in yet.
Oh that's very interesting.
Oh you can't you don't have enough stars. I thought it would be unlocked for the whole lobby. Interesting. Hey, we discovered a thing.
I'm not sure if that's a I think that's intended. I can't remember. I thought it was supposed to be whoever the highest star owner was, but
Okay, I've taken 15 pictures of the shiny to try and get something that's good.
Oh, he's noisy.
Um, what was I saying? I was saying something. Oh, the sound design. So, yeah, we actually had to have the ambience be created of without bird sounds in it. So that layering it all up
to make it sound uh kind of more up. You can't have fake

bird sounds or even real bird sounds that are not representative of the birds in the game appearing in the ambience. So it's really interesting. Um yeah, I think that is a bug that you can't get up here. So hopefully you get your stars down there.
Yeah, almost no other group, by the way, would have that problem.
Yeah, that is a great example of a unique problem specific to this this kind of game, right? Like, and it's so interesting, too, because I think it really highlights how far off parts of the beaten path the idea of making a third space game is because lots of games would not consider that as a problem or many games would not consider that as a problem at all because of of course there aren't Uh, of course there are bird sounds. That's like why would the birds be relevant in a large number of games,

right, that are like, you know, about something more actionoriented or adventure oriented. Like the birds are just set dressing. They're not the point,
right? And so like as you cut into territory, that's not generally considered to be like a game, right? That I I can't think of another bird watching game. I can think of hunting games, but those are very different, right? Like, but I can't think of another game that like cares about interacting with wildlife in this way at this level of detail at all, let alone a multiplayer one, right? Like it's it's definitely cutting like new territory and you're inevitably going to find new problems.
Yeah, there's a interesting com uh chat too, which is um asking how does the star rating work? I'm always interested in how games like this identify what is in frame and how it rates things. That's a great question and it's been actually something we've worked on a lot to get right because star ratings are really difficult. It's really really hard to figure out what should be a good photo

because you have different poses. You need to in for the guide book in the game. You need to get all the poses. So, front, back, side, and flying. But, you know, when you get to a point where like what's a three star photo and what feels like the difference between a two star and a three star photo, you might take a photo that's 2.99 out of three. But if we round that up, then the 2.98 feels like it should be a three and it just goes down and down and down and down and so it becomes really really hard. Oh, sorry. I'm scaring away this bird. Um, it becomes really really hard. So, we actually have a system. We built a a tool that lets us have the configuration of we can actually set exactly what a third a three star photo should be. So it's based on the head and the feet position and the size in the frame uh and how centered they are and how perfect their pose are. So if if you're looking for a side photo, you want the bird's body facing the side and the head facing the side and all of those things line up and you get a higher rating on

your on your picture. Uh, yes, proximity chat does scare away the birds.
Yep. Uh, we don't have proximity chat on, so we can talk through our our voice call here. Um,
uh, I did want to, uh, I got two new stars, which I love. I I love
See if we can open up the marsh.
Uh, yeah, I have a total of
how many stars I got now? I have 11 stars.
Yeah, we can unlock the marsh. Why don't you come down here and we can show the opening.
Okay, let's see. I missed you. What happens if I jump off a cliff? Let's find out.
Why don't you try it? Woohoo!
Might pop an achievement.
I might
I didn't actually get an achievement for that.
Maybe it wasn't high enough.
Yeah, [music]
let's see. Develop.
Yay.
Oh, I need to go. Uh Oh, no. I developed. That's how I got the star.
Oh, it's a hell chicken.
No, no, this is a This is a swan. This is a mute swan.
Also a hell chicken.
No, they nice. He's friendly. Hello. Oh,

he's on your head. Look up. Look up.
That's amazing. That's phenomenal. I love that. Like that that level of like detail. Excellent. Amazing.
He might poop on your head when he flies away though. Be careful. [laughter]
I do have bird poop. You can, by the way, uh if you're interested, you can turn bird poop off when you choose.
Yeah, if it grosses you out, you can turn that off. It's a hack.
But I'm just going to be here creeping on the in the in the weeds. I need to figure out how to find you guys. Now,
we're down in the marsh. Um,
there's like a little gateway uh down here.
So, if you come off of the the thing uh Oh, I see you. If you turn left from that box
and down the road,
you will see me. And then you'll come to another box. And then there's a
a little guy. Here he comes.
Hey, woodpecker.
See, this is the thing. It's so easy to get distracted by the birds that show up. You're like, "Oh, I haven't seen a

finger before. Oh my god."
uh I am acutely aware of my own propensity for getting distracted, which is why I am keeping a laser eye on the time because what I do not want to do is completely time slip into uh bird watching for, you know, an hour.
It it does happen. It's dangerous like that.
So, uh Indie Gamer says, "It would be cool if you could get bird seed to attract all the birds."
Well, isn't that convenient? Why don't I show you how the bird seed works? Yeah, there is in fact bird seed. It is a purchasable item in game. Uh
here I'll come. I'm holding a little baggie of it here. I'll come show you.
Yeah,
look at the birds. So, every bird has a preferred type of seed. Um you can see it in the guide book on the bird page. It'll show you if you click on a bird what they what kind of seed they like.
And uh then when you put it down, they will Oh, look at that. He's eating the kingfish is eating the bird the pet the seeds. That was I'm really glad I had very lucky I had the right seeds.
Always cute.

I'm out of pictures. I'm gonna go back away and go run and develop.
Um there are 60 birds in the game. Um people asking the number. Yeah, there's 60 birds uh split across all the biomes. We're planning on adding some more after launch. Um and then we're hoping to be able to do other maps, so other regions. um part of what we did through uh getting funded by Outer Sloth, who are the people who make Among Us and Slay the Spire and another um anonymous dev, they funded the game so that we could have the resources to be able to do um more regions, which is really exciting. So, we'd like to do, you know, maybe like an outback map or Australia, New Zealand, or maybe European stuff. And that would be really great to be able to have just a become the birding game and have the the biodiversity of the planet, which would be amazing.
Mhm. So, that'd be fun. There aren't flamingos right now, but would I'd love to have flamingos in there one day.
Yeah. Um,
man, I need you to introduce you to Patch.
Oh. Uh, by Patch, he means Tier Zoo,

uh, the YouTuber, uh, who who makes, uh, a large number of videos, uh, about putting animals into tears and, uh, comparing and what animals have OP adaptations and
Oh, I think I've seen that. Yeah, that's funny. and also um has helped do some good charity work um
with different um groups
uh different birds do have different behavior patterns. So uh we have um we have obviously water pal we have uh birds that drum on trees. We have hummingbirds. Um we have uh soaring birds that fly above and perch on on high areas. And there's another shiny that would have just spawned in. Can we access fall yet? Oh, we do.
I do love, by the way, the the little musical sting is very nice.
Yeah,
really. It really
uh very Breath of the Wildesque, if you will, trying to make it more like a open

airy soundtrack. There's not really any music
because you need to be able to hear for the bird calls.
Yeah. Well, and I I like it because it it makes um I'm gonna be really honest, it makes me think of PBS. Like it makes me feel like like you know old school like there is definitely some guy who has seen more birds in his entire life than most entire bird watching clubs and has a show on PBS about watching birds and is going to show you like how to spot the rarest bird you'll never see and has like you know
and here we find ourselves in the full biome of goose lake. Right. [laughter] Exactly. Looking for the most beautiful golden crowned sparrow. Can I also tell you, by the way, how much I enjoy that you put leaves that float in the wind because I keep catching things out of the corner of my eye
that you think are birds and they're actually leaves spinning in the wind.
Yep. [laughter]
Can Can I just tell you how much I
support that design choice?
The the sholing sound in the in the in

the crunching of the leaves.
Yes.
Is very
Yeah. I think uh Vtor did an amazing job getting the footstep sounds unique for every area. So it really feel I mean you can turn the sound up on when you're playing solo and just feel like you're forest bathing. It's just everything feels crunchy. The wood steps do the you know going into into the caves and whatnot.
Um it just feels good to play. I think
I I don't I don't know that we we want to put a casawari in uh Umbrell mostly because I'm pretty sure that getting disembowled is not part of most bird watching games. Although truth be told this is cutting new territory. I don't know any other bird watching games, so maybe it is.
So, will if you go to the shop up here, so every shop actually has different things in it. You can upgrade your stuff and everyone, but there's different bird whistles, but if you upgrade your camera, I mean, uh, sorry, your your um binoculars, you can actually have it highlight birds. So, if you buy the the top one
and uh then then bring up your uh your binoculars and look across the map from the fire tower, you'll be able to see

how many birds there are all over the map. Oh, that is very cool. That is a very helpful um very very helpful upgrade. I thought you were going to say that you can see Firewatch from here, but
I wish I do love fire. I mean, the Firewatch background is literally my my wallpaper. So,
it's so good. And I feel like
I feel like that also says something about the vibe, right? That like Firewatch, if you've never played it, by the way,
look up nothing else about it and play Firewatch. It is a phenomenal experience game. It is, I would say, uh, just really great at delivering the vibe of a story in progress. It's it's immaculate in my opinion. Um,
there's comments in the chat about trying to like seeing Brennan Millie Mulligan trying to do the game changer episode with the Rosate Spoon bill. And we have tried to get Brennan Lee Mulligan to play this game with us. Like I I have tried to contact him through a

variety of channels to get him to play walk around, but so far no luck. But that's still the dream get is getting uh if you guys know Brendon Lee Mulligan from uh
Dimension and all that stuff.
Toby, remind me later.
I have a friend who has a friend.
All right.
I know the friend who has a friend that you are
kind of a friend.
Yeah, you're I tried to talk to Critical Role about it, but they they they uh didn't the timing didn't work out. So,
um, uh, so you said there's an achievement, maybe.
Yeah. But why, but before you do that, why don't you try and get on the Oh.
Oh, no. I'm gone. Oh, why don't I try and get up?
Yeah. See if you can get on the top of the thing cuz, uh, one of the fun things is you can actually jump on each other's heads and stack.
Completely unnecessary. Utterly based.
Yes. This is a friend slop game. You got to be able to jump around. Okay. So, if you jump on my head and see if you can if you jump and I jump, can you get up on top? Uh, okay. Close.
Okay. Got the achievement for bouncing off you and plummeting to my doom.

You're going to have to kind of like floaty jump around.
You can do it.
Oh, boy. I'm trying to get the timing uh down, but Okay, you jump. Oh, I see. I can't You can't jump with me on your head. So, I have to
You need to jump and then you need to jump off me. So, it's like a double jump. You're just
You guys need to move a tiny bit further out.
Yeah,
cuz you're hitting the uh
get goomb. All right. Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe not. Yeah. The team jump from Thomas was alone.
Yeah. Now, now do a game in which you're a bird and you have to annoy bird watchers in different and funny ways. Maybe DLC. Play as the bird. Your job is to poop on bird watchers.
Just saying.
Chad, do you have a favorite bird? I would say my favorite bird is the Anna's hummingbird because they nest in the backyard of my house and so I often see them uh right outside my window and they have their babies and they're so cute.

Um we had one that hung out for like a whole season and I I nicknamed it hummus the hummingbird.
Yeah. Um uh my my parents back when we had an open like an open porch, they have a screen porch now. Um uh I can't quite get it. I keep bonking on the edge of the thing. I wonder if we can stack again. Like if if I crouch
and Jeff jumps on top and then you jump on
Yep.
Here I come.
Sorry, just turning in my picture.
Okay.
If you jump on my head.
Okay.
And then stand slightly off to the side. Can Will jump on me and then jump on you. If you stand Yeah. Yeah.
Uh so you got to move slightly to the outside. So I I need part of his head to stand on. You got like
back up a little bit.
There you go.
Nope. a bit more maybe.
Uh Tubby, can you crouch?
If I crouch, I won't be able to get back up is the only thing.
There we go.
Okay, so now I'm going to jump and then you can stand up.
So uncrouch, Jeff.

I think he I think he is. Oh
man, it's too hard.
Okay. I love how it became about bird watching and now we're stacking. Like that's
that's the friend slop.
Yeah. No, that's fair. And I think that like The thing that like when we when we talk about um third spaces uh in the tree here there is an owl. It's like a barn owl or a spotted owl of some description. Um
I'm going to scare it. Uh, one of the things that's really important that differentiates like a game that is a third space from a game that something that is a little more driven is um the the ability to don't right like that's one of the big things about MMOs. Like it's why housing in MMOs is so big, right? Because you can just go to your house and not play the game. You

can go to your house and do something that has nothing to do with the evil BBEG trying to take over the world or your quest as an adventurer or your class or the struggles of that, you know, local town that got lit on fire by a necromancer or what. Nothing to do with any of that. you can not play the game and still be in the game, right? And th this feels like the same thing where like maybe what we're doing is we're just piling or parkouring or like whatever. And like maybe maybe we find that shiny bird and maybe we don't and that's okay, right? And that's like
exactly
that's the space versus game distinction. And I really do think that you've uh got it down here because how long did you spend on the like movement mechanics? cuz it feels like for a game that's where move isn't one of the verbs that I think of when I think of bird watching. Like I might think walk, but I

don't think parkour. Right. You
That's a funny question.
Yeah,
because we it kind of came out of just play testing because we we literally did the most basic movement controller possible with like, you know, there's no coyote time, which is where like if you jump off a ledge, you have a second hit jump. like it's literally just the most basic like we I think we just use like a default GDAU character controller at a point. Um and then we found that we were just kind of like stmming and running around jumping on everything and like oh let's climb the bushes. Let's see if we can do this and uh to just move and so we just improved the the controller and like added sprinting and added crouching and just wanted to have it be this fun thing uh because people just naturally were parkouring when they were play testing and we're like okay. So, we added trees you could climb. So, most of the trees have like you can just climb the trunk, but the branches can't be climbed. But then if we go to if we unlock the bluffs, you can actually um climb the pine trees. I've actually specifically

made the trees in a way that you can jump up to the top.
That's really cool.
Yeah, that was actually really popular on our social media is talking about the parkour and adding adding parkour to our bird watching game and trying to, you know, be hop around.
Yeah. And it's one of the things we were talking about with iterative development is that sometimes you know you know what your core part of the game is, but you can also find additional fun.
Yeah.
That hopefully in aggregate when you put them all together is what makes the experience.
Yeah.
Oh, 100%.
I'm lagging.
Oh no. Audible.
Oh no. Made it. We made it this far. I'm not losing anyone now. Not detect problems. This is developing my my photos. Um chat, we've got uh 10 to 15 minutes left um in our in our stream here. While we're while we're uh boppinging around, did anybody have any questions uh from either chat that we we could maybe

answer that we haven't gotten to about third space design, about Flockound? Um is there anything that you all have burning curiosity about? Um because I I'm just interested to hear your thoughts. Um, what is this tree trunk? Feel like there there should be something in it.
Unfortunately, it's just a dead tree.
Put like a shiny thing in the bottom.
Just like waterfalls. Every waterfall must have something behind it or it's opportunity. I have not. I'm going to go do it right now though cuz I didn't see the waterfall and now I've seen the waterfall. So, I'm going to go check the waterfall.
Thank you. What's a Twitch anyway? I appreciate that.
Yeah. Oh, we can just wade through the water. highlight it.
I think it's been really fun to work on a game that is um just about enjoying moving around and talking to your friends. I think it's really really it's a wholesome game. It's cozy. It makes me happy. And uh
yeah.
Isn't it weird how this industry you can

go from like your will you consider what your last game was to this game?
Yeah. Yeah. [snorts] action rog light hardcore you know like super niche super skill driven
um
the vibes
to this [snorts]
I think that's one of the real strengths of being a developer in the industry is that you do get to work on radically different things over your career
yeah I love I love it I feel like I have like the ADHD brain of like I need to be trying new things and I can only hyperfocus on something for so long So, short development cycles, working on a variety of projects. It just keeps me excited. Um, question in the chat, how much is the game going to be? It's going to be $4.99 US. Uh, so pretty cheap. We want to get people to play it. We want people to invite their friends. You can have 10 people in a lobby. Um, so we're hoping that it's uh affordable and can bring joy to people for hopefully [laughter] a ways to come. That's a really loud crow.

Or is that a raven?
No, dude.
I believe that's a crow. And ravens are like a louder.
Oh, you should probably know.
You Toby, what's the difference between a raven and a crow? My 5-year-old's been asking me.
Oh man, I'm not the person to ask this to be honest. I'm not as hardcore of a burer as some people. I think a lot of it has to do with I mean they're the still I think they're part of the same overall.
They are part of the same family
family. So I think you can identify them by the shape of their feathers and I think uh ravens are more have like a more ruffled uh like if you will. They're also much bigger than crows. They tend to be [snorts]
um
because one of them hangs out in Parliaments and the other is a murder.
Yes, murder of crows. Um it's only coming to uh PC. It's going to be Mac Mac and PC and then Linux through Proton through Steam. So, we're not doing any consoles. Uh maybe one day, but there's already enough work going into Steam. Um and we are doing regional pricing where

we can. So, hopefully it is affordable in your local currency. We've we've worked with um indiebi throughout sllo for that. So hopefully it's something that uh people can enjoy. And yeah, you can get 10 people in a lobby. You should have someone who has a decent PC and decent internet cuz it can get a little bit choppy. But uh it's honestly like having a party when you have that many people in because we haven't really played with the proximity chat, but it really feels like you're in a space with the people and you can hear them talking, but they're more of like a mumble in the background. You can move around and people kind of cluster together. It's quite fun. Do we have enough for bluffs?
Uh we might.
We do.
Uh apparently uh one has a wedge tail and the other one has a fan tail.
Yes.
Which is very interesting. Also uh if one of them asks if you would like to talk to the all father, uh that's raven.
That is true.
Also, if it uh sits up and croaks never more at you, also a raven.
There's a California coil here. It's it's doing the cutest call. It's saying

Chicago. You hear it?
Oh, too.
If I knew where you were,
we're in the bluffs. Uh the green the bright green biome
right next to the biome.
Oh, he's so cute.
Uh for those of you wondering when you're saying it gets a little choppy and you're looking at the graphics, [clears throat] it isn't the graphics. It's 10 people across the internet with spatial audio.
Yes, exactly right. Uh, also if it says Azeroth, Metrion, Zenthos, it's also a raven. True, different kind that I feel like a lot of people won't get that because unfortunately a large portion of our audience is too young for that character because I regret to inform much of many of you that we are old.
Uh,
yes. So before we hop out of this, any closing thoughts? Actually, we should close out in the coffee shop, but um
we're gonna head back there in a minute.

Um I I'm I'm really enjoying it. Uh Chad Chad had a couple of questions uh that we we answered when when you got up, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm really enjoying the the variety of sceneries that you've packed into such a small area while not making it feel crowded. Um, yeah. I mean, part of what we were trying to do was we wanted to make the spaces in the biomes feel authentic. So, they're all based loosely on like biomes we have here in in the on the West Coast in Canada. And so, like obviously there's a little bit of tricker going on like we're not going to have fall and snow and and spring at the same time. But, you know, these these this is a Gary Oak biome that we're in right now. And this is how you see like this is the shape of how things work and the way the rocks point um point through the ground. And it just feels different. Even though like functionally the gameplay doesn't change biome to biome, it just gives you kind of a visual relief and it's fun to explore a different place and there's different birds. So it it does feel a little bit unique, but we wanted to try and make it feel big but not feel so big that you couldn't your friend couldn't

be like, "Oh my god, I found this bird." And you couldn't get there before it leaves.
Yeah.
Very very cool. Well, let's let's head back to that uh to that there coffee shop. Um, sounds good. And uh
we will wrap up.
Oh dear.
Yay.
Yay.
Let me hop out of the game as well.
Walk around and find out.
Yeah, I will. I will kick everyone out of the game. Um, so again, this is coming out next week.
Are you Friday?
Are next Friday. Are you hype?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm I'm excited. I feel like we we've really built this game um with the mentality that we could ship it at any point. So, you know, if things if we really had to, it was like, okay, we could try and ship in January or February or March. And we we've hadn't had announced a release date yet until we were like, okay, this is really like I think the game is ready to go. And so, there are features that we're adding every day. Like, you know, we just added the progression system. I think it's really cool. We're going to add more stuff. We're going to add items, but we're not coming in so hot that it's

going to be like we don't know if it's going to do okay, like in terms of crashing our bugs. like it should be pretty stable. We hope. You never know. There's always going to be stuff when people play at scale. But I'm just really excited for people to finally be able to get their hands on it. We've had uh our demo up for a long time. We have, you know, tons of people playing it every day. People love it. People play it for hours and hours and it's just I'm excited to give people more of of just more birds. More birds.
Yeah.
Excellent. Excellent. Well, Toby, thank you so much for joining us once again. Um this is uh the game that we've just played is called Flock Around. It'll be out next Friday the 24th.
Yeah. At 10:00 a.m.
24th. Um it'll be $5 on Steam or uh potentially regionally priced in your area. You can go wish now.
Um do that. Uh we hope you've enjoyed our discussion on third spaces and designing them because I I really enjoyed it. Um
that was great. Thank you so much for having
able to go from a theoretical talk and a talk both theoretical and practical and into
let's show what Toby's been talking

about because we can actually hop in and
like do the thing.
Yeah, absolutely. Um I think that's it for me. Jeeoff, any any closing thoughts here?
No. And just Toby, I want to celebrate like launching games is always like there are so many games people work on that never get out just because of our industry and never see the light of day. Mhm.
that I am excited for you to be launching. The game looks great. I'm excited to see, you know, as more and more people get to see it. And also just excited to see what you guys decide to then do with it over time because um you're going to get the whole waves of feedback in
Yeah.
as well. And there's always one or two things you're like, "Oh, that's a great idea.
Great idea." Yeah. I'm I'm really excited for that. I mean, that was the progression system came out of that. You know, we had a play test and people were like, "Oh, what if you could unlock the biomes?" And I was like, "Ah." And then our engineer was like, "We could totally do that." And I was like, "Okay, that sounds like fun." And I think, you know, there's we have so many things on our scope list of like, you know, we want to try and do a quest system to try and unite people like, "Oh, try and find

this bird all together or, you know, people have been asking for a dayight mode for a long time, but there's so many I we even talk about the design challenges of doing a dayight cycle or day mode in a game like this where when it's multiplayer,
when there's fewer nocturnal birds. So, it's like we're trying to figure out how that's going to work and if we can do it." And then just more maps. I mean, the number one thing that people want is more birds and more maps. And so, we're trying to make it as accurate as we can. I mean, there's some birds that are maybe not as super accurate, but to to the location, we had someone this morning be like, "Why is there a northern mocking bird in the game? That's not from the Pacific Northwest." And we're like, "Oh, that slipped through the cracks. We just really like the bird, I guess, so it's in the game." But uh I'm really excited and I I really appreciate you guys having me on and facilitating the conversation because
you know Jeeoff when we first met at PAX last year we were still at the point of talking about we just wanted to make a third space and we weren't sure what form that was going to take and to now be able to kind of touch base with you again after GDC and it's like be able to show like here's what that turned into is really really great. So
and and will thank you so much for the questions too is really really awesome.

Course this is this is one of my favorite things to do. All right. I think that all that remains to us is for Jeff to say bye to the people.
Bye to the people. Thanks everybody. Have a great week. [music]
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