Fantasy Horror Kidnapping Sim ‘Life Eater’ with Xalavier Nelson Jr. | 349

[Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of Game Dev unchain the number one game development podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof I am your host Brandon fam and with me a special guest xivir Nelson Jr how you doing zel I'm doing great thanks so much for having me all right man this is the part of the podast where I introduce Our Guest which is yourself about yourself right if you don't mind kind of cluing in the audience where you've been where you at where you heading just a little intro about everything that you've been doing so yeah my name is Oliver I run a studio called strange scaffold we've released 12 games in the past five years from El Paso elsewhere which uh recently had a uh uh film development announced around it uh to life eater a horror fantasy kidnapp Sim about a druid living in

modern day Suburbia who has to sacrifice his neighbors to delay the end of the world on the behalf of a God that he isn't sure exists I've worked on over 90 games in the past eight years of my Dev career from Indie to Triple A before that I was a journalist I've had a wide and holistic set of experiences and I try to use it to explore how to make games better faster cheaper and healthier than the industry assumes is possible all right man uh fantastic so let's let's dig uh let's dig right from the get-go right your your game that you guys are promoting right now uh is the concept is a kidnapping simulator right uh fantasy with a horror fantasy setting all right so uh let's just start off right off the bat how how did you come across with this idea uh in and the beginnings of it yeah so I was talking with a friend about the saw horror franchise something

that we both respect and appreciate a whole lot we were talking about how we might make a game out of it and my friend proposed an idea and I came to that prompt with my own game development sensibilities and went okay so especially having worked on licensed projects before I don't think that you get an accurate or scope friendly representation of the spirit of the FR saw franchise having you build the traps or trying to escape from the traps but the moment before people are brought into that scenario the moment at which they are abducted at which they are even chosen for abduction that is an expression of the moral ambiguity and darkness of that universe that has a lot of space for mechanical interest as well as narrative Intrigue and useful

discomfort something that isn't just grotesque for the sake of it but actually gets you to think about the world in a different way and after I finished coming up with this idea I was like oh dang that's actually that's actually good I want to make that and so came up with an original setting solved a lot of uh game design and setting problems to create hopefully the best context possible and that resulted in the final version of Life eater that you see today which is a distinct universe that boy howdy it sure it sure still is about looking into people's lives very intrusively to find the moment at which they are vulnerable and then sacrificing them to a dark God for a dark God not to a dark God I think you know with our medium um obviously uh there's always been like we kind of been like the Forefront of like simulation or or training criminals or something like that right obviously

media controversies yeah with the sensitivity around the issue I am a game developer I'm a gamer grew up in GTA world so to me it's like no that's not how it works but how how do you guys how do you kind of approach the balance between the Intrigue like obviously it's interesting and the sensitivity to kind of kind of ward off this misconception uh at least at the beginning for me I think a really important piece of avoiding the worst version of Any Given uh concept like this is kind of just coming in through the door saying we aren't trying to attract controversy we aren't telling this story simply to titilate or to get people angry at the idea the reason we're making this game is because the game has something to say both through its mechanics and its

setting that couldn't be done otherwise so uh having that very strong guarding guiding star going in we made a game called space warlord organ trading simulator and people including my parents were like uh game about taging organs and that game ended up on Game Pass because we were able to make the argument especially once the game was unveiled of like hey there's people out there who would make an organ trading simulator yeah not only is it a space warlord organ trading simulator but you can very clearly see how organs become a medium for us to discuss other things in this case the nonsensical uh vagaries of late stage capitalism as applied to uh organs Among the Stars the strange scaffold games in general they range from stuff that's cute and

wholesome like in airport for aliens currently run by dogs to things like life feater but whenever we're approaching that territory I think that priority on nuance and on saying something outside of hey we made a game about this grotesque thing means that we avoid a lot of the pitfalls that games have historically entered into frankly just kind of doing that right saying Hey what if we made a game that is simply about the darkness of humanity but without anything further to say or Express beyond that point yeah like I think the most important thing uh you know as as was learning about the game like there there are obviously subject matters that are happening right now right uh and I think you know this gives an opportunity to to kind of highlight like what's going on and like you said be a conversation starter like I recently I was in Dallas uh Houston Texas right and uh I was kind of near your town is right never been in 8 hours

East 8 Hour East but in Texas to me it's all like Texas that's how that my geography but like in Houston like right when I got there the ambient alerts kept like going off it was like I think I would stay there for 3 days and then every like 2 three hours the Amber Alerts it was like another kidnapping another kidnapping another I was like I had no idea how much of an issue it was uh and and one of the big concern points for that especially cuz you would think in a digital world that it's harder to lose somebody right but when I was growing up I was maybe the last uh age of people on the internet who were told you don't give your real name you don't give your real location especially if you're gone from your house and uh you don't give out a bunch of different pertinent details about yourself they can be that can be used to steal your passw

that can be used to uh pre upon you especially if you're a kid and now regardless of age group people will go on vacation and take photos that are geolink to their current location while they're away from their house in a different location or yeah they use their real name they use their real photos they input the name information of their kids someone puts a prompt up on Twitter and says hey what was the name of your first dog and your grandmother's birthday people post it the idea of rampid posting and how that has impacted security and how that creates this really interesting question to build a story around which is what if someone wanted to use that information for evil what if when you were gone from your house that means that there could be someone else there it's just that very literal fear of the loopholes and gaps that people actively

create in their lives intentionally or not and how a game can draw attention to that and maybe encourage someone to wait a little bit longer before posting that pick or overshare a little bit less on the internet as a result it's it's something that certainly was already a lingering fear for me but especially as I started to do more research for the game became more pertinent so I think a really good example of this is are you familiar with like Geo tags the trend now of you can attach Geo tag to something yeah you can look it up on your phone and now find it right right right anyone can plant that anywhere and so people were noting hey I found a Geo tag under my car that doesn't belong to me someone was tracking me to to my house and in another case there is a pack it's like an actual like like air tag type of Hardware right air tag type of Hardware very easy to slip in to anywhere slip it

into someone's uh purse or pocket or underneath their car and their wheel well that is a thing that's happening right now the package fraud the reverse package fraud that's happening right now where people will leave in an Amazon branded box a ring camera or a toy and people open up their door they see a ring camera or a toy and they think oh I got one over on Amazon they gave it to me for free I'm not going to tell them yeah and so so they put it in their house but actually someone has installed a back door to that toy meaning they now have a camera inside your house or that ring camera meaning they can see what you're seeing and they also have access to your Wi-Fi because you hooked up the device to Wi-Fi it's I don't want to promote fear uh despite the fact that in certain ways we do live in a scary world but I do very much think that intentionality and mindfulness is helpful and every Arena of life so yeah next time you see

a a suspicious package that's too good to be true may maybe maybe maybe think twice and maybe think twice because you played live theater no no that's that's a a very interesting point like um the the voluntary uh ignorance that that people are uh more and more every day with this Tech and all these Ava you know all these available tools that we have uh people don't really give it a second thought like uh there was a couple of things that you brought up that was super interesting you know like I I think you know if you maybe a decade ago we hear about these studies you know in these uh site classes about all right uh what's the difference between you and a murderer right and they had these exercises it's like all right if you were to plan a murder uh how would you do it to get rid of the body without being caught and and it was like people were pretty elaborate and were able to kind of think through the crime and the

the the the result of the study was not about like you know how to kill people but it was more of like the difference between an actual murderer and you is very minimal except that your mental state uh disallows you from carrying through such a crime right your your your your moral compass your ethics uh is the only thing that's preventing you from doing something like that but we all feel anger we all feel resentment we all feel these same feelings and it's just that Moment of clarity that really prevents you from going all the way through so like your game the idea of like flipping the perspective and really thinking through about you know if you were to do it how would you do it and make and bring awareness of like how it feels and how vulnerable we are now more than before which is a very interesting point it's like you would think with all this technology we're safer than ever but kind of is the opposite it's like it's

much easier to track someone much easier to stalk him the idea of like Amazon Prime is everyday's Christmas you know uh everyone loves gifts uh really uh allow somebody right who has criminal Criminal Intent to real do really do harm with very minimal effort uh I don't think a lot of people think about that um when when they're taking their kids to school uh how open they are uh it is very scary to to to be uh everyday stressed about certain things obviously there's a limit you got to live your life right but it also helps kind of understand awareness of these things that are happening uh more than ever I feel like more than like I was very surprised uh it really opened my eyes being in Houston Texas is uh seeing all

those Amber Alerts throughout the day uh that you know when I I'm for California I had no idea you know just you know the the realities of just a few States over um and that that's probably happening in my state right uh we're not talking about a different country it's like we're in the same place Time same types of people uh but uh you know people just have like this ignorance that they live dayto day thinking that we're safer than ever and I I think what life eater offers is like more of that I think what you're trying to do you know with these things is just like let's flip the script like really think about it how easy it is to to Really carry through with something like this an exercise right I think there's also one of my favorite things about from a development perspective expressing the philosophy is you never get to orchestrate the moment of

abduction because the horrifying reality of pulling someone from their life is not the point of the game again we the point is not to wallow this is not this is the framing and this is the game in certain regards but if the point was that we would make the moment of abduction in choosing your tools a piece of that mechanical and gameplay Loop but we didn't what instead we do is once you have investigated your Target's life you have to get a prerequisite amount of information about them before you can hit the big red button and abduct them and when you hit the abduct button it cuts to hey now they're just in your basement and what you see is a meat constellation and you're essentially given this intimacy test of like okay how old were they uh what color hair did they have how did they have a commute to work

or not did they have kids you get this essentially a cosmic multiple choice question framed as the things that you do for a ritual that you're like okay so I cracked the 22 rib because they get less than six hours of sleep at night and that is weird and grotesque but it makes the wider Point through via mechanics and framing in the total Loop of this isn't a game where the greatest sin is having kidnapped someone the greatest sin is beforehand the ways in which you intruded upon their lives and made them unsafe beforehand you ripped away their sense of privacy and their sense of agency in the in the process so the final quote unquote interaction you have with the target should be based entirely around that and we actually just did an update for the game that we had a binary set of options before where you basically just take note of do they have a commute or not you basically will uh

can mechanically methodically go through the scenario in the new update you have these questions can have variance so when it asks how old they are it isn't just are they less than 30 years old it might ask are they older than 60 and then you in that moment have to go oh dang okay did I actually note their name did I notice their General time span and uh lifetime the idea of again this game being to a degree about intimacy and when intimacy is had with you without your knowledge or consent and you're like don't don't want this guy knowing all this stuff about my life how open our lives are to that type of intrusion now all those things again culminate in a game Loop that also expresses The Wider philosophical point that it's a kid napping simulator that

isn't about the simulation of kidnapping but but about the wider societal Dynamics as well as uh methodical processes that end up altering both you and your Target in the process yeah man uh have to have to ask you about this man what what kind of research did you have to go through because obviously you're not like you're going to have to rely on some facts right to kind of like really design some gameplay Concepts around the subject matter right especially now I feel like uh kidnapping such a it's a booming business right which is a probably insensitive way to frame it but like that it seems to have to be more of a problem now than before or at least the the awareness is a bigger thing than before but human trafficking is is on the rise as well as awareness of it and the awareness accompanying that rise is the one thing we can point

to as at least a comforting sign and hopefully an incitement for change yeah so if you don't mind kind of diving into what you learned in your research uh uh comparing to you know what you knew before diving into the research for a life eater I'd say that a lot of the research around kidnapping actually was not helpful because kidnappings unfortunately are mundane most kidnappings are perpetrated by someone who is close to the victim wow so it will be a uh a strange dad it'll be an uncle it'll be a neighbor there's all kinds of Netflix true crime documentaries that will tell you as much it was always usually someone in the life of the person to start with I believe that's the case for 90% of people who are kidnapped if not more the

the research then around kidnapping and methods of kidnapping don't necessarily give you a foundation for at least a versatile game offering a large mechanical and narrative space for the dev team to to bring to life yeah so what ended up actually being really useful was this thinking more so about um I have to remember the exact phrase for it but it's essentially the idea of intrusion testing so you have people who their entire job is to they are told to you know go to this Bank figure out how difficult is it for you to get into the Vault and put something there you have a week to prepare at some point during that week you're going to hit this Bank uh the people inside the bank probably have not been told beforehand and so they're basically hackers

and intrusion testers for good showing hey so I didn't even have to go that hard I just noticed that the the janitor wears a non- descript blue jumpsuit if he enters through this entrance there's not even a key card lock I I bought a blue jumpsuit from a nearby store walked through that door went down these two hallways asked for help to find a thing was able to in the process take a thing that let me get inside of room plant the the object and prove that I was able to successfully intr this location here's the eight things you need to do to make this location more secure in the future learning about those types of processes learning about new types of crimes especially in the information age one of the key mechanics in the game or actions that the player can do in order to reveal information about their target is to stock their social media and uh it takes six hours believe of in-game time and

it's just you literally the the the the the image we hope to create in players heads is your in-game character is just scrolling through Instagram Twitter Facebook for six hours yeah and that gives you so much information in the process so yeah research mainly looks at Main research mainly looked not at the world of kidnapping but at the again world of where and how information and access is distributed these days as well as how people for good and wicked purposes already take advantage of that now yeah there's definitely so many uh things to kind of Aid in creating crime like it just feels like uh pretty imbalanced to be honest just the the the the I mean privacy ma

privacy issues have always been dominant right uh in the last decade also real quick penetration testing is the term so it's uh penetration testing or a pentest is how uh there's people who do that for a living and they are all cool as hell every time you see a YouTube video where they will do a lecture about it it's the neatest gosh dang thing so the the the the frame of penetration testing is about invasion of facilities invasion of stocking like what exactly can you break it down what it means so it's often uh it's as penetration testing also know as pen testing or ethical hacking uh that's that definition is from hacker one.com the idea is for both physical locations as well as just sometimes assist your network someone will attempt

to you hire a person or a firm to test out where your vulnerabilities lie and they show you where those vulnerabilities lie so that you can fix them that type of information learning about how people went through that process is not just deeply revelatory and interesting but also ended up being quite helpful for the game because if someone can use that for good they can also use it for evil yeah there's like been like a recent um like home evasions in California I know like across the states there's been a lot of like especially around Beverly Hills right a pretty Hightech home invasion burgies that's been happening around Hollywood uh basically just turning down the Wi-Fi completely shuts down like surveillance of a lot of these

homes and it's been pretty organized yeah there's been like a lot that's been happening in the recent months uh all over the states and they think it's some kind of organized crime that's happening because the way they're doing is super efficient they know exactly where the surveillance are or they just turn off the Wi-Fi and a lot of uh uh com combative or ways to kind of uh fight against it is just people just saying to to to hard wire you know your your your surveillance instead of just you know new fear unlocked cool yeah yeah it's it's very interesting and it's it's it's uh but it's like it's those kind of scenarios to kind of highlight what you're talking about like no one thinks past that right it's like all right I got surveillance my home is secure I can see myself on the camera I'm away from home I see it oh right it took them one step turn off your Wi-Fi and then that whole you know system is completely infiltrated right uh and you're

completely vulnerable uh and but it's like those type of things where our medium can really help educate on on like really flipping the perspective and really think through these issues it's like if I really want to break into your house if I want to break into my own house how would I do it right uh but I I don't think a lot of people think past a certain point just to kind of prevent uh harm right right to your earlier point about the difference between you and a murderer test that were and psychological studies that were conducted in the 80s one of my favorite quotes is a lock only deters an honest man and that's part of why games are also really exciting because you play a game like de X yes and you get to problem solve in a way you never do in real life or where you only speculatively do it in real life yeah to accomplish a a goal which you could

feasibly stack several boxes on top of each other to climb into a event in real life right but doing that to infiltrate uh a conspiracy and save the world is a unique video game fantasy yes so yeah I wouldn't there is a piece of Life eater that is simply telling this dark story and narrative and that is looking at how do you build a horror fantasy kidnapping simulator than the process we realized we were breaking new genre space but uh a piece of it is also to your point education and discussion one of my favorite things in reading some of the reviews is that people talked about ways that they changed looking at their own lives because not even based off of seeing vulnerabilities in other people's lives

but seeing people's lives cut up into schedule chunks because for those who are not familiar with the game The Analog horror UI based interface that you interact with looks a lot like a video editing program so seeing someone else's life par out into chunks like commute browses in Internet uh wakes up screaming etc etc etc yeah that caused people to actively think like man from the outside looking in how would my life appear is this the life I want to live and I didn't mean to make people so existential but it is really cool to create the door for people to have that consideration I think that's a a highlight light of all of strange scaffold's projects no matter how pulpy or weird or controversial the subject matter we never existing on the strength of oh let's make a game about

stock photo dogs we aren't just giving the joke we're using the joke as an entrance point to connect with people in hopefully a really human and meaningful way uh do you mind kind of talking more about like the uh the the player feedback that you guys been getting um in terms of the the impact of the game what have you guys been seeing uh that you're you're kind of either adding to the game ing the game designed while while making it or even thinking about after release right I'd say the player feedback the biggest fear we had coming in is that people wouldn't get it m we made a game on time and on budget to fulfill a somewhat controversial brief which is horror fantasy kidnapping Sim kidnapping people delay to delay the end of the world also so your God may not exist the concept there is out there

and that is part of what gets attention but it's also the thing that makes it most likely for the audience to misunderstand what you're making most likely for the audience to look at from afar and say man that is a cool thing you did I'm not g to play that because that's dark my mom initially did not play the game on launch because she was like I I don't know if I want that in my head I think I'd get too obsessed with it and i' really excited and then I just be thinking about kidnapping people all day she ultimately didn't have to play a level and enjoying it which I was really happy about but I'd say in general the thing that we were so grateful for is that we released the game and people just got it there are people who said I don't know if this is a game that should exist uh which is an opinion I can respect and appreciate uh and those folks are entitled to it but for the most part both critics and players understood what we were bringing to life and that

it was more than its grotesque Framing and so the reactions have been we expected maybe like four out of tens we got a nine out of 10 we got eights out eight out of tens and sixes and sevens that perfect sweet spot for you pulled off an interesting thing that said what it wanted to say so I'd say the reaction has been positive a lot of people have understood the game or Come Away with new insights about themselves some of the more negative orx feedback did come from more binary pieces of the ritual especially because one of the early questions was how many times does your target go to the bathroom in a day and just because of the way we assembled those Target schedules it basically didn't become useful for most people it's just another piece of information so we SWA that out which a far more

interesting question that has especially in a new setup where there's some dynamism in how these questions are asked it has the thing of hey what what age are they if they're younger than this do this if they're older than this do that we are being reactive and we fix controller support we are looking for ways to accentuate what the game is doing that will culminate in the release of an endless mode within the next few weeks where you have an endless list of targets that uh flips the core Dynamic of the game on its head because a lot of the core game as it stands is you're given vague information and you have to find a Target that aligns with that information as well as have enough intimacy with their schedule and who they are to be able to successfully complete your

ritual in the endless mode we flip the information and say a very specific piece of information like find the lawyer or find the teacher but the information you get on that schedule is far less specific than it is in the story mode so rather than say you know go to courthouse it just says work and you have to figure out from other pieces of their lives and assumptions you can make about the overall context okay the work this person is working really long hours they're constantly hitting the bar uh are are they a lawyer or are they a different aligned archetype it gives you again a lot of the core challenge and intuition that you're allowed to apply within the story constructed scenarios but in an endless format so that'll be coming out soon and we're really excited about how players react to that but in general I can say that we made a really wild thing that took very big

swings and people got it and at the end of the day you can't really ask for much more than that yeah I mean like you had something to say and you said it and I feel like the most interesting games are always the better ones um uh especially you know with a smaller team uh you know that's the the fun of it right uh to explore things that um most other develop Vel opers probably won't touch uh were there like different considerations uh when uh for cultural perspectives when you guys were designing kidnapping elements of the game uh did you even uh think about those type of things or or put it into the game by cultural do you mean things like for lack of a better term uh what are the Optics of kidnapping this type of person or from this culture or what names we put in here right yeah yeah

yeah like like was it easier was it harder I mean did any of that like go into the consideration in into designing it or everyone was fair game or was just AG you know it was a lot easier because we did uh it was a lot easier than it would have been otherwise because we built from the ground up with those concerns kind of like accessibility we don't usually have font text that you can and font sizes that you can adjust manually in our games right uh it takes Dev time and takes testing would I love to in an ideal world have that in all of our projects yes do we usually have time and cash for that no what but we do do is from the beginning of development we say what is the the the accessible font size or the closest we can get to it and build our entire interface around that from the ground up which I I think if you can

get both that and multiple options you're hitting the gold standard so because we have this care for and recognition of cultural elements and how that impacts a person's perception of the game early on and that's deeply embedded in in all of the teams at strange scaffold yeah we when we were inputting names into the random generator we were like okay we want to be really careful of name of this of names from this culture or that culture or that one culture is over represented you want to the idea of someone being a religious leader in their Comm Community is we don't want to lock off the possibility of someone being a community leader or religious leader but when we're thinking about occupations for our targets yeah thinking about what happens when that

becomes specific or is identified with uh certain cultures that already experienced marginalization or hatred targeting in general all of those were really deep active collaborative conversations from the beginning of the project and I think it's part of the reason that the heat that we got on launch from what heat we did get was all should this game exist and not oh my gosh can you believe that they made a game where every single time you're kidnapping someone it's someone from the queer Community we with an aware and empathetic Dev team we were able to head off all of those things very early which given especially my Dev work on again projects from Indie to Tria elsewhere when I see that doesn't happen for people with much more time and resources than our

team has I do recognize that yes stuff happens but also that is that is a failure of of recognition and of creating a team culture to uplift those issues early enough to head off those disasters because if you have that team and if you have that environment people will tell you and notice those things long before you get there like the the the the player perspective right um there's an uphill battle just like all right just play the game you know what was the publisher side of just pitching the game like what was that like to like hey I have this idea you know uh what was that process just kind of peek behind the curtains uh what you guys have to go through to get the game made we were going to self-publish yeah because I said this is a game game that is in alignment with the strange scaffold motto which is better faster

cheaper and healthier yeah it is something we can efficiently produce and can be very impactful and that has both a gameplay Loop and a narrative hook and a hopefully impact on the world that I I can stand behind yeah we're going to make this regardless of whether or not someone gives us cash and can be produced efficiently enough that we can self fund it regardless of what happens with pass elsewhere and so I was talking to a work colleague uh fisel sethy founder of Frosty poop I was working on pillow champ and still I am working on pillow champ their upcoming really cool crossplatform fighting game which is it's a game where you where you fight with pillows that's that's thing it's an entire society and culture kind of arms style if we're arms and Splatoon style that has been revolutionized by the idea of

organized pillow fighting touching every piece of culture uh I as part of the things the number of things I did to keep strange scaffold alive through 2023 I was working on pillow champ I had become friends with uh the founder of the studio making pillow champ and at one point we were just having a conversation I was like yeah you know after El Paso elsewhere I know what we're going to do and how and the overall things that we're going to work on to survive this space where the market is at we're g to make a horror fantasy kidnapping Sim it's going to work like this no one would ever publish it so we're going to do it ourselves uh and I think literally a moment went by and he went like well I would publish it that sounds good and you make things on time and on budget and I trust your team and that culminated in the the five game Deal that we announced earlier this

year where uh a port of El Paso elsewhere is in development life eater is the first release from this collaboration it's a horror fantasy kidnapping Sim after that we have a fast-paced uh covert Revenge Thriller FPS that's coming out later this year we have a after hours Library horror game and then we have a co-op Kaiju horror cooking game nice all of those things are are are flowing uh as a result of collaboration with Frosty pop because they took the somewhat radical move of looking at our track record and looking at the things we were making and evaluating games that we that we had on the horizon and that we believed in and saying I believe in this team to make these things and I believe in this team to make this wild kidnapping game uh that they are not going to destroy both of our reputations or this Prospect of releasing video

games without government oversight in the process and so I'm real r or die for Frosty pop at this point because you don't see that type of trust and ongoing collaboration and vote of confidence given towards even the heaviest hitters of our medium uh you might see a big publisher work with someone multiple times but the formalization of no these people have what it takes yeah and also even if they're doing something absurd they're going to do it in a way that is Meaningful and responsible yeah uh yeah you don't see that in games and it it meant the world that Frosty pop put that towards us and I hope we did and continue to do that trust Justice yeah I think that's a that's definitely a a a value that that doesn't get talked about enough right I think U and I I complain a lot about this

exact issue because um on several points right the first point is like this idea of people uh getting funding right and then going out there as if they hit the lottery it's like hold on guys you're giving this money to make the game right this is the the the easiest part of the journey right and a lot of people just celebrate you know as soon as they get invested as soon as they get funding it's like oh it's game over it's done we did it celebrate high five but like the the business of game making is is a lot more brutal than that right hence why the marketing conditions uh that that we're going through right now and not enough credibility is given to people who are actually finishing games right shipping games who would have thought the shipping game is good for business in the game industry right uh and it I still feel like that's not you know talked about

enough yeah I think that's part of the reason why the games isn't the really weird space where it is right now not only do we have this hyper escalation is perspective that's taking hold across all of entertainment where no one wants to take a profitable bet they just want to take the biggest bet they can uh so it's not about profitability it's not about whether or not it satisfies what players need or want or asking for it's scale scale is King and within that perspective uh when you're looking when teams are looking for funding I'm seeing teams that have 10 15 20 years of experience working together struggling to get funding to ship a game the same way that a student team does yeah and that feels deeply broken and it's part of the reason why games

struggles to ship anything on time and on budget outside of wider production concerns which I've spoken about in a lot of different Arenas uh we celebrate shipping but we do not prioritize it and we don't value it and we don't make that core tenant a big part of discussing how and where we put funding so we're always starting from scratch we're always hoping that this next one is going to turn out all right because we don't create the conditions for it to happen consistently in the first place and players suffer in the process yeah um let's kind of talk more about that right the the the marking condition that we're undergoing I I I I uh coign with you with this crazy idea with investors and Publishers that you there's like you either a small uh project or these Mega skill project and and I've been I hear

this all the time if you your budget is anywhere in between they don't want to hear about it it's like a weird spot where nobody want it's like that makes no sense it's like go go big or go home it's like that's such a that there's a reason why our industry is kind of known for failing more than succeeding uh in terms of just project being lit right um this markting condition of 2023 hopefully we're starting to see the TA end of it I feel like it's getting there you know after June July it's what I'm hearing maybe right but like it's been a long stretch of a year and a half of like me and you probably have a lot of friends that are still looking for jobs and uh would love to kind of hear your perspective what you think it's going on what you're seeing um how to prevent something like this uh hopefully uh on a personal level or even as a you know uh a as a leader of a company the big term I've heard is

survive until 25 and unfortunately I don't believe that to be the case because if you look at where the medium is at business is booming people love buying and playing games still yeah they buy games both in original and licensed IP which is something that Hollywood and music and all the other people are struggling with if something isn't associated with a big name struggle to sell it in games that's the status quo still we are in a golden place as far as where the quote unquote Market is concerned uh because more people than ever are playing more games than ever and have built an ecosystem of appreciating those games and wanting to find what the what developers

will bring to Life Next unfortunately the business is rotting and that's what we're seeing the business is rotting while the market is booming which means the systemic decisions that brought us to where we are now that resulted in 2023 are not being reversed partially because we aren't receiving a hard stop at a reset point if the entire Market crashed that would have been awful but everyone would have had to pick up the pieces and say okay what do we do now what we were doing before doesn't work Publishers who only refuse Publishers who refuse to take anything but the largest bet though when they take a bet that hits It's like a jackpot in a casino and what we're seeing is a casino style gambling mindset and so when you have a thing that you you hit Max bet eight times and it only hit once that once is still going

to unfortunately Rule and is ruling across investment sectors of games to say well we got to hit Max bet again because what if it does it what if it happens again yeah so the systemic factors that brought us where we are even outside of the impact from The Wider economy of things like how in how Rising interest rates impacted gaming do will there be ways in which 2025 or once we get past June and July this year things may ease up on people yes just because money's still being made games still got to get made games need to get signed and are getting signed they were getting signed even in 2023 yeah we're just still going to deal with ongoing systemic consequences because all the factors that brought us here are systemic it wasn't an unprecedented meteor that shuck the industry and we're all recovering from it it's a lot of people made a lot of

decisions that unfortunately are not being reversed or uh having their base assumptions corrected as we go into the next few years so I don't know when or if Games quote unquote recovers yeah because the systemic factors to create an environment where players are consistently seeing high quality sustainably made products uh those don't exist and aren't existing and to answer the last piece of your question for the for what people can do as leaders and as individuals to confront that environment I can only say what strange scaffold is doing which is detaching ourselves from entities that we do not trust to utilize responsible and sustainable

business practices if someone is only willing to invest in us if we go Max bet then we aren't going to go Max bet because Max bet doesn't guarantee a good game yeah if we can't use our the processes that we have found and continue to iterate on and evolve to make great games consistently and quickly without destroying people in the process someone doesn't want to fund us on those bases then we don't work with those people and we don't make those games and so we're working with Frosty pop we have a couple of unannounced Partners who they're actively supporting our processes and so we're going to work with them and the rest of the stuff or once those funding uh agreements end if there is no further prospected partnership we'll we'll make our little five figure games and continue to bring things to life that no one else could uh and our safe Little Shelter because uh the

alternative is risking the lives of developers and risking the player experience simply to satisfy assumptions which are only situationally true that's a fantastic uh end point I feel like uh for for what we've been talking about this is the the one hour mark I want to thank you man for coming on spending the time hopefully for having me it was quick and fun uh this is the part where I shut up handed the mic over to you to talk directly to the listeners and audience out there about what you want to talk about promote give attention to uh go for it two quick things uh you're going to want to keep an eye on strange scaffold we have a lot of uh cool things upcoming in the future we have life eater obviously which is now out on Steam and itch you can pick it up uh right now people say it's quite good and it's like nothing else you've ever played it's a horror fantasy kidnapping Sim we have I am your Beast a

fast-paced Cod Revenge Thriller that we're going to be talking about in more detail later this year and that will also be coming out later this year uh lots of games getting made in ways that are hopefully sustainable exuberant and provide something you've never seen before or never seen quite this way uh you can follow our social channels at strange scaffold or me at RIT Nelson if you'd like to hear me ramble more about making games that uh are great in a way that makes uh sense um outside of that Defenders Quest 2 a game that I was the co-lead on is also coming out in the near future that game is a sequel to an indie darling 10 years in the making I I helped to bring that thing to a point where it can ship and it's one of my favorite stories I've ever written so wish list that on Steam today finally we're talking about outside of plugs despite what you might have heard with the sunshine Shuffle controversy um it's harder to teach children not to gamble than to teach them to gamble children have gambling in their hearts Dave and Busters understands this which is why they've re

uh rolled out their recent Awards and loyalties programs that allow you to bet on arcade games and uh Carnival attractions as you play them and this is why uh my PSA for everyone when it relates to child gambling is uh would you rather them learn to gamble from The Wider world or would you like to be the one to teach them gamble you can take the future into your own hands and teach them how to play blackjack poker and all those other casino games responsibly so yeah take take Life by the horns teach child to gamble today yeah awesome I love it man I I love the the the subject matters you guys are tackling I feel like it it's is very impactful it gets me thinking a lot um about things that I don't really think about and I think as adults um now getting through all this you know uh it's good to stop and and then have

awareness of what's going on uh because I before it's too late obviously right so uh I think uh it's been a very intriguing talk uh love to continue talking uh anytime uh you want to come back on but uh thank you guys see you guys next week thanks for having me [Music] [Music]