GDC Plays Bugsnax with Young Horses

[Music] hey everyone welcome to the gdc twitch channel my name is brian francis i am a contributing editor at gamasutro.com uh i am also the community manager for gdc uh we are here today back on the gc twitch channel playing a game you may have heard about called bug snacks what are bug snacks what adorable uh what what happens when you eat them this is something that you will find out the footage that is playing for us right here which unfortunately is pre-recorded um sadly we are not playing live today but hey if you like bug snacks you're gonna see some bug snacks if you would prefer not to get any spoilers uh i would suggest uh um tuning away because this is gonna be spoilers for the first hour of the game but we're not just here to play bug snacks we are here to talk with some of the folks who made bug snacks uh that would be our good friends kevin geisler and john murphy murphy who will be here in the lower left-hand corner

uh sure well i'm kevin i'm a programmer at young horses uh one of two of us i primarily worked on the playstation side of things in addition to just my half of you know the rest of the gameplay logic um and uh i'm john and i was a gameplay designer for both snacks mostly uh you know designing the game mechanics the sort of behaviors of bug snacks and the tools and traps used to capture them in the game right on uh we're going to be talking a lot about tools and traps in just a minute while the intro to bug snacks plays out before us uh if you're in the audience and you'd like to ask for designer development questions for the folks from young horses feel free to do so i've got chat and i will be asking them um kevin and john if you wouldn't mind starting off um bug snacks is a

it's a weird game with an incredibly functional like purpose and game logic that has just captured people's attention where did this come from uh like it's kind of like multi that's a multiplayer questions because like where did the idea for bug snacks bugs which are snacks come from where did the idea of a like systems driven game where you interact with them come from where did the idea of everyone is grumpus otter's things come from like there's so many layers to the question where did this come from and i only hope you can answer some of them uh in the way i praised it i got it i got it uh kevin why don't you you have a better answer for like the the uh where did the original concept come from so why don't you start with that well i'm just gonna hand it over to you best well because i would say like me so after oxford uh we as a team decided hey let's try to do something new uh we've only done octodad that's been our

lives let's try to come up with some some different ideas and prototype them and see where that gets us so we had a number of prototypes after sort of like pitching a few dozen or more ideas uh that we ended up trying and making monster hunt uh one of them pitched by uh creative director kevin zoon public apology was sort of based on the idea of football mascot as uh you know different dozen man such as like if i'm stuck cleaning up your sloppy work you know what we ended up with the game like a crab apple um and the idea was we would go on like a safari or even a on rails pokemon snap style adventure where you are using different

like physics-based tools to sort of lure and capture them from your vehicle and we over time moved away from that when we decided uh i'm not sure that on rails is fun i'm not sure that pokemon snap is actually fun anymore um so from there we kind of ended up layering civilization a lot of other gameplay mechanics just even from our other pitches that we didn't go forward with uh and that's where we sort of brought in like oh what if these uh you know characters are on this island what if they're reacting to eating you know different bug snacks um what are their back stories how does that change completely away from the original pitch

but into something that i think we all wanted to actively work on yeah and i i guess there are sort of like three games that we actually prototyped that like we none of them really worked by themselves there was there was a game that was like a sort of like spooky narrative summer camp sort of idea that we abandoned and then slowly over time like the sort of like like being a small community and like you know bringing people into that community and and you know exploring outward from from that that sort of main main camp uh like crept back into the game there is a a pitch for a game um about um where the name grumpus came from was a pitch for for a game called gut city grumpus that was like about

like changing the guts of of these sort of like cute monsters that looked very similar to to what grumpuses ended up like and and uh you know like maybe like changing their behavior by feeding them things uh so like some aspects of that ended up in there um and then yeah um and then then the when we were making the pokemon snap like on rails sort of thing the mechanics we like basically like oh let's try to make something that's like on rails like this because this was when we started making this it was like when like vr was like really peaking as a thing so that was like kind of in our minds that we could try to take advantage of that but then like that didn't end up working and our our like ways of trying to make it uh not just a snapping pictures like

straight up pokemon snap sort of thing those mechanics uh that we started to develop like didn't work with being on rails because it just like felt like you're being rushed all the time like you can't like set up a trap like this because then it's like oh wait there's my the thing that i'm trying to do is like i'm i'm constantly moving past it on this roller coaster and that's stressful and bad so eventually we were just like let's take some of these like observing and capturing mechanics and like make a little bit more of like a chill wow more observational experience uh chill slow and observational i actually really we're in the tutorial right now so you're sort of getting the guided version of what these mechanics all look like but yeah i like that description observational like that feels like the best part of this experience is when you're in that mode like oh this making connections um [Music]

i don't know who you are but they want to say hi john uh they don't know if john can see that that's why like i said i'm here i and i don't know who that is but hi uh professor zagal we only hope that you're you're not taking time away from oh wait yes i do know who that is i didn't recognize the pronunciation ah jose that's about to say like now i know it took me a second anyway uh yeah so if you've got questions feel free i'll also pull up your people's streaming comments you know it's a stream it's interactive we're here like they're like i'm just i'm just an in-between guy for y'all to chat anyway more about bugs next john you said you introduced yourself with kind of a like um yeah like this game has a lot of like kind of if-then logic that it invites you to pick up on like the simple logic right here of this animal is scared if it's nearby you can't capture it like that's the most one of the most basic principles and then as you'll see this this escalates really quickly with sort of once we get

this 30 minute mark um what uh what makes good if then logic in a game like this i guess like what guided you through the process of making all these complex interactions uh that's very it's funny to me because like so like on octodad it was very much like very linear if then logic uh that like the sort of stuff that i was doing and so like i did not know what i was getting myself into starting to create these sort of like much more modular um i guess pieces of the game both the traps and the bug snacks and everything where they they interact with each other in in ways that like i can't always predict and like the if then logic of like the basically building rudimentary ai was not really a thing that i'd ever done before um and it took a lot of like back and

forth and and help and and kevin most both kevin and and devin our other programmer making a lot of like customized um tech stuff and and features for the our editor to allow me to to do this sort of more like class based um stuff instead of having everything just be like flat triggers in a level that are very simple and straightforward gotcha um kevin is there anything you'd like to throw in about making this kind of in-game logic work like that you think other developers might benefit from knowing um i don't know because we really had a lot of iteration on different layers of gameplay like some of the stuff didn't make the cut but i would say once we hammered in some of

the like little things it was nice to be able to just broadly apply them to you know all the bugs as sort of behavior you know like being able to run to a bush and hide um not necessarily restricting that to one single bug but being able to you know allow a group of bugs to have that sort of behavior as part of their list of actions i guess like kind of my follow-up question about like uh bug behavior would be um uh there's you know the game is is sort of working right now as we've seen the footage to establish a logic for the player to understand about that behavior so you know this is um was there anything in this process where you sort of thought about okay stupid this is cool and fun but can we make sure players actually understand it um

i'm curious if you had any particular challenges about that making sure that like your good idea is working we're all on our last chances around here buddy i know well i think in a lot of those cases we ended up trying to make sure are there multiple ways to solve this even if they seem uh you know unintuitive because people may not get maybe the most straightforward way we are trying to to guide them with some of these behaviors but they'll usually creatively think of at least one alternate and they're especially cases where you know maybe most of us on the team wouldn't think of that solution at all uh and are pleasantly surprised when that shows up uh i know one for me that was out here i guess was intentional there's just some bugs i didn't realize you could just hit with the slingshot out of the air and they'll just go you know flying and yeah i don't think the game

explicitly tells you to try to do that but me discovering that on my own in this game that i worked on was actually you know very nice john is there anything you learned about like trying to help players understand bugs logic how's the farm um i'm still alive well one thing in terms of understanding sort of like the journalists giving an impression of like what the the bug stacks were like bringing them back was uh the addition of the the little emoji bubbles i think that that that helps one with just like a little bit of like very minor character building and helps reinforce this thing like don't do this this is making it afraid uh for like uh this this bug snack isn't this other bug snack in this in this situation no um another thing was basically we have like you could not a huge set

of behaviors there's like bug snacks can shoot things bug snacks can be on fire or be frosty so it's hard to catch them they can be sort of quick moving and evasive and or they can be flying those sorts of things um or maybe like 12 things like that stranger um i could use it and then this goes hopefully recombining those simple would make it so that when a player comes across a new bug snack they have enough experience with other bug snacks that they can sort of piece together or quickly figure out by by playing around with it and and using the snack scope to get some some clues about it um you know it's not entirely new every time yeah i guess the follow-up like like the what happens after players learn about

bug snacks you know what they like they're also you know like you're you're caught like we have a task right here you know you just catch up to lure burger beetle i forget the real nature but sorry bur uh bunker uh you know then you have to create sort of puzzles for the player i guess on top of that so you guys go check it out um the i obviously you know making games is a iterative multi-layered process like first you know you have to make logic and then you're iterating on puzzles but i guess like from there it was like okay now you have like a chain of logic um and i guess along with i mean we can talk about the narrative context later because the narrative context is delightful but you know then when you get down to it we're gonna see some puzzles later where it's like um becomes a structure for how things proceed and and on some level that has to it has to work and be understandable as well even with uh logically described so so i guess what were your thoughts about making approaches

sort of like trying to make it so that you know it's essentially a series of fetch quests like a lot it's like the core loop of the catching and questing but we tried to mix in some other non-bug catching things or other mechanics that are related to interacting with the bug snacks you know for for example of you know like a mini game where you have to to uh use the buggy ball your little hamster ball thing to lead a bug snack through a maze just like little things like that combined with i mean the the the storytelling and characters all do most of the work i think of breaking up all of that but we also wanted to have some some mechanical variety in in there um while still having this sort of core core loop kevin do you want to add anything

um i guess i'd just say or reiterate like well this level that we're watching especially really just sets up sort of the sequence of how a lot of the rest of the game is where it will give you a tool presented at its most basic to get you to understand that tool but then giving you an objective where you really have to combine it in sequence with another tool in order to accomplish a specific goal and i know this level in particular went through a lot of iteration uh making sure you know is at the right difficulty and the right pacing which is kind of hard because we had a decently wide audience of people testing this level over and over where you get some

uh people who were just able to breeze through this and are like this is too easy this is a very boring tutorial but then you have other people like really struggling uh you know either to get the puzzles or to uh just grasp the sort of twitchiness that the gameplay can sometimes require and trying to figure out how to balance that a lot of the work really went into this you know sequence of the game in particular but i think that's probably going to be true of a lot of games especially games that are trying to do you know something different with their mechanics they're going to spend a very large percentage of game development making sure like this level or this sequence uh works gotcha um like i said uh this is the gc twitch channel normally we are here talking about you know how games get made like trying to crack them open and

discuss the internal logic why why why do i bounce up right now when this bunker hits me for instance but um we're gonna bring in a fun question from chad from uh kinmoku87 kimoko 87 says they love bug snacks uh did you enjoy coming up with new snacks concepts and most importantly um who is your favorite snack and who is your favorite i guess i'll answer first yeah go for it i feel like bilbo is my favorite character but maybe that's because he's uh very inoffensive i just kind of like that uh you know no matter what he's trying to push along uh both the player and uh the other characters in the game to sort of come back together and recover from the sort of split that has occurred my favorite bug snack is

probably the ribble ped uh which you really have to watch it in action to see why it's such a good bug um even aside from that the transforms that it gives are a bit jarring but uh incredibly well done uh john what is your i need to know what your favorite bug snack is before we can continue also your favorite crumble but yeah so i would say i'm gonna go so so the rebel pete is is kind of centipede rib uh my favorite is the um i'm gonna say it's this the sprinkle peed which is a a donut a donut millipede um mostly because of the the animation and uh sound design on that one because you it when you uh you know scare it out of hiding it runs around

the whole level and it rolls around like a like a wheel um and um makes like a car screeching like peel out sound if you get too close to it and it's just a it's a great looking design um and uh my favorite grumpus is chandlo it's kind of like a a uh a kind chill bro [Music] okay let's let's dive into uh there's a big um there's a playstationy part of all this that i think is worth bringing up um uh i played this game on playstation 5. it's also available on playstation 4. it's a game that you can buy you don't have to buy it if you have a playstation you know i forget uh a playstation subscription it's not ps

plus it's got it with the service and i use the service so this is very bad hosting of me but um uh this is a game that is launching with the ps5 it has some interesting features that take advantage of the controller the the new haptics um it also because it's launching a ps5 it means you guys were developing for new hardware before a lot of other developers were what was kind of that experience um and uh octodad was also kind of an early ps4 game too so it seems like young horses has gotten two opportunities to sort of be part of the indie launch for sony's new consoles uh is there anything you guys have learned about this experience uh that was particularly i don't know like what like what do you think other developers should know about making games for this console um well pleasantly uh working on ps5 was uh kind of identical to working on ps4 um we had put together our own tech in order to do octodad and basically after

that we kind of went with the decision well we already ported it to you know like 11 platforms or whatever uh let's try to get another game out uh you know while this generation happens so me personally i was anticipating we would release this game before the next generation which we i guess kind of made it uh being a launch title or ps5 was pretty beneficial uh just because it gave us sort of like a talking point for when we announced our game plus we still had the playstation 4 version that we have been working on this whole time it's been rough since um as far as sort of the development differences uh hey sure could you help with this

drink i do think coming into this the controller was absolutely my favorite part to play with in terms of development um we ended up using f mod for audio um and uh seth who did our uh sounds and ended up getting assigned doing all the the sort of haptic feedback and vibrations for the game through that system and i'm not sure we really don't have any like external game development experience i can't say what games did before this but a cool thing we were able to do was with the audio uh sort of just use that to feed into other systems for instance the animations of the characters are all flapping jaw animations it's just all driven by amplitude coming out of f mod and now the controller vibrations are also just

uh i haven't seen a new video sent out from f mod uh seth can just hook up a sound and route it straight to the controller as a vibration and on top of that uh the the work that went into the playstation 5 version we were able to put into the ps4 version where i bet you uh it may not have the cool rumble features but we can just track all that audio that was meant to be routed to the playstation controller and reroute it to just the controller rumble and amplitude on other platforms bring it here i'll show you how it's done so that was my favorite part uh the controller also had some cool stuff we did with the the triggers as well just sort of trying to make those feel different uh in terms of like oh when you've got the scope open uh one of the triggers feels more like a clicking a a shutter button

and then because i was sort of enamored with the controller we also threw in uh controller sounds so like capturing the bug the controller then uh speaks the bug's name right after capture it and i wish we could have captured that for the stream but unless i have my phone recording it you can't like i'm just sitting here capturing bugs and it's just like like hunger like just pops out of my hand i'm like okay yeah um no that one that one really gets people yeah i i liked that you brought up the controller because it's i i'm playing a couple other ps5 games and i agree this thing is like it's just such a cool device like it's there's weird little ways that like even though like you kind of don't think of these things as essential for a game they certainly like make things feel really cool

like i'm sort of like you know like developers you know you guys launched this game first on ps5 you mentioned octodad got ported so you've worked with other consoles um we we have been wondering from like here talking to some of the developers about like should developers like put extra time and effort how much extra time and effort does it take to make things for this controller um what are your kind of thoughts about like what the payoff is for developers who are making games for multiple platforms to be paying attention to the controller and putting work into making spread around nobody would want to come back here um the controller specifically i think is absolutely worth the effort but i guess in terms of like platform-specific features it was one of the things that took the least amount of time because there are certainly other things that we had to to learn to use or to rethink uh [Music] but i don't know i think i think the controller is certainly a

thing that adds an extra layer to playing the game that really didn't take that much time to do compared to a lot of you know other things we put in um ooh uh me oh that's interesting excel kobayashi would like to know and you may not have an answer to this but it's worth asking does the ps5 style rumble work with the ps5 controller on pc uh excel kobayashi i can answer part of that before they do which is steam just announced that the controller is supported but the special haptic features aren't being supported right now uh but i don't know have you guys worked with it on pc at all do you know if it's going to be like along there i i don't know anything beyond what i just said no i read the same thing as you and i don't know make everybody happy you know that gets implemented across different games i will say i wish uh windows had better

controller support they basically you know support an xbox controller uh or use direct input and you have a lot of different under the hood hacks if you want other features to work and i know steam has been doing a very good job of gaining access to a lot of these controller features and just automatically supporting on their platform uh i wish it wasn't just a steam driven thing but uh it'll be interesting to see everybody if they actually i was in charge do you get the ps5 style rumble working on pc because that would be pretty pretty nice yeah john before we move off the controller is there anything you'd like to weigh in with about everybody you know working on the ps5 i don't know either working on the ps5 or working on the specific controller dual shock um that you particularly enjoyed in this process i know like you said it was your sound guy doing a lot of it but uh if there are any thoughts you have sorry buddy uh yeah yeah like

i i didn't really have much direct input but like a post-release thing that that players have noticed that um and bring everything i think it's worth mentioning is that like the game helps you can do some more interviews uh figure out what happens it's been really nice for people though just like giving you having these little video hints of how to like catch a particular bug snack oh yeah about the little tutorials yeah so that i'll be here if you need any advice we had a lot of help from sony on actually generating all of that but that is a thing that i think you know i imagine in general that's that's the thing that that developers are gonna have to to do if they want to support that and i think that that players are going to like it a lot or like at least for games like ours like it's like okay next time i want to keep in the back of my

head that like uh if like maybe we're going to have to do this and it's going to be a lot of work but it might be worth it um will probably be worth it or at least it'll be a new expectation from from players that it's there um yeah just put that yeah people liked it a lot for like bug snacks i've seen people say that it is like a a particularly good use of that feature yeah i guess does that um we're all talking kind of abstract here because it seems like i mean it's so hard to predict how these things will play from the list i know like it's not accurate for me to say this influenced how puzzles got made in this game because that's no one makes puzzles with the expectations of how the guides will be but does it like kind of help you as a designer to go okay i can push the boundaries off if i'm confident that that player some players will want to participate in that challenge others will have the ability to quickly and efficiently all this processes get a leg up you know and sort of

without hurting the other player like having that little little like there is a crutch out there that players can rely on that's in the console itself not it's not on youtube it's not on i spent a mechanism of time on game facts back when i was 12 years old um so shout out to those guys but um yeah like does that affect your thoughts how you structure puzzles i guess like it's so i apologize for the abstractness of the question but i'm just curious if it's if that's where your perspective has shifted i i think it would depend on on the game like for this game i like never really wanted like really tough puzzles like a little bit like the you know expressive you've got different ways to do this and like sometimes it's tricky so uh for me it's it's more like ah this is uh this fills in the gaps in my bad design sometimes it feels like a safety net for me so like that's kind of similar to what you're talking about but like

uh yeah if i was trying to make a hard puzzle game yes but like in general that's not what i am trying to do anyway i think the use case that i saw when we had started first implementing it was this would be amazing for parents with children that maybe can't get past a certain part and are stuck and are asking why won't this game do this and the parent then may come in and see well i have no idea where you are i haven't been playing this game at all but they can jump into game help uh and either you know help them uh play through it or play through it for their child um and even aside from that type relation uh i think players who haven't been playing the game in a while

uh may want to return to any sort of game and see hey i've got these uh activities active this is where i left off but i have no idea what i was supposed to be doing and while we try to give those instructions in the game sometimes you know having that extra video feedback or it would just be you instruction can just sort of help them get the ball rolling again uh i do think that's kind of what sony was trying to go for with the activity cards in general was to keep players uh being able to move through a game uh and not just sort of so to languish on a specific spot that they may have happened to get caught up on very well the activity cards though i don't know if they're getting talked about as much as i think they ought to but uh one thing i wish we had done that i i want to say that spiderman has done is

have specific activity cards that you can't access the content in the game otherwise uh you have to go through the activity card to do you know the singular activity and it's you know completely unrelated to the rest of the main game story but uh for me either continuing with thug snacks or our next game i'd love to do just weird non-canon activities that you jump in where we don't have to worry about like does this float with the game it's just sort of this limited thing to do and that's where i see a lot of cool moments coming from the activities cards in the future you have made me now i have to go back in because i'm playing miles morales right now and i need to go check out those activity cards because i did not know that and b i thought i read an article there's something about pigeons i

it's weird because it's like it's only playstation that's doing it right so like you're making i don't know like we already have like content that's platform exclusive um that is a thing that oh you know developers shell out money for but if it's gonna be that way like i do appreciate i'm excited by the idea of developers being able to make something special for people who are paying attention and only a few people see it uh but it's the ones who like check the activity cards and go hey wait a minute like that excites me because i like it i feel like it makes relationships between um players and developers like a little more concrete like you can sort of sub-section out a group of people who will go that far as opposed to the people who are like um oh this is like like you know like it helps you sort of categorize your fans i guess um uh for my next bug snacky question uh sprout loves adventure there's there's also um we skipped over it there's a

interview system in this game where after character you successfully get characters back to town um like you said you mentioned earlier you know it's from another summer camp prototype this whole notion of getting a community back together like helping people solve their problems um there is kind of this neat like oh like players acquiring facts and piecing together those facts to do information which it's delightful that this is a game where you're a journalist because as an alleged journalist um uh it's nice to play a game where i'm the hero for once instead of uh the side character who gets punched like in mass effect 2. um uh i gotta say like what were sort of your thoughts about making a game where instead of just having a story that uh and there is this kind of a straightforward story to it but and there are dialogue trees which are more conventional with this kind of like interviewing people like it's low key and interrogation like the information that you get from these interviews needs to be you know like like what what where's how did that sort i know this is maybe more of a question for your creative director but i'm curious what thoughts you guys had

about making a system like that in a game when you're already bogged down with like so much bug snacks logic to also have this interview system logic well as we were play testing we would continuously get feedback that uh it was unclear who the player was or like why they what their motivation was and things like that so we like slowly layered in you know like the sort of like opening scene with your with your editor and then the the interviewing mechanic and um yeah so i guess we just wanted that that sort of narrative frame for for who the the player is i think kevin could talk a bit more about like the iteration on the interview mechanic because like that was for a long time

like kind of like tedious and not super uh you know it's like okay this is what we're trying to use to solve this problem of not knowing who it's like the main reminder throughout the game that you are a journalist and while you're there but for a long time it was like it took a while to get it right yeah kevin do you want to do you have anything to throw in i'll just say like yeah the the interview system i would say came in late and so a lot of things about our game were a bit scopey during development but i would say doing a 3d object journal uh and printing the ui on that uh all while not having a uh a ui editor i had to code all the ui uh yeah and not having a ui artist for years yeah i was about to say not having a few

sort of key people that were you know kind of the driving force behind the interview system like we had bryce uh come in about midway through the project and then late in the project uh along with other people on the team uh just sort of finally hammered out like okay we need to make the sequence actually look good uh it needs to be presented well because otherwise like the whole driving force of the story is that you're the journalist so like if the interviews just sort of act like the dialogue system then you know what's the point but then of course we had [Music] we brought in justine as ui artist to help us dress up all of the the ui in addition to that to actually make all this ui shine and then

of course seth's music and audio helped make the sort of sequence kind of you know defining moments for the player uh and sort of giving them a chance to autograph oh i can see you know narratively pick out like what is it that is driving these characters and i don't know it really helps uh create good moments uh and sort of sets the mood going forward for each of these characters yeah i i'm not that hung up about it it's just you guys well the second you guys put out a trailer that showed you're a journalist every game journalist i knew collectively went oh no like not out of like fear but just more out of like oh no it's us like we're we're the hero

like it's it's a specific uh thing um for folks in chat we only have a few more minutes to get questions in uh we would love to hear your questions if you have them but if you also just want to hang out and admire the bug snacks we're just happy to have you here um i am going to go ahead and uh um ask one of my final questions uh which is you i know like this again this would be kind of more of a creative director question but i am curious as to what your guys thoughts are bug snacks has a really interesting tone where it's cute and also horrifying um like like there's there's there's like low-key it's low-key like this like like the people transforming is kind of body horrory but it's also adorable um uh it's the plot is is on the one hand like it's cute and it's about an island with with all these grumpuses and all these names on the other hand like i kind of get the vibe that like there's something kind of serious going on like um i haven't seen the late game yet so i'm there's even other things that i have heard about but not seen for myself

yet um but i'm just kind of like like this is such a specific intersection like this is sort of like it's not cutesy like a pbs show it's not horror like david lynch and yet so many people i know when they saw this game were just like low-key like what am i looking at like the specific intersection of these two things that is perfectly natural and also like completely wrong like how did you sort of feel as as as creative people like working on a game that had this kind of tone um uh that is both of those things like cute and maybe a little horrifying well i mean i i think it really just comes from like like we are a very like collaborative team like we probably do a little bit too much of like everyone being in everyone else's business you know like before the pandemic we are all in one room all the time and there we all have like

there's a pretty interesting like range of of tastes and influences uh on the team um you know like we i think we all agreed that and like sort of the intersection of what everyone likes is sort of in the sort of like adventure time zone where there's like serious real stuff and it's also silly and it's all so cute um so like that it's you know it's good that that we're able to actually get all that in there you know and we you know we have uh influences that range all the way from like you know cute muppets and and stuff like that um to like you know a thing that i always was like was in the back of my head was like a like apocalypse now you know like like someone looking for this missing person and like slowly descending into this

dark scary place you know and that got temper that of course gets tempered a lot but like created or like you mentioned david lynch right like while we were making this like one of my favorite shows was like the newest season of peaks so it's like things like that like a little bit of the flavor sneaks in just it's kind of like a weird process that isn't always conscious but you know i need you to turn it up darling yeah um would you throw anything in with that they're too fast for grandma or eye to catch but maybe you can find a way to slow them down uh i don't know um certainly there were times where this game was brighter and there were definitely times where this game was darker in terms of tone uh i think we were trying to find that kind of balance where it could still be for ages that could sort of competently play our game to the end uh

because i know a lot of us go back and we'll sometimes rewatch you know the family films that were actually quite dark and there's still even some now it's not just what we grew up with uh so being able to take those sort of uh messages and like put them through narratively through the characters because not everything's going well for them you know you're trying to help them through their troubles a lot of children's media doesn't shy away from that it's able to present it in a way that i think kids understand and you know i think older people sometimes look at kids and like oh they're going to be horrified by this or but i don't know i think kids probably see a lot more horrifying things uh that i don't think most of what happens

in this game uh phases them like if you turn a character into a you know a giant apple or whatever it's it's not going to phase them as much as an adult who's like uh that looks weird yeah maybe it's just like i feel like maybe it's like as adults like there's just more uh i i am scared of more things as an adult well i don't know like when i was a kid i was scared of tornadoes but i thought tornadoes were like these grumpy looking monsters that opened the basement uh not the actual windstorms that plagued us when i lived in minnesota for a year um as an adult uh i have a mild case of tryptophobia where if you show me a thing with too many holes uh i'm bothered as a kid i would have been like whatever like tryptophobia but like i saw one tree when i was like 14 or something and now that tree is with me for life uh and possibly um impossibly uh that is definitely tmi but um i uh uh kevin and and and john thank you so much

for joining us today thank you for bringing us the wonderful world of bug snacks uh we're gonna wrap things up here uh blader coyote uh i'll address you in a second um uh for those of you uh who are new to the gtc twitch channel this is a place where we interview developers uh talk about the games they're making give you a chance to answer questions about them and gtc in general is all about the art and business of making games it's not just programming it's design it's not just design it's the you know the ui art it's not just the ui art it's how do you sell and market games and sometimes we're talking about that we try to here and on gamma suture.com that is what we are talking about so if you want to stick around we'd love it if you click the follow button um if you're a game developer talks for gdc 2021 uh you can submit your talks now uh head over to our website which is down at the bottom trying to point there we go that direction on your screen you can go and look up information about submitting a talk um and uh blader coyote is going to ask the question that

uh is most likely to get us all in trouble with sony can you guys confirm that the protagonist is peter parker on vacation is the protagonist's name grumpus garker i guess huh uh it seems like no seems like the answer is no yes that's i guess that's a no no comment yeah very element okay um with that we're gonna end a little early over here um and thank you all so much for doing this i hope you all are doing well it is a pandemic play gear of many scary things and i hope everyone just stays inside wears a mask and and continues to keep each other uh alive this is the first stream we've had where we didn't have time to talk about making games remotely in 2020 and i would have loved to you know pick your guy's brains about it but we spent too much time admiring the adorable bugs which i don't think you can actually spend too much time doing with that have a good day everyone bye thank you