GDC Plays GDCA Nominee Baba Is You with Arvi Teikari

hi everyone welcome to the GDC channel my name is Brian Francis I am invisible voice inside your head I'm here as always representing GDC that is the community manager representing the fine folks at Gamasutra oh boy oh okay sorry I'm gonna do the intro then I'm gonna worry about this game okay cool hi I'm Bryant I'm a contributing editor gamasutra I'm a community manager at GCC in the lower left hand corner of the screen my friend Alex Wawro has joined us today Alex how you doing I'm doing all right I hope you noticed how odd it is that because of a camera mix-up I'm the only face on here yeah I need I'm the least interesting person on this stream we have a very special guest with us today a very special guest would you please tell everyone who you are and what you do okay hello there I'm with a guy on the developer Oh Baba as you and I was kindly asked to be the disembodied

voice on the stream to describe possibly what is happening on screen I'm gonna notice some other things this year that's why we're here I feel so this game one was nominated didn't win it was nominated back at the IGF in 2017 or did about 18 yeah it was nominated in four categories and it won two categories so yeah it's like oh yeah it was nominated in grand prize innovation or nuova award the excellence design and test student came at one excellence in design and Student Aid with that in mind we are here don't want to do that we're here playing Baba is here with army just taking your questions chatting about the game design

development after after seeing it do so wealthy Awards this year we just wanted to come back and chat with Harvey and see how things are going you're working on a level editor right RV yeah yeah we are we are going to release a level editor sometime this year I was really hoping for a supreme real estate but as it happens things always take longer than expected so it's at this at this point I'm trying to avoid from missing any dates but yeah it will be sometime this year is surprisingly difficult like when you're a game developer you sometimes want to make a level editor for your own use and there you can just hide everything behind obscure bottom combinations but when you make a level editor for like actual users you kind of have to make it nice to use and that's surprisingly difficult mm-hmm yeah well I try to figure out this puzzle right here and nicely just arrows myself would you mind getting into we should also

give a shout out to the folks in chat we've got folks like writer of blocks hanging out writer thanks for joining us we'll be taking questions from folks like you as we go on so we have questions for RV please feel free to put them in chat I'm going to set about trying to solve this puzzle so Harvey I'm going to ask you a question and then go do that because I mean this is really hard on my brain would you mind I know would you mind retelling the story of where Baba as you came from and how you you took it from prototype to full-fledged indie game that's a very nice big question gives a plenty of time for the puzzles so I was at the Nordic game gem which is one of these islands where people make games in a time limit following a loose theme the game gems are kind of popular nowadays I guess most people are maybe at least to some extent aware of the concept but anyway the Nordic game jam is one of my favorites it's a very cozy nice gem held

in Copenhagen every year and I was there in 2017 I was actually going there to meet my friends because I have a lot of friends in Copenhagen and I had existing projects that I wanted to work on so I was actually kind of sneekly going into the event with his mind said that okay I don't mind if I don't make a game for the jam I'm here for the like social element of it but then the theme of the game gem was released and revealed it's a very loose gem like you're not supposed to be super strict about following the theme you are free to interpret it however we want and the theme was not there which kind of I just wondered about congratulations Network the level effective so I thought about the theme and for some reason I don't I have no idea why I latched on to the

first part of not word and started thinking how in logic and I guess programming you can say have a like concept something like push and you can universe of reverse its meaning by saying not pushed or not has this kind of reversal meaning in some contexts and I had played some really good puzzle games over the past couple of years for example Steve and sausage roll a snake bird - extremely difficult but very satisfying very enjoyable puzzle game I had liked a lot and prayed several years earlier all those games had kind of filled me with a desire to make a puzzle game but I had always run into some design problems there are some things I couldn't kind of get working when I tried to make my own puzzle games and the kind of inspiration I had gathered over years from these puzzle games wobbled in my head as I thought about this not their theme and

eventually they just kind of combined together into this mental image of a like a block pushing game where there will be pool of room of lava some blocks of ice and the ice congratulations the eyes would be meltable in the lava obviously because lava is hot ice is multiple but then you would be as a player able to say ice is not melt and that's kind of the as far as I can remember that's kind of the beginning of the idea and yeah I wasn't super certain about the idea at first it sounded like a it would be maybe a bit dull or it would be difficult to figure out puzzles for that kind of a concept and also I wasn't really sure at first what kind of a game it would be but I started working on it because one of the nice things about game jams is that is that I can just I just decided okay I'll do something if it doesn't work I can scrap it I don't have to think about it anymore I can go cry in a corner if it

works I can be happy and get friends and so I just started prototyping it and it turned out to be working pretty well and other people also they kind of came to look over my shoulder and say that hey that balloon super cool are pretty cool at least and that encouraged me and I ended up winning the games I'm like being voted the best game of the game jam and that's combined with the encouragement from my colleagues convinced me that I should make a full game out of it and then two years later things happen and they get me released yeah I say some things happen for sure I mean you you won those awards the game came out it seems to do quite well something we didn't mention it top of the show you are nominated this year for two game developers Choice Awards at GDC I think it's best design and maybe Best Debut or most innovation I think I think it's an innovation of design yeah yeah an innovation design quite right and those are like really incredible awards

to be up for and I think Baba is you is eminently deserving of that when you talk about no worries when you talk about the process of implementing that basic idea during the jam and just seeing it work pretty well I feel like you might be glossing over a lot there and I really want to know I can't how did it work at first because this the entire idea this negation of well the approach to the design like I've never seen anything like this in a commercial game that I can recall and I would guess that it must have been real tricky to implement hmm well first of all the whole not there like the not word kind of disappeared in development because pretty quickly when I started working on the prototype I realized that it's actually somatically way cooler if the lava is not hot by default and the ice is not mountable by default like if nothing has inherent abilities not

instead everything is stated by the rules it it felt just like a way cooler thing in my head but also it kind of invalidated the whole not thing why say ice is not melt if the ice isn't melt by default anyway right so that's kind of one of the first things that happened when I started working on the game but to be honest because especially at game jams you don't really worry about implementing things well you can just hack things in the only only thing you need to care about is that you have something that's at least it seems to work after the 48 or 72 hours of our along the game jam takes or lasts so with my eyes you I kind of I had fairly recently only about a year ago I had learned the Lua scripting language and I fairly quickly figured out pretty simple syntax that

would let me just kind of read the rules you know on the screen put all those rules another lists or actually learn a couple of different lists and then let me on run time ask the game like hey is this rule does this rule exist or is something you if something is you please return all the things that are you and then I can do something for all those things that argue so that kind of basic system of the game is built very largely around this kind of asking these questions of hey yeah please tell me everyone who fulfills this requirement a spirit especially later on when I added this kind of conditional words spoiler alert eventually there will be conditionals that can be added to the rules so especially when those were added it became even more important to have these kind of please return me all the things that argue while also taking into account all these kind of

conditionals or special cases that might appear and those special cases are aware that the development became like really tricky I would say that the basic rule system is actually fairly simple but there are some certain areas where the game even now is not working at all perfectly and when I really is the level editor I will probably spend endless hours pulling my hair out trying to make some kind of a passable compromise between things working on me dying of old age the other brings us to a good question from chat which is uh-oh I have a question what's the most challenging thing you've encountered when developing the level editor that comes from writer box yeah thanks for the question I'd say that so far one thing that I we haven't implemented fully yet and I will be responsible for large parts of the government of the code because I can't do networking stuff

that the level editor is going to have a level sharing functionality will be able to share levels with others and I'm pretty sure that there will be some things related to that that will turn out to be surprisingly tricky like how to handle kind of which levels to show first and so on but that's not my concern kind of so I guess I should say about things I myself implemented and for from those I'd say that when I made the level editor for the game originally the one that I have used personally to kind of make the game I had only a fairly limited amount of things I could put in a level right in this level you can see there's a lagaye ALG ALG how do you pronounce it I don't know there's Baba sorry algae algae thank you so there's some tiles there's a

brickwork there's a wolves flag Baba there were a limited amount of those a limited amount of words so I could just like do a huge list of everything and when you press tab in the editor just shows you almost everything and you can peek from there and do some adjustments if needed but for the final editor there will be too many things to really show just as a single lists it would be really confusing to use if the player had to kind of browse a huge list every time they want to add something do you want a hint take it Brian hmm so you built a level when something that is you touches something that is win yes and so yes okay congratulations so for the final version of the editor I

have to implement the system where you kind of have kind of a palais or a selection of objects you can pick from to add to the level and then you can add and remove objects from that list so you have kind of like a level specific palais of objects and then you have a like full list and you have to be able to interact with those and there has to be like a search functionality and tag functionality so you can easily find the things you want to find and implementing that system has been not as terrible as i assumed it could be but i be streaming developing obamas you pretty frequently this year and during the last dream I definitely felt pretty exhausted at the end of the stream when I kind of managed to optimize a system for finding certain objects and displaying their icons in

the editor so it's a it's a fairly complicated thing it's also kind of probably pretty uninteresting sounding because it's such a kind of like a technical thing but to answer honestly that would be Mouser I think you should be very technical and detailed like most people watching this are gonna be game developers themselves which at say hey I'm Pony and next minute science thinks it's cool to see Paula getting a GDC shout out man make you got that backwards it's cool that it's cool that he came onto our stream that's right it's very kind of you to invite me as nation super nice to be able to see people play the game and say words about it as well oh yeah we've covered a couple things I wanted to dig into deeper let's just pick one a random tell me a bit about puzzle game design because I you know I've been keeping track of your work folks who don't know you've made I think dozens of games

right there on your website this is sort of the one that has gotten a lot of attention recently but you're working on some other stuff as well and I think your last project and your next project are sort of a more Metroidvania type game some I'm so curious what do you appreciate about puzzle game design and like sort of what is challenging about it that you are dealing with right now because I imagine laying on these levels must be like brain breaking yeah well for the things you said earlier I think I counted all the games I've made if we also count like very small gem games and I think there was like 45 or so that I've made over the past 12 years I think that's it but yeah most of them are just like I made this in one hour because I I was young and decided that make a game in one hours fun okay and yeah the game that I'm working on currently is the sequel to my first commercial cattle and yeah it's a Metroidvania I kind of promised people that I would make a sequel and I'm it's it's fun to make a

Metroidvania even though I be more in the puzzle world lately but we have four puzzle games I think the thing that I like most in puzzle games and puzzle game design is is that when I'm at games I usually strive for making something surprising or amazing I haven't really found the good like words in English English but the idea is that like to best express what I mean is that for me it's a lot of fun if I see someone play my game and the game does something that catches them by surprise in a good way so that they like maybe burst out laughing in surprise like whoa what became this kind of a thing what that's kind of that kind of experience is what I live for when making games Metroidvania SAR organised for that because they can have secrets and boss fights and that kind of thing things

that I think puzzle games are even more suited for that because they can have like meta puzzles they can have they can have things where some simple ideas iterated in some way that the player doesn't expect at all and Imbaba is you are kind of try to make every level or as many levels as possible do something in music summize the amount of these kinds of surprising moments surprising twists that is something that I learned from the Steven sausage roll and the snake bird games those games both kind of do a really good job at requiring you to do something at least slightly unique in every level and that is something I kind of strove for and that I find enjoying enjoyable when I play puzzle games myself and I'm actually kind of trying to always trying to find more puzzle games that follow a similar

system this actually just to pause for a moment and talk about the game being played here so it's actually a very good kind of non tutorial moment that I should have maybe tutorial s better which is that there are these two new words open and shut and what those words do literally spoiler alert is that if something is shuts if it touches something that's open they destroy each other and saying like if something is open if I do open and it touches a key in that is shot they destroy each other but obviously for a very obvious reason itself is the games a story shut people assume that the door is like a solid object that it cannot move through it then that is not actually true and the reason why breaking the rule Dora shot didn't let you pass through the door is because there is also Dora stopped at the top causes a lot of trouble and I feel that it's kind of a at least to

some extent it's a failure from my kind of tutorial izing just kind of wanted to point it out because from a subconscious perspective my brain was already tracking towards I might change what the door is I can get through the door sorry Alex I jump buddy there no no no and that's it's interesting to hear you describe that problem because I did sense it as I ran through it cuz I could confused why killing door to stop didn't do anything but then it just sort of thankfully my brain just suffered or moved to the next problem solving technique but you know like I was testing hypothesis right like this game is very promising if I try this then this will happen and thankfully that just let me try something different nopes so wall is defeat got him yeah it's someone planted like a player pointed out at some point that I should have made the word open should have should be unlock and shut should be locked and I agree it would be maybe a bit more informative or like more intuitive there's actually pretty interesting stories and getting

sidetracked that there's the word defeat and in the original game jam version of the game the word was actually killed but because the game is so cute see and I also kind of describe developing a metro mania I generally prefer having like non-violence non-violence in my games I try to find bigger solutions that are less violent if possible so I felt kill was a very violent where especially like if you see that here's baba baba is killed that's brutal and I spent in the end I think like a half a year figured trying to figure out what to change the word kill to and because the idea is that kill only destroy something that is you it doesn't harm anything else but you so the idea is that it's harmful to living things so to say and kill conveys that idea really well and I think right after trying many ideas and getting such as turns from people defeat was the like next best

answer there's like gone and proof and I don't remember the others but there were several suggestions we went through the decision right now to either keep clearing out the levels in here and is or I have the decision to move on to the next area which is loading going back up to the map I don't know I don't know why or I missed so what what I would like to know is what was your mindset behind creating these scenarios where players could either finish finish an area and then move on versus like giving them the opportunity to move here I'm gonna go

ahead and move onto the next area just so we have some variety of the stream and I'm curious what your thought process was behind that as a game designer before you go I would suggest playing one more level in the previous area that's what I was worried about because yeah if you play level 9 this explains the thing that could be helpful but if that's the case like why did you let me do that like why would you let me advance here without learning something useful here I guess in this specific case is an oversight from my part but the reason the kind of even if we discount this play this specific situation where something that is will be useful is maybe not taught by the game if you skip these levels I wanted to make it so that you always have as many options as possible for kind of progressing because in a puzzle game it's very easy to get mentally stuck and

kind of if you only have one option for a puzzle if you get stuck in that puzzle it might be that you kind of you won't get anywhere because you are stuck trying a single idea over and over and not kind of refreshing your mind you mean to take a break to kind of refresh your concept on what you are doing and the offering the players multiple options to pick from I feel it's nicer because if they get stuck in one puzzle they still can do something in the game they don't have to close the game and wait until they get the insight they can go to other level which might be easier for them another reason is that Imbaba is you I felt that it would be best if the levels were grouped by the words used in them instead of by like purely by difficulty obviously there needs to be like difficulty curve but especially

because some of those specific words are very odd so to say like very complex very specific I felt that it would be nicer if the player doesn't have to learn so many words at once but instead different areas would have different words and if I group the levels yeah using that criteria there will inevitably be levels that are easier in one area and there are some levels in the earlier areas like if I introduce a new word entirely a new concept I need to make an easy level that tutorial Isis that concept and so I think I thought it would be odd if they would be the player kind of Excel is expects and even difficulty curve and then gets into a new area and then I'm paying this is a super easy level so I decided to go with the concept that every area kind of resets the difficulty

curve at least a little bit like pushes it back so in every area you can start from the easy levels you can beat the easy levels and move on but if you want you can keep going for the harder levels that like really explore the limits of the words introduced in those worlds and this is partially also related to how because I knew that the game would be possibly pretty pretty difficult it's very hard to estimate estimate as a game developer how difficult the game is by yourself but I assume that the game would be pretty difficult but I knew that there would be people who like to play these kinds of games or would like to see you like Bava in action even if they don't enjoy playing super hard puzzle games I wanted to have a system where they are actually testers such as that having a system for kind of opting out once you have seen enough so that

people who want to see the system but don't want to go get super hardcore on it they can play the game they get offered some like hey if you beat this level you can say that you beat the game and you can move on you don't have to get stressed and annoyed about the difficulty so the game is now structured so that he only mean to be I think about 30 levels to get access to the final level there's still more to do there are plenty more levels after that but you can still like you can complete the game technically at a very early stage and that's also related to this kind of not structuring nice I'm gonna go ahead and grab a good question here from chat because there have been so many writer blocks wants to know what inspired the cutesy design of the game they love Baba's design so how did you come up with this unique aesthetic yes so at the game job you have or I had only 48 hours to make

everything so I my go-to method has been to use the default windows palais like the old windows 98 palais with fully saturated everything i actually kind of like the palais nowadays because i've used it so many times i've been corrupted by it and in baba as you everything was static they were just like moving pictures on the screen and when i started working on the full game i spent some time worried that maybe I should make the graphical style very kind of appealing to the masses or disabled to kind of put it in a kind of a condescending way I wondered if I should go for 3d arts if I went for 3d art I would have to learn a new tool because the tool I use to make bye-byes you cannot do 3d art so I was kind of conflicted about this kind of maybe I should spend the eggs

spend the extra effort to make the game really appealing and then spend more time having to learn the tools to get it finished or maybe I should go with a tire style that I can already do and accept that the game will probably be a bit less interesting looking or a lot less interesting looking and the final decision for this specific style came from two sources first was that I had played the game Crayon Physics deluxe by Petra Bora in 2008 it won the seumas McNally grand prize in 2008 and it had a really nice this like creamy style where things were had this kind of slide animation slight wobble all the time and as a young game developer actually made clothes of that game Petre it likes to mention it from time to time when we meet but I got really attached to this kind of wobbly style

and I also use it in some non clone ideas later on that kind of a similar idea where I draw every animation frame several times again is kind of slight wobble to everything so I already knew that that that style works and the other inspiration came from a fellow developer Jason Boyer who has actually just recently released the Kickstarter for the new game like a mega dating game right I'm so sorry I don't remember the exact right now don't feel bad about it yeah that's good they had they made a stream playing by eyes you with their friends pretty quickly after I released the original games from version in each i/o the game is actually still available freeware and HIO if you want to see the like very original version of it and for this dream they made our video they made like a piece of fun arts where they interpreted ba ba as a cute bipedal goat

person in the original sprite I had intended Baba to be a robot they had like a tiny antenna and they were like bipedal robots but Jason interpret those antenna as horns and to be honest I really like that design a robot this kind of clinical often not always but often kind of boring it's a very easy this kind of non personal abstract main character option for acts like me who don't know how to do interesting looking robots so after seeing Jason's fun arts and kind of pondering where I should go with the visual style I realize it okay maybe actually if I use this wobbly style that I'm comfortable with using and I know how it works and if I do like a cutesy style I think it would really work really well with the game also because Baba is you like many people told me after the game jam that Baba is you

contains in their eyes some kind of interesting philosophical concept so you can consider the word you to be like a the the consciousness and the consciousness moves through objects many many different things can be conscious and they have their own agency when they're conscious but they can be only conscious one other time this kind of thing and I thought it would be a kind of a funny juxtaposition if some people could see these kind of deep themes or kind of a morbid themes in that lies you but at the same time the game game would have this kind of very harmless visual style going on of that yeah I had not thought about it all about how this game reflects the notion of consciousness as transitory that's ah well it's that's good Buddhism going on right yeah man you made a good video game there's a question here I have some more questions but there's another one here in chat I want to get to it's a good follow-up it's um forgive

me if I butcher this it's it's me Avinash asks they have a technical question they want to know how did you learn to code games they know a little bit of Python and C++ but engines like unity seem very difficult to learn yeah this is a kind of a embarrassing question in a way not really that's oh do go on I was just wondering if I should ask if a hint is needed but I I guess I nice nice yeah we're not here to waste we're here to play yeah so Bob as you was made mostly or like the base engine is a game creation tool kind of like game maker but not exactly game maker called multimedia fusion 2 my click team it's a fairly old program there are newer versions when I use an older version because I'm old-school and little bit of fusion and its predecessors were actually in that kind of one of the first graphical no coding

experience needed game creation tools in the market the first version was released in 1994 so it's a pretty old old family of tools and they used to be very popular but then programs such as game maker and construct kind of advanced so far that multiple fusion or in clickteam fusion it's a follower have been a bit less they're not as common nowadays that they used to be like 10 years ago or so and I was in primary school a school might ask me if I want to make games I super wanted to make games I have played Super Mario World on my cousin's Super Nintendo and I really wanted to make games I have also drawn video games in kindergarten on paper I wanted to make games so school might introduced game maker to me I think game everyone game maker was in version 4 something at that point in this early early times like 2002 or something like that and we started making games we made like a space innovator with pac-man in game

maker stuff like that but game maker has its own scripting language the GML and because I was in primary school I didn't understand English very well and I didn't have very much patience so learning a scripting language was way beyond me apart from like simple copying code from examples that wasn't really satisfactory so eventually another schoolmate introduced the program called the games factory to me which is basically the predecessor of multimedia fusion and that one didn't require any coding there's no scripting at all it was purely practical and that was perfect for me because I even if I didn't understand what something meant I could trial and error my way through it so that's how I started and there was actually a lack of boom of like preteen kids making their own games in the games Factory in Finland specifically in like early how about how do you say like the

in the early 2000s right and I kind of yeah I followed that boom even though I didn't have my own website and I was too young to put my games online or even to finish anything and then in 2016 after using all the video fusion for like eight years happily without knowing any programming I tried to get into unity I tried to get into ActionScript I tried to get into some other languages but they always felt too intimidating a good friend of mine Lucas Miller who has taught me a lot of things about game development and programming told me that there's a plug-in for little-bitty fusion - that lets me use the Lua scripting language and they basically taught me there may be tutorials for how to use Lua in general and also how to use in multimedia fusion specifically and then I guess the time was right I was old enough at that point I kind of

understood English a little bit as at the ripe age of like 23 or something 24 and congratulations nice and so as I got really quickly into Lua and one year passed and I got the idea for Baba as you and like Lua has been very integral for the process so right now I just make games by using this engine from 2006 combined with Lua nice classics real quick I'm just curious what is not having English as your first language like when you're trying to be a successful international game developer you see I mean that's a specific example of how you sort of found it difficult to use the tools until you're at a higher proficiency with the language but in any other way like has it been has it been challenging or anyway

interesting try and overcome those barriers not really because in Finland most of most kids of my generation learned English really quickly because it was the time of MSN Messenger and internet forums and so on like so a lot of kids even those who are not interested in making games or even playing games learn English at a very young age also Finland doesn't have the kind of dubbing as much we use more subtitles on TV so many kids learn English by watching movies subtitle and so on so it was never really a problem I've looked at some of my earliest posts or some internet photos from like from like 2006 yeah they are filled with XD and typos and some interesting there's actually a very nice anecdote where using English was really cool obviously even before I could understand English but like just like when you don't speak English it's always slightly cooler to

use a different language than your own and I try to make like a game where your soldier fighting against aliens and you go into missions to kind of disturbed kaleil yes basically and the first mission was such that you are in a like a anti-air artillery bunker and you need to eradicate all the aliens there and I have tried to write that like mission explanation without knowing much English and the final sentence that came into the game was washed the fly bunker for aliens and it wasn't really I mean I didn't I got I got some words like some of the grammar makes sense so it wasn't total failure but it didn't really convey the correct idea right on yeah I mean I I only asked I specifically I have never even though I

probably should have heard this more often I have never heard a game designer mentioned English language proficiency as part of their one of the hurdles to adopting a new programming language or learning the fine more complex you know nature of a language so that's just something I'd never really thought about it all is sort of another aspect of privilege that comes with that language is so many of them are written by default in English yeah it's definitely like definitely when I was in primary school it kind of slow the process and it might be that if I had understood English natively I would have been able to get into actual programming languages instead of game creation tools but who can say what would have happened so it's it what I didn't really consider it a huge problem and it's actually a huge perk that English words look cooler because it's very way easier to give like fantasy names to things like there's the Super Nintendo game f-zero where one of the ships or the brazing things is called wild goose or wild geese or sahaba and

as a kid I didn't understand was like what a goose is and I was like oh this is some cool sci-fi name it's like super monster it's a bird it was I like if I would have called it Villa honey in Finnish it'll mean I'm gonna be a school Top Gun really weird yeah yeah it's it's a scary bird I mean I live across the street from a bird habitat and geese will mess you up I mean wow wild goose is not isn't intimidating anyway I think everyone has learned about he's over in the past year right yeah Nick's mad science and chat calls out on Thai old goose gamers the new harbinger of the goose future yeah there's more actually there's maybe not there's one small question in chat maybe we can just clear up from Nick's mad science they just wanted to check in and

verify when we were talking about Lua and Fusion interacting so the lower fuel is kind of pardon me to the Lua files does Lua kind of dictate what happens in engine or is there any greater Thai there between the two tools that's a very interesting and possibly difficult question to answer yeah well but Ambala is you specifically multiple diffusion mostly handles anything that is kind of graphical in some way and also some things that are just more intuitive for me to make using multimedia fusion syntax for example if I need to attach an object to another object for whatever reason there are some situations for example if the sub button and the button needs to have text that is kind of stuck in the button that is easier for me to do using Woodmere

fusion that because multimedia fusion handles things like destroying objects and creating new objects but for the most part the actual rule changing logic is in Lua and the plug-in that allows you to use functionality in Mulberry fusion has some really nice tools for example because most men diffusion is an object-based language and all the things you see on the screen are just objects that can have animations and things happening to them so the plugin allows me to kind of add objects from Ultima diffusion to Lou up so they kind of become entities in the luau so I can just refer to them and change their values directly in lua instead of having to do some kind of like a here's a Lua function that course will be diffusion to do something to the object and return something back any is that I can just do all of that directly in Lua and it's been extremely helpful

except for the part where the plugin sorry where the plugins developers stopped working on it at one point and there's a memory leak related to that specific functionality so if you play the multi video infusion version of the game for long enough it was it will crash but apart from that it was very powerful and useful mmm yeah thanks for thanks for getting that I know it can be tricky sometimes to explain in a cogent way though the weird ways that tech tools and you know programming languages have all kind of hinged together but that's it's kind of what we're about here so I appreciate it ya know this is uh let's I kind of want to as we get to the end of our hour here and please we got about 15 more minutes left so you do have any burning questions get them out now I kind of want to know how you're feeling now that the games out and release I mean you're working on meaningful updates and a new project and you're up for a new slate of awards next month how are you feeling like how has

this game changed your career as the game developer and what's different now the Baba is he was out in the world I get more emails mmm after the release of Baba's you I've recently counted and I like personally answer to well over 1300 emails or mouths don't know it's not a good idea to answer that many emails you should preserve yourself from that but yeah buhbuh success has definitely enabled me to be more relaxed about my future things I can be in a situation where like I can plan my life so that I can actually kind of have working hours I can try to make it so that I get enough exercise and I can like I just have more

ability to plan what to do with my life so that I live a healthy life instead of having to worry as much about like everything burning down on me like ending up bankrupt or something something it kind of it kind of simultaneously gives me that kind of peace of mind but partially related to those emails it does also make everything more stressful because it also means that there are more eyes on what I do it hasn't that part of it hasn't really manifested in the way it could have like I could imagine there being some really awkward situations and there might be in the future like if someone gets Rick gets really invested in Bubba and expects me to do something and gets angry when I don't do that and that kind of stuff I'm very neurotic so I'm very

good at imagining those kinds of things happening but that kind of stuff hasn't really happened but it's still like the idea that okay those are now more of a possibility that they would have been earlier is sometimes sometimes stressful and yeah I guess I guess I could list things like that I guess the like baseline is that things are more stressful in some ways but they are also more peaceful in like economical what do I spend my time on ways yeah I mean I'm generally glad to hear that it sounds like the price with success are you still contributing to noida at all I know you were working on that for a little while yeah actually actually like a spoiler spoiler alert Babaji was made entirely on my free time my day job was no eita for the past seven years yeah I mean now

I'm currently not working on noida anymore after seven years it was kind of the game came out on early access early access and the same is has been doing really good like when people have they seen him to like the game a lot of so on so it was kind of it was time to look for look for other problem or like set my sights in the future as they say I'm sorry you can see my hand waving over here but like imagine artistic hand waves but ya know that was kind of has being a big part of my past several years nice yeah nice also in GDC a Awards this year so that's that's also thinking it's nice that people have receive it so so very kindly yeah absolutely I think I think that sort of points to a through-line in these two games right I mean I think

both were also in the IGF as well I mean both have sort of gotten attention for being sort of innovative and rule-breaking and sort of getting into like the real well they've both gotten attention for a lot of good reasons and I'm so curious to know like they both sort of point to a theory of game design that you spoke to earlier how you love games that you know foster opportunities for players to go oh like aha moments right where you just realize what you're supposed to do where you discover something you didn't know worked so much of Noida is about like figuring out how systems work together and discovering new interesting ways to use them I'm just curious what do you agree with that and is still like what what is it about the school game design a game you know that really you know motivates you inspires you why do you well I think it's for my personal perspective I maybe wouldn't do an entirely similar comparison because for my point of view in Oita the kind of the surprise of how

things work is very closely related to like synergy in games which is a very big like old-school roguelike thing the thing where surprising things have been taken into account by the developers and you can do things that you that might have work in all games because they have a made coda to take those into account but they still work in Noida whereas Imbaba is you it's more it's less the kind of emergent dynamic world part of it and more the kind of developer intentionally building hard enough hard coded but like a building handcrafted tricks to trick you and surprise you but and also in big noida all the basically all the cool things you have seen of noida all the sooner giant dynamic things are more to the credit of the

amazing programmers all infantry in the team who kind of made those things of reality I'd be more in the kind of design and graphics department of things but I know that that kind of synergy the fact that things that usually in games you don't expect to work do work and have interactions together is something that I would say has been a very big driving force behind noida specifically mm-hmm ya know fair enough that's a great point it is so much about Bob as you is about that feeling of you know like dealing directly with the mind of the puzzle designer and trying to figure out what they want you to do again we have about five minutes left so if you have any questions don't get them in but wanted I think she's an associate publisher as well she was she had a question her

question was literally how level design is possible and my joke to her was that clearly you just broke down the level design and possible and stuck in is between them and that's how Lovelace I'm happened but what was your mindset for making Bob as you all's like coming I guess like this is weird an interesting look right now so it was basically like Pikachu again came to me in my dreams and told me you need to make these levels and I just follow the holy word of Pikachu so the way I've kind of used to explain sorry for cutting you off no no no okay so for me the way I've explained Baba's use level design has been using the term reverse engineering and completely misusing the term but here we go anyway so the way I approach level design or I

would like to say I approach level design this way obviously anytime a game developer says them I did this to make the game they are lying because they are like combining many things both consciously unconsciously but at least when it comes to what I consciously know that I tried to do embarrass you I have these different words and different mechanics there the block pushing part the different movement systems and actually implementing the movement system was one of those like extremely difficult things that are still broken in many ways that you hopefully don't notice and I have these different rules that could interact with each other so when I started a new level or when I kind of made mental notes about level ideas I usually try to think of those systems and concepts and words and combine them in mind in my mind just kind of trying to figure out combinations of words or combinations of words and mechanics that I hadn't considered before like what would happen if I have this and this

thing coexisting at the same time is there something cool that could happen like something that looks cool or feels cool or is surprising in some way and you for a very long time for a long time it was very easy to come up with those surprises like I could get a lot of ideas okay oh that would be pretty surprising all right and so I kind of mmm through one of those ideas those that felt especially cool or sometimes though that didn't feel especially cool and those didn't make us good levels and I can them eventually that's something that felt like it could have potential to make an interesting interaction and then I made a level where I tried to build a structure that forces the player to use that specific interaction to solve it so that if I think the interaction looks or feels cool the player has to see the cool thing to solve the level so in this particular

level this was actually added later after the release because I felt the weight functionality that you can press a button where things that are move move we'll need some tutor realization I completely botched the word because this doesn't work really well as a tutorial but that's the kind of intention behind this so here my mindset was that okay you can press a to wait and let things that move move but make like you not move for one turn I would like to make a level where you're forced to use the wait button to solve the level and then I just like organically put walls down it was very hard to make paper notes for Bob eyes you because it was so is so much easier to kind of do those things in the actual editor and see how things work so in this case I just doodle the level I think I'm took a couple it took a couple of tries but eventually I ended up with this structure sometimes

afterwards I felt that the solution was too obvious and added some like extra elements to kind of obfuscate solution but that was sometimes also bad bad idea because it could drive the players attention away from the cool twist but then yeah that's kind of the basic basic process I guess this level is not the best example because they hear the cool interaction is a very simple but it's like press one button where I won't tell you where you need to press that button to solve all them that's what you need to do at one point of the level to solve it I guess a better example would be that there's later on the worksheet that makes things work as conveyor belts I can build this shape and if you move on the belt the belt pushes you along and I realized that if you put two belts on top of each other obviously they push each other at the same time so they just become like this perpetuate model that just moves on forever like two conveyor belts pushing each other and I made a level around that because it was a cool sounding interaction between the same

word but still kind of two things doing some something this level is really one of my favorites because I failed and found the solute I failed and it showed me a way forward yeah that's nice that's been working right now man I could play this game all day we could we could yak it up all day but I do not quite we do not quite have the time to do that oh man I'm so close I'm so close I need to make skull Bowl I think maybe I'm wrong but anyway I sadly to wrap things up if you enjoy babas you and you want to see it at the game developers Choice Award ceremony you can either attend the ceremony live at GDC which is coming up next month geez we're only a month away oh geez oh geez and if you are not coming to GZ we'll miss you but you can watch the ceremony on March 18th here on the GBC twitch channel just click the call

button and if you do that you'll get a notification via live we also have other great interviews coming up with some of the other nominees we've got all year round we are doing interviews of interesting game developers because GE scene is about learning about how games get made how games get sold how games how developers make games what their lives are like making games it's all those things it's more and we try to embody that here on the channel by talking to other people to make games and playing them and showing you sometimes how frustrating it is it's great RV thank you so much for joining us and I hope you have a wonderful day if people have questions for you at Baba's he or she danced I actually just opened the stream so I will be in the chat if some people have want to ask questions directly but otherwise otherwise you can send me questions on Twitter how do I even say hats at Baba's you under - on Twitter I think that's maybe the

easiest way to get questions to me I usually answer could at least answer easy nice questions very quickly there are a difficult question that I might hesitate but thank you very much for having me it was very nice to talk about Baba's you and yeah be a disembodied voices mentioned earlier I really like sometimes being a disembodied voice it feels like I'm a ghost you're good at it you say thank you you too thank you all so much for all