GDC Plays Loop Hero with Four Quarters team

good morning everyone good afternoon depending on where you are in the world good evening to our developer friends uh who are joining us in the lower left hand corner of the screen my name is brian francis welcome to the gdc twitch channel uh we are here today checking out a wonderful game i am obsessed with it hopefully you're obsessed with the two it's called loop hero um i'm so excited to have two wonderful guests who are in the lower left hand corner of the screen first off we have uh alexander vatizerian aka flinvall and alexander gorslovitz aka blinch since both of their first names are alexander we're going to call them finlaw and blinch today they're the developers from four quarter team who brought us bloop hero uh finn law and blinch would you guys please introduce yourselves um hello you are on the camera so you go first okay okay uh i'm lynch i'm composer and

uh sound designer and partly a game designer of loop hero and hello i don't know what to say and i'm alexander i'm programmer and like i'm sorry final i'm programmer and the artist did some of that and some of that uh it's so nice to have you guys on the channel as i said um uh before we started talking i am so excited about this game it is so much fun i start playing it and then 90 minutes go by and i just don't remember how anything like i don't remember how time works anymore um you all might hear some noises from my machine i'm switching between two machines so make some windows notification beeps um sorry about that that's just trying to manage this whole system by myself so loop hero as you can see we're playing it right now um let me know and chat if there's any issues with audio or video um this is a game where where uh your adventurer just sort of goes on a loop and you build the environment in which they go with lube on that's a very poor way to explain it there's a lot of neat

backstory game design going on um it's to me i find this game incredibly compelling it's incredibly i don't like the word addicting but it's the shortest word to explain what um addiction is obviously a big serious thing but it's so cool it's a neat game um so finland lynch uh i'm gonna be asking you questions if you are watching in twitch chat uh please feel free to ask your own questions i will grab them i've got the whole monitor set up here so i can read chat and answer your questions uh and yeah whatever you've got for the devs we want to hear it um so to get started um let's let's just lay some groundwork let's go to the beginning of the game of win of development for lupiro um where did the idea for lupio come from and how did it change from prototyping the game to finishing the game it comes from pretty old conversation with our um main artist and main game designer dimitro karim of

aka deceiver and we're just talking with him about zero player game genre where you not directly control your hero and not actually control the game itself but it's and yeah it's come from this conversation that me to redress us talking about his idea about little hero who walk in the art circle road and player must just build some tiles around the road and try to balance this uh how it's difficult and how um main hero getting stronger this monster and battles on this role so it was uh not for you know we will not jump in uh right after it we just okay interesting idea and forgot about it yeah then uh we joined ludum there 20

um yeah i mean it was october 20th sorry yeah and 19 2019 and uh it was uh ludum about start with nothing and we have not really good idea for for this but then we remember about uh that idea about the little hero who just walking in circles and we're like okay he it's pretty much he starts with nothing let's try something and yeah that's where he's come from but yeah yeah it's just where it came from uh deceiver uh said always says that it was like a mental training for him to come up with um like mechanics that will allow zero player game to be engaging because he

just likes to think about stuff like that and also he likes clickers it is it does feel kind of like a clicker game um what changed just to sort of repeat the second half of my question what changed in making loop hero from those first ideas um what were some of the biggest changes the game went through as you worked on it and finished it our idea is pretty like it is right now it's about to say a little hero who just bulking circle but uh yeah but but then we um making it complex and complex and out a lot of things like game building storytelling um tiles uh synergy when it transformed by each transformation of tiles yeah yeah and the perk system or and many others so core idea is uh not changed too much but

we are adding a lot of new things um we can talk a little bit more like you said this is a game where uh the player doesn't control the combat they don't control the hero so there's there's kind of this automatic combat system that you can see on screen right now um uh i was worried when i first saw it that that it might i don't know like you know we think of games we think of combat games we think oh like combat has to be fun and the game playing itself for you doesn't automatically seem fun fun at first when you first see it the idea might not be i guess um what what do you think is fun about it because it's it's very strange to be sitting here you know we're watching the game right now um and i'm looking back at what i was playing a few days ago and it's still compelling to just watch the automatic little fights play out you know even though it's just kind of numbers i know in my head it's just numbers sort of firing off and that i have no control over it but it's it's there there's it's compelling um what do you think works about that

uh you not control the bottle in the game but you control everything else on the screen you set up your hero build like builds inventory perks some additional stuff from camp and it's like you you set up this mechanism and and just uh watching how it will work and it's it's pretty addictive thing and sometimes it works sometimes it's not you you can't uh say how your um current action will affect in the long distance is really interesting to see will it work or not maybe i can you know little tweak it try something else next time and yeah that is and as for why it works uh like

it's kind of like watching a stream you you you cannot really control the streamer when you're watching him you still are rooting for for them because uh you want them to win and uh when they fail you you get certain when they win you get uh happy that that's kind of thing that goes on here it's like your little tamagotchi you know i like that i it feels like tamagotchi actually like or for me god it feels like the there were these digimon tamagotchi i don't know if you if you had digimon in your uh or like in the 90s or like these little toys you could carry around and go on walks with and they would battle automatically yeah actually very similar to that um okay so our next question is going to be um we can talk about the environment card so if you're looking at the screen

right now on the lower left hand corner if you know loop here you know this but i'm explaining for the new folks if you're on the lower left hand corner of the screen there are environment cards um some of them you place on the side as you can see with all those rocks in the mountain other ones you place on the path that the hero walks on um these spawn more monsters and combined in ways to increase the difficulty uh for the little guy making the loop um how do you feel you've been able to encourage players to to try and ex you know and experiment with these cards to try new things because when you put a card down what you're essentially saying is okay i want more monsters and i can see why someone might like myself for instance i was like i don't know why i would make it harder for myself i don't know why i would make more monsters and i sort of figured out why after a while but i'm curious as developers like how did you make players want to try new cards and new experiments

i guess it's just like the core the core idea of the game is that you have to balance between making it too easy and too hard and again you didn't have uh you you didn't know why you should place more monsters on the road but then you tried not doing that and okay yeah that that is not getting me uh closer to winning so i will try to place monsters and then you start to do it because uh if you you don't you get bad loot from slimes you cannot summon the boss and if you do it's very light loop and you die so you have to basically yeah it's also part of learning about game because firstly you just walk around and yeah when you're just starting the game you don't feel it's the difficulty because you know player i mean hero just uh fight he he by his own and it's it's not difficult

so okay i will put this uh spiders for example and it's still not difficult and the player just starting to place any tiles chaotically because it's not he don't understand how it affected his run for long distance and then he dies and he like okay he recognized he realized that it's not working maybe i need to place little bit less monster or maybe i need to try put other monster instead this one and yes and it's only how it started and it's processed during the whole game like you were just trying to tweak it for your best um um best strategy for game how it will be perfect balance for your hero and i'll be and then and then you just unlock new classes and it's all not work for them in the uni yet started uh

by any new cycle of uh this balancing stuff um just a fun anecdote i can share so when i was playing my my partner is also playing this game and she's a few hours ahead of me and she's seen things i haven't seen yet she walked over while i was playing not this specific run but like a run essentially where i was playing like this and she just said it screamed out loud like why have you put all that stuff together like why have you made this so hard for yourself and i was like i don't know and then we just started like like as soon as she said that something like one of the the oh yeah it was i layered the graveyards on top of each other and we had um uh like it was like oh a vampire died and then there was a ghost and then there was a ghost of a ghost and then the primal matter showed up and she audibly screamed like what the hell is that like i haven't seen that she said i'm just like i don't know i'm just make i push button and loop hero gober if if if you get that um so that was a really fun like our two different play styles collided right away um and my my more aggressive

layering approach which you can see right now uh threw her off it's always funny to see how people play differently and it's it's say all um you know every people find out some own strategy and it's always interesting to see how how they will be you know set up their roles which styles they choose it's really interesting how many variations of these people found yeah i this isn't something we talk like this isn't in the questions i sent you guys before but i um i kind of found as i was playing that um uh uh um what one thing i experienced was after a while like some cards just weren't fun for me i guess um like i might go oh okay like i've had like the spiders for instance the spider card in my kit for a while but now i've got some new things and i'm making decisions about trading them out and um after a

while i was like i know this thing gives me rewards and there are specific rewards i can get out of this but i i just like i just the swamp is actually a much better example the swamp i picked it up because i'm like oh i see what this does this makes my healing damage so i need to be careful with this so i need to build a strategy that's involved around healing and this early in the game i finally hit a point where i was like oh but healing's like fun and not like it was kind of like i was like wow this kind of sucks to be in the middle of a swamp in a longer fight and my health was just tanking and i was just like okay well i'll just turn off the swamp and try another environment and i was surprised at like um uh i was surprised at just how it came how it all worked out yeah we get to see my past mistakes here um uh wl strategy ww1 wf stride uh has shown up in the chat wf stride thank you so much for watching um

wf stride uh has a question for us uh which is where did you get the idea for this type of looping game mechanic um we kind of talked about where it came from before uh so we don't want to totally retread that ground uh but i will say wf stribe wants to say great game by the way so uh that's one person in chat who's already written for you all um so i guess we can build on that question about where the looping came from and more like um it kind of feels like a programming loop doesn't it like this game feels like you know like uh you set up a loop and you know when you're coding or whatever and if then and then the loop just kind of keeps running um where did the idea evolve from you know you talked about having a hero you don't control um and doing that game jam uh doing ludum dare i think it was um when did you sort of have the idea to like have this kind of almost like a programming loop come into play it was just an

in the original idea that you build a road tile and you have to like live with it now because it will stay there and you will pass multiple times so you build something and then you will interact with this many times on the loop so yeah it's also original idea but it's not something which would come later here cool yeah so it's it's like the very basic part it's it's like when did you get idea that in a shooter you shoot a gun yeah so stride uh if you didn't catch it i totally recommend going back to the front of the um the top of the stream and and uh seeing the the full story they gave about the game's origin um we've also got another question from uh video space games uh they wanted to say they also love this game um they want to ask uh was this game inspired by idol games at all

i it was as i said before we're just talking about uh idol games and about uh zero player games but it was not you know directly inspired by some someone specific game right um yeah so it was like a conversation about genre itself but pretty quick look here is grown up from this genre and now it's something different but yeah originally it was just our thoughts about zero playing gaming something right what do you think idol games do so well that you know like we talked about earlier like the sort of the notion that every game must be as interactive as possible and as but i know i love idol games i'm playing one on my phone right now um uh that absolutely has like the deepest grind i'm not gonna name it because i don't wanna name and shame but it's just got this really deep grind and i'm like oh this is very hard but i don't do much but i like this like what do you guys think is so

compelling about idol play uh if you talk about look hero it's not actually idol game right or you know um like itself but it's a little bit part of uh look here it's idle game if you're talking about uh hero control but you know after you're playing some time you understand it's you need to do a lot of action in this game yeah yeah it's depend on your attention for game um it's so it's not really idle but why idle game so addictive um i think people just like to you know see how number going increase infinity and you just can um a little bit uh you know rest by playing them so maybe because i think maybe saint paul cannot know more about title games yeah it's just

basically you your brain gets gets happy when numbers go up and in idle games you don't really have to work for it you can just meditate and see numbers go up and that's it yeah it's like a good rest i do think you guys have done a really good job adapting that and even with with more interactivity like we're seeing like almost every few seconds you can see me in this footage like moving around and clicking and it's some of it is numbers going up but like you know there's the neatness of making that mountain in the lower left hand corner there's laying out combos on the path uh i really think you guys have done a good job adapting both that idle factor even while you increase the interactivity um we're going to go to our next question in chat from uh ill made coder um this is a long one so just give me a second to read if you to read all of it um ill made coder says that they were

playing around with remaking this game as a side project is that a kosher thing to bring up an interview i don't know that they're trying to remake your game but hey i guess you inspired them um and i was they were they said they were playing around with the classes being within items rather than being something you choose so instead you would try to have to form a build for the class via the equipment slots um was that something that was ever thought of in design and do you think that would be tricky to pull off we actually were talking at some point about a kind system like that but it's like it might be not promising anything not not saying it it will but there is a small chance that it will be implemented in the game kinda system like that is uh your equipment uh making you

more of the class but uh don't know it was just one one talk one little talk and that's it glitch is there anything you want to add um actually no we don't have any plans for it right now we talked about some um making a class system more complex but not something specific but we can announce right now so that's that's totally fair uh i'm honestly i'm super i'm a pr i appreciate you guys saying that it was an idea so good you're you might do it yourself um uh we discussed something like that at some point but uh not it's not in the game as you can see you just pick the class and that's it right um yeah so my my next question um uh illibate coder wants to say add uh by the way they're just remaking the game

for fun and to learn not to try and compete uh yeah i ill make coder i can only say for myself uh i admire you trying to retro engineer this game so i think that's super neat um uh my next question is going to be um uh were there any challenges when it came to like readability and having players understand what was going on um you've got this incredible pixel art aesthetic i personally sometimes myself have trouble seeing exactly what is happening on screen um uh it hits harder in town like when i look if we get back to the town uh part of the game in a bit uh i can describe it more accurately but sometimes when i'm looking at you know right now i can sort of clearly see okay those are the mountains that's the grass and i can pick out you know the swamp the field the vampire mansion uh the blood trees there's no vampires out right now because i think i turn them off um the goblin camp but um you know it's i i you understand that after hours of

play you know things become more familiar but i'm curious when making this game uh did you have any challenges about you know making sure players understood what's going on just at a glance it's uh deceiva is who drove all these styles and sometimes he redropped few ones for more readability and desert for example and rocks and mountains i remember too road as well so yeah it's uh it was some challenge for it and maybe we still have few problems maybe we want to for example uh make something for you and notice your hero is more creepy on late uh late looks when it's you know too many too many uh enemies and you can't uh

see where your hero going so here we will be planning to improve it so it was a lot of challenge but yeah as i say it's deceiver for artists and who made all the styles and it's definitely need to ask him so we just can't answer this for sure that's totally fair um i think he did a good job overall just you know it's i think uh as displays have gotten bigger um pixel art you know pixlr was made for smaller screens smaller computing power um and sometimes as as those two things have scaled up i've just noticed that uh it sometimes creates you know sometimes it's just as hard to read as as you know moshi pixels but in less good games from yesteryear might have been not this game necessarily just pixlr as a broad art um

let's let's take kind of a programming tack um uh obviously as as um this this game as loops in this game get more and more elaborate and complex um you know the game is trying to you know layer uh different different systems and remember okay you know if there's a graveyard then ghosts you know are supposed to spawn um where enemies are supposed to become ghosts if there's vampires they get regen in you and the stacking complexity gets gets very uh uh it grows and it scales and complexity as and it may you know this is still early in the game the footage we're looking at but i'm sure as it goes on it gets even more and more complex um were there any challenges when it came to kind of making sure the game and the game's core structure could handle all that information coming in rapidly um you know because sometimes what i've when i've talked to game programmers you know and they're working on less graphically complex games obviously you know when you have a game that has

realistic lighting when you have more realistic features those are very complex to render but then you know strategy game developers have told me like man like when you are trying to like make sure your game can store and run all this complex information like that's actually its own challenge um that's less visible to players did anything like that come up in development not really i mean storing like a an array or a like a single variable it's very cheap like a computer from 2005 can handle it easily and oh more than just more than that like uh an enemy is just basically a number of variables maybe like a hundred but hundred variables still bytes or kilobytes of data so it's it's not much maybe in strategies uh like if it's a global strategy with a

thousand of units and they're in 3d and they have vectors and they have like um 3d lighting with the so this is like the how do you call it the the lion that goes from the front i think yeah then then you then then you will need more memory but here no it's very easy to store it all and for the complexity there were challenges because like there are only two programmers and one day we are thinking what to do with like for there are four chapters in the game i guess you can spoil it yeah yeah maybe maybe i shouldn't but too late already and we were thinking okay there are four chapters how we make enemies more

interesting so they sometimes some of them have skills maybe we just make that their skill can proc with more percentage with each chapter so like spiders can throw a web with five percent at first chapter 10 at second and so on but uh then we decided that now we can add a new skill for each enemy each chapter so there are like hundreds of skills there are more actually like uh yeah and two guys had to code 100 skills which was yeah it was it was hard and then uh turned out that some of the skills didn't work some did break something some messed with some other parts of the game

and we had to test it a lot and uh people still still found some skills uh really broken in certain circumstances despite all the testing because we just couldn't test everything yeah and there were rare uh occasions in which well the game just uh soft locked basically because one of the skills um without but we we we are we are working on it honestly without um without teaching the audience how to soft lock loop hero um is there a particular um skill or or skill interaction that surprised you uh either something you guys found while you were developing the game um uh or is there something um or is there something any type of any type of this interaction it was some skill combination or skill itself or even i don't know

this was any type of this uh skill activity can broaden the game and they have really a lot of testing try to catch this one have no pitch everyone i mean but yeah still uh some they find out some skill broken and or or not working uh as they must do yeah it was pretty challenging part of the development was there was there any skill interaction that was really funny that you didn't expect because i already think there's a lot of funny ones that are by design but what are the unintentional ones i think i can remember for example last one but it's not really funny and we have a lot of you know negative feedback because of it uh harpies in the game have ability how many punches they get then the armor is increased by every punch every heat i mean punches so uh we have uh

archer in the tower of archers from your camp so around your campfire yeah you you have some additional support from them and they uh they they strike pretty fast so if you have four archers who strike with like i don't remember maybe two hit in a second this hub is getting uh like citadel of armor pretty fast yeah and you can you can kill them like no chances and we have no couple basically you cannot you cannot damage them at all sometimes because they can have vampirism or a region too high and like you deal one damage then they heal five so just impossible to yeah and and many people no it's maybe not many

but some people get this soft lock and some of them was too angry and rightly or i don't know shut out for us you know because of this little bag but we've already fixed it um and this sort of things is sometimes appears and you can't you know predict everything for example i also it's one of the latest enemy in the game it's syrian and they have ability to summon uh jellyfish on the bottom i'm not remember for sure but it was some broken ability and they someone not uh like infinity jellyfish on the bottle map and you can kill them oh no it was a combination of probability they have a second ability

um about if uh water type of the enemy on the bottom around them they have more evasion there's a year and it's evasion percent was more than 100 and you can kill them no chances too but it was before uh release or demo and we fix it yeah it's basically when you kill it when you kill a jellyfish uh like the siren counted the dead jellyfish's uh evasion also yeah yeah yeah so like 20 vision for each jellyfish that ever was on the battlefield uh although it like it should always have plus 20 and that's it even if there are like four jellyfishes at once just plus 20. um there also like was a funny bug

uh with the skeletons cracking like the skeletons can crack and not die immediately and you have to find the cracked skeleton there was a bug in which like a skeleton spawned a cracked skeleton every frame of the game and there was an infinite amount of them oh no so yeah and uh you attack and you have like 100 damage numbers appearing each uh each frame oh god it was funny i i love it when um i love it when bugs in this game are combinations common this is something that already happens naturally which is that the combinations of skills oh yeah this is my first encounter with the boss we get to see me die for the diet of the boston the first time um to the lich uh um uh i like it how i like how the combinations of skills create interesting thematic

elements you know like when the vampires give everyone regen that's a basic example i already like that uh i like it when even more when the the bugs you know create these thematic like it's thematic and it's existentially horrifying to consider you know sirens that just have all the jellyfish and their corpses help them dodge forever i i just sent my favorite bug from the development in the discord maybe you can show it somehow uh did you send it in chat did you type it i don't know it's just a gif in the discord oh it's a gif uh let me okay we're gonna pop out i'm gonna i'm gonna get it on screen okay so uh i need to uh full screen this come on okay so we're looking at if you look at the lower left hand corner of the screen right now uh oh my god oh my god what what happened what am i looking at i'm seeing oh no

i forgot two breaks in in code basically i'm gonna tr i'm gonna try and full screen this hang on i wanna i want everyone to see this okay and every of them have uh own ghoul okay so we're popping this out we're gonna pop this out so that everyone gets a full screen view of this this is incredible so you've got two breaks in the code and what exactly am i looking at here uh well i i don't want to spoil the mechanic of the of a few crafts so just you actually can you actually can it's you know game developer conference yeah well let's assume well you know we'll give a spoiler warning if you don't want to see the spoiler right now i just i i just want to think about this this gif is an abstract art i did you this is beautiful basically you have um you have a card called labyrinth

it does nothing absolutely it just fills up the boss's uh what do you call it the boss's bar and like i forgot to to make that the additional labyrinths didn't spawn their own labyrinth so you place one it spawns 15 those 15 spawn even more and so on and so on and they fill out the whole map and i also forgot to make it so um the card the card after labyrinth pawns ghouls of the monster pools when they are installed and i forgot the break there so labyrinths is kind of asking the code what should i do when i'm installed when i'm placed on on a map and it says well do this and then there is no break so it goes to the next line and

it says spawn ghoul so yeah that's it that's incredible i i i i just keep staring at it because just like loop here this loop of this chip is just it's it's hypnotized it's my favorite uh oh my god thank you thank you so much for sharing this with us i uh you know it's it's games you know when you're selling games games seem to look as perfect and polished as possible and showing their rough messiness is sometimes risky actually actually they posted in twitter so oh yeah well there you go uh hey buy our game it once looked it once broke like this uh this is this is art it's like you said this i agree with you this is fine art i'm gonna shrink it and send it back but if you wanna if you too want to stare at this forever on twitter um you should absolutely uh you should absolutely um go to their twitter account and just watch it uh stream over again if you just give me a second i'm just gonna resize the window here um that was beautiful that

was one of the best things that's ever happened on the switch channel is getting to put a bug like that at full screen um oh uh to look at chat there's some wf stride is a that that was a bug from before released so it's not real you can't encounter it um i just want to make that clear the bug that we just got to stare at over and over again uh will not happen to you probably i'm going to put a disclaimer in there just in case those line breaks showed up again somewhere else um uh okay um uh looks like straw uh it looks like um np knt's question has been answered uh you can download loop here on steam if you want to check it out it's not on any it's not a gogg or anything it's not any other stores is it uh i think it's also on gog and the epic store right yeah loop hero is also available on the uh on the epic store and gog if you want to check it out um i'm gonna ask a couple more questions here from my part we

might need to cut out early here because of something that's popped up at my end um uh okay so i want to ask a question this is one of my fav this is a one of my favorite things in the game this is when i realized like oh there's something special here like just because um there's a system where um in the game you can see it right now uh when mountains and meadows are placed um those boost the players health um and i think that is so cool and so interesting because it doesn't make a lick of sense to me like it does not i i there's a like the narrative of the game establishes that there's you know like a link between you know the objects of the world and and the hero's conception of the world and so when more of the world is back like like there's there is a thematic link but broadly the idea of oh i placed a mountain down i have more health now it just i can't link it in my head but the fact that this game made me totally accept that logic i i think that's what something games are brilliant at is like helping players take abstract ideas and

internalize them um where did that idea come from like where where did that system come from and and how did it sort of evolve to you know then it scales upward obviously you know because when mountains combine together you get the big mountain that spawns the harpies you know where did that end of the system come from to make those meadow and mountain placement integral to the player's health in beginning we don't have um we only have three types of the tiles you know one of them is on the road then we'll just like okay let them spawn enemies or maybe uh get you some resources when you volca vulcan uh second type is by the road like uh like later or time crystals or vampires we decide okay they can also spawn enemy but maybe they will add some additional effects and free type it's out the road so we're just

thinking if they will spawn many enemies too this will be too chaotic for control it so it's not working okay what they also can do maybe they can do some bigger additional effect these bigger areas like uh lightning temple or beacon but uh then we thinking about hero has attributes and maybe they will affect all of them because you know in our game you don't have too many attributes and um variation of interaction is how hero can get him stronger or something like that so yeah that's where he's come from so it was like pretty natural this decision in the beginning of development gotcha we're gonna end and as for how they conflict the narrative it's actually vice versa

it's narrative doesn't explain the mountains because at first the game was completely mechanical it didn't have any narrative at all and like the narrative is here to explain the mechanics and so the mountain gives you health because uh we had to come up with something the mountains do and we thought okay you can pick up pick a mountain and make like a build that is reliant on your health so yeah that's what mountains are but then for the lore so you already have this maximum hp but you know when your hero creating some something that beautiful as that mountain he will so happy and uncover his power or something it's basically mountains inspire your hero to yeah yes they're really beautiful

maybe it's like an alpine air that gives you more health yeah and he was a life longer for just looking at them as uh long as possible look i'll just say that i relate i live in los angeles california i'm surrounded by mountains and on a clear day when i can go see those mountains i do feel better it's i think i think you're on to something here um it's more it's work yeah it's realistic i i mean also that i i thought i was pointing to anyway yeah you know what okay so there's a question in chat i want to get to before we sign off i'll get to that question from stixx if you also want to throw in a question in chat you can totally do that um there's one more question from my end that i wanted to ask um it's lore related i i didn't want to spend too much time on lore and story today because i sort of think people should just play this game and check it out for themselves um this is what this is another thing that made me go oh my god this game is something special um this game is a fantasy game there are some conventional fantasy elements you know fantasy enemies slime skeletons

monsters vampires name it pick it um and there's a lot of dialogue that goes into like you know all of these things are lost or in the void and you're bringing back the world by summoning them the first dialogue that you encounter with the vampires which we're not seeing here because i've already by this point seen the vampire so many times um the hero and the vampire have an interaction where the hero says oh vampires were land owners they you know they were nobles who saw to the land they weren't you know they weren't just monsters they and i thought oh my god that's so cool that like they're monsters but they have a role in the world and and the harpies also have some dialogue like that like you know there was a society and vampire and this little bit of something like made me care more about the vampires than if they had just shown up in you know if like you could have totally presented to me i would have been hooked by the mechanics in the loop but that one little line like it just maybe conceptualized something different about these vampires even though it it sort of barely matters the rest of the game um

uh blinch i think that was more your role you did more of the writing was there what was your thoughts behind that like where did that come from in your you know when did you sort of go hey we want players to like care a little bit more about these monsters than just making them things to kill yeah for first the main writer was deceiver and that brilliant dialogue yeah it's his work i vivid spindle make little writing or encyclopedia you can find some a few more story about vampires by my uh you know by my writing too but so originally um in luke hero your goal not to kill all monster or revenge to some billion or something you basically try to rebuild this world try to remember it so it was um it would be pretty strange if your hero you know try to

um uh his goal was he'll go his goal was kill off all monsters because you you uh put this monster all his way by your own so it's a little bit dissonance about it so his focus on the story was uh rebuilding and we try to make some you know make more sense why hero must kill this is all this uh creature just not because they evil maybe not all of them evil but just because they have no other choice and they have some um um how to say right um some they own uh balls for its conflict this uh hero tried to reach yeah um we're gonna get one more we're gonna get this last question here before we go if if our audience here has any more questions for the the four quarters team

um where should they ask them where should they send you all like if and and you know where should they ask if they want to learn more about making the making of lupiro can you could also just say nowhere don't have questions live in ignorance uh we made you this game stop talking to us let us let us take a rest and let us fix the game and make it better you can also that's a totally valid answer we're gonna let it go you know what you have questions you can only ask them here you can only ask them to me uh these guys are doing us a wonderful service by making loop hero don't go bug them with your questions let them make the game um but that said stixx i love you for asking the question you have brought because it's a great question and it's the one i want to ask on but for my part i will just say uh if you want to learn more about loop hero they do have a twitter account uh four quarters does

have a twitter account you can go look that up i would suggest doing it um and devolver digital is obviously uh the publisher and you can check out their feed if you want more info on where you can buy it is it gonna be on sale i don't know it's it's on steam there's going to be a steam sale for it those will pop up um so we're going to end on steak's question um did you did you two did the loop hero team ever do any experimenting with a more pure roguelike version of loop hero one with less persistence and more permadeath or was it always designed with upgrades and persistence in mind at first there was no upgrades it was completely permanent again we made it on ludum there which in which the team was start with nothing and that was it you start with nothing and then you go kill some slimes get some cards some items then you build some more cards and the goal was just to get a higher loop and that's it

and then when again we didn't plan on making it the full game right away if uh the formula didn't work if uh like it was boring then okay yeah we made the game we spent two weeks let's go back to something else uh but when we saw that yeah okay people like it it actually can be interesting um we thought uh what can we do and deceiver said yeah okay i have an idea that we'll turn this like half our game into a thousand dollar game let's add a camp which you can upgrade and you get resources from the expeditions so here's your in incentive to like live longer and make more loops so yeah originally the game was completely completely without any progression

yeah but then uh we don't want to permanent or something like that because they try to push for a player for experiment with your um uh tarp deck with your building on the camp with your some various builds for your hero and you know if you try something new in group hero you're not lost anything you just will take uh get new experience take few resources in any way if even if it will fail uh so you not lost uh nothing so yeah we don't try to make clever that or something uh gotcha well with that we're going to wrap things up for today uh um blinch finlaw thank you so much for joining me this is this has been loop hero this game is great for our part we are the gdc twitch channel um uh we're also just gdc uh if you wanna know more about this year's game developers conference it's gonna be in

july it's gonna be all digital um if you checked out gdc showcase last week you got to see um how we do digital events we also did this for gdc summer last year um and so you're going to be able to register and watch talks and network all online this summer from all over the world um we're so excited for it we're so excited to have developers talk to you about making their games just like we have today with the loophill developers so i hope you join us i you know there's gonna be something for everyone for all for narrative folks artists coders uh producers uh it's all there that's all that's what game developers conference is and that's what we love bringing you uh blinch finlah thank you so much again and we're gonna rap and we're just gonna go on home bye everyone goodbye bye