GDC plays Nowhere Prophet with Martin Nerurkar

good morning if you are in everywhere with the East Coast in America good afternoon and if you're on the East Coast good afternoon or good evening if you're in Europe ah good morning I guess if you're in Hawaii I'm sure Hawaii it's early for you my name is Brian Francis I am a contributing editor at Gamasutra comm I am a community manager with GDC I am your host your invisible voice who hangs out here and plays video games with you I'm gonna give a quick shout out and chat looks like we got some few folks in here already we got Cthulhu and connect kind of hero thank you both for joining us what we are at here today doing what we're here today playing we're here playing no we're profit we are talking to a Marten narrow car who is down in the lower left-hand corner of your screen Martin how are you doing I'm doing fine it's very warm as you can see from my change at choice and attire yeah but it's uh I can see that getting colder it's the evening so I can see on

your on your on your shirt there you're wearing a GGC shirt from like 2011 because it's gcz yeah yeah and then Alissa Gamasutra master of words how are you doing I'm very sleepy but I am here hello yeah it's the tired weird today we were tired Developers Conference um yeah I got out of bed very late today as well as I can I feel it yeah thank you all for joining us like I said we heard something know where prophet it is a science fiction uh kind of a card-based RPG I guess you can call it an RPG strategy it's kind of strategy game were than that so it's a mix of kind of a you're about to see it is a you might be you guys say I don't know what's gonna happen when I go to these crossroads it is kind of a mix of card-playing elements with this organ trail slash FTL kind of narrative interludes and Martin here as the lead developer at shark bomb

the company that brought us the game Martin well I get started on my first part of my leg of this adventure which you might explain the origins of nowhere prophet Oh Oh God so no I don't but it's it's difficult so I kind of started with the first prototypes for what would eventually become nonprofit back in 2014 like over five years ago at this point and I was basically looking for sort of an abstract conflict resolution system that could manage sort of conflict actual physical sides and sort of social situations as well because I really liked stuff like in Mass Effect when it's towards the end of the game you can sort of convince I think Saren was his name from not attacking you and he instead sort of kills himself but Jen you still have a boss side but I liked the idea of sort of going through the world in sort of winning with words instead of with weapons so I looked at sort of abstract conflict resolution mechanics and the first ones I sort of played around with or timing based

because I needed something that is not like shooter thing and I think you have a shooter and then making that map to sort of cook talking doesn't work for me so I start with some timing mechanics and then sort of move to cards and from there ended up with like a card system that I really liked which is in fact really different from what we have now and then sort of built the game around it and the world could sort of came from me sort of looking into my my my background so my I'm half German half Indian so that sort of weather Indian inspiration comes from and every always really like post-apocalypse but I just I was bored was sort of the I don't know I'm just gonna say why dudes in leather jackets in brown world's so I tried to sort of mix it up with sort of a different aesthetic and sort of have more colors in there more colourful people more colorful sort of a strange planet with like purple sky stuff and different moons and that was sort of where it came from sort of initially which is funny because I've recently

looked at Grif glance I think the alpha or the beta which is a clay card game and they have this sort of two two pronged sort of social and physical combat thing which I had to scrap because when I was sort of working on the game was still the old system it was just too much work for me because you mentioned the developer like there's nobody else here but me it's not like a big teams I had to scrap the social sort of comment because it was just too much to sort of deal with two entire different sort of dicks and everything which was a shame but that right choice a night side right on just reminder for folks in chat we are taking your questions let's see battle for a minute I guess funny thing um like a bunch of them yeah that guy that's just dying now from the dude just lost forever is engine he's the author wrecked of the game so there's like we made portraits

of a bunch of the people that worked on the game and I got me involved he's gone Bryant way to go yes I mean that that's not no that sounds like a contradiction of sort of saying it's only me and then I'm saying that's an art director it basically it's sort of to explain before anybody's confused as the I'm sort of the only full-time developer on the game I do did all the design I did all the did 99% of the code I did a lot of the writing I did all the interface design but and I did a lot of the art direction as well we did that sort of as a two-man team but I didn't do the pretty pictures I did very few of the sound effects and I did none of the music so that's all thanks to very talented people but you can see in the credits continue the line of questioning so once you you you sort of migrated from you said you have want to do conflict resolution in a way that wasn't that wasn't combat base that wasn't shooting that wasn't sort of moving in dodging what made you move

towards kind of this like adventure like trekking across a landscape while managing a convoy of nomads kind of take I mean that's always weird to sort of started on like I had the terrible conflict system and I wanted to put something around it and I wanted to have some story about sort of a bunch of people and not just like this one here or that goes and sort of does everything by himself in the early combat system I had which eventually got scrapped was a lot more sort of party based and you had a bunch of sort of special people each at their own small decks and you sort of had this one sort of three versus three party fights going on and I don't know I always liked sort of stories about community banner saga really spoke to me as sort of from the narrative that kind of had and I kind of wanted to do something that's not I said not about like the lone hero mm-hmm what were some of the other game designer choices you felt like

reinforced that decision as opposed to the woman did you sort of like realize you're wandering off course and needed to get back to that so I mean the most important one was the old system was sort of you had another force which was pretty much just a number like you had 17 follow us 24 hours and then you had these dudes that were sort of you have warriors which would have their own sort of little decks and you you know three of yours against three of the enemy and I scrapped that because it while the system itself worked it was a fun sort of card game that I enjoyed playing and that people enjoyed playing but it didn't fit the theme enough because all your people in your convoy were just numbers so I was when I sort of I took a break at that point if I was really satisfied with where the game was going I could have finished it that poem was just not it was just not where I wanted it to be and then I just sort of

redesigned the entire combat system which came back did a sort of extensive favor paper prototyping to solve some issues I have with a with a gameplay in sort of a longer term progression but also to make the convoy matter more and then sort of where where this sort of idea comes from that actually the people in your convoy are specific cards which I think the whole the whole cards are people and sort of wounds on cards thing and blessing cards it's really a sort of very good thing that does wonders for nowhere profit it's sort of for the deck-building part of it getting started okay I'm gonna jump into my question pile for a minute oh man our co-worker Alex would like to point out that you have very good hair thank you it's it's been pink for two

days now nice we are also taking questions from chat if you've got questions about making no more profit you are before the stream we were discussing you are currently sanding off the edges of some of your AI we're discussing about how the difficulty spikes are sort of jumping a little head than where you want where you want want them to be would you mind talking about the discussion of like realizing that you'd be making an AI during game instead of like a you know car I think what card game I think of magic I think of Pokemon I think it was something I play would another person what was sort of that process like fer figuring out your games once you realized you had to be in AI programmer as well as a game designer and ya know is that going so I mean the reason for for the game being a single-player game is because I really love car games and I actually currently still I play a lot of magic the gathering I'm like I got back into it like like almost a year ago at this point I played 25 years ago that I'm

like sort of like it's like a teenager in high school and I'm getting back into it I really love sort of playing physical card games with people because you have sort of your local meta and you know you play people and you can play in a sort of relaxed manner you make you can make fun decks and sort of make interesting choices and I played a lot of hearthstone also sort of as research for the game but also I have played a bunch of online card games before and the issue for me was always if you play online you suddenly have this sort of very competitive arena that you're in which means it's sort of like going to a magic tournament to compete you need to know what that's sort of what the deck fields are you need to build a perfect deck you need to spend money or grind like my hell to get the red cards or be very lucky and then you have a chance of competing and that sort of sucks out the fun of sort of building the deck for me because it becomes this know the meta and play to the meta kind of thing and I never really wanted to go there and I'm like before I designed our prophet I played Dominion I'm not sure if anyone

if you know that it's a physical card game that is sort of the granddaddy of deck building as a concept it's a game where you have a bunch of cards that's a bunch of cards on a table and you use you have a small deck which we cycle through constantly and you said deck to sort of buy stuff into your deck and you need to buy stuff that allows you to do more things but also need to buy victory points which do nothing for your deck so you sort of have this back and forth between buying stuff or buying stuff before somebody else buys into buying victory points and and it's a really fun challenge of deck building like it's pretty old at this point but when I played it I sort of got a really new access to sort of the fun of deck building because I remembered looking thinking back on magic that 25 years ago I always built fun and jackée decks but I sucked at them like my decks was [ __ ] and because people were building more efficient decks and sort of Dominion like yes it's ten years ago or something sort of gave me an idea that deck building actually can be very fun if it's not sort of this thing you need to

do before and you need to do your homework and your research but if it's part of the game and part of the resources and sort of the challenges managing the resources right and sort of you know and that's sort of where this comes from and then sort of talk about the eye man make building any eyes it's hard it's hard because it's super in transparent like yeah I does things and you hope it does things the right way but man it's it's tough I mean like my goal for there for the I was always it doesn't need to be perfect it doesn't need to be sort of compete with all sort of on a human level because it's a single-player game it's not like a multiplayer we're on an even footing kind of it needs to be match you or be boring because it's had the game has sort of this attrition aspect that's you play sort of you lose resources so you want to be efficient in your fights which means the AI doesn't need to be superb but it doesn't need to be stupid

it should never make mistakes and where you go like what the hell why are you doing this and unfortunately the game launched last weekend with a bag in there which I just actually like an hour ago fixed that made the idea super things I'm gonna write up an announcement about that later but sort of what it boils down to is like six weeks again 7 weeks ago I went through and optimized the AI to make sure it runs quicker and faster so and it allows me to do more iteration the AI basically simulates a whole bunch of moves so evaluates those moves and then picks the best move and then that's the same thing over and over again mm-hmm actually simulates a bunch of moves forward so just if I do this and then this and then this how good is the move or if I do this and then this and then this how good is sort of bad and then it sort of evaluates the different branches it's more to call it research if anyone's sort of interested in the actual sort of algorithm behind it but there was this little back in the game where when I

optimize it I wasn't paying a lot of attention and so what happened was when it would do one move everything was fine but when was doing the second move there was an error in sort of that that changed the game State and that would also always make this move more look like it's more valuable than it was and the further down it went the more valuable the moves became even though the move might have been [ __ ] but the deviation from the actual game state became bigger and bigger so that it would take moves that weren't useful just because it's odd Oh in the end it's gonna be really good from the issue was I basically I had a reference to a list and was feeling stuff in that list instead of copying the list and then filling the list happens unfortunately but finding that one was a [ __ ] management over here elissa show the question ball to you you had mentioned like as a deck building game I loved I really love what you're saying about magic because I loved playing just like fun decks and I loved

deck building but I'm actually crap at any kind of like competitive element or like I had taking it beyond just like having fun with it so that kind of like resonated with me when you're talking about deck building before and deck building with a roguelike game is actually like a super good mix and it's it's just really interesting with how you kind of merge those two elements so I was wondering if you could talk about how you kind of fell into the roguelike elements of this game a little bit what I mean I don't think I fell into them it sort of they were always there as soon as had the core gameplay I knew I kind of want to do a single-player thing I didn't want to do multiplayer both for a sort of pragmatic reasons like I don't want to build sort of networking code also you know as an indie if you make a multiplayer game and not enough people play then it's dead in the water and it's gonna be dead forever and I didn't really want to go there I didn't want to run the risk of sort of building something and also felt like it would be bigger than anything I would I would be doing on my own because I sort

of I knew I was gonna do most of this on my own ended up being more I'd ended up biting off more than I could chew anyway this thing is huge it took five years but I'm glad I never picked multiplayer and I don't know the roguelike I am I mean that's sort of the inspiration of FTL is sort of obvious from the map and that's sort of it talked about banner saga even though that's not on a roguelike but I think STL really sort of gripped me with sort of replayability and and I really enjoy sort of procedural generation so that's kind of where this came in I was like all right I really like a card game stick building games like roblox let's just put them together and make something cool um speaking of the map sort of the map we see currently which is this sort of very FTL like map is is like the process of three months of iteration of make coming up with different versions of not doing this kind of map but doing something car based or something different and I just iterated away and came up with a lot of

interesting sort of ideas but nothing that really worked for dole profit a sort of with a card game and just ended up being too complex and I ended up rolling back everything and going with the basic boring map which I know still sort of man but I mean the maximum yeah and at some point I was just like [ __ ] I need to stop iterating I need to do the get make the game so that that actually that's a good question why did you think well like you kind of just said it like he liked you you you thought it was boring you you wanted to improve it make it better but I'm kind of at a point where I'm like wait like if it wasn't like there is not like I guess like we're all kind of we're making things we're looking to hope to make the best that will be perfect in our heads what made you think that this you know doing something it was sort of similar to what other devs it doesn't wasn't quite letting up I'm sorry that's a weird my question didn't come out great but I'm just sort of like it's kind of worth interrogating like what made you go what what do you think is that like like though because the version I see is super functional I love the narrative events to pop up what sort of makes you

go hang on this isn't everything it could be I guess what I mean I've sort of made my peace with a map because it's it is functional and it's not the heart of the game like I mean that the heart of the game is sort of the travel but whether the map is this kind of map or a different kind of map actually doesn't make that much of a difference let me just sort of for a few people that are watching can I share the screen I probably should be able to yeah oh yeah I wanted to show some of the sort of early concepts if people if anybody sort of bought the art book that's a bunch of early concepts on the map travel gameplay we tried like is a metric view sort of car based things and sorry now I lost my sort of train of thought I suppose it's kind of one of the things to you when you're working as like psyllid ever like I got a really small team too you don't have that constant kind of checks and balances to be like okay do I need to keep developing this or isn't good how it is absolutely like

I'm speaking candidly I'm very proud of my prophet I'm very happy with the thing I built but I would never do it again because I did it on might find myself and I just sort of I like this the example of sort of this map iteration we had a lot of cool ideas like I did a lot of brainstorming with my art director but he was all sorted if he was never sort of on an even level because he was freelancing it was never sort of an okay let's talk about what's best for the game is more like a service provider and we had a lot of cool ideas and a lot of like I'm looking at sort of the art of there but I think at at that point it would been really useful to have somebody sort of bat head with butt heads with and sort of go do we really need to do this instead really something that's gonna make the game better is the time invested better elsewhere which is one of the biggest of drawbacks of doing it alone there's nobody to sort

of keep your weirdest because at my heart because you introduced me as a lead developer which sort of doesn't quite sit right with me because I'm a game designer goddammit but like keeping that in a designer in check is hard I just just you know I just want to do everything perfect are now being evasive and some cool new ideas and don't do it like the other guys do it because you know people seen it you'll never release a game that way I mean we spend a lot of time on the map which is sort of wasted time because I ended up with a thing I started on but I learned a lot I had a lot of cool ideas maybe something of that is another game at some point I'm not on a lot of only southern for these GDC streams every now and then but it's kind of shocking how often you'll hear a developer be like yeah no I love this game I love what I made that I would never do this again already aren't you I mean not know where a profit but like you know you're already I mean you're you're working or a profit right now but like this isn't the game it makes you

quick video games if I if I have that right well this got really depressing well I'm not sure to be I said to be sort of candid I don't know what I'm what I'm gonna do next people keep asking and they've been asking me even before the game launch what's gonna be next what's next for you and I'm like [ __ ] I don't even know the game is out and I I can stop fiddling with it then I still want to fiddle with it like I need to do bug fixes there's still bugs coming in I need to improve the AI and fix this AI bug but there's still sort of ways to make it better and that's stupid then I probably need to do some small content updates there's console versions which I'm not going to make myself but I'm sort of need to be involved in because I want to make sure the controls are right and then it's suddenly 2020 like this is how it goes and then just gonna take a take a serious break because sort of the key problem when sort of the development pain of normal profit was not necessarily how long it took I said sort of five years sort of first prototypes

to release but the fact that I did it by myself and not sort of all by myself I had people helping but sort of nobody sort of run and even I don't know even footing I guess and I would never ever do that again for a project that's even remotely of that size because it's just gonna make me terribly unhappy so this sort of depends like if I if I end up with a team or sort of a team I can join a collaborate with then I'd love doing something like that again but otherwise it's small stuff for like doing it in a different different setting or surroundings because that just did not do it for me we hope you folks at home are having a good time we'd love to take your questions for Martin dice you've got son Martin I'm going to go ahead and different topic oh I sort of skimmed over the art direction that you said that you you had a contracted you know talented

contracted art director who worked with you on this this is this game I think still stands out because um it uses a like like you said earlier it's not a bunch of white guys in dust dusters roaming around the desert this instead a bunch of multicultural though Indian inspired folks wandering on the deserts some with dusters like are here I was some with colored robes and other droves yet um what was I guess like you know there's even though there was an art director you worked but there was still a specific creative influence you were drawing on would you mind like breaking down some of what you were thinking about with yeah you said you were drawing on your own sort of you know your own background your own heritage with some of them yeah would you mind like explaining how you translated that you know like because you know this is this is this is not what India looks like right now these never meant to be like it never wanted to sort of representing in some way shape or form I know it's sort of difficult to say I mean the whole art

direction process was like four months of intensive sort of talk back and forth and sort of figuring out how the game should look I I sort of started the process was sort of a very strong vision already so like I want these people to be the sort of an inner inspired world I want to sort of would it be very colorful I wanted to be on a strange planet it's sort of this sleek science fiction that's broken down cyberpunk aesthetic and sort of actually sort of the other day both of these in the discord unfortunately I cannot really show you to share them because then it's tiny as well I found a bunch of old PDFs of mine we just sort of collected artwork I found on the internet and sort of searched for specific things to give a start as sort of an inspiration point for what sort of the art direction would then start off on there's a bunch of really cool stuff like this one she called humans which is just like pictures of sort of old Indian to do it with like paint on them and like Arab sort of headscarves high fashion and

like I don't know it's a bunch of interesting stuff in there but I don't really know how I how I came to that starting point because I was just I don't know I was looking for an interesting world that I was sort of I wanted to make a world as well like I wanted to do so many things coming off of Banner Saga which really touched me I really enjoyed the worlds of exploring that world and that's one of the sort of this points I sort of started on I wanted to make a world that is that is sort of mine is that it's unique to me that's interesting that maybe I'll make a tabletop role-playing big game in this world at some point you know that's sort of where I started off and for some reason because I like post-apocalypse and because I know I felt I wanted to pull some of my background in there this is sort of where we ended up at um funny aside which hasn't so much to do with the setting but with the art style in the early days I was very sort of enamored with low-poly Styles think of

something like Overland what they have and have a bunch of reference in here one of them is actually from the Overland lead artist funnily enough and we actually sort of tried some 3dsmax out but ended up what they sort of actually like sort of going over 3d we played around with shaders and some sort of tuned shaders we ended up with something that was very sort of black dark sort of shadows and sort of colors and from then we said oh this is interesting but we don't want to do 3d we sort of ended up because engine is really the art director is really sort of a comic fan we ended up instead of looking at graphic novels and sort of Hellboy which is a has a really strong sort of aesthetic and sort of black shadows very slim highlights and we sort of used that as a cue to sort of build the visual style which I'm really really happy happy with so that's one of the things that sort of people constantly sort of give positive feedback about game just looks gorgeous yeah I fixed that bug

it's not going to happen at least I hope oh he's just oh well he that's actually clever he's just inciting his guys playing a lot of card because his guy gets bigger yeah I'm gonna circle back a little bit back when you're talking about everyone clamoring to find out what you're gonna do next but in terms of your development you didn't do an early access period you did like a beta for a couple months correct no there was a there was the first access everything at the end of 2017 in on each only so it was available in age from October 2017 to like March separated here something like that okay so how would you say that feedback in that period affected your development was it useful how did you kind of parse through what you were getting back I was

it was super useful like the game is so much better for it I mean the the the the thing why I went to itch not to steam was sort of to to avoid having a shitty steam launch because if you go out of early access people don't care as much then om steam finally so I didn't want to sort of run that risk of being this oh I did thought of early access nobody cares and I didn't need to do the early access for the money I just wanted to build a community and get some feedback from people and it did a lot like I said it was an early access for one and a half years like one thing for example which is sort of obvious is the wound system that was sort of in in the beginning but in the beginning followers could take three wounds and would die with the fourth or with a third I don't quite remember and it sort of just ended up being two people who didn't really care they just ended up too finicky so I did a lot of sort of fine-tuning on the wound system and sort of this is also at some point when the blessing system came in that actually came out of a streamer

that streamed a bunch of times doing the first access plaid and he's actually in the game because during the first access people could sort of buy the game for a more expensive price and then get their face with one of the units and the steward you're using right now is actually inky is one of the the people that came in during the first access and he provided just a shit-ton a valuable feedback he sort of he's been with the game from I don't know for over a year at this point and this helped me sort of rebalance a bunch of times and that's just invaluable because especially if you're on your own you just end up with one perspective so having other people it's really good nice yeah I remember like I don't remember where I read it but back when early access was starting to become a thing there was people saying like oh well you only get one launch like even if you launch an early access that's gonna be your impactful moment there's a risk people won't care when you go 1.0 so what you did kind of mitigated that in a way because I didn't know it was an early access because I went to the steam page and it wasn't there so it just looks like a regular full launch so that's interesting that

was there was kind of the book that's actually if people are interested there's a blog post I wrote up on Gama Sutra blog about half a year after or the exits launched a sort of half the number isn't get to talk about the feedback a bit also one thing is sort of the the blessing feature that actually sort of came out of the stream as mentioned because plad he streamed and since you can rename followers whenever a fella would do the killing blow to the enemy he would rename that follower based on one of the people from his chat which gave me the idea of sort of adding value to that final blow and making that an interesting decision like who is on the board who am I gonna sort of time this to have the final blow which is sort of where the where the blessing mechanic came from which is really nice because it's sort of interacts with the moon a mechanic like do you want to you want to put in some wounded guys because then you can sort of if they get the blessing because they do the final blow they get healed for free which saves you some resources so that's sort of interesting as I don't

know as a where this thing came from I guess yeah it's kind of like a social feature and also a strategic feature yeah I'm gonna pull a question from chat where Cthulhu wants to know if even though the game style has changed is there anything of the original party when they had individual decks used as inspiration for the leader classes yeah I mean sort of from the from the world-building the idea of Technology or I'm not sure how to pronounce it the invitation okay I know English is hard I can do it in German I can't do it in English I'm just gonna go on a week go with technopath II was there from the start like there was the idea of these operators frequency operators that can manipulate technology and the initial sort of warrior followers you had were all techno paths there were all sort of powered people in that sense and they would sort of defend the convoy and the classes the class ideas and class names and class images are sort of still the same like I have ideas for more class with because if you

have three people you need more than four classes to put in stuff so there's some some names and ideas for future future profile classes but making a class for the current iteration of the game is pretty pretty intensive because you need a bunch of split many cards you need to find out sort of dick bills and how do you sort of put them in there different different unlockables but the sort of like all the what used to be individual heroes are now sort of individual classes for the character nice how's it going Bryant why are you doing good so far how you want to make deck-building fun I was playing throne breaker which is the witcher's The Witcher card game and

I was thinking a lot about deck building playing that because I've noticed that as a my kind of player deck building is a scary feed for me in games I play I talk too much here about extra minion which is a game I play where you're essentially always deck-building because you're changing the ships you want to fly and that's like building a deck but when it comes to putting a deck of cards ago that I'm randomly pulling things from in turn if you're on a combo that is very frightening to me what did you sort of learn about teaching players like hey you should be thinking about pulling like how did you teach players deck clothing I'm genuinely sort of one actually I'm not sure I'm doing it enough there's a rule book that sort of has a section on strategy and how to build a deck but the game actually doesn't do a lot of instead of teaching you how to build a good deck and it's hard like what's a good deck a good deck is generally not too big because then you sort of limit your choices I don't know it's a good question I don't think I have an answer for it I think I could do the job better than I do

what you're doing a card system is sort of like it's a little bit harsh Tony in some ways you know attacking a hero a man a system but um well where did you start thinking up like um kind of card ideas and like hierarchies for for how these cards would work like what was kind of your your process for saying like okay I need this kind of cards I need like I'm kind of curious we get workflows for designing units as cards well in sort of it there's a lot of em went through a lot of iterations it sort of starts with all right what's my my basic sort of attack health stab sort of relationship do people have a lot of health and very little attack or a lot of attack better than health how sort of fragile is everything then went through a bunch of sort of balanced situations over the course of the game and especially during the first axis is a sort of fiddling with that I'm trying to find something that feels right and then

this is the staff actions that sort of have been in the game before I did think of sort of the gameplay change so that I still wanted to sort of have in there then it was a little bit I was giving them different identities sort of finding different parts in the gameplay that makes sense to sort of build around and put them to the factions I think that's something that also could have could have been done better I sort of could have cleaned it up a little more and I think in hindsight 10 factions this probably sort of cluttering it up too much for the player I just liked all of them too much to scrap any one of them and then it's sort of I like I had I don't 300 something units and I had them in the first axis and then did a balancing through a bunch of out that just didn't work and replaced him and sort of kept fine-tuning sort of what they were and also where they belong to and I said there's a bunch of sort of moments where it sort of just shuffled stuff around to make the faction identity stronger it's like all right this guy is nice but he needs to be over

there and then this guy needs to go over here because I need to have equal numbers on the factions because they have chances to roll and that kind of thing so I think I asked like some variation of this question every time we do a stream with someone who has roguelike elements in their game but the thing that's persistently interesting to me with roguelike games is that you take failure or losing a unit or something and you make it into kind of like a positive learning moment so I guess how did you balance with the roguelike elements in this game how did you balance kind of that that failed like quote quote fail state like punishing the player they're losing something forever with encouraging them to try new things and learning from their mistakes oh god someone is good and hard questions I mean that's just you don't

lose everything there's some progress you can make in the game like you're gonna unlock new stuff and you can sort of unlock and use stuff like new perks for the convoys you have so even if some you lose something you still sort of make some progress somewhere which I feel even those like the each car has three perks and they're sort of their small bonuses in the travel gameplay like you feel a little better you sell stuff for a little bit more batteries I kind of said nothing that has a big impact but stuff that feels nice and that you sort of have fun unlocking so I think that's a good sort of start to make that fail saying I just feel super bad but again sort of you don't want to overdo it because then you can just grind your way through the rock life but just getting really good by having high stats so it's just like small bonuses and I think sort of the the the audience that likes to play card games likes to sort of have interesting puzzles like you have you start to turn the situation

on the board there's a situation in your hand and a lot of the stuff you can do is very predictable there's some random effects but for example hearthstone has a lot of sort of unpredictability to it which makes it really good for new players because they can just win by sheer luck and they have a lot of but for me is just it's too much like that's one of the things I really don't like about a hearthstone this is too much randomness I can just make a break a game so sort of you start you have this sort of interesting puzzles ephemeral cards business the situation and then you sort of look for what's the the optimal play for this turn and maybe for the next turn and maybe the turn after that and that's sort of always an interesting puzzle and that's I don't know that's I think that's what the people play for her they don't play to sort of win the game they played you have interesting puzzles and sort of have them transmute overtime puzzles

like stringing together combos I noticed that like you know when I'm trying to set up you know what I'm picking Moses for saying okay what's the unit that can match my energy now versus what's the unit that when I play it now and then next turn I can play something else in your head like I guess like what was your idea what do you think makes a fun combo in a game like this like how do you that's sort of a generic strange question and I apologize for that but um I sort of think it's worth noting because you can sort of say oh like when I put this card down this next card will do three damage to everything and then you actually no one uses it because it's not even funny because for some reason I guess that's what that's providers right now I mean sort of a good combo I think needs to feel like the player discovered it like it needs to be like oh oh if I do this and then this this makes a lot of sense like you see this one piece that we're like alright this is okay but I'm not sure

then you see this other piece you go like oh wait wait that's these two together you know and if the piece says a says a USB 2 for me and B says a I work well with a then it just you know it's boring but it's interesting if this like sort of if you can find them and if there are a lot of sort of axes one thing I sort of so found out in the in the design process of the cards and specifically again so when I redid the equipment's team a couple couple of months back to throughout the entire equipment system we did it because it just didn't combo well enough and I did a sort of and it tried to come up with better effects that had more combo potential kind of always err on the side of alright this thing needs to work in a way that a lot of other things can work off of it does that make sense I am you have I struggle to come up with an actual example right now but now I get

what you mean there's this there's this really cool phenomenon that game where you have these moments where you do something really cool and you're like I thought of this this is great I solved this like big murder puzzle and it's executed this really cool thing and then the developers are back they're like no we actually meant for you to do that but like graphing those moments where it feels as you did something really creative and substantial is a difficult beast to tame and kind of clean I'd imagine yeah I mean this one example is there's robust units that when they get killed they heal up so they get reset to one health and they get pushed back and if they cannot be pushed back anymore they die um which actually really strong and thinking about nerfing that a little bit but like they get reset to one health and this receptor one health could be just reset but it's a heal which means everything that triggers of heal sugars really well works really well with robust units and I think that's just making a lot of pieces that interact with pizzas allows people to find enough of

them to make an interesting deck out of it mm-hmm Chad we got about 15 minutes left in our conversation with Martin we would love it if you would ask but yeah we'd love to hear your questions that wasn't I mean like questions questions and gameplay can be hard Martin I guess we were the GTC twitch channel we can talk about GDC you have a GG c 2011 shirt um let's move a little bit outside the world of making know where profit i guess you said this year we're skipping GDC because you were taking an off conference here and i imagine you had to actually shape your game that's

important uh how you know as a game designer i you spend when you've gotten to talk about your background at all so like what was your foundation as a game designer and what made you want to make games like no we're profit and they like I can make the cool world that's expressed through cards and numbers and have a keel as real as a book or as other things I guess forgive the cross medium comparison maybe well no it's not good so I don't know my background sort of I I'm always like why so it's it took me a while to understand that not everybody knows what they want to do with their life because I always knew like I was I I was six years old I was making terrible games that didn't work on a c64 Commodore in basic I was making sort of have a sort of box with trashy terrible roll of dice to move card board games and built as like a eight year old I don't know I've always made games I've spent a lot of time in my high school

years sort of modern quake which sort of dates me I guess quake one quick to quickly did a bunch of mods so sort of games were always something I was really interested in and spend a lot of time on and learned a lot so that I learn 3d modeling from making quake 2 weapon mods kind of and then I actually I studied architecture because when I was done with high school I wanted to study and there was no real game options and I didn't want to do coding either because that seemed to dry I want to do something more creative so I started architecture was done with that and was like a [ __ ] I want to do games instead and went on doing is like what are you still think about your architecture like like used to influence your work as a designer I mean I did the architecture degree has in in revoke irrevocably and English is heart it relatively irrevocably whatever I'm I'm

not gonna repeat it a fourth time it changed in sort of bent my aesthetic sense like people hate naked concrete walls and I love them it's just that's just what happens to you I guess so I think it's sort of influenced by my aesthetic sensibilities a lot and it's also sort of given me a sharper sort of focus of a designer in general because even though it sort of feels like it's very different architecture and games have been actually sort of closed because in both cases you're not the guy necessarily making everything but you need to be the guy that sort of keeps crafts and arts sort of in balance and make sure the thing gets built functions and is sort of aesthetically pleasing um like is that sort of an answer I guess yeah you're actually fighting one of the bosses that I tweaked down a bit I hope you updated to your game on Steam no

he's his but like he was actually the one that I got the most complaints about it was just funny because in in the beta test I don't not a lot of people complain about him he his effect is whenever one of his guys gets killed he gets him back on his hands for cheaper and complain again which basically just means he never runs out of guys and in the in the in the early release version the the effect would trigger for every guy you killed so if it doesn't matter how many you killed as long as he had zoom in his hand he would get them back and now it's been changed to it only triggers on the first guy you kill so it's sort of the question is which one do you want to pick off in this case which one will he run against you to get back so it becomes a more more active player choice it's not like alright whatever I do he's gonna get them back that's right which one can I do I want to take off is the least bad for me to give him back to him so that's interesting I find like another similar

tweak you've had to make where there's some system that you change so that it became more involved on the players side so it became a more strategic thing too but you have another boss which was out if whenever you tell damaged him with a follower the following you would die so now it's always the first one each turn so the question is which one of mine am I gonna sacrifice to make room for the other people which makes them a lot more interesting I need to do a bunch of other tweaks like for example the the glory figure you just fought he always gets his people back and his deck has a lot of synergy with stuff that does affect when they enter battle so he puts them out gets an instant effect he loses them gets him back puts him out again and I sort of had to lower the synergy of sort of the enemy decks in the early levels a little bit because if he just you know pumps out stuff all the time stuff he just gets too strong when your deck is still sort of trying to find its footing like in the first map is it's currently still sort of the hardest

because your deck is sort of unoptimized instead of trying to sort of get stuff together to to build up a strategy find some equipment of synergize with something you can build and then sort of find people to put in there to make it stronger and stronger and early on if the enemies are just really well sort of energized you'll have trouble sort of keeping pace Brian I'm going to do a two-parter question where I post something and then you polish it okay so you talked earlier about wanting to kind of create a world so it's gonna kind of segue in a narrative stuff a little bit and then you would mentioned that like that fight in Mass Effect with sarin which was like one of like my favorite moments and games ever so what the YouTube video of the conversation with sovereign the first one you have it's just such an awesome but I kind of want

to ask I haven't played the game Bryant has so I want to kind of segue into more about like the narrative side of things and how that kind of that initial thought made it carried throughout the game or if it didn't or kind of go from there so I don't know Frank you can elaborate oh there's someone who's played a game more on that I think it does the I mean I'd say the only my only comment is that the the convoy still feels a little interpersonal like even though there's a whole crowd of people down here I love this graphic representation of all my units I've gone a little attached to some of them as they get kills but if I'm being frankly honest and it's still it's missing a little bit that about Oregon Trail you know ex person you Kara has died of dysentery where that bad it's called dysentery I would I was I would have said this century our language stinks I think I think I think the but I think the underlying theme is very very obvious and clear I think what is it how would you describe it it's not a quiz

there's no wrong answer no okay so I got the sense when I'm playing this game like I am searching for a unattainable for almost an unattainable goal you know like like we're looking for like you know we're going we're on a journey to the Holy Land if you will like like that kind of that's that's very instinctual ISM going like I'm going somewhere that no one believes I can go you're like being on the sacred mission like that and having this crew of followers with me my sense for them is like occasionally I could when they show open the chats like I could see when their name is highlighted in green and I get the you know that they've done something that helps me out and I know that these are the people who will get me there what's interesting to me is that I get way more sense of character from the we meet in this game from the the shamans from the guide so it couldn't afford to hire and so it got some of my people killed the sort of the the thing we're pushing against the other people in this world the people we encounter give me way more of a sense of the world the sense of how people are and it's

interesting because like he's harder to get from the idea of apocalypse that everything's dying what I love about my sense of this game is that every with everything actually feels pretty alive like everyone's got a way of living on the slave stuff is the slave stuff is sadly not cool and by that's a very light way to put it no no like slick no yeah the slavery thing is the only thing where I'm like wow this is like the biggest sense I have that the world is not right but like there is also a sense that like people are alive so those are the things that leak that have stuck with me as a player so far like these militaristic factions that have popped up I thought it was interesting I was paying attention to you know I think I haven't here some units in my convoy that's not the right button over here there's a couple units who have kind of a more of a colonial outlook about the like they're wearing sorry yeah the rash guard the rash guard yeah and I have one of the Saiyans the strategists down there I think to her yeah I have a strategist right here no I think unless

the glasses you would argue a little more Western and colonized but there's sort of some more but like there's an interesting mix of like and it's not even along like racial lines like you can sort of tell the difference between the spark shop and the skip shifty scavenger hero this guy just good this guy just looks like he's a youtuber if the youtuber is the hook colonists I don't know there's there are some sort of a like like I like that sense of it I like the sense of there are ways that people you know who seek power have dressed themselves like how there are people who are just sort of trying to get by who have dressed themselves it gives me a sense of place in being I know this is a question for you but I guess I am the interviewed that's my that's my sense the here we go the scion instigator like look at this like the guys got a suit he's got a not just a suit he's wearing like a you know fancy fancy shirt yeah the hair slicked hair slicked back me it looks like he as it gets down a comb but yeah that's that's where I'm at with the game I guess yeah I mean that's sort of that's sort of what I was aiming for I sort of agree

with your SF the people in the condo I don't get enough character um in hindsight I feel like the event system is the one thing that would have I'm not even quite where it should be I did you know I did it by myself most of it I didn't write all the events because that's way too much anyway but I had to sort of you know at some point just sort of get it done mm-hmm but I think especially the event system would have benefited like there's a bunch of events there's a whole bunch of events that are just like hey you meet some people at site if I would have just scrapped those put good you know markers on the map all right this is a fight start the fight and then have the guy on the other side gives you like a one-line bark like I'm gonna make you so my slaves that's enough like we don't need all this text it's great for world building but it's it's a lot of cruft I would have rather sort of boiled down to fewer events and have them be more complex and have more events sort of involve your people sort of like strings where they like one of your guys is uh

you know he's a war criminal this is a story and it's randomly pick one of you guys every time or like every fifth match you get a war criminal we pick one of them he's a war criminal and if you don't kill them you can have the story that sort of sometimes like and then you get to a milestone and sort of interacts with a milestone in different ways based on which of these people you have that'd be super cool just of like what the question I was trying to figure out like I figure out words for before was you like with all the sites where you mentioned kind of like tweaking them so there's more strategic player choice I was wondering if there's like a similar thread in the narrative elements of the game where the conversations you have or the events the one thing that I think really helps the event system is the just moments where the event pops up and there's a picture of one of you guys on the left and you go for like hey I can do something and I have something there's some extra text like the game basically what it does is it looks for a

specific section of specific gravity like do you have a beast that's at least a rare and then that unlocks options where you go like all right let the beasts knowledge these people to intimidate them or send that guy to distraction because he's abandoned he's good at distracting or like that guy blow something up because he's from the Union and the Union a sort of they blow things up and that's that's where the people become a little bit more get a little more fleshed out but it's still sort of it doesn't give them a lot of character because it's not a lot of personality behind these you doing very little moments but that's really interesting things I think no I do like the the composition of your party can kind of play into these random encounters or give you additional things you wouldn't have without that specific party member so that's great I like that you could oh yeah yeah well I'm gonna oh

well I'm gonna but at first I'm gonna make the bad guys out of the way and then steadily where'd this guy down thank you all for joining us on the GC twitch channel today we are thrilled to be joined by Martin the game is nowhere a profit published by no more robots we forgot to disclose up front then no more robots no war no no we're profit which is published by no more robots is it nowhere no more robots specifically is advised by Simon Carlos who is boss man GGC boss man geez place president GB blah blah blah there's a connection we forgot to mention out top sorry about that he helped out on this game so we would like to both give him credit and acknowledge a you know disclosure disclosures are important um I spend a lot of time making sure my English isn't terrible in the event from

there we would also like to invite folks who are following us to officially follow us to click on the follow button here on the GC twitch channel because if you'd like other cool games that are coming out this year there's a chance we might have an interview with the developers we are working to talk to the folks behind Elsinore right now I've reached out to talk to some folks behind hopefully games like Church in the darkness and oh god there's another one that I'm actually trying to line up oh yeah creature in the well creature in the well we're hopefully gonna have a stream with them and with that I'm good sweet good timing I'm going to thank you everyone for watching thank for you for the question that we got from chat ELISA thank you for helping out and Martin as always thank you for joining us thank you for having thank you have a good day bye boo bye