How This Game Dev Sold 50,000+ Copies of His Game — Full Time Game Dev Podcast Ep. 006

Jason how you doing man I'm doing well how are you I am really really good I have been looking forward to this conversation for I guess it's been a full week since we we've been talking about doing this that's right and I wrote down a t I wrote down a ton of questions first thing is go ahead and introduce yourself um like who you are who you work for you work for yourself but and what you're working on um and we'll get into working for yourself because that's your big thing right but um yeah tell me about yourself yeah so I'm Jason Smith or jsaw games as you may know me on the internet um I'm the developer of cultic um I'm being published by uh 3D Realms so if you are familiar with uh 3D Realms that might be where you've seen cultic before or if you're one of the awesome people who've been following it since it was a baby project uh then that was probably probably more of a surprise than the folks who discovered it initially as a 3D RS project but yeah originally just a hobby project so this this hobby project turned into your full time gig is this

the first game that got you that full-time gig as a fulltime game developer oh yeah it's the first game that ever got out of like um like tiny little single scene hobby project status cuz uh I was a pretty pretty serial project Hopper before culk just like as soon as something new like a new idea would would hit my brain I would just stop what I was working on and go work on that I know yeah yeah and that's the thing and I know my audience so many people who listen to this struggle with that and it's one of the it's it's definitely a problem that Solo solo developers have because there's like no accountability and we're going to talk all about solo development because there's a ton of questions about solo development so you you release cultic you're still releasing chapters for cultic and that's providing you a full-time income along with I'm sure 3D Realms funds you correct um I it just funded off of um

the sales of my game so it's just uh if I succeed then I succeed and if I and if I stop selling games uh then I don't get to have electricity anymore so um I'm I'm officially officially took the plunge into being self- sustaining which right now is working out great but I would lie um if I said there wasn't a great anxiety that I'll like never release another good game and the thought of going back to like like an 8 to five like regular gig uh is really is really scary because I'm a spoiled man now I totally know how you feel it's a it's almost a guilty feeling of like I know this isn't fair yeah that I get to do what I do yeah 100% And and so it's G to end yeah it's it's gonna like the universe or God is going to take it away from me well and sorry go ahead no and that's that's what I've been dealing with for for seven years cuz cuz it when I first went full-time

was seven years ago because of a Kickstarter campaign and I I consistently told my wife it's going to get taken away like all of it's just going to go away because it feels it just feels too good to be true it's so wrong it's so dirty I think um I think the worst thing for me was like when I um when I started going fulltime was still I guess I guess it it was still kind of during like not not that CO's gone away but it was like during like Co like time you know when stuff was still kind of shut down and and I remember like and I guess I still kind of get this but like just like going to like if I go to the grocery store at like at like 11: a.m. on a Tuesday because you know my schedule makes no sense um it's just like I see people working way harder than me and I feel so bad because I'm just like you know my I'm just going to go home and set up my computer and work on my games it's it's like it's like a very weird um I guess I don't know what the ter it it's it's a bad guilty feeling and yeah it is uh I don't know I mean I I guess I

I've been there before you know like that was you know I did that was what I did in college was that kind of you know uh like like retail work and so like I know I know that it can be kind of Soul draining and so to be doing something that's like the opposite of that that's very like fulfilling um is just like it feels weird because I'm you know I'm only two years into getting to do this full-time now um so it's it's still feels very weird yeah well let take me back to those retail years um what what was the process like going from going from specifically from because I I worked retail I was I was a shoe salesman I worked at a shoe store and it all of my high school friends and college friends were doing it MH we all we all worked at this well me and my buddy worked at it but everyone was working some kind of retail job and that was just what you did right um to to pay for like your rent at college or whatever so

I got my first like I got like $20,000 from some silly small Flash game that I did and it was shocking to me because I was like standing at the register at the shoe store and I thought I'm going to quit yeah it's over it's over it's done and then so I felt like the plane had landed and I was off the ride and I was like now I can just kind of chill but then again after that I got married and then the money went away and I worked and then I went worked a full-time gig as at a marketing agency mhm and I went through that same process again so tell me about what it was like for you and how you how you got like maybe for like five 10 minutes of conversation here just getting from that that those couple days working the job you hated all the way to the point where you got that email that said you were going to get funded so I um I went to college for graphic design um and that was kind of what I did professionally before this so I I guess like you know so so retail was

uh that was like college like high school college trying to pay my way through college cuz I um since I went to like I went to like a tech school like a vocational school for graphic design which was pretty cool um but because the tuition was only like like I think my full tuition for two years there books and everything was like seven Grand and so I was like oh I'm not getting a loan for that I'm just going to like work at I'm just going to work so I worked at Sears if you remember Sears everybody uh I I worked I worked at Sears selling Electronics which was actually a pretty fun job um and then after that I worked at the at a Walgreens photo lab um which would have been a cool job if people weren't sending me like like I guess this is going on YouTube so I'm not going to say that but um people people sending me things I didn't want to print um was uh you know you kind it's it's kind of like a like a I I I went to college in well a a college town but also like a very um it just wasn't a great town and so the kind of stuff that you get asked to print was

kind of yucky uh but so after that I actually went into graphic design um and I did that gosh from like 2013 through 2017 and in and in 2017 me too and in 2017 I was actually working an awesome job I worked for a hospitality company um and I did like graphic design and photography for the restaurant division um so I so I did their menus and got to go like photograph all of the re-shoot like the seasonal menu flips um which meant I got to eat a lot of food which really good at doing so that was a great job for me um but then the living situation I was in at the time fell apart um relationship fell apart and so I decided to move back home to Kansas uh and I'd kind of I'd always been I've always been interested in more of like you know I've been interested in game development since I was like 10 years old and so I you know ideally that's what I always wanted to do but you know when you start to look at realistic jobs in the real world it's like okay well maybe that's going to turn into like an IT job or something instead um so when I moved home I switched gears um and I got

a job um actually in my hometown doing software support um so which which would just be like a call center job except that it was kind of like half call center and then half like actually getting to like dig into a little bit of code and like troubleshoot stuff and that was and so that was like kind of fun and that was uh yeah like it was a less prestigious job than getting to do all this like photography for these cool like restaurants and stuff but it was something that it I like I was so much more passionate about it um yeah and so it was a lot more fulfilling and then so I did that for a few years and then in 2020 um I started working on cultic it was January of 2020 I'm trying to remember my my or was it 2021 oh Lord I'm so old I can't remember um I think it was 20 January 2020 I think is when I started working on it yeah um so by working on it sorry it was 2021 January 2021 all you gotta say is was it during Co or not

it it was during it was during Co so it would have been January 2021 yeah so I started working on it January 2021 when you say started working on it do you mean you started learning game development no no I've been doing game divs so you I've been doing game divs since I was uh 10 or 11 years old and of course how old are you Jason I'm 31 old and I have like this we have like the same life um like I'm I'm 33 and I I worked I was graphic design for I went to college for graphic design I went to a tech school I ended up going to Clemson um which is not a tech school but I went to a tech school for the first year um raised in a very small conservative Town hey I'm still here yeah I'm still here man and I you know there's it's it's there's good and bad um but I love I love small town America it's like yeah it's something I'm I'm really passionate about like the good and the bad right yeah about southern gothic Southern Gothic is one of my

favorite Aesthetics um are you in a small town now did you move back to one after yeah no well I I grew up I grew up it's in South Carolina so um it was a small town and now it's blowing up because after Co everybody started coming here um trying to get out of like bigger cities the only the only South Carolina city I've been to is Myrtle Beach I'm going to guess that's not where you are not where I am but I love it I love all of it's such a it's kind of a TR asy kind of place it it's like it's like the Vegas it's like the Vegas of the South and it's awesome uh you can go to all the you can go to all the wings stores and buy T-shirts and things that have things on them that we can't talk about on a YouTube show yeah that's exactly right but what's cool about this is and I want my audience to hear this is that you and I are two of like the most normal guys out there we're like classic normal American dude um we didn't have some crazy I I mean I mean it sounds like your childhood was fairly

decent just like a normal kid is that correct yeah I'm pretty much nothing too uh nothing too exciting same for me and yet here you and I both are working with 3D Realms and we're releasing some of the most vile violent video games today especially today because these kind of games don't really get made anymore especially your game um so anyway you you started working on cultic right um you were still working a full-time job yeah so I started doing Game Dev when I was like 10 or 11 and by Game Dev I mean I downloaded game maker I think it was four or five back then and was just like stealing Sprites from spriters resource and making games that way um and then I started doing my own animation or my own Sprites um in high school which would have been like 2006 MH and then it wasn't until I want to say 2015 that I finally started looking into 3D Game Dev um so I think 2015 or

2016 is when I finally like downloaded Unity cuz all of these game ideas I had in my head 2D wasn't going to cut it for them anymore like I needed more than than 2D um and so I so that's about when I started learning modeling and and like 3D game development and and a real uh programming language because game maker of course uses gml um and then Unity use a c and so I was learning more of a I guess like a a more respected engine I don't a more respected language I I hear I hear people poop on gml all the time because its syntax is really loose I don't know if that's still the case or not um but it was definitely the case when I was using it um and then yeah so 2021 I started working on CK and the idea for CK has been around for a long time I've wanted to make that game since oh gosh probably when I first started playing like build engine Shooters which would have been in like Middle School um but I never you know I knew it had to be a 3D game and I didn't have any 3D game development skills and

so I never tried to make it in my game maker days um and then I tried to start making it in unity several times but my 3D skills were just terrible like you know I was still learning and so every time I would try it I wouldn't be happy with the results I was getting because in you know I've been building up this idea of mine as like a dream game in my head and so I don't I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than like like Perfection which is a a word that's probably going to get thrown around a lot today um and uh and then so early 2021 I was actually working on a completely different game um called cryptic uh which was going to be I I was is like right in the middle of like phasmophobia craze right and which is still one of my favorite games um and I really wanted to make a game kind of like phasmophobia but but more action oriented and you were like hunting Cryptids and I still want to make this game sometime in the future unless someone steals it from me which would be fine because I still want to play it um and I modeled this just this May's leg lever action rifle for it but I wanted

it to be like a low poly PS1 aesthetic kind of thing um but just for funsies I decided to I had this model that I had made for this completely different game um and I wanted to try turning it into a Sprite like just for fun I'd never done that kind of like 3D model to Sprite workflow and so and so I did that and I and I found this cool palette that I liked and modified it a bit and applied the palette to those Sprites that I made um and I put it on Twitter and it was like the big biggest tweet I'd ever had in my life and granted I had like maybe 100 followers then um and so this was like normally if I tweeted something it would get like maybe 12 likes on it um on a good day and this was something that got like hundreds um and so I was like oh man I'm on to something here um and so I took another model from an old from a game I wanted to work on um which was the old uh axe cultist model the really low poly one um and I turned him into a Sprite too and then I put the two things together in unity with a really crunchy palette and made that they one of those earliest

cultic videos of just like shooting these guys with the lever action and that like that blew up um and then so I work on that for a little bit and I'm to the point where I have like this tiny test area which is just like like a 10x10 Unity unit dirt Square basically and and like one enemy and like two weapons and then Fred from 3D Realms reaches out to me um and I thought it was a scam when I saw the message because I mean I mean it's like it's like that's like getting you know like the email that's like I'm the king of this country and I want to give you a bunch of money you know it's like it's just you know um you start to get a little bit of attention and then suddenly some somebody from a game Studio was like we want to buy we know we want to sign your game um and I didn't and I didn't know who he was um because you know my knowledge of 3D Realms was pretty much limited to to Duke Nukem 3D that was it um and so I was like I used to you I used to play that that game that's a cool game um and then I saw I don't remember how but I saw um I think I probably just decided to look him up and I was like well let's

see if this guy's real and then I look him up and it's like oh no he's he's a real person and he's actually from 3D Realms um and so then I really hastily replied to him because I think I just left him in my inbox for a couple days because I thought it was fake um and yeah and so it's like here I am with this you know this Rinky Dink little game that's like one test area and just like some Sprites and then I've got you know this company that made these games that I used to play and I still love that's like wanting to sign my game and that was I that was that was crazy and then uh and I my impostor syndrome was still is but at the time was like so deep that I was like no like I I don't even have a game yet I just have some Sprites and so I told him like let me make a proof of concept demo for you um to kind of show you because I didn't have any gam playay yet and so I was because I want to show you what I'm thinking cultic is going to be um or at the time it was still cryptic actually um but I was like I want to show you what like what I want this game to be and so I spent all of March like you know I worked full-time 8 to 5 and then I would say from like 5: to 1: in the

morning I would work on my this first level demo um and so by the end of March I had a one so what time what time did you start I'm sorry to interrupt what time did you start working and what time did you end because people listening might want to replicate your schedule it sounds it sounds insane but if people really want it they're going to go for it so what was your schedule again so I I my day job was 8 to 5 um and then I then I would like take a break and eat dinner and then I would usually work on my game for from like 5:00 p.m. until 11: to 1: in the morning whenever I was like I have to go to bed yes I'm so happy for you and excited for you that you did that because that takes so much and I'm also a little bit I'm a little bit proud because I did the same thing and and you see so many people on YouTube and on Twitter in the comments saying like well I can't do what you guys do because I have X Y and Z going on and I'm like every most people are doing exactly what everyone else is doing doing working our butts off the

only difference is is that once 500 p.m. hits that's not Netflix time yeah or like or like I don't know playing video games it's time to make games yeah for you for you and me now I I can't I could never do it again yeah Y and right now like even tonight doing this podcast with you is exhausting like yeah yeah usually usually it's 5:00 I'm done hang out with my kids go go Netflix and chill but when I was when I first got married and I this is the best part the best part of working a day job is that you learn what you don't want and more importantly even even what you hate so that it pushes you and propels you to go and do what you did which is I'm going to work till 1:00 a.m. just to get out of this stupid day job yeah now granted I think you said you liked your day job so I did that was yeah yeah part part of it yeah I did like my day job um cuz I doing like software support stuff meant that I basically sat on Discord with all my co-workers who were good friends of

mine and we just like you know yeah I almost said I almost said a bad word we just uh we just bsed all day and um and uh and so you know it was it was fun like I looked forward to going to work so that definitely helps you know if it was a thing where I was working you know like again like if it was like like my retail job like at Walgreens like I could never I don't think I could have ever gone home and then made myself work until 1:00 in the morning after that job cuz that job was physically exhausting yeah um but yeah no I mean it was it was very very busy and that unfortunately that schedule persisted into up until probably about Chapter One released um not how long was that how many months about uh about a year um I think okay so so cultic and I'm trying to give my audience a good framework here sure of what they can potentially replicate so I'm I'm really sorry I'm interrupting you but how dare you um I'm trying to get a framework so that people can kind of understand what they might have to do to do what you do um okay so you had an 8 to5 job then you worked all through the evenings all the way to midnight

basically on cultic and you did this for a year now did you have something prior um before that conversation with Fred that put you well I'm trying to figure this out so you worked on it a year and then got let me lay out yeah let me lay out the timeline so I started on it in January of 2021 um and I and it was basically just a little hobby whenever I have time project for about two months um but during that time is when my tweets about the game were like picking up steam and so I was I was I was working on it more and more March is when Fred reached out to me um and then from March to April I worked on the the the the the proof of concept demo I guess to show them like this you know this is what I want the game to look like and if you still like it then yes I would love to I would love to sign on um and then April to August was putting together the Realms deep demo April to August was the 8 to5 um and then 5 to one that was that schedule so you you weren't willing to quit your job to even

though you signed with a publisher so um right so I had I I didn't really feel enough security because basically all it was not that I like not that I didn't respect the opinion of 3D Realms or appreciate them but at the time it was basically my my 500 Twitter followers and then 3D Realms that were excited about this game and and you know I'm SM I'm smart enough to know that that's not enough money for me to quit my day job um and I also and can't I'm not going to go into details about it but the uh the the publishing deal that I accepted was um it was very safe for me so I did not I did not stake there weren't there weren't a lot of like Financial Stakes involved there um Goa gotcha because I didn't want because I was I was terrified of like cultic failing and then me like owing somebody a bunch of money you know I I didn't want that to happen and for clarity for clarity for my audience and I apologize if if I'm arguing with you here that can't happen right no I mean and and now being

you know being around a publisher for this long I'm I I know that but at the time I you know I had never I had never you know I had never I hadn't even dipped one toe into the game development world so that was like so my thought was like you know if if a publisher says that you know they'll give me XYZ budget to work on a game and the game flops terribly and I had never released anything to that point so I had no you know I didn't know how it was going to go um I don't you know I don't be I don't want to be on the hook for all of this so that that was my concern at the time yeah you think it's alone but it's not alone it felt it felt like alone yeah it's not alone it's here's the money and then we're going to make it back if we don't make it back that's on us yeah because we signed the wrong game right um but yeah but that's that you know so that's kind of what I was scared of at the time um so so and then so August rolls around and then Realms deep happens and and I you know you know at at that point cultic being a 3D Realms game was still secret I had to keep it secret for like the entire summer it

sucked um and then Realms deep happens and the trailer for cultic drops that's like it's a 3D Realms game here's like an actual look at gameplay and there's a demo available right now because I've been working on that demo map for months um and I and that was that was crunch time like I was working my my butt off like weekends and and very late hours um and then realm Zep happened the demo came out and the reception was was incredible like it was it was so positive and it was like it was more than more attention than I had ever had on a game ever wow um and that was I think like and I'm sure you you talked about that moment when you're standing at your at your retail job holding this you know $220,000 paycheck or whatever um and and thinking like that's it I can quit right that that was Realms deep for me was seeing this giant outpouring of um of support and then like the wish lists and you're just like and you're like holy crap this is real like this is this is a

real game that people will buy um and I think at that moment I was like okay I'm going to quit my job but um but I put in like a month's notice because I worked on like a really small team and I worked with all my friends and so I didn't want to like screw anybody over so I worked for a month at this job which I like the job but it's it's not game development um and so then then you have a month at this job where it's like in a month I'm going to be a full Time game developer how am I supposed to care about this job at all right now like that's and that and that was really tough um and then September of 2021 I finally went full-time as a game developer and it was it was crazy you know like 30 years well not 30 years because I hadn't been working since I was an infant but you know uh I I guess I guess like 12 years of of 8 to five um and and then finally being on my own schedule um and it's crazy just like like like how like how freeing that is

not and like obviously yes making your own schedule is very freeing assuming you have the discipline to like keep working but just stuff like like scheduling dentist appointments not being like the biggest pain in the butt in the world you know it's just like like I can come whenever because you know I'm not beholden to this Corporation every minute of every day um and I don't know like stuff like that is just um was just something you take for granted really is is like how easy it is to just go grocery shopping and like because you don't you know somebody else doesn't own 8 to five of your life every day and that's and that's that was that was an amazing feeling but um what did it do to your ego um I have like probably some of the worst anxiety and impostor syndrome that exists on the planet so I would say that like if anything it shrank because it was like now it's now it's real and now I'm facing a threat of like like like when I actually release culk and people play it they're going to hate it like you know after they've paid they like it cuz it's a demo and it's free but like

once once it's out and people have people have exchanged money for it they're going to hate it um and so I was terrified for like a year you know and like leading up to the release it was just like I was terrified that it was going to flop um which didn't happen luckily um but yeah I mean it was just like it it was a year of of like you know I was still working you know like I wasn't working till 1:00 in the morning anymore because instead of working from 5: to 1: now I was working from like 9:00 a.m. to like 7 p.m so it was still a lot of hours but it wasn't like sucking my life away anymore which was great um with do you um do you feel good when you tell people locally that you make games for a living um it it depends on the person um because I feel like a lot of the times when you tell somebody and I don't mind this at all because I love what I do but um when you nine times out of 10 when you tell somebody you make games the response is like oh my nephew plays video games or like oh my or like oh my son would love to talk to you because he

plays fortnite and it's just like it's always that always which I'm like yeah absolutely cuz I love talking about actually done that so uh some um some lady at our church she uh she called me and she was like my son really wants to learn video games can he come on over and so he came over and we hung out and he just for four hours watched me make I couldn't show him what I was making honestly because it's twisted Towers violent so I was like why don't we make like a bouncy ball game together uh so I I ended up like teaching him that and but that's the response you always get it's always my son has this or it's like Hey Thomas can we can we get coffee Someday I'm like yeah yes why and they're like and I'm I'm hoping they'll be like can we talk about entrepreneurship or something but instead it's I have an app idea and I'm like oh see that that that one that one I don't get luckily um that one I don't get um

uh but yeah it's it's it's and it's I actually um just like a month ago or is in November I I got to do um somebody somebody's kid uh their their High School like requires them to do like a job shadowing thing and somebody um a friend of a family friend of ours their son uh shadowed me just like over Zoom um but that was really cool and so yeah I did like I I we did like a little bit of 3D modeling for cultic um and then a little bit of um a little bit of code for bone rooms and it it was really cool um okay so the sorry to interrupt you here the I I can we talk about the technical side so we we talked about the scheduling side and like that journey to get your game from start to finish right right so that we talked about the schedule and the emotional side can we talk about the the technical side of what it takes for someone like you to make a game completely alone sure um was it was it was it because you were a genius did you like I think it I think

you might be because you did the art the music the sound design the code so get give me a breakdown of the technical side of how this game was made and give me give me some context as it pertains to doing it solo because I could I swear to you the audience listening they most of them are going to want to make this their game solo so they want to figure out okay how do I make a game technically and how can I do it all by myself yeah so I mean the biggest thing is just um is really having a big appetite for learning um which sounds which sounds really corny to say but it's just like you you have to have that drive to learn if you want to do everything yourself because like because I didn't go to college for game design I I didn't go to college for music theory I can't even read sheet music um so like learning how to do music was just like I'm just going to download the tools and and and go crazy um and that's kind of the way it was for everything was like you know starting with game maker and just downloading Sprites off the internet eventually was like well I'm not satisfied with using somebody else's Sprites uh or especially ones that are

copyrighted U and so I like well I want to make my own Sprites cuz I want to make my own game um and so then you learn that and it's like well I don't want to use stock music and I don't want to use music from games that exist so I'm I need to learn how to make my own um yeah and it was so crazy cuz like right before I switched to Unity I was like really comfortable in game maker and I was making some like technically like pretty technically decent games you know like they had they had like like okay Sprite work and good audio um and and were functional and like fun and so I felt like I was really getting the hang of it and then I switched to 3D and I felt like like a baby again it was just like I like how how do you do anything um it's such a paradigm shift and it's it's it's so you feel so naked uh when when the z-axis has added to your life you feel so naked yeah well and it's it's just like it's frustrating going from like you know it's like in game maker it was like okay if I if I want to add a new a new weapon to this game I know exactly how to do it like I can lay in bed at night and I can and I can think through all the steps to do it and I and I could get up in the morning

and do it but when he when when he switched to Unity I was just like I don't know how to do anything like I I just want to make I just want to make this character walk forward and I don't know how to do it and it's so frustrating I got that feeling dude when when the whole Unity debacle happened and we'll talk about that yep I got freak I got freaked out so I downloaded unreal yep yep same and and I got a cold sweats and chills when I opened it because I was like this is a different Paradigm yeah I did the exact same thing and we can say we'll talk about later but yeah I did the exact same thing so let's let's make sure we come back to that cuz that'll be a fun conversation so Unity Unity was your tool of choice that's what you ended up landing on even though you started with game maker do you write the co and also really quick the the sound design tool what did you what do you use uh for uh I use uh fru Loops FL Studio for music studio okay and and the alternative is logic pro for Mac that's what I use um and Okay so we've got Fruity Loops for those of you who want to make music uh for developers

who want to make 2D games you can start in game maker but you can make 3D games in unity do you code the game yes yep okay so do you use visual scripting at all or is it just C from scratch all c um I don't I don't I don't have I don't have anything against visual scripting but it always it always feels limiting to me um personally because I'm like I know exactly what I want to do so I just want I just want to type it out and do it I don't want to mess with like I don't want to mess with spaghetti but and big butt um had visual scripting been at the point that it's at right now when I started with unity I probably would have started with it um like if I were getting into Game Dev today and blue and like blueprint was an option that's that might have been where I started um yeah have you ever seen the blueprint Maps though like like it's zoomed out oh yeah yeah yeah that I maybe I'm just an old kudin but I'm like that is not how you make a game yeah uh I I mean it I know that's not true I know it's not true but that's how I feel

I get frustrated cuz it looks so ugly I couldn't do it personally because for me like in like in Visual Studio like being able to like to bookmark my common functions and be able to like search and find and find and replace stuff like that is so essential um and so I can't you know having to sort through blueprint um that that scares me and again this is this is nothing against people who use blueprint it's just like me personally like code um it feels it feels more powerful and in the case of unity I think that's true in in Blueprint maybe not so much um but I just yeah I I'm I'm way more comfortable with c and C's cozy man it's a cozy language dude I was just about to say that um me and my brother my brother's a software engineer and we hang out a lot and we talk we just talk about code and and development uh we have a glass of of whiskey and just talk about code see I want to do that he says I know it's great you need to come over um and we can just all hang out and just talk about code but he says that every time

he opens up code he feels like he's flying into the warmth of a server he's like it's like it's like flying into a black hole of warmth and coziness and you just code and that's that's how I feel when I make games you're in this cozy it it's a cozy job as as long as you it's only cozy if if you're organized because i' I've done games where it's a complete wreck it's a mess it's a house of cards and it's cozy it's just very stressful yeah but I've gotten to the point now where everything's so precise and clean um and the the the code is all commented and all my variables have the proper syntax uh it's a cozy experience I don't comment anything but you don't see this is the thing though how are your variables named intuitively oh yeah yeah yeah yeah are they super descriptive uh they certainly can be yeah and uh if there's one like if I'm using an integer to describe like a state system because I was too lazy easy to use in a numerator then I like make a big code block so I get a summary of uh of what

each value does but um like cultic getting to the point where it's starting to not be cozy to code because I started working on it's when you go fulltime on a game it's crazy how much faster you learn than if you're doing it hobby like I it's it's like an exponential curve of learning and so it's like like every month at least early on it was like every month that I would work on cultic you could look back and it was like the modeling got so much better and the mapping got so much better cuz it was like this was my first time doing mapping it was my first time doing modeling to that scale it was my first time doing um like interconnected level design it was my first time doing menus like a menu system in a game you know and so it's like you're learning all this for the first time and then a month later you're like I can't believe I did it like that a month ago what was I thinking let's hope Jason that that doesn't change because looking back on your project a month later you should be able to see issues because you should have grown in the last month you know

and for me I'm on my third commercial release and nothing's changed like I've been doing this full-time thing for seven years and I I never love my work and now I can't say my work because I work with a team and everybody's doing something but the team even will'll all say together like dude isn't this game so much better than it was a month ago or wasn't isn't it so much better than it was a year ago and it's frustrating because you want to go back and fix stuff yeah but you can't and you and you you can't because it's like it's almost it's almost immoral it's like it's like a one of the Ten Commandments of game development which is like don't go back and fix everything because you're gonna you're going to the Temptation will be so strong to do that did you do that with cultic did you go back and fix everything um I there was a period of time where I fixed the stuff that needed to be fixed like um I don't know if you remember the original realms deep demo and then the next Fest demo of 22 I

completely redid the demo map from the first uh time around because like like the the original demo for cultic was basically the first map that IID ever made more or less um because all all the games I had worked on before were either like single scene like arcadey kind of things or they were more like procedural generated so I was working on small set pieces and then using like a generator so that was my first experience with like long form level design and so when I started on my second map I it was it was already so many leagues better than the first one that I it like you could it was like he would jump to a different game um and so I went back and fixed the and and redid the first map completely because it needed redone um and then the art went through a complete overhaul around nextfest as well cuz let's talk about go ahead sorry I was going to say cuz originally I was using placeholder stuff basically like this lever action model was from a different project and my little cultist model was from a different project um and so as I started

to make new assets for culk they didn't match up with my old ones because my old ones were from a year or two ago um and so for nextfest I did a complete overhaul of the art but at nextfest that was like my new that was my new Benchmark or that was my new like guideline for the art it was like this is how I'm going to do it moving forward and so after that I did I didn't do much going back and replacing stuff well what was the what was your art tool of choice um to for some context here cultic is a combination of 2D Sprites and 3D correct uh right so the art the art process is kind of like a a bucket of butts because it's um it's like um it's so everything in the game is is 3D modeled uh originally so like the even though the firstperson uh weapons like in like Doom or or Duke 3D or whatever are are Sprites they are fully modeled um and I model them in blender and then I set up a camera rig which exports that or renders them down to a 2D image and then and then I take the 2D image into

Photoshop and I clean it up um I you know brush out like weird 3D artifacts or like clipping um and then adjust like the highlights and the shadows and brush on a bit of extra shading um and then U it gets sent to aprite which is my spriting tool it's as p a Sprite um and that's where I would apply the color palette um sequency animations and then do the final touch-ups and since CK's color palette is so limited so much of like like if I if I apply the color palette and it looked like crap then I would just I would go back to photoshop and and do more texture work um and so the textures are very heavily tailored so that when it gets um because the color palette is so limited that in order to make everything pop your highlights and your shadows have to be really distinct um and a lot of times you're using uh Hue instead of um brightness to create um like to create contrast because the

color palette's so limited and so a lot of that so like if you go and look at the original renders they're like they are they're painted all over like there's all this all this markup all over them um so yeah it it was it was quite a process okay um and you're doing all this artwork from scratch you're not using assets right um okay what about your 3D models are you ever tempted to go grab you know some kind of mesh from Turbo squid or something low poly mesh and then repaint it um it's been really tempting with um with cars um because for chapter 2 uh since it takes place partially in the city I need to have a lot of City props and it's like because of because it's getting voxelized and because the texture color count is so low whether I perfectly model a car or whether I go get a perfectly modeled car it's going to look the same in the end um but cars are one of my biggest my one of my weakest points as an artist like I just can't draw them um and so I was like no

I'm GNA I'm going to model them um that's that's the way to do it I think the only I I want to say the only asset in game that I used is the statue in the cemetery in the fountain um is is something that I got off of some free asset that's one of the other reasons I don't use assets if I can avoid it is because I'm so terrified of somebody coming back and claiming copyright on it like I'm like I I found it on a website that said it was free but then it turns out that website stole it and it's just like oh man we use a lot of assets at at our team um and we but we buy them all so what was like the um there was like a i i could be getting this wrong but if I remember correctly a long time ago Seven Days to Die used a zombie model in their game that they got off of an asset site but it was stolen from killing floor it was just the clot zombie from killing floor and and so

they're like they're like showing off footage with this enemy that to anybody who's played Killing Floor it's like that's from killing floor um that's that's the version I heard it could have been that they they just used it and they knew it was stolen but I I mean I doubt that they would do that I could be wrong anyway but but that that's like one of those things that I was like I don't want that to happen to me like I don't want So you you're a you are a timid game developer you don't quit you don't quit your job you wait until you get a ton of wish lists before you quit your job and you do everything from scratch because you you want to make sure that you're doing it legally but also it clearly paid off because the game has a such a cohesive style yeah well that's the other thing is that like this like the style because like because things are getting voxelized they have to be modeled a certain way so that what does that mean voxelized uh so there's meshes in cultic that are made up of that are like voxy so they have like big chunky pixels on them rather than being a true 3D mesh because that's kind of how that

like in in build engine games like blood and Shadow Warrior that was kind of an early way of showing 3D models um that were that were too complex for like the map editor or that just needed to have more intricacy to them or needed to be able to rotate or whatever um and so I kind of wanted to emulate that a bit and so there's this this kind of flimsy unspoken design process behind cix visuals where for 3D meshes in the game if you could feasibly make the mesh in a map editor um like hammer or build or whatever then it stay as a 3D mesh so things like trees or large Boulders or you know things that are big and and blocky those stay as 3D meshes but for something that is like too complex like a car or a bulldozer or you know like a barrel that needs to be thrown around those are those get voxelized um so they get turned from a nice 3D mesh into a very crunchy crusty voxy model which which like quadruples the triangle count

too uh which is great yeah yeah um okay so yeah go ahead sorry I was gonna say so what's kind of funny is that CK actually has reverse lods in it um because really yeah so like like the cars are a great example so the voxel model for the car it's got It's got like 11,000 triangles on it because every voxel is a cube that has at least two triangles on each side and so when you have this huge model it's a ton of triangles but the original mesh is super low poly so the original mesh is like maybe a thousand or two and then so this is this is like a stylistic decision at the expense of the the GPU yeah there's and there's actually there's a lot of those in the game um like the fact that I really wanted lights to be destructible and so oh and animated and so nearly every single actually every single light source in cultic is dynamic there's no baked lights are you serious see we're going through that right now now with Twisted Tower I can't figure out what like the industry standard is

so we've got like we've got like maybe this is terrible but like 300 realtime lights in a scene yep yeah like I think um I think interlude that one map the interlude map has like 86 or 90 Dynamic lights in it um and almost all of them can be destroyed um and a lot of them are animated like lights that flicker or pulse or whatever yeah yeah how how's that affecting performance on um on frame rate on big well like so when I first when I first I do optimization last generally um I like here so like when interlude was first done like when the map was done and you could play it all the way through in the unity editor which has a ton of overhead so it usually kills the frame rate um it was I was getting like 40 frames per second at worst which is which is which is playable but bad um and then I got it to the point where at the worst spot in the map it was running at 80 frames per second in the editor for me which is like CeX Maps CeX maps are fully simulated so like every enemy is all active at once unless they're like a

trap enemy that spawns later so like so interlude has like I think like maybe 80 enemies in it so there's like 80 enemies that are all standing around like looking for the player they've got their path finding on standby like all like everything the map is simulated at all times because so many of the maps in cultic are super wide open where like you could you know you could flub a shot and hit an enemy on the other side of the map and then he's going to he's going to follow you for all the way across the map and come attack you um and so and that's actually kind of a frustrating thing that um people get people are kind of spoiled with performance uh sometimes especially when you have like you know games like like I say like Doom Eternal like things that are on like idtech that just like run way better than they have any right to um because they're made by awesome teams with tons of money um and and then people people are like oh well I can run I can run Doom Eternal at 120 frames per second but culk only runs 80 I'm like yeah well if you you know give me give me ID's staff and their money and I'm sure we'll get it running great for you

um but I think but people also they see culk looking the way that it looks and they assume that it should run um it it should run like Doom like the original Doom or like a build engine game like well I could run doom on my you know on my on my calculator so why can't I say wrong cting I'm like well Doom doesn't have a physics engine it doesn't have real time shadowing it doesn't have real-time lighting it doesn't have you know all you know it's just and it's just like it's a big misunderstanding right and I think we forget how just how bad retro games like old old school 90s games were um like clearly they're amazing games right yeah so I'm not I'm not going to be Blasphemous here but I you know me and my brother we'll we'll pull out the Super Nintendo and we'll we'll try and play some of the games and it's like plenty of nostalgia plenty of respect but man oh yeah you want to talk about those those games were limited man you want to talk about Doom like like oh yeah it runs it oh where is it here it is is you can't see this cuz I'm recording right now but you want to talk about how Doom always ran amazingly I'm

holding up my red Super Nintendo Doom cartridge to the camera nice doom doom did not always run amazingly um but it's just like yeah I mean so and and part of that's also because um part of the dynamic lighting thing is just because like I hate I hate baking lights it's terrible it's horrible and it and I don't know if you're using and and yeah this is a great segue to the next conversation that I want to have is which is all about mistakes that you made um being a solo game developer but one of the big mistakes I've made is is not fully understanding baking until the end of the project um because we we went through weeks weeks of being confused mhm like where did my metallics go where did my specular go we'd bake and the metallic and the specular is completely gone so what are what are some this is sort of this question I'd love to just sort of tailor for my audience what for the the people

listening who want to be solo game developers let's can we can we try and think of maybe like four or five mistakes that you've made as a solo game developer and how you can avoid them uh mistake and why why their mistakes why are they so problematic mistake number one uh being a solo game developer no I'm just kidding uh so it it's like um the so the I would say the number one mistake in this is n this just like a solo Game Dev thing but this is just like a starting out thing and this is any anytime anybody asks me for like advice for game devs it's this one is like never ever ever ever ever ever go into Game Dev thinking that you're going to make your dream game first no you're making pong first that's what you do like you start small um and that's it's so important especially when you get into um because start small turns into like controlling scope um so maybe you can I don't know which one you want to call we'll say controlling scope right yeah um and that's it's actually that's actually really uh really timely cuz I just today released an update for cultic that uh adds uh ability mode into the

game and abilities like kind of like Supernatural Bioshock abilities were something that were in cultic way like in the first year development um just because I was like this would be a fun thing to make um and then you realize really quickly that a like it didn't fit the game at all like it it was a really bad fit for the pacing but the bigger thing was like adding that kind of complexity into the game now means that I have to like I have to tutorial this for the player because the system is deep enough it needs tutorial isation I have to justify it which means like trying to it's it's like um like you I assume you've played Bioshock one right the first one first oh yeah I mean Twisted Tower our game Twisted Tower is basically the same thing yeah so like that that it would be like if if they gave you your first e or your first plasmid without like the cut scene of your guy like injecting it into himself and go like you have to kind of explain why you have these Powers um and that and that's not something I wanted to do in CK because CK's kind of got that like Dark Souls hands-off storytelling a bit

to it um and so it was just like the more I looked into it it was like this is going to blow my scope up because now I also have to design combat scenarios around the player having these powers and it was just like it took what was a really clean and simple gameplay Loop and blew it out of scope um and so that's I would say I say I almost did that thing where I got off the interstate um so yeah number one big thing start small and don't and don't blow your scope out of portion um because so like I would say the second most common thing I hear besides uh oh my nephew likes video games when I tell somebody I'm game developer is somebody who's like oh man I've always wanted to make my own halo or whatever and it's like open world yeah yeah and it's like no I totally agree in fact I I say and then we can move on to the second one but what I say is don't even start small start as a turd like release your first crappy game as fast as you can so that you know what it feels like to release a game yeah um and I don't know if you did that but I I released like four crappy games before I actually did like a good

game that actually made money CK's my first commercial release so uh no I I'd never even finished a game before CK so no I would say I didn't make it that far that's awesome that's that's a that's a anomaly that's amazing I'm trying to think of I'm trying to think of other other Game Dev mistakes and if if you have suggestions that we can talk about I would I guess um another one would be like uh um and I guess this kind of goes hand in hand with starting small but um play like you have to play to your strengths um like one and this this this is really nebulous it has overlap with 0.1 I apologize for that but um originally culk had a lot more like storytelling and narration and like characters and voice acting um and and I got into it and I started look and like once I started working on the game and I started like considering how I was going to develop those things it was like I don't know how to do any of that I don't know how to write I'm not a voice actor I can't write jokes like I don't I don't know how to hire voice actors like

that's going to be a mess and so I cut all of that right away cuz I was like I can't do any of this um so you played to your strengths with with the art the music yeah and the gameplay yeah and I was and you know I mean the art style is is you know one of my favorite parts of cultic but it is a crutch you know like like a big part of working a big part and it's the same reason why like PS1 aesthetic games um are are surging is because like you can you you can get your point across without having to spend hours and hours and hours on on Art assets um which is great I and I and I mean like I I I don't fault it at all because that's basically CK's just like a more refined PS1 core really you know it's it's using it's I I'm rendering my crappy 3D models down to 180 pixels so you can't see how bad they are that's and that and that's and I was able to make a game work around that which was which was which was great U but it is a crutch it really is well it's it's the the hook of your game is the the style and the aesthetic do you agree uh yeah I

I would definitely part of it okay that that's definitely the like that's like the that's like the thing that gets you to stop and look at it on your timeline that's right that's right and actually um Justin at 3D Realms um he was talking to me about that is is just how important that stop that that I call I call it the stop and stare Factor the thing that about your game that people stop and actually pay attention and so that for me is the third mistake if I can throw in one of my mistakes which please do uh which is um it's probably a good idea this sounds really corporate and Commercial and monopolistic but I'm just going to go for it I feel like game developers would be so much happier if they would just test their ideas first on social media before going for it and really finishing the game out because some ideas are trash and you shouldn't even make the game and sometimes you just need you

need an audience or or a 100 followers to say Hey you know this isn't really that interesting you know and it it seems like that's what you did like yeah you signed with 3D Realms but until you got the feedback you needed to know that the game actually had sort of viral potential you weren't fully you weren't fully two feet both feet stepping into the project right yeah I mean I don't know like if you're wanting to make a career out of game development like if you want game development to pay all of your bills then then yes like Commercial Appeal is very important because like you can go like you can go you can pause this video right now and go to steam and look at the new releases uh and then see how many games that were released in the last day alone and it's like you're competing with all of those yeah um but when it comes to game development as an art form um which is more of what I view it as and that's a little hypocritical because yes it is my job and I am making money off of it but I am very much a passion first developer which is why

like which is why I'm working on bone rooms like bone rooms just sounded like a fun game to work on so I'm working on it um and so if you're if you're making a game because it's it's it's an idea that seems really cool to you like other people will think it's cool too um but yes like if you if you're getting near the release of your game and and you haven't managed to crack 100 F you know like 100 wish lists um it it might be tough for you to make a commercial success out of that and so part of that I guess is determining what your what your goal is like if your goal is to release your game and make a ton of money and and and have that pay your bills then yeah you know a bit of the corporate like you said like the soulless corporate side of it a bit of that's required because the because the industry sucks um it it it really sucks um it's very competitive it's very and dude AI is going to completely flood steam oh it's going to be it is going to be I'm getting chills of Terror right now it is going to be so bad we're going to get zombie games like

you wouldn't believe but what I mean by zombie games is like they're just like they're dead games that look pretty because they have ai art and cool AI front covers and cool AI trailers but then when you crack it open and play it it's what was that game that just released that it looked cool on paper day gone day day day before day no day before the day before we're the day before we're going to get a bunch of those games that look cool on paper but are trash and because of that that's that's why I bring up the the you might want to be a little bit more commercial focused the reason I say that is I'm trying to save I'm trying to save the listeners sanity because I I want people like okay just because this is me play Playing devil's advocate to you who you seem more of a purist than me I'm not as much I'm not as pure um and the reason why I'm not is

because just because you're testing an idea with the audience doesn't mean the idea wasn't yours and it wasn't something you're passionate about right right so like I can have five ideas that I'm all passionate about and I do I've got five different game ideas for our next game I'm passionate about every single one but I'm only going to pick the one that seems to be performing well on social media yeah you know what I mean I'm going to apologize uh when you watch the video I was just looking at my other monitor cuz I was trying to find um I was trying to find a developer on Twitter because there's a really interesting point about this um I can't remember I can't remember the developers name they're working on a horror game um but they have started uh from their their Dev account they've started tweeting these just like funny C memes um just like just like Jo like they did one um yesterday that was like joking about uh C adding an iant statement like ifnt which is like the opposite of an if and and they get they get huge traction because they're just funny C memes yeah

um and and and this this this devs like quadrupled their following in like a month just from these funny memes and they made a post today that was talking about how some people um are have like really frowned upon them using memes to build a following and it was just a really interesting segue because it's like um I don't personally build my following using um using memes and whatnot because um I feel like that's just like not what my Twitter's about but my most successful tweets have all been memes you know it's like I I I I like I like just today I releas I I I tweeted about um about this ability mode update which is something I worked hard on and I'm really proud of it and I think it looks cool and it maybe it got like maybe 200 likes and then sometimes I'll tweet you know I tweet I tweet like a meme just like something Goofy and it gets like 15,000 and I'm just like okay it's so frustrating um but and to to your point which as you said um focus on what you're passionate about um I don't think you and I disagree you know

because um I do think you should do what you're passionate about but I think you should test that uh people are willing to purchase your passionate idea if people are willing to purchase it then um and that's probably where you you disagree with me but if people are willing to purchase it you'll be you can be sane while you make your game you could think well at least there's people that who are going to be waiting to buy this game and at least I'm going to make some money so that I can make another game and so that I don't have to be worried and afraid that I'm not going to be able to pay my bills or have to go work a crappy job that I hate yeah and so like I said I think there being being Flex being flexible with your being flexible with your uh uh your view of how how how much Artistic integrity you should have I think goes a long way it it helps you be a game developer for 20 years because it's it's it's um it's sort of seated

and interrupted with moments of freedom because you have money yeah and and you don't have to worry and be stressed you know what I mean yeah it it just depends on your end goal um you know like at at this at this point um like at this point in my life a Game Dev is my job so I have to be successful in order to keep paying my bills and so now I'm like I'm I'm a little more open to dipping my toes into uh ways to just like try to build a following like maybe doing like a bit of a a bit of you know of a Meme here and there just to try to like break out of my Game Dev Circle but two you know three four years ago when being a full-time Game Dev wasn't even on my radar um I I wouldn't have thought of it because I'm like no like my Twitter is only about Game Dev it's about my games and my progress on them um and so it just depends on your goals you know um and one of the reasons that like um like like if I had been 80% of the way through developing cultic and and I had like no followers on Twitter and you

know no publisher I still would have seen it through because like I'm just I'm all about getting an idea on paper and getting it out there if I'm sure of it you know that's one of the reasons why I do solo development is because I don't I don't like being told no on an idea like I like if it's going to fail I want to see it fail like I I want I want to I want to try it and I want to learn why it doesn't work I don't want to have somebody else tell me no we're not going to do that um and I do and I do have ideas that I try and they suck and they're terrible and I'm like okay yeah I'm never doing that again um yep like uh like like when CK's title used to have a subtitle and I was like ah this is a cool subtitle and people were like no it sucks go back to your old title and I was like okay yeah you're right man I don't like subtitle games they I I don't know why people do them um what's what's the logic behind that I'm curious um I guess for me it was because like um like my game has no identity like it's not I'm not Resident Evil you can't just say Resident Evil and know what you know you you can't say C at the time you

couldn't say cultic and know what my game is about um it could be about anything but like if you include a subtitle you can kind of flavor it you know to be like so you know it would be you know I don't know it would be like um I'm struggling to think of an example so I'm not going to try but like you know it was it was a way to add more identity to the game so you could look at the title and be like oh this is going to be like kind of a like a like a like a a horror themed game um but people people hated it and so I was like okay uh so then so then I showed off uh the grenade launcher when I first added it to the game and I showed it off by blowing up the subtitle uh with it it was it was a really fun tweet I love that cool okay so any other any other mistakes you can think of as a solo developer that you wish you you you had known at the time Productions schedule anything you could think of here totally fine if not we can move on to the next the next topic yeah I'm sure I'm sure there are um I'm just like I struggle to think of any because CK I got really

lucky I got really really lucky with CK I I was making it at a time where Boomer shooters were hot if I had tried to make if I had tried to make cultic two years from now or like six years ago it probably would wouldn't have had a blip on the radar I got a lot of it was luck you know like I got I got a following um because some tweets of mine happened to blow up a little bit um I 3D Realms picked me up because they happened to see you know my tweets you know it's just like I I am not at all I I like I will never deny the fact that a big chunk of cultic success was luck and and unfortunately I think that's a big chunk of of Game Dev in general like some you know sometimes the difference between your game succeeding and not is a is a YouTuber playing it you know it's uh and and uh and I mean like heck even like I like think I think Among Us is a great example of that where it was this really and and it might have taken off on its own um but like to my understanding it was kind of a kind of like a a not very wellknown at all game until it got you know it got the right people playing it

and then it and then it just exploded um and there's probably a lot of other examples of that but that's just the one that comes to mind but um like I said I mean there's so like go look at the steam new releases today um after you sort through the six or seven uh porn games that are there um look how many games came out today and it's like you're and you're competing for you're competing for people's money with like all of these games and and so I think there is a good chunk of luck with it and had CK not have had that and I had to earn my following more honestly we'll say you know like through through good oldfashioned hard work um I think there would probably be a lot more mistakes to speak of because it would have been a much more painful process well what about what about schedule and and like your relationship with your wife like is there anything if if is and you don't have to answer it's just I have I have my own uh stories to tell about how game development seeps into my brain and stays there and I can't get I can't get it out in the evening um I can't I can't stop being obsessed with a certain idea

I guess that is that an issue you've had in the past I guess luckily for me um uh my would have been girlfriend at the time um she she works she worked as as like a CPA uh and at at like a very small tax firm that was constantly swamped and so I mean like from like October to the end of tax season she I just never saw her so I I had tons of time to work on my game it was great um and so we you know we didn't struggle that much with it then um and and it honestly wasn't until like this last summer that we kind of that she moved away from that position and we've actually had a little more free time um and so for us it wasn't a problem because she was so busy that me working until you know midnight didn't really matter um right I would say the bigger thing with scheduling was um once I moved to full-time and I wasn't working an8 to five making another company a bunch of money anymore um it was it was tough to make myself

get up at 800 in the morning and go to my desk um because it's just like I don't have to um and I and I really found myself falling into this trap where it was like like I don't really want to work today and I would just be like well if I just take one day off it's not you know it's not going to hurt the project but if you do that like you know 80 times then then you set your game back by two months um and so there was kind of the Str you know and so it turned into because as as a creative and I'm sure you get this like if you if you don't have the drive to work on something creative and you make yourself do it it it harms the product um at least at least in my experience like like me like me bashing my head against a wall with level design makes terrible levels um and so for me it's much better to like switch to music or take a day off like if I wake up in the morning and I'm like I have no brain juices like I can't um then it then I'm I'm just not going to work because the because if I force myself to do level design when I am feeling creatively burned out then the next day I'm just going to come back and redo it all

because it's because you can feel it like you can feel it's uninspired um at least in my case because I hate level design so um so yeah I mean that that was a big part of it was just like like finding like you have to be you have to be you have to keep yourself working you have to be selfmotivated because like you're working you're like kind of watching your funds trickle away and because you're not getting a paycheck anymore and um so yeah like it's um you really have to find out how how much of like a selfstarter and a hard worker you are when like your financial future now depends solely on like you and the work that you do right well how how did you find that is that who you are naturally were you raised to be that way just a self-starter motivated uh doesn't take no for an answer just because you're burnt out doesn't mean you quit yeah you kind of have to be to be a solo Dev who does literally everything like you know to if you like to be somebody who learns how to do art and animation and code and you know and music and marketing and audio design and videos editing like you

have to you have to be motivated to learn how to do all those things and so I think some of that that selfstarter is is is a requirement because like how else are you going to learn those skills if you don't if you don't take the time to to learn um and so yeah I mean like that's it is a part of who I am I'm a you know a bit of a perfectionist and um and and and a a Bonafide OCD struggler so so it's like y I don't know it's it's it it can really suck but um so so is is that is is there a is there a certain type of person that is best for being a a solo game developer um probably can can anybody do it can anybody do it no I don't think so um I just like I because I think there's some people that are more built to be really really really good at one thing like they're like oh my God I follow I follow devs on on Twitter who are like primarily programmers and the stuff that

they can do blows my mind because I am not I'm I'm like a I'm like a I'm I'm like a like a c minus programmer uh so I'm just like I I can I can code stuff that works but like I can't do Shader code dude like I can't no and then like I see people coding these absolutely crazy visual effects and like these insane AI systems um the cool AI not the not the not the game industry ruining Ai and and I'm just like I can't even begin to imagine where to start with that um and and so like so I I think that for somebody who wants to be like somebody who wants to be a solo Dev I think in a way has to and this this is actually one of the other big pieces of advice I like to give is that as a solo Dev you have to pick your battles and and picking your battles sometimes means knowing that you won't be the best at at everything um it's really a jack of all trades kind of job where you have to like I I think that I I am impassible at all the things that I do um and and I and I know that like you know like there's there there's programmers at 3D

Realms that put me to shame and there or I guess at slipgate um and then there's artists that you know like the artists that do like the the work for Graven and Phantom Fury that just that put me to shame and I'm just like like I can't do what they do um and so and so that's fine that's like I'm happy being a solo developer and knowing that I'm not a AAA level artist I'm not a AAA level coder um but that's kind of scary thinking that if if solo Dev didn't work out I couldn't go get a job at a game Studio because I'm not that good at any of the things that I do oh wow dude that's a scary thought I don't think I could either like I I mean like maybe I could maybe leadership position yeah like maybe I could maybe I could be like a producer and like help like with communication and like pulling a project together but I can't be a lead coder for a game are you crazy like I'm I'm just I'm not that good I'd be like let's see let's see if we can find a tutorial for this uh system on you you know I think Jason I think you're underselling yourself I think you'd make an incredible art director um really

because an art director I think his primary job is to to consolidate all the resources into a single vision and ensure that that vision is cohesive yeah I maybe and that's that cultic has such a strong flavor it's it's a very unique I like to think of games as food for some reason it's a very unique dish and flavor I always call cultic horror flavor that's my my favorite describer for it because it's not it's not it's not a straight up horror game it's horror flavored so so one of these uh these tips here that you mentioned for solo developers is you need to be okay with being a generalist yeah is is that what you're saying yeah and not be a perfectionist about oh I saw this coder or I saw this developer on Twitter or Instagram I'm not like them so I need to scramble and figure out how to be just like them yeah unless I mean the difference being like I think there's a there's like a distinction between a

solo Dev and a oneman army um or or the 1 ma um is that like like you can be like I guess the the example I would use would be like um uh D ner uh the guy who made phasmophobia I think guy I don't want to make they the person who made phasmophobia um almost everything of phasmophobia when it launched to my knowledge was an asset but what what they brought to the table was like a phenomenal idea and a phenomenal gameplay Loop and so like this this person designed a great game and that was their strength but they didn't do all of the code I don't think they didn't do like any of the any of the models you know or any of that stuff but you know like so and I'm not I'm not speaking for them I don't know them personally I've never listened to like them talk or anything but I I'm just like think looking at it as an outsider like the thing that they wanted to bring to the table was this awesome gameplay idea um and and and they did and so by that same token someone can be a phenomenal programmer who is okay with

paying an artist or you know like or buying or or using like an asset pack but their like their code and gameplay ideas are great and so if you want to be a oneman army and you want to be a complete control freak and do everything yourself uh like I do then then yes like being a generalist is is like you have to be okay with the fact that like um you're kind of just making stuff for you uh like I I I couldn't write music for uh like like Tempest Rising for example cuz like I the style of music that that game uses isn't I can't write like that it's just not it's not a genre I'm familiar with um like like metal I'm I'm not I I don't really like metal music that much I'm not a metal head and so I couldn't write metal music and so for a game that needs metal music I I'm not I'm not your guy I just can't do it right um and so there and so there's big gaps in my skill set and I'm okay with that like I can't write Shader code um and that's fine because there's shaders in unity already and and like I feel the same way I don't know how to do it either and like I'm just now teaching myself about like PB like physically

based rent PBR modeling and so like I'm just now learning about metallics and and and specular maps and and it's really bone rooms yeah yeah and it's really fun like it's so cool isn't it great I love it it's so cool to like to take like a base color texture and then you slap on your metallic layer and your normals and then you put it in engine and you're like oh my God it looks like a real thing that's so cool the the craziest the craziest aspect of materials is for me or the the most effective is the smoothness map um I'm not sure if you've gotten into that yet and you're learning oh yeah I've I've been I've been re reworking all the textures in Twisted Tower and throwing on these grimy smoothness Maps so everything looks scratched and like the the the poly is peeling off of the paint and stuff it's just so cool so so effective I've got so many grungy photoshop brushes now that I've just been picking up for this for for doing these these textures um but yeah but I

mean like if you're okay with um like I mean if you're okay with making a game with programmer art but like your like your code and your gameplay is topnotch then like that's where you that's where you get into your side of it where you talk about um like discoverability and marketability um is like you might you might be sacrificing marketability um if you're just like I'm just going to use programmer and so the S comes down to like is this is this passion you know is this just a passion project that you want to get out there or do or are you like do you want this to blow up and become a job um and so it's so it's all about like picking your battles I think um at least as a small team or a solo developer and and CK's a lot like that like um a lot of the environments in cultic if you look around are like are like pretty empty as far as like like small details and decorations goes and that's L like I I could spend like a week modeling you know 40 different tiny props to put into this one room um but it's not going to be something that people write about in magazines it's not going to be like oh my God CK has

industry leading environment design and it's room that people are going to be in for 4 seconds they're going to shoot a guy in the head they're going to grab some bullets and they're going to leave and it's like no I'm going to put a desk here I'm going to put a door there I'm going to put a chair here and then I'm done I'm moving on because because that's like I I'm not no one's going to no one's going to leave reviews about cultic and talk about the environment design because that's again playing to my strengths that's not why I'm here I'm not I'm not that good of an environment artist and so I'm here for the gameplay and I'm here for like the art style and and you know the rest of the stuff I just have to let go because it's like it's not it's not something that's going to be achievable for me yeah well let's let's uh this this brings me to I want to kind of talk about unreal and unity okay um with unreal you can actually become that guy who has photorealistic Graphics um you can be that that person who can create this beautiful forest with quick soulle

Mega scans and volumetric lighting um it's a lot easier and unreal um whereas Unity it's not as as easy and sometimes it's like it feels like clunky and and it feels out of date so I'm curious if you'd be willing to talk about why you choose to use unity and are you still using Unity for bone rooms yeah your next game mhm so so after that whole debacle about the pricing structure are you willing to discuss why you still want to use Unity yeah um so let's go back to your first thing you said about like you know in in unreal you can make you make this you know these beautiful environments um you can if you have all of those assets to do it um and this is actually a really funny thing cuz I um often times you'll see and we're going to see a lot of it like you said with the AI Advent on Steam but um make having a game in unreal where you you know you went to the unreal Marketplace

and you got this beautiful Mega scan pack for a forest um and you're like okay I'm going to make a spooky I'm going to make a spooky Forest body cam horror game it's like okay cool you have the forest what what are you going to do for your creature are you going to do you have a creature that's also a quickel mega scan or are you going to make it yourself because if you make it yourself are you going to make it to the same level of quality as as that and so yes you can create a beautiful environment and unreal but you have to be able to match that quality in everything else you do um and and this is such a um it it's s it's such a big problem in asset flip games um where you start to see that break down where it's like you're you know like I'm in the super realistic environment but then when I go and um I I don't I'm not going to say any game names because I don't want to cast any shame but or any shade but um I watch I recently um I was watching a trailer for this game that initially looked really cool and then as I started watching through the trailer immediately jumped out that it was an asset flip um and the first thing was that like you start to notice

that like all the styles of things are mismatched it's like yes the environment looks awesome because it's a pack it's an asset pack it always the environments always look the best and I know I know what kind of games you're talking about and then and then there was this there was they showed a cut scene which I assume was from like the beginning of a boss battle um and the boss's animations were incredibly stiff like like like beginners first month of blender stiff animations and it was like okay so you've got these gorgeous environments that are EXT that were made by a very talented 3D artist but then the animations are terrible like they look awful and they're super stilted and then uh then there's like gameplay and you see gameplay of the of the character like interacting with things in the environment and it's extremely clunky like nothing is nothing is smooth and it's like okay so you're seeing the gaps there you're seeing the gaps in the assets so it's like the environment asset looks great the weapon the character's holding asset looks great

the player's firsters controller template that they got looks great until the player needs to do something that isn't in that template like like like um like like hiding inside of a container from an enemy and then you see that the player just kind of lurs into position and it's like wait a second what happened to this super smooth first-person controller I was thing um and so I and so I do agree with you like you can make some awesome looking stuff in unreal with a lot less effort than I think it would take to do it in unity um and so if your goal as a game developer is to make breathtakingly beautiful games and you have the chops to do it then yeah unreal is probably your best bet but if you have the assets and the talent and the budget to make a game that big like you're probably going to want you're probably working in unreal already anyway like um I agree I agree you know the thing is is that uh you know I don't have a problem with unreal I really don't I don't have a problem with unreal and in fact I have more of a

problem with unity than I have with unreal yet I still use Unity but the issue is is that you see a lot of concept Games come out of unreal like uh like body cam type games or walking Simulator games oh yeah and there's these mini like 10-minute games and they look amazing they're super simple um very tight focused on one little thing um but if you wanted to scale that and make a full game that's like a six-h hour experience with a variety of different characters and weapons and environments and mechanics it's it's it's really I'll just say that's a really difficult thing to do cohesively with assets yeah um you have you have to be very very you have to have a good eye as a as an artist to know because I do that all the time me and my team we're

picking assets all the time but if you look at Twisted Tower it does not look like an asset Flip Game and that's because we we take the assets and we're very precise with which assets we choose MH and then we will retopologize them retexture them repaint them in substance painter and bring them into the game under one style yeah well that's the difference between like like uh like I said I was tempted with cultic to use to just like find some some 3D models of cars because I'm going to take that model and I'm going to I'm going to texture it myself and then I'm going to voxelize it and so it's like I'm not just taking it and copy pasting it into my game um and even then I decided not to do that because I wanted to learn how to model cars because I didn't know how to do it um so that was just like a learning opportunity but yeah there I mean there's a big Gulf between like like in oh here's a great example in bone rooms uh the skeleton model I use um is an asset um yeah because like granted the the decoy the skeleton that's like in the Hazmat suit is you know I made the Hazmat suit but the thing with like the skeleton model is that like if I this is a really nice looking human skeleton model and if I spend I can spend a week making my own

and even if I make an awesome looking skeleton it's going to look just like this one because because it's the same thing it'll be the same model I know that's what I tell my team all the time because my team they uh one of my team members Felipe he's such a great artist and he wants to make all the models and I I think it's great I'm glad he wants to do that but I keep telling him I'm like if it's something simple like a suitcase or something it's going to look the same so let's just go grab a suitcase a suitcase is a suitcase yeah yeah actually that's not true because if you the suitcases in in Twisted Tower are gorgeous and he did those so I take that back um and he he usually proves me wrong um because I'm always like let's just go find the asset and then he's like he's like give me five he has a really deep voice give me 5 minutes and I'll show you why we want to do this and then he'll send me something 5 minutes later I'm like oh oh yeah that's why you wanted to do that so you know unreal unreal is it's a it's a tempting I think it's more

um it's kind of like walking into a a huge Buffet um and and all the food looks delicious and you just want to get everything you want all the quick toega scans you want all the volumetric lighting um you want all the real- time lighting all the real-time shadows and it's it's working amazing and you and you're so impressed with what you've created and then you try and run it on an Xbox or you try and run it on a PlayStation and it's like 20 frames per second um and I think that that's the difference between unreal and unity because and by the way you know it's like there's probably unreal listeners unreal developers listening right now and they're thinking well I don't do that and I'm thinking yes I agree I 100% agree a lot of unreal developers don't do that but there's a ton who do because they don't don't understand that unreal is a is a very heavy engine oh yeah if if you're not careful just look

just look at the install size that's that's that was that's a crazy difference to me and granted that that really doesn't mean anything in the scope of Game Dev but it's like like slow when you open it I I found it to be slow when I opened it um and used it but then again I haven't used it that much so I mean Unity for me is just um and granted of course I've been using it for quite a while um and so I'm really comfortable with it but Unity is cozy it's it's a very cozy engine um what do you mean by let's talk about that what does that mean um it's just it's uh especially for for beginners and solo like for solo smaller project it's it's it's uh it has everything you need and and and and that's it like that's it's it's very easy to get started in the the UI is very clean it's just very cozy and I you talked about this like when the when the when the unity scare of 2023 happened um of like jumping into to Unreal and just the absolute like bombardment of features that are there and not that that's a bad thing but it's

like uh man like I I just I don't need all of that um especially for like the games I make are simple um and and so Unity is it's very it's very clean and simple and and and it's like it's almost like comparing and somebody who's like a C++ Pro is going to call me on this I'm going to say that but like it's almost like comparing C++ and C in terms of like like readability and and what I would say again is coziness it's just like I feel like I feel like C is a Cozier language um it's it's easier to get to grips with it's easier to parse it's easier to read I mean parse from like a visual standpoint not like a not not like an Assembly Language standpoint um and I I've always been very very comfortable in unity and of course I've used it for you know like eight years now and so yeah the unity scare of this year sucked that was awful an awful time it did suck an awful time it did suck I agree with you I I totally agree with you that Unity has this cozy Vibe um it it's you could compare it to like cultures maybe

like the unit the unity culture not the com corporate culture I don't like the corporate culture yeah yeah yeah but what I mean is like when I go to a different country um like if I go to Italy uh I can say I don't like Italy and it's like well you've only been there for a week and you're you've also been raised in America you're whole life so you don't you can't just fit in randomly you have to actually do the work to fit in thing about Unity is it to me the the framework of unity and the way that it works it just made sense to me on a core almost a genetic level like when I opened it up it made sense to me how it communicates with itself and how game objects and components communicate to each other it just makes sense to me yep I agree and unreal I can't it's it's just a different Paradigm it's a different Paradigm and I'm it's not wrong clearly it works it's great one of

my favorite games the game we're replicating TW or not replicating but really really inspired by T is Twisted Tower where is BioShock so Twisted Tower our game is inspired by Bioshock and Bioshock was made in unreal and so I know that unreal is great it's just very very it's it's a different Paradigm and I I tried it and I I can't I I don't know I I don't think I'm smart enough to understand it or something yeah I during the unity scare I like many other people uh downloaded unreal and looked at it and I was like if this Unity thing goes through I might just be done with Game Dev I was just like I I can't like I I don't and I'm sure I would have gotten used to it and I would have loved it U but I'm just like man but it's really funny you talk about um like like culture of a game engine which brings me to another great point I had um the worst part about the unity scare besides Unity being being turds was um the worst part was everyone just telling me to switch to God dot or gdo God dot how do you pronounce that GD it's it's well that's the problem is that everybody's

got the right way to say it everybody telling me to just switch to gdau was God I'm G say God do was was infuriating because I'm just like it's not the same engine it doesn't have what I need and and people Point like they're like yeah well I I've been using it for half a day and I made this I made this game already and the game is like one scene with like two objects I'm like you didn't make game like that's not a game uh and I and I haven't used good out myself so and I'm it looks really cool and really promising and I don't mean any disrespect towards it but it's just like when you look at it like you like nobody can point me to like large scale games that were made but it's like what cruelty Squad I think was made in God do I think which I haven't played there there are a few um and it's it's the thing is this is that I think that this same could be said about maybe blender before it became massive yeah and so you know but that but but to your

credit it's like yeah but I don't have time for that yeah like I've got to make I've got to make a commercial game for Xbox PlayStation and steam and potentially Nintendo switch I can't rely on an open source engine that is not fully functional and all the features are available for like that's the big part about Unity is that porting other platforms yes it is a nightmare even with unity but Unity has that documentation and those relationships with those platforms like Xbox and Playstation yeah that currently gdau does not have yeah well and just like it's just like when people are like man there was this thread on the steam discussions about for cultic that I had to lock because it was it was disgusting it was just like like this really toxic like this person came in and was just like you should just switch to you should just switch Unity or cultic over to over to God Dot and I was like and I was like why like what what like what what does God dot offer me and like like let's say at best that the that the that the engines feature complete feature

parody which they don't as far as I know right now um let's say that at best they offer complete parody what benefit do I gain right now from switching my game that's already released to a different engine like tell me that because I don't think you understand game development whatsoever to this person that's sign the switch um cuz it's like hey this is this is go ahead it's like hey I wouldn't be able to Port the game like that's that's a big bold like red flag I it's a huge problem yeah um and be like you can't I you can't point me to another game that does what cultic does um with its scale with all the lighting with all the physics stuff like you can't point me to another game that does that to show me that the engine's capable of it and I'm sure I'm sure it is but like I have to see that like I have to see that games of that same caliber were made in that engine and run well and run acceptably um and it's just like I don't know like I like I said I I haven't used Godot myself I have nothing against it this is just coming from the unity the unity I don't have anything against it either I I have something against what I'm about to say which is

okay okay I don't like how human beings gravitate towards religious Behavior with everything yeah so like it's whether it's politics whether it's movies video games and game development it bugs me well are you are you implying that people aren't level-headed about politics are you sure yeah how can I say that what am I talking about but the the the problem is like and this is coming I'm a religious person right I am a religious person but I I I I stay religious about one thing and then everything else I'm not H and I and I get frustrated when people get hyper like cultic dare I say about I'm putting a pin on that I'm putting a pin on that I come back about game engines and you're you're right like when the big Unity scare happened and let's let's both admit the scare was legitimate what they did was what they did was really dumb and Let's cross our fingers that

they don't do some runtime fee thing again right do we agree well okay so how much do you buy into the conspiracy theory that that that idea that was so gigantically stupid that like everybody knew was gigantically stupid was was put out there in public just to get rid of richello what do you think so I heard I saw somebody say that and I was like man I could see that like I could see that happening you know there's I think there's potential is is this a bad topic is this going to get us is this going to get us if it if no no no if it did I would cut it it's not it's like I like the guy I got to meet him and hang out with him at the unity head I got see this is the thing is I got people got mad at me because I said he was a nice guy MH I I don't have a dog in that fight I I only I only know him I only know him

for the things he said online so that's that's where my that's where I come from well he has he says dumb things he's he has said dumb things in the past but literally I'm like I met John we had a great conversation I think he's a nice guy I think what he did was stupid and then people get frustrated with me and they're like you can't just you can't just say people are a nice guy and and with what what he's done and I'm like we don't have to behave like some sort of tribe here um it's a game engine guys it's just a game engine right well and to him it's to him it's business you know it's business and that's and that's the thing is like like um if if if if JN and I were to were to meet in rural Kansas for some reason um and and if we were to talk about like like uh like barbecue and um and I don't know like the weather we'd probably get along fine cuz I'm sure he's he's a normal human being but if we were to talk about business as it relates to game you know me coming me as somebody who's all about passion and him who is you know more all

about business I'm sure we would heartily disagree U and so there I mean there there are two sides of it but like going back well you're a very you're a very principled Game Dev with very pure reasons for why you make games uh I'm sort of a little bit more corrupt and then and then John is way way way way way well it's it's just it's just different ways of approaching it there there's a sliding scale from like you know from like purist making itch.io games who never charges for their games cuz it's all passion and then there's you know nft AI crypto into gaming on the far end of it um where it's all about games as as numbers and profit um and and then somewhere in the middle is is you and I you know like and we're you know we're we're we're not we're not at either end of that spectrum because I I you know I do consider myself very much all about like the soul and art of game design but it's also my career so I do care about I do care about the money side of it I do care about marketing you know like I do you know those things are important to me um Ju Just Not to the

same scale as they're important to somebody who wants to put a bunch of microtransactions in their game or who wants to you know do like a like a Pay to Win kind of thing like that's I I'm far from that but you know I'm also far from releasing games for free on itch because yeah I have I have a mortgage now and I can't do that yeah exactly well that that brings me to you know you you say um you you care about the revenue you make are you worried that Unity is going to take start taking Revenue like they are you worried that they're going to do what they did again or do you think they're going to put a pin in that I don't think that even if they had put that dumb plan of theirs into motion I don't think it would have been legally enforceable because I don't think you can I don't think you can retroactively change the terms of use on something like I just don't think that's legal so like you know like I don't and and I don't know how you would enforce it you know especially for a game like cultic that's not like a giant multi-million dollar game like it's like

yeah like am I worried that if that if that if those changes went through I probably would have switched to Unreal and it would have sucked and it would have been a big learning curve but I'm not going to like I'm not going to abide by those weird terms because they because like they're dumb and they're but they're invasive I mean they're super invasive um and and they're really scary yeah and for that to have worked the amount of super invasive software practices that Unity would have had to indulge in to accurately get install numbers would have been it would have been way outside of what I'm comfortable with and so I I would have left which I me too um it originally I was like ah I think I may have tweeted like everybody's overreacting and then I looked at the the the the issue in particular with the runtime fee and how they were basically going to I mean how are they going to parse whether your game was pirate it or not yeah um and then you realize okay they're going to have to basically put malware on my computer spies on my uh on everybody's computer so I realized that

I was like whoa this is a huge problem but I think the reaction that they got was so detrimental oh it was huge it was huge so detrimental to their brand that I really man I I might eat my words here I don't think they're going to try and pull that for another decade see and the thing is like the idea was like Not only was it stupid like it it was a terrible idea but you've got like I'm sure that everybody inside of unity said it was a terrible idea except maybe some shareholders who were like oh dollar signs H um yeah but like not only so like just conceptually it was dumb but like if you look towards it like towards the execution of it like you said like logistically how do you gather those numbers and how do you do them accurately and then they're like they go on record publicly and say that like oh we're going to make we're going to make Steam we're going to make Microsoft track it it's like no you're not like really you're going to get accurate numbers from the platforms on that like it it just it was never going to work and that's why I have this weird like

conspiracy theory that I'm like there there's no way no it's it's what I mentioned like I'm I'm like I did you make it up no no no no no I I read I read somebody say it was like a tweet where they were like what if this was all just a a big ploy to get rid of uh the CEO who was massively unpopular because of you know his his TI the stuff that he said publicly and his ties to EA and all the crap about well what he said publicly he said game developers who don't choose to Market their games are stupid or something uh it was I'm pretty sure it was monetized it was like about um and yeah and and sure and like I I didn't really dig into that that deeply um I'm I'm personally like I don't like the idea of heavy monetization on like in-game stuff I'm more of like a you know like like on a game like uh like like like fortnite for example you know I got that game for free and I have a lot of fun with it so I don't if if a $5 skin comes out that I think looks cool that's fine like I whatever um but then you have games

where it just goes like way too far um and so and so there's a line there because I think that like a free game with optional purchases is fine but if but if those purchases are barring enjoyable play I think that's a problem and also games that lean very heavily on like ads like overtaking the experience which I know is mainly a mobile thing um but Unity was really uh was really cozy with mobile gaming uh for a bit there probably still is um and so yeah I look at it you know I'm looking at it from a somebody who has only been making money off of Game Dev for like two years um so very very much A lot of my views on are still steeped in like passionate developer like and I and I hope it stays that way um because I really value that part of Game Dev and that part of the community but um but yeah no I mean like if if that had gone through I probably would have left cuz I mean it suck but the outcome of it was a great New Deal for small time devs like the what was it like the cap for having to pay anything

went up doubled so it's 200,000 now which is awesome agree I agree the the the current pricing structure is is really great um um it's I think it beats unreal um but everybody in the comments are going to say how foolish we are and you you watch that people are going to say we're being foolish I I don't I'm like I'm just not I I I I'm not there they that would be such a dumb decision to to go back on what they said it would be so bad it would completely obliterate their brand it would it would be really bad permanently so I just can't see it happening ever again yeah and I don't and I don't want people to think that I'm sitting here being like like it's fine like what they did wasn't n bad no it was bad what they did was horrible but was because they went back they they they took it back and they made the

current agreement far better for their core audience which is beginner and and smaller Dev teams and they made the public the current deal so much better for them that situation for me is sorry go ahead they fired John yeah that's true as well that's true so that's a big deal right they got they changed out their leadership yeah so go ahead sorry no no no yeah you're fine so like all of that it's like when it was first going on looking at Unity the plan that they were trying to push out was that a big enough problem for me to throw away eight years of experience with an engine and with a scripting language yes it was um it w it would suck but yeah that's that's a big enough compromise of like what I of Integrity that I would yeah I would have been done however and and there were some developers that did that were like no that like we can't trust them anymore and I 100% get that but my Stakes are a lot smaller because like the numbers that Unity was like here's here here's where we're going to start charging you I'm going to look right at

the audience CK's nowhere near those numbers I'm I'm completely safe um but after they went back on it and you know they they they made their apologies they fired John they improved the current deal for developers no it's no longer a big enough problem for me to throw away all of these years of experience I have with the engine and I hope it'll get better you know like because I have you know I've been with unity a long time so I've seen all of the garbage um that's been going like you know the fact that the the new input system was is still I think in like beta basically and it was for a long time and there were there were multiple half of the features are in beta andine yeah and like we had multiple years where we just didn't have a multiplayer solution because they deprecated unet and then and then N Net code for game objects didn't come out until like last year and and so like there are huge problems with the engine and and they haven't like the really cool thing about unreal that I I really respect what they're doing right now is their integration of of fortnite and unreal

and I know that some people probably hate fortnite and whatever but from a from from my perspective it's very cool to see like you're like fortnite was made in unreal and it's like and there there's no there's no there's no baloney about it you know it's like it's like the like because it's you could make this game in this engine um and that's cool and unity doesn't have that they don't have that game and they and they've said that they were going to and I think they were working on one at one point um but Unity doesn't have a game that's like this is a game made by unity to show the power of the engine and that just isn't that doesn't that doesn't exist and that sucks because that means that there's nobody at Unity there's no team at Unity that is using their product to make games to see where the gaps are um because there are gaps and and and the community is yelling about them but I don't no know and and I imagine fortnite in development was an awesome learning opportunity for that team to to see all of these cool new features that they could be including in their um in their in their product in

their game engine for the public to use um and again I could be off base I'm kind of guessing here but that's just like my perspective on it um I think that's really cool yeah for sure well man that's that is that is great to to hear your thoughts on on the unity situation because you know social media was just a it was just a dumpster fire and I I didn't really get to talk to anybody who yeah it sucked it was bad who and I didn't get to talk to anybody who wasn't panicking so it's been good hearing from you about that so let's let's wrap this up here I want to see um do you want to do you want to do a little show and tell oh you with guns show and do want shto with guns well yeah I mean it's it's up to you because again I think you're the you're the one with the risk here of uh of of YouTube getting grumpy that there's guns in your video well if if if if I only do what YouTube wants me to do I'm going against my principles and you've inspired me to

be more principled cuz I have I have some guns myself not just my arms but my over in my closet uh over in my closet cuz hey I'm in South Carolina what do you expect are you pointing are you pointing in your closet while flexing your guns right now I can't see you I have to imagine that's I'm not yeah so for this show int tell yes I'd love to see your guns um I can't see them because we're recording locally on our computer so I can't see you right now oh no all right well so I've had so I've I've had my my Mouser c96 on my desk this whole time actually let's see here is there a way to no there's not I'm going to Google search it while you say it so that I can feel like I'm looking at your guns okay okay yes and then and then I'll watch the video the podcast later and I'll be really impressed so go ahead so so I have I have so I'm a gun guy um but I'm not like a gun expert I'm like a gun enthusiast especially guns that are like I collect novelty 22s um so like cuz 22s for those of you who don't know 22s are

a very small caliber um they're not you don't really use them much for like uh you would use them for like hunting large game or anything but they're really fun for shooting soda cans with um and uh and and like target shooting and they're cheap they're really cheap yeah um and 22s don't kick a lot they're not very loud um and so it you know you don't blow your shoulder out so I like to collect novelty 2 like guns that never really made it big because they were just like goofy or impractical um but I also have a lot of the guns from cultic so I have I have a Mouser c96 which is a which which c96 yeah or the the red n this isn't a red n but um the titular gun from uh from cultic um it's my favorite handgun of all time uh since playing Resident Evil 4 yes it's Resident Evil 4 inspired thing um it's also it's also Han Solo blaster in Star Wars is the c96 with a bunch of a bunch of stuff glued to it um was it actually that gun yeah yeah yeah well I don't know if it was like a prop one or a real one but it's yeah it's it's a c96

well yeah like the Stormtrooper rifles are the are the same thing they're like oh I don't want to get this wrong I think they're a Sterling submachine gun I'm not going to look it up now if I'm wrong I'm sorry but they're also I think a real gun with just stuff glued to them um so yeah that's that one uh was it's a gun I've always really wanted to buy but they're really expensive um and so that was kind of like when col it came out and I got my first royalty check um I was like I'm going to do it I'm going to buy it um and so so I got and so I got I got a broom handle paying your mortgage you bought a gun no I did both I did both um I'm going to scoot off camera here I've also got um some of these aren't as cool as the ones in culk because they're legal um but I've also got my my trusty double barrel shotgun and a lot of the shotgun reload sounds in cultic were recorded from this no way really yeah so like the like the sounds of uh of like popping the shotgun open and and slamming shells in it I recorded um actually at my old house um in my my at the time girlfriend's closet she has a a CL like a walk-in closet completely

full of clothing that makes a surprisingly good acoustic uh chamber to recording because there's like no Echo um and then let's see I gotta I'm kind of like tethered here I'm gonna take my headset off for a second um just slide these over a little closer to me oh this feels so weird having all these at my desk okay so then I've got everyone's everyone's favorite the Leever the May's leg lever action rifle um which in the game is a three is 357 this one's 22 um so it's it's a little smaller but I've got that um that's really fun the uh the semi-automatic shotgun which is a chop down um well it's technically a model 11 um but the Browning Auto 5 looks almost identical um the internals I think are a bit different but so i' I've got a legal one because you can't chop them down like that that's bad well that's what I was going to ask um so this one's legal very legal um and then so do you hunt by the way Jason I don't I um I I think that uh

I don't think I could I don't think I could shoot an animal yeah I don't I don't I don't I don't have anything against people who do hunt I'm just like me personally I don't think I could do it you said you're you live in Kansas right yeah yeah yeah so that it's a great place to hunt uh so yeah I I like to hunt like Soup cans uh like line those up and I also have and cult leaders and cult leaders yeah yeah I also have a a replica Sten Mark 5 because oh my goodness getting one of those in good shape is a uh it's a full auto weapon so I as a collector it would be really expensive to get one you can buy parts kits and like weld them together with a semi-automatic uh with semi-automatic internals I think again I'm a gun enthusiast not an expert so if I'm wrong just just call me on it um so yeah I've got like I've got like half the Arsenal and then um that's so cool man I won't be able to get a China Lake because those are mostly in museums I think what's it called a China Lake yeah that's the grenade launcher um it's it was like how do just oh China Lake okay

yeah it's it was like an experimental grenade launcher I think developed for the Marines maybe um but there's there's there's like not very many of them that exist surely you can get one right oh yeah yeah yeah I think uh I think I'm allowed to own I think I'm allowed to own a you know a pump action grenade launcher in Kansas that's probably fine um I think in Kansas probably now I'm I'm being kind of serious there's certain things that you're allowed to get like tanks um that are legal well as long as it doesn't shoot I think is usually it's like it's like it's like you can buy like you can I can buy a grenade launcher I can't get grenades for it I think is where I think is where I think is where the line gets drawn um full the fully automatic weapons are legal depending on if you have a tax stamp or not did you know this I I am not going to spend the money to be a full auto collector I'm that's not not gonna happen I'm not I went to a uh a gun range I won't say with who but it's it's

someone it's another someone at another YouTube channel and uh we went to a gun range and we they really wanted to shoot a fully automatic weapon and I was like well just cuz we're in South Carolina doesn't mean all of a sudden you get to get fully automatic weapon like because people think like in South Carolina it's like free rain um and so we go to the we go to the gun range and and lo and behold there's all these 1980s fully automatic weapons that you can rent oh yeah and so we we rented a couple and it was insane shooting those things and this this is the thing about video games and and I'm glad that you like you you like guns because you know how they're supposed to feel in a video game because if you grow up your whole life playing Halo which I did and then you go and you actually shoot a fully automatic weapon do you know what the person said there was there was two people who went with

me and one of the one of the one of the people persons said it's way louder than I expected oh yeah they I mean they're wearing they wearing hearing protection right yeah but they were like scared they were like it's it's it's kind of scary I'm like yeah of of course it is yeah it's it's it's they're big very dangerous they're big and powerful and dangerous and you have to be yeah it's just like um I uh so a couple of my friends from from Denmark that I met through 3D Realms uh came for our wedding in October um and I took them out shooting because that's not something they had they had really done before and that was fun that was a really what is it with the Danes man that the people I took out were Danish I don't know I it's just that's what you do it's like if you uh it's it's so funny because like uh so a lot of those folks will give me crap for being American and being a gun A gun person um and they'll like you know they'll they'll they'll they'll tease me about it but then I went when I

was up uh when I was in Denmark we had like a like a team building day um for 3D Realms and slipgate and and it was great but we were kind of we were like out kind of in the country and somebody brought like a pellet gun like an air like an air an air rifle and people lost their minds like they were so excited I'm like you see if we were in America I would get out of shot G and you guys would be like it would be awesome you're you're you're you're making fun of me for being excited about guns and you're flipping out over a pellet gun come on like that's it is it is very true and I I went to um Slovakia over the summer and and uh guns are I I believe guns are basically fully illegal there and all they wanted to talk about yeah I went and hung out with some uh students at like this um this like English camp and I helped teach English there oh cool and it was really fun everyone wanted to talk about guns and cuz and and I say well well you should come to America you know because because maybe maybe you can check out

some shoot some guns at a gun range and they they they said I don't want to die because they feel like if they if they get to America they're immediately going to get shot well you know that's like if you if you fly into Chicago maybe yeah yeah I uh I feel like it was it's kind of funny there's a um there's another another person at um at 3D Realms that I used to work with that um not not somebody who was like uh who's left but just like I don't do I used to do graphic design with them actually this whole last year U I was doing graphic design for 3D Realms and um I feel like I'm just like going to identify them at this point anyway somebody I worked with there uh was was from uh Detroit I think and and I am in small town cutesy small town Kansas and so our views on like America are completely different it's it's so funny cuz I'm just like like I love it here like you said earlier I'm a small town guy and so like I I I live in a town of like like less than 2 200 people I have like we have

like a grocery store a gas station a bar a Mexican restaurant like a steak house so we have like just enough stuff and it's great I'm just imagining like Twin Peaks um that small town Vibe there's like a lumber mill over across the corner and a diner yeah no yeah little I'm a small to right exactly I'm a small town guy too and that's that's a great way to close this um podcast because I want I want people listening to know that game development it's it's the best job on Earth but you could do it anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or who you are um and it just takes it I think it takes persistence and and a really good idea and I think I think you're a great example of that oh well thanks I appreciate that get over [Music] here hey thanks for watching by the way

if you haven't downloaded that free 2D game kit below click below it's my treat to you I used this game kit to make a game for PewDiePie in 14 days and actually got to play it with him in front of his audience which is really cool this game kit is totally free it's my treat to you and you can use it however you want you can make a commercial game and make a million bucks off this game kit I don't care or you could just use it for a hobby project it's my treat to you and by the way if you haven't clicked like that would mean a ton to me hit subscribe and also this is important hit that notification Bell here's why if you get notified of when I'm live you can watch me make my next game and let me know in the chat what you think about the game or any ideas you have and you might just show up your chat might just show up in the next video that I upload all right I'll talk to you later bye I love you too