How To Make Games Completely Alone (w/ Lost Relic) — Full Time Game Dev Podcast Ep. 032

look I get it the number one issue you have in making your indie game is probably time right you don't have the time or the energy to make your indie game well I had a great conversation with John he's the owner of lost Relic games and he's working on a game called blooded me John he's like you not only is he a father a husband working a desk job and also running a YouTube channel he's also making his indie game he's honest about well Publishers reaching out and turning them down despite the fact that they might have an income for him he's honest about how it feels to be exhausted and burnt out on your indie game he's honest about what it feels like to be discouraged and to not really feel like this is the right career path for you this conversation is incredibly Frank and I'm so thankful to John for his transparency you're going to learn a ton stick around through the end you've got this um I don't know why but you are one of those YouTubers who

makes me scared um because you're you if I ever made a mistake if I ever did something on YouTube or if I if I ever did a honey scam I don't know if you heard about the honey scam where they took SP sponsors I have yep the honey if I ever did that I feel like you'd be the guy to call me out immediately on YouTube because your your videos are so honest and brutal like for example you you were willing to just shred that publisher on a video when they when they said your game was too violent you just shredded them hi John after consultation with the team we'd like to request a dial down of the game's violence as we feel the game could appeal to a wider audience now I have thought about your request and it did strike me as a little bit odd because the game is of course called blood and me but with that said I do agree that the dial on this violence could be adjusted ever so slightly

firstly with the right skill level you can now perform an execution so that was um that was personal I guess so I wouldn't typically Just sh a random Youtube is it's not really my thing I shredded a few Kickstarter campaigns and had a few upset DMS and I kind of stopped doing that because it's not really the it's not really what I'm trying to do you know what I mean I'm trying to make games and sometimes as a YouTuber you know you got to make content kind of just to buy the time into your next Dev vog or whatever so you know you experiment with different formats and uh yeah so sometimes I I might get myself into trouble with I few those kind of videos but um in terms of the um publisher so over the um I guess past 12 months of development my game has I guess improved a lot I kind of managed to um I'll call it like a style maturation I kind of found a particular Focus I wanted to take it and I took it

there and after I managed to kind of uh cross that barrier a lot of people started reaching out a lot of Publishers and initially you become flattered like hey you got Publishers um reaching out to me you know they must like the game or whatever but but you quickly start to realize that a lot of these people are just reaching out to everyone hoping for a publishing deal I mean I digress a little bit here but you know a lot of Publishers I found um are not not really legitimate Publishers I say in the in in the IND in Indie space many are looking for a cash grab so I had a few of these reach out to me and I kind of started suspecting that um I'm not sure how authentic they were in what they were offering so I felt I could kind had a bit of leeway with them to to play with them a little bit and I I went down the rabbit hole with one of them and I thought well you know let's see where this goes I'll entertain them you know I said I'm you

know interested in um what you have to offer and after a bit of back and forth I I got a request to yeah to make changes to the games like that they were saying well we'll take you on board um but you have to you know tweet make a few critical tweaks I me not there's not a subtle change you're you're you're changing the vision of the game what did they want to change I I found that quite offensive to be honest so what was it that they wanted to change John they wanted me to tone the violence down specifically I mean and I in the video I I made it clear um the game is called blood and me I mean this is very much the hook of the game and it has become the hook um you know gory 2D action combat so to tone that down would be a real disservice to the to the vision you know sure gosh man how how do how do how did you know how did you know that some of these because people listening right now they've probably some people have

probably gotten emails and by the way let let us know in the comments anyone listening if you've ever gotten an email that you know was from just a shady publisher um what how do you know if they're shady I mean their history just does not reflect what they're offering I think that is a red flag right there because I think a lot of these Publishers on on that level I'm talking that kind of dubious duplicitous level I think that in many cases all they will do for you is maybe post to Reddit on your behalf that's about the extent of what they can do and you working in the pr space you're a YouTuber you understand what is the potential and there's only so much you can do like what can a publisher who has 2,000 followers on Twitter I mean and which could be fake for all we know what can they possibly do I mean contact streamers they have the typical promises here we'll contact we have our contacts list our emails

list we'll put you in touch with the the people I mean you can kind of do that yourself and really um when it comes to like um game journalist I don't think that really moves the needle much I'm not sure that's really going to do it so um when you factor in how much you're giving up for um for such a a promise quite often 30 to 40% depending on who you're working with for Life yeah with you know being locked out your account for payments it being paid by someone else that's a lot to hand over on what is essentially just kind of like hey you've been working on your game for five years we're just showing up now and we've got a opening email trust us we're going to get you there and you're going to pay us for life are you kidding me well that that is that is unnerving perspective you know it really is you know there's there's a lot here um and the

there 99.9% of everything in me is in 99.9% agreement with you however Serenity Forge which was my publisher for Never song they were they appeared to be that publisher at the time okay they're not that anymore they're they're doing really well right now and Z the the the CEO said president or coo or owner whatever he's the lead guy he's doing an incredible job leading that company um especially through the the Meer of 2024 he's done an incredible job but at the time which was like I think it was like 2017 or 18 they were tiny like no no real um great like solid IP that they invested in they were always like console ports right that they were publishing and they didn't have a huge I don't know if this is true I'm just I'm kind of guessing here I'm trying to remember I'm not sure they had a huge social media following at the time and I signed a deal with them because I liked

who they were I liked the two lead guys Kevin and z and I signed this deal and in my head during the whole process I was like I don't know if they're going to bring much value here like I felt like I I I could probably bring more value myself so I decided to just do most of the leg work well I thought I was I thought I'm going to be the guy who does the leg work here and if they do a good job then yay but I'm not going to rely on them and I kind of approach just to be completely honest I approach Publishers all that way I always approach it as if you don't carry the weight I will and I'm going to carry it by default the marketing weight I'll carry it by default and if you show up yay thank you so much for showing up but I'm not going to count on you and the reason I'm I am that way is because Publishers tend to let me down however with Serenity Forge holy crap did they show up like they had connections with apple

arcade that blew my mind when they told me the final numbers that that because we ended up signing a deal with Apple so despite the fact that everything on paper was like okay they're they're not really going to probably give me much um in terms of marketing or connections or anything like that they were just the right guys they were just so in a way I I invested in invested we invested in a relationship as opposed to this onp paper credibility whereas I will say that I've signed deals with Publishers where on paper they had the credibility the following the budget the financing and yet they let me down so I'm I agree with you however there is part of me that's like if lost Relic if you guys got um a publishing deal offer

from an unknown publisher it could be that you might be talking to the next raw fury because I was just talking to and I'm I'm G I'll shut up I promise but I was talking to Thomas Thomas Vandenberg the uh the creator of the Kingdom series and he signed a deal with raw Fury before raw Fury was a thing and it was their first game um that they signed and look what happened you know so I don't know what to do with that because I I agree with you like almost 100% but there's also that like it is kind of cool to spin uh spin the chamber and see if you you like land a solid publisher yeah before I I I agree with you with that 1% also like I'm I'm I'm there with you I get it and if the right offer um did come with a I guess a publisher who understood what I'm trying to do and was able to kind of um offer something compelling I'd be I'd be for that for sure so I'm definitely not like anti- publisher or anything like that

but yeah um I guess just to explain the situation and and why I kind of made that video and I was intentially trying to be bit tongue and cheek with it yeah it was great it was I I think the developer probably knew that the publisher probably knew that too sure did you let's let's let's shift gears here to talk about wish list because um first off when I see blood and me is the hook and for people who are listening who don't know what a hook is because I didn't when I started making games a hook or the USP the unique selling point it's the thing that you can immediately grasp from a game like if I look at Hollow night I'm like oh Metroid Venia uh Dark Souls with bugs that's the hook bang got it right with blooded Mead is it true that it's super violent hacking slash where you get drunk is that kind of the the hook cuz I think it should be okay no definitely yeah yeah I think um I was

drinking tooo much beer during that div cycle and I was inspired by the by the sweet Brew sweet nectar but um you know absolutely um it's interesting because I kind of when I started the project I had a vision in my mind and hence the name was kind of there from the beginning yeah but I just couldn't deliver on the vision I just didn't have the um the artistic skills and the taste I think is a big part of it to make it happen and I just kept kind of uh like it just took time to to get to a point where the the vision in my mind could even be converted to to something playable and it's taken a lot of time uh for those have been following the project they know um it has taken time and in a way I could have um I could have abandoned the project and probably should have to years ago or something yeah I know the feel but I made a choice um I made the choice that well I said to myself if I abandon now

at this point without launching yes I'll be free of it and maybe it's it's a good thing because sometimes you just have to let it go and then I'll probably start something new and I might find myself in the same situation two years down the track from that and I'll be forever on this treadmill of not finishing constantly getting to this resistance Point especially when you're working fully solo and you don't have any kind of want to lean on for support um you can you can find yourself constantly there so I made a decision I did a lot of soul searching um a lot of contemplation and um I kind of managed to break through I feel like so instead of starting a new project I decided to keep going and stack stack all the knowledge that I taken um in that time and build on top of it you know I kind of pretended to myself that I had just been inher I just had just inherited the project you know and that was one way to kind of swallow the situation a bit uh more EAS

um well is the is the um is blood and me this is just a side note I wanted to talk to you about this because I wanted to encourage you about something um I'm fascinated by uh coming up with hooks I'm I'm fascinated I'm fascinated by how the games the games that tend to do well have the the strongest hooks that are like they're not they're they're not fragrant they're pungent they're like Colt of the Lamb is like so blatant in your face What The Hook is that it's it's almost like too much but I so many successful games are this way it's so obvious it's so freaking obvious What The Hook is the moment you open the steam page and so I'm curious I just wanted to ask you really quick do you think you should go stronger with the me part of the hook cuz I think you should but I wanted to get your thoughts there like for

example uh alcohol and and beer is those are all of your upgrades the gods the Norse gods are all like gods of barley and gods of Wheat and gods of beer and all everything is related to beer do you think you should do that I I I just wanted to throw that at you because I I thought immed yeah that's an interesting idea um yeah like I mean to be to be to be honest I was kind of people keep going where's the me John where's the me like there was this kind of running joke in the comments of my devlogs like there's blood everywhere but but where's the me and it was like where's the me where's the me but the things I already knew where the me was I just hadn't got to that devlog yet like the work had been done but it just wasn't kind of ready to show yet so I had a lot of loose loose ends to tie off before I um unveiled that kind of uh psychopath um Spartan mode which I did in the last devlog and they kind of put it together um where he drinks the meat and just turns into this kind of raging I love

that I love that so that's Go part of the kind of yeah that ties into the hook I guess like hook in a hook where yeah yeah I think I think uh a violent hacking slash is it's it's enough but I think that when you when you suddenly put alcohol or beer as the upgrade system in my opinion that's what makes it that's what separates this from every other hacker slash where you you can get all these different kinds of beer and me and different flavors and some of them are like more out of control and some of them are are less out of control less less powerful but you can be more in control you know what I mean um so I just wanted to throw that at you it's funny you say that because um that was actually the original concept that I had going back some time now and I I had the original concept was that you have

different barrels that have different Ms you could you could man ah this taking me back but you know this is this is how loose the project um scope was the design scope I just throwing everything in there like no game design document like let's see what works and because sometimes you have to actually build it to know right like you can craft and that's part of the reason why things take so long because you have an idea on paper you're like well will it work will it won't work you have to often build it it's really hard to conceptualize a system working prior to building it and quite often you got to take the weeks or months depending on how or days if you're lucky to build it only to throw it out if it's not working you know so my my project is like a has a debris field of all these kind of Legacy systems which I've been kind of clearing out in in um recent months but uh there was a system where you could actually there was a gardening system in this game there was like a cozy gardening vik com I don't know like there was a

Gardening System where you could cultivate different herbs and Brew to actually Brew me and they would come together and you could pee on the plants to make them grow like there this the weirdest stuff in there and and maybe some of that stuff was good you know but and I should probably bring it back but um so you could craft different be uh Meats I think I had like four and drinking each one would give you a different Power one would make you fly one would make you run fast one would make you um swim and whatever else and then but it became so um challenging from a design perspective to bring this all together I had a flying system I had a swimming system I had a you know it's like now design levels for this you know it's it was it was just yeah often times I think oftentimes it's as simple as a visual change of an item like I could be wrong here cuz I haven't released it I haven't released Twisted Tower yet but

with Twisted Tower what happened was dude I I know exactly where you've been by the way with this whole like what am I making I have no idea what this is and you you create so much stuff and then you trash so much stuff that game was we're still I'm still working on it I say we it's just me now I'm still working on it and I think we we remade that games like game like three times like just emotionally exhausting because is expensive but that said what I found was often times just throwing in thematic stuff on top of a standard genra can is all you need so like for blood and Mead it could be like what what's the health that you collect in the game um drumsticks like a classic drumstick I would change that cheese wheel I would change it to beer it's like you got your light beer and it's like a can and it has like Viking horns on it you know it's like a it's like a literally like a Bud Light but it's for

it's for Vikings um and every single thing thematically um all you got to do is just swap it out with beer and the reason I say that I'm not saying you have to do this and I'm not saying I'm smart I'm just it was just an idea I had right when we started the call I was like I want to tell them this because what you could do is instead of creating all this crafting stuff and you just go no I'm just going to swap out as much as I can with beer and then there's like the ultimate rage beer um which is like the me you know and the reason I say that is because it's a it it may not be great for gameplay it's like what it's not changing anything with gameplay but what it does and this is what people listening and what I'm learning um or what I didn't understand and what people might not understand is that you have to figure out a way to get people to stick around for your trailer and so if if the trailer starts like immediately with the two hooks which is he drinks a ton of beer and then he collects some beer um and he throws the

beer can away or he throws the I don't know what that horn is the beer horn away and then he Powers up and then he starts beating up people and blood spraying everywhere if you start with that hook and then it spreads throughout the trailer all of a sudden people are going Ah that's what makes this unique it's not just a hack and slash it's all about booze and blood right and it's just atic change good stuff yeah yeah I don't know I didn't I didn't plan on doing this podcast and just telling you what to do I just had this idea so I just wanted to I like it to be honest I really appreciate it because you know I've been in my own head for so long and um as time goes on and you and you you haven't shipped you start to lose you go into these projects feeling very confident in your design ability and your ideas and things like that but as time goes on you you have your moment your little hiccups where you trip a little bit and you start to question

your own design ability you know and think am I any good do I know what I'm doing you know like this is the the thing I've been running into lately so I've been kind of um yeah just I've been in a rut it's been a difficult year um you know it's been difficult I just you know I I stopped making YouTube videos I completely went radio silent I closed my patreon I took emails you could not contact me for like 10 months and and with that probably you missed opportunities and and whatnot you know but sometimes you got to do that just to um you bury yourself into work to make progress what happened I just felt like I couldn't like the the Finish Line kept moving you know like I was climbing the mountain and the the top of the mountain just kept the mountain kept growing and I've got you know I Keep

to-do list and notebooks and they're just like thousands of pages of just pens um scribbles and I'm thinking wow this is a lot of effort expenditure a lot of energy that has gone into this like this should be further along you know and I started kind of just kind of um becoming disappointed in the progress and realizing that something needed to change and the YouTube though it's been fantastic for um bringing exposure to the project and not just that you know I've I've I watched some of your um previous discussions uh I think with with Ponte where you guys were talking about devlogs and YouTube and how is it worth it basically um and it depends on what value you're trying to extract from it you know um if it's if your metric for success is purely wishlist growth or or

um um you know this kind of exposure it's one thing but I got a lot of feedback from the dev Vlogs I had so much great Community feedback where people had some great ideas that went straight into the I was like that's that's it I got to put that in you know and I was very receptive I never um I know some developers can be very sensitive with with feedback I think when you first get started you you don't want to hear anyone's opinion you know but after a while you realize hey man this there gold out there you know start digging and a lot of it is quite often um you you know not um not not what you want but there is stuff out there and when you see it you know it you know and you're like and I quite I love just responding to them and saying thank you you know youve and I was planning to make a video with all the different changes I've made um and I've kept a screenshot of all those different comments that change the course of the project you know and I'm so grateful for those for those moments yeah um I think that sure where I was going but in that sense the YouTube has been worth it but

it had to it had to get shut down I think you're brought up YouTube because it was taking way too much of your time right is that what it was or is it was it exhausting you or you know and it's like what's the point like what what am I getting out of this and so many people so many people get frustrated when they hear me or they hear well I'll just speak for me some people get frustrated when they hear me talk about my YouTube channel as a marketing tool and it's a business and I'm like it's so it takes so much effort to to build YouTube video uh uh make YouTube videos that to to want a YouTuber to not make money from their channel to me is is kind of it's it it's it's an asinine way to think about somebody like I want this YouTuber to make me content that's not sponsored or it's not going to make them wish lists or any money I just want this to be a YouTube channel that's pure and perfect and there's no motivation

behind it and that to me I would never want a YouTuber to make no money off of their videos like there's got to be something they're getting out of it or else they're just going to be grinding for no reason yeah and I see a lot of Game Dev YouTubers doing this where they're making content and I don't know what their end goal is I think maybe I want to cheer them on and say yay you're building an audience congratulations and and you're building a community and I think that's great but like like what happened with you it's like you're going to burn out like you're just going to it's just going to you're going to be bled dry um so I want people to know how to find sponsorship gigs or know how to get wish list or sell something right like sell sell a resource or something so that it can help fund their projects do you feel like there's something wrong with that mentality um no um you know we live in a

a world where effort should be exchanged for some kind of um monetary game basically you know and whereever it's um the ads themselves or you know everyone that just to um working in the making videos in the tech space everyone's running ad blocker so there's like no money coming from ads if you're making like if you're making videos for like car channels and stuff like they just make a killing I remember watching some like car Enthusiast Channel and he was showing his analytics I'm like man look at that CPM that's not what I'm getting what was it you know man I can't remember but it was like you know three four five times more I was like what the hell man I was like man this must be like an ad blocker thing or yeah maybe not the CPN but overall how much they were getting like per uh per views that's what everybody ask like whenever whenever it's so funny I don't know if you've encountered this before John but um have you ever had a young person or their parents say hey what do you do and you say oh I'm a YouTuber and I make

games and immediately the kid who's standing with the parent is like oh I want to do that you know uh or the parent says oh my son wants to or my daughter can can they talk to you they want to do that too it's like the two coolest jobs and the first thing you hear is oh man you must make so much money off of AD Revenue you know that's the first thing that that I'll hear is oh it's that you getting a lot of money from the ads and I'm like that is my worst income source um It's ADS so I don't even turn them on anymore for these videos I just turn it off um this one might have it but I I don't even turn them on I'm I'm like it's just going to make people I feel like they're going to watch less of the video if it's keeps getting interjected with ads I don't know maybe I'm wrong I I thought um I thought maybe well I heard rumors you know hear rumors about the YouTube algorithm that if there's no ads on the video that they might put it down because I mean that makes sense from a business perspective because they're trying to make money and if your video has no money because if it I mean

one offs say here and there but if that became like a trend you know that would it would lower their their um profit margin so sure I don't know well okay so what's your goal what's your goal with coming back to YouTube like it's I mean you don't have to share your goal but I feel like there should be some kind of goal right look you you you made a like what you said before was was correct where there should be um some kind of purpose um Beyond just making content to build like a Community there should be some long-term vision and for me there certainly is you know um I'm a kind of educator at heart I've always when I started the channel I was doing tutorials um and a lot of this kind of content and that was good and that came with that came with its own kind of pitfalls because everyone tries to reach out to you for the um kind of simplest Unity like uh it's right there just Google it first first result man but um yeah so but that but that comes with a territory you know like people look up if you position

yourself as a teacher people are going to um you know treat you that way and and people ask teachers you know um sure so I'd like to go back to that at some point um uh I think that'll be yeah I mean I was making um Unity kits and stuff and I made a bit of profit from my channel promoting those for a little while and I'd like to get back to doing that and to be honest I have always Grand visions of course like all of us do um of what you know where we want to be and what we want to do but I feel like my life is on H until the game is done I because I feel like any of those things as minor as it is is going to be a distraction and I've got you know all these lists of hey I want to do you know this kind of business that kind of business um courses and udmi and probably already should have banged something out you know but um yeah I knew that I knew that it would be a distraction from what I'm effectively trying to decor what I'm trying to do which is make games sure um

because you got to support courses you know whether it's UD Demi or otherwise um and that becomes like a separate kind of job so in intentionally I've tried to keep the YouTube stuff from not being a job and I have turned down pretty much all sponsorships I've got a B you monitor here that I have to bloody videotape next week it be like pretty much the first sponsorship yeah um that should be fun but um I figured I figed what the hell man let's do it you know um well I kind of inally tried to keep it from oh sorry I wanted to intentionally keep it from becoming a job it because I didn't want to fall into the Trap of needing to rely on YouTube while I have other unsettled business with the game because you know you get a few thousand doll from a uh Advertiser and all of a sudden you're like hey man I like that let's do that again and then it becomes part of your income stream and you expecting a certain um level for your you know it

integrates into your uh into your quality of life you know whatever um income you you receive and then it's hard to then say nope stop you know so it's almost I felt it's better just not get involved in that right now yep but you know it's a sometimes I um make some these could be mistakes you know what I mean but I I just feel like I I going to not get be distracted basically that is so good man um and by the way there there's if people are listening there's a little bit of lag I'm talking to you across you know the entire world so there's a little bit of a lag here I'm in you're in Australia if you didn't uh mention it I had to I had to jet lag myself for this discussion we have a 15 we have a 15 hour um time difference if I'm not mistaken yeah oh yeah oh yeah but anyway um you know when it comes to uh when it comes to what is it the the purpose of YouTube

um for me it's always been a drisker so for me but I know exactly what you mean when the goal is oh maybe I can get this extra drip of income to drisk my studio uh then all of a sudden it's like it becomes this like constant no maybe okay Tuesday I'll take on a sponsorship I'll do a video on Tuesday I'll do a sponsorship on Wednesday and it just you get greedy with sponsorships or selling stuff or what ever and I've been there and I've done that and 2025 for me the goal is to be like no Thomas Twisted Tower focus on Twisted Tower get this freaking thing done stop worrying so much about doing YouTube for me though YouTube is a great way like okay so like the way the world works now is different than like the 90s right the '90s it's you get a job or you build one business and that's that now you can do it all you can build two business business is and have a job and you can just sort of have them running because of all this

automated Tech right or AI or whatever um especially with digital products and so for me um I love I love the idea of having one business that's I'm just making games selling games but then you have another business that provides uh income when this one is suffering so if the game Studio suffers or for example in my case let's say I finished Twisted Tower all the publisher money runs out and then the game has to recoup what the publisher Advanced that period is like the desert period it's like I've got three months to wait for this thing to recoup so that's where that income comes in from let's say YouTube right um whether it's a course or a resource or something like that um and so I love the idea if people can manage it of having multiple streams of income as a game developer because like I've just been I've been I don't know what your thoughts on this John are

but like the more and more I I'm in the game industry the more I'm realizing I feel like I'm in a giant Casino you know it's like I'm GNA pull this lever and I hope that this game makes money now obviously you you can learn how to play your hand and gamble better but it is a gamble I think it's more of a gamble than let's say owning a rest well restaurants are tough too but I've heard restaurants are one of the hardest businesses to run um but you know like a a car shop where you fix cars it's like I could start that business or maybe I could be an accountant or a CPA or I could maybe make this game about Vikings that cut each other's heads off and get drunk and I can make money that way do you feel that way about your games yep and yeah absolutely and because look I've got a um I've got now I've got a good amount of wish list relatively speaking I'm you not in that upper tier I I I I can just say it I guess I'm kind of closing in on 20,000

which is great and and I'm I'm yet to go from my full kind of marketing cycle I'm I'm yet to even upload a proper trailer yet you know what I mean yeah yeah so there's a few things I still have to do so um when it settles if I can get close to 30 or something and launch that'll be good you know that's more than I was kind of expecting when I started the project um I mean obviously go for what you can um but but even with that I just think well that doesn't mean anything you know like it it means something but it certainly does not reflect any kind of like um uh success necessarily because it is a lever to some degree and launching on the wrong day like a very unfortunate day can completely wipe you out I was watching this um one game uh I made a tweet about it or a post about it um I can't remember but it it post they they launched their game on it was a looking game but it was on the um

like the day of the presidential election or something like that on the results and oh I heard about this the the the the review numbers like I was watching them because I I like to study launches of games and I will screenshot them over the course of a week like day one day two day three just to kind of see um how they flow and this one was one I was actually personally watching and I was like wow that's interesting um but it I I mean look there could have been other factors involved you know I mean obviously there's there's so many different variables when it comes to launching again not just simply the day you launch you know but I do think that probably had an impact on it just because nobody was um just nobody was I mean it was such a potent media cycle you know like people were just so locked in on that that everything else I mean people might be forgetting kind of exactly what that I mean I'm in a different country and I was kind of you know barely paying attention to what was coming out on Steam in that wow in that week you know so the American election the American

election is just sort of this uh shock wave throughout the whole world for like a week is that what you're saying well it felt like that yeah yeah yeah who was that Jason yeah that was Jason Smith he he made a game called bone rooms and he said he launched it during election and it didn't perform he said that on the that might be that might have been another one might have been a different game I mean look there's probably a few people but yeah I do agree that there is this kind of level of um uncertainty when uh you release and and the big problem with that is I put a lot of thought into this and quite often I think man is this the career I should have rolled of all the things I could have been doing this is it John this is it the hardest job in the world I mean it's every single it's like 10 different skill sets in one man and it's Arts become real estate agent I know right I have some friends who are real estate agents and they're just they're raking it in dude driving

Mercedes benz's and yes yes yes but it's a c you know but the thing is we're addicted to the creative to to the craft you know and it's kind of hard to explain that to people who are doing non-creative jobs because some people um pick their vocation purely odd money and that that's that's fine but some people they work backwards like what's going to pay x amount and let's work backwards from there and pick their career where some people um will go more organic kind of um creative route where they kind of follow what works for them what feels right and if you become good enough and dedicated enough then that can also lead to that that that same outcome you know and you can come at it from a different trajectory but the challenge is at the moment the bar in the indie game Market has become so high over the past few years you know I I I started in the flash era I think you may have two yes l in to new grounds and I I released a stack of these kind of smaller games and

some which were even commercially successful relatively speaking for the time I had like a like a car game um called clutch bur that got sponsored for like $10,000 from um wow F FGL Flash game license they had a sponsorship program um so for for that era back then that was um that was not bad I mean I would I would ask you not to look up this game I am looking it up right now and I recognize it it's so funny I recognize this game John you know what's interesting I played it in high school you You released this game now nobody would play but you know back then it had like 40 million um views on like armor games or whatever it was it's like huge numbers you know you felt like a god do you remember when you released your first games on flash and I remember this I got like four I think I got a million a mill I think it's four million plays now but I got like a million plays on my first game or one of my first games called coma I remember going to I was in uh

it's like my last semester of high school I remember walking through the halls and I was like I am such a badass and I I was making like I made like I was making like $400 on you know these non-exclusive sponsorships and I was just like boom boom boom boom boom I remember uh andon games that was one of my first sponsorships I took and I all my friends were making like work at like pizza like Papa John's pizza or something making $5 an hour and I was like I felt like I was so cool and then of course all the money dried up so fast you know $20,000 I think $20,000 was what I had made it's amazing how quickly that goes when you have it when you have the money and it's in your bank account all of a sudden you're like well actually you know I could probably buy this and I could buy that and I get it goes so quickly and so you realize you realize that that Godlike feeling you have you it goes away so quickly and it's not

the correct it's not an appropriate feeling to have for one um I'm I'm being I'm sort of confessing my sins here but also you get you crave it again and you crave it again and you crave it again and so that's why people kept releasing these small little flash games did you do that where you just kept releasing them absolutely yeah yeah I loved it it was so much fun and and the turnaround was you know um one month or or whatever you know you do and but it was very much the industry was very much kind of hobby driven I don't think anyone was really looking at as a career I mean you could make pocket money and but it wasn't really like hey I'm going to quit my job it's something you did kind of just for the for the for the shits and giggles you know and if you got paid from it that was really good where now like with the kind of steam error coming into it um that that whole and obviously flash pay um dying it's become a different thing now um Indie kind of what it was sort of doesn't I mean it exists but it's very hard to be commercially

successful with that kind of perspective however with that said it is kind of coming around a little bit and you can see that with like Pony's um recent game the climbing game that was like a really good example of a I think he mentioned he didn't even have a title screen on that you know yes no title it it was dude why am I not making games like this with no title screen I thought the same thing John I was like what I there I'm going through this strange um it's it feels like my my mind is opening up it's like it's like a Zen moment where I'm going okay there's G there there's there's a game needs a gimmick now pont's game has a very strong gimmick I don't know if you've played it but I played it last week and I hated it in all the right ways um for people who don't know it's a game a difficult game

about climbing and you use the right right click as one hand and left click is another hand and you you climb up a mountain right and it's a rage game and I realized all he needed to do and there's going to a giant asterisk here all he needed to do was come up with a really really fun gimmick and that gimmick can take eight hours to make right it could take you maybe maybe a week tops to come up with the or to to build out the gimmick but the process of coming up with the gimmick that's the Brilliance that's expensive or it it's not it's expensive either you pay in Talent OR you pay in time right and some people have the talent already stored away in their little Talent bank and people like Pony they're just like bang there's the idea but some people they have to spend years just like laying in their beds thinking about what is my freaking gimmick and I struggle with that like I struggle with being able to

come up with a gimmick cuz my games and this brings me to the other side of the equation and maybe you I hope you understand what I'm saying here but like the other side of the equation is some some developers they just make really good games that have that don't really have a gimmick I played a game uh yesterday it was called constants have you heard of this game constants no um or maybe I've seen the screenshots if you want to Google it while we're talking you can but this game is like straight up Hollow night it's just Hollow night that's all it is but it plays and feels and looks so good that I don't care I don't care if it's Hollow night I get to play Hollow night again there's not really a gimmick I mean there's like like we talked about earlier where you can interject a thematic Vis A visual that's thematic but it's not necessarily a mechanical gimmick it's so for example you have like a paintbrush and you can like Dash

and you look like paint when you dash it's like that's not really a necessarily A gameplay gimmick but it's a thematic one but my point is this is that I thought two weeks ago maybe three weeks ago I thought we're in the gimmick era you have to have a strong gimmick if you're game's going to do well for example uh building a cult right that's the G Cult of the Lamb that's the gimmick you got to have the gimmick a difficult game about climbing the gimmick is right and left click for your hands and you climb MH but now I played I played constants yesterday and my brain was like I was like wait a second this is the game I want to play I mean I love a difficult game about climbing it's fun but for me personally I want to play constants because even though there's not really a strong gimmick here it it's like a it's like a it's like a delicious homey meal of

beef stew I've had it my whole life and I want to have it again and again and again and so there's there's part of me that's saying I think the industry might be going backwards like it's going back to its roots do you know what I'm saying I'm not sure if any of that made sense no no absolutely um I I just made a like over Christmas I have a tradition where I play uh kind of game that I enjoy and what iron meat uh which is was basically just like a 2d um just a basically a re U not a remake but a kind of spiritual successor of the original Contra there was nothing really new it was it was it had pretty good um you know like I think like 600 um um reviews yeah overwhelmingly positive 636 and I think I think they've done relatively well I mean I don't know it was oh so it was actually one person who did it all they had a published was like a solo developer Ian um y that's pry release yeah that's and That's a classic arcade

game more or less you know kind of going back to just that um you know because you know how you get these trends that pass through the Indie space every's like oh this new trend backpack battles you then everyone's kind of like trying to clamber on um but this whole kind of um deep game Rogue replayability thing came in a few uh some time ago now but it's kind of still there and it it's um freaked a lot of people out it's been freaking me out where you get to a point with the project it's like Hey where's the replayability in my game you know what I mean there is none like not well there is some but not to that level of like dead cells or something where you can play it for for 80 hours or something like that like forever where and I know with your previous uh game so maybe you can you can speak to this as well where um your my current game is is similar in a sense to your U 2D Sky scrollers stripe Once Upon a coma in in

that they are um content driven experiences MH you burn through the content that's pretty much it and how much content is there you know probably a few hours typically speaking if you know and that few hours of content will take years in that kind of genre of game these 2DS scrollers are extremely timec consuming to make because you constantly need fresh art for the different areas um bosses lot of unique stuff you can reuse some stuff but you do need to kind of keep it novel and fresh as the player moves through the world where in a game like um well in in a lot of some some Rogues you can you you're replaying the first level for for you know countless of hours quite often um and so you're getting maximum reuse um so we the expectation on Indie developers has grown in a sense I believe where um you know people consider how long game is and I think that's trickled down from Tria I guess

in a sense where Tria started making bigger games longer games you know you look look back at the Xbox 360 era well even before that um take GTA and gr um Red Dead Redemption aside there were a lot of games that were just kind of like six hour games um you know 7 hour games and they're Triple A so um relatively to that an indie game should be you know 3 hours you know based on what we can actually do with our time and resources and money um but then you see like a Content driven game and you read the reviews and people would be like oh this game was only eight hours and they give it a thumbs down and I'm thinking like the amount of times I've read this because obviously um I I study games that are similar to mine in terms of how they do I I love to read the negative reviews of games that are kind of in the genre I'm building it's so useful to see what annoys people what p PES people off and I'll I can make a little folder of

negative reviews and I'll I'll use them as a reference for my own systems like I don't want to make that mistake or Y you know but um but it's interesting when people do bring up things like time and that has been one of the things that kind of had me making more levels and dragging out my gameplay where now I think I feel like I've got probably like five to six hours of of gameplay and a story kind of driven content driven um game you know Adventure RPG sidescroller yeah and but that's all I can give until I make a rogue light you know but do you have kids John I have I have a full-time job I got a wife and two kids sleeping in the other room okay so very limited time here I know right so the reason I ask is because what kind of games do you want to play you know do you want to play these games that are

highly replayable um very Dynamic Rogue Rog like or procedurally generated games or tons of upgrades or do you want to sit down have a glass of whiskey and play Contra you know it's a sincere question I like to ask Dad's this yeah no totally it's it's it's the it's the latter and and just to clarify something when I said I have limited time I mean not not in terms of this interview but in terms of my um Indie Dev output yeah yeah I got you but yeah I love to just pick up and I just live love to pick up and um play a game and you know I just recently got um God of all Ragnarok I was on special I was I'll get that I knew I would never finish it but I thought I'll check it out and you know I this quick time um scene after quick time scene um just story stuff I was like man I just want to play a game here you know so I end up just turning

it off and man putting in my like Nest mini or something to play quick game and I love those games don't get me wrong I love those big games but I'm just finding um less and less time I love the romance of it like in my mind I have this kind of fictitious scenario where I'm kicking back and finishing a 80 hour game or something like I used to but the mental energy anymore some degree well that's why I feel well it's the kind of guilt also you just want to you just want to be working on the game quite often not so not guilt guilt is not not the right um way to put it but quite often you just feel the time moving you're like man this is productivity time you know oh yeah I know the feeling and you know for me okay I was talking about this with um a friend of mine actually um his name is Jason and he he shows up on my live streams a lot he's one of my mods but he lives at actually down the road for me and he came over and we were hanging out and I said there was somebody who

tweeted at me or Edmond McMillan or somebody I we were like wrapped up in this sort of tweet string and the person was like I need advice help me help me help me I have kids and I'm a father and I'm just I'm struggling to find motivation like you guys have and I'm like I'm doing this fulltime this is my job I'm not I'm not making games on the side I did that in my 20s you know when I didn't have kids when I had time to be selfish and spend like but what by selfish what I mean is like to have gears and I want to ask you about this as a father to have gears spinning in your head all the time while your kids are playing with you is not good like to have your idea how do I make blood and me do this or how do I make the character do this or oh this bug I can't figure out this bug and your kids are trying to crawl on you MH it is

not good and so I think it was Ed who responded and said give yourself some credit dude you've got kids like that is incredibly diff and it's hard for people to like if you don't have kids and you're listening right now I promise I'm not trying to be pretentious or like gatekeep but until you have a maybe two kids um one kid is hard enough but once there's two it's like your life is completely different and I told myself I wouldn't be that guy but once I had the kit once I had two it was like nope you're going to be that guy and the guy is laying on his couch with his head neck his head is propped up by a pillow and half of his belly is showing and he's watching football that's the that's the guy I became because you're just exhausted you're exhausted you've got your full-time gig then you then you're hanging out with your kids and they wear you out all the good way all the best ways and so I bring all this up because

I ask how are you handling this as a father working a full-time job and you're making games full-time but like on the side you're working on blood me what is how is this going for you well I've had to I've had to put a lot of myself into I've had to compromise a lot to the point where sometimes I but um Let me let me try to think of the correct angle to come at this because it it's definitely hard and I've had to go to a lot of Dark Places mentally to to get through like I've I've had I've I've regularly not not so much anymore but it still happens sometimes I will go to sleep with this

sense of dread just dread and quite often it's it's because I've had a tough day of development or just you know you can get stuck on a bug sometimes something so stupid and it will make you question everything like do I even know how this how this works how this engine work do I have you start to question your fundamental understanding of the simple stuff but quite often just means you need you need a good night's sleep you know so I've learned a lot of um hacks and tricks with myself um to know when to call it first of all um I used to just burn past way past midnight into the early hours on a holidays it can still happen but um but I've had to learn to listen to my body listen to my mind get kind of very well acquainted because I'm um you got to learn to um you got to learn to be your own best friend and also harshest critic oh there's there's a lot that

that could be said here um because it's a it's a very fial situation for the most part do you have trouble turning your brain off from your game absolutely yeah I I have like perhaps you do I suffer from the Affliction of constant thoughts creative thoughts U just problem solving my wife will often catch me and I'm just like writing writing code with my finger in the air and she'll just laugh oh and she and she'll mock me she'll make gestures back he's doing that thing again where I'm like solving equations or writing like shudo code with my finger in the air um so things like this go on and you know I'll be in the middle of the lounge room you know playing a a game or something and I'll pull out the camera and I'll take photos of the TV because I like to rather than taking screenshots because I I I like to play on the TV these days as opposed to computer it's bit more so I'll be in the L room with with the kids out and I'll be jumping up to take

photos of the TV you know and the kids be like Mom dad's taking photos of the TV again you know things like this so there's a lot of kind of peculiar behavior that goes on that um a lot of idiosyncrasies um which are part of their creative process um but I have learned after having some serious burnouts um some time ago I was like this can't go on I need to get on top of this um so kind of personal protocols to to deal with this stuff and I pretty much I don't want to say you know I more or less don't burn out anymore like if that makes sense because I've I feel like I've burnt out so many times and I've I've come to understand what that Red Zone feels like so often it's like I I'm so acquainted with the heat of the fire that you know now I can kind of dance around it's like oh that's that feeling again you know it's like oh I know this I've been here before it's it's for familiar it's like it's it's warming now but it it doesn't um it doesn't ruin me like it used to um and I

know look you know some people would be like well this sounds like this crunch culture grind I mean no because these are your own things and you you do it because you kind of love it and you want to do it it's different if you're being told to do this by a um a boss or it's a very different situation like that's crunch if you have to sleep under your desk at a studio but when you're doing it for yourself where you have a like a creative expression wouldn't really call it crunch CU you don't have to be doing it you can stop at any moment no one's putting a gun to your head you know crunch is only earning win is kind of unavoidable and you're kind of being forced into that situation um but anyway um major digression but yeah I do a lot of little things I to clear my mind put it that way yeah I assume you work out I saw I saw the your your biceps earlier and I was like oh this this guy works out um I think I think you've got the edge on me no I I I'm actually trying to lose some weight I I feel like I've I've I'm

starting to get a little bit uh dad dad bought a little bit but granted I've got three kids so I you know that's that's what happens you know what what what's the uh I wanted to ask really quick though what what is this burnout like what why are you going why are you putting yourself through this like what's the point um you know why why do you need to get this game done um that's that's an excellent question I'm not sure I've ever I've ever ask myself that I mean there um yeah there is no like reason to to to to there's no um um there's no outcome that I can't live without but I I guess it's it's stepping into the unknown I think that's what it is I have a sense for of vure you know I like to try things that are difficult and this has certainly proved itself to

be extremely difficult um and kind of test the boundaries of what's possible and I think just the act of creating something and people playing it you know because I used to I experienced that with in the flash era so I know what that feels like and it's so rejuvenating for the soul to have someone um um play your creation or as an artist maybe like watch your movie or um you know look at your painting I'm sure it's a very similar thing but there's something to that it's been ineffable I think it's a it's it's a deep something deep in the human spirit and condition that there's something there which is at the core of humanity and I think that's what we're kind of playing with here with this craft and and I think it's not it's not trivial at all I think it's kind of fundamental to who we are you know to get a little bit esoteric here um so I guess that's what drives me you know that's that um that pursuit of um you

know following the Muse or whatever you want to call it yeah what um what is how does this reflect in your family life and you can we can cut anything you want but I'll speak for me first I'll go first and then you don't have to answer if you don't want but for me it's gotten to the point now where my wife is like look y you know it was cool and when you were in your 20s like I was all there for you as your cheerleader like this is so cool Thomas is building a game studio now she's like this is a job it's a job so she doesn't want to hear me complain like I did when I was in my 20s she doesn't want me going up to her and saying oh I'm so scared and I'm so upset and I'm so frustrated I put all this time into this game and I'm scared it's not going to do well she's like bro you're 35 you've been doing this for over a decade put your big boy boots

on uh and treat this like a business get it done she's very matter of fact she she is so um uh what's the word uh she treats she treats me with a ton of like it's like respect it's like you I know that you can put put your chin up pull your shoulders back and power through this I don't want to hear you whine and complain and most people would say man I don't want my wife to talk to me that way I want to be treated with like Grace and comfort and gentleness but the truth is is that that's not what I personally need and she knows that because she knows that I'll milk that so the way that I approach this now is this is a business this is a job and I'm going to do everything I can to confidently pursue it without being miserable CU it's just not going to work if I am

miserable so that's my side if you're willing to answer what's that what's this like with your family yeah um so the kids obviously love it yeah that's making a game and they often do little pictures and stuff but um I mean I think the stuff with with the wife or with the PARTA um is is significant and because it's that whole um we talking about kind of work life balance here you know and the wrestle the um which to a degree is unavoidable um I feel like there is no such I mean it's been said before that there is kind of no such thing as work life balance to a degree like you you can have this naive notion of it and I was like yeah you go to look there is but there also isn't depending on how far you want to take it right yeah um I look at sometimes people like Elon Musk and I'm like I don't I don't get it you know I don't yeah how is he doing how is he I know there's kind of levels there's levels to this stuff you know but

obviously he's probably not having an exceptional relationship with each one of his kids you just can't do all these things without right I mean you got to compromise right and that's you kind of you you win some and you lose some and that's how that's how it is so for me I've tried very hard to um be aware of what it is that I do and how it affects uh my wife and my kids because if you don't keep that in check your life will fall apart very quickly and um had I kind of continued the trajectory that I was on previously I probably would have lost my marriage um yeah absolutely because was that last year not last year I think this going going back a couple of years now um because marriage is hard to begin with you know like two people trying to understand each other and getting to know each other over a period of time and you're kind of living together it's It's Tricky you know you got to um yeah

there's a lot there's a lot of compromises right and it's the hardest thing in the world develop yeah underneath underneath being a parent it's the hardest thing in the world and Indie Dev doesn't really offer too much compromise if you really want to be all in like if you want to be all if you want just want to dabble with it on the side and kind of whatever happens but if you want to be commercially successful you know make a market viable game that's not that's no joke because there there's a lot more to it behind the scenes than quite often people realize so are kind of just uh looking at it peripherally or just it you know there's obviously the honeymoon phase that everyone gets enamored with but beyond that it's just like man you know what I mean multiple input support you know plugging in different console controllers and having the correct prompts come up and detecting all the you know and [ __ ] like this um but um but I've I have a pretty understanding wife and she's a creative as well um so

I kind of I'm I'm fortunate in in that regard because I um you got you got you got to pick your partners right I think this is an important rule as well because some don't make it you know and um you have to make sure that the person you're with is kind of um compatible with with that lifestyle and that's got to be kind of clear early on um because that's yeah Indie Dev especially if you're doing it solo is all consuming it really is I mean at this point I'm doing the you know like I I know you're moving into solo now too I saw you mention um so you know you got programming you've got design work you got potentially artwork um and then doing PR promotion managing a Discord Community I've got a Discord as well you know like 5,000 people wow um I used to be a lot more active there U like directly helping people but I had to

kind of rebalance things a little bit thankfully I've got a lot of uh fantastic moderators there what's up Ash um so yeah like I mean there's no kind of simple pragmatic answer it's very much a kind of um feel it out kind of thing you know where you you give a little you take a little and you hope it works out I love what you said about um picking picking your partner cuz um there's so many times when I'm having a conversation with my friends or my family or something and I'm talking about a new development with like a publisher or the game or YouTube some new business strategy or some new game mechanic and I'll say and I'm so I'll be talking to a family member I'll be saying it worked you I'm so surprised it worked like recently we're we're about to do a sponsorship with a sponsor um and I've always wanted to do the a relationship with the with um or at this

level with this sponsor and my wife will she'll go she'll look at me and do this because what she's saying is I told you and that you didn't need to freak out Thomas I told you you just needed to be patient and she's always told me stop stop the spiral dude like everything's fine the reason I bring that up is because that's what I personally need in my wife you know my personality needs someone to say chill chill whereas some people they need a wife that's tell me more and and and and I'll listen and I'll hear you whereas with me I'm a verbal processor and so I'll just vomit and it doesn't but it doesn't make things better it makes things worse if I just keep talking about something I get worse and worse and worse and worse so what she does she knows me so well we she's known me more almost half of my life now we started dating in high

school uh she's like how about we stop talking about this and you just take a chill pill like take it easy breathe and it's like okay I just actually I don't need to talk about this I just need to go get in the cold plunge and then that's it like that's it you know I just need to be shocked out of my my mental spiral so a partner it's it's like a puzzle piece you know it's like you need to find that that perfect fit for your personal it it's not easy you know no hey I wanted to ask you since you're here just about your your game like you've moved from 2D to to 3D with this game and I'm thinking it was kind of um kind of an attempt to go to kind of a next level in a sense um would that be right kind of move into more of a like double A let's call it mhm yeah that was the the impetus and and clear I mean obviously that's not necessarily true

that just because you change Dimensions suddenly you make you make more money or uh it's going to be more profitable or whatever MH you know so have you have you found it um well I think the answer is going to be yes but have you found it inherently more challenging than working on the 2D games it's been hell on Earth I'm thinking yes cuz you probably picked a bigger scope overall just um I guess you just want to level up as you go but um yeah yeah that's a great thank you for asking um it's been the worst year of my life 2024 was the worst year of my life I've had a really good life so I'm not sitting here like people are probably listening like yeah but my my dad died or I lost my brother or whatever but like for me it was the hardest year of my life because I've had a really good life but that that year 2024 was so freaking expensive um do you know that feeling

John where you're like you're like I cannot believe that I'm working on this Sprite again I thought I was done with the the the drumstick and I cannot believe that I'm working on this drumstick again for the fifth time do you know that feeling where it's like you're you're back to I feel it deeply deeply yeah this is being this is pretty much the story of my whole de development cycle yeah yeah so with 3D it's like I cannot believe that I'm worried about these the the the Z fighting of these planes like I thought everything was perfect and now I'm going and or there's this one thing that we were working on where it's like for some reason one of our levels took like 4 minutes to load and it was because of some stupid issue with the the meshes that the levels uh load time to be like 10 times as long the the reason I say all that is

that when in 2D you've got that what what do we call that feeling it's the the the deja vu feeling of I can't believe I'm doing I'm I'm back in that hell that I was in two years ago are you freaking kidding me with 3D the the deja vu hell is like 10 times as worse because you're just in that you got a whole another Dimension to worry about and that Dimension is not only visual it's also part of your code you know your code has to deal with that too um and then the control schemes like 3D games players expect controls to be rebound I I I should be able to rebind all of my controls in 3D in 2D it's like no these are the controls you get but in 3D it's a whole other Paradigm so right now I'm I'm I'm dealing with this whole oh what's the word um you're dealing with player expectations with 3D games

it's way worse and so if if there's one thing like you were talking about negative comments if there's one thing oh I can't rebind the flashlight are you freaking kidding me refund down vote negative comment because of one tiny little expectation that wasn't met for 3D game and I guess I'm probably talking more about first-person shooters because that that that genre for some reason uh maybe it's justifiable I don't know but for some reason that genre it's it's hard to please people uh because they just have such strong expectations of what a first-person shooter should be so why do you ask well um because I've I was thinking about doing some 3D stuff after this because you know I'm already kind of thinking well what's the next project you you always have to it's it's always there you know it's good because it kind of keeps you to it's it's perhaps thinking and planning your next

project is perhaps the strongest carrot in terms of the carrot and stick metaphor you can possibly have to wrap up your current project yes like if you because yeah you need you need that kind of next project there it's like I want to work on that and I've actually been mucking around with some kind of 3D stuff prototypes but before committing to it it'll be interesting to know like what that actually feels like a few years in because you know like game development has that cycle of the honeymoon phase everything it's like you could break it up into like four phases I guess well you know the hollym moon phase then it's like this um grief um state where you realize that holy [ __ ] this is actually more to it than I realized it's like any any any any level of any um any skill or expertise like you can you get into it whether it's fishing or pogo sticking you know but you realize there's like a a level of Excellence that you run into yeah beyond the kind

of superficial um usage you know can I can I give you a sorry to interrupt I didn't mean to um no go for it um and the reason I I always have to say this there's lag so it sounds like I interrupt people because there's a break and then I so I I go okay well let's jump in and then you keep going but um can I give you a couple things here about 3D that might help you um the first thing is is that 3D is extremely expensive uh whether it's time or money and so you don't have as much flexibility to dick around and say well maybe this will be cool or maybe that'll be cool or maybe this will be cool or maybe that'll be cool remaking the Mead or I'm sorry the drumstick Sprite redoing the Sprite might take you an hour whereas in 3D it it's going to take you 8 hours you know um so the reason I bring that up is it's best I think to start with 2D

games um so that you learn the development process and the design process so that you can come in like a god like Jonas Ty roller who has a very strong understanding of the stepbystep process to creating the prototype to the finished product he knows it backwards and forwards it's like being a general contractor for a house it's like let's let's let's do it on in a two-dimension first and understand how to actually do the blueprint and let's list out the two dimens let's list out the steps of building a house step by step that's kind of like building a 2d game it's all it's almost like it's on paper because it's flat and it's simple but now that you understand the step-by-step process of building a a house then you can go in and do the full 3D house and you understand it step by step because look if you put the windows in before you put let's say the

foundation in for the house that's like the whole cost of the house is is you're G to have to do it again so you're doubling your expenses so when it comes to 3D it's very important to understand how you work and also what you're development processes and your design processes and to understand your flaws and your weaknesses so that you can you could prepare and avoid those and go okay wait wait wait John tends to redo the meshes i' I've redone the meshes four times or I've I've redone the Sprites four times in my previous game so I'm not going to do any of the graphics at all for the first two years of development because I know that I'm going to discover what this game is and I know that I'm going to probably end up changing all of the graphics so I'm not going to put the graphics in now so that's kind of the it's like I'm I'm not going to put in the windows yet I'm not going to put I'm not going to paint the walls yet because

I know I need my me personally I have to put the foundation in first so it's understanding yourself as a designer and a developer and so that's why it's so important to be uh to release a 2d game first or some kind of small game so that you understand this the the building blocks of how you work because like not everybody's going to have the same steps in process of making a game now there's kind of a general flow of of the the step-by-step process but some people like me I I have to see things visually to discover what my game is so it's a buil-in budgeted expense that I know I'm going to have to spend I have to feel it and I have to smell it I've said that to my team before I have to smell my game like for your game I'm looking at it I'm like I could smell the blood I have to smell the smoke and the blood of my game to even know what it is mechanically which seems so backwards so I know that about myself and so I'm like that's a built-in expense and so I just know that that's going to cost me so knowing yourself as

a developer is going to help um with with making 3D games the second thing I'll say about 3D games is that um the moment your game looks too good you've actually so this is the second tip I know you didn't ask for a top five most mistakes of making 3D games but I like I like where you're going with this it's a it's something that's worth discussing for sure yeah so the first one is know thyself uh the second one is uh number two I'm writing it down it helps me to write it down number two it's um uh the moment your game looks too good you've just devalued your game um so what I mean by this is that if you if your game starts to look really ah if your 3D game start it's a positioning thing right like positioning yourself on the ladder you can Mis you can mislead the audience into believing

the game is more premium than it actually is by giving the Allure of a triaa not speaking about your game but like a hypothetical developer working on a AAA game bringing in um Nano assets from the um unreal asset store thinking hey man i' got High Fidelity yeah high high fraility measures at this game because you know that's what and I've seen that before have contacted me um and it's hard to tell them like cuz there's only one answer to to give them and it's like hey you don't want to break their heart you know but um well they will show you hey I'm working on this what do you think and and they'll show you little like a Sandbox environment with like full the highest Fidelity measures that they sourced from somewhere and I'm thinking to myself how are you going to populate this whole game with this like this is great with one room but how are you going to make a like a you know 12-hour uh I mean whatever like just a world with this in a compelling meaningful way just the coherency and the um that's

required and you're just kind of cobbling it together and I mean maybe you can get lucky which is kind of why what you said about not going too high right as an indie I think kind of know your spot on the ladder and understand what you can like earn there if you're very kind of um if you're aiming for a particular kind of return I guess yeah kind of know what is achievable and kind of pick the right rung and low poly works good for this stuff although low poly has kind of been saturated thanks to all those cinty cinty assets which are constantly on sale now everyone's got like cinti low poly yeah but yeah you can kind of get away with it in that style but anything higher that you have to be careful yeah I totally agree with you man and I think that ultimately the end goal is to be um how can you stand out in the cheapest way possible you know and that's kind of like having you cake it's tough though like it's like how can I Stand Out visually and this be freaking cheap um and for me I found

that this is often best achieved with a visual style that is just not present on Steam I mean if you can if you can come up with a style that you've never seen before in a way you've won the game at least when it comes to your visual hook um so for me I like I like that with Waker vibe that just everything's flat and solid it's cell shaded but like just solid flat and really really strong sense of color theory and I don't I don't think there's a ton of games that have that uh uh that look so that's probably what I'm going to go for for my next game um but yeah and then finally number three is focusing on a gimmick um with 3D it's especially important to focus on a gimmick because you can utilize that gimmick throughout this entire three-dimensional space and as long as

you've got one really solid gimmick you can just it's almost kind of like a Sandbox you know uh I can imagine why um a difficult game about climbing was so quickly developed by Pony pants it's because one gimmick and then create the assets and there you go you know lay out the levels and there's no dialogue system there's no inventory system system there's no menu like he said uh it's just one little gimmick and that that just shrinks the scope significantly because the moment you interject like a mechanic like let's say I've got one mechanic okay development time balloons because of just one mechanic then you interject two it's almost like a logarithmic expon or an exponential ballooning it's like now I got two mechanics it's like now four times as big you know um and the reason why is because it's it has to do with teaching so like in 3D games teaching is much more difficult than 2D games you have to

teach the player so when you interject a mechanic into a 3D game you've now created yourself you now you've now put into your development schedule I now need to teach the player exactly how to do this one mechanic in a three-dimensional environment and I need to do it in a clever way that's not obtrusive or a wall of text so that's the third one Focus on a sing um yeah and and and because these days just in terms of kind of design sensibilities um there is a requirement for a bit more handholding um so every new kind of system has to be more or less kind of isolated and introduced in a safe space um explained um you can just you know different degrees depending on what the system is but um that's very much just a kind of um de facto standard now now where I think in the past you could get away with just kind of throwing players in and see what

happens I I played a lot of got my hands on an old 360 so I've been kind of expanding my library there and it's really interesting playing those games from I guess back from kind of 2009 2013 and and what's interesting why I like uh playing that Thomas and I think you'll appreciate this is because a lot of those games like with the of course there's so your massive blockbusters that that are not going to be part of this but a lot of the games are kind of the games that you could probably make with a small team now as an indie developer with the current engines and the accessibility that we have and you and so it's very interesting kind of going back through some of those games and um finding interesting um systems and mechanics and hooks because if you go too far back I think like the Super Nintendo emulators or whatever it's very I found it a little bit harder to find hooks because a lot of games just didn't have hooks it was just like this is a platformer this is a sid scroller you

run you shoot but there wasn't any real potent hooks because quite often the designers were the developers so they had a kind of one job and they and they were learning right they were they were finding they were discovering like there was no um format depending on how far you're going back so they kind they were creating the groundwork exactly and I I that's a really smart thing that you said which is the the the further you go back the less hooks there were um and I think that's a that is a a hook is a necessity built from it's a marketing tool a hook is a marketing tool um primarily it's a marketing tool it's a way for you to stand out amongst the rest of the games back then in the '90s they didn't really need much marketing it's like the hook is that it's a game that's the

hook you know if it was if it was on the Shelf people would buy it like just let's just get it out like there's no Consumer Testing for half the games you know the kind of and like let's just get it on the Shelf before Christmas we come on we got three weeks to get it on that shelf and they're just like slamming out these games and the reason why I think the reason why these games didn't really teach the player well like dude there was this game for Super Nintendo was a Lion King game brutal brutal platformer that game is like it's a ra it's officially probably like one of the first Rage games like you do you okay so there's the one where you're think the um the giraffes and you're kind of trying to find your way through this mes of giraffes yeah yes and it's horribly designed they don't teach you at all they got away with it because you just

spent $60 $70 which is like a billion dollars in the 90s and your mom gave it to you for your birthday and she's like okay you can either play this one game that you own one out of like maybe four or um go out go outside play in the hot sun which is how it was at my house it was either play play Lion King or go stand in the Sun and so me and my brothers would play this Lion King game and you would force yourself to learn it because you didn't have anything else to do you didn't have any other games to play so that they didn't have to teach and they didn't need a hook which those things are so freaking expensive now those two things are huge like probably one of the reasons why you've gone and remade blood and me so many times is probably because you're like I don't know it seems like you're you're refocusing on the hook and you're trying to to to to teach the player better and focus the focusing is what's so expensive yeah that that there I think

um I guess more people who are getting into the Indie Dev space and it's like the flood gets open at this point Ai and everyone's like cobbling together stuff but um if if there's if there's one thing that I've kind of um realized that you need to focus in and kind of get a macro look and start you know I mean look it's been said said over and over by like every um you know game design educator all the books level up and all these things just kind of strip away the onion right uh but it's easier said than done because quite often we it's hard for the Creator to discern what is um excess and what is not like the whole Weir and chaff thing it's kind of hard to if if you don't know you don't know right like it's what's what's the um what's the actual good stuff um and I guess o over time you get good in that but um I think the one thing that what at least for myself which kind of saw me

at least you know increase the game's popularity increased and I had asmond like coming across it and saying he liked it or whatever but that was kind of um after all these refocusing took place right prior to that nobody gave a [ __ ] about the game like nobody could care the moment I got rid of all these baggage systems and just kind of focusing on one thing which is the combat make the combat gory and and that's kind of like a one core system and then you can have all your other kind of padded systems and shops and uh skill trees and all that which are there too but it's very much centered around that one system and if you don't have that kind of one focal system to kind of make the game unique I think it's it's it's it's tough you got to find what that is sure and the question is like how do you know and so like the ultimate goal I think of a game developer should be to establish I think you mentioned this earlier in the podcast EST establish a sense of taste

like it's just it's fine-tuning your taste of what is actually good you know I'll I'll play these indie games on my live streams and I'll just play you know subscribers and Twitter followers I'll play their games and it is truly remarkable and I'm guilty this too so don't think that I'm just on my high horse it's remarkable how I'm staring at something and I'm like how did you think that this was a good idea to put this in here this is so so like such a bad idea and I was doing this literally seven months ago when we were doing testing there were so many things because play testers played the game I looked now at it and I'm like how did I think that was okay to put that in there it's so it's a it's a terrible idea the mechanic it's boring it's it's bloated so there's something there's like this blindness

just blinders that game developers have and it's something like the older you get and the more games you release it broadens and so the blind spots go away over time but it's painful to learn that um is there anything with when it comes to blood and me that you're like I cannot believe that I thought that was a good idea to put that in there and it seems so obvious now yeah well um oh man I got to yeah I had some weird I I went for a like a a job interview at a game Studio once this is going really back for like an early version and I showed them like a really early kind of prototype version this was still when it was like just a it wasn't even a thing yet you know I was like yeah I was kind of working on this thing and it was the thing is with blood and me to be to be clean I think people most people get it and it's why that publisher was kind of a little bit kind of it was a bit unusual request

it's a stylized game it's clearly just a bit kind of comic comical and um so a bit of excess and um gratuitous violence is kind of okay you can get away with it I mean it may not even affect the rating just because of how stylized and cartoony it is you know it's not a it's not a murder simulator it's not like um it's not like realistic violence yeah you can cut people head off but you kind of chuckle when you do it he like that's kind of funny you know um oh yeah so um yeah I went into this um job interview I won't say who the studio was for or we have limited kind of studios in Australia but there's a few kind of that you would know um and I showed them this prototype and they kind of just went like this lean backing their chairs and this was I don't know I think this was kind of around um ah I don't know maybe kind of 2 15 or something MH and um it was I added a system where because

I was watching Game of Thrones at the time and it had like the whole salt wife concept where these um can't remember which house it was but they would um they would go out and go rating and bring home assault wives and they were and I thought yeah it's kind of like a viking thing right so let's Chuck that in there so I had a so I showed them this system I go check this out guys and they I was in his boardroom and they were all sitting around watching me play and in the boardroom they have a big TV that they use for like um presentations and stuff so I chucked it on there and um there's like five guys in suits in there and um the system I showed them was where you could like kidnap the women in the village and stack them on your shoulder and you could bring them back to your boat and it would kind of like tell your points where you could have like a stack of 10 women on your shoulder that's so funny oh I think it's great I take it all that's it's funny it's it's a it's clearly a joke um yeah but they got offended I I did take that

yeah I mean their reaction was it was was um they were very serious about it and I was the interview um ended shortly after did you get the job I was like oh no no that that happened to me too though that happened to me too though it's it's uh I was I've mentioned this before but um in one of my videos but uh one publisher was offended that my game was about Scotland and it was called Brave boy they were like that's it's kind of cringe you know that's a little bit offensive I'm like you sure really it's just it's just like a meme it's just silly I'm just being silly but that's that's one of the reasons why it was turned down by one of these Publishers it's like it just so that's why I love the Indie space and I'm I'm just more more interested in self-publishing because it's just like guys this a game let's just release games it's fine we're just having fun

here and the '90s you know they there was a you could like blood mean bead it's like it just has that classic feel of like let's let's just let's just be kind of offensive here you know and and go all out I think it's great I think it's great yeah I'll have to get you a a um got a demo coming up soon I'll have to send you a private link you can check it out please tell me you're going to do it during next Fest uh yeah I will at some point is here's the thing like when you're a solo developer it's so hard to just keep track of everything like you're development and you got all these like festivals coming up and you're like oh man I can't even and you're like oh man did I miss that or you know and then you're on then you're on X trying to like post some stuff and you're like oh let's get this and you're jumping over to Reddit and getting like shamed there or whatever goes on on Reddit and you know mainly sh yeah much Reddit is a tough crowd man I I've got several posts about me on Reddit that are not nice um I've seen

some yeah yeah it's like Thomas all he does is sell courses which I do sell a lot of courses but um so yeah go you know they're they're probably right um but yeah you know dude and then we'll wrap this up but I just want to say don't nextfest don't miss nextfest and then also look man if you can get 50,000 wish lists and let's say they convert at a 10% um what is that 500 uh let's no let's give you TW 15% conversion rate for launch what is that do you think 15% they'll convert it 15% I don't know I haven't I haven't even considered the numbers to be honest which sounds kind of a bit short-sided no I should but yeah okay that's 75k to sell it for 10 bucks and I think it should be a $15 game what do you think hey I'll I'll be happy with some some pocket change to be honest and just move on to the next creative Endeavor and bigger better Pocket Change that's

amazing 75 grand man yeah so if you convert it 15% like this is why why the reason I'm telling you this is to encourage you that the Finish Line is it it could be releasing your game sure that's a good Finish Line but also could you possibly make the Finish Line I need to get 50,000 wish list you know if because if you can go if I do 50,000 if I get 50,000 wish list during the remaining development time and then I launch it and I get a 15% conversion that's $75,000 I think my math is right here uh 50,000 times 15% is 7500 time $10 let's say you launch it a12 $15 game and then you do a discount or whatever I don't know for a launch that's 75 grand but weight times 7 which you're actually is 52 and then taxes Australian is like taxes is like 30% I think right so point

we got to we're going to move to where is it doar or something tax some tax Haven I do too man my my taxes are brutal okay well okay let's wrap this up link is in link is below guys please wish list blood me below um but only wish list if you want to play it cuz well I mean it's up to you but I feel like you don't want a bloated wish list with people who don't so I guess if you you like the idea of a kind of um story um driven um combat RPG inspired by Lord of the Rings and all my childhood personal favorite delicious different Inspirations um bit of God of War in there um very much a kind of Hardcore well it's becoming a hardcore RPG you know with skill systems and shops and cheeky shopkeepers and all types of things to find you know so it's one of those kind of games sweet it looks amazing man I'm super duper proud of what you've made here yeah by the way I

just want to leave you with this it looks and and feels just from the way the trailer feels with the game feel like 10 times better than what it was let's say a year or two ago so I'm really excited about it it looks really good I learning experience yeah cool all right John thanks man this was really really fun hey thanks for having me on and it's been a pleasure to meet you man that's fantastic let's stay connected all right y cheers see you