Julian Ball: Why His Game Took 8 Years To Make, How Launch Went, Staying Motivated | Ep. #049

If you're tired of quitting your projects, if you're feeling like the road is too long, I don't want to hear it. That's because Julian Ball, he spent eight years on his game, and if he [music] can do it, you certainly can finish your project as well. I've spent 5 years on a single game before, and I remember complaining daily about the project's length to my wife. But Julian, somehow through it all, he's confident. He doesn't complain and he's at peace with its final release, which is happening in just a handful of weeks. Stop. Wait. Sorry to interrupt, but Julian just messaged me while this podcast was being edited, and he actually just released his game, and he wanted to share the final results with you. Here's a voice message from him. Let's go ahead and hear what he has to say. Hey, sorry, I'm just going for a run, but this popped into my mind. I can give you the stats of how the game launch actually went. Actually, I don't think it should be that easy for you. I'm going to have you wait a bit. Stick around to the end of the podcast to hear Julian's final launch numbers. After

all, he had to wait 8 years to find out what the launch numbers were. So, I'll share them at the end. Julian, honestly, he's a game dev I certainly aspired to be like, and he shows us all what confident, sort of stoic discipline and motivation can [music] achieve. We talk all about this. We talk about finishing large games. And we talk about the number one most important thing your project needs if you want to actually finish it. Why negative motivation is crucial for success. What to expect during your game's launch and how to launch your game. And we also open up Lens Island inside of Unity. And I'm just being real here. This project was insanely impressive, but it's also massive. Get ready. 4 weeks away from launch after working on this thing for 7 years. How are you feeling? Good. Yeah. every sort of every emotion actually like I I buzz cut my head the other day. So [laughter] if anyone wants to know when Julian is in peak crunch, it's when I buzz cut my hair because I can't be bothered going to the hairdresser.

That's right. I I did it at the original early access [music] launch and uh my wife Steph thought I was like Britney Spears crazy. Um I just like I just showed up to the like the lounge room one day and my head was shaved. I was like, "Hey." [laughter] But uh good. a lot better than the previous crunch that we did for the early access launch. When was that? Um that was 2021. Um that was a heart attack and stuff. We mentioned that on the previous podcast. Yeah. Where you had a heart attack. Yeah. Yeah. You can watch the the previous podcast for a full in-depth dive and all of that, but my my health took a very big hit. Um almost almost took away Julian uh that day, but I managed to get through through that. And yeah, this time it's super busy. Like I go to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. most nights and then I hop online at like 8 or 9 a.m. and because like one of our developers is in Australia still and then everyone else is in Europe. So I've also got to manage two time zones and talk to everyone and um it's like all I do is work every second of the day. However, um I I

definitely take in my health like I'm eating a lot healthier and and working out and running still. Like I sort of make these little time slots to sort of manage my life. And um yeah, it's super hard and like I've been sort of in this this zone for a couple months now, but it's it's manageable. It's doable. I've done it before and it's a lot better this time. So, we're getting through it. Um it's sort of just like what we have to do realistically. Like Lens Island is a game that should be made by 20 people. Um, and it's not. It's made by like three people. [snorts] So, we sort of have to do 20 persons worth of work and that's it. It's sort of just like if we want to make the game that we want to make, we just have to work very diligently and very hard and efficiently for sort of long hours. So, um, all of us are really in the trenches, but we're also very very proud of what we're putting together. It's coming together and it's it's one of those things too cuz we Lens Arm was originally single player the whole time.

Like right now on Steam it's a single player game and one of the biggest things we're changing in 1.0 is is multiplayer. So it's co-op multiplayer up to eight players and we basically it was a single player game. So we had to remake the whole game in multiplayer halfway through and it was brutal. Of course, I do not suggest that to I've heard that if you're going to make a multiplayer game, you have to make it from the ground up because the way that all the data is being okay. So like for example, if you have a conditional statement in a sing single player game, you're the condition is based on a local variable in the game. Every variable in a in a multiplayer game is being pulled from like a server, right? And so you have to change all your conditional code to pull from the server, right? And then you have lag and then you have to figure out how to reframe stuff based on the lag so that it's feels fair. Yeah. Oh my dude, such a can of worms. Like what previous previously used to be like a one line of code. Oh yeah, if this do this. It's now

okay. If this broadcast it to the server, wait for it to come back. Make sure everyone else's lines up. If it doesn't line up, do this. But and and it's just everything is like magnitudes more difficult to do. It's sort of like workload difficulty for all the units of content we have went from like a 1x to a 10x. Um so it was a big we somehow did it. We somehow pulled it together and um playing the game and testing it now. Uh because we also made crazy amounts of new content. It's sort of like yes it's a what it's multiplayer but it's also double the game it used to be at the same time. Mhm. So, um, playing it now is just so enjoyable and I just so satisfying and seeing all the play testers playing it and having so much fun. Um, it's really really rough and got some long days, but the the spark and like the the the proudness that I feel seeing it, it just sort of makes up for everything and it keeps it keeps me going.

Hey, you know, I was talking to Pony Pants yesterday about falling in love with your project again and again. I I wonder if you know what that's like where you fall out of love with a project while you're working on it. Definitely. And then towards the end in my mind, especially for my game Twisted Tower, it's been 3 years in development. I am forcibly making myself fall in love with the project again at the final stretch because I know that I need to be in love with it. I need to be infatuated with it if I'm going to finish it strong. Do you relate to that at all? like with this final stretch. Yeah, that like absolutely. I've I think multiple times every year of the past eight years I've fallen out of love with Lens Island and fallen back in love. More recently in like December last year when I started the journey of um when I sort of hit that that critical moment of going, okay, like the game's not ready. We're supposed to launch now. Do we want to rush it out? Do we want to find a publisher? Um, in amongst all of that, I

also had just crazy life circumstances too. Like we moved from Australia to Switzerland last year. So, um, I'm in Switzerland right now. Originally, I wasn't. And, um, we even had troubles with our visa. At one point, we got So, like in in the midst of basically going, okay, we need money to keep the studio going and and we want to make sure that everything's going smoothly. We want to find a publisher. We were supposed to launch now, but then we ended up not launching. What do we do next? We basically got a letter from the Swiss government saying, "Oh, the people doing your visa, completely screwed it up, and you're out of days and you have to leave Europe right now." So then we had to pack up the whole car and drive across France to the UK and then me and my wife lived out of an Airbnb for a month. No. Um, in the middle of like crunch, you know, like I'm like, so what ended up being a really weird silver lining is while we're in UK, Fireshine's headquarters happened to be in London. So I drove to London and just saw them in person for the first meeting and we just sort of clicked and it was just

there and like that ended up being our publisher. So it was a really weird set of circumstances but I fell very much out of love with Lens Island throughout that period and it got to a point where I actually I I just stopped working on the game for about like 3 or 4 weeks. I I got to the point where I just had my foot on the gas for so long and it was really grueling every day to go like there's something about there's something so difficult. It just feels like torture when you're forced to be creative when you don't want to be. It's like, okay, you got to both be technical and use your sort of programming technical knowledge, but you got to be creative. Like, you have to do art and come up ideas and doing that within the framework of not being in love with it and and sort of resenting it a little bit is just super brutal. So, I was feeling that and then I I just took a step back and I went, "Okay, this is not efficient. I'm wasting time. I'm feeling very unhappy." Cuz we also moved to a new country. We

had no family, no friends here. Everyone speaks German. It was just all around quite a brutal time for us personally. I took a break. I actually worked on like a little small like survivor game for a little while. Um I've got a friend here in in uh in Zurich. Uh his name's Thomas and he makes a game called Bro, which is like this little 2D survivor game. Super successful, super addictive. I actually played his game a lot before I met him. And um this looks like an Ed McMillan game, like Binding of Isaac. Yeah, definitely has that sort of art style vibe to it and I sort of fell in love with this genre like the whole vampire survivors sort of genre. I just it was like a nice little uh escape for me. So I actually worked on like a little game like that for a few weeks and [clears throat] it definitely reignited that sort of passion and by the end of it um I was I was really like I was I was had a burning desire to get back to Lens Island. I I sort of missed the project. So sure, the key takeaway is just sometimes you just need a bit of

moderation. Like sometimes you can just look at one thing for too long and just separating [clears throat] yourself, refreshing, coming back. Often times I found that if you fall out of love with your game, it might be because you're just working on the stuff that you don't love, you know, and you'll get to a place where you do work on the stuff you love. Like to be completely honest, for my game Twisted Tower, for 3 years, it wasn't that I was on autopilot. It it's that I was I was leading a team and they were doing the fun stuff, right? So, like kind of directing it's like directing a film. It's like maybe you're you love photography and lighting, but as the director, you're kind of offloading that to someone who's more talented than you. And that's what I was doing with the 3D art is Filipe, the the 3D artist, he was just way better at 3D art than I was. And so I was guiding that and I was like directing that, but he got to do the fun stuff, you know. And so finally, finally after 3 years of development, now that the game is basically done, the game has this artistic canvas that's already been

done. And now I'm coming in completely burnt out and bored and out of love with the project. And I'm coming in and I'm finally adding the story. And now that's where I'm falling in love again. Um, if I don't love like story for for me, story is my forte. So who's ever listening right now, it's like your forte is probably the thing that you're passionate about and that's where you need to go in and do like the the 120% effort of the thing that you're really really good at. So I'm going into the story now and I'm just writing. I I spent I think four days four days full four full four full four full four full four full four full four full four full four full four full four full four four full days just writing the story [snorts] and I it's so funny because we're at 90% of development but now I'm writing the story now um and I'm going in and I'm basically what I do and this is relevant to to whatever you're working on if you're a coder or if you're writing music I'm basically consuming as much stuff that

makes me feel something while I write. So, I have the soundtrack of um Nightmare Alley from Del Toro. It's it's a great film. It's not perfect, but it's it's got a really good soundtrack, and it's got that 1950s vibe. And I'm going in and I'm falling in love with the characters of Twisted Tower. And I've always said, for me personally, um if I don't if I don't cry after I've written the story, it's not good enough. And that's that's sort of my brand. It's like all my games need to have this very strong emotional story. And [snorts] so I'm I'm forcibly falling in love with the game. I'm forcing myself to do it um by bringing in music and looking at uh watching films and getting inspiration. And this is at that last final lap of development. And I find it so strange and I feel like I'm I feel like I might be doing it backwards. you know, you should probably know what your story is before you before you, I guess, start the game, especially if you're making a linear story game. That said, you know,

a lot of times, um, you need you need to figure out what the game is while you make it. Um, and I'm not sure if you felt that way with Lens Island where it's like you fall out of love and then when you fall out of love, suddenly something clicks and you go, "Oh, that's what's fun about this game or that's what's good about this game." And then you go in and then you emphasize that thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's like um I also don't think it's necessarily worse to build the story at the end. I I I definitely I like to think that creativity can really flourish with constraints. And sometimes you have the constraints of a framework already in place and you go, how do I make a story fit this? you can come up with some really interesting ideas under those constraints rather than just a fully blank slate because it might be a bit more a bit more vanilla, a bit less inspired, a bit less, you know, um those little those little

pedals in the road that feel a little bit odd sometimes are like the best parts of stories. I think you're right. And and like I've done that to a certain extent for Lens Island. It's funny. Story is my weakest point of all. I hate story games. You would have to tie me [laughter] to a chair to play like Last of Us or something or my game. But yeah. Yeah. Well, your game has shooting, so that's got me. I'll just like be Yeah. Doing like 360 nocopes on clowns and stuff. [laughter] So, um but yeah, like I stories I I sort of suck at it. I had a pretty good idea of the story um from the start with with Lens Island and we sort of definitely honed that in and polished it over time. It's it's sort of strange though like game development especially indie or solo game development is this really strange thing where you're you're walking a tight rope between I like to think of it it's almost like if if David Gogggins is on one side somewhat like the imagine the embodiment of some person that ignores all of all emotions all bodily instincts and they

just keep pushing forward it just grind like just grind if that's one end of the spectrum and then the other end of spectrum is like imagine or Mosart or Einstein or someone that falls in love what they're doing and they only do things they're in love with and they only do things the exact way in which they want to do them. You know, like everyone's heard stories about, oh, like this musician created his best music when he was up in the mountains and locked himself away and did a bunch of drugs or whatever and stayed up all night for a week straight or something. It's like they created these very wacky, weird conditions that just felt like what they wanted to do. And it's like this big spectrum. And a lot of the time when you want to be creative, it's very hard to just like slap that onto a 9 to5 work schedule, managing a team, running a business, like also, you know, grinding and like and ignoring a lot of that emotion and sort of like natural rhythms that you have and going against it and forcibly having to work. So you just have to like find this middle ground where you just sort of sort of

like go between the two where it's like sometimes yes like you do have to be a bit of a machine like you you can't just be in this loving relationship with the game and every time you go on the game it's like oh sprinkle a bit there sprinkle a bit there this is all so nice I love it. [laughter] Um, it's like it's going to be a bit brutal sometimes. It's going to take some determination, some persistence. You will have to lock in and and do it. You know, like when I'm doing localization keys for my game, I don't like doing that. Like no one likes doing that, you know? Like there there's a lot of facets of game design that aren't necessarily fun, but you do have to do. And then there's some facets of games which can be really fun, and then you have to do them under stressful conditions or constraints, and they're no longer fun. and you still have to perform. And uh so yeah, like sometimes you get to those points that seems we're at now, which is yeah, you have to forcibly be creative and perform to your creative highest even though you don't really want to. Um and you have to like force that sort of loving relationship. But I

do think through that process, you can find all those little strands that you're like, "Oh yeah, this is why I came up with this idea. That's right." Like this feels so good. And you can find all those little threads to pull on and they can sort of get you back in that driver's seat, make you feel a lot more immersed and creative and passionate about the project again cuz sometimes you get too busy developing a game to actually just play it and remember what it's like to just feel the game. And I think that has been a big thing for me. Usually, we have these big grinding sessions where we work on big updates for Lens Island and then it's at the last minute, like the last week before the update's about to go live, where I start like intensively play testing the game and I'm just sitting there all day playing my game and I'm sit back like, "Oh, this is such a good game. Like, I [laughter] love this game, man. Whoever made this game, he's awesome." You know, it's like, yeah, I just I just made the game that I want. So, when I play it, I sort of get reminded of that and it's a really fun, enjoyable experience. And I think that's

that's like the bit of gold that's always waiting for you. If you push through and just force yourself to go back in love of it, have some determination and persistence, you can find those little nuggets of like, oh yeah, like this this is why I'm doing this and it feels satisfying. There's a lot of people listening right now who would say that they're not disciplined people and um they wish that they could be, you know, and I think that what I found with disciplined game developers and disciplined entrepreneurs and artists is it's not necessarily that they're disciplined, it's that they know how to they know what turns them on and they [clears throat] know how to power through a desert, a season where it's just a desert and it's boring. They know they know how to dream of like that moment where they get to a certain spot in development or releasing the game. They can see they almost know how to like see into the future and go, "Okay, I'm going to be I'm going to have so much pleasure at this moment and the only way to get to that moment is to

power through." So, it's it's kind of like visualization. It's kind of having a vision and and knowing knowing what it's going to feel like. The problem with that is I think there's a lot of people who have never ever felt that before. They've never felt an early access launch or a demo launch or seeing their wish list tick up and all of a sudden they've got 20,000 more wish lists or having a streamer play their game which is really fun. I'm sure you've enjoyed seeing that too. You know, they've never I know, [laughter] right? Um, [snorts] but side note, I I had I had some streamers play the demo for Twisted Tower, and there's so many like I think over it's close to a million total views for the demo, which I think is I'm really proud of and I think that's awesome for a demo, but there's so many videos where it's like for some reason the streamer cranked up the brightness and so it's really washed out and it's got like eight or like 100,000 views and I'm like, "No, what happened? Why does it look so [laughter] bad?" Um, regardless, it's it's a great feeling to

have all these things happen and I know how it feels and I know that it's possible to get to those moments. Whereas a lot of dreaming developers, they don't they've never experienced that. And I I would love to hear people's stories in the comments of like how they feel knowing that they've never had that before and they don't know that it's possible. And so I think discipline, the foundation of discipline is it's something like knowing what it feels like to reach a goal and to have it happen, you know? Yeah, it all just stems from motivation. Like it just this is actually like a big part of my life. It's something I think about often. And I've talked to a lot of other game developers and just people all all walks of life about this topic of just about like what motivates people to do things and um and yeah like you always get but I was myself in in that sort of in those shoes at one point where I was like oh like I really want to do this and it it's it's like the worst position

in life to be always saying you want to you want to do something you just never do it and obviously it's a very very simple answer to that just do it. Just start doing the thing that you like stop talking about the thing you want to do. But in order to make that transition, there has to be motivation. Like if if motivation isn't there, um it just doesn't matter. You you will never truly do the thing you want to do. And motivation can stem from two places from from positive or negative. Negative is always a lot more powerful than positive. And I think it's also why the whole story of I quit my job, you know, blah blah blah blah, people under these sort of very constrained circumstances usually end up flourishing and doing these extraordinary things because they have a very strong negative motivation. And then I think there's this uh more of a philosophical journey like an internal journey that happens if people start off with negative constraints forcing them to then become better people. How can

they flip that into a positive motivation and start to structure life in positive ways? cuz I had that exact transformation like throughout my whole life. Um I've it's sort of random, but I've had like a really strong fear of death. Like I have panic attacks just in the middle of night. Oh my god, I'm going to die one day. Like what's the point of living if poof gone for infinity? And it's like this everpresent fear that I still have, but it used to be a lot more intense when I was younger. And um that's a pretty big motivator. And it's sort of put my life under this scope of like okay this is Julian's life and everything outside of that is the infinite void of death and it's like what do I have control over that part in the middle it's literally the only thing I have control over so I have two choices just be a nihilist and be sad my whole life or like take some sense of ownership and agency and at least try to control and change that middle part and that would make me feel like I won a little bit even if I'm in this this sort

of these circumstances that I can't control and it it annoys me getting some sense of control and agency back would make me feel better. So then that's what I did like I started doing these little things to try to get some control out of my life and it was all sparked by negative motivation and then it sort of got to the point few years ago where I sort of thought okay it's come it's got me this far and it's actually got me quite successful but now I feel like I have this unhealthy relationship with motivation where unless something kicks me up the ass and makes me feel like I'm going to die I don't do it and I've had to make this transition now where it's like okay instead of being scared of what's behind me chasing me. I need to be excited about what's in front of me and I need to run towards the exciting part. And for me now that is I want to I want to keep making games that I'm proud of. I want to add art to the world. I want to create experiences. I want to also hopefully as an outcome of that be able to buy a house and build a family and have a more sustainable fun life. I get to be creative and provide the world with these fun gaming

experiences. I've got all this stuff to look forward to now. But I don't think anyone's going to do anything remotely interesting if they don't have an underlying motivation because it's just like why? Like why why do it if there is no why? Just keep doing what you're doing. If you're living a comfy life and you've got no reason to change, yeah, don't change. So I think like the first step is always like find a why. Sometimes it might be a negative why. Sometimes people force negative wise. They suddenly quit their job. they do something drastic in order to force their own force themselves into like a survival situation which I wouldn't necessarily recommend but I've I think there's always that friend group where it's like there's that one person that just seems to always land on their feet and they're always in this like crazy situations and and things just seem to like come to them and those are typically those people where it's like they don't create their own luck like they don't they don't create their own reasons but if if a negative situation gets imposed on them bam like they just react and

they get they get out of it. When I when people I want people listening right now cuz there's I I know a lot of people in my life who they see they see pain and misery and and a lot of people there I I get it. You know, it's life is really hard when you when you lose like a child or or something. And I I get that and I I I've had a very privileged life. But there's people in my life who they just they live in suffering and they want it they they they see it only as suffering and they don't turn it into something. And I just want people listening who feel like everything sucks and that life just sucks and no I can't I can't build a project or or be creative because life sucks. And I'm like no that's exactly that's exactly what you need to be creative. every single moment of suffering or pain or money's tight or someone got sick or whatever, it's like this is going to be great material for a game or a story or a product that you're creating. It's perfect for you.

It's it's like there is no greater asset for creativity than suffering. So, in a way, it is kind of like investing in the stock market. So, let's talk really quick about about your seven years of it wasn't all suffering, but it was grinding for sure. Let's talk about those seven years and leading up to this launch. Before we open up your project, I want to I want to kind of get an idea of what what is it that you're I guess the [clears throat] most afraid. Are you are you afraid of anything with this launch? Is there anything that you're worried about? You're like, man, I really am kind of tense about this one thing. Yeah, I guess just like not being a successful launch. I'm not overly afraid of anything, but like if [laughter] I was to choose something, it'd be like if it sold no copies, I'd be a little bit sad. [laughter] That would be a bit late, but but like I know it's a really good game and people love it and it already sells copies and the game that it will be at 1.0 launch is substantially better than the game it is now. So there is like a level of like confidence that I have there. Um, so that's possible. It's possible to

work on a game and get so much feedback that you pretty much know. Yeah. I I feel like the only thing I don't know is just the randomness that come, you know, will will some huge streamer happen to pick up my game and then a bunch more people play it and will it it's just like the luck of the draw when it comes to marketing exposure. There's there's all that side where it's like, yeah, we we'll see what happens. Um maybe we'll get unlucky or lucky, but at the end of the day, the best marketing tool for a game is the game. So, it's the game's truly great. Um with zero marketing budget, it will still succeed. It would just take a lot longer to succeed. momentum. So, I am very proud of the game. So, I don't really have any outstanding fears or anything. I think the fear that I did for a long time is just if we can get it done and if we could get multiplayer in. I totally brutal cuz that was definitely like looking at a mountain. It's like I've never climbed this mountain before and I don't know how to climb it. I'm just going to make it up as I go and I have to get to the top or That's right. That's right. And again, motivation. It's like what's

it was sort of like the the big ravine behind me was like eight years of my life, my whole life's work, you know, the thing that pays for the food on my plate and the place where I live and just everything is is that all goes down the the toilet if if I don't climb up this mountain. So, it's like we had to succeed. We had no other choice. Um, and it was stressful, but at the same time, I don't think we would have gotten to the end if I didn't have that sort of pressure um the whole time. I just don't think it would have really happened. [snorts] You know, there's there's some developers who they see the mountain, right? And and they can see the peak and they know where where they need to get to. Uh I was just talking about this with my dad yesterday. The metaphor for me is there's a scene I think in Titanic. I love I love that movie despite it being kind of cringe, but I love that movie where it's they're just I think they're looking out into a bleak darkness as they're approaching the

iceberg, but all they see is it's just black and they're they're they they don't really know where they are or where they're going. It's just bleak blackness. you know, being on my third commercial release, third time being published last year, that was what that felt like all the way up until this moment. It's like, is there even a peak that I'm aiming for here? It's just emptiness. Like, for some reason, my vision is just completely black. And [snorts] that is a terrifying feeling. and and to say I'm going to keep I'm just going to keep going and keep investing in this thing when I have no idea what's in front of me. And so I I say that just to kind of sympathize with people listening right now who like they might think that you and I we've we've [snorts] we've always got a destination in mind and maybe you do, but for me it's like sometimes you have moments where or seasons even when you're making your project and it's just like I don't even know what's at the end of this thing. I have sometimes I even

forget why I'm even working on it. And that's a scary feeling. And and a great entrepreneur is going to be someone who like we've we've talked about, it's someone who embraces that cold darkness and they just in a way they they they learn to enjoy it, [snorts] right? It's this process of transition from point A to point B and just and just being okay with it, you know, embracing that. also using it as like there's something slightly satisfying about knowing that you're at the if you think about like the extent of like if you're really happy and really motivated and going along really well in a project or if you feel very lost very downtrodden and you feel like you might quit when you're up against that barrier where the wall where you're like oh man I don't know what to do next you can have a sense of resolve knowing okay you're at the barrier that's pretty easy decision quit or keep going you If you keep going, it's all up from here. Everything gets better. Like, if you just stick through, every day will be better than the last

and before you know it, in a month from now, you're back on track and you're feeling great. But if you can't handle it, like that's also cool. Quit. Do something else. Like, maybe this actually isn't for you. Um, and that those always are those turning points. But if if if your heart up against that barrier and you feel it, which I've felt a lot of times, there is just like this nice feeling where you just go like, well, I can't feel any more sorry for myself. like I can't do any be any more lost than what I am. Like it's I'm sort of like I'm here. I've reached my [snorts] destination. What do I want to do now? Oh man, I love that. My dad used to say he used to say Thomas there's nothing harder for a man than having multiple opportunities in front of him because you don't know which one to pick and there's like so for me like earlier this quarter I had like five or six opportunities in front of me and I couldn't figure out which one to really dedicate my time to. Uh yesterday I got I got several bits of information about like okay this path is officially closed this path is officially closed like lots of paths closed and that can feel sad

but it's like all of a sudden there's this sense of relief like okay there's only two paths which one do I take you know and you can move forward from there and so for me with twisted for this final stretch of development for me there's potential for more funding and I'll talk about it in the future if I have time. But the probable path for me for Twisted Tower because we had budget cuts last year and I've got to I've got to keep moving forward and keep funding this thing is I'm really grateful for this podcast because this podcast is actually one of the ways that the game is getting funded in its final stretch. despite having a publisher and despite my past of doing Kickstarter campaigns and working with publishers and investors, I'm like, "Okay, so the path is the podcast and the podcast can support the final stretch of development." And I know people listening right now there there are people who want to do that and they want to help support and so that's this that's the final path. You know, it's probably going to be keep pumping

out great content for this podcast and that will that will fund the development of Twisted Tower. Um, so that's that's three years of just basically all these different revenue opportunities and paths I had to take, this winding [snorts] road of getting this game done. Even Thomas, who a lot of people respect me, even Thomas is like just making all these wild turns to get a project done. And often times I did feel like I was up against that wall for you. eight years. Eight years on that path and it seems like I don't even know how you did it. So, let's go ahead and open up this seven-year pro eight project in Unity if you don't mind and kind of see what all of those crazy decisions and paths you took what it finally led to. You want to open up in Unity with me? Sure. Yeah. Okay. It's going to take me It's a big old project, so it's going to take a little while. [laughter] I think I think I think Twisted Tower might be 100 gigabytes the the project. Um because that big. Yeah. All of our uh files are are

original files. So like Photoshop files, massive Photoshop files that are layered. Ah, our textures are all that as well. I didn't export anything. And then also Blender Blender files are all um all of our 3D models are mostly Blender files. So yeah, we don't have any pretty much any raw files of the project. Like it's all exported and then we have like a separate drive with Can you explain why you do that? Um, a couple reasons. God, I just got flashbanged by [laughter] um but uh mostly it's just better for a team environment and it also yeah like it keeps it keeps the engine smaller. Um but especially when you've got external contractors or anyone else working in the team, you can segment stuff and someone can work on working files without having to actually have access to the the repo and the game itself, which is which is really handy. My approach is uh and like I think I think that works for you. My approach is uh and I'm not arguing with you, but my approach is um I want to be able to

double click on anything immediately and edit it in Photoshop cuz I'm I'm always tweaking little tiny textures. So it's like every little texture I want to tweak, I'm like double click, change in Photoshop, save, boom, updated, you know? So it's just quick. It's a quick and sort of frantic way to make a game. And I like that. So let me throw this on the stage here. This is This is actually our intro cut scene. So, I might skip through this. Um I don't want to. How'd you do the cut scenes? Um I can actually just quickly show it. It's just like using the the timeline Unity timeline system and animations. Um, so it is just like uh I don't have the timeline open right now, but it's literally just a canvas uh with a whole bunch of yeah, these frames and then some text and then they're just going from one to the other and just animating um relatively simple. They're just using some simple components just to make each one trigger the next one. Sweet, dude. Yeah, the way I do these is I do them in Premiere um and just do

export a full video, not the text because it has to be localized. But for me, the reason I use Premiere is cuz I want full control over the the sound and everything to make it more cinematic. Um but my game is more like Bioshock, so I want it to feel more way more cinematic like like an actual film. So this is a great solution, though. I love this. Yeah. Yeah, it worked. But it sort of just I had not much time, so I quickly came up with it. Um, this is like another little little entry to the game. So, bro, check out that water. Is that an asset? What? How did you do that? No, no, it's all our own shader. Yeah. So, all the Yeah, pretty much like we don't really use any shaders by other people. We just sort of make everything ourselves. The water's one of the big we spent a long time working on the water systems. Can I see this in a scene view? Uh, Julian, can you pause it and we can look at the scene? Well, actually um uh well actually shown in the official Unity documentation for how to make good-looking water. And the funny thing is it was for URP and we do

not use URP. They thought our water was so good that they thought it was URP when it's not. Well, that's what's so funny is everybody thinks that URP by default makes your game look better and it's like no, it's just there's different reasons why people URP use URP or HTP. It's primarily related to like a function that you like one little thing that you need is in URP and so you I guess we got to use URP, you know. Yeah. It's not because it just by default makes it look better, you know. So, I'm curious about that mist that's blowing off of the boat. Yeah, that that is what looks really good. What is that? Um just a whole bunch of particle effects. Like for example, this is all so so just like gross. Let me find, for example, there is a water splash particle here. And then I just have like an animation trigger. So like every time the boat comes and then sort of hits there, it just replays this this particle effect. And then I've got all these particle effects going along the way. But that's like the main mist. And then this is just a scrolling like this

is just an adaptation of our water shader on a plane that just scrolls. So it basically has some noise and just scrolls. The boat doesn't move. Everything's stationary and it just scrolls and I just animated everything just to sort of line up with how the waves just sort of match. Yeah. And um and then I just basically have these big particle zones that sort of match the waves. Oh my word. Um so this is like a wave spray and then it just literally just has some smoke dude. It's a magic trick. Yeah. All of it's completely smoking. You can also see like a depth shader that we have here to sort of mask out the water from the boat so it doesn't go over it and it's just a bunch of cubes just placed. Have you Have you checked out how this runs on like Steam Deck? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like we build for like it's available on Mac and also Steam Deck. We don't like officially support Steam Deck, but it runs I have a Steam Deck just here and it runs runs fine on on both um like pretty low devices. It's not a not a problem. Yeah,

like most of the time you get 60. it can dip a little bit below sometimes, but um Steam Deck and um consoles are sort of like a post 1.0 priority for us. It's not a Lens Island isn't launching 1.0 on console at all, but it is playable on Steam Deck and it there is controller support in the game, but it's we still want to improve it. We still want to sort of refine it over time. We didn't want to rush to get Lens Island out on every single device and every format all at once and then have that take up all our development time and then the the [clears throat] underlying game be worse because of it. Exactly. Exactly. What do we got here? A frozen uh a frozen loading screen cuz Unity can't handle loading scenes properly um in the editor. Um but uh we're actually redoing all the splash art for Lens Island which is we're really excited to showcase new splash art soon. So, this is the current sort of main artwork we sort of have for the game. I will say this, and I'm glad you said that. In my mind, when I saw that, I thought that doesn't look as good as the previous scene.

Um, there there it there's it it needs a little bit of a glow up and and so I think you're going to you made the right call there. Yeah. Yeah. I think a sense of like uh depth and action and perspective and also multiplayer is is going to make a big difference um to the artwork in general. This looks so beautiful, dude. So, this isn't isometric but or um orthographic, but it's it's it feels like it, right? Yeah, it sort of has like um it it's like the top down camera angle, but I like to sort of think it's like an an evolved version of the top. There's some depth here. Yeah, there is a bit of perspective. There's a bit of depth. There is camera rotation and there's camera zoom in. You can zoom out and also sort of tilt the camera to sort of see in the background and then also zoom right in. Let's see what it looks like in scene view here. If you want to pause it or something. [snorts] Um, and let's see what it looks like without lighting and post-processing. If you could turn the post-processing off. Yeah, I'll just pause it as well. So, here we

go. So, like I said, here's our sort of chunk system. So, you could see that these are sort of the edges of the world. So, this is just one sort of portion of an island that's loaded in. And then, uh, right now we're sort of standing somewhere in the middle here. It looks good, but it's it it's encouraging to people watching probably that they're like, "Oh, this is actually what it looks like." You know, it's lighting that does all the magic and and um the post-processing and all that, you know, the fog and yeah, the lighting, even just the color grading does so much, dude. Like the the whole time, like from from the first day of making Lens Island, the color grading has done the biggest impact on the looks of the game. It's just uh let's take a look at all of your different postprocessing if you don't mind. Yeah, I'll um I've got a few. So, we sort of have two we're also using the old post-processing stack, but we have sort of two layers. We have like a layer postprocessing which does like in-game stuff for example like if I um if I get

like hurt you know like we have like you know like all these sorts of effects and we have I use I sort of I do everything in a slightly sort of interesting uh not maybe non-advised way. So, for example, right, let's have a look at this like fire. Um, even I'm just about to set the time. Uh, okay. Set time and let's set it to like actually a bit later. That is so cool, dude. So, right now it's sort of at night time. And then you can see I've got this little sort of fire here. So, if I go to like our main camera, we have a um we use like a package for uh glow called MK Glow. So, you can see what I sort of do is like a combination. And I have this sort of strong intense glow that has a pretty tight sort of um blur size. Um but then there's also a second glow that I do at second bloom which is actually like unity post-processing blue and that has a lower threshold but like a much bigger blur size. Um what it sort of ends up it

almost you think that there's sort of like light scattering where it's like there is this like little bit of bloom internally of the thing and then there's like large amount of bloom that sort of affects like the whole the whole area and it's just two blooms just overlaid on top of each other. So and I've I've definitely encountered this problem where it's like I want certain things to have a high intensity and then I want the rest of the game to have a soft bloom. the soft bloom would be justified by I guess like moisture in the air, you know, um creating that scattered light. So, there is that problem and I never knew how to solve it. So, it looks like you you kind of had to solve it with your own sort of band-aid approach, which I love it. It looks great. We could probably even see Yeah. a bit more. The world is has loaded now. It's going to rendering two views at once. This is going to be interesting on the performance. Is exactly. We'll probably see the world change as we walk around. Julian, is the is the land terrain? Um, yeah, all Unity terrains. Yeah, you can

see some cells sort of unloading there slowly on the bottom as I as I sort of walk around. Are they are they generated with code or is it uh chunks of different land that snap together that are pre-made? Pre-made. Yeah. So, every single rock and stick and everything in Lens Island was handbuilt. Like all the terrains are hand painted. We don't use terrain like generation. Like I I mucked around with some terrain generation tools like GIA and stuff like that, but none of them really gave me the control or results that I sort of wanted. A lot of Lens Island is actually birthed from restraint. It's like for example, we have like an interesting inventory system where uh everything is actually pre-laid out in sort of tabs and there is like item dragging and there are storage and stuff but it's sort of like everybody hates sifting through their inventory so let's just do the sifting for you and it's all there and that

whole mechanic is just birthed from I didn't know how to make gridbased inventories when I first started making gays games. It's sort of like it felt that like that's too hard. I I don't know how to do that. So, I'm going to make a different kind of inventory system. And um a lot of Lens Island is sort of built around what I would what was possible for me to make and then it sort of like snowballed that over time. So, like a selling point for me is the fact that the world is handmade. And the reason why it's handmade is because it's like I don't know how to do procedural generation or sort of like make all these terrains and object placement via via code. And when I tried to do it, the results were just nowhere as good. when I did it by hand. So then we sort of like met in the middle. I was like, "Cool, I'm going to hand build everything because I know how to do it. It's going to be more labor intensive. It take longer, but it'll give better results and we'll just basically procedurally organize all of these handbuilt aspects of the world." So are these um are these AI uh animals

are they using a nav mesh? Yeah. Yeah. So there's a whole Okay. So you're baking the nav mesh on the chunks at runtime. Gotcha. Yeah. cuz we like Lens Island is, you know, a sandbox game, right? So, uh, okay, this is going to like completely ruin my performance, but it'll be good to good to show. So, if I go to navigation tab, see, we can sort of see some some nav mesh build here. And um, you can build a lens island anywhere in the whole world. So, you can build crazy castles and sort of do whatever. So if I sort of start building, we have to affect this nav mesh at runtime and rebuild it at runtime. So you can see as I'm placing these foundations, it's actually rebuilding the nav mesh every single time. I mean, are you using nav mesh obstacles? Is that what it is or is it literally recomputing it without? It's literally recmping it. Yeah, cuz it cuz you know nav mesh where I'm standing didn't exist before. Um we have obstacles in like the bottoms of the

foundations to make sure that things don't [clears throat] go below them, but above here it has to sort of reconstruct it. So um yeah. Okay. Are you using occlusion culling at all? I I can't imagine you are because it's all real time to to to an extent. We actually built our own um sort of occlusion optimization system that we use in the game. Um, so like a lot of assets sort of have this this system that we um sort of built basically our own version of like occlusion occlusion culling also distance culling. So things basically step down the shader enable disable the shadows and do all sorts of like LODs based on distance to the camera and and sort of everything else. Okay. So let's talk about your weather system or your dayight cycle and all that. Uh can you give me a breakdown of how this works? Um, I can I'll make a guess here that the directional light is not enough. Like you have to do a lot of post-processing adjustments. You have to

tweak the color grading. You have to tweak the shadow colors. Is this true? Yeah, definitely. It's definitely like a unison sort of everything. Um, so right now I just I just changed the weather to to rainy and you can see there are it's sort of there's like this slow it's sort of like light rain at the moment and weather sort of slowly morphs over time. Um, there's also like a a storm set. Can you show me in the scene view? Can you show me in the scene view what's happening here? So obviously a bunch of post-processing happening, bunch of particles. It's basically like a all the cell objects of the of the world here. So, I can close that. I'm I'm I'm shocked that this runs well on uh Steam Deck to be completely honest with you. There's so much going on. [laughter] A lot of Yeah, we've just we've had to solve a lot of creative problems of optimization and stuff over time. Um but yeah. Yeah, I've I've played through almost the whole game on the

Steam Deck and hasn't really skipped a beat. Um can you play through the whole game? There's a there's a finish point. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's what we're bringing in 1.0. There will be a credit roll, an official final boss, final dungeon, a finish point, but it is in its core still an open world sandbox. So it's like in order to get that end point, you can take 40 hours or 200 hours, you know, like you can really play the game however you want. And there's a lot of there are theoretically more than one end points. There's a lot of different satisfying completions to Lens Island. can have if you're a farmer, if you're a builder, if you're a fighter, sort of Lens Island is a very hard game to make as far as game design because the whole concept of Lens Island is like, I want to play Diablo, but when I'm bored of playing Diablo, I want to play Stardew Valley. I want to play [laughter] Minecraft, but when I'm bored of playing Minecraft, I want to play this other game. And it's like, how can I get all these games to be under this one roof and cohesive? And in order to do that, you have to build four games worth of content. You can't just have

one game that has like a slither of that amount of content. You have to just farm and play a farming game and it holds up on its own two feet and then it's like, "Hey, I'm I'm tired of my farming game. I'm going to do a bit of dungeon crawling and exploring and build a boat and find islands and stuff." And uh it's been very interesting to make it all work from a design perspective. So, and you by the way, Julian, you tell me when you got to go. I know you're busy. Um that's fine. We could I want to I want to see if you don't mind your solution for the dungeons. Yeah. Um yeah, we can we can it's like okay making an exterior terrain based game just [clears throat] at its core just from an art perspective is really simple. Um the moment you go to interiors in in my game which is a first-person game everything changes. The whole the whole way the game is produced is completely different. Um, there's no terrain, there's no painting things. It's building things out with ProBuilder. Um, and then set dressing. There's no

painting objects into the scene. So, how does your interior dungeons work? Is it the same approach as the terrain? Uh, the same approach that you just said where it's completely different to the above world, [laughter] but we also have sort of three uh three different world types in lens arm. There's the above world, right, which is a procedurally generated sort of chunk based world which is very very big, like very big. Um, then there's a cave system which is sort of a mirror of that above world but underground and it's a big sprawling procedurally generated cave network of mining and enemies and structures and all sorts of stuff. And that's also procedurally generated and the two layers have to like talk to each other. And then there's dungeons. So then there's like dozens and dozens of these fullyfledged dungeons around the game that are these handbuilt dungeons that are basically just their own individual scenes and they come back focused. Yeah. And there's just like you're just straight up playing Path of Exile when you're in these dungeons except we have

a bunch of Minecraft and a lot more sort of sandbox elements also mixed in. Um so I'm going to we'll open up into one of these. This is like the first tutorial uh dungeon right now. Okay. And I'm just going to let us So, the underground is is still an explorative world and then a dungeon is combat focused with a maze that isn't procedurally generated. Is that what you're saying? Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, the cave system and above world are like handbuilt tiles using a grid system that are, you know, procedurally swapped around. And then, yeah, the dungeons are just a big scene and there's just no there's no real adherence to like a grid or chunk system or anything. And also just like the whole method of how we design the levels is completely different. Like the above we use terrains and everything in the above world, but the dungeons, as you'll see, they're sort of like floating in this void. And we very much went with this like minimalistic approach where when you just look at the scene and you just see this this sort of dungeon just floating there, you're like that looks a bit weird. But then when you're actually playing it in a game, it doesn't feel

weird. Like it just feels completely normal and you don't even second guess the sort of the situation that you're in. So, this is a sort of tutorial dungeon. So, it's sort of a little bit cave here. Enemies roaming around. No terrain. Um, some stuff is like optimized away. You can see some things disappeared, but you could see it is just this this simple level. And like it's just literally just like the edge of the level. Like this is black in the scene. And that's like a significant part of Lens Island. The level design is you can fall off the edge of the level. And if you fall off, you take damage and you respawn back on the level. So, a lot of the combat is very movement focused in Lens Island. And that's another thing. It's like it was a restriction. It's like I don't want to make this world where it's like, okay, a restriction to level design is I have to build like these huge cave walls on the side and have all this stuff down here. It's like that's so much effort. I'm going to have to build this whole camera fading system and all this other stuff. Let's do none of that. And instead, it's a mechanic. And the mechanic is like positioning and your movement is very important in the

game because you have these small little thin levels that you can you can fall out of and um and take damage. So you can see just it's just a void and um and a lot of the time you're fighting enemies on the edge of this sort of of this void. And there's a lot of elements of the game, light torches and stuff. Oh my word, that's so cool. Well, it looks like your textures are like all the same color and you're using lighting to create a dynamic color scheme. Um, is it true that they're all the same texture or is it just they're all the same hue? I guess what I'm asking is are these pre-built in Blender and then painted in like Substance and they all have their own texture map or are they all just a looping tiling texture? Yeah. So, every Yeah, everything is the exact workflow you just said. So, we use Mayer. Everything is handbuilt in Mayer and then um and textured in substance and they all have their own textures, but I definitely use lighting to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I'm

looking at like a black and white. It's like a black. It looks really I hope you don't take offense to this. It looks bad. Looks Oh, it looks terrible. [laughter] Like you look at this and you're like, uh, okay. And then you look at that and you're like, that's not the same game, right? No. That's why lighting lighting being having an understanding of cinematic lighting is so crucial with game development. Yeah. Yeah. And the the other interesting like I guess optimization thing is um also a lot of these so for example, right? Like this asset here, this cliff, this is one single mesh that's a cliff and every single cliff you see in this whole level is just the same thing. It's just the the same cliff. I just rotated it and trans I scaled it and moved it around, but they're just all the same asset. And there's like a couple variants, but to build like all of the rock structures in the whole game of Lens Island, dozens and dozens of dungeons, there's basically like three rocks and all the ground of the levels is this one ground piece that's just rotated. And it's like I just made things in ways where it's

like, for example, uh if I have a cliff like that that's flat and then I merge into another cliff, I get I get Z fighting here, right? And like we don't want that. So then all the assets have a slight little bulge like this, like it's like a dome. So I can like make all the cliffs go inside of each other and mix and match them and all the all the sort of textures line up and you just sort of never never really notice. You know, I'd love to see what it looks like without ambient occlusion as a post-processing because ambient occlusion solves a lot of the pro the problems of objects intersecting with each other and not looking natural. We don't use ambient occlusion at all. Wow. It just the none of the game uses ambient occlusion in any way. It looks so good. I'm wondering how you got away with that. Honestly, I can Let me find the uh I'll get into the post-process here cuz I guess I didn't properly show it before cuz it definitely is doing uh an insane amount of of of heavy lifting. Um, let me find the

So, I think this one. Here we go. There you go. That's no post-processing and with post-processing. So, you can say the the colors quite drastically shift with the post-processing. What exactly is what exactly is the color grade you're doing? Are you adjusting the mid the mid and the highlights or what? Yeah, like a whole bunch of stuff. A lot of it is like the the basic sort of highlights. It's nothing crazy. Little bit of contrast, little saturation. Um, but a lot of You can remove this in the options. Julian, um, this color grading. No, this is just sort of baked into the game. Uh, because it's sort of the way that I design the game is sort of interesting. I basically what you said before, everything looks like crap to begin with and then I assume it's going to go through this color grading pipeline and then it becomes what it's supposed to be and that even happens for the UI which is something that wo I'm happy with the outcome but it's a pain and you can see look like the whole

UI gets the color grading part. Okay, so the UI is not necessarily consistent across the game level. every single asset that I have to export, I have to export with a filter that basically I make I make an icon. I'm like, cool, that icon looks good. And then now I'm going to make it look like crap with a with a bunch of Photoshop filters and then put into the game and then revert it back to sort of how it how it should be. And the reason why I do this is just cohesion. like the the UI and the game world has the same color theory and the same rules and the same um tones applied and it just feels cohesive across the whole game no matter what you're doing. Green in an icon is always sort of going to match the green of grass. The gold for example in your UI has a real shiny bloom to it, you know, it looks like just really special and that is because of that color grading, you know. Um, I love that, dude. Can you um can you and then we'll wrap up here, but can you talk to me about your color theory um in this scene? I'm

seeing a lot of that high purpley red, high saturation purple red. Do you have intention behind your color theory or did you just wing it? Yeah, that definitely attention like um I can also just quickly show you what it looks like in sort of other other times of day. It's going to take a little while for things to sort of load in. Um but uh but yeah, you can sort of see a fair bit into the into the distance here. That's a sort of another dungeon and stuff. Um but yeah, like color theory is always like very considered. Obviously, this needs to look this needs to look cold. Um but it also needs to look uh like a like a place that I can also sort of um come into I guess it's sort of like a bit of a mixed bag. The intention with this specific town was that it looks a bit bleak, a little bit a little bit cold, and almost a little bit uncomfortable. The color palette during the daytime, you can see it is a bit washed out, and

it doesn't feel super cozy, but it definitely looks pretty dramatic. Like, it looks you go, "Wo, look at this sort of town, the cherry blossoms. It has some popping colors, but it doesn't necessarily feel homely." But then at the night time that really shifts and just like the huge amount of orange light cast everywhere um makes you feel a lot more a lot more sort of nestled. Um, so like the the overall feeling that I sort of wanted to give was like this town is your safe space and you you basically just see this this orange red out here and then everything here is blue and it's harsh and it's cold and you don't want to be out there. And it's just sort of really real sort of simple where like this town is like a bit of like a a beacon um where you can sort of see from distance and go okay up there maybe won't kill me. I'm going to go up there. Mhm. Um, well, dude, thank you so much for sharing this. It is, I would say, the most complicated

project I've looked at on this podcast and definitely intimidating for even me to see, you know, and I say even me just cuz I've been make I've been making games a long time and I'm really impressed with what you've done here. I'm just What? How did you get that water to move over there at the top right hand corner? Oh, that's like a current. So, we have current, dude. Yeah, we have we [laughter] have currents in our game and you can ride the currents on your boat and get little sort of speed boosts around the around the map. Okay. Yeah, I'm officially jealous. Um I'm not jealous of the eight years lost, but [laughter] this is great, dude. Well, thanks for coming on that this is just amazing and and I I really I really am impressed and I know I can see here it's going to do well. It it's going to do well, man. I'm I'm really I'm feeling good about it and I could see why you're confident in it. So yeah, like it's I have a lot of fun playing it and I think I've got a pretty good opinion of of what's a good game. So hopefully that opinion stays true. Um

but yeah, like like I said, the the confidence can somewhat be uh tangible because it's already released. Like we know people really like the game. For me, it's just very much been a journey of um can I just get to the end, you know, and be proud of it. For me, it's a bit of a difference between something that is good and something that I'm proud of. I think probably the difference is knowing that I gave it my all. Like, I can make something good, but I could also at this at the same time know that I didn't give it my all and I I could have made it great. So, I'm at this point where there's no doubt left in my mind anymore. I gave it my all. I think it's great. And I I I think other people are going to think it's great, too. So, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. 4 weeks from now, the big release. All right. Well, link is in the description to either wish list or play. You know, most people probably watch this when it's available to play. So, please everybody click the link in the description and um support this game. It looks amazing. Anything else in the

description you wanted, Julian? No, no, we just released um the release date trailer as well. So, if you want to see a little bit more about the game, you can like see the trailer. Is that on the Steam page? Yeah, that's on the Steam page. We I I can't really share too much, but there may be a way you can play the game without paying for it at some point and maybe. So, maybe just keep an eye on if you want a little try of Lens Island. Maybe something will come up in the future. Brilliant. All right, dude. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Yep. Cheers. Okay. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Do you want to listen to the voice message from Julian and hear the final results? All right, let's go. Hey, sorry, I'm just going for a run, but this popped into my mind if it's not too late at the start of the video. I can give you the stats of how the game launch actually went cuz I think we made like a million bucks in like a few days over the launch. So, I don't know cuz in

the video I guess I have no idea about how the lords went. Um, yeah, up to you. I just thought I'd just like um mention it just in case you would prefer to like record a little bit of a start or if you want any of those stats, just let me know and I can just um I can just send you a screenshot of like our our Steam sale stats when I get