Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut with Tony & Abby Howard | 360

[Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of Game Dev unchain the number one game development podcast about game development and the livey thereof I am your host Brandon fam and welcoming back Tony and Abby from black tabby games what's up guys what's up Brandon happy to be here [Music] uh just as a reminder for those who didn't listen to the previous episode if you guys don't mind kind of introducing yourselves again to the listeners out there just a little uh intro to where you guys been where you're at where are you heading uh so we're a two-person Studio we make visual novels most recently we released slay the princess that was in October of 2023 coming to consults this fall um also localizing it into a bunch

of new languages um so should be cool and we also work on Scarlet Hollow which is an ongoing episodic visual novel that one's in Early Access yeah uh as a reminder you know we've had you on before uh for longtime listeners uh I was super impressed back then right you guys started your studio in 2019 able to build a community on your own able to kind of service your community and your community came through in a big way and I've been following your latest slay the princess in the past 6 months or this year right let's just say that and I've just seen like this Amplified uh uh response that I know you guys engineered that and maybe some of it's luck but I would love I would love to kind of dive into that because it is as we've seen this year uh and even in the Summerfest how kind of

like games kicked off Indie development is the The Innovation that industry needs especially in these really trying times um like the old business model is outdated and in a lot of ways hurting the industry and what I've seen you guys been doing is very inspiring but also I really do think and feel if not already it's Paving the way of how devel ERS should start thinking about their products so we love to kind of go back you know kind of take the timeline back to when you guys first produced the your first title and the success from that and going back to the drawing board was kind of where we were talking about uh talking to each other about last time we love to kind of or from then on what happened uh in terms of the planning stage what you guys thinking you guys took some time off off how did that slay

the princess begin development so we have not taken any anytime never stop stop so like slay the princess sort of popped up in the middle of scarlet hollow's development so like that one again episodic um we still have three more episodes to release before we're done with that story right and uh that one just like the Early Access release model was grinding us to dust MH um I think uh to go back on something you mentioned like a minute or so ago um sort of the idea of the old business model for the games industry failing I think that it's not so much that so much is like larger companies have pivoted to a new model that's failing and I view a lot of what we do as closer to the old model of someone buys a game yeah they own the game they get all the updates is

just part of that experience and there's no need for like paid DLC or microt transactions or gambling or anything like that so it's like with Scarlet hollow's release schedule that that is always just been the first episode is available is like a free demo and then you can buy the full game and you're not paying like an individual fee for each new content drop you pay the the stick price once and then you get the rest of the story as it comes out um on the Early Access side of things that was just getting very very difficult because like you know the kind of the sales graph for a game I don't know how many of your listeners are Audio Only or how many will be watching the video yeah but it's kind of like a yeah right like you start off as a huge Peak and then it falls off almost immediately like we've been blessed with

long tails on both of our games but the general rule of thumb is you get something like 20% like 10 to 20% of your wish lists at launch as sales not conversions it's just because that also includes people who see your game for the first time and buy it then so you can expect 10 to 20% of that number in like your first week and then you expect that number again in like maybe your's first month and then you expect that number again in like your first year so it falls off rapidly and Scarlet Hollow is like I think like word of mouth has done a lot for both of our games and it's really extended the tail especially since we don't have the budget for huge marketing pushes so we're generally entering the market like with a hyperfocused very engaged community that then shares our stuff so we we spend more time propagating so like Scarlet Hollow is like doing much better than

that curve and it was having spikes um with every new episode released but like the Baseline was still going down and getting kind of sweaty so with SL the princess it was sort of a move of you know in between every episode release because of our how our workflow is structured I had some downtime Abby always writes the first draft of new Scarlet Hollow episodes and I don't start the second draft and coding until he's done with that and starts art so I'm just doing marketing and business stuff in that time so like what if we had a second project we could develop in parallel that uses kind of that dead zone for me better than just like talking to Publishers or tweeting really hard yeah um and then is also less demanding on her from the art side of things which um we sort of lived up to and also did not live up to Art was very demanding for slay the prince in the end

yeah yeah sorry AB for some reason I your mic is not working as well as Tony's for go a little closer maybe talking because we're splitting headphones it's using this one um hold on we can let's let's try like a slowo switch and see if that does it that works okay yeah can you still hear us yeah yeah yeah yeah and we can hear you and Abby if you talk yeah for some reason I hear Tony the whole time I don't hear you Abby yeah can you hear her now it's still the same uh issue I think wonder if it's from the webcam no it wouldn't make sense I hear Tony really well I project um let it feel it feels like the mic is next to you uh for

reference this um how's this is this better I hear you sound there you go better yes there we go okay perfect we've switched to the computer uh mic which should be okay no worries yeah so the the art for this was very much built around one character in one location um but of course that did not turn out to be what the art was since she's constantly shifting and the entire uh environment is shifting with her so I wound up drawing basically the same background in various different forms 24 25 times I'm not really sure this yeah but but it was like you know four backgrounds each of them drawn 24 times and of course like the the Sprite work is a lot more Dynamic than it is in uh Scarlet Hollow which is really fun yeah but at the same time it also meant that there was more of it because every single action that any like anything that she did had to have a unique asset for it which like tends to be the case in

Scarlet Hollow anyway but there's less action in general because you're not fighting another person right right and the protagonist has visible hands in uh slay the princess and doesn't in Scarlet Hollow CU like with Scarlet Hollow we felt it was very important that anyone who plays can kind of self-insert an alternate version of themselves um so instead of going through like all of these sliders for what should this person's hands look like we just avoid ever portraying it um which which is actually kind of a challenge compared to just being able to have your hands on things right so the develop there there was a couple things I I would love to kind of follow up on you were talking about like these kind of measures which I feel like the Indie development team especially those who've been through a couple rounds it's a very foreign idea to people who are starting to to think about uh making their own product but You' heard about it before you know wish listing having

some kind of uh correlation to to at least there's some science to it right that you can rely on in in terms of not exactly conversion but like a percentage chunk but you were mentioning like there were uh uh uh timely indicators you know you can the first week the month in the year what exactly is happening in those periods that is kind of giving you that type of reliable result within a month or year yeah I mean these are these these are all just sort of data driven points and like for both of our games neither of them have followed the standard formula right um I want to say a lot of these numbers come from uh an indie Dev called uh named Jake Burkett uh he worked on Regency solitire he does a lot of number crunching very very active on Twitter yeah there you go I've talked to him

yeah so so he he he crunched some things out and and it it works for most people but you know games are extremely hype driven um and just so many are coming out all the time right that unless you're in like a really really commanding position either because you're a large player or because you make something that isn't just good but like touches people to the extent that they have to keep sharing it with other people uh just the fallof is huge it's dramatic and like some of this is socially driven and some of it is algorithmically driven by steam right because steam is a platform that is optimized around making steam as much money as it possibly can so they also know there that well new releases are really EXC exciting um and like I think

the platform does a very good job showering like attention on new titles even smaller ones and just seeing like okay well when someone sees this page for the first time do they click do they wish list if it's out do they buy it if they buy it do they refund it um how many hours they put it in like they they they have good data here and I think it's like the end of the day the data just says well for the most part people will play a game and and they'll move on what exactly do you think uh I call him Uncle Gabe because Uncle Gabe seems to like slow and steady over the years they you know they don't have to do anything but once in a while you hear a rumor that valve is making a game but steam is like their bread and butter right it's pretty but what do you think like a license to print money right yeah yeah and they never go above and beyond where they you know they can go super charge it if they wanted to but they don't they just like you know slow and steady but what exactly is steam doing for the

smaller teams that other consoles uh I don't seen the same result with you know um you know Xbox kind of kicked it off with xbla and all this stuff console is obviously still a place for new games to to appear but steam keeps uh being like the foundation for a lot of smaller teams to kind of like we got a first and foremost make sure we're succeeding on Steam before thinking about anything else yeah I mean it's bigger right it's just bigger than every other platform I think there is also a tendency where steam has over the years curated um kind of a picture of itself as a place to go for Indie stuff whereas I think a lot of console Gamers they lean more towards

first party games um and that like first party games are often at least in previous generations a big reason someone would pick one console over the other I remember when I was in high school and I got my my first console it was a big oh do I get an Xbox or a PlayStation thing and it was like well do you want Halo and Gears of War or do you want like demon souls and Uncharted um I picked demon souls and Uncharted uh but so I think that's part of it and I I do think it's just like I I don't know like the steam has this thing unlike other storefronts where there's like a habitual browsing behavior in its player base I want to say thinking about how I've used different platforms it's probably a holdover from just how wildly good the deals were

on Steam like in the early 2010s where it's like oh you check in every day and what's the daily deal what can you get for 80% off things were heavily discounted there um and then you also had like lower starting price points than most console games which were usually retailing at I don't know $60 um and the deals have gotten like less good over time because I think charging next to nothing for games is an unsustainable business model it's why I think that a lot of consoles decisions to Pivot into games as a service and like subscription models is unviable for the long term it just doesn't support the industry but I don't know the Habit is still there like it feels like a cultural thing instead of like just a store you go to every now and then right like if I were to compare it to Epic um great company lot of really really great people there but

like I've never used their store other than popping in and claiming a free game and leaving and I think part of that was for years their strategy was I I think trying to mirror like the good deals steam was cutting but then they didn't really build functionality or anything around Community there right it was you you go in you get your free thing you maybe use a coupon and then you leave where is like steam had had friends it had achievements it had all these social aspects forums reviews um it was a place and it still is a place where it's like if you're into games that's where you go and learn about them right um like I even today I will study what other games are doing by looking at their steam pages and seeing what people are saying there and tracking like you know their concurrent players over time or their followers over time and like that gives

me such a clear-headed sense of the industry and I wouldn't be able to get that sort of insight if I were browsing on a console storefront yeah I think I completely agree with you the steam ecosystem it took years to build up I remember the first time it launched everybody hated on it I mean the experience was actually pretty similar it didn't change that much from day one but over time they just added value and yeah same thing with epic uh besides from claiming games that I never play you know I have really Killer Games I just go and buy that game yeah it's just to take it but yeah there's definitely uh I don't like they need to separate the uh the game store from their engine it's this this big browser with like a ton of tabs and it's a fortnite has its own tab it's just too much it doesn't uh take in the the PC experience that you know what steam has

it's like hey I'm here to buy games to play games and make it very clear and it's like they're fighting a really hard uphill battle too because steam had so much time in this space and yeah I a lot of people like to say that steam has a monopoly I don't think that's true I don't think they have they they don't really do many you know anti-competitive practices but they do have like this huge just momentum driven Advantage where even ignoring everything else I'm reluctant to do stuff on Epic because like as a gamer uh because I have a library of a thousand things on Steam yeah and it's like well I'm never going to abandon this Library so it's either there's something that I need I have to either need this platform to make me boot it up yeah um which you know that'll happen once in a while I'm an avid star rail player right now and

if I'm playing on PC I have to go through their launcher um but it's like other than that like steam is just going to perpetually be my home base because I bought so many things on there yeah we're invested uh and for the first time they they've talked about um when when you unfortunately when you die you're not going to you can't you can't trans you're in a will yeah which is I don't know how they're going to control that I'm leaving my steam password in my will uh for my grandchildren on a Post-It note yeah it'll be fine what are they gonna do but uh I wanted to talk about a bit because I I feel like that is an important aspect as a game developer to understand the gamer habits uh especially if you're a smaller team you are going for PC usually first and to understand that market is so pivotal for what you kind of plan on kind of uh

dispersing your game right and you talked about episode of content uh for first title and it is starting to becoming more mainstream this idea of Early Access right um the the the ory and the blind Forest people not ory is it ory yeah it is or they had like a a like an isometric Souls like in early right no something about uh uh nothing for the wicked or something but it's an early access it's a bigger team and it's kind of becoming more acceptable and honestly supported because nobody likes developing games for five years and it becoming a flop um this early community building with your community building this Niche uh audience in this game for that audience uh the earlier the better um seems to to be a model

from from teams like yourselves uh innovated I do think though that there is a nugget in what you said that's important to unpack which is your go-to was the Ori developers um which big Studio you know forign Indie loads of name recognition large pre-existing audience and Early Access is that double-edged sword where it can be a great way to build out a community for a specific game over time yeah but if you're if you go into that launch without enough momentum and that can be either content um that can be a pre-existing Community pre-existing Community is a huge one like you kind of get locked into something where you know you have an obligation to keep working on something that maybe isn't working out right it's like the Ori devs with their new thing it's like they could go into it and like um super giant with um

Hades and Hades 2 they could go into Early Access for both of those kind of knowing well we're set regardless and this will probably only make the game bigger yeah um but I've seen a lot of um smaller games try the Early Access route and then you know they get a couple hundred maybe a thousand sales over the first tower for long and then they're stuck there um and like for us with Scarlet Hollow when we started the Early Access thing we were sort of in a middle ground where we had enough audience to kind of keep the lights on and and trudge forward um but it was you know it was leading into like a death by a thousand cut scenario yeah so your mileage may vary yeah and at the same time it's also like the structure of the game lent itself to that right versus releasing a game where people then get used to the game as it exists and every change you make to it kind of makes a large subset of your audience say I liked it better

before like releasing basically a finished game can be a little bit of an issue versus releasing something where it's not all at once it's an episodic game I think that really helped and I think with Scarlet Hollow another thing that's important to think about is like it's not just episodic but it's like each episode is almost a self-contained game it's just nestled Within larger narrative and your choices carry over but like you have to make sure that like it feels satisfying when an update comes out versus feeling like you're getting just the next chapter in a book which gets you just a little farther feeling like you're experiencing something complete that like makes you emotional that like engages you in that way and then ends on a cliffhanger to the next one it's kind of a a subtle art I suppose the storytelling there but like something to to maybe point at and obviously we are orders of magnitude

smaller in scope than this but like right the the Mass Effect Trilogy it's three games that you know you fully play through they have their own self-contained story from start to finish but everything you did in the first Mass Effect get carried over into the second one and it follows an overarching narrative that contains those smaller ones so like with Scarlet Hollow we sort of doing that on a on a micro level um so it's like with narrative stuff in particular uh unless you are writing a story that kind of just happens to fit the format well uh you can wind up getting into a hole where it's like you know does someone have a reason to come back for the next episode were they satisfied enough with like uh The One You released um Cliffhangers are important but then also resolution is important within that structure yeah I think that's a key thing having a selfs satisfactory experience if you're

going to episodically release things and not just kind of do minor patches and and be unsatisfied it is a big concern like the the the pesimistic part of me is that I feel like this is a um Innovation that the Indie development teams uh were able to use as a way to kind of Finance their project successfully right and and I I I'm just afraid that bigger teams are just using this as a marketing tool right kind of like how Kickstarter were huge for the smaller team development team to kind of Finance their games and then these bigger teams already having all the finance they need just started using it as a market and it kind of K as a press yeah and it really it really and and a lot of unfortunately a lot of them were scams too they just stopped finishing the game and like oh well that's it right so like it hurt I think that

Community uh and it's recovering you know obviously kickstar still around there's people still fighting and the noise died down right um but it know you know I I think in a way it took away uh a lot of opportunities for smaller teams to thrive if it continued that that that buzz uh I hope that um there's a couple things I can see with bigger teams you know the the investors can pull their money it's like well you're not getting the reception thank God year one we find this out which is a good thing I think like it's in a way it is a good thing it's like if it's not working it's not working but at the same time well you know maybe giving it a little more time to finesse that's the whole point to kind of figure this formula out but uh I don't know I'm I'm hoping I I I I'm kind of want this to just be for smaller teams because I think it's a

perfect model uh if the design makes sense for it right to release things in patches I think it's great and and I do think that audiences like they differentiate between the two right yeah they do like they get they I I've noticed people in general they get more irritated when a giant like AAA studio with tons of VC funding goes into early access and pushes out something Half Baked and they're a lot more warm and welcoming and friendly to the smaller developers like this is just a real aspect of the industry there's a lot more sympathy in uh knowledge uh about game development in general to to average Gamers nowadays that I've uh I didn't see two years ago like gamers are just getting more just smarter about the business of games and uh overall not just forgiving but

very supportive of smaller teams they it becomes like uh a champion topic for for them to like oh this is developed by two three five people you know and that becomes part of well a good part of the conversation of why they're behind the game yeah and I do think one one other note on Early Access stuff before we we close that little book is um I think that larger and smaller Studios tend to have different approaches to what it means to go into Early Access and I think there is like one general rule of thumb which is regardless of your studio size you you should treat your Early Access launch as your games launch right like you are selling it people are buying and playing it now it might be unfinished but like it should have the Polish of a full

release and one I think smaller Studios when they when their projects are much smaller in scope they're able to hit a release level of polish with their Early Access launch but like a lot of bigger titles are you know even even like straight to 1.0 release uh AAA games are often by by their nature as like $200 million projects riddled with bugs because they're just so unfathomably big and they're on such a tight turnaround that like you can't possibly get everything ironed out when it's ready to go out the out the door at that budget um so like that that's just another differentiating Factor um like for scarlet Hollow episodes we we have like you know a week long really really crunchy period after every launch where I have to find every

little bug it's like the narrative is way too complicated to thoroughly test until thousands of people are playing it um but it's like you know those episodes they are launching as finished polish products um I think this is part of the reason um CET bring up super giant again like both hads games have been like so phenomenal in Early Access because like there is a complete polish experience there they're just tuning things and making making more of it uh one of the biggest advice is has always been have tandem projects going you know to be able to well I mean the bigger teenss are doing this they have to right to kind of uh when when something is ending the another On's beginning to kind of borrow resources how are you guys balancing two projects at the same time uh given that you guys are such a small

team right uh and being able to support both there might be some overlap in terms of community but I'm I'm sure there's like new audience in each corner right how are you guys able to do this um was it what you anticipated was it more that you thought guys think were were undertaking would love to kind of hear more of your opinions after say the princess was definitely more than we anticipated to be uh and part of that was kind of the natural way that the structure of the story kind of progressed and at the same time it was also because a lot more people were playing it so we thought we should make sure that we polish it so after the demos came out we could have just kept if it hadn't kind of taken off the way it did we could have made it into a much smaller project so that it wouldn't take too much time away from Scarlet Hollow but at the same time we also want to make sure that we put out things that we're proud of so uh that being said it did still adhere to the structure that we had laid out for it which is uh Tony

writes the first draft of the script for slay the princess which means that I'm working on Scarlet Hollow at that time and then I do edits and I start on Art so that takes me away from the project but for a less like shorter amount of time than it would if I were doing this art style that I use for scarlet Hollow so we just kind of tried to pair it down as much as possible to not uh have too much conflict yeah I think at the end of the day it was probably for me about seven months of work so not terrible and I was I was at like N9 or 10 like the working on both things in tandem at least for the script period was going great until it turned out the scope of episode five of scarlet Hollow is just like double that of episode 4 it's like I I was kind of assuming okay so like we will finish the scripts at the same time and um you know then we'll do the art for slay the princess and then when slay the princess is done like I'll be able

to start my next thing with Scarlet Hollow and we could go yeah so both projects kind of wind up being bigger than we thought they well yeah was like for in terms the expectations we had for timing like I think Abby finished about half of the the script for episode five by the time I started Sorry by the time I finished the first draft of slay the princess um so if it had been in line with like the previous two chapters scope would have been perfect but you know uh one of the things that we care about a lot as developers is treating player decisions seriously and making the type of branching stories where even if you pick outcomes that seem bad you still get something interesting right like there's kind of two two things that we've really tried avoiding and one that

is happened a bunch with like The Walking Dead game where well there's a decision in episode one where a character lives or dies right and it's like if they live they wind up leaving halfway through episode two um and like part of this is Telltale just like they to voice act everything they had to animate everything like the burden of keeping a character in the story um much higher than than ours so one we're avoiding that and then two the other thing is if you make a decision where said character dies um and we do keep them like in the narrative thinking about this more like a party member in like a BioWare game where sometimes you can make a decision and someone can die and then it's just like there's an empty space there um so like really exploring like in that scenario um how do we make this an interesting

decision how do we make it so that you're not being robbed of content you're just getting completely different content but the same amount of it even though you have one less character yeah making sure that things are still interesting and that there is a plot around that character that they still exist in this universe right and that like and if they if they're gone then being gone means something it means that they leave a hole behind and how to other people deal with the hole how does the story adapt to that hole um but it means that like with every new episode of scarlet Hollow we have you know yet another large set of outcomes that we want to really be able to explore with it um so it takes a while yeah yeah it's definitely a lot of little strings to keep track of uh the process of uh creating a demo right the I feel like demo and early access at least to a gamer or out outside of the Indie bubble

like it felt like it really became a a bigger thing the last two years right I know steam has like yeah has its Fest for demos dedicated and I think it's a great idea because there's so much for the gamers to face with in that storm uh that steam store Page right to be able to play and try before deciding or wish listing has always been a part of a gamer experience it's just been kind of quiet I would say the last decade but it's kind of you know becoming a main stay a thing that you have to do um would love to kind of hear your thoughts about that but also the process of you guys planning for this demo putting it out what was the deadlines like the the procedure to the reception was it everything that you wanted to because it is very uh it doesn't get talked about too much I don't think uh I don't at least when I try to read into it not a lot of people talk

about making sure this demo is a big part of their marketing to to to get hands-on experience yeah I think one thing to say before diving into it is like we mentioned kind of the importance of like really strong hookie Cliffhangers with like episodic releases I think something very similar plays into designing a good demo and I think there is this really unfortunate thing where a lot of the skills it takes to make a good video game which would be a complete experience are very different than the skills it takes to make a good demo um because you need to be able to give someone a small slice of an experience that is good enough to keep to make them want to come back for more but that also isn't so good that it satisfies them um so that's really

really really hard yeah something that sticks with people um and makes them remember when they see your game has released uh and keeps them wanting to come back so that's not really something you can I think write down a formula for it's just depends on each game yeah how do you prepare for that like what's can you is it just several guesses of how this is how we should tell this story to kind of get people to try this and keep thinking about us until we release like is there a way that you guys found that like helped with keeping interests alive after people demo your game I think would SL the princess in particular since this is very like game specific uh it was definitely the kind of nature of the short uh intro to to the game so like the fact that you can play through chapter one and then start again at

chapter 2 and immediately see that there is a lot to it and that it can kind of blossom into something huge which it did uh and by huge of course I mean like the branching and the way that I can kind of react to your choices uh I think the the short nature of that really helped like within 15 or 20 minutes you can kind of show someone what this game could be uh and leave it on something that is very intriguing like just the of the princess having changed and she has a new name and you have voices in your head that are talking to each other uh and you can get more of them like just kind of hinting at that and having it be something that happens in such a short amount of time so yeah um and it's like both of our games are very I don't know if twist driven is the way to describe it but there are enormous like dramatic narrative turns in them so like that's just part

of how we write and I think we just have like an instinct for and then here's the good place to cut it off where like there's a lot of very good um narrative games that just have different styles where they're they're a little more Meandering in a good way but like how do you how do you sell that feeling um and bring people back for the full release when you're done I don't know what the answer is there like even for scarlet Hollow I feel we don't have an equivalent to the first SL the princess demo like and especially the second like you know any of the slay the princess demos because it does take a little while for you to understand what Scarlet Hollow is doing I'd say the entire first episode which can be about an hour or so depending on how fast you read yeah one to two hours uh that's kind of what you need to form a picture of what Scarlet Hollow is going to be so and that's a little bit more of a Time commit it's a little bit more uh kind of focused versus being able to go through

these chapters really quickly how many demos did you guys end up uh releasing for slay the princess before the game released just two just two was was there a reason for two was there game changed enough in between like the first demo and kind of the direction we were taking the script I see so it's like the first demo there were only like six different chapter 2 princesses and we wanted to make sure that the final demo reflected like the full 10 we were going with MH and then we also just saw that as an opportunity to um you know bring something new and exclusive to PX East that uh that year yeah knowing that we were going to be showing a demo we wanted it to reflect what the game was going to be better and we wanted it to be more interesting more polished more polished is there a you were mentioning 50 20 minutes is is that the magic number of where you want

people to uh try the game have a good taste and be able to walk away anything longer or shorter than that that was just the the length that a single run wound up being okay for the oh Sor I think it was good for being able to hook people quickly uh but that is definitely not the amount of time that we want people to be like satisfied with it we want it to be a hook and then that draws you into the rest of the game which takes hours so yeah and I mean like if you're looking for every ending in the demo that's like a 2hour experience if you want to spend more time in it you can but you don't have to and I think that that's good to kind of engage more people um it wasn't something we like necessarily set out with in mind it just happened that way uh did you guys seek extra help with the second game do you guys just kind of build off of what you learned from the first uh in terms of like either Contracting or marketing uh

Indie marketing or anything um and why exactly so we hired PR help okay we worked with stride for that they were great um and yeah that was just like you have to send a lot of emails um when you're marketing a game and I was sick of it yeah figured people who already had press contacts would would be helpful there they did a great job and then um one of the things we were doing when we started work on slay the princesses just across the board we were scoping it up to be much smaller than Scarlet Hollow because Scarlet Hollow is just becoming a behemoth to work on and it's like we were talking about earlier it's it's tough to just like start to finish bootstrap your way through a five-year development cycle um but the smaller scope let us bring in

help for areas that would just be un infeasible for for scarlet Hollow namely we were able to have voice acting which I think was absolutely huge for the game we're able to land a couple of extremely talented actors for that and um it also put us in a position where it's like now that the game's doing really well we can afford to localize it where it's like so the final word count for slay the princess including the expansion is like 190,000 Words which you know brings like the cost of localization if you're using Professional Services to like somewhere between 20 and 30 grand language um which is feasible and like you can project an Roi off of that uh whereas like Scarlet Hollow is going to be something like 1.3 million words when it's done and you know that that would mean it would be like close to a quarter of a million

dollars per language and it's just like obviously the market really can't support that yeah like if the game sold 10 times better than it was selling now then maybe for one or two languages it would be feasible um but I think it's just like the scope of that one pigeon holes it into being an English only text right which local localization um what what kind of success are you seeing with that in terms of like we're glad we did it and this is something that would tell would would advise new developers like think about it and which language exactly is the biggest AR ask us in four months okay so you're in the mid process of learning we're we're in the middle of it and it's releasing alongside the director's cut this fall okay um so we're doing we're doing 12 languages though so we're doing uh traditional and

simplified Chinese counting that as two CU you know different enough separate teams same with Latin American and European Spanish and then we're doing Brazilian Portuguese we're doing French Italian German polish Japanese Korean and Russian wow um so really must be pretty exciting huh just seeing how all that it's a whole new audience it's both exciting completely overwhelming every morning I wake up and have like 20 to 30 questions from localizers to answer to the game is written in a very like symbolic and metaphorical way um which is hard often there are things that I don't even realize are like idioms or expressions or metaphors that someone is like what does this mean and I'm like oh how do I describe this without using another idiom accidentally yeah ah what what an interesting process it seems

like you guys are constantly this is where I feel like a lot of teams that have found success uh uh continue to be successful it's just like every game you kind of learn something new and you add on to that and you kind of broaden your Audience by doing that and the most important team thing about it is the team stays the same uh and grows the team size instead of just always mix and matching which is what the bigger teams are having trouble with a lot of people leave or other things that happens and uh game one that you love game two is not quite the same it's funny like you're the third person today that mentioned Mass Effect just out of the blue there's no new Mass Effect but there's like all these shows that are being successful now that I like I would love the Mass Effect he's like yeah that would be great yeah if they do that but uh yeah yeah like the Mass Effect team

unfortunately mostly are not together anymore and it's just those type of things that I I feel like as a creative uh it's so important uh to to to to continue to be successful that uh just because of the how the industry is you just can't have that all the time yeah I like I think there's this thing where people just they perceive Brands as almost people that make sense right where it's like they think that this brand will always make things of this quality when really it was a team who made that and most of the team has been fired well they just left because not many people stay with the same place for a decade right blizzard that made Diablo 4 is just not the blizzard that made Diablo 2 it's a ship of thesis situation yeah um so you know It's Tricky right like one of the the good things about being such a tiny studio is the core

team is pretty much exactly the same project for project maybe we'll bring in voice talent for one maybe we won't yeah that is something that independent creators kind of can hold on to which is the small team and as long as nothing catastrophic happens between them they can use their collective experience to keep making things that at least have a similar vibe to what they made before but better but the big studios are they're itively Publishers that have you know in-house Dev teams and it's like you know are you are you going to at the end of the day like are your tastes built around seeing a24 films or they built around seeing what AR Aster's been up to um I think that even if sort of the larger Brands the Publishers the um production companies uh even if they wind up absorbing a lot of

the recognition and this is a huge challenge in the space you know at the end of the day it's like the devs are are the folks making the games um and and that's something to keep sight of right yeah um in terms of uh road map right I'm sure there's a billion ideas that you guys want to try but uh you're in self control in terms of scope because it's like you know we're growing we're learning there's certain things we got to accomplish before we want to do the ultimate game let's say right uh how do you guys balance that in terms of having two successful projects uh already uh having a ton of more experience than when you get started uh how how are you guys able to uh start constructing that road map of one day we'll try this but not yet and how do you kind of keep

yourself each other in check to make sure that we're keeping align with our goals uh to to build it smart basically sure I mean we already tried doing two things at once and it was like it it worked out yeah you know as a as a play yeah phenomenally but it was it was excruciating like I I think the last time we talked I don't know if I had any gray hair and like my hair is like half gone silver at this point I'm 32 yeah um yeah so uh it's definitely a lot and um fortunately now I think our timelines are kind of paced out by deadlines so we have to finish Scarlet Hollow so we're going to finish the only thing we're working on until we're done yeah we're just going to finish it we now slay the princess has allowed us to just have the funds to be able to finish a project like this so uh that's going be really complicated episode 5 is already very complicated and um then I'm going to

finish a web comic that I started when I was like 21 and I haven't I had to put it on hold because of all of the other projects that paid more so here we are and uh then perhaps another game who knows but that's kind of how we're able to Pace it out and we can kind of figure out where our skills have grown um and kind of match the next project to that yeah yeah and I mean like so it's like right now we sometimes talk about a third game but it's just it's just a fun conversation we have once every three months when we're driving somewhere and a run out of other things to talk about uh where that idea just comes back in and like I I I I feel like our current third game thing is finally at a place where we've had many different ideas and they all get replaced within like 3 months and it's like where they kind of get changed into something else fit into other ideas we have but I'm like kind of

fond of the thing we have right now but uh I'm in no rush to get started yeah um Scarlet Hollow is just like such a ridiculously ambitious project so it's not like um it's not like we're being held back um by you know prior obligations if anything like I think the skills that we developed over the course of working on slay the princess were the necessary like level up need to do this episode which like that was a that was a thing that was really great about the episodic uh structure of scarlet Hollow in general where it was like you know episode one was the first game we ever made um it was a learning experience and the lessons we learned there meant that we could do the things we wanted to do with episode two and we could make it better the things we learned with episode 2 went into episode three and made that better and then that's kind of that's sort of what fed into slay the princess we started that demo and then

we finished episode 4 between slay the princess's demo and um working on the rest of slay the princess fulltime and it was like that demo is what leveled us up enough to do what we needed to do for episode four which leveled us up enough to do what we needed to do with slay the princess which leveled us up enough for the like director's cut which has finally like leveled us up enough for episode five of scarlet B so it's like it's one of those things where um one I think it's good to set just like this kind of growing curve of ambition over time so you can you can fill into that cup and and fit the shape of it um but you're also just always going to be taking the things you've learned from previous projects and almost like instinctively applying them to the next one like there's this thing episode four of scarlet Hollow where there's like these paint monsters right

and we wanted to give them kind of like a bit of a shifting ethereal quality because they're they're like made of liquid and when we were working on the slay the princess demo we had to learn how to do like open GL shaders to create a boil effect so so like that art has its shifting quality so it was something where it's like we're running into this new problem and oh suddenly we have a solution from work we've already done so we can apply it here and then move on to the next step yeah uh I I think as I get older uh quality of life is definitely uh it's the main motivation for everything uh you know yeah I can do that make more money there or I could do this and you know be uh what it feels like more successful right

but at the end of the day I was like ah I want to just enjoy what I'm doing at the same time so there's always like that back and forth uh of of kind of scaling back over ambition or or doing stuff and I talk to developers and they're they're always in that uh in the middle there where trying to figure out what's the balance uh to because to them it's like especially end of developers it's not so much about um going 120% right it's about sustainability which is what Jake is the king of right Jake Burkett he's the the Indie sustainable Master right for like 20 going still going and I ever since I talked to him to be honest it seems like this is how you're supposed to build games it's just uh don't sit in a cave for like 10 years right get your cont content out there is uh when it makes sense to players get that feedback and like you

said level up from that experience because there's I think as a creative output it's it's nice to be isolated and make things but the other half of is just seeing how people receive it at the same time because I I think that's the business side part of it but you know as an Entertainer uh it's nice to kind of see people enjoying your work too it kind of pushes you to The Next Step so I admire what you guys do uh you guys been saying this since 2019 I think the last time we talked was around 2020 2021 or something uh we started in 2020 so I'm gonna guess it was like 21 or yeah it was it was around that time when we first talked but it was great to kind of see how you guys developed that concept continued on and and seeing that uh starting to translate to other Studios like the idea of just being small and build your community

more than ever now I I think the the the amount of games that are out there there's definitely like buus choice is infinite right now yeah and even more important too many I would say yeah even more important is just like you just got to carve your own audience and be able to talk to them you know what makes them want to buy your game versus the others just simply they know you or you know you have some some kind of relation and that's the future proofing that every developer needs to think about instead of relying on an outside third party to sell the game for you you know uh you got to have some kind of connection there um I would like to say this is the top of the hour I want to thank you for giving one hour of your guys' busy schedule right uh this is the part where I actually shut up and hand over the mic so that you guys can talk directly to the listeners and viewers out there about anything go for

it gosh Christine cut coming this fall look out slay the princess is coming to consoles so yeah that'll be great um episode five Scarlet Hollow coming out next year yep buy our games play our games slay the princess has a demo Scarlet Hollow has um free first episode on Steam so try it before you buy it mhm um have fun yeah and thank you so much for having thank you so much for having us this was so lovely of course uh I'm following you guys' journey I just I just been so happy seeing like the success that you guys have been getting lately right with everything and uh it's very uh inspir inspiring right I'd say especially this last year and a half uh so it's great that you guys did this before everything and you know figured this out uh to to a certain uh aspect and I hope this

message is uh is good for all the listeners out there it's never too late to start uh if anything now is a good time to kind of think about it but uh as always nice to have you see you guys all next week [Music] [Music]