Steam Demos Are the New Early Access

Too many devs treat their demo like it's a play test, but the reality is your demo is a launch.
This is a conversation with Tommy, an indie game developer from Australia, co-developer of Gnomes, a tower defense rogike that was built completely in [music] Rust in a custom engine.
In total, it took about 10 months. The week he posted, we ended up with like 6 or 7,000 wish lists. A lot of people have a problem with like a marketing first approach, but I think a lot of those people don't understand what marketing actually is.
I really enjoyed the game. It looks exactly [music] like the kind of game that anyone could make, but it only looks that way cuz there's a lot of depth. There's a lot of knowhow behind [music] it.
Stop trying to think about what other people think is cool and make something that you think is cool. [music] Like stick stick to what you know. I want to learn how to make games like this. I find it super inspiring. It It doesn't look too difficult, but how difficult is it really to make a game like this?

Let's dive right in and I [music] hope you enjoy. I think the most interesting thing that I would like to ask you about is the custom engine. You made Gnomes in Rust in a custom engine. [music] It's not baby.
No, no, it's not bevy at all. Um, so what happened was I actually finished up uh another game called Sea of Survivors and uh we were sort of just taking a bit of time off and I I met this guy Patrick uh at a gamedev meetup here in Brisbane [music] and uh I don't know, we sort of just hit it off and he was a pretty quirky interesting guy that had similar [music] tastes in games to me and um he said, "Hey, we can make a game but the only condition is we have to use my Rust engine." And I went, "All right." Um, if I don't have to do any programming, amazing. If all I have to do is make music and art and help with game design, then [music] that sounds perfect. So, yeah, that's that's how it all happened. Um, Gnomes itself is like six really really long scripts and then like a few helper scripts and stuff as well. So,

yeah,
it's pretty it's pretty
yeah, we use the OpenGL and some other things just to sort of make it a bit easier out of the box. But um yeah, Patrick is just a mega math brain who um he he's got like an electrical engineering degree and you know he he loves the challenge and for him it was actually just faster. This is what he's most comfortable with.
So he already had like a custom engine sitting there and waiting to be used essentially. Well, Gnomes was kind of like our second swing actually because we had a another little game we were working on that after a little while we realized like that our scope was just absurd and we said hey what can we just knock out in a few months and uh he said why don't we just try make like a tower defense and do a little game jam and uh I think within uh probably a weekn gnome's the first map and like the most basic gameplay play was pretty much implemented. Um,

like the whole idea of goblins having random paths and being able to move gnomes around and planting crops for for uh your economy and stuff. We did uh take a few rifts out of throne as well, which you might have noticed
like the dayight cycle and like a do I greed my economy or do I um build up my defense and you know just that that give and take. I thought that was really interesting. Obviously that's, you know, not not a completely original idea from Thronefall, but
um I had been playing some other similar games as well.
I really loved Warcraft 3,
mixing tower defense with economy, right? How quickly did you make the game? I I heard you you made it quite quickly, but I missed somehow missed the exact timeline. Was it 2 months or what what did you say?
No. Um, well, we we could have probably released the game after 2 months, but it would have been much less content and it would have been a much more shallow game. But, uh, it kind of took off when

we put it out there and we went, "Oh, well, hey, we know that this game is probably going to sell by the time we get there, so we might as well put a little bit more in it and see if we can maximize it." M
I think it's important to like not decide how big your scope is until you know how much people want it if that makes sense.
Mhm.
So in total it took about I think from conception to Steam page live for sale about 10 months.
10 months. Okay. That's still very fast. I mean Thronefall took us two and a half or three years depending on how you count. So 10 months um is very fast especially for using a custom engine and so on. It's pretty good.
Was that uh including your early access for Thronefall or are you talking about to 1.0?
Got to to early access in like one and a half two yearsish and then another year of early access.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. We we kind of treated our demo as our early access. Um and I feel like

these days that's something you kind of have to do. like maybe 3 or 4 years ago it wasn't the case but
I think the the market's changed a bit and people expect a lot more out of demos and a lot lot more out of early access games and uh more importantly if your early access game doesn't hit uh people still expect you to keep working on it uh regardless you know what I mean what's your take on that
on early access yeah I mean people have have this expectation I think early access for me is mostly a way to communicate to players is that the game is still actively getting updates. So, whenever you put early access tech on your game, it's it's like saying, "Hey, we're we're going to keep updating this for for a while." And also, it doesn't maybe have as much content as you would expect from a full release yet, [snorts]
but people still expect like the
the quality level to be at a decent level. Like,
yeah,
you you can add more content during early access. cannot afford to go into

early access with like low quality. Like the quality needs to be high and then you can expand like horizontally the amount of content you have during early access.
And did you guys do a demo for Thronefall as well?
We did a demo and it it was also uh quite well received and gave us
big big wish list boost during during a next fest. Yeah, that was a good one.
And for Gnomes, you said you noticed before release that people were responding well to it. Was that also the demo? So before we did the demo, um like I I I had just finished marketing another game which was Sea of Survivors and you know that game had a few moments where I'd post on Reddit and you know we'd get a thousand wish lists overnight or whatever and you know I thought that was pretty crazy but uh with Gnomes um I just knew straight away uh from putting it in front of people and getting them to play test it that it was going to be something a bit special. Uh, you know, I

had I've I've play tested bad games and I've play tested good games and you you kind of can just tell if you know what I mean. Um, the other thing was I kind of use Reddit as my main like uh gorilla marketing platform to like drive people to the Steam page early on or like get play testers into our Discord server or whatever we need. And I found it just like 50% easier or probably probably even more than that than I did with SE survivors. We kind of just maybe it was because I was better at finding the people for the game, like finding the right niches. But it also just seemed like uh when uh you know when I'd post on on Reddit, we'd get like 100 up votes every time versus like a 50/50 chance we were going to get down voted to hell or you know it was that it might be a semisuccessful post like it was with Z survivors if that makes sense.
Okay. I did not know about Z survivors. I just opened the Steam page. It looks

looks has has a very cool art style. Is it like a survivors like game?
Yeah. Yeah. So that was pretty early on in the survivor like rush. We we um got the Steam page up which helped us out a lot. It was it was a fun game to make. Like I made all the music and I got to do all the art and stuff and I pirates are like one of my favorite things, you know, probably probably up there with gnomes as well. I think gnomes are pretty cool. But
uh yeah, it was just a a couple of friends of mine that I've known for some time and it was actually our first commercial game together. So, it kind of we kind of just had to learn on the fly and uh you know I I as you can see too, it's still in early access and um it's it's finished but it's you know we've just got to put a few pieces together and and put it out there. Um, but this is kind of probably why I've got the opinion about early access that I do. It's like if your game doesn't really turn into a mega hit, um, you still got

to finish it or else you look like you've just taken the money and run, you know?
Yep. That's the problem with early access that I've also seen a couple of times is and you know, for Sea of Survivors, you you did decently well, right? It's sitting at like 400 reviews or so. That's pretty decent. But they're like games that go into early access with like a huge list of things and like promises that they're going to add and then they said then they get like 20 reviews or something and it's like
that really sucks. [laughter]
Well, that was one of the first things we said was like we can't we're not going to promise anything.
We're we're just going we're going to promise what we've already made. So, uh yeah, the the the main thing with C Survivors though is I feel like it would have sold better if we just did a 1.0 no launch and then updated it after the fact. And the reason is is because it would have had a chance in new and trending on Steam, which in my opinion is like the make or break for a game. My goal with every game that I'm I'm making

is when I put it out there, I want to get in on day one getting to new and trending on Steam. And uh if my game doesn't make it after that, then I probably made the wrong game or I've managed to skull drag to the right wish list count that R tells us to.
Um
yeah, but for it to really like get seen by everyone and have a real chance, I think that's that's like a minimum uh floor of entry.
Yeah. I wonder if the new and trending tab on Steam is still the same as it used to. I kind of noticed that it's further and further down the on the Steam page every time I check. like it used to be very very far up like it used to be one of the first
gadgets and now it's like you have to scroll for a while to even get to new and trending
but I guess it's still a way to still a way to see how the algorithm likes your game right if if you're new and trending that's probably still a good sign overall
from what I understand it's about uh 8,000 US in sales that it's taken to

that's what it took us to trigger it for gnomes and Uh the thing is that the better you perform the longer you stay there as well. But what like what you said, not only is it probably gone down a little bit further, but you're seeing a lot more games cycle through there because I think uh every man in his dogs figured out, you know, he's got to hit these numbers and he's got to make his steam capsule look like this and that then he'll he'll get there. But the reality is the the game play is king. If you if your game play um doesn't stand out, then you can get it new and trending, but you know, you're going to spend half a day there and uh your game might sell a bit, but it's never going to get uh the traction that just a game that a content creator will pick up or, you know, people are going to recommend to their friends, you know.
Game play is king. Yeah, we'll talk a bit about that a bit more later. That's interesting. One more question. The Sea of Thieves see is published and

developed by Na Games. That's a different studio, right?
Sea of Sea of Survivors. I wish I made Exactly.
Um, yeah, but it's funny you say that. We did actually get We actually have had uh people say, "Oh, that's too similar to the title Sea of Thieves." But I mean,
so similar that got the mix up. Damn it. See? Well, it I think that's that's some of the learnings that I also had with that game was um you know, we could have probably had a little bit more originality uh in the title amongst other things, especially seeing other survival likes come out and you know, they they've kind of rather than tried to you either really need we either should have made pirate survivors or you know made something completely original rather than tried to do something in between. Uh
sorry. The question was
it's a it's a different Yes. So um the two guys I was working with one of them uh is like my oldest friend and he had just sold his company and um so he's

wasn't really in a hurry to make any money and wasn't really in a hurry to finish the game. And one of the other guys uh is still working three three days a week um in a pretty wellpaying job. So me on the other hand, I was the only one that was a full-time developer. I was doing like commissions for music and stuff in between. And um yeah, I just had to make another game. And luckily, I met Patrick when I did and he was in a similar position. He he had a job that he hated and said, "I just need someone who can handle everything I don't don't want to do," which happens to be everything that I do. So it was just, you know, a perfect match, wasn't it? And Patrick was al did also work on Sea of Survivors.
No, he did not. Okay.
He he only worked on Gnomes with me. Uh so
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Yeah.
So you so you basically switched teams after Sea of Survivors/ are still in in both teams a little bit. Uh yeah, look,

I I could afford to spend a day or two a week on SE survivors and now it's basically done and we're just waiting on a few, you know, a few other little final pieces to be done and uh we can probably move on.
But right now, as we speak, I'm actually trying my luck uh solo for the first time. Um Okay.
Not only [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Gnomes Gnomes is uh almost done. I think Patrick's having a little bit of a holiday and we're going to get back together and do another content update. But, uh, yeah, my intention at the moment is to become like a triple threat. I want to be able to do all the art and all the music and then do all of the programming and and game engine stuff myself as well. So, I've transitioned to GDAU and I'm kind of just doing a bit of a
bit of a experiment in there at at the moment, even trying 3D, which which brings me to a question that I would like to ask you as someone who's made 2D

and 3D games. Do you in some ways find 3D easier? Yes, I think 3D is actually easier not necessarily to program, but it's easier to sell and to market. I think quite significantly because it's I think it's a lot more difficult as a 2D artist to make an art style that stands out as compared to a 3D art style that stands out as appealing and that you
want to dive into. And I think one of the main reasons for that is maybe the the immersion factor. If you see something that's 3D, it's it's a bit easier to as a player or as a customer to immediately get immersed into it. Yeah,
you can still achieve that with 2D. I think it's possible, but I think it's more difficult with 2D.
Oh, for sure. Trying to get something to look like what it is with 16 by 16 pixels is a real challenge in itself. But when you pull it off, it definitely

is satisfying. What you said before though about programming, I I have actually found it easier. I've I've done a few experiments uh in 2D and a few experiments in 3D and I feel like with for someone who's not the strongest programmer, 3D kind of feels like out of the box things just work a lot better. um like
no
you know you know I I feel like creating something that's more modular like what I do is I'll watch a tutorial about each component that I'm trying to build and put them together whereas 2D you kind of need to have a full picture of what you're trying to make u and it's a lot more like UI heavy um if that makes sense.
Yeah. You also, if you do 2D, you sometimes run into wonky situations cuz your your 2D art is trying to emulate a 3D space, right? So then you have like a like a isometric sprite or something and then

then that isometric sprite needs to spawn an arrow because it's like an archer that shoots something and then all of a sudden you're
you're kind of doing 3D but in 2D and then things start getting weird quite quickly. And in 3D, it's just, yeah, I I just spawn it here. It flies in an arch, whatever.
That's exactly the type of thing I'm talking about. Like with with gnomes, we still have problems with um you know, the different Y sorting of of all the different assets. Like we it's just even in if you look closely in the trailer, you'll see a few moments where like uh something will run over the top of something that probably shouldn't have. But luckily because of the art style we've chosen and that it's a pretty low fidelity game, we kind of get a bit of forgiveness.
Oh, for sure.
And also feel like there's a lot of overlap right there. Like for example, trees are are trees contained entirely in their own cell.
Look, initially I tried to do that, but eventually I kind of just gave a few too

many little artistic flourishes and kind of gave it all away. Um, so sometimes it does overlap a little bit and sometimes there is like a bit of a, you know, a Y sorting error or something like that, but
I I definitely think it it was worth it. Um, cuz once once we created more than one map, you know, I kind you can only draw so many 16 by 16 style trees, right? And uh and also especially with the goblins too because there's like I don't know there must be like 60 goblins or something in the game now. So trying to draw all these different types of goblins in that tiny space was uh you know that that was a pretty big challenge. So some of them take up a bit more room than that because they might have accessories or or something going on. Right.
I see that makes sense. So CF survivors was obviously not the the custom bevy engine uh the custom rust engine. Then
it was
we use Unity for C Survivors. Um, and I think, you know, the the big thing

about Unity is if you're making games for the first time, there's a lot of resources to learn how to use Unity. But if I was going to tell someone who I just met what engine to use, I'd tell them to use GDAU, I think.
Mhm. Yeah, I think Gdor is clearly becoming a stronger and stronger contender. And I think I would agree if I would probably recommend God Unity to people who want to get into indie games. Yeah.
Yeah. I think the other thing too is not having to worry about paying a license. For most people that'll never be a problem, but you know, I've I've kind of become a bit of like a uh open- source purist recently. And I don't know, it just feels nice not not having to worry about one day getting a bill from Unity or something like that. I had to pay an F mod bill recently and it kind of stung a little bit. It's making me think, should I do that again or not? Um,
but now now we got the license, I guess. So, uh, that's the main thing,
I guess. Just just speaking about uh,

Unity, you've you've made games with uh, teams of people and you've also made games on your own. Have you always used Unity?
I've used Game Maker for a very long time. I learned how to make games in Game Maker and also I made Will you snail one of my like quoteunquote big Steam releases that I worked on for like three four years is also Game Maker.
Yeah. Okay.
And I was a solo project.
That was a solo project. Exactly. And then at university I got into using Unity because everybody was using Unity and we made islanders in Unity and we also made Thrronfall in Unity and now I'm I'm very used to the Unity workflow and to the Unity ecosystem and so on. So now I'm a little bit stuck with Unity. I've dabbled with God and I I like it a lot. I don't feel like it's entirely ready. Like I'm missing a couple of

things that I have in Unity. But at the same time, I'm also really annoyed by a lot of Unity things. It's like
I hope I can switch I hope I can switch to GDO at some point. I really hope hope so. I guess that's why I'm kind of lucky that I've never really had to get my hands too dirty in a game engine because I've I can understand the grand concepts and learning them in GDAU and having like the node based workflow was just I think it was a good stepby-step process for me. Um, I can see too how uh GDAU would work really well as a team, whereas Unity working with teams, you kind of had to like understand everyone else's spaghetti to to know how everything's working. Like um there was like a lot of customuilt tools and stuff in C survivors that with I I just think in GDAU I probably wouldn't need. Um, but from from your experience working alone and with a team, do you have like any takeaways from there being a

difference? Like for me, the big thing is um I find solo, you know, I can do things a lot faster, but I'm a lot more limited to a narrow scope, if that makes sense.
Oh yeah, you are more limited to a narrow scope. And that's not because you are much faster solo, it's because you're slower solo, right? you like you underestimate just how much work the other people in the team put in. If you go from like a team project to a solo project, then I think uh you'll be surprised at how slowly some things are moving because you need to do everything yourself, right? So
okay,
in a normal pro like in a twoman project, half of the work just happens automatically and when you do it solo, it takes like twice as long at least. But as you're not as skilled at some of these tasks as like maybe your teammate would be, they're going to take you even longer. So it's not like twice as long. It's like 2 times as long or something like that.

So what you
what you said makes sense. You just uh have to scope accordingly.
Yeah.
I I think that totally makes sense. Like I I'm uh kind of dealing with pathing algorithms and all that kind of business at the moment. that's Patrick's specialty and I I've kind of in the last few days I've grown some gray hairs. So, I definitely think yeah, that was probably something I needed to hear and and maybe uh some of the some of the scope that I've considered uh you know, yeah, there's definitely things that I just considered easy mode stuff because I've never really had to touch it. But now that I'm in with my hands dirty, it's something that I you know, I've I've definitely got to go back to the drawing board on a few things, right?
I guess there are a lot of fart cuts you can take, right? It's also I think gamede is a lot of gamede is like figuring out how to work smarter not harder right so
using systems other people build maybe for some things and so on like you don't have to build your own custom pathing system you don't have to build your own

engine just just use stuff from the shelf
yeah I suppose where the optimal situation when you're in a team is uh when you've got two people that are doing very different things or more or you know a bigger team, but everyone's got their own lane. I think you said one time in one of your videos like everyone needs to be the captain of their own uh section of the game and they're the ones that kind of can pull rank. Uh but yeah, being being the captain of everything, you kind of the the remote so random access memory in my brains just kind of you know I need another stick. Right.
Sure. But it's it's also kind of interesting the fact that I think making games solo and making games in a team, you can make very different kinds of games when you're working solo. Cuz if you work on a team and especially the bigger the team gets, the more washed out all of the ideas become. And if you work solo, then that doesn't have to be

the case. Then you can
go all in on a very specific and also like very weird we weird vision and nobody is going to be like no that's that's weird we're not going to do that.
That would be the biggest benefit wouldn't it? Because you don't have to justify your vision to anyone. You don't have to ne that being in a team it feels like a constant negotiation between visions doesn't it? you know, that walking that tight rope of trying to do what's best for the game, but also letting everyone feel like they're heard and they've got their input at the same time, right?
Yeah. And I think that honestly that probably most of the time makes for better design decisions if there's like a bit little bit of argument and push back. Um, but sometimes the weird unoptimized not fully thought through ideas are the ones that feel really special to people. So there's
there's value in that as well.
Well, I hope that's going to be the case for this next little experiment that I'm working on.
What what are you working on? Can you

share anything about that?
Look, maybe we won't put this part in the video. We'll see. But uh I I had a little idea which was I'm working on like an FPS PSX style game. Like I I think there's a lot of art assets assets available. like FPS is a very well well doumented genre and you know I first thing I've done is I've just created a really solid FPS controller and um you know some ragd doll physics and that kind of stuff and you know that from there I can kind of just take it where I want to go. Yeah. So without giving giving too much away just thinking maybe a touch of like touch of horror touch of uh you know dark humor sort of thing. I haven't really got anything I'm ready to share just yet but yeah watch this space. We'll see. We'll see if I can get this pathing to work and and we'll go from there.
There are some questions that I'm just asking all of the people who are on the podcast recently
and one of them would be how do you see the role of luck in making successful indie games? How much of a role does

luck play? What do what's your estimate?
I think everything's a bet, isn't it? you know, like you but you can make the make a better bet than some bets are better than other bets if that makes sense. Like I always am thinking about three things when I'm writing down my ideas log that's like 100 pages long. I firstly think like is this something that I even want to make? Um and if the answer is no, then I suppose it probably doesn't get too much more input for me. And uh then there's obviously the scope of the idea which is like if the idea is something I can make um then you know obviously it's got more value and it's a better bet. But the most important thing I think is like will people care about the idea? So like the appeal side of it. So it's kind of like the like the triforce you know like if you can get say yes to all three of those things you probably got a pretty decent bet. I mean, a game that doesn't get finished is a bad bet, and a game that no one's

going to care about is a bad bet. And a game I don't want to make is a bad bet. So, regarding
luck being a factor, yes, there's going to be luck whether Splattercat or Northern Lion opens your email. You know, whe whether you get them on the right day, but you can also email them twice.
And I suppose, you know, whether you're going to have a viral post that gets you a thousand wish lists is another bit of luck, but you're only going to know if you make the post, right? My my motto has always been if you're not sure just send the email.
I mean I mean that's kind of what I did with you. I think it might have been the second time I emailed you actually and and here we are. [clears throat] So maybe it was just the lucky day where
where I emailed you and uh it was just the right time of day where you were checking your emails and it was the top one on the list. You never know. There is a component to luck but you have to you have to make more bets if you if you want to want to get lucky if that makes sense. you acknowledge that there's luck, but you think you can significantly control your odds by like by choosing which bets you make.

Yeah. Make the right game. And uh if if you the other thing is if if you didn't make the right bet, don't double down on that bet. Make a different bet and go and make another game, you know? Don't don't spend two years working on a game that no one wants.
I see. What do you like what what do you mostly do for Gnomes? You said music and game design, right?
So, I do did all the art. I did all the music and sound and stuff. So, where me and Patrick meet in the middle is the game design side of things. So, I'm a much more like user experience f focused game designer and I care about um you know making things really accessible and I hate tutorials. So, I want to make everything uh as organic feeling as possible. So, if they're doing the right thing, you know, it should feel great to do the right thing. Whereas Patrick on the other hand has a lot of crazy ideas, but a lot of the time, um, you know, they're probably a little bit too weird for a commercial game. So, we kind of

like drag each other into a good spot where, you know, we have we have some really deep gameplay, but we haven't necessarily got the complexity that comes with it, if that makes sense.
And how does content creation look like in a custom engine? Do you have like spreadsheets or how how would you for example add a new enemy or a new gnome to your game?
It's really easy actually. Um, basically I just drop a PNG sprite sheet in and I know how the sprite sheets got to be structured like you know uh we've got the up direction, the the down direction, left direction, right direction or whatever. Um, and then if I'm putting a new enemy in, um, it's just one big script that contains all the enemies. Like I said, known as like six scripts, so I can go in and just add a new um enemy entity and then just basically, it's almost like you, you know, you export variables that you can control in Unity or whatever, only it's just in a script. Uh and I, okay, will,

you know, decide how many frames it is and, you know, how fast it can run and how much HP it's got or whatever. Um, so that sort of stuff's real easy and I can just do it myself. Um, whereas there's some more technical things like the path pathing scripts. I wouldn't even want to look at those because that's like Patrick's uh Patrick's. Yeah, he's Well, we call it the deep scrolls. I'm not allowed to go near the deep scrolls. You know what I mean?
I see. I see. So everything in six scripts, those are long scripts then probably. Oh,
very very. Yeah.
Um, but because Rust is just so efficient, it wasn't really a problem with performance or anything like that. We did have a few headaches with like compatibility and stuff and you know, bless Patrick for putting in the work to to try and uh get it working on every system you can. We had to change our um change from like OpenGL to something else at some point. I it's a little bit above my head. Um but yeah, Patrick's happy to do it. So making visual shaders and that kind of thing. So it was really fun when he got to make the CRT filters

and all that retro stuff. So yeah, he he it definitely wasn't something that he didn't want to do. Let's put it that way.
Like the entire game's database was is basically hardcoded into the script is what you're saying. So
yeah,
part of the design process for you was basically to for example create a new spreadsheet for for new content and then to just add like a new database entry into the script essentially.
Yeah. Yeah. Then there was a couple of um exceptions to that structure like the gnomes were a bit more complicated because they've got some pretty complicated behaviors. Uh well, you know, as far as a game of our scale goes, pretty complicated behaviors. Some of the like relics and and buildings and things in the game got a bit more complicated. So those are things that Patrick handles. Um but generally speaking um unless they were you know something very very unique they pretty much were within handful of scripts. Obviously you know as the game got

bigger we started to eat our own tail a little bit and uh one of the big big headaches we had was that uh we didn't have a font system in the game. So, our font was just the PNG.
Um, that was just like, you know, the English alphabet and a few icons that we used.
And then when we had to do Chinese and Korean and Japanese, [clears throat] we found
they're actually like 6,000 potential characters. And so, luckily Patrick actually automated something that like all I had to do is find the fonts and everything like that. But, uh, you'll see that there's like 6,000 PGs for some of those languages in in the game files, which is pretty crazy. So, um, but he he, um, he he ends up playing a bit of Factorio with the code and and getting it all to sort of sort of work a bit more efficiently.
Oh, wow.
But yeah, all the hardcoded text in the game, basically, we had to export that

all out into JSONs and stuff and and get it translated manually. But
oh yeah, that that took that we did that after launch,
so we all launched in English only.
Um, and it, you know, we we weren't ever really planning on even bothering with translations outside of English.
Um, but we just got so many people asking for it that we just it was just easier to do it in the end. Um,
we got a bit of help from Gamer Sky as well um for the like Asian regional languages and they helped us with like a second launch.
So, we basically did like a big content update and then 15 languages or something. Uh, and we got a daily deal at the same time and we ended up selling as many copies if not more over those couple of days when we did the daily deal as we did on our launch day. So, that's something that's pretty unheard of. And you know, we we got a a lower price because it was discounted and um there was regional pricing and stuff, but uh yeah, that that was pretty cool

to to like wake up one morning and it's like having launch day all over again.
Yeah. I guess let's talk about the game a little bit. I I had quite a blast playing it. I thought it was quite awesome. What did the design process look like exactly? What were your design goals with with the game? I think it's really important to have a theme that matches your mechanics. I I think that there's like a as in Velatro terms, there's like a malt X multiplier if you get that right.
So, the first idea we had was, oh, what if it was a just a tower defense, but the gimmick is you can move your towers around. And uh then Patrick's had the idea of oh what if the map expanded every turn and the pathing instead of just being generic you know tower defense paths like in balloons um it you know we we make a pathing algorithm and you know we we let them decide what they're going to run over and what they're going to avoid and all

that kind of thing. and we I did like an art mockup um in one afternoon and uh yeah just I came up with the idea of making it gnomes and it just just really clicked. So yeah, we we knew pretty quickly what the game was. The thing the things that kind of came a bit later was like the progression. Uh, we decided we wanted to try and be purist and make it rogue likey where you just unlock maps and and and new guilds rather than like only getting uh certain items as you progress which I mean we we'll never know whether that was the right decision to make but we were it saved us a bit of work and it also was we quite like the game play how it is. It's a game that we like to play.
I think we need to do a little bit of explaining for the people who have not played it. So the general structure of the game is is it's essentially a rog like right. So you play a run on a specific map and then when you lose you

just start a new run but there's some there's some meta progression so you can unlock I think you called it guilds.
Yeah. So we we create we created a bunch of guilds which are just your starting set essentially. So, you start with a certain gnome and you need some kind of housing so you can house your gnomes and uh we usually give them a relic or like some kind of utility item as well and usually like an eco item. As as you get later in the game, you start to get some weird combinations and stuff, but [clears throat]
the actual run itself essentially you plant crops to get money. Kind of like in Thronefall how you build houses and you know, you've got to invest in your economy or or or whatever. or you buy gnomes to defend your your your garden and your garden shed. The thing that happens throughout the game is as you earn money, you can either just buy more of the same thing or you can go into the shop and buy relics and buy uh you know different crops or different types of gnomes or or whatever it is. And that's sort of how your build starts to take

shape. Think like Rot is probably where we kind of y the shop structure from. Um, I thought it was really, uh, the Rotator did the shop really well. And, you know, I liked being able to roll and hold items and, um, you know, I like the the the mix of having both active items that you can use as weapons, but also um, having relics that are passives that change the way the game works. So, yeah, as you progress throughout the run, you become more powerful, and so do the enemies. And, uh, if you make it to the last day, you unlock the the new map. And uh if you manage to survive the last day, you can keep playing forever until the game eventually just gets uncontrollably powerful and steamrolls you or your computer dies, which I think is how you finish the game. [laughter]
Nice. Yes. That's interesting cuz you went exactly one of the routes that we thought about for Thronefall. I I can remember for Thronfall at some point we were wondering should we go like into a

more rog likey direction with like randomly generated levels and random upgrades and so on and we decided to go the other way. We were like let's make it so that there are reproducible build orders that you can refine over time right so it's the exact same every time and then you can learn from your mistakes and correct them the next time you try the level. But I have to say that uh this take on the formula also works really well like um all of the randomness and so on. It's very enjoyable game loop. It's really satisfying.
You have also [laughter]
Yeah, you're welcome. But you also uh adopted one of the problems we also have for Thronefall, which is that the economy decides almost all of the balancing, which is I think
Yeah,
that was that was such an annoyance for Thronefall where it's like right if you have like twice the economy, the level is going to be freaking easy. If you have like half the economy, then it's

going to feel impossible and you're going to be like, "How the hell am I supposed to beat this?" So if you have economy in these types of games, it very very quickly becomes almost only about the economy. Right.
Right. I guess it's like how how skint well how um weak can I keep my defense until I really need to start investing in in my defenses. Right.
Um and yeah, like I found a simil similar thing with Thronefall. if you once you sort of get a real feel for the game, you can you can kind of not even build any defensive units for the first few nights and you know you've got a good start and yeah so is it's I suppose we did while we didn't directly inspire ourselves from throne there was like we definitely liked the idea of the greed or or defense gameplay but
I mean yeah like like we said the downside is always going to be that it becomes economy wins in saying that though in some of the later apps. We've

made it so challenging that uh you have to spend money early on on your defenses or else you're in big trouble. And we kind of give them a little bit of relief in the middle rounds. And also the other thing is if you want to be a completionist, some guilds are going to have a very hard time on different map types. Like
uh for example, there's some gnomes that only can attack one square in front of them and then there's explosive enemies that will blow them up and destroy them. So, you've got to think of some some other creative way to get around the map and usually that's a bit more expensive. Whereas, if you pick the right guild, you can kind of just steamroll any map. And we usually give them that guild when they unlock that map as well. Does that make sense?
I see.
Just just to stop people from like getting stuck.
I I don't I don't really think people mind too much. As someone who's created a survivor, like I've learned pretty quickly that most people, whether they realize it or not, have a power fantasy and and they want to uh feel super super

strong once they figured the game out. And you know, whether that's what everyone is, I don't know. But usually by that point, they've got their money's worth out of the game and they're pretty happy and they've already left you a positive review, right? I mean, I took me a little bit to figure out how the gameplay works and so on on the first map, but on the second map, I felt like I absolutely destroyed it. Like I still haven't completed the run. I think I'm getting like like 500 coins per day now. And
Oh, really?
Yeah. And
which guild did you use?
Uh the one you gave me for the second map is like this I don't know the swamp people. They can build far on like swamp or something. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's it was my favorite map and probably my favorite song, too. Like if I go back to play, I'll probably play the swamp map, too, actually.
Yeah. It's it's quite fun. Yeah. This um quite quite a varied map. And you there's so much space for you to to build up your economy cuz I in the beginning I thought, okay, the way

you're going to limit my economy is with fertile ground, right? There's only so much fertile ground. So [snorts] um that's that's the way you stop the economy from going absolutely exponential. But on the swamp map where you can build economy almost anywhere if you can build on the swamp tiles. Um it just led to the like the exponential curve is not slowing down yet because I haven't run out of swamp tiles yet. [laughter]
Yeah, I don't think you will either. Yeah, I suppose we tried to create different challenges there. Like you can't place gnomes on the swamp, so you kind of sometimes end up with gaps. And we also introduce flying enemies as well. Um, but yeah, look, once you've if you've got like the experience playing tower defense and rogike type of games, um, gnomes can be a pretty trivial game, I guess. I mean, there will be combinations that'll be hard, like we were saying before. Uh, but, you know, that's I don't really see that as the worst thing. Um, some some people

we we get negative reviews all the time saying the game's way too hard.
So, you know, you can't you can't please everybody, right? That's exactly the problem with the economy because that's the problem we have for Thronefall as well is some people say it's way too hard, some people say it's way too easy and that's due to the snowbally economy because if you don't have enough economy, it's too hard. If you have too much economy, it's way too easy. [laughter]
It's impossible to solve for that. But I guess you're right. What it leads to is it definitely feeds into the power fantasy. If you get on the correct side of the curve and you stomp everything, it's not like I'm having a bad time or something like it's just it feels feels nice to be that powerful. I'm not complaining. [laughter]
The other thing too is uh with a random shop too, you might just get an item that completely breaks your run and makes you unstoppable. And you know, other times you get nothing. And that's another common complaint that we get too

that there's too much RNG. Um, and you know, it doesn't doesn't really bother me too much. Like people love vampire survivors and that's all RNG, isn't it? So
yeah, I guess there there is definitely an element of strategy to it. I I suppose like, you know, when to be aggressive and when to be defensive, but you know, these these are games. We're not we're not creating um hardships for people, are we? you know, we're here to we're here to let people relax and have fun as long as it feels good while you're doing it.
I also think you can work around the randomness in in quite nice ways in your game cuz you you also have like a banish system. You have a roll system. So, you can roll the shop quite quite cheaply for the most part. So, I I think you can I didn't feel like the randomness was a huge problem so far. Sure.
And as as the game's gotten bigger too, the amount of items in the game has changed the shop balance and stuff like that. So, it's just a constant song and dance for us to stay on top of everything. And I I think I think um typically speaking,
you're better off making the especially

the early part of your game, you're probably better off making it a tiny little bit easier than it needs to be. And uh you know as Patrick and I are probably the two biggest players of gnomes ever because you know we've been we were addicted to the game as we were making it which is probably one of the most
cool feelings you can ever have right is making the thing that that you're you're hooked on right
yeah you're creating content content for yourself at that point.
Exactly right. You know and that's that's when you know I feel I think like when you you're motivated to make the game like I was saying before you're making something that you love. Um, yeah. And and I guess that's what also made it easy to be in a team together was that most of the ideas we had we had pretty pretty similar taste on. And like we've got the same dark sense of humor and we both love medieval fantasy, but at the same time we both have the same dark sense of humor and love love dark fantasy stuff, but we also have like a bit of like a retro bug inness as well. So it was just a a cool um combination of of our likes and dislikes put

together, right? Mhm. What I find fascinating about Gnomes is that it looks and feels surprisingly impressive. Like the game play positively surprised me compared to the looks of the game. Cuz when I saw like the screenshots, I I expected like a somewhat basic normal tower defense like game. And then when I played it, I was very surprised by how deep it is and how much content there is. And I think this is also something you said earlier is that um your way of thinking about it at least is very gameplay focused, right? You're
Yeah.
Like uh so the user experience
putting Yeah. Putting user experience first I I kind of think is probably the way to put it because it doesn't matter if you've got the coolest mechanics. If people don't understand it or like it doesn't feel good to do it, then it's kind of lost, isn't it? I'm someone who doesn't like tutorials. like if you a

tutorial takes 5 minutes, I'd probably have already bounced off your demo. Sorry about that. But um I
I tried to make sure that the tutorial um was something that was only the bare minimum. Uh and Patrick did a good job at implementing it. Uh but the rest of it you learn on the fly. And you might notice like when you hover over something, you can click on it like there's plenty of juice to it. like a a gnome bounces up down and gives a little little bark or or you know
when you enter the shop or whatever and and you can press a button or can't press a button. We try to make it pretty obvious. Uh UI is something that I've always like struggled with and hated doing, but you know, I'm pretty proud of what we actually came up with in the end, especially, you know, we tried to make it the type of game you can play with one hand just with your mouse or whatever.
And you know, that that's I guess because we didn't want to do controller support or anything like that. You know, it was just a a big a big haul to try and do all those extra little tasks and

you know, they just add months and months to to your game time, right? Yeah. So we tried to make everything playable with one button basically and yeah just make it super super obvious. But the gameplay feel like juice was always front and center like keep the mechanics simple, keep the keep the uh art and everything simple but leverage juice as hard as we can. Sound effects I think are like a huge huge thing. Um, it's actually like I was saying earlier, it's how I got my start in games. And I I think it's one of the things that so many developers really undervalue. Um, they don't put enough time or even consider what sound effects can do for their game. Just whether it be vibes or whether it be um, you know, really tangible feeling sounds. So everything that you're doing um, feels it feels like the rubble pack on Nintendo 64, right? That's that's the idea of what you should be doing with your sounds. That's also a user experience thing is

the the enemies are freaking fast, man. They like the the nights go by very quickly. Like in thronefall you I don't know you play a night is like couple of minutes sometimes and in gnomes is like seconds. If you blink you might miss it.
Yeah. Right. Especially if you press the fast forward button as well. But I think it's gnomes is a lot more sweaty in that sense. Uh the other thing about Thronefall though is that Thonefall's got a very important active component. Like you kind of did something similar to what I was trying to do only uh you you did it with a controller I guess by making the character the controller. You do everything by putting your character close enough to whatever you're interacting with. And there's the auto attack and then you've got the active attack which is like you know a little touch of mastery that you can add to it. But I think it's fine that Thronefall has long nights and some nights go for quite some time because you're directly affecting the result. Whereas Gnomes is

the exact opposite. You're just basically watching what you've done unfold, chewing on your fingernails, hoping that um you know, hoping that you survive and and you're sort of just clenching your teeth and hoping not to hear that game over sound. And I think that's like you know, equally as tense. you know, you're putting a lot more thought into the positioning of everything in in Gnomes and and creating the perfect path and
yeah, watching it unfold. So, it's I think it's it's tense not being able to control it because that detail. I don't think the game needed an active component is kind of what I'm saying there because it was
Yeah. Does that make sense?
It did not. It did not need an active component. And I guess what I was saying was more like I understand why you you made that decision. It's more like I very much respect it because I think a lot of developers would not have made the correct call there to make it that

freaking quickly and I I thought it was on double it was on double speed and turns out I wasn't even on double speed and it was already that fast. I think what you see in a lot of tower defense games is that even if there's no active component, they let the action play out much much slower. I was very surprised by like the default speed of of action in your game. And
yeah,
I like it.
But when when the round ends and
when the round ends or like you lose HP or whatever, we wanted it to really like slap you in the face too. So you know that like
you've made a mistake. Oh, no. You're watching you're watching your hearts go down and you're watching your shed get beaten up and you know uh or or your crops get trampled. Like there's a lot of sort of juicy moments. There's there's a few things that we wish we could have done that were just like technical limitations of the game engine that we had. Like we actually we can't people ask us to make the game zoom in and out. It's like so we just can't do that. Uh [laughter] we're locked at this

we're locked at this resolution. So we can let you pan but
yeah. Um, yeah. I suppose going back to what we were talking about earlier, it's like we're always looking for the most bang forbuck thing we can do and you know with Gnomes using that engine that Patrick created was definitely one of the most bang for-buck things we could have done. Uh but and like like what you've done with Throne Falls, uh really the art style and [clears throat] locking the cam the the lighting in one direction to make I've seen your videos how you you'll rotate the the light over here and it just doesn't quite look right. But you know, it's made that simple art style just really pop. Similar thing with gnomes like the 16x6 grid. Um, while it, you know, on paper doesn't sound that exciting, it actually inspired like most of our mechanics and um, created the the limitations inspired so much creativity and it it basically made the game design itself, if that makes sense.
Interesting. You mean the the limitation

of having everything on a grid and that was
that was something that there was a limitation of the engine specifically or was that a design choice you made?
A bit of both. like for us to do something it was it was easier for me to create like tiles that were that size and you know everything just sort of looked better that way and Patrick it's like significantly less math to do if you're only dealing with little grid based uh units rather than having something you can freely place or whatever. Um
yeah, so everything to put it simply, everything basically has like you it's got a tile type and it's got like an entity type that can go on top of it. Um so there's nothing that ever takes up more than two squares or or anything like that that makes the building system more complicated. Um and yeah, just I suppose when it came to like the pathing algorithm and everything, it made it a lot easier for us and just faster to produce. Right. And when you say the

engine was a lot of bang for your buck, what do you mean with that exactly? Don't you think you could have made the same thing in maybe Unity or Gdor?
Well, yes, we probably could have. Going back to what I was saying before about when I met Patrick is uh he actually didn't know how to use a game engine. He he's been making games uh from scratch forever and this is kind of like the latest iteration of his like Frankenstein machine that he's made. and I basically said, "I'm not that great at programming."
Um, and he said, "Hey, I'm really good at programming, but I don't want to use a game engine."
And I said, "Sweet. Well, I'll do everything else." And uh, you know, he could kind of have like a lone wolf bonus. He didn't need have someone looking over his shoulder checking his code or anything like that. I just trusted that he was doing it right. And um, you know, as we both had our different ideas, uh, we'd come together and the cool stuff would float to the top and that's what we'd that's what we'd make.
I'm very jumpy. Like there are a couple of things I wanted to ask about but I keep forgetting.
I sorry. Yeah, I know man. It's pretty

late pretty late in the day for me too, so I'm um [laughter] not at 100%. What I would probably say that I'm going to be most useful for like the people that are tuning in um is maybe giving them some like really practical marketing advice for like smalltime indies. Like especially cuz the whole thing with us was we built this game uh with basically no budget. Like our our total marketing budget including capsule art was probably jeez like I think it was like $1,000 Australian which is like 700 American or something like that. Like don't know how many euros that is like 650 or something. But
yeah, like what I think is most important is making the right game. And making the right game to me is choosing like a very specific experience that you want to give and making it narrow but very very deep rather than trying to do
everything. The more you try to do the

less well you do it. So for us gnomes was about you know trying to build a garden and have a bunch of cute little garden gnomes or whatever. And obviously Thronefall is a game about managing managing your little kingdom. What most people want out of the game is not uh you know they they didn't want like a whole surf management system or you know they didn't want a whole water they didn't want to have to water their plants and everything like that in gnomes but they wanted to have like a a deep um tactical experience that's it's unforgiving but at the same time it's rewarding because it is unforgiving.
One thing I found interesting is you said you did a lot of gorilla marketing on Reddit. Maybe you can talk about that cuz I think a lot of game devs nowadays are very scared of Reddits like the the angry place where the the mods will ban you for just being there. [laughter]
Oh yeah, but who cares if they're going to ban you? I mean, it's just it's just

one subreddit, right? Um I think like if you're not sure, just make the post anyway. But also, it's important to like look at the subreddit and kind of pick up on what's the vibe here and and when people do promote their games on the subreddit, what are they doing? Like what how are they uh framing their their post and um how what kind of content are they posting as well? Are they posting a certain type of game in this subreddit? Uh, I find the more common, so the more general subreddits like indie games or or that kind of thing, they don't ever perform as well as a really niche subreddit that's specific for your game. Funny enough, the one that did the best for us was Rogue Lights, despite our game not really being a rogue light. But every time I'd post there, we get awesome responses. And
yeah, I guess I guess the meaning of that word is kind of just lost. It just um
if you're a fan of Rogue Lights, you're probably a fan of Rogue Lights.

It doesn't I didn't even know there was a difference for a long time. Yeah, I only
learned that a while ago. [laughter]
Well, the correct term I've been told is actually run based because we're not pure pure rogue likes, right? You know, anyway, let's not get into that um discussion because we'll uh
know what we what we mean if rogue like I think nowaday basically means run base, right? I think that's how most people understand that term.
Uh the the thing that I the single uh biggest moment for us marketing wise was when a fellow called Splatterat played our game actually. Uh
so you've probably heard of him since you've been on YouTube since Jesus was playing for Jerusalem. But, uh, you know, it's it's been I I think six months since Spydercat posted, um, posted a video of Gnomes on on his channel, and we're still getting uh, traffic from that video,

which is crazy. Like, we still have people jumping into our Discord saying, "Oh, hey, I found you on Splattercat's channel." And, you know, this this happens like pretty frequently.
But the week he posted, we ended up with like six or seven thousand wish lists. And at that point, we're basically just like, "Oh, we can finally relax because we know, you know, we've got enough wish list now that we can uh not have to stress whether the game's going to be picked up by the algorithm on Steam and we can just make the game." Um, but for me, the biggest thing was just like get it in front of as many different content creators as possible. But there's two caveats to that. you need to do it as closer together as possible, but also I think like just before you release your demo as well. So if you're giving out like a thousand keys to content creators and say 50 of them make videos and then two days later or even even later the same day or or or whatever you put your demo out, it's

just like how you get the most out of the the most out of that marketing activity, if that makes sense. I think everything you should be doing um everything you're doing should be with the intention of converting people that care about your game into something tangible, which is wish listers, right? I know it just seems like it's so overtalked about now, but the reality is like um I I would probably never post something about my game until I have a Steam page up where I can convert people into wish listers because imagine like finding out you've got a viral game and having a huge post or you know having a video go really well
and missing out on all the juice from that, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. So for Reddit, do you think it's just important to basically spend it's important to just spend time on Reddit so that you understand the space maybe a little bit or you understand what Ver maybe observe what other devs are doing

stuff like that?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll do if I'm if I've never posted in a sub before is I will like sort by top and see see what posts do the best and I will kind of dissect what they've done well and then I'll maybe look at the ones that don't do so well and you can normally pretty quickly find a pattern um of of what kind of things
they want to see on the sub. The other thing too is um being a bit personal and like being like not not positioning yourself as a studio. Reddit's like a social media account for an individual, not a studio. So yeah, I always see when people post as a studio, it never does as well as like just being a guy who makes games. Like they Reddit loves uh helping out the little guy. And I think that's kind of goes with like most of the internet. We we kind of like they always rally behind indie devs and I I definitely think Gnome's benefited from being you know a bit of a

you know hyper indie so to speak or or you know a very small studio or we we're very anti-corporate I suppose is probably one way to put it.
Sure. And then obviously the fact that it's a custom engine helps with that aspect too, right? That's absolutely the card you would play in
in social posts for sure. every every advantage that you you can think of for your game. Um, you know, whether it be theme, whether it be something quirky about your development process, just try try out a bunch of different things and the things that work, keep keep doing it is is the way I put it. I think I I see a lot of people, they'll try post on whatever platform like Reddit wasn't the only platform I tried. I tried Twitter and I tried Tik Tok and, you know, I tried other platforms, but no one cared on those platforms. So rather than, you know, spending all my bandwidth on these platforms where no one cares, I just doubled down on Reddit talking about how to
get the most out of your marketing without spending any money. I think

there was there was a I think she's from Switzerland, the lady who did the marketing for Wandering Village. I I was watching that uh episode of the podcast and she said something that
was one of one of the most probably one of the best ways to put it. it's that you don't need, you know, a flamethrower. You just need a spark if your fire is big enough, right? And and everything will just sort of take off by itself. Um, you know, like so many people are asking advice like, "How do we get a publisher, you know, how do we um, you know, how do I get more upotes on my Reddit posts or or or how more views on my trailer?" And the reality is is like you've either got a feather or you've got a stone and it's going to float or it's going to sink. Um, and the only way to do to know whether you have one or the other is to put it out there and just put it in front of like find 100 people who you think will really care about this game and see what they

think of it. Uh, because you're not making a game for everyone. You're making a narrow, deep experience specifically for those people. The way I think about it is stop trying to think about what other people think is cool and make something that you think is cool. Uh stick stick to what you know and that's that's how you make for you personally that's how you make your best game rather than trying to um you know create something artificial that is designed to to sell. So, I suppose I' I've seen in the comments on on this podcast as well that, you know, a lot of people have a problem with like a marketing first approach, but I think a lot of those people don't understand what marketing actually is. And what marketing actually is is basically it's fulfilling a fantasy. That's that's what it comes down to. If you can if you can fulfill a fantasy for a small group of people that no one else filled yet, then

you've got a product that people will want,
right? and you want like a deep experience cuz I think this is something that's also a good point is that the people who play the most tower defense games for example are the hardcore tower defense fans. So whenever you make anything you're always kind of making it for the hardcore fans cuz they are most likely to find and buy your game first. So, I guess the the response to that is if you're making a tower defense game, are you a hardcore tower defense fan? Because like so often you'll see someone that goes, "Oh, this genre is popular. I should make a game in this genre because this this is a hot genre." But they've never played that genre.
Um, yeah. I mean, I'm not I'm not saying that you should make a competitor to World of Warcraft or something like that, but you know, find find the types of games that you really like and find the themes that you really like and and figure out how you can put those two together to create something that's

truly unique and I guess a extension of yourself rather than trying to create something that a corporation would make in a boardroom, right? We see how that's all turning out for for a lot of the big studios at the moment. Can you help me out with something is like do you think Gnomes is a marketable game or do you think it's just a very fun and deep game? Do you think like it sells well because people see it and then they instantly want to play it or is it because they see a recommendation or they get a recommendation or they see somebody else play it and it looks cool?
That's a good question. I I think that it definitely alienates a lot of people because of how simple it looks. that at a first glance a lot of people just aren't going to give it a chance. But, you know, may it probably would have done better. Actually, good question. Do you think Gnomes would have done better if we had the exact same mechanics and it was like a high fidelity 3D game? Like, do you think that would have been a good bet? Like, I I don't I don't

know. like because the niche the niche style like we we've we've like bundled with some other games that have a very similar art style like Tiny Rogues and uh the North Appalog and those are our two higher selling bundles even though there's other games we're bundled with that you know have you know more more sales or you know they're they're a more well-known game just because we knew there was an audience for like the negative space background and like you know, lowfidelity pixel art. We knew that people wanted that. Um, and I and I guess like, you know, you see games like Dwarf Fortress and you see games like uh, you know, what's another good example? Like Rift Wizard, for example, they they're fulfilling a very niche fantasy, right? Uh, we thought, well, we we I love the idea of like the killer gnomes. Like I don't know if you've seen like some of the art people do of like an angry gnome holding holding a kitchen knife, which is what I kind of copied

myself.
Um, you know, I I've always found that quite funny. And there was also the the Crawy the Gnome memes getting around at the time when we first started um with the idea. I um the first original piece of art I did was like a a gnome holding an assault rifle and I just I just couldn't not stop laughing. I made a little a little clip uh a little music clip and and sent it to Patrick. Say, "What about this?" And and we just from the second we saw it, we knew that we had captured the vibe. And if you have if you have a moment like that, you you kind of know if if you if it makes you feel like that, it's probably going to make someone else feel like that. Um you just need to find those people, right?
I think in a weird way, the fantasy that you chose works surprisingly well. Like it's one of those fantasies that you don't know you need fulfilled until until you see it. It's like not not one of those ah I've always wanted to be an astronaut or I've always wanted to be a doctor or I've always wanted to be a superhero. It's like

wait a second.
Yeah,
I can build a an army of gnomes in like a massive garden and kill hordes of goblins. Oo,
listen.
Yeah,
this kind of goes back to what we were talking about before how like you can only when you when you're a solo dev, you can really attune yourself to some very specific fantasy. But I guess that me and Patrick are on just like such in sync brain lengths, sorry, wavelengths that we we both whenever we'd give each other an idea, we really felt um you know that we really felt like they they were married together easily. you know, it's it's not always like that when you're working in a team, I guess. But, um, yeah, it's a we were very lucky that we had similar tastes and and found the same things funny and also had like a similar tactical mind when it came to the type of games that we find fulfilling. Uh, you know, like we we

probably weren't ever going to make like a a chalk all game where you know, like Powerwash Simulator is a cool game, but it's not really my style, right? like I prefer a deep tactical game that punishes me for making mistakes. So that's if I'm going to play a game tonight after we get off the podcast, it's probably going to be something like that. I I wonder like one thing that I find very inspiring about Gnomes also is that it looks so doable. I'm always like very very inspired by games that look like anyone could make them almost a little bit in a way if you know what I mean. It's it's a little bit like like for example Pedal Pedal Pedal is also a great example of this. When you look at that game, it's like anyone could have made that game. But if you're the one to make it, then you're still the one to make them, right? [laughter]
Yeah. How how do how do you find these kinds of games and how do you or how do you design these kinds of games? I guess is an an interesting question.
Yeah, exactly right. I think there's a couple of components to it. first of all

is like seeing someone make a really bang forbuck game as another developer you're like respect man good job like that's that's cool but also being the first person to deliver on that idea is like a why didn't I think of that like everyone has that thought about vampire survivors like oh why didn't I make vampire survivors it's like such a simple simple idea but dude's
dude's probably sitting on a yacht right now right like you know not not that that's the end goal like I'm I'm pretty happy just to not have to go to a cubicle every day and you know wake up when I want to and make games like that's
as long as I don't have to worry if I've got food in the fridge and my rent's paid like I'm I'm pretty happy right
so I guess the main thing is can I do it again we do it again you know the main thing is for me at the moment is not to let my eyes get too big go wise for whatever thing I work on next
because the fastest way to kill your runway is just have an idea that's too

and you'll be 6 or 12 months in and going, "Oh what have I done?" [laughter] Like, am I so so often I meet people that are in a position where they put their game out there after working on it a year and no one wants to know about it. So, it's like, ah, do I do I keep pushing and finish this thing or do I try and make something else? Um so I guess like we were talking about earlier um you know is there an element of luck to making games? Well yes. So have more smaller bets rather than making one big bet. You know know the outcome. Have a have an idea of the outcome before you fully invest in it.
I guess what you what we also see like vampire survivors is also like a really good example of this phenomenon that I tried to describe. I guess one interesting thing about all of these games that look they kind of look like anyone could have made them. I know it's not that simple, right? It's it's obviously there's a lot of skill

and so on that goes into making a good version of of of that idea. But I guess all of these games are rather gameplay focused. Like for example, Vampire Survivors is also quite quite gameplay focused, right? Quite deep in its own way. Lots of upgrade combinations and so on. It's It's interesting. I think it's a type of appeal that I haven't really thought about much. Yeah, it's because I feel like for some games you can kind of see the depth almost on the screenshots. And I think I can see it for Gnomes because maybe it reminds me of um Dwarf Fortress a little bit, but I also see that there are a lot of different icons, lots of different terrain. And I'm like, if they you have such a simple art style, they probably do have a lot of content. And I mean, you do have quite a lot of content. So,
well, yeah, that is definitely the trade-off of the art style is that to for us to create an item, if we know exactly what we want it to do, we can have an item in the game ready to test

out in 30 minutes, 60 minutes, everything done, and then it's in our next run, which we've spent 2 hours playing. You know what I mean? So, that's awesome.
That those are that's definitely the biggest benefit of of having such a simple art style. I'm finding now uh going through like the whole you know uh modeling and then rigging process that like oh jeez this is like taken me a whole week to get one character fully animated and rigged in the game and now I've got it now it's still not behaving how I want it to behave and I guess that's
that's a sign that maybe pick a different style.
Yeah. Right. Or or maybe like when you're working in 3D rather than creating whole world create like one room like uh like a clover pit for example. It's
yeah, you know, like
create create like a small contained space where everything still feels good and rather than having a UI, they've just got a bunch of buttons in a room which you press.
Um, so I think that's a really good bang forbuck game that once again it's like one of those ones you're like why didn't I think of that kind of thing. So

yeah, true.
I guess with uh with Throne for you did you use something called ProBuilder or something like that to make a lot of your assets or how how did you go about that? So, the assets are all made in Blender, like the houses and towers and so on.
And the terrain is built with a custom Unity tool that we created that
Oh, wow.
It's essentially a spline tool. So, you you don't necessarily need ours. You can just get a some random spline tool [laughter]
from the asset store and use that. That will do the job just as well. So essentially we designed the the entire maps are all just splines. So essentially paths that a mesh is procedurally generated around.
Okay. Yeah. Because the the obviously the thing uh that despite being 3D Thronefall is a very bang forbuck art style. Um and your other one uh is is it

Superflight? Uh, Superflight is a Grizzly Games game, but I personally did not work on Superflight. So,
okay.
My my university friends made Superflight before I joined the team and then I joined the team. The team configuration changed a little bit and then I was part of making islanders. So, so Superflight is by the same studio, but I was not involved in making Superflight.
The The point I was about to make for Superflight though is that you basically have one character. So they have one character asset which is like used in every scene and then the map's procedurally generated and it's like a very smart use of different color palettes and stuff like that. So once again like a bang forbuck 3D game. So, um I guess unless you're I mean in my case at the moment like I'm looking at a lot of PSX style art and sort of just using that for uh my current experiment.

Whether it becomes a game or not, we'll see.
But I'm finding it the environment stuff really fun and easy to do. It's almost like playing the Sims or something like that. Just like building scenes because you know what? I don't need to make a a tree when there's already someone who's an expert at this art style that's made a great tree. Uh, you know, I'm I'm letting lighting do a lot of the work to try and like blend everything together and um using some post-processing and stuff. But, uh, that's the stuff I find really fun is is like creating creating vibes. Yeah, I think I think you are right. If it's taken me a whole week to get a character in, I guess part of it is learning learning the process, but if I can
Yeah. keep it repeatable and and get quicker every time it will make sense.
I think for example there's um one art style for example that I always wanted to try which is like a more stop motiony 3D art style that almost looks like a stop motion animation a little bit and yeah mega and if I don't know if you you

probably know Mega Bonk [laughter]
I was just about to say how Mega Bonk did it. Yes. Um how they must do 12 FPS or something like that. That's that's pretty cool, isn't it? Actually, [clears throat] ina in the case of Mega Bonk, I think it's for the purpose of performance optimization because if you have so many enemies and they're all skinned meshes, then it's going to cost quite a bit of performance. I think in this specific case, it was like
they're still meshes. It's not like they've done what Halls of Torment did or something like that. It's like still meshes. They're they're they're just like rendering the animations at 12 frames or something like that. Right.
Right. But they don't have bones anymore. The animations in Mega Bonk are baked, so that saves a crapload of performance because it's basically just
Very smart.
Lookup tables. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. That's pretty smart. I So it's it's like a sprite a 3D sprite sheet basically. That's
Oh, wow. That's That's very smart. Cool. I I
think I think more developers will do this in the future, honestly. I think it's it's a it's a cool style, b it's

easier to make, c it's more performance efficient. I think
Yeah. Wow. I think.
Well, thanks for bringing that up. I had no idea, but because I I saw in the uh I saw in the the performance recommendations it said, "We'll run on a toaster if you ask it nicely," which I thought was pretty funny. So, that's kind of like the goal for a lot of There's kind of two devs. There's like a performance, don't worry about it, and then there's devs that are just want to play Factorio with their code and make everything perfect. So, sounds like um this guy's that type of dev. I also heard that he might be someone that's actually very well known. uh and was making the game under an alias.
Can cannot cannot deny or conf confirm. I know nothing.
There's a YouTube rabbit hole for for everyone watching. [laughter]
Yeah. I mean, I just find Gnomes to be a very interesting case study in in terms of also good good scope and everything. I I just like the whole package also

from from a player perspective and also from a developer perspective. I can very well imagine making something like this at some point. Maybe like making making a rog like strategy game with like a very minimalist simple pixel art look and it's just it's not about the graphics. It's just one going 100% into the depth and into the game play. I think it's cool to see that that can still work. I guess maybe one interesting question would be do you have any regrets about design decisions you made for Gnomes and if so which ones?
It's kind of it's kind of like there is a few but at the same time we'll just we kind of will never know. There's there's a few things that Patrick and I kind of don't agree on at the end of the day what gets pushed up onto Steam. um is kind of it kind of is

Patrick's call because he's the one with the git repo, you know what I mean? So
um I guess one example is later after the fact we ended up adding a uh restart day button. Um and we we kind of I kind of didn't want to do it at all because I I was happy to just like let people, you know, that's the end of your run, you can't try anymore. We when we did implement it, I used Thronefall as an example of how to do it because I thought, you know, you don't you don't want to like you want to give them the chance to respend their money and everything like that if they invested poorly.
Uh but I think that I we've seen like a bit of a dip in our review score since doing it. And
I don't think people realize what it is, but getting booted from the run and having to start again is actually the best experience in my opinion. So that's that's one example. Another thing. Yeah. Look, so can you can you explain that a bit in a bit more detail? So I mean technically the way it works now is you never really get booted from the experience because you can always retry,

right?
And one thing one one thing that this does is it takes away the riskreward a little bit because you can
you can just try to go for the econom economic option and if it doesn't work out then then you do something then you add some defenses for example. Right.
Well, there's there's two there's two examples. So, first of all, um people can get stuck in a no-win situation, which is not something that I really like, and you know, they can keep playing over and over and and not be able to beat the day. Um, and the other thing is that I think when people get stuck restarting over and over and over again, the game loses a little bit of its magic. Like, as much as um so, so my the way I think of players is that players don't always know what they want, but they know exactly how they feel, and they but they don't know why. And this is one of those situations where it's like they don't feel quite as good as if they just started again because
they would have forgotten about their last run by the time they're, you know, 2 minutes into their new run because now now they're attached to this new run.

Whereas letting them repeat the same uh the same run or the same day of the run where they're stuck over and over and over again just makes them frustrated. I think if yeah, if I if I could have my time again, I wouldn't I would have probably put my foot down and said we shouldn't do this. But um now that it's in the game, it's something that you can't really take out
cuz there will be people that get upset about it.
I've seen examples of people making much bigger blunders than this, like changing how a whole system works after their game is fully released. And you know, it's fundamentally changed the game and the dev goes, "No, this is better."
But the players hate it. and you know they go from positive to mixed pretty quickly. But it's also one of those things where it's like oh the dev can't backtrack either like so after you've launched your game and you make choices like that um yeah it can be very you you got to think very carefully if you're going to change something fundamental about the game. The other big thing that uh I am not

we released the game in English only and really the reality was the reality is we were just completely broke and we could not have waited another month. Um,
yeah.
Uh, yeah. Uh, but I feel like if we released the game in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, you know, German, we probably would have had a much more exponential start just because our audience would have been twice as big if not bigger.
Uh, but that's that's just something like we'll just never know. Um, unfortunately.
Yeah. Uh, but as far as like game design decisions go, um, for the most part, I I'm pretty proud of like what we've come up with together. And if anything, I kind of feel like like we were talking about earlier with with the simple constraints, a lot of these decisions just came so naturally. Um because it was rather than having you know so many choices of things we could do there was there was always just like a very obvious we use the terogaboo like caveman mode solution you know what's

the most ugger solution to this to this problem. Um rather than creating a whole system for it it's like well maybe this button just needs to work differently or or whatever. Okay.
Yeah. Go with the ugabooga solution first. I like it.
Yeah that's right. the lowest the lowest investment solution and see if it's good enough. You know, done is better than perfect.
That's right. But just saying do the ugabooga solution in a weird way explains all of that without any fancy words and you know exactly what it means. [laughter]
There you go.
Can you by the way if you restart a day can you roll the shop and get different items or how does that work?
That's a great question. That's um there's a bunch of nuances like that that only Patrick can answer, I think. Um, actually, no. I'm sure there's some players in our Discord that could answer that question. But, um, this this change has happened after the bulk of my QA has happened. I I I um Yeah, so I actually can't answer that question. Um, I can tell you though that we did an a daily run feature, which is one of the things

I'm really happy we did. I kind of almost vetoed it because it was just, you know, one extra thing to get in before launch. But it's been one of the best retention um tools for us is like there's, you know, we we get it at least 300 odd players a day coming back to the game, which is pretty great.
Um the main thing about it though is that every run is the same. So the the shop seed and everything's identical. Whereas in the real game, uh it's pretty much impossible to get the same seed twice. So everyone if you roll the same shop at the same time, you'll get like everything in the same order.
Okay. Okay. Okay. I see.
And the only thing change that changes that is like what you purchase. So yeah. And like everyone gets the same tiles, the same chunks and everything like that.
So there there's a seat that just keeps going. I I see. [snorts]
Yeah. Is there is there a high score for the
Yeah, so the high score is basically who

survives the most days in endless mode. And sometimes it's just crazy um what what day people get to. Um and it's been a long time since I've managed to get into the high schoolers. Let me just tell you that because some of these guys are just just uh fanatics. They're just crazy. They some some of them just don't stop until their computer stops working um because they're so good. There's c there's sort of like a a critical mass point where it's kind of just impossible. Like you literally can't win because you run out of space to plant crops and everything like that or you just can't deal enough damage.
But uh
yeah, I I guess that's just one of those things. If we wanted to do endless mode, it had to get a bit wacky at some point. You know, it's the same with procedural generation, too. You know, if you're going to if you're going to have a procedurally generated environment,
you're never going to have a perfect environment, right? is there's always going to be something one in a 100 times that just isn't right.
Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Yeah, I got to try the the daily mode. That sounds fun indeed. Is it like a top 10 score? Why do you say you haven't gotten

into it for a while?
Uh the top 10 I mean you can scroll back. Uh and we've even got like a halfbaked website for it as well because people wanted to be able to navigate it a bit easier, but um yeah, the to get into the top 10 is a pretty big task. Um especially some some some runs like they're so hard that people barely anyone ever even finishes that just the regular 16 days. So
yeah, I think I think the hard part with the daily run was creating combinations that don't cancel each other out. And Patrick put a lot of work into like um all the conditions. Like for example, if you get a gnome, you always have to have something that gives you population. So like a house or like one of the population relics or
um if you get like only if you get no economy items, you have to get something that like gives you a way to generate money or else um yeah it's it's yeah quite a lot of work went into that. Um making making bad combinations

impossible.
I see. So all of the daily runs are also probably generated from from a seed. So maybe the the seed is generated from the current date or something like this.
Yeah, that's right. Um so it's it's basically set to be random forever. So, um, it it when me and Patrick, uh, when our bones have turned to dust, if you get online and play gnomes, you'll still you'll still be able to get a random seed that's never happened before.
Nice. Cool. And is do we have any cheat prevention or are there are there cheaters on the leaderboards?
Oh, good question. I'm sure someone's cheated on the leaderboard somehow. We we have um cheat mode. Uh if you click on the gnome's eye a bunch of times, it turns on cheat mode. Um I think it's left eye. So if you if you uh but it it tags it as cheat mode so that you can't

like brag by getting a crazy straw. It's look, some of this stuff's a little bit janky, but that kind of comes with the territory of
this type of game. I found out the other day that the average person on Steam is like 35 years old or something like that. So,
um, they're used to this kind of thing and like it's almost nostalgic having a little bit of this type of jank.
35. Wow, that's quite old. So, all of the young players are are on mobile and on Fortnite and Roblox.
Maybe maybe
I think you probably you'd probably know better, weren't you working on a mobile game at one point recently?
Uh, yeah. I'm I'm making a puzzle puzzle game, but it's like I guess super young people are also probably not the target audience for that. I guess the reason why it's going to be a free game is because I really don't know who is going to be the target audience for it except for hardcore puzzle fans, which there aren't a lot of.
There's something I have to ask you that I just thought of since we're talking about mo mobile.

You bet. Do you know what I'm going to ask you?
King.
Oh, yeah. Mhm. King.
Have you What's What's the the deal with that? Like did they not just straight up rip your assets or like what's happened there? Do you know anything about it or you just put it in the back of your mind?
Yeah. No, no, we had some legal confrontation also with them about that. Um the problem is it's a little bit like wacka mole, right? So they they upload these crappy ads and then when they when they tell them to stop or to put it down, then they just create another one the next day, different one. And then also, you know, if we sent them a letter with a lawyer and to tell them that they should please stop using our original soundtrack that they ripped out of our [laughter] trailer or whatever, then the next day they'll just have a new trailer where they rec recreated the entire soundtrack, but like changed a couple of notes. I'm like, "Fick me with with with the time. You could have made your own

soundtrack. What the hell are you doing?" But that's how it works. So, um,
yeah, I when I first saw that, I
very hard.
Yeah, it's must be really frustrating to deal with that, but at the same time,
yeah, like what do you do? What do you do? It's like you're better off just you're better off just putting your head down and making something else faster than they can keep up, right?
Yeah.
Luckily, I think most of the audience is pretty vocal. Sorry, I was just talking over. I said, luckily, the audience is um pretty vocal. I think like there's a lot of a lot of negative reviews of people saying this is just thrown for ripoff, you know, and and and uh you know, at least at least like the the audience is out there um backing you guys. So, but yeah, so I'm sorry to see that's happened to you, but I'm sure you're not the first person and I'm sure you're not going to be the last either.
It's not really a problem for us cuz we're I mean Thronefall Thronefall is on mobile now. You can play Thronfall on mobile, but they're not really eating into our market share or whatever. They're just doing their own thing and

they used our assets in the beginning. Now I think they don't use our assets anymore. So now they're just a very close copycat visually speaking. But then when you actually see the game play, you you quickly realize that the gameplay also is quite quite quite different. It's uh very mobiley, you know, you have like lots of in inner purchases and and like all of the typical mobile stuff. So it's it's very very different in in that aspect also.
Yeah. A lot of people have said to us that we should put gnomes on mobile and I've I've said first of all we can't because of our custom engine. One of the quirks of it a lot of the things have come to bite us in the ass like we can't do mobile or or um or console. Basically anything that's Cbased we just can't touch it unless we want to spend another year on it. I think a lot of people have a have the idea that mobile gaming does a lot better than it really does. Like the monetization model for mobile gaming, there's not going to be a lot of

people spending $5 on a game on mobile, right? It's it's the advertising that earns um that's how you monetize, right?
It's it's quite surprising. I mean, yes and no. There there developers telling stories about both developers telling story about their complete completely flopped mobile ventures and they're they never want to do it again and then they maybe do it again and then suddenly it works. It's like hard to generalize. I think
I think mobile is um I think mobile for me personally is more difficult to understand than Steam. Yeah, I I feel like I have a good understanding of CM. I feel like mobile because I don't know it as well because I don't understand it as well. It's more of a black box. It's more like a random game to me personally. But I'm not sure if it's more random in general or if that or or if it just feels more random because I don't know it as well.
I think it's the same thing for me. it's

that I don't play mobile games at all and uh I I I looked at my uh Steam purchases history and how much I've spent on Steam or something like that and I realized I could have bought a boat.
Um so it [laughter] turns out turns out this is turns out this is my uh my hobby. Um but because of that I know Steam very well and you know I've got um Chris Sakowski on speed dial as well and I'm subscribed to the blog. So, it I think it's just for for someone who doesn't have a marketing budget and is a fan of that type of game, it makes sense to only make games for Steam. And maybe one day if I make something that's cool enough, uh, I can get a third party involved to do a port for me or something like that. But
when I cross that bridge,
we we'll talk about it.
So, you do play a crapload of games on Steam, right? Or where does
So, um, literal. Do you buy like a new game every week or like like what's your what's your habits there?

So, um I do have a look at the demos like few times a week and just see what's coming coming up. And I try to like almost like your Steam guess a game, try and figure out what's going to be a hit and what isn't. And if something looks pretty cool, I'll I'll give it a bit of a go. And luckily, most demos only have like an hour or two of content, so it it um kind of caps me from playing for too long. But um when I play a game, I will play a game for like 48 hours without sleeping, just non-stop. Like I'll find something and if it really grabs me, I'll just I'll just uh completely immerse myself in it until I can just play it no longer. And I guess that's kind of like translates to my game development method as well, which is that I'll just like go and go and go and go until like one day I just can't even get off the couch and I'll sit down and I'll watch a whole series of a show or whatever like, you know, until I just crash, you know? I'm very I'm very like I have no rigor. I have I'm just like I I some people work like

cogs and others work like cannonballs and I work like a cannonball. Like I'm just like
once you're going, you're going. [laughter]
Yeah. Right.
There's no stopping you. Okay. I see.
What about you? Are you similar or are you more like methodical?
I think I'm a marathon runner, so I try to not burn myself out. I do a little bit every day and as long as I'm making some progress every day, I'm satisfied.
As as I've started making games by myself, I'm realizing that it's more you've got to be like that if you're you're solo. when when you're part of a team. Um, especially when it comes to marketing as well, like being a cannonball is kind of a good thing or like you know if you've got to make a huge art piece or or you know you've got to make an entire song or whatever definitely definitely helps and then you sort of I take time off and reflect like while I'm doing whatever I'm doing that's not games I'm thinking or you know meditating on ideas that I have and then when I cannonball myself again I

I've basically built up built up what I want to do as like you know my gunpowder for and I go again. Right. But yeah, as as I've started uh working more solo, it just seems like that's not going to work for me in the long run. Like I've got to I've got to be, you know, putting in 6 hours a day instead of 18 hours one day and and none the next, you know.
Also, in Do you have a family or how's your
Well, um funny funny you asked that. Uh not yet, but uh pretty soon. Pretty soon. So, I've got to
I've got to make some smart decisions, I think, going forward and being I've got to probably be a little bit more uh you know, have a bit more rigor about my workflow and I don't one day my life's just going to change completely very soon. So, we'll see how it all fits into into itself, I guess. Um, you know, if you watch Thomas Brush or someone like that, he manages he manages to run YouTube and and make games and have three kids or something at the same

time. So, we know we know it can be done. Um but yeah, I guess
the Yeah, exciting, terrifying, everything.
Yeah, I guess it changes has to change your approach a bit, right?
Yeah. I mean, when when you're um a young man, you can you can play it like the young man's game, but you know, one day one day you've got to uh you've got to take stock and and look at how you're doing things, right?
What's the reason that you you're going solo now? is like is Patrick does Patrick have different plans or
it's that Patrick I think he's just a little bit burnt out at the moment. Um we definitely we have to get back together to do more Nomes content.
Um he's just traveling around with his laptop at the moment and just enjoying himself and
fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's he's it's kind of um we we've worked on a few little prototypes and stuff together, but it's we haven't like had that moment

we did for Gnomes where it was like we both knew this is exactly the game we wanted to make.
Um and you know there's a very good chance we're going to make another game together. Um but I think we both kind of need to see we both want to see more of the whole picture. um like I want to learn a bit more about actually building the game myself so that you know maybe one day Patrick won't be in the picture I can do it myself and I guess he
uh kind of wants to understand a bit more about the marketing and like the art direction stuff and well like we still you know correspond and and like share ideas and stuff like that. It's the same with the CS survivors guys as well. Like I'm basically just like their free marketing consultant now going forward. They've got other prototypes they've made without me. And um you know at the same time like if I have any technical advice I just ask them and that they'll give me like a corporate solution to whatever spaghetti code I'm making, right? Um,
yeah. I I think it definitely makes sense to

like not tie yourself down in the same team with the same people all the time. You know, you you it's almost like you come together to create something and once you've created that thing, you can move on and, you know, find other people to work with or just use that energy yourself. I I I um yeah, I I do like the idea of um having those people in my corner so that maybe one day in a year or two or five, you know, we can we can see who's still making games and and see if we've got an idea that all lines up.
Yeah, I think it's a good idea to learn how to make a full game on your own because
then you hold all of the cards and you can like entirely freely choose who you want to work with and who you don't like. you you don't depend on anyone.
Yeah.
If for some reason you don't like working with somebody or you don't like working with somebody anymore, then it's just like,
okay.
Yeah,
that's a that's just a that's a good situation to be in in general. Yeah, I

agree.
I agree. I think I think the people that um are in the best position to uh to to earn a living from Steam are the generalists who uh you know, they're developers, artists. I don't think you have to be a musician, that's kind of like a bit of a a cherry on top, but for me, like I very much enjoy creating the music and the sound for my games. So, uh, to be like the triple threat would be a bit of a dream come true for me. And I feel like, you know, every day I'm getting a few steps closer to that, you know, with the way things are going, one day we won't even be programming games. We'll just be just be transmitting our ideas through our neurolink anyway. So,
yeah. Uh, I hope that's still a little while away yet. But [laughter]
yeah,
the AI will guess what you want to play and uh code the game for you overnight or or neural generated anyway.
Yeah, we we won't even be um we won't even be making games. It'll just be like making games for everyone will just have their own personal game, won't they?

That that's whatever they desire at that time.
Yeah. Have you seen these videos of like these AI generated games that almost feel like dream worlds? They're basically like like video generators, like realtime video generators, but they respond to your button inputs.
No, I'm not saying this. For for example, the for example the AI Minecraft where they have you not seen that they trained like a they trained a neural net on a bunch of uh Minecraft footage in combination like with the button presses that created the imagery. So they have an AI version of Minecraft where you can look around and mind blocks and so on. But it's like like a weird dreamland because when you look away and then you look back then suddenly there's something different there because
Oh wow. Okay.
It's not persistent. It's all just AI generated, right? [laughter]
Yeah. Right. So, from what I understand, it's uh like talking to a genius goldfish is is is kind of like the um
Yeah,

that's the at the moment.
I have used it for um like as a bit of a tutor from time to time when I'm programming and I'll be like, why isn't my code working? It's like, oh, you just forgot your parenthesis, bro. And it's like just these, you know, these little things that someone like me who hasn't got a lot of experience can just it just it just knows what's what's wrong with it after a glance. Or, you know, if I don't know what something is in GDAU, I'll I'll go what is this thing or, you know, what's
what's quian mean or or whatever. And uh you know, these these little things that all um it explains it like I'm five, which is exactly what I' I've always needed. So,
it's perfect for those kind of questions. sound.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I guess where people are going to get tripped up though is just putting in a prompt for an entire project and then wondering why it's dog water. So, uh yeah, I think that that being able to do that is a very very very long way away. And I'd say that

your Minecraft video you're speaking about is probably someone who's a very much a specialist has managed to figure that out. And surely it isn't just straight out of the box. Yeah, I think was some kind of research project. I don't know.
It's very difficult to predict timelines, but I'm sure it's going to be a mixture of later than we expect and sooner than we expect at the same time, if that makes sense. Like it when it comes, it will probably be it'll be like feel it will feel unexpected. Yeah.
But I don't think it's going to be tomorrow. No,
I I still am yet to find any like art or music that doesn't have a certain stank about it. Even the really really good stuff that everyone's written and raving about, there's always
it's always just got like a unoriginal feel to it. So, I'm not really too concerned about like game artists being replaced. Uh, but I I do think that it won't be too long until like it becomes standard practice to have like a

co-pilot at the very least. In fact, I think that probably already is the standard practice now. I know it is for a lot of corporations and such.
Yeah,
I think that is pretty much the standard now. And
yeah, I agreed for AI music. You can you can hear it when you're paying attention, right? For example, sometimes when I listen random listen to random playlists on YouTube, I I just listen to whatever comes up in autoplay and then often times I end find myself being like, "Wait a second, am I listening to AI music?" [laughter]
Yeah. Right. Oh, there's nothing worse.
Yeah.
When you when you're thinking a part of for me, part of it is like the connection with the artist that that I suppose makes me feel something like maybe it's just a placebo. Um because a lot of these AI artists like they they're marketing them as a real person too, aren't they? So um well I guess maybe one day it'll be good enough. It does for me. For me, there is a huge opportunity here though for the art because as what is now considered normal becomes more and more just easy to

create because, you know, that's what this thing's trained on. Or really wacky weird games like Mega Bonk that are just doing super experimental not well not even that experimental but just strange things that no one's thought of yet. I think I feel like the audience for that is really uh responsive, you know, when whenever something just completely strange comes out. Um but still, you know, within the scope of like uh artistic, for lack of a better word. Yeah. I think there's there's games that are winning now that five or 10 years ago would have just been, you know, people wouldn't wouldn't have given them a second look because they're just too strange. So that that's that's the silver lining of all of this. I think
the average Steam player's 35 years old though.
Are you sure, man?
Yeah. Don't don't uh quote me, but uh this is something that like 30 30 to 35 I think is the bracket.
Uhhuh. Interesting. Interesting. I wonder I wonder if there's like a curve if like

the average has gotten older and older probably. Right.
Well, I'm 33 now, so I'm And I feel like I'm the average Steam player.
Maybe it's just because, you know, that's all my friends are the same age, but
uh you know.
True. Yeah. Uh and that's why I think games games that are or they that's why the nostalgia sells, you know. Uh was it Gavin was saying that's like his whole thing is like just tries to dial into something that uh makes you feel like you're a child again or or you know take takes you back to 1999.
Does Gnomes play into the nostalgia a bit as well? Probably. Right.
Absolutely. Like the art style. I think what what it is is like you want to have like a rose colored glasses tint over over your game. Um especially when you're when you're batting in our league, you know, we're not we're not competing with like the the hell divers and you know the um you know those huge huge types of games like we're we're trying to

we're trying to find 100,000 or you know 500,000 people that in the whole world that will think whatever we're making is really cool and be happy to give us 10 bucks, right? rather than trying to be the trying to compete for
We don't need a whole slice of the pie. We just need the crumbs.
The crumbs are quite big.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a big It's a big freaking cake. The massive crumbs.
Massive cake. Yeah. And we're just tiny little mouses. So, um we don't need big crumbs at all. Yeah.
One thing with the making games solo and in a team is I find myself so it's a bit of the grass is always greener on the other side kind of situation. Whenever whenever I make games in a team, I get cravings to make a game solo. And whenever I make games solo, I get a craving to go back to working in a team.
We'll see how that plays out for you.
Yeah, I think that's probably a good way to put where Patrick and I are both at at the moment is um you know, we spent a year, seven days a week almost working together and we both like have we I

think we've kind of exhausted all of our shared ideas and now we've the ideas that are left are just a bit different. So, it's for us to find a middle ground again. Maybe we need to like go and spend some time in the other paddic and, you know, until all that green grass is eaten up.
Um, and I I also think that that same metaphor applies to game engines. Like just before I got on the call with you, I was like getting so frustrated with the pathing stuff I was talking about earlier that I like was almost going to download Unreal Engine and have a look at see what it's all about. But after talking to you, I'm thinking, "Oh, what am I doing?" Like, this is it's just an excuse to procrastinate, isn't it? Right. Okay. You know, I guess I I still kind of am like shopping for an idea at this point. Whether the idea I've put the most effort into is the one I go with or not, we'll see. But you sometimes you just got to remind yourself that the game engine isn't going to make the game, right? Or, you know, whatever.
There is no secret tool to any of this. It's just the only thing that's going to really make this thing happen is some

blood, sweat, and tears at the end of the day.
Do you have to suffer for your art? [laughter] I think you think so.
I think so. Like in some in some like you it's hard work like of course like you know it's still a job you know there's there's days where I think like oh gez you know I don't really want to be doing this but then like other days I'll just wake up and I will I'll be it'll be 11:00 in the morning and I haven't had a coffee or anything and I'm like oh gez well like I wish the day was longer because I'm having such a good time doing this. It's almost euphoric. It's it's the same feeling you get playing a game. Uh but you know it just depends on what problem you're trying to solve or like you know what part of it uh what part of it you're working on. Um or how passionate how motivated you are by the idea. So like like you said seeing a small amount of progress every day is something that I think I need to become more more used to rather than trying to like get a like I I'll spend

like 18 hours straight working on something until I get it how I want it. Whereas I should be happy to just like break it down into four parts and it might even be more efficient to do it that way because I I I'll have a more efficient 6hour day instead of uh you know uh I I just I lack the patience I suppose is is one problem that I've got to I've got I've got to kind of develop
that. I think patience is a skill almost
probably. Yeah, it probably is. I think the problem I have is with working on game deer for more than six hours is that my productivity definitely dwindles drastically after like the six hour mark. I can be can work with a very high level of focus I would say for about 6 hours and after that it's very very steeply downhill. [laughter] I yeah, I think I think the the hard part is like telling yourself when to stop. Like, no, you're not going to you're not going to do anything good from this point or or you know, you're quality of work is only going to suffer.

As much as you want to keep going, you you kind of just need to write it off and go and spend time with your family and you know, go outside and touch some grass. That's one big one for me. That's that's a reminder for myself actually. go outside and touch some grass and yeah, just come back and try again with a fresh fresh night's sleep and um a full belly the next morning, right?
Sure. I mean, surely good has decent built-in navigation system, right? There there's probably some n mesh solution in good already, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. There is definitely nav mesh solutions. It's just I've never I've never used it before. So, um I'm just wrestling with uh I made the mistake of building my map first and now I'm trying to get my nav measures and stuff to work with it. So, uh
yeah. Yeah. So, I've probably got to go I'm I'm doing everything I can to not have to rebuild the map again. So, [laughter] there's just there's just,
you know, lost uh what is it? Lost profit fallacy or whatever it is. Sunk profit fallacy.
Sunk cost fallacy.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. There's a few times where

it's where it's like that and you know I like I built a whole FPS um system and I was like I don't need a a state machine and now I'm like a damn I need a state machine. I didn't want to learn what a state machine was and uh here I am. So [laughter] yeah. So uh yeah there's there's all these kinds of like kinds of things where like at the moment my goal is to like get something that looks good enough to make a steam trailer out of and that doesn't necessarily mean that everything needs to work. It just needs to look like it works and it needs to have like those exciting moments.
You're going the trailer first approach.
Yeah. I think I think that's that's the way to do it is like have something that shows your idea and um see what people think of your idea and based on what people think of your idea. It can be either a you know a $5 game or a $20 game, right? Um,
but I think you call it the balloon approach where where you like your scope just gets bigger depending on, you know, how in demand your idea is or like how

how much runway you have to make it. I'm in the position where you know
the balloon was from Thomas Brush, I think. But
Oh, was it okay?
I think so. Yeah.
Oh, I mix you guys up. You look you guys look too similar. So, I mix you up. [laughter] I guess that that's the goal for me at the moment is try and get something that I can present. I guess the term industry term is vertical slice. Um, and maybe it means that the game's not built the most efficiently it can be, but you circle back around and make it better. um once you know people are interested in it. I suppose that that's how I guess I see the marketing first approach is when this is your job, you can't afford to uh you can't afford to from day one go, okay, I'm going to make a game that's going to take three years or you know a game that's going to take two years. You need to
have like a scope A, scope B, scope C kind of situation where
it's almost like how they have have gated Kickstarters only you're just

doing that internally. um based on audience engagement is is how I I'd put it.
You're testing the waters basically. I I guess one of the advantages you seem to have is that you because you play a lot of games, you seem to have a decent feel for what works, right? You play a lot of demos and so on. And you you said earlier that when you played uh Gnomes for for the first time, when when you had like the first prototype for Gnomes, you instantly knew that there was something there was something there.
Yeah. And we we did some like close play testing where I'd like get in a Discord call with one of my friends and be like, "Hey man, let me watch you play this." and I wouldn't tell them anything about it and I'd send them a zip file
and um I just just have a little chat to them, not about the game at all. I would observe like how they played the game and that was a lot to do with like how I

developed UX is I look at what people assume things does sorry assume things do. Um and I maybe will just ask some questions like uh you know what was your thinking when you did that? There's no wrong answers just I'm trying to make the game better. um when I know that the game's good is when two or three hours later they're sending me screenshots after the call's way over because they're still playing it. You know, that's that's kind of when you know like, okay, there's something here. Um it's not just another um little wacky prototype I've sent somebody. Uh this is this is maybe got a bit of the secret source. Um so that's like the first kind of sign outside of like, wow, this just feels fun to play for myself and I can't put it down. But that's like the the thing that that's not necessarily something you see or can test with a trailer.
Yes, I agree. I think uh like but what I for what I'm building at the moment like I'm trying to make everything feel real

juicy like you shoot something and the personops and uh you know there's a bit of destruction destructible environment stuff happening or or or whatever. Um, and you know, you can make a very very tight kind of ugly version of the loop. Um, but there's certain moments that can probably be a little bit crafted for a trailer. Um, rather than like uh I suppose a lot of a lot of indie games we I think they're too far along by the time they get to Steam. um like they've actually almost completed the game and and you know they've got a a few weeks or a few months before they launch. Whereas like ideally I think you want as long you you you want a a version of the trailer or a version of the of the Steam page as a complete package that looks like what the final thing is going to be. But you want to get that there as early as possible is is basically the strategy that I'm talking about here. But that's a bit of a different strategy

than what you did for Gnomes then because for Gnomes the game play was first it was like very gameplay focused approach and you were like game play works game play is nice and then only a bit later you tested how it vibes with people and that was also good. And here you're now you're maybe trying to do it the other way around, trying to go for the appeal first, make a nice trailer, and then maybe worry a bit later. Is the game play is the game play good? Or what's your way of thinking about those two things? Like the
like you have the the marketability that you can see from the outside and you have the I guess the other type of marketability almost. It's like
it it plays well and it's like it creates word of mouth, but these are like separate in a way, right? Yeah, I guess like with with with Gnomes, there was a lot of um things that there was a lot of things that came later. Um like our original trailer actually had like few gameplay mechanics that were dropped

before we put the demo out there. Um, there was a little thing we we dropped like going back to what we were talking about before like do I regret any design decisions that you used to have to manually rotate the gnomes and when we took that out a lot of people that were play testing the game got upset but I think it might have been the right choice because it was just like a UX decision despite despite me being the UX guy. Patrick was the one that pulled rank and said no we we're getting rid of the rotation because it's just like I'm sick of trying to teach people how to rotate the names. So, there's always going to be little things like that that will change. Uh, we knew pretty early on like like the art style from Gnomes and and the actual like idea of a tower defense where you can move the towers. That was like a core idea that was just really solid. And yeah, of course, like before I put a trailer on Steam, I'll definitely have something that people can play test that's like maybe it's like a crafted level rather than like using a bit more randomness. And maybe it won't have like the second loop which is like you know any kind of aggression

or whatever. Like uh
it'll it'll definitely be in a state where people can at least give me some feedback on hey dude you're like you're cooking. What are you doing? Is this isn't a good game or
um you know I'll be able to gauge the I'll be able to gauge the response of the selected people that do get to try out before we put a Steam page up. Um, at the same time, I do kind of in a lot of ways get similar feelings for like it's this it's a good good that you bring this up though because you kind of have like you have to decide whether am I enjoying playing this or am I proud that I've made this and like those can be very similar feelings that I think a lot of people mix up. So, I'm glad you I'm glad you mentioned this um because
for me it's like something as as like the creative lead and like the UX guy and the main QA guy being now being the person that's creating something. Um maybe I am going to get tripped up on

this and end up finding myself in a position where I think something's cool because I made it, not because it is actually cool. Does that make sense?
I think it does. Do you think you have played enough shooter games to get the same feeling of knowing it's there when you see it? Like similar to playing gnomes and being like um do you think you have a feel for the genre like that?
Yeah, I was um I I used to play pretty high level Counter-Strike back in the day, funny enough.
And I do really like a PSX shooter. There's actually one that I really love at the moment called Pig Face, which I'm taking a fair bit of inspiration from. If you haven't seen that already, check it out. It's a cool game. I I've got a lot of people around me that play these kinds of games as well that are not developers. These are just like, you know, people I know who I can probably go, hey, check this out. And
yeah, so it's I won't be going in completely blind. Um, but I'm glad that I'm glad that you uh you put to me like that though because part of wanting to talk to you today was having some of

these like um ideas that I have maybe challenged because I don't I can't afford to fall into a trap like that. Um where you know maybe I think something's better than it is pointing it out there. Oh, now I've got a game on Steam that no one wants and I've got to finish it. Like that's that's not the position that I want to be in. So, um, yeah, I guess like there there's like a fine dance that you have to do between getting a trailer out on Steam, testing whether the broader audience is actually interested in it and actually uh, you know, play testing the project before play testing it deeply enough before you actually, you know, make that investment as well because it's going to minimum it's like a,000 bucks to get a game up on Steam by the time you paid for your capture art plus all the time you spent investing in the project, right? The important thing for me is that when I'm playing it, it needs to feel good. And then when I give it to somebody else, it needs to be more than just a, "Oh, hey, yeah, that was cool, man. Thanks. See you later." You can Your friends are

going to lie to you. They're bad play testers. The only way you can tell if it's good is if is by what they do. Um, observe what they do, not what they say
is probably a good way to put it.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. It is a very delicate dance. You kind of have to nail both aspects of it. You have to make sure it's you have to make sure it looks fun and you have to sure make sure it is fun. Has to look fun. It has to be fun. And you kind of have to worry about both if you if you want to make it on Steam. I feel like you you do need both.
Yeah.
Who knows? I might turn around in a few weeks of of um cooking further and uh be like, what am I doing back to 2D? Um, but for now I'm just very much treating this as uh the worst thing that can happen is I learn a bunch of stuff, learn how I get better at programming, I learn how to use GDAU, I learn the 3D workflow and uh, you know, maybe I can turn it into a

commercial game at the end of it. We'll see what happens.
I hope it works out. Otherwise, I think Patrick and you could easily also make another tilebased strategy game. Yeah,
I think I think you could easily just reuse the engine, make another tile based strategy rog like I think that that would also still absolutely work.
Yeah. Well, when he's um when he's back on the map, maybe we'll see how we go. But for now, I just don't want to be sitting on my hands. I want to um you know, be developing myself. Um we even talked about doing a bit of a quirky triad rogike. I'm I'm a bit of a trad rogike nerd as well, but um once again, that's just like something that's one of our many many prototypes that are just floating around in the ether really. like he he's even got I I could I could start like you were you said in one of your videos um before uh creating phoneful like you showed off a bunch of the different uh demos like there was that one with the flowers uh was

shooting shooting flowers across the map which was kind of cool I thought like there's a bunch of little toys like that that we've made that um you know it's about just making the right bet so that We have the best chance out of our luck, right?
Makes sense. Did you also do the balancing for Gnomes? By the way,
it was it was a kind of a twoperson job for sure. Um Patrick's someone who's inclined to make things too hard and I'm inclined to make things too easy. So, it's one of those like balancing acts where, you know, we we try and um meet in the middle. The other thing, too, is we both had very different strategic patterns. like there was things that I would just find very easy and vice versa and just other things that I'd find impossible or too frustrating. Um, but the biggest thing was having like a steady flow of play testers as we were making the game throughout between putting the Steam page up and putting the demo out. Uh, we would have had like

500 play testers probably.
Wow, that's
Yeah, the best best place to get play testers is on Reddit. you just post on Reddit saying, "Hey, I'm giving out free keys to my game for anyone that wants to give me feedback." And maybe, you know, maybe out of the 500, you'll get 100 uh responses uh from people you give keys to. But
um yeah, it's really really solid way to figure out what's working and what's not working. Um because random people on the internet are the best play testers because they don't care about your feelings.
Mhm. True. I guess you can sort of test the appeal of your game at the same time because the easier it is for you to find play testers that probably means your game is more appealing, right? Cuz
yeah,
people don't just want to play test anything. Like I I there are a lot of developers who struggle to find play testers and often times it's just because their games don't look like something that would be fun to play test for.
I think that's exactly right. If you

can't find people to play test your game, how are you going to get someone to play? You'll pay for it at the end of the day. Like is that's that's [laughter] just
and I've been I've been there too. Um you know before Sea of Survivors which was probably the first game that we went okay this has got a bit of something to it. We would have had oh I've worked on probably half a dozen games before that of varying levels of seriousness. But um and that's not including just like messing around in Unity either. Like this is like games where I we've said, "Hey, we're going to make a game or you know, I'm working as part of a team on a game and yeah, like you you know, you you just know like people people can't wait to play your game and it's it's a toy. You're trying you're not um you're not selling like a financial product. You don't need a call center here. You're like you should be able to put a gift of your game out there and have people go, "How do I play this?"
So, you gave out 500 keys before the game released. So was like um beta beta keys you gave out
you gave

so you Steam's got a play test feature um so you can put the play test um button on your Steam page uh and let people register but to me that wasn't very useful because I want direct feedback from people. I want people to tell me what they like and what they don't like. And um you know even like create some super fans from these people, the people that are like there from the start because they love it so much and you know they help guide development a bit. You know they tell us
uh what they think each time we make a major change and we have to either listen to them or ignore them or you know just say trust us we know better kind of thing. Um
yeah. Yeah. Some sometimes you just have to kill some darlings and say just trust us the bigger picture will make sense. But yeah, the thing with feedback from players is that players, they will often give suggestions, but the suggestions aren't always that they aren't always helpful. What what you're looking for is the reason they're giving the suggestion. Um, there might be a problem with the game that you can identify

through what they're asking for. So, like an example would be, "Oh, I feel like I'm I feel like I'm dying too fast. I wish that we had more health." Well, it might not be that the player needs more health. It might mean that they need to understand how to defend themselves better. So, maybe it's like, as much as I hate tutorials, maybe it is a tutorialization issue or something like that. Or maybe um, you know, they're not actually investing in their economy early enough. Like, one of the big issues we saw pretty early on was that people weren't spending all their money when they could. and and not spending your money on day one is like a you know that that's it's an exponential um you know it's exponential as you uh
Yep.
you know you plan you put a house down in thallful on day one then it's worth like 12 gold by the end of it or whatever right
or 13 gold.
Yeah. Even more because you can spend that gold again on more houses.
Exactly. Exactly right. It's a It's

about identifying what the problem is rather than doing what they suggest.
Listen to the problems, not to the solutions. That's exactly it.
Which is kind of the opposite of what you'd want from like an employee or something like that. If you have an employee, you don't want to hear problems, you want solutions, right?
Yeah. For play testing, true, it's the other way around. You you hear the
problems, not the solutions. Yeah. I mean, you you are the one making the game. You're responsible for the solutions. Makes sense.
Yeah. [laughter] But so I I think this a smart way to build a play testing audience in super fans. So you gave out play test keys. You can specifically generate play test keys in the scene back end
and it's a different app. we our our like live um flow at the moment. So, we don't use it so much anymore, but um each time we have an update, we will put it out on play test first and we'll ping all the people that are play testers and uh you know, whoever's interested jumps on and and gives us a bit of feedback. we only need like 10 or 20 people um

these days because it's normally like hey what do you if if we're showing off like a new map or something like that it normally gets a bit more exciting and we might get like you know a couple hundred people that get in and we get feedback from 20 30 50 of them
um
and that's great for balance and stuff uh especially
uh but but what is especially valuable that is like uh very a commodity that you need to cherish is first time play testers, people that are playing your game for the first time ever.
And uh because once someone's played the game once, they can never be pure again. So they've already they've learned.
Yeah. So So um
when you do have first time play testers, especially early early days, I think it's really important to try and watch them rather than just waiting for them to like give you a feedback report. Like if you can um you know watch in a Discord call or like if you can you know go to an event and put a laptop in front of somebody and say hey do you want to play this and you know

if you've made a really good game you'll know because you can't kick them off it. But uh
sometimes um there's just going to be things every time you iterate that you just miss as a developer. like uh you you you get so used to the quirks of your game that you forget um you know, oh that's actually a bug I have to fix, but I'm just so used to like pressing the buttons in this order that you know I jump over that obstacle that isn't meant to be there or whatever.
Um yeah, so these little these little quirks about your game can only be solved by fresh eyes on the game. And the first or two hours of uh of the game are also so important that it doesn't matter that they're only testing the first one or two hours cuz that's that's what you have to nail, right? After that it's after that where like once people have been there for like 2 hours they're more forgiving if things are maybe a bit harder to understand after that or if like you you build up some patience because you have more zunk cost fallacy

as a player also.
Yeah, I think so. I think that's I think that's exactly right. I would probably say like the thing that matters the most is like if you think about a Steam demo like Chris Zakowski reckons that an hour of um one one hour of gameplay on a demo is absolutely huge which of medium time medium play time that's that's huge right and that's like a gold standard but
the reality is that 15 minutes is probably still okay
but to get that 15 minutes you need to make as many people stick around for 15 minutes as possible. So that's why I kind of overtutorializing your game is one of the most the biggest demo killers, right? Um you need to let them get straight into the action and if anything like the tutorial is the game like it's just the first map is just a little bit easier and things are a little bit more obvious, right?
Yeah,
that that first 15 minutes is has got to be the most important. But yeah, the first couple hours is like where you

need most of the content to be. I think for Gnomes, um, our median play time is only two hours anyway, despite like most the reviews saying
quite a lot.
Oh, that's for the full game though. Um,
yeah. Yeah, I know. For the for the full game, I think for Islanders the average play time was something like 30 minutes for the full game.
So,
Oh, really? Oh,
2 hours is not not too bad at all.
Well, I guess it probably it probably doesn't really matter like how long people are playing the game for. It's like how long does the game live rent free in their head for, you know? Yeah, like if you look at a game like Unpacking, which is a game from Brisbane here, apparently I've I've not played it, but apparently the whole game is like 2 to 4 hours long, but it's got 30,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews and no one cares that it's only 2 to four hours long because it's just like such a such a great experience that people remember. So,
yeah. Yeah, that I think I think that's that's an important thing to think about is like maybe while yes, it's a it's a pretty good catch all that median play

time is really really a good indication of the health of your game, it's not the end of the world to have a shorter game if it's intentional.
Yeah. And I think also the fact that demos are such an important part of the game's marketing journey at the moment makes it really makes it extra important that the first 15 minutes are good, right? That amplifies the whole thing
cuz
yeah,
people going to see your first 15 minutes in the demo as well and are going to make a judgment call if they want to wish list based on that. So first 15 minutes are like really really important
which brings me to an important point that I think too many devs treat their demo like it's a play test but the reality is your demo is a launch like it's it's a it it should be treated like an early access nowadays like we were saying earlier so often like someone will message me a few days after their demos come out and say hey man why how

can I get some players to play my demo and I kind of just ah pulling my hair out saying you're meant to you're meant to build the hype before you put the demo out because this is you know this is this is uh and you know it's worse when someone's released a game and does the same thing. It's kind of you know it's you know good good on them for getting there and putting a game out there but it is a bit disappointing seeing them go to all this effort and just you know just get the order of the playbook wrong. Um because I'm sure they'd probably have a great game. It's just that um they just didn't know better. Um
yeah. So yeah, if you're watching this, make sure you treat your demo like a launch.
I I like that you used the word playbook there because to me that's exactly how marketing feels like. It feels like a
playbook. You just there's just a standard playbook that almost every indie dev nowadays has the same playbook with a couple of differences, but like the general keystones of the playbook, everybody does the same things.

This is not really black magic. and just go through the playbook in the correct order and if you have the correct game then it's going to work.
Yeah, that's and it's there's not really much more to say than than that. Like I mean sure having a publisher and having a budget is going to make some difference but at the same time uh it's also a big way to quickly tear up money uh if you have the wrong game.
Yeah. Plus plus some luck uh which I'm acknowledging that that is a factor. Yeah, [laughter]
I agree. I I do definitely think so. But uh more bets, more luck, right? Test your luck more often.
Yeah. Cool. Anything else we you think we should touch on? I think those quite we went quite into depth there overall.
Yeah. Oh, look, I'm I think it's like 35° in this room. Celsius, by the way, [laughter] um for those Americans out there. But, uh yeah, I'm sweating my backside off [laughter] and uh yeah, this is just Australian Australian summer. So, uh, I might actually go and

sit in some air conditioning and, uh, and enjoy myself for the rest of the evening. But, uh, Jonas, it's been I've wanted to meet you for a long time. So, thank you so much for having me on. It's been um it's been great hearing some of your tales and some of your experiences and I'm glad I got to share mine with you as