The Story of Battlebit Remastered with Max Fink (theliquidhorse) | 324

foreign what's up everybody welcome to another episode of Game Dev Unchained the number one game development podcasts about game development and the lifestyle thereof I am your host Brandon Pham and with me a special guest Max Fink how you doing pretty good how are you good man uh so this is the part of the podcast before we get into it uh where it asks Our Guest which is yourself about yourself where you been where you at where are you heading just a little introduction to our listeners and Views out there yeah um open Max some people know me from the better bed thing um I think I didn't tell you about I'm in the battlebot developer well one of the guys I have been here all day I'm probably heading like in a few hours there and I'm coming right back here oh

wow that's pretty much only thing I do currently yeah Perfect all right so uh man where to start right so you guys are having quite a moment right now right with battle bit remastered um and I guess the best place to start is from the beginning so as far as we can tell at least from the public information domain there's three of you guys that have worked on this continue to work this can you kind of give us a little insight about how did this start for those who are been in the cat cave for for for the last couple months you guys are the number one game on Steam right now um so let's talk about in the beginning I don't think number one I think we will never be able to beat CS go in that field outside of valve uh you know in Monopoly yeah you guys are new yeah

um it's actually funny sorry it kind of is like these 3 AM uh you hang out at some place thing sorry so I have to admit I joined the team one year after it initially started so it only started with okin Velasquez the two others that are currently missing and could made it for today sadly so and they when I think Squad released both of them come from not really like third world countries but more on the plural side they come from turkey and Bella Russia so they only had really bad hardware and they all wanted to play squads they've been huge Battlefield fans and their systems never could run the game so they just came up with the right idea okay we know how to do some things in game development why not just like make it ourselves and this is basically where it started and it's two years later quality of the game make something that delivers the same experience but on the very lowest end of hardware that makes sense to me quite a simple formula not gonna lie

well I mean this is funny enough that you mentioned valve and CS go right I mean this is like their mantra for the longest time uh and it wasn't until recently that you know Counter-Strike actually somewhat looks pretty good right but for the longest time performance was King and especially shooter I think most people who play competitively want that 60 frames per second experience or above there's a clear difference when it isn't um another game that references this following kind of like the valve way of thinking uh and fair enough Call of Duty as well right um but valve kind of originated at this it's Valor Valerian is uh low Graphics stylized Graphics but minimum spec is kind of like their key thing for development so when you mention you know you joined the team a year later how many years ago did the development of this game actually started

uh it funnily enough it started in 2016. it goes all the way back to 2016 and I joined somewhere the end of 2017. I usually come well I came from a different background I used to make in mods for games I was not really a game developer so I kind of just dropped into it more or less um Jan was just doing mods for other games at the time just for fun fun little projects and I heard of okay because I came in touch with a bit of a project back then a lot of them hey they need help with vehicles and I made a lot of vehicles back then yeah so I was like okay I'm sure I can help and I kind of sticked with it until today so and throughout the years just learn more uh dibbled in more Fields so I'm by far not only the artists at this project anymore in the meantime I do a bunch of more things uh than just artists for example I I run a whole management the whole moderators is everything I run Conor Creator relations basically something that has to do with

people most of the time so the makeup of this team is kind of like vague right now uh there's mainly three developers but I'm assuming you guys are using contractors outside help volunteer like what how exactly are you before early release how many people would you say is actually on and off on the project fun fact it's us three it's just you three dude everything pretty much so we have some people sometimes we are just too bad in some topics so we get help from outside so Freelancers we pay them for their work they do for example the animations most of the animations on game there was I think there's one that I did there's a few that okay did back then from 2016 but all the new weapons they all have of one person we pay for it and apart from this that's pretty much it everything else is there's always like people that come in like hey I I work in this field I know exactly what I'm doing if you do it in this in this way then it

will work but there's a bunch of them so I have no idea how many it was like in the end um even like industry people people that work in the same industries make similar games than us they come to us and say hey I think it's really cool what do you want to do so let me just help you with that um but do some honestly like one-offs you you talk once this person you get the tips from them and then you'll never talk again because everyone especially in the field we're in everyone will always tell you hey you kind of have to figure out yourself yeah it's like I give you these tips to push in the right direction you'll actually have to figure out yourself how it would be best so that's more or less the field but to the Core it's pretty much just us three the only person I would really counted to here is still our animator which makes it then four but he's like only contract work and everything else from art with artists all my department but sounds we just buy online there's a tons of cider outside where you can just like buy sounds license them for one project and

that's the same as we do it's cheap it's easy uh I forget exactly what engine are you guys using your own engine or Unity unreal uh we're using Unity we're running with unity at least of what's left with it because a lot of systems we have in place uh they're custom made because Unity just doesn't deliver the performance for like 250 players anymore it was a good Baseline to build off of a yeah and uh in in terms of uh you know you you mentioned in your preview experience before helping with the team was it similar with the um other two developers as well they had kind of various backgrounds before deciding to do this not really we all basically started from zero I know of okay that he just like did a little bit around he found like gaming game development is interesting so you like tried a little bit of things in there uh

same with Velasquez I think Velasquez also comes from modding background they were not wrong he definitely made mods for a long time um but it's like for all of us um Velasquez found a job in a different game company and he has been doing it for a while now but like only after it but for all of us definitely this is our first release ever that's the first time we actually release a project even if it's I would say or like our own or someone's different business for all of us it's the first time it's the first time we ever release a game did you guys anticipate well I don't want to jump too far here we'll get to the success of the game but I would say when you guys originally set this out because it seems like when you um hit early release which is this year that was about seven years in development six years in development roughly seven seven more or less

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endeavors all right that's a fun story because we kind of never plan to release the game yeah you so it was just for fun between you guys and 256 of your best friends uh more or less no it was like it was like always us of pushing the limits of what we can do because it's like fun to find out there's like no one that restricts us from anything so you have the full creative freedom you can just do whatever we want so um it was always just more like hey how we do this and how we do this and the original idea is still just a game that we we enjoy playing and that's still how we develop this we just try rounds as long as it needs just to find a space where we think okay there's something I see myself playing I I would play this I would like this exactly like the way it is currently we definitely take our players feedback and accounts usually we even have we had that four days ago [Music] definitely two days ago I actually did

an open stream about a development again I think four days ago we had an open development talk and we were actually continued this every Saturday now that we just stream live on Twitch and we talk about new features and the whole Community can be there with us on Twitch and decide how we want to do features give their inputs and interact with us and like we we go back and forth with our community until we find actually feature that they would like we would like so we have to the perfect middle grounds of what we actually want to do and when you as were so what what pushed to the actual release was it just you guys felt pretty pretty confident where it was people were giving you really good feedback internal testing I mean I'm assuming you guys are playing with your friends and family I mean how big were those sessions while before release like how so you had 200 people just around playing or no is it always like 10 or 20. uh it was actually fairly small so the game got it kind of released already

in 2000 yeah end of 2016 early 2017 somewhere around that time so there was something some small community around the game but we did for all these and when the game blew up one and a half year ago before the game blew up really we actually had like the same as we did in the whole last one and a half years still the same play test but usually always like at best with 80 people like all from Community worldwide um and we just played everyone knew each other so it was like really cool everyone I knew everyone that was playing at the time because we all like hang out with them in a Discord all the time so it was it was really cool it was a really close thing and then yeah the game kind of blew up in January because yeah some other game company didn't release a game that people didn't want that way um so I I wouldn't blame them for it because I definitely know it's not their fault it was definitely on somewhere else because no game developer ever

would release a project like this um so yeah it it blew up there's still a voice recording from us from that time in our staff chat somewhere where we absolutely freak out because we have seen we have never seen 600 players in a server yeah so we actually had never more than two servers running um games was running so we absolutely freaked out in our small team that oh my God we have like so many people playing now what do we do now and that was like the initial switch for that is that we switched to the steam play testing before you could request the beta key from us you would just get it for free and then get the beta access and then we switch to play testing and suddenly everything was different like way more people could play the game because it was way more accessible you just go and steam request access and you have access Internet you can just play it so it was insane for that hype and helped us like in the end actually come to the size that we we have been before released

this project so when you when the open beta test team for community building was that like a kind of invite only was there like a buy-in to kind of get access to you guys before it blew up like how do you guys actually get that going um that beta was actually it was more or less just here there's a message in a Discord and we will send your key for the game so you get access to the beta that was it that was everything you took to actually get access back then when it was still like in development because it was like always small it's always our fun thing and we developed it with our community which more became family down the line um it was never too big corporate but when it actually blew up we knew like okay it's kind of the time now that we actually have to release the game yeah it's not like we have a big Choice anymore we can't like with all the hype we've been getting them we can't just say okay yeah we'll just like do as we feel like and we'll lose it like in 10

years or something yeah monetizing that that official blow up that was the first time you guys like let's put a price on it and uh not even we didn't well we had like in prize in mind which we actually later we lowered it we lowered our price before we release the game so we usually had like 20 bucks in game yeah or in in our mind and I think around one year ago we actually loaded to 15. we said okay with how many people were getting now we can actually go a low price which will make it more accessible again right so that that is the thing we did actually for our community modelers yeah so the decision was based on the fact that hey we're making enough so I mean let's get it out there and and just have more people reach out to us and and be able to access the game so like for those who don't understand the steam your ecosystem so the you know you can always load up your game and have people access through Steam which is what you guys did through beta keys

right um um yeah I'm honest yeah and then finally switching to play testing is that where the Early Access thing is is kind of more available what it is right now in in the current state is that what you were mentioning uh no the steam play testing is actually and feature steam introduced I think two years ago which is different you can actually if you what's the game that's currently in play testing um okay I don't know any game that's currently in play testing is different from Early Access yeah it's different so instead of actually getting the game you get a second application in your steam uh in your steam inventory which has game name play test and it's not actually the game it's a different app it's like a demo app but for like testing it's not like time restricted or whatever it is like a pure testing app um so and that that was really easy to achieve because it would still say in

Steam store hey this game is not released you can just press the wishlist button if you want to have it and right below it it said okay if you want to take part in the play testing request access to the play test and if you press that because we didn't put in limit in it it was just all out if you requested you would get Yes again that's actually doing that Arc Raider the inbox our creator is doing that oh no I think but they are limited if I'm not mistake they are limited but there is a button that you can add on wishlist to Plate because I think their demos coming out at the end of this week for people to test it uh I did see that button yeah here's the thing with steam right unless you're in the community it's hard to know exactly what are the different stages and availability once you're in it they don't really advertise you know the the steps as much as they should because these are really cool all right that's the first time I I you're literally telling me something that nobody has ever told me which is there's a place testing phase that you can upload your game and have a

play test because like where why don't you like put that on the front page sometimes um okay so there's this interim stage that you guys entered that play test that everybody can request access and that's how you guys were able to communicate directly to to uh to to players who are interested and then it wasn't until January things blew up where you guys switched to Early Access is that um no in we are we just launched into Early Access Early Access is more or less a steam thing like hey you don't have to finish your game you can launch it into Early Access and continue development and it's more or less a declaimer disclaimer for everyone that gets the game hey this is an unfinished product it's looked fully finished we know yeah yeah um and then you actually have to fill out on the steam form or like in the steam site what they actually want to do to like fully finish it you actually have this like I think six questions you'll have to ask and everyone knows steam store can then read it okay what is our plan to finish this project

um the play testing thing is like yeah that is one and a half years ago and where we switched from our more or less closed but open Beta to play testing and then it went into public play testing and it just made it way more easier for people to get access to the game in this very close development State before because before we only launched servers on specific times we launched them Saturdays for six hours that is when we did testing when we got in all our info we needed to continue in the next week uh like go into the next week fix all the issues we had see if the change with it worked and then next slide we'll try it again and we did this for like months now so and what we did now is like we launched into Early Access we're just at steam hey we're still in development thing but now the game is playable 24 7. that is the big difference between both of them um closed beta was like really client at close access but yet still open Play

testing was like all open access for like one and a half years and now we're in like all all open um but with their paid requirements so that moment when it uh I want to kind of retrace that that moment when you guys all realize this is blowing up what's happening um you mean you guys are just trying to serve the community make it fun make basically gains for yourself right and then it just suddenly organically grew into this product that moment when it happened it sounds like in January were you guys able to in retrospect Trace back what happened exactly to kind of see how it blew up or have you guys put any thought into if we were to recreate this moment can we oh I think nothing ever can recreate that moment yeah um seeing your own project just Skyrocket within days is well kind of the launch now the Early Access launch kind of recreated it because the project literally

skyrocketed within days something we didn't even expect something like this we have expect I think we can pretty much only say about or like talk about it in our play testing which was all free everyone could play the game for free we when the project initially kicked off in January 2022 um we had like 20 000 people playing which is absolutely insane for play testing uh that broke down to 15 000 throughout the year and then we had one final play this which was one weekend long except not only six hours it was a full weekend all and we had 32 000 people playing which was mind-blowing for us it is it is way more than we ever expected because we have been used to like 15 000 people because it was like at the end of the year we were like okay maybe we get like 20 000 people and we got like see twice so oh we went to 32 000 and then okay well next week we launched the game it's paid then maybe 15 000 active

players like at the same time and well we just after now one week of launching we're like one and a half weeks in now yesterday night we just peaked again with 87 000 people which is insane we are far away from fifteen thousand now we have not hit 15 000 yet we have never gone so low as 15 000 players which is insane yeah well it's a testament to you guys is uh you know game design it's a fun game and there's so many elements to the game that's impressive where uh well there's three of you mainly uh the idea that this was more like a like a prod a pet project you know just a hobbyist project you know for yourself uh and then letting some people in that eventually blew up I guess you know one question before I move on is like those people who were beta or play testing before were they converted into just

owning the game or were they have to go through the process of purchasing how did you guys handle that so there's more callings of people like from way back then but because we don't have any publisher we don't have any investor we don't have no sponsors no nothing the project itself was evil Finance from our own Pockets yeah or later on the line completely Community Finance um we had a patron running where people could donate and one of the benefits for donating there is except some other rewards in game and everything was actually a copy of the game on release so everyone that helped us to this point actually got the game uh for more or less half the price and what do you have to pay now for the same content you can still obtain the content if you buy the supporter pack which we released with it but everyone that supported us way before and it could only explanate it once you didn't have to stay donating every single one if you could just do it once and you would still get the whole game and everyone that is there has got the game now yeah

how did you uh there's like a million questions going through my head because what you guys are doing I mean we hear stories like this from the end of the community and I feel like I'm always a huge proponent of support for for teams like yours that are small but also very agile but I in a lot of ways moving the industry forward you know away from the traditional way of doing things like you mentioned before usually you have a publisher investor right and uh it can be a pro and con to that obviously and the con is you guys can't be able to you wouldn't be able to do what you guys are doing you know uh take your time you know Foster Community but also kind of make your own calls you know without any outside pressure right and uh yeah you know and at the same time play around with the the the the the pay model you know get it to the point where it feels like it works for them and it works for us

you know in terms of your community as well as the developer team you mentioned it before like something your team were and yourself were balancing different things while developing this game I hope that because of the success things have changed uh when did things change for you guys or decided to change or realizing there's a huge change with a success like a successful product now you know what you know your outlook for the next five ten years are continuing in terms of time spent on just this project now uh could you describe kind of like that moment for yourself at least of like all right now I can really seriously just think about this game all the time um that was actually funny because two of us me included still have a main job we still have a nine to five um and I'm here in Germany and I'm just an apprentice and to be or to learn in a

company to learn like that specific task you're going to do in your job you go to school one day a week that is actually tomorrow I will wake up tomorrow at 5am and actually drive to school um it's I could choose differently but I I still want to continue this I want to have my degree I want to have my paper that then I'm a proper German engineer which is very funny um but overall to this point there is some tasks yes we give away within the moderation team uh there's a there's a big team backing us with all the moderation because moderating 87 000 players is a huge Challenge and by far couldn't be done by Austria um there's quite a big team I think we have 50 people in this team now um like 24 7 just seeing a few reports someone in the game because he's doing any nasty things he says like bad words or something someone will check this and work on this and there's definitely

tasks we give away I'm slowly trying to diverse my tasks into where we're going with some things but overall we actually don't want things to change um we are not planning to hire x amount of people we're not planning to expand like this and this and maybe like horrible with them no we because it's a passion thing it's not something we have to do it's something we'd love to do um and more or less we only have to pay ourselves so we came from a zero budget if we continue with the zero budget that's fully fine with us yeah so we our main focus is only the game make the game as enjoyable as possible there are consequences around we don't care about them more or less so there will not be like I'm not really others I will not hire like two other people that do my job now and I will only do management or something no I will do my art things and I'll do will my management yes it might take time but

there's no one forcing us that we have to do like hey you have to do like 95 and if this isn't done by five as a huge issue or something no we're free it's a hobby like if it takes like until in the middle of the night then it takes until the middle of the night who cares yeah this definitely a pureness to that philosophy you know just to kind of provide some background myself you know I went through the whole college and went through Studios AAA small big right and what I'm finding myself in later in my life as a game developer is that I'm trying to return back to kind of like my college Spirit of like let's make games for fun right which is what I find a lot what smaller teams and Indie developers such as yourselves are doing and just enjoying for the pure fact of making entertainment and um you know if you like to talk to a lot of developers like myself uh we kind of lost the way there become

a lot more about the business exactly how you kind of um kind of laid out there in the 95 getting clocked out of five and then I get to live my life right which is uh some for something for what we do there is an advantage to uh have that line blurred right and I'm doing this for fun it's always been fun you know and for me the stop is just basically saying I don't feel like having fun right now right so uh I do want to ask you uh to kind of dive into this moderation team that you guys built up to 50. where did that begin like how did that started you know was it because you guys were just uh with just the three of you guys figured yo this is just way too much work for all three of us to manage at first 15 000 people and then it slowly Grew From there like can you kind of explain like the steps you guys took to kind of what is this moderation thing is it a company is it groups of people what is this exactly it's more or less just a bunch of random

people from the community who just think okay that's like pretty cool I kind of want to help them and because we we mainly run on Discord and our main communication is still on Discord everything there's a lot of open chats we have chats in various languages and you need like sometimes there's always that one person that acts funny and maybe I'm not fully around all the time maybe someone else is not around all the time someone is sleeping whatever someone needs to be there and this is where Canada started so like just it's pretty pretty usual like around Discord service there's always like a moderator someone that just controls everything a little bit checks if people are misbehaving and another warnings or maybe bands in front of the community um this has always been a thing it's been a thing with the game there was like before when it was very small and it was like one person playing and he was like kind of moderating what do people write in chats because it's mostly all open in the meantime it's not well it's still all open but we monitored way more than

we used to just because we have to there's a lot of legal things that in the meantime going to like running a big thing like this which we haven't been aware of we have been made aware of that very quickly um to yeah to provide a safe experience for everyone that is out there and playing it and this is how it just grew and what we really noticed like before we had like I think like seven people in the moderation team like all across the globe to just like have 24 7 coverage and they're all volunteers there's no one paid in this team they are all just here because they actually just love what we're doing too and they just want to be part of it so yeah and to not put like a huge burden on everyone and I completely shovel them with work like it would be in a nine to five we just got a bunch more people that is how we do so someone can take off isn't here today that's fine because it's like other people too there's no one ever left fully alone so yeah this is how we then grew it with

the more people we're going the more the bigger the game grows the more people we need in this team so everyone can have some free time doesn't have to be there all the time and in the meantime I think it's pretty much expected that we have a huge workload in this team um that's why I'm actually currently in this moment I think there's currently yeah there's even currently an interview going on I'm actually currently getting new people on their team because it's just so much work that we don't have enough people anymore to put us in a perspective if you report someone in game there's not always a ticket going out to one of the moderators to check on it only if there's like there's some weight system in this and like how probable it is that this person actually did this and there's a there's an interesting system behind this but overall we're currently getting a thousand tickets an hour G thousand single things someone has to check on it did this person do it did he

not do it and then act on it and a thousand things an hour is too much for one person it would be too much for us three while handling the game so that's why you start to get people in it so are you guys mostly doing this in Discord I'm sure I feel like the I know steam has a bug testing a bug reporting system as in place are you guys using that as well or what are what else are you leveraging uh to kind of get this reporting system up no we have made internal tools um I design time okay program them we have a bunch of internal tools um own apps we built just for this purpose which we will hand out to moderators once they join a team but yeah a lot of it goes still in our Discord uh there's a lot going on in our discords especially like all communication is done in the Discord we are there like all the time you know stuff Channel says always people there's always those are the currently around they usually hang around their stuff Channel just to

communicate with everyone else that is currently online okay what are you guys doing they Intel in this um is there something I can take over like all these things which is it's interesting as soon as I get like really dedicated people it has sometimes think just things just run themselves like everyone be like okay I I don't wait for my supervisor to tell me where to go I would be like hey do you guys need help here there's another question I have for that uh it's uh regarding to in in terms of after developing something like this that you guys built kind of like this ecosystem that a lot of Studios with experience um have set kind of uh the foundation yes you're doing this organically and intuition wise just having it they're in place and the main purpose is just serving the community making sure that the the people playing the game are enjoying the game and continue to want to play the game such a simple concept but a lot of games nowadays just simply aren't doing that I mean your guys's own frustration I mean obviously you guys are very big fans and inspired

by a lot of Shooters out there your fan base seems to kind of be responding the same exact way I can even equate it to like there's a lot of feels like there's frustration out there that these games that are currently available are not serving and you guys are serving them well um with game design being the Forefront right uh being the the main uh objective uh I know you guys at first were setting to design this to make sure that it runs on all systems because you guys want to be inclusive and felt like you guys were outside of reach for a lot of these games that required really high spec PCS right so that was a great obviously sample of the demographic that you guys are currently serving have you guys been able to kind of start pinpointing like why are these guys playing our games specifically is it in response to what's out there right now or are we just serving or just doing

something so unique and different here that we feel like it was only a matter of time that that this game will kind of hit it off um not really so I don't think that we did something way better than others there's so many great games out there my steam library is like filled with great games I will probably be never able to complete because that's just how steam kind of works you'll you'll buy a game you never completed yeah um I think we're just like we have made a thing we've made a thing that we think is funny and I think a lot of people just think it's funny too it for us we don't kind of care about numbers so we'll obviously look at it because it's having a lot of players will definitely impact the performance but in any case in any decision we take and that is pretty obvious I think from our stream it was pretty obvious already

everything we do is with with serving the community in our in the mind we would never add something that would go against the community we would always go like hey how you guys like this is this fine uh how about we run like this all this and how can we make this the best way possible for it so everyone is included so every decision we do is to completely serve the community this is nothing we did changes we didn't want to do but like I really wanted us so okay we just make the best out of it so how can we combine both worlds it's actually the between me and Okie um the artist he's a programmer he wants some things more performance I want to have them pretty and so basically there's a lot of fighting between us but usually yeah because we're always like compulsive Cooperative with each other we usually always find the middle grounds where we meet where we think what is best for the game next and to be honest I don't know why people play your game

I don't know it I've never been a data analyst as I said before this is the first guy time we ever release the game we have no idea what we did but it works I would ah I'll take a stab at it so obviously you know I found out probably after it got popular you know a couple of months ago we saw in this game kind of blew up I mean obviously you guys got a lot of press coverage um and uh being the fact that you guys are a three-man team being the fact that this is probably the opposite of what you know uh Triple A Shooters are which is really graphic heavy and intensive uh it's also in the midst of conversations where you know I think the we did a uh I did I dedicate a whole episode last week or the week before on uh something that the Xbox boss was saying how games were taking four to six years to make and a lot of people who were outraged by that

was saying that you know we're just spending too much resources in art or graphically you know just all the stuff and then and you know you're you're a fan of the industry a lot of these games that come out that are quote unquote Triple A Day One have to be patched or just unplayable just glitches and uh bugs and it's a Half Baked game so you know unfortunately AAA has kind of been tagline with poorly perform just poor games just terrible games just day one and they spend the next year and a half cyberpunk being like a good sample right take a year and a half to to fix it after release right so there's a pattern here so what's refreshing about you guys is you guys just went you know it's not graphic heavy right it's all about design there's a shitload of people in the server and people are generally just having a lot of fun also you know it has uh I would love to kind

of hear your thoughts people are like compared to Roblox in terms of you know the looks of it it's also a time where um Roblox kind of went and was built off of kind of Minecraft uh not the system but like I felt like it was an era of like you know how graphic it shouldn't be like priority and it should be gameplay all right so I felt like you guys came at the right time and mechanically Everything feels great uh you guys did a great job just nailing like the inspiration that you guys are drawing from and combined it in a way that was just pure fun um and I think it capitalized it on on a lot of the younger generation you know people who kids who are playing fortnite on Roblox you know find what you guys made very uh inviting right um it it it's not as intense as Call of Duty or Battlefield parents don't mind the kids playing these your game right um it's not as violent even though you

are shooting each other but it's approachable uh so you know it's from the books of Nintendo you know approachable Graphics fun game design right so this is a definitely an audience that's been starving for a while uh for something new and I I would say successfully you guys did something better than a lot of AAA games you know you play war zone you know I play Warzone all the time yes I played one spot when it initially came out and only was on one one the two I just never touched right and all it's it's pretty divisive you know people don't like it I enjoy it enough to keep playing it but when you jump in you're mostly encountering a squad right it doesn't feel like a battlefield war zone type of setting and even Battlefield right now it's kind of losing its audience it's kind of losing its in my

opinion essence of what made Battlefield great it's just not a lot of I feel like they've been kind of taking a lot of missteps but you guys is getting I jump in it feels like War you know the fact that it's 200 plus people actually that I can see feels pretty awesome to me it reminds me more of something like uh valve's Day of Defeat when I was uh seeing your game for the first time it feels like I'm with a bunch of my buddies trying to you know catch or clear a hill and stuff right A lot of these first person shooters nowadays don't have that feeling of a squad War like thing and you guys I feel like did that successfully um above all others right so that's my theory and it feels like that is from The Outsider looking in and she said you guys just nailed it uh in terms of the timing and and everything even though it's a seven year game in the making uh

it blew up because I felt like you guys kind of did everything kind of right at the same time I'm the last person to tell you if we did something right or wrong I I even refused to say something or like introduce my own game or like people when people ask me how's um like how would you advertise your game I just refused just read reviews see what other people think about it my opinion is always biased so I would never be someone that reviews my game but I I I don't even know like where everyone growing in the avatars were right with our title um I'm not even from this industry I never worked in this industry so it's more or less basically coming back to my original thing it's something we did just for the pure pleasure of playing it yeah and um you what's funny is that you say yeah okay it's applicable for kids the

majority of what I read from reviews and people in my DMs majority of them are older than me yeah I played I remember playing Bad Company 2 way out of its prime I played a few years later um I kind of skipped Battlefield 3 and I played a lot of Battlefield 4. um actually laid in Battlefield 4 Prime was never there from the release on so and I I love these games and sometimes when I do actually modeling the fun fact I jump into Battlefield 4 and see how they did it because I have no idea how it's done um especially like some some things just to see okay how how did like the the great games I ever enjoyed how did they did it and what is really funny is that a lot of people actually come into my DM stand say hey like I'm like 40 now I have worked my job I barely play games but you're the first game I really enjoy playing again like this reminds me of my old days when I was a kid I it was the first time in a

year that I actually played through a whole night um or like there's people coming there's even reviews of it people currently they played with their kids now hey it's applicable for kids because it's like Roblox characters or whatever um and it's not too graphic on everything I can just play it with my kid and it's the best time I ever had because I love the game and he likes to play too so it's just insane for us especially with the fact that kind of we don't know what we're doing well we kind of know what we're doing but we kind of don't know what we're doing well you guys are I think that comes through I mean before even talking to you and hearing your story it looks like a game made out of pure enjoyment I mean I kind of got a hint when I only saw three of you guys working on the game I was like all right these guys are making games for themselves and I think that gets lost like I said I think the funny thing when you start working for entertainment as a product you start focusing it being a product a lot as you're kind of developing these games and you have all these massive

teens marketing Executives and leads and all these people who are trying to just make money right kind of take the joy out of it sometimes in the process and um this is something that I don't see in in smaller teams in in the development uh where you know they're purely spending the time heart and soul sweat to to make a game for themselves because otherwise if they don't it's really hard to sustain that you know it's like well I'm not getting paid for this you know I'd rather do something else you can't make these type of gains to what you guys make for the time that you guys put in without the pure joy of it yeah you know it other than that you know you'll you'll pretty much give up and so what you see is like these bigger teams you know so start to just wrap whatever they can and just push it through the door before it's ready because they're running out of time right so how can you compete with the

team like you guys were you have infinite time because you're making out of pure joy and you're working on zero dollar budget right so it's like it's a deadly combo and it's exactly what you need when you're trying to make something fun that's the funny thing about it you know business and fun actually is very hard to compromise uh to make a product and you guys were just making this out of fun and it shows like you said and people respond to it because you guys made a game for yourself and inadvertently made gains for a lot of people who who like you said fell out of playing games for a while right so big congratulations on you guys I mean you guys the story I mean what you're kind of sharing is very inspirational uh in a time where I felt like um at least in the Indie scene there was a period where it was like this as the norm I was like hey man I was just busting ass and pushing through but now we're you know the last couple of years and I don't know I would love

to kind of dig into the subject with you guys where uh even though it's a small team they look towards Publishers now there's Indie publishing there's Indie investment right just to kind of lower the risk did you guys ever in terms of your developments when you we're starting to see the numbers gross seeing traction right we're like hey this might be something be nice to get paid for this did you guys even Explore that option at all or and ultimately decided that that was not the way you guys wanted to go or did you just just hey it was 100 spent seven years on this let's just see and give it a shot on our own no to be honest we never could yeah we just never could um I have a job I own my money I made this when I came home I come home from work and I do this for fun yeah there's no need to be paid for this yeah it would be cool if you do like one day full-time kind of thing but

no you give it it's fine if anyone who wants to do it um and you're insecure about your things because it it takes a lot of balls to do what we did yeah um especially because it was very risky um if we would have failed a release now if there was something going like if we would have complete server outage and people can play in a huge issues we would have been completely bankrupt um it's per probably also the reason why no one is doing big FPS games in the Indie scene because it's really [ __ ] expensive it's extremely expensive with like everything you have to take in account from anti-cheat to just the whole server back end um we're like easily speaking like six digits uh a month this is this is how much this is costing so it was really high risk it is Extreme high risk and it's really unclear if that is rewarding and um yeah okay you

get these people in but the problem is that we would have is okay we get money with the publisher the publisher tells us okay you lose on this month because it's the best for your game to release on what if it's the games already yeah what if we get an investor okay hey you guys like I pay you this and we do like really good rate for you it might be actually really good in Universal terms and we release the game we maybe don't even make the money back oh what do we have to do then I go to work for 40 years just to pay that one guy back yeah no I don't um or like even okay you know um I'm in shortage now I need my money back we'll release the game tomorrow no we can't and that is just a creative freedom we always wanted to have and we will forever continue to have so if you haven't publisher investor don't look at us we will say no or don't even reply [Music] um we just want to have our full freedom in

what we do we we would never make something because there's money involved we would never just do this thing because we earn more money you can't believe how many emails I've got before like hey we make your game big and like if we do this for publishing business but we don't want to make the game Big we want to make the game for the people that are there the for the people that want to play something to have that experience to play something like this the people that because the people that want to play like something like this and they want to have the experience of it they will find the game they will find the game somewhat within these other communities because someone will talk about it um if they enjoy the game so if you want to reach the people you actually want to reach at least it works in our case I don't know about ever other cases I never studied marketing I'm probably very bad at it but rules um Just Go With It release your own game I see sometimes in

my YouTube because I look at a lot of game developer things GDC talks sometimes see like devlogs of some developers where they're just also completely only by himself release the game and these games like pop up in my steam because I play like um yeah a lot of shooter games and like this and this and I see their games yay with what they did without like any Big Marketing they reached me because I'm actually interested in this project and it's like especially where steam comes an account a lot because steam will Market to your projects or products that are similar and steam just doesn't care who's developer behind it Stephen just says okay this is the best project for you this is the best next game for you and that is pretty much our strategy we win too if people enjoy the game the game will kinda sell itself yeah well sellers but yeah people will play themselves they will find it themselves because if you don't hear something bad about the game and you only need great things all your

friends love playing it you will get into it too more or less yeah I mean you nailed it your intuition was correct everyone who wants to place it you guys mentioned like the big bump um initially from 15 to 30 and now you know you have 80 000 current players right were there anything in the traditional marketing media press that helped kind of you feel boost things up was the the streamers that were helping was it the uh you know media Outlets like journalism that was helping what do you feel was the biggest contributor to your number starting to like really increase so everything to this point is just I think in marketing terms it's called guerrilla marketing it's more or less mouth to mouth it's just because people talked about it um and then we'll start calling create a blue Drake who like initially kicked a lot out and

we're really thankful for him he he did a huge thing but overall everyone who wanted to play something like this everyone who's interested in that field he found the game himself there's so many people um currently like in twitch playing with like the highest people that are within twitch the biggest streamers around um xqc and summit1g where shroud we have lyric like all the people that are really high-end and a lot of people watch and they're really known for playing FPS games they just come into little bit and chill they just play the game uh like for days and days like every evening you see the same people over and over and it doesn't matter if they're big people or snow people and they never ask us for keys they just bought it himself yeah because I want to see it um we almost no one is asking us for keys to be honest there's quite a few but most of them are actually like really small people but we can understand it but all the bigger people they just don't us

they just come in and play and it was always like this even through the whole play testing people just comment because they want to see what it is like they only hear like great things about it they want to see what it's like so yeah everything to this point the only actual money and effort we spend into marketing is that we have been invited to dreamhack uh now three weeks ago the only one I ever spent in marketing is actually getting these stickers [Music] I spent 24 bucks on stickers and that's all money we spend in marketing so far and I paid it for my own Pockets so kind of we didn't even spend it it's perfect it's marketing as best which is no marketing at all so when you guys were uh you know the word of mouth is always King obviously if it's fun it'll speak for itself you know people who are looking to play these type of games will find it um

and you know it's going to carry through the crazy fat is still an early access I mean you guys haven't officially released the game and so it's only going to get better and bigger uh just following the principles it gets established you know just serving the community and constantly asking uh for new Futures and running that through your community to kind of get it 100 where it needs to be uh if you guys were to give you know advice to developers out there who are thinking along this path right I mean there was a couple things there that was crazy obviously you guys went through this huge learning curve right this being your first release game you know you're talking about you know like keeping a game like this running every month because the server costs and moderation anti-cheat you know easily in six figures which is hugely believable right there must have been steps towards

that though right like oh all right we got to increase server this is how many people are playing there might have been some learning uh examples there where like oh our server crash or like we need you know we have way too many people jumping in how long did it take for you guys to kind of in the span of months to kind of finally kind of like all right this is how it has to be because I'm sure that was a whole thing right um to finally get it to a rhythm where you guys are constantly serving the people who want to play and and not running to problems um at least on the Technic side of things to be honest you'll never reach that point you will never reach this point because with everything you do and that is very true with BattleBots because what we're currently seeing is not like seven years of continuous on this one this is the fifth or sixth iteration of a little bit this is from the core completely new

remade it completely and it's something I keep up currently my skills improved I remake my old weapons because I look [ __ ] now um I meet remade them several times already in the meantime I remake the vehicles several times in the meantime like oh like in a few months we'll like find a new thing a new feature we can do oh we can apply it to every single vehicle or then you have to remake all vehicles again that is just how the flow goes more or less um with more or less everything in the game and there's like always like sometimes if you're a really stagger point usually one of these key people will appear and push in the right direction if he just talk to them and um if you make a game the only thing I can really recommend to you is start building a community really early Community will heavily push for you will heavily push you in what you're doing because it's a really fun to work with the community and just having that feedback of like hey okay we did it now

exactly the guys you or exactly how you guys wanted it you know people will notice okay the way we wanted it okay we see now it's kind of not really the great way and then like with the community you start finding out okay where's the best ground so what can we do what can they do and um it's really just insanely great to work with your community regarding those things and committee will help you grow um sounds interesting but Community will helply help you grow especially in your task resource there's people out there and none of them are students not all of them have like learned nothing in their life um and they only do like the 90 like nine to five things and the Sprites I have and chemistry whatever there's some people out there that have like jobs in specific Fields there is probably now coming there's a bunch of game developers and if we just openly say and we are very transparent I'm as transparent as slowly streaming on Twitch what I am doing and it's like people coming in my chat like uh way

better at the program I'm using a way better Blend or whatever very bad at modeling they will tell me hey do you know about the shortcuts and I've tried out and you're like oh that saves so much time I never knew that because I I never went for University for it's like learning by doing it's if you do a game and you completely almost filled with it and in one year we'll notice okay with the skills I had back then what I can currently do back then is completely [ __ ] I will just rewrite it completely um and that is more or less where the flow goes where you just like don't be afraid to do mistakes nothing you will ever do is ever perfect it will be probably should in the next year and you just have to admit it to yourself more or less and this is this is once you've reached at that point where you know hey what do I do now it's kind of just broken down the line anyway but by the time I reach that it is I have like such a good skill that I can

completely fix it within way less time that is really where the fun begins where you just like constantly try to improve yourself and to concentrate just try to [ __ ] around more and see okay how can I do this better and I do this I notice that a lot in weapons recently again how like I [ __ ] around with shape so much to make the current ones way better than the ones I made like uh half a year ago but a half a year ago I was like I'm now going back into and see like huh okay couldn't order the half and like with this thing a little trick I learned this could be better now but I will revisit it in one year because at that point I couldn't probably do something way better already well this is the best student project I've heard for a long time yeah it's great I think that the cool things you guys faster to me that that want to be uh if anything I think nowadays um with you know twitch and YouTube the community is a lot more uh uh

a lot more aware of how good game development works it used to be magic right but like the fact that you are able to kind of have a community that is with you and want to be with you as you kind of patch this game up to full release is like you said very um encouraging right it is a definitely a very fun way if you're a very fun and motivating way to to continue to improve the game uh I've always been against the idea of traditional game development where you basically hide in a cave for three years and nobody knows about it on you know outside of development team and then you just hope and pray when you release it it's somehow good and receptive and are surprised and shocked when it's not right which is most the case so uh I think your intuition your guys's intuition to kind of share getting out in front of people you know and and just constantly build off of that is is very

unique I think in in game development that isn't fully utilized you look at any other entertainment product like movies and TV shows and whatnot no one no one even in small teams are doing that right the way that we do it and um we have tools and the successful stories such as yourself to kind of use that as a a mere example to we should be doing it like this you know if it feels appropriate you should do it uh as best as you can to kind of get your your supporters as you're building the game um which totally makes sense um is this something because you felt like as a as a gamer you wanted yourself or is this just something you guys like how did you guys get to this level of maturity of understanding like

you know the success of our game matters and how we tie in with their community well I just did it for fun to be honest just that fun there's nothing we have always said okay there's nothing really crazy we have to hide if it goes into like really the whole infrastructure on the server back and and safety and something yeah you should not be very public about that um this will probably just come right back at you and slap you in the back but overall if you just work on your features and like you you're doing coding stream and I show how in your system of your knowledge you will build a future like this or even in my department life when I do art I say okay we're doing a new map now um and we do it like this and this and you actually show people what it takes to make your weapon people will get even more understanding so people always especially with current times I notice that more and more a lot of people are

just very impatient and um it's kind of interesting because actively showing people what you do brings back that that patience like if people ask me okay what it does take to make a weapon and even in slopoli it takes way less time than like really high-end things uh it still takes eight hours yeah just for the base model and people like what eight hours is a whole day of working yeah until it's in the game that's 25 hours past 25 hours have been put into this one weapon before it is actually in the game and you play with it that is how long it takes on our ends and people don't know that and I don't blame anyone for not knowing that because I can't know it no one is into this but if you go there and show people people will understand why some updates just take weeks until they come out because it just takes a lot of time to make it work especially with how

transparent we are we have even more level life ticker every time we publish an update in the unity Branch they will be in small update node thing my brother's coming out wait let me open the garage fine because I I'm close to it there we go I don't know um yeah it's there's a live ticket every time there's an update pushed people see it it's not yet in the game published because you'll see it when it updates in Steam but you see exactly what we did because we always write the text okay we did this now and then we did this and then we did this and then we did this and we adjusted this and this basically and fully transparent there was even like streams where me and Oaky sit together I make my models he makes that programming for the background already with some dummies I create for him and we were like co-developing that one feature and everyone knows they are live with us to see what it takes and how many trials

and errors it is until it works properly how much testing actually goes into some features yeah I think uh exactly what you said yeah there's definitely an impatience and it's not all about being malice and mean it can definitely lead to that when um no updates are provided but uh overall I think people are just generally interested in content in whatever form and like you said you know building a community that's not just about releasing the game in patches all the time it could be just getting them involved with behind the scenes get them invested um in other ways right in in terms of uh just understanding the process and a lot of uh I feel like the the generation the audience nowadays are very susceptible to to wanting to learn uh and and basically be a part of the development process right so you guys are directly asking about features and stuff like that are there other things

that you are thinking to experiment with that like how how else can we get the community involved um because what you guys are doing or I think very few studios are doing and there are a lot of I I feel people are experimenting with Innovation so how do we get people going six months into development one year into development you know two years away from full release are there ideas that you guys are playing around with right now that are pretty new that you guys feel like this hasn't been done before actually yes um there's one idea we will actually we just started more or less we kicked it off on Thursday is I want to start doing an actual like proper podcast where me and Yogi just sit down 30 minutes and just discuss about the next update because about high power weeks wind because I think that

could be just interesting that you have a full Insight of what it is like to like do this in a week like every week uh same as we we want to continue streaming live on Twitch when we actually do new updates I will continue streaming when I work on things and overall we want to have and we still do it even right now we just jump into public chats once in a while and actually just ask people about their parents ask what they want to see maybe where they have issues with the game all this where it's more or less just the pure communication with people and maybe even do like well it sounds bad but the full influencer style kind of thing where you just like hey hey I make a video like um 10 minute video oh we have had this opportunity like if you travel because yeah if you do games especially with us as small as we are currently if we are on any events invited we will probably do a lot of traveling on this side too

yeah um if you're just doing small videos okay what is it like if you actually actually travel there and not like only the fancy fans even like the bad things okay what is really bad about it and just being a fully on a skate it actually takes this and this amount of effort uh doing doing something like this in this style and just being like very open in public but what we are and Who We Are I think this is something we can definitely expand in and make people actually aware of what it would be like and what people will get into and even for those who just play our game okay I want to be with this game and I can actually be close to their developers because usually I watch the developer streams too because I think that's really interesting usually it's just like three people sitting on a round table have you noticed that like every interview is like actually just three people yeah sitting on a round table it's extremely funny whatever you watch

from whatever company it's like always that and here well it has happened uh through this whole podcast too in it you can just leave it in if you want to because I wouldn't blame it I leave because I just still live at home yeah so there's my full family and everything around me which is like completely nothing they have nothing to do with the game I'm just like the only one that doesn't sell for a zombie so um it's the same for okay in Velasquez okay he also lives with his family still Velasquez lifts with his wife currently so he lives alone in a demand but because we all are different countries we have actually never met before oh just don't tell me that so that's even oh my gosh we've met in person no I've never met in person um you guys have like this crazy success and never thought to fly out and just high-five each other and have a lunch well we will meet at some point and I hope

this year's Gamescom because I live in Germany is fairly close to me and yeah I have to convince Loki to come over because it would be also his first convention ever um to maybe go there with me yeah you guys just go get pizza man does it have to be like a world event you guys deserve it you know yeah but yeah of all I think even with like me uh my family knows that I stream and they still just complain all the time but I think that is actually the very great thing because that makes me what is the best term for it if people they connect with me yeah I am not some black magician and uh I have like you have years of training and like back experience no just like some random dude and it's like room at like my parents house yeah and the same as for the other two we're just like three random dudes we just met on the internet we just like do play we play games together we just do some real [ __ ]

that's inspirational man if you guys don't mind if you don't mind me asking what is the age range between year three how old are you guys um is that secret I'm the I'm the youngest in the group still okay um okay yeah okay turned 23 in February Velasquez is about to turn 223 and I will turn 23 in September so I'm currently still 22. oh so you guys just rarely found each other and yes around the same age how funny is that yeah yeah are we all coincidence yeah yeah it's funny it's like we're all in our early 20s we're just like [ __ ] around the internet and we we don't care there's like you start developing how funny how your guys age is coincides with the actual year so you guys met 17 years old then 16 years old okay okay like fully started like everything I think when you just learned things or thinking like when he was 14 yeah [Music]

um so I actually started with 3B modding when I was 14 and we met around to the age of 17 16. yeah how are you guys family and friends reacting to all the success that you're suddenly finding yourself in is it still stupid some of them don't know because yeah first of all we don't care too much about maniana we all are randomly enough we are all or people that would not brag about money um even like the massive success I I wouldn't even call it messages if I talk to my friends I still go out there casually I will still go to school I'm not like oh like we run like [ __ ] tons of money now I will never go to school again no I will still let's do my normal things I will still just say that person that I am I've before I will continue to be the same person afterwards uh so the other two our main value is just like half I once time valuable and everyone's experience fun and even though it would be really fun because

I'm a huge confusing just earning and really expensive sports car I will probably just never buy one yeah well you guys sound very uh un-American over here as soon as we see success it's like it's like [ __ ] you [ __ ] you [ __ ] you I'm out but you know all the hard work the hard work really is proving itself to to win and you guys are definitely hard workers uh to continue building the game as well as like not abandoning you know your guys's other Ambitions even before the game was a success so that really speaks volume to you guys character to uh to kind of finish what you guys started and and not let success change you guess in any way that's that's incredible and inspiring to hear and yeah I think a lot of people can can learn a lot from you guys is uh background now hopefully you guys share more of your story you know to other outlets too because it was hard finding info about you guys you know the

only thing that I saw was you know what was listed on Steam I was like man these guys must be but they don't even care the Lister names you know you guys even going to buy your Discord dance I was like oh this is gonna be a good story I I just have a feeling that these guys are just you know you guys were just making games for yourself and the success you know was a product of you guys hard work and not so much as like uh purposely trying to look for Success right it was just a byproduct of making a fun thing between you guys so it was it's awesome man um I want to say that uh you know we were a little past the hour mark but you know time flies when you're having fun and I had a lot of fun learning you guys's story your story uh what you guys are continuing to want to do with battle bits uh I hope listeners and viewers out there are learning a lot from this and I really do hope as you know for game developers to kind of take more of what you guys did I think it's always safer that way you know create

fun for the sake of fun without any outside pressure I can equate to a lot of problems being outside pressure a lot of the times at least in game development and um you know you guys are are Shining Light to like what's possible so thank you but before I end it you know I I warned you before this is the talk uh part of the podcast where I showed up hand over the mic so you can talk directly to the viewers and listeners out there about what you want them to know where to find you and all that so uh take it away will if you if you want to play the game you want to find the game yeah yeah if you want to learn more about us uh best friends is like if you actually want to meet us in post like in person I will probably go to some events soonish um yes the Gamescom I will most likely be at Gamescom if you want to meet me in

person if you just want to meet us online around your best friends or the desktop because we actually hang around at public channels a lot if you just want to see like actually what we do behind the curtains which is not really where undercuts because they are like we don't even have curtains um just check metal bits or this on Twitch has been a bit official there's our Twitter um a little bit game you will you'll find those you'll find us well there you have it guys if you want to play you do the work and find them I want to thank you Max for coming on uh it was a pleasure and for those uh links will be provided in this show description to make it even easier right maybe I I will just say if you want to play them just fine uh but I'll I'll make it simple but uh thanks guys and see you guys all next week hello everybody Brandon here I want to talk to you today about something very

special you've been on this wild ride together haven't we from my early days as a senior employee feeling a bit lost all the way to Leading multiple Studios transitioning to smaller Indie teens into the mobile industry and now running my own game studio for the last six years throughout this time you've been here listening and learning along with me sharing this never-ending journey of Discovery this year I'm kind of on this quest of meeting serial Studio Founders discussing Acquisitions or exploring what it takes to grow Studio to over 100 Developers I've always tried to find an exciting topic to delve into and every year is a little different the focus is a little different because that's where I am in my career currently and I want to be able to share what I'm learning with you guys so I've always been to dedicate to asking the tough questions bringing you insightful answers from industry leaders and experts and now I want to share with you how I'm applying these answers to my own Journey this is why I'm excited to announce that for just 1.99 per month you can now subscribe to our exclusive content series these bonus episodes will

give you a deeper look into my personal experiences and how I'm putting into practice what our esteemed guests are preaching it's more of a personal side of the journey that I hope will show you that we're all in this together and we're all continuously learning whether you're a game developer Studio founder or just a passionate gamer there's something in it for everyone by subscribing not only will you gain access to this exclusive content but you also be supporting the ongoing production of the regular programming it helps keeps the lights on and ensures that I can continue bringing you top quality content and insight into the world of game development the links to the Subscribe are in the description your support means the world to me and helps me keep doing what I love sharing this journey with you so show some love hit that subscribe button and let's continue this adventure together thank you offer you continued support and as always stay tuned for more exciting content until next time this is Brandon signing off [Music]

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