Their Second Game Did Worse, Now What?

Usually, people get to me with their success stories, and you're one of the first ones who comes to me with some regrets. Yes. First game was very successful commercially, and our second game while it is doing all right, has 90% positive reviews, it it is far behind our first game commercially.
This is a conversation with Julian Kolbus, the CEO of Digitals Interactive. They make narratively driven detective games like Lacuna or Between Horizons.
I would have more tried to find the essence, like what is the core and what makes that core fun, rather than thinking, "Okay, we have a working thing. What could we How could we expand on that?" Just focus on the thing that makes it good, and people will appreciate that, and you won't have to spend money on all the other stuff.
We talk about how to make successful indie games, in particular narratively driven ones, which I find a super fascinating topic. Does story even sell games nowadays? We go into a lot of detail, a lot of the nitty-gritty. I found it quite interesting, and I hope

you do as well. Enjoy. Tell us more about those regrets. Which regrets do you have?
Okay. So, our first game was very successful, and our second game, it is far behind our first game commercially. I basically have had a year to ponder why that was, and recently wrote up a postmortem about it. Uh so, what are my biggest regrets in a nutshell? I think a lot of factors were out of our control, but one of the things we definitely did wrong was making a game without marketability in mind, where it's kind of hard to get the concept across easily. And that's something that was already in the concept stage and was kind of on us and not our publisher, who was like handed this game, and we were like, "Hey, market this." Uh but I think having designed the game already, we put them in a tough situation because it was kind of like this weird hybrid that's hard to grasp. On your website, um I think it says that your entire studio is focused on making

detective games where your choices matter. Mhm. So, both your first game and your second game both fall into this category, right? Yes, exactly. And our third game may also do that. Got it. So, that's quite interesting. So, you're Even though they're in the same genre, you say one was way more marketable than the other. So, it's not the genre, then what is it? Uh well, with our first game, we just went all in uh setting-wise on something that kind of screams detective gameplay because we have this noir type setting and main character, too. If you have a main character who's this like brooding, smoking, trench-coat-wearing uh dude, right? Uh then I think it's much easier to understand for the players what this character is going to do, right? It's like going to be some detective type. And our second game was much more like pure sci-fi, and sci-fi isn't necessarily associated with detective gameplay. So, we had the

especially with the artwork, we had very little clues as to what you would be doing in the game, um even though both games provide a very similar like type of experience, the first one's setting and character designs and everything was much closer to to that, like conveyed that more easily. Got it. So, the first detective game screamed detective game, and the second one did not, and that's why it was more difficult, and that's basically the problem in a nutshell that that you've identified. I think I think it's one of the big problems. Like, I identified a few more as to what went wrong. I think the market also changed in between the two releases, the first one being in 2021 at the height of COVID, and the second at 2024, when a bunch of games were coming out that were still like funded during the COVID boom. Uh so, we kind of went with the highs and the lows of the market as well. It's

impossible to tell if like if the release windows were switched, what would have happened. But I do think there are other issues that are inside our control, like the marketability that made it harder to. I have the two Steam pages open here on my second monitor, and looking at the art, is this hindsight bias, right? It's always easy to say in hindsight, but I think I kind of get where the the first one sold better. Mhm. And I think it's also My theory would be also that it's got a bit to do with the 3D Mhm, yeah.
style because it's You would think that 3D sells better. Typically, in my experience, 3D actually sells better. Mhm. But I But I think one of the side effects of 3D is that um it makes assets more expensive to make, and so you make less of them. Mhm.
the the rooms look a little bit more generic and empty because you have to reuse more and so on and so forth. So, when I look at the 2D screenshots, I

think they they have a lot of personality because there's a lot of detail. And when I look at the your 2.5D screenshots from Between Horizons, they they also look very nice. So, don't get me wrong, right? I'm complaining on a very high level here. Like, expert-level complaints. But I think they do look a bit more generic. Yeah, I agree with you. We You know, when we first started out, we thought, "Okay, maybe we can have a production-level quality of of some of the games that that Like, for example, I don't know if you saw um a game called The Last Night that was announced and never came out. Um in the meantime, a game called Replaced was announced that is probably going to come out at some point. Um and those are also like mixing pixel art and 3D. But if you're if you're honest with yourself looking at these, the workload um and the level of detail they have to put in every scene is kind of insane. So, with the budget and crew that we had, there was just no way to to achieve

that level of detail in the time frame. Um so, like you said, it kind of ended up more barren than we anticipated. Exactly. And um I think detail is more important for some genres than others, right? For some genres, it might not matter, but for a detective game where detail is kind of the interesting thing, Yeah.
probably does make a bit of a difference. I I also think to expand on this 2D thing, a lot of people who like our games are from the point-and-click crowd, and they kind of recognize, "This is my type of jam. It's a 2D game." Um and it's kind of more It's closer in style to point-and-click games than the 3D game that we made. So, I think that's also a factor that people have a harder time recognizing, "This is the type of game I like." Because often times, the games that are adjacent to ours are 2D. That's a very interesting point, yeah. So, the So, Lacuna taps more into the

nostalgia factor and also the the recognizability of people who have played lots of point-and-click. Got it. Exactly. Even though that wasn't that was kind of an accident. Like, we don't really pay play point-and-click games ourselves much. We didn't take them as inspiration much, and pixel art wasn't a nostalgic choice. It was a design choice, like a GI style that we like. But we just attracted these people who were like, "Oh, this is a lot like X and Y from the '90s or the '80s even." And we were like, "Oh, yeah, I guess." But we did change a lot of things, and people are receptive to them. So, you have like platformer controls rather than actually point You never point or click. But to this day, every like third review we get says, "This is a great point-and-click game." Okay. Yeah, I think the point-and-click genre at some point kind of disappeared, right? I I remember there being a lot of point-and-click adventures when when I was young. Yeah. Now, they're kind of gone. I I wonder

why that is. Maybe maybe cuz the the formula evolved into sort of the type of game that you made with Lacuna, and it's just uh combining everything with everything in the inventory is maybe not the proper way to design games anymore. Yeah. I I think back in the day, when not as many games were coming out, and you couldn't just look up every little thing online immediately, you would like be ready to engage with a game and click every pixel on the screen and combine every item with every item and think that's peak gameplay, right? But like 30, 40 years later, we found other more entertaining ways, and we have a shorter attention span. So, I think that, you know, we modernized on a lot of these aspects. You don't have an inventory. You don't do pixel hunting. You can just hit a button and see what's interactable around you. You don't have to click and wait for your character to walk there. Instead, you just play with a gamepad or or a mouse, right? So, um a lot of these things are that are like tedious about point-and-click games are not in our game. But at its core,

um it's still, you know, very narrative and puzzly, and you have to think and read a lot. So, I think it's the same people who who like point-and-click games. At least there's a good overlap. I think that makes a lot of sense. I I also have one friend who really likes point-and-click and actually also really is into this old retro look and feel. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I can
go hand in hand. confirm that from my personal circle as well, yeah. I saw you also have some uh other regrets, though. For example, one related to maybe growing the team too quickly. Yeah.
What was that? You grew the team too quickly. You know, it wasn't even necessarily too quickly, or maybe it was for the wrong reasons, or for no reason at all, maybe. Like, we Off the heels of our first game, we had, you know, quite had successful launch, and then we were talking to our publisher again, to Assemble Entertainment, who published

our first game. And they were like, "Sure, let's do let's do the next game together." Because they were happy with how it went, and we had the budget, and we were like, "Okay, okay, cool. I guess that's what you do then." Like uh when you're successful, you just like get bigger, and you scope your next game bigger. And that was a little bit without rhyme or reason, even though the ways in which we extended the formula, they were all based in thorough game design considerations and discussions. At the end of the day, we didn't need to change the formula in such a way that it blew up the budget and the team and the scope and the uh and uh the the runtime of the production. We could have uh improved the formula without doing these things. And it sort of resulted in had side effects that in hindsight made it unnecessarily hard and and not fun for me. Um because I was just managing a lot, and I didn't get to do the fun parts as much. And sort of my

creative input was was less on on Between Horizons, just because when you have seven employees, you have less time for that. And you get, you know, you let other people do the get like get their hands dirty with the actual game development. But it also resulted in me not having much of an insight into the nitty-gritty anymore. So, I didn't know how systems worked anymore. Um and whenever I would like run into a bug while I was trying to implement content or test something or had to send out a bill for whatever reason, and there was an issue, I had to rely on someone else. I had to make a ticket and report, uh you know, everything in detail and record footage. And as someone who works basically 24/7 because it's what I like to do and I pay myself, that would oftentimes result in me having to wait 3 days until the coder was like free from the task or because the weekend was over. So, you know, with Lacuna, I could just grind at it all the time because I

had a my hands in every little system. And with Between Horizons, I kind of needlessly gave up a lot of the control when we could have just made a game that improved on some things without having to do all this. Would you say that back then you maybe didn't fully understand why the why Lacuna was successful in the first place and thereby uh expand on the wrong things, maybe a bit. Is that a way to put it? I'm not sure. Uh I don't really know I don't really remember what I knew or thought 3 years ago. Um but I will say that if I had to expand on the formula now or should make changes, like as Lacuna with Lacuna as the starting point, I would definitely make different changes. I mean, that's the power of hindsight, like you said. But the types of changes that we made to the formula, even though they were well thought out, they added stuff um in ways that wasn't necessary. Um

when I would have maybe even cut down on stuff. Like I would have more tried to find the essence. Like what is the core and what makes that core fun? Rather than thinking, "Okay, we have a working thing. What could we How could we expand on that?" Because we didn't need to expand. The thing we had was already good. I think um if you look at some later really like the case of The Golden Idol came out after Lacuna and just overtook us in in a short amount of time, even though it has arguably fewer features and is more simple and more focused on the detective loop in a very very elegant way. And I think I would have strived for elegance rather than adding stuff. If I had to make the choice again.
That makes a lot of sense. It's It's always so frustrating as a developer cuz you you fall into this trap where you think if you put in more effort, it will do better. Or if you or if you scale it up, it will do better, right? So, we have a working formula, so

if we scale this formula up, it will do better. And that's just that's not how it works at all.
all. Not at all. Not at all. You have to know exactly which which corners you can cut and what what you have to really nail. And I see this a lot with like I I play a lot of these very cheap horror games on Steam. And they oftentimes are quite successful. Like they have like four-digit amounts of of reviews. Or at least uh you know, like for for what they are, it's impressive because the the the UI looks like trash. Everything is this It's like the default UI. They just slapped it in there. Um but as long as there is like somewhat of an atmosphere or some cool little gimmick that people like, nothing really matters. Uh like it it does the horror thing that people came here for. And if they only paid like five bucks, a lot of people will come for just that. And you can pretty much like everything else fall by the wayside if you have a cool little concept with the gimmick that people like.

With the knowledge you have now, what what would you say? How do you find this essence of your game? How do you know what matters and what should you what should be left out? I can only speak to the detective genre. I think with the detective genre, we focused more on the story that we needed that we needed to because while that is kind of cool, people will get invested in the story by having to think about the story either way, even if it's nonsensical or silly or not that well written. At the end of the day, once they figure it out, that is the mo like the eureka moments, right? That's kind of what what makes that the fun in detective games. So, I think the the process of of solving a case, and that isn't a puzzle or a riddle or a mini game. So, like cases are sort of a different beast in that you have a lot of information that the player is presented with. Ideally, something that isn't very fun, I think, is the memorization of that. If you have to go looking for all that

stuff again, ideally, the game organizes for you in a concise way, and it's like a puzzle that you have to put together in your mind. And detective games are very elegant in that they don't really care how you arrive at the solution. They don't provide a template for you to communicate your thought process. What they do is they they throw a bunch of stuff at you, let you organize that in your mind, and then you just communicate back the solution. It's like writing the answer to a math problem without any of the steps. Um right? In between. And this process, nailing this um and making the UI um non-frustrating in such a way that you have everything right where you need it. Um and then just giving it to the player, that is kind of what a detective game is at its core. And we do a lot of other stuff around it. Like you can walk around, and you have characters, and you have choices, and a story. And that kind of makes it unique. But I like if you look at games that just do detective gameplay really well, like Return of the Obra Dinn or uh Case of the Golden Idol,

that are less focused on the story and where the story is always subjugated to the game design, clearly. Even though the stories can be good, it really doesn't matter that much.
Those are all much more successful than ours. Mhm. Because they did this one thing and they did it really well, and they communicated oftentimes better than we do. Like if you have something like the case in the title is also very smart. Right? Uh we we joke internally that our next game will be called uh The Case of of the Mystery Clue or something, you know. So, when you talk about um detective games, you do mean games where eventually the player has to make a guess of who uh committed the crime or who was the murderer or something. So, you have uh the entire game leads to that one moment where you put in that one name, essentially, right? Yes, yes. It can be like there are different ways to ask the solution from the player. One challenge is that you don't prompt them with the solution, right? There are some games that have moments where you have

to like pick a solution. I think in in The Wolf Among Us, there's this moment where you have to have this big revelation, but you only have three dialogue choices. And like two of them make no sense, so like you pick, you know. Uh and kind of a a good detective game has to like do the opposite by uh having a like combinatorial explosion, right? You like for example, you have the player put together a whole sentence that is like a closed text, and they have a bunch of verbs and a bunch of nouns, and it's kind of impossible to guess unless you really went through the whole thought process, and then you have this eureka moment, and then you just put in the three words out of however hundreds of thousands of combinations you can make with those words. This is when you really like You have to make players feel clever. I think that's the fun.
And of course, you can have intermediate steps where maybe you need to guess um certain subgoals or subinformation that you need to solve the final case or something like this, right? Yes. But one

thing with detective games is that you can't really confirm or deny that a solution is correct until How should I put this? One problem is that if you let players guess at partial solutions, and it's kind of easy to just like go to all possible solutions and just lock in the one the when the game tells you this is the correct one, right? Um then you can just brute force your way through the whole thing. Uh so, detective games often have mechanics like Return of the Obra Dinn where after you get like Return of the Obra Dinn, to those who don't know, is like uh you uh enter like an empty ship that comes back with everybody is gone or dead on board. And you have to figure out the fates of everybody that was on the ship. Um and you have a bunch of like verbs of like how they died, like stabbed or eaten or whatever, right? Um and you have to match the names to the people and the fates and only after a set of three fates that you got

completely right will the game tell you correct. So, basically, you can only like guess at it a little bit when you are certain of two fates and with the third fate you're like, is this like impaled or is this speared or is this stabbed? And you just go through it until the game says, yes, okay. Um but you can't do this in small increments, otherwise people can just brute force it. And when you say detective games where your choices matter, what does that mean that choices matter? So, it means two things. For one, you can have choices in the story that are like usually moral gray areas where there's no real good solution like Telltale games, right? It's like usually choosing between two defensible positions or two bad things in just in the story. Uh and those are usually related to the core questions that the the story has like or like the themes of the story. Um but also in our games so far, you could get the cases wrong um

and the story will go on and there will be repercussions and the game never explicitly says your case solution was correct or wrong. Um and people really enjoyed that because it kind of keeps you on it you only have one chance. The game like just saves all the time. There's no way of going back and you just have to keep wondering like, did I get the right suspect or something? And like two chapters later you're like, oh, no. Oh, okay. Right? So, um this is kind of a USP of our games, but is it worth it? Because branching content is is such a pain to implement. Um and a lot of people left reviews saying, oh, there isn't even much branching cut which is untrue. Like there's so many ways the game is can evolve, but because it's kind of seamless and I hope because it's well written, you think you're like in the one main storyline because there's no clearly, oh, I skipped this whole cool part because I got this thing wrong. You still get the whole story. Um and at the end of the day, I don't know how much people really appreciate

this because other detective games who didn't do this, they did just as well or better. So, what what are we doing all this for? Yeah, that's what I'm that's what I'm also wondering about is if that's a necessary part of the formula or if that's one part of the formula that could be simplified away. That's an interesting interesting question, but that's also why some games have like these little pop-ups. Uh Jonas will remember that or something like that is like, okay, this does have some kind of impact, I guess. I think so. I think so, too. They added this later because people were like, well, no, my all my actions have no effects even when they did. So, they just they just put it there saying, no, your action does have an effect um because people didn't realize, but um it yeah, they really do and we didn't do this. We never we never show a visualization. We are very obscure about like anything you can tell you tell anyone could have some ripple effect and you just don't know. And I think that's

really cool, but it leads to a lot of people not even knowing that it is. I think the way to possibly solve that is in the onboarding process, right? You need to create one situation at the very beginning of the game where it becomes very very obvious without a without having a pop-up Yeah. that your actions do have consequences and then maybe players get it. Yeah. But Yeah, because like Lacuna was a is linear in terms of like which scenes you get in with little exceptions, but with like a few. We have this in Lacuna. In the very beginning, you can like decide to go with a friend and then you're late for class and the teacher scolds you because you're late for class. So, you're like, oh, okay, that dialogue option in the beginning had like but in an environment where it doesn't really punish you, right? It's just to show you in a safe environment, hey, your first choice impacted the next scene. Um Oh, you did try that. Okay. And that was the problem. Okay. No, because people still

don't know what later on really led to what, right? Okay. Uh and in Between Horizons, it's kind of more obvious because there's much more agency on the player to begin with because we have like a semi-open world that's like we basically have like Metroidvania style unlocks except you get the new areas with new cases Mhm. uh rather than new gadgets, right? So, you can just um freely move around the the spaceship and you can show anyone any clue, so it's super open-ended.
Okay. Um and you retain all the clues from the entire game, so they might still be relevant to a case much later. Um and we had to account for a a million things um to a point where it it becomes impossible to account for all that where we had the problem that players were like, well, they didn't account for anything. Like I had this idea, but if you realize there's like 40 plus people on the ship and you have like dozens and dozens of clues to show them and you can talk to every person about every other

person about every clue and about every location on the ship, then we would blow up our localization budget um to like unfathomable like bigger than the production itself, right? Uh to just have people react to every little thing. So, people are like, well, you give me this freedom, but I can only like really do something with 5% of it.
I think this problem is probably in theory somewhat solvable with LLMs now if you're clever about it. Yes. But yeah, I see the point. Yeah. So, but that that sounds like a bit of an oversight of on your end as well then to um blow up the combinatorial space so much that you can only cover a small percentage of things people might try, right? Yes, exactly. I mean, it is somewhat alleviated if we nudge them enough that they're never like super clueless and try to like just brute force anything, but it can happen and then then they will blame the game obviously because that's how it goes.

But also for the for the branching decisions and for the branching storylines. So, players weren't like, oh, that's so cool that the story is branching and they were more like, where is it branching? That was like more the reaction you got so far or Um it's just a downside that I mentioned. A lot of people do appreciate and notice it. Okay. Um I'm just saying if you try to be extra seamless by doing like um like, you know, every story path justice and by obscuring what like decisions actually do have consequences, then it might backfire in a way that people just never realize that that's what happened. I think there are a lot of people interested in in making story-based games. I'm also curious, what do you think what makes for a good story in a game specifically? Well, in a game specifically, I would say it's player agency. I think that you can really give people something to think about if you put them in a tough spot, right? Like in a book,

um you can talk about something in depth, but in a game, you can play make make players responsible for their actions and what they say. So, I do think that that is like difficult choices are generally what makes games interesting and difficult choices in stories is what makes story games interesting in my opinion. Um and what makes a story good in general, I would say is an overarching theme or question that's like universally true in my opinion and that's usually like our guiding star when we write. Like every dialogue that you have or every major story beat at least somewhat contributes to the larger question or theme. So, there for every game, there's like one big underlying question maybe a moral question or something along those lines? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I often think about games in terms of of appeal, right? In terms of what attracts players to a game. Do you I I I often wonder this. Do you think that story does have

appeal factor? Do other people who play games for the story? And if so, how do you attract those players?
they do. Um the problem is that knowing if a story is good takes like 3 hours until you are like invested, right? Um if if you have a game to sell someone because uh of a of a simple premise or gameplay gimmick or whatever, it's much easier. Like with story games, how do you tell them, hey, we have a good story? It's it's super difficult to convey, I think, like as opposed to selling a game via an art style or or a core mechanic where or even a premise. Like some games just say, uh like Frog Detective. You're a frog that's a detective, right? It's genius. It's brilliant. It's like what you see is what you get. Whereas in Between Horizons, if I were to like

describe to you why the story is good, like we have to take 5 minutes, right? So, it's a hard sell in that you're only going to know if you're interested and invested after you're already in the game. And this also makes it super duper hard for people to like we we barely go to physical events anymore. And if we do, it's more for other reasons because people will not play the game for an hour and start caring about the characters and start thinking about their predicaments. Like it's nobody does that at Gamescom, right? Um so, I think story games are for those reasons kind of a hard sell in general, but otherwise, I think you sell them the same way you sell the other people on other genres. You try to get the tags right on Steam and you try to get, you know, into this crowd and this niche where the people already are who appreciate story games. But the people who come to your store page, will will they ever say something

like, "Oh, the story of this sounds interesting. I want to play it." or is it that they buy the game for different reasons and then they're hooked by the story once they're in the game? I mean, I we try to make the things that are immediately obvious like the art style, we try to make them at least appealing enough so people will be then are not turned off by them and I yeah, I think that a lot of people look at game like when I imagine somebody looking at a store page, they might look at the review score, they might look at games similar to what you played, they might look at this is owned or recommended by a friend and and many metrics that are not like really in your control that communicate to the player oh, this is some that is the type of game that I like. I also think that UI is often times a big giveaway to, you know, oh, yeah, okay, I see there's a dialogue UI. I like games where I have to make choices

or or something like this, right? Or oh, there's a clue thing UI or there's like a closed text. Oh, I like games where I have to solve cases. But I don't ever think people buy it because they think, "Oh, the question the core of this game is something that I've asked myself for a long time or you know, I don't think that the narrative premise much more than the setting. I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, I like sci-fi or I like noir and that's my thing." Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. It's the the setting maybe serves as a proxy for the story in a way. Yeah, absolutely. But I do think sci-fi is kind of tough like sci-fi is kind of very far removed from our reality and and I I like sometimes like very clean and clinical. I don't know how I think it's a harder sell than some other settings. But maybe it's just because it's a hard like I know this is a hard sell, maybe everything is a hard sell. I sort of have this theory that what makes things

interesting is often times making them oddly specific, right? A generic sci-fi corridor that's not not interesting, nobody cares about that. But if it's like very oddly specific, if it's like there very specific cables leading to a very specific box that's like a strange design on it. And and the floor tiles are like not typical spaceship iron floor, but it's like maybe maybe a specific carpet. And it's like is there's a reason why this carpet is there maybe maybe it leads to the chief's office and he wants to have like a nice carpet to his to his capsule or something. Then all of a sudden it it gets so much more interesting, right? So oddly specific things are interesting and I think those things are often lacking in sci-fi themes because sci-fi is so detached from what we typically see that we can't even really imagine how these oddly specific things might look like. I agree

with you. I think like for example, mouthwashing is sci-fi, but it has such a weird aesthetic of its own and the whole setting is such a twist and not very clean sci-fi at all that it's a much better much better like selling point than our very generic clean it's a it's a spaceship you know, type deal. And that's what I'm saying, Lacuna has this much more. It's like when you look at the screenshots there's a lot more oddly specific things where like an environmental storytelling, why is that there and you kind of see the the slums and all of the the houses and all of the specific people the furniture of the houses you're in and it's like not not generic, it's like specific furniture like this one screenshot I'm looking at is like very very high quality chair what it looks like paintings on the walls and so on. I I think you you absolutely put your finger on something important and like one thing that you said is like doing

like level of detail on personality in 3D just costs more than it does in 2D. But also this was had a few reasons like for one thing if you grow your team unless you pay very close attention or have very strong vision keeper, things become a little more design by committee like as the committee grows, right? Because with Lacuna, the team was smaller, we had like one in-house artist and I would very specifically write up requirements and often come up with the like the premise of the environments. I would be like, "What if we have like a market, but that market is like on built on bridges between high-rises, wouldn't that be like I had sometimes this like, right? And a lot of this process was not as present in Between Horizons for a number of reason. One I kind of gave it away more and I was like, "Hey, we need something and for the gameplay, we need this and that clue to be there, right? But otherwise it's a machine room, right?" And that's pretty

much it. The other thing was Between Horizons, we had to develop the pitch and basically jump into the pre-production in parallel to Lacuna because, you know, you don't want to start thinking about your next game when your when your previous game comes out. You have to have a lot ready and basically be able to jump into pre-production on release day for your previous title. So this was already going on for a while, but we didn't have as much time. Lacuna was basically in pre-production for years before we even found the Digitails. So it had a lot of time to rattle around my head and have developed more of a personality, right? Whereas in Between Horizons, it had a year during which we basically made the biggest part of Lacuna still. So there it just had less time to evolve and from the first moment on, we were locked into like a monthly deliverable schedule with our publisher. Whereas in

Lacuna, we had like five years to just like try stuff out and shelve it sometimes and take it back out and then it, you know, would evolve much more organically. Yeah, the design by committee is also very interesting and very true like the more like oddly specific is much easier to do when you're alone or in a small team Yeah. because when you suggest something oddly specific in a team then other people are likely to to to just say, "Well, that's that's odd." Yeah, yeah, yeah. When it's actually the odd ideas that are often like really good like like mouthwashing like what like the ship transports mouthwashing. Why like what? It's so stupid, but it's such a good game and such a good story because it has this edge and this personality. Okay, maybe this is the time to to dive into studio history. Do you want to tell me a bit about how it all started and sort of the the entire journey, how it's been like so far? So I started out making music and sound

design for games about 11 years ago. I lived in Munich at the time and started working with studios there, started freelancing in parallel to my masters and then I joined Clonk Games that became Daedalic Entertainment and then became shut down. And basically I was in-house there doing gigs for them audio stuff. But that way I kind of got a bit of an idea of what it is to like work in a studio and what, you know, can go right and what can go wrong. Through that time I kind of wanted to do more and I I wanted to do video games because I was a gamer and I just could only do audio, but I've always kind of thought about expanding that and then yeah, with my co-founder Yasmine, we we started working on Lacuna in our free time in parallel and then founded the studio in 2019. Um and this was a good time because the

state funding program was just started. We were just go headed into the pandemic which was bad in many ways, but not for the games industry and we had, you know, publishers had money to throw around at the time unlike now it feels like. So we basically had our vertical slice ready at that point. We pitched it to Assemble Entertainment. They signed us which is kind of rare. We we pitched it to only a handful of publishers and one of them gave us a funding deal which was really a big leap on their part, but it it paid off. Like Lacuna was very successful and then So when you said when you say we, how many people were you back then? We founded as four people. We had Yasmine and myself who were doing pretty much everything except art and then we had one artist and one programmer. Okay. Yeah. And this was actually kind of a sweet spot. I think four people was really good. And then for Between Horizons as I

mentioned, we grew the team, we worked with Assemble again, we were seven people and ever since like Between Horizons came out a year and a half ago, but it was supposed to come out even sooner. So we had to cover the production for a longer time and we've kind of yeah, been running on fumes for a while now. So we're we're okay compared to some some friends. A lot of friends have shut down over the past few years. But we're still kicking, but we also scaled the studio down. We're only three people in-house now and two very regular external people. Got it. Yeah. And that's also why you're maybe running a planning to run a Kickstarter for your next game?
Yeah, so part of the reason for that that's a whole different story. So our next game is actually not Unburied for which the Kickstarter is already uh the Kickstarter preview pages up. Our next game is actually coming out in between uh and we haven't announced it yet.

We're going to announce it later this year. And uh we also happened to become a publisher this year which was more of a opportunistic move than a big strategy thing. But uh friends of ours uh uh were making a game called The Great Sasanelli and we really liked it. Uh it's like this World War I setting where you manage like a traveling circus in Europe and you have to make a lot of tough choices which is what was kind of our deal. And it's really really well written and it was uh pretty far in development so we decided to help them out to get it across the finish line and publish the game. Um so those two are coming up next and then we're actually going to do the Kickstarter for Unburied. For now this is all self-funded. But like I said not not from our Scrooge McDuck uh you know money bin. Uh we are we are uh running a very lean operation now.
Okay. Okay. Yeah, but I mean

by my circumstance but also by choice in a way because like I said earlier I felt like expanding wasn't even the right move to begin with.
If you can break free of the the funding treadmill eventually that's like the the goal for most studios that are in the place anyway, right? So
Exactly. Now we're thinking we're going to make shorter games that we can bankroll. We're going to publish them more frequently. They're going to be cheaper but if we're not giving a lion's share to the publisher we're still going to get the same you know amount per unit. Uh but if the game is only five bucks and not 15 bucks a lot more people might buy it. So you know we have a more frequent release schedule and we might just uh make uh just as much money with the games. And and they're cheaper to make. Yeah, I mean from a from a business perspective this sounds like a smart idea, right? Make your entire studio focus on like one specific niche genre

and like get very good at it and then just pump out a lot of games.
Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like a good idea. I'm I'm not sure we're going to stick with the genre for the next game we will but for example Unburied definitely is outside of our comfort zone. It has like survival horror elements and and stuff that we never really dabbled in only like as fans. Um but uh because Unburied is kind of a bigger production again we're going to have two possibly three releases over the next two years that will help uh fund it because no Kickstarter actually finances an entire game's production. That's true. The thing is that when whenever you dip your toes into a new genre you kind of have to relearn what people in that genre actually care about, right? Otherwise you'll you'll repeat the mistake of optimizing the wrong things, expanding the wrong things. Absolutely.
And this is of course possible and doable like we also like dipping our toes into different genres, making different kinds of games.

Um yeah, but it's it's a good question though, right? How do you how do you really find I asked the same question earlier. I'll just ask it again and see if we can uh dig a bit deeper. How do you figure out what what matters especially when you get into a new genre that maybe you don't have as much experience with yet. Yeah. I mean the good thing about genres like survival horror unlike detective games where your choices matter is you can just steal it, right? Like you know I don't know how does it I don't want to butcher it. Like good artists copy great artists steal uh or something. Um I feel like there are some things that just still work about survival horror. Some things have become kind of obnoxious but when you look at how survival horror games are remastered I feel like we've already figured out what we want to keep around and what we want to ditch. Um so a lot of really good survival horror games have been coming out that have a more modern formula. And if you

do something like that I'm not going to you know I I wouldn't reinvent the wheel. Yes, there's like safe rooms and there you can save uh and you have a magic crate that is everywhere and you have uh limited inventory space and uh it like the all these things in survival horror it is very formulaic.
Yeah. Um and people because this market isn't super oversaturated from where I'm standing um people will play it if it has a good production value. That's so that's the hope. I mean interview me again in a few years. Yeah. Uh it's uh you always know more in hindsight. So what I find weird about horror games in general is they're obsession with with monsters. They're basically they're usually just uh chase games, right? You're you're chased by a monster, you have to hide. May maybe sometimes you do some resource management and you have some some

weapons to maybe either fend off some weaker monsters or or scare away the big monster and that's kind of every horror game is kind of exactly this way. I wouldn't say everyone but I think a lot of the more like um recent successes are very much built around gimmicky monsters like Poppy Playtime, right? You see their little little dude as a merch in every corner store and it's like crazy focused on that. There is this genre of like these games for kids with like a kids type setting that are actually really creepy um that have been making the rounds and but I think classic survival horror uh in the vein of Resident Evil and Silent Hill it is it's a little different, right? It's like I mean of course you have iconic monster designs. You have a you have like Pyramid Head and Nemesis or whatever. But at the end of the day the the draw is more the overall experience, this like feeling of dread and

everything being always running out and depleted. And I I have the theory that this like way of disempowering the player because we like to see games as power fantasies a lot of the time. But survival horror games kind of do the opposite. Like you can barely fight back. You have like three bullets and 15 enemies roaming the area, right? And you already like are low on health and you have like no more pills and everything feels shitty and you dive deeper and deeper into this complex and everything feels more there's no way you're going to get out of this alive. And at the end you actually defeat the big bad and you actually do kind of find a way to overcome everything. I think it's just like delayed empowerment in a way, right? You like beat the player down uh and they and getting up at the end is all the more like uh cathartic and empowering.
I wonder how much of that is like essentially a magic trick where programmers are just like if you have uh more than 30 ammunition I'm just not

going to drop any new ammunition and then as soon as it's low and then we're going to drop some new stuff for you or something. Yeah, I I think there's a lot of trickery to this to making things feel more close, right? I'm pretty sure that like they have this vague indication of health for example and I think um that the lower ones actually tank more damage. Like you're okay um but you take one damage and it's like um no longer it's like it's like orange, right? And you take two damage and it's red and you run around in the red for a long time. You're like, "Oh my god, I'm almost dead." But in in reality it's like the health the half of your health bar is still left, right? You can still take. And and like this this impression of making it closer than it actually is um is I think big part of of horror games. Actually health potions and like um ways to heal yourself kind of have the same effect cuz it essentially splits your health bar into multiple parts, right?

In Dark Souls if you carry 10 health potions you essentially have 10 x the amount of health that actually shows up in this little HP bar. Exactly. Exactly.
a lot closer because obviously if you don't manage to heal yourself then you're dead. So Yeah. Yeah.
And and also I think in horror games in particular you don't want to like people to die uh because that kind of takes you out of the experience, right? It's scary that you're afraid of dying. But after you died five times it's gone. Like you you know what it is and you just like start to think of it more as a game and you start min-maxing and you just go through and you get you tank all the hits and then you just reload the save and all that So I think um making the player think they're almost dead all the time but in reality the monsters just like would awkwardly stare at you for five more seconds uh before you kindly move out of the way, right? Um that's kind of also a big part of the trickery. Like in those haunted there's like haunted house videos on TikTok where

people just don't run away from the performers and because the performers they won't actually stab you they just like stand there because you're supposed to be scared of what they could do to you, right? And I I think uh yeah, a lot of this this magic is also in video games.
All right, so you're you're getting into that genre with your unannounced game or no no that was the Kickstarter game is the one in this direction you said. Our our unannounced game is more of in the vein of our previous games. More detective story like yeah.
Yep. Learning from from some of the mistakes and what are you doing for differently for the unannounced game like without spoiling anything?
So it's more linear. We have We have some choices that have some impact on the story, but we dropped the open-ended stuff from Between Horizons and we even dropped the thing that you can solve cases wrong and the story will do something else. At least unless we can like sneak it in like a

low-effort way, but probably not. We probably just going to drop this um because of the games that since came out, they just require you to solve the case and then you can move on. It seems people are fine with that. We always had this mantra of not getting stuck was one of our big design principles, um but in a time when everybody can just like go on Reddit real quick, you're never really stuck, right? So we were like, "Oh, it's going to break the immersion." But like, "No, we we just have to balance it well and that's fine. So that that's gone at least for this game um because other games have shown that it's unnecessary. Um so it's more focused on the detective stuff and the story is also more secondary. There is a kind of a story that's still deep, it's still a lot of yapping, it's still complex characters, it still has a message and a theme and all that, um but it is less of a focus and more uh subjugated to game design. And now you're just curious to um explore new

genres or what's your idea behind the change? Or are you like maybe maybe detective games is not uh where the big money can be made or what's like your what's your reasoning for the change in direction?
The reasoning is honestly kind of personal. Like after over a decade of dabbling in detective games, I mean we've been doing it full-time for like half a decade now, but the Q and A was already rattling around my head for 5 years prior. Uh I've kind of I don't want to do something else. Okay. Okay. It's not a strategic thing, but we are kind of in games because it's the thing we like to do, right? So I think having that dictate somewhat what you want to do next is is fair. Yeah, of course. That makes sense. Coming back to your article, let me quickly check what else you wrote about there. Suffering from success is like the first headline I see here. Yeah. Do you think

it's a common thing that people struggle with their second game? Actually, the interview I recorded last week was with with Katarina from Spelgarden. Oh, yeah, cool. They made Sticky Business and then they made Ritual of the Raven and also their first game was I think it's fair to say much more successful than
Yeah. It's a common pattern. I think it's not super uncommon. Why do you think this happens and do you think this can be avoided?
So in their particular case, we know we know each other very well. We actually worked on their on their all their latest DLCs that came out and they said came out. We did those. Yeah, that we made them and I actually I personally ported everything to a Nintendo Switch that came out the Sticky Business for the last few years.
Oh, that's funny. Yeah, so yeah, I think that they're in their case, if I were to like like criticize them directly, I think that they made a similar mistake to us. They Ritual of the Raven doesn't really tell

like it has a vibe like Between Horizons has a sci-fi vibe, Ritual of the Raven has like a magically mystery vibe, but at the end of the day, what the game is is kind of harder to convey and is much more than just it's a little magic and mystery because you have all these contra constructs that you can um like program to do like your harvesting of your fields and stuff and like it's and it's all based on tarot cards and it takes a lot of tutorials to get across and stuff. Whereas their first game, it's called Sticky Business and you have a sticker business. much said, right? So I think the premise is just much easier to convey. Um the other thing is also that their first game came out in a better and different market than their second game, which is not something you really control. I think they have some of the same issues that we have with our with our games. Um but in terms of like why your first game might be your best game at least for a long time um is because sometimes your first game

is the one you really wanted to get out and it had like a decade to develop in the back of your head, right? And then after that you're like, "Oh we have a game studio now and we have to come up with another game." Um and that might not be as mature of an idea, but uh yeah. It's not as mature, but at the same time you want to scale it up and make it bigger. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you have maybe you run into some of these fallacies, too, because the first game uh you were maybe more full of doubt and scaled it small and you're like, "Oh god, awesome. We like made a big-ass game and like like now we can just do a bigger game." But I think there's a lot of traps you can fall into off the heels of a successful release. And I think it's difficult like I think no matter if you're making games or music or whatever, you're always kind of afraid that you peaked back then, right? You're like, "Oh was that the best I could do? Was I better when I was younger? Was it lightning in a bottle or whatever?" Um but I think that's rarely the case. I

think you just have to analyze um what works and what doesn't and be honest with yourself and uh just try again. A lot of studios had slumps in the middle or had a game bomb at some point and their fifth game was their breakout success. I don't think there's a hard rule to this. I think this is what something I saw in your article as well as that as a game developer you never really feel like you made it, right? I I had this I had the feeling for a long time. I was like at my first successful game the feeling of yes, I made it it just never set in. It didn't set set in after the second game and now even even after after the third one, I'm still like, "I don't know. I don't know if the next one's going to do well." Oh, yeah. Yeah, you still have to put in the work. It never stops. Yeah. I completely agree. It's not like we were like, "Oh my god, we're on top of the world." It's not like we made a a super successful game, but for a debut title, it was good and we thought, "Okay, we have something

and we can expand on that, right?" Um but that was already wrong. Like we shouldn't have expanded on it in the way that we did. Growth for growth's sake. Yeah. It's It's just a normal tendency to want to make your games bigger, probably, right? It's like you want to make cool stuff. Bigger is cooler. Yeah. Yeah, I I yeah, I no longer think that, but yeah, that's the that's the thinking basically, yeah. I think if you have a really focused small game that does one thing really well, that's kind of what I strive towards more now. Mhm. And when you say play it safe, but don't play it too safe, what do you mean with that? So I think that that's more catchy wording for the headline. What I like in specifically meant there is making sequels is also kind of hard and selling them to people, especially when they are clearly worded as a sequel because in my mind and what I've seen from some indie

friends, but this is anecdotal, is that when people see that something is you know, so-and-so game two or the reawakening or whatever the hell, um and they didn't play the first game, um they will just buy the first game that goes on sale when like much more steeply when your second game launches, right? You have like a launch discount of 15%, but in order to like boost that, you put your first game on sale and in a bundle or you do discount it by 70%, so it gets a lot of traffic and you can plug your other game. But people are like, "Oh, yeah, okay, I've never heard of the first one." So they might buy it, um but then they might never install it and then they might never play it and then they might never finish it. And like by the time all these gates are passed, the potential person who buys your game part two is like is like just a tiny tiny percentage of of of everybody who like even considered your first game. So I really think that you hinder yourself if

you if you even like as much as imply a little bit that it might make sense to start with the first one. Unless it was like a breakout success, you have something on your hands like Little Nightmares and Little Nightmares two, I guess that's fine, right? But even that for brand recognition, specifically the Little Nightmares people, everybody knows they're now making Reanimal even though it's not called Little Nightmares because you can see their creative identity in it, right?
Yeah. So especially for indies, I would always recommend do a completely different franchise or if if you're going to do the same universe, maybe make it sound like an anthology. Like the Mimimi guys, they did like Shadow Tactics X, Shadow Tactics Y, Shadow Gambit. You see it's like shadow and sort of this type of gameplay, but you never think, "Oh, I have to have played the other game to start this game." Right? I think that that was mainly what I wanted to get across. Yeah, and this is especially true probably for story-based games cuz first story-based

games imply an order that you should play things in and then if they like statistically speaking, it's just a lot of people don't finish games. It's just the way it is. And if they don't they don't finish the first one, they're they're not going to get to the second one. Exactly. That's the thing. You You like making a game on purpose for incredibly small contingent of your potential player base because it's the people who bought, installed, played, finished your first game. And all of these gates already let through like 5% of the previous So like why why are you selling a game to these five people? And that's interestingly different to how it works in the movie industry probably, right? Cuz for for films it's like a very seems or a very for big studios it seems like a very safe strategy to be like let's make Madagascar 4, I guess. Yeah. People

watch the last three. I I guess if it's worth their time. I don't really know the reasoning, but I mean the case of Madagascar, you have a big success with the first one and you can ride the wave and it plays it more safe than doing something completely new. But as an indie game who had like a thousand or two thousand reviews, which is good for an indie game, that still doesn't justify at all trying to make a sequel and getting this player base again. Because they almost nobody who bought your game finished your game. Yeah. I have to call you out on a similar thing I saw on your Between Horizons store page. Yeah. Cuz your trailer starts with with a title card that says with the from the creators of Lacuna. Yeah. That that's a bit optimistic that people know what this is even though it's quite successful, right? Yeah. I Yeah, I was I would never put this like on its own where I already start with visuals and

it started off to the side so it doesn't delay the start of the trailer. We did this because we hoped that people would recognize us, but obviously like you say, almost nobody ever heard of us, even people who might see this trailer. But surprisingly, every other review mentions I'm here because I played Lacuna and liked it. So a good amount of our player base does come from our previous game and they follow us as a studio even though we didn't make Lacuna 2. So we have those guys and new guys.
How did you How did you bring them over? Did you like heavily market from your other store page or did you like Yeah, I think it's mostly Steam internal traffic. We don't have a big socials that people follow and I think they just have Lacuna and then they maybe follow our developer page. We have a decent following there. And we have like cross promotion between the games. Now Steam made it harder,

right? Now you can only at the bottom of your page say what you want featured there like more from this developer. But for the most part since Between Horizons came out, it was still possible to add a little thing on your store page. So the first thing on Lacuna, which always got a lot of traffic, was also by Between Horizons because by the same guys. And I think this is the main driver. Thing is our publisher is the one who put the games out on the platforms and even though we can't edit the store pages, we don't have access to the analytics data. So I couldn't tell you for sure. Yeah, right. So now what you do is you just put up at least put a bundle at the very top here. I can see that it's possible to get both of your games in a bundle at least. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and we did bundles with other games like Darkside Detective and like games that people might like. Do you know what's going on with the bundle matter on Steam because I've been getting like we've been getting lots of bundle requests recently. Is this like a like a very beneficial thing to be in

bundles or is it is it that you're trying to get visibility on somebody else's store page essentially or what do you think what's the the reasoning behind that? Maybe it's just bigger in the matter now because it's harder to plug your games on your own game pages, right? Because they removed the ability to just add in these blocks until the very bottom of the page. So I think cross promotion by going to third-party events and bundling with other developers are maybe more prevalent now. But that's just my guess. I mean also one cool thing about bundles I guess is that they allow you to permanently discount your games which you can't do otherwise, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, they don't adhere to the cool down of the individual game, right?
Yeah. Yeah. What do you think makes for good writing? Like on on the you answered the question on the macro level. You said like something have an underlying question. What for you zoom in on the on the micro level of what

what for example what makes for a good dialogue in a game? One thing that we strive for is that people speak like people. This is not necessarily something that's universally good or bad, but I think it's something that gives you a certain style and also accessibility and like authenticity. A lot of game dialogue is very corny and you have, you know, villains doing the evil laugh and not behaving like humans, right? So we always try to have people have believable personalities and way of speaking that is not only reflective of their personality, but also easy to read for everyone. So we don't like use big words that try to sound smart and we don't use we try to not use stereotypes too much in our writing. Sometimes stereotypes can be something you can hook someone in with

like our noir main character dude, right? Looks like a noir main character dude. So it's like easily understandable on the surface, but then you can flesh that out and give it some twists and turns and some contradictions throughout the dialogues. Like, you know, and and make give give him a a more of a interesting profile. The other thing is I think dialogues are a good way of conveying story rather than just prose. Also, I think I can write them more easily because I speak a lot and I hear people speak a lot. But writing in like a literary way, writing prose or poems or whatever, especially when it's not my first language. We always write in English. And I'm German. So you know, it comes more easily to us to just convey everything in dialogue. And they're more they're more slow-paced because every dialogue is a back and forth. It's one sentence or maybe two. You can have dialogues while people are doing things. You can have dialogues with multiple people involved. I think one of

the worst-case scenarios, and this is kind of something that we navigated ourselves in the corner with with Between Horizons, is is just two people looking at each other and just talking the whole time. Because in Between Horizons you like go up to someone with like a piece of evidence and then it unlocks a thing and they they tell you something. But when you look at how movies do dialogues, I mean it's a budget question, too, but usually it's while something's happening. They're going somewhere or like something around them is happening and stuff. So making a little bit of set dressing for the dialogue that makes it more dynamic is is also good practice. You can also do this by changing like by having the player just even if you just flip the sprite. Like somebody is mad at someone and they turn away from them. Like it could very cheap ways of making dialogue a little dynamic or moving the camera over or like, you know, things like that. Um playing like changing the music up. Like with this restrictive camera view that

we have, we can't do close-ups of actors' faces. We're very limited range of expressing things. So knowing how you can do things around the dialogue with the means available to you and using them a lot is also part of the writing process. Like the mise-en-scène, right? This is not just the words to make it less boring to just have people look at each other and talk. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see. A lot of games also quite heavily stylize their their text, right? Like when somebody's angry like the text is shaking or
Yes. stuff like that. Also cool stuff. We We've done this only to an extent. We had big plans for that, but it was one of the things that kind of fell off the you know. Throughout production, but that is really cool. Yeah, when people are angry and they yell individual words and they appear immediately or or things like that. Yeah. Those are really cool and we utilize them also. Mhm. Not as much as we wanted to. What's really cool like

the the to me the like big like mastery level is when you start using the UI in in like creative ways. Like for example in in Celeste there is this moment where a character like breaks out of the dialogue box. Like you have the portrait and and this person gets super angry and like grabs the dialogue box and like becomes bigger and it like this like super creative use of this type When you break the fourth wall in some ways. This is like super duper cool, but also matter of budget and time. I share your love for dialogue and I think I can put a finger on it also why that is. I think the reason is that in dialogue you can write a single sentence, but it can have a lot more meaning than a single sentence cuz Yes. the person could be lying. The person could be saying something, but meaning something different. Like sometimes the

reason you say something is like there's so much subtext in dialogue that in my opinion that's more interesting than just plainly writing things out. Absolutely. You always communicate on like multiple channels if you want to or not, right? You try to convey a self-image. You try to have a interpersonal message. Like the the informational contents are just a small part of of what you say at any given time. So, I really think like keeping these channels in mind also makes for good writing for sure when you like people have an interest in conveying something that might be between the lines. Yeah, you want to I I agree. I think that's key actually. You want to convey things and you don't want the dialogue to just be info dumps. Exactly. But this is difficult difficult line to tow because in detective games you sometimes have a lot of information you have to get across. Right? You have to have a premise. So, somebody broke in last

night and they meddled with this and we have these scanners. They work this and that way. So, if somebody passed through here, blah blah blah. So, yeah, we have to sort of strike a balance between providing information about the case and the ongoing story and still not lose everybody everybody's personality in the process. Have you played Outer Wilds? I have, yes. I haven't finished it, but I look forward to doing that eventually. Yeah, you should. But one thing I find find interesting about the writing in Outer Wilds is that it was one of the first games that made me care about reading all of the dialogues. And the reason for that was because I knew that every piece of information in there and also all of the subtext and everything like the the more I pay attention the closer I pay attention there's like a direct gameplay reward in that potentially. So, if I read carefully, I might get an idea that helps me advance in the game.

This is exactly how we ended up with this story detective game combination because we realized forcing players to go a little bit out of their comfort zone and having to think and having to read by making that making basically a test intermittently about how how well you paid attention to the previous bit is super fun actually. It it really invests you in the story if if the story is the gameplay and you have to pay attention like this is basically the negative example of this is how I originally came up with Aequorin because I was grinding some MMO. I was like playing Elder Scrolls Online and I was just like click click like yeah, some NPC gives me some blah blah blah. I don't give a Where's the where's the quest marker and what's my reward basically, right? Because you you get so focused on, you know, like the the things that actually matter to the gameplay like what gear am I going

to get? How much gold am I going to get? Whatever. I don't care if your sister fell into a well. Like what's the where's the icon on the map? So, you just go there and you don't really give a about the story. And I was like what the what the hell am I doing with my time? Like I don't like I don't care about any of this. But then there was a quest where I actually had to pay attention and you come up to this shrine and you have to recite it something in the right order. And it was it was like a choice for me. I was like, wait, what? I had to listen to someone before this? Oh And then I did it wrong and it spawned a bunch of super high level enemies. I was like, oh, that's so cool. There are suddenly stakes to the things people say to me. And and so I was like taken out of this boredom and I went back to the person. I was like, so okay, so about that poem like what what was that about, right? And and I was suddenly invested and I started listening and paying attention and then suddenly the when the dialogue mattered to the outcome, it was such like day and night switch

and I thought, what about making a game where that's the whole thing. You have to pay super close to attention to everything everybody says and the story is the gameplay because it's the mystery and you'll get tested on how well you paid attention to the story. And that makes people super invested and super immersed. Right. But I think also the difference on how you're tested probably makes a big difference. I I feel like if it's too much like a test at school where it's like fill in the correct answer here then it's like can also be a bit frustrating because you're like, I didn't know I had to pay attention to this or Yeah. You So, first of all, you also have to get players into like the into that mindset and make sure they they know what they need to pay attention to or sort of prime them a little bit on that. You can also ease them in through the difficulty. You have to give them some easy wins in the beginning and then then what before they know it, they are taking notes on a

physical paper which a lot of our players do. They like pause the game and start writing down and taking notes and drawing connections on their on their notepads which is uh it is not a level of investment that you're ready for when you start a game, but we like turn turn the temperature up slowly. In the beginning you have to retain two things and put them together. But once you're in that mindset it can basically be like a test. be very straightforwardly Sure. Yeah. Sure. But there are also the tests where you don't even know that you're being tested and then later you realize that there there is a test. And like realizing that there is a test is like part of the test. That's that's also interesting and kind of the the way Outer Wilds does it often times. Yeah, that is really cool. Actually in Between Horizons, we set up a mystery in the intro that is never part of the cases you get throughout the game and it's sort of a hidden case that

spans much of the story and you get hints that it is even a thing you can solve without the game ever telling you. And if you show the right hints to the right people and get referred to the next correct clue, you can basically discover this case and solve the mystery that is the whole setup for the for the story that other people will never know even was a mystery. Like or it was solvable. Yeah, that finding that type of stuff is very rewarding. Yeah.
And I feel like the trick is maybe kind of to have a lot of things like this in your game because people are randomly going to find different ones like like I really like these Metroid brainiums, right? For example, blueprints was another one recently that I really enjoyed and that game also has so many mysteries that you can solve. But there are so many different mysteries that you are almost certain to solve some of them almost by coincidence

because there's just so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that gives you some that gives everybody some cool moments.
I also think having a variety of mysteries to solve at a time. This was one of the things that we added to the design for Between Horizons kind of makes it more digestible because you can just if you're stuck on a case, you can just try the other case for a bit and maybe while you do that you stumble upon a clue for your first case or you just give it more time to think and when you come back you have like a fresh mind. So, in the middle of the game you can have like three, four cases open at a time. Yes. And this is kind of also a nice way to balance it because people can just forget about a case if they are annoyed with it for a while. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that is actually part of the reason also why classical point and click adventures were often so frustrating is because they they had a very linear path of now you need to find this item then you bring that person this item like a very strict order almost in which you have to

do things. Like yeah, a little bit of freedom in when to do what, but typically you're very blocked on. You can't do this thing unless you've already done this thing kind of kind of thing, right?
Yeah. And I feel like these um games they're often at their best when they open up quite a bit more and there are like different things to work on and you can kind of decide what you want to work on and that way you're you're less likely to be stuck on anything. Yeah. Yeah, that that was our thinking for Between Horizons, but opening up the the map was also such a like a minefield of of design problems. Yeah. I mean, if you have multiple cases and then maybe also not knowing which clue belongs to which case for example, stuff like that, right? You probably going to be careful. I mean, we tried to make that part of the challenge. We were like, okay, we're going to really amp up the possible combinations and solutions to everything. Whereas in Aequorin we had a preset amount of solutions for cases that just came like out of the ether. You like

you just had words that you could fill in. They came from nowhere and they were just limited by us the developer, I guess. In Between Horizons, the clues themselves are solutions to the cases. So, if you're looking for a perpetrator, any person clue you found in the game so far can be submitted as the solution. And if you're looking for a location of something, any room clue you found in the game so far can be submitted as the solution. And while that that makes it more open-ended and kind of harder because you have to really think about everything, it also kind of makes it a little frustrating for players who are like, well, I said that the captain sabotaged the machine room and nobody had a word to say about that, you know? Because they're always like, yeah, yeah, okay, we'll look at the solution of your case and then and then later on they're like, okay, dude, that led nowhere. And they don't tell you, bro, what do you mean the

captain? Are you insane? You're going to be stripped of your duties, right? So, we never like in a lot of cases we don't account for possible mistakes specific mistakes you could make. Interesting. Yeah, so this could either have been solved with a lot of writing or maybe with some very careful play testing to catch more of the common things people do. We We did play test the game throughout and we did account for some of the major ones. Like there's one case for example where a character is like a cold case from the past and the character says I was accused and I I want to be exonerated. Um and there we had to account for the player finding the real culprit. I'm not just going to spoil it. It wasn't him so you can actually exonerate him. Um but we have to account for the player finding the real culprit, the player finding the wrong other culprit, or the player accusing him again and saying it was actually you. Mhm. Um so we had to account for these three and for the

wrong other culprit we had to sort of write a way around it by saying, "Well, this implausible." Like uh because the guy we wrote it in such a way that the guy already knows who else did it but doesn't tell you. He wants you to come to the correct conclusion backed up by evidence. And if you say it, then he's exonerated. But so we had to account for three things there, right? And in some other cases we also had to account for some things that players might do. Sometimes even the order in which they talk to people about things. The The dialogue logic is extremely complex because sometimes there's like multiple people involved in something. Um but we only have the big revelation dialogue with one of them. So the other person is like, "Okay, yeah, I guess the jig is up. Uh I admit it but go to that other guy. Uh he will tell you all about it." Um and a lot of modules of

dialogues can be set by different characters. Um and they will often be strung together uh based on what you already learned. So if a party already told you something, um that module is no longer in the other person's dialogue when they come clean about it. Uh and like it's Yeah. We had to and we did account for a lot of stuff.
Yeah. But the uh the infinite amount of stuff to account for Yeah. Yeah. Okay. is just uh is still so vast that players will complain. Uh and understandably they will complain that you didn't account for that one specific thing they did. And um I mean from making so many story-driven games with dialogue, do you have any recommendations for how you should organize dialogue from a code and logic perspective? Yeah, we have our own internal dialogue editor that we wrote uh because it just accommodated exactly what we needed. I would recommend people

do some tailor-made solution if they can rather than doing a third-party plugin because more often than not in our experience they don't do what you need or then you update Unity and something breaks or you need to reach out to the developer and they're nowhere to be found. Like this is my general advice when it comes to third-party plugins. I would just avoid them as I if I can. And with dialogue tools especially to integrate them into your logic and tailor them to your needs, just do your own. We have some basic features that I can tell you right now. Um they can check and set bools. We basically our entire game state is just a bunch of booleans. And uh they when you enter a scene based on the configuration of these booleans characters are present or not or you have certain dialogues or not and whatever. Um we don't actually retain a lot in the save games in terms of this character is positioned there. When you go into a scene it's just like

is this boolean true? Then the character is there. And if not it's not there. Okay. Um and we do a similar thing with our dialogue logic. Basically if you are in a certain game state the dialogue is available or not. And dialogues themselves can check these. They can also set these. Um you can also have um branches where the game goes into one or the other based on this bool. Uh right? So I big tip there, always account for all possible bool configurations because sometimes you might think "Oh, you know, if this is true we go here and if this is true we go here." Which is fatal because you know, not one of them might like both of them might be false, right?
Yeah. Um Uh so always do the opposite. Um Yeah. And then we have a gate We call them gated nodes. We also have gated choices. So if a if a uh certain thing is true, then a choice appears. And if

it is not true, the choice isn't there for the player to make. Uh so gated nodes and gated choices are a big thing. Um
of these All of these bools, I imagine the way a beginner would imagine this is like you have a C# file with with lots and lots of bools basically defined as public variables or something. I imagine that's not the case. Are you using like a dictionary for the bools or like how how are these bools handled or stored in your system?
So we Different games had different approaches to this. With Between Horizons we had a bunch of scriptable objects. What what I can't recommend is that you save things to scriptable objects on runtime. Just use them as like a initial setup thing. I'm actually not sure. I I haven't worked on this part. This is mostly my co-founder Jasmin. Um But But at the end of the day they are all in our save game and read from our save game. That is like after you started the game once that is the instance where it's checked.

What's true and what isn't.
your in your dialogue editor, do you have like a drop-down for all of the bools or do you type in the name or how does it work?
For different things For the bools specifically we just type them. Okay. Um Makes sense. I I know that a lot of programmers are like, "Oh my god, that is so unsafe. What if you mis type it?" But that's never been a real problem. If I mis type it I will When I I immediately notice that the the game doesn't do the thing. Yeah. Uh or if not immediately then one of the other thousand times I will play this. Uh I oftentimes just copy-paste. It's fine. You can just use strings as IDs. Sure. Uh and you just type it.
you could theoretically even write a tool that checks spelling of your hand things or something like Yeah or something like that. For some things we have drop-downs like for the saved existing dialogues in our database I can drop down I use a drop-down but I could say if I type something above it's like a search and it the drop-down limits itself to the

dialogues that contain that string. So we have a lot of utility by now and you can see on a node immediately "Oh, there's a little lock on it." That means there's a condition to this node or "Oh, there's a little other symbol." That means it changes a game state boolean and things like that. But Yeah. Yeah. Got it. That makes sense. Also the the save file is basically just a bunch of bools. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's your player It's the player decisions but also how far you are in the story in certain paths. Like had this and that dialogue is often times a a bool that is automatically there for every dialogue. So you don't get that dialogue again because all our dialogues are unique. Like unlike point-and-click adventures where you can just have the same dialogue over and over. Ours are always unique. And the choices are locked in basically. Um there's one exception which we call interrogation dialogues because it didn't make any sense for the player to not ask all the questions if there's no like time limit to how long they can

talk to an NPC. Uh so instead of the dialogue becoming unavailable, the individual choices become like everyone has a bool and once that bool gets false, that choice is no longer available when you talk to the NPC again. But you you can't It's like that information recorded in a different system or is it literally like if you don't write it down on your little notebook or whatever then it's information's like gone. Well, there's always a log of all dialogues you had. Okay. And there's usually highlighted words, which is a feature you can turn off, but often times it helps people skim a dialogue again um in their log. That's kind of a big part of the gameplay that you reread, "Hey, wait a minute. This guy said something else from this guy." And then you compare their statements or whatever somebody told you PIN code for somewhere. You can just read that up again in that dialogue. Okay, that's smart. So instead of having the immersion breaker of going to the same person again and having to ask the same question is like you have just have a log of

all of the dialogues you had. Exactly. That's how you do it.
it We thought it was a good compromise because you also in detective games you have to be careful not to prompt the player too much with information, right? So we didn't want to just have a journal that automatically writes down what was important about this dialogue because that should be up to the player to find and identify what's really crucial for your case. I like that approach. That sounds very reasonable. So was that something you already did in Lacuna or was that something you innovated for um the new game? Uh no, it's it's in all our games. Okay. It's in Lacuna, Between Horizons, and in our third game as well. Yeah, we we thought about making like it easier or something but at the end of the day people didn't really complain about it. You feel detective-y if you reread the log and you're just like, "Wait, what did he say?" And it's it's fine. It essentially feels like you have like an audio recorder with you all the time and you uh can re-listen to the recording or

something like that. Exactly. We We don't even explain that like narratively. We We just like, "You're an investigator type and it's sort of a sci-fi world so everything's recorded, whatever." Uh which is honestly we already live in that world. Everything's recorded. Exactly. Uh it's not that much of a stretch. I don't know, do you want to engage in some general theory crafting about how to make a successful game? Is that something you think think about? Oh, for sure, yeah. Absolutely. What are your conclusions so far?
I think in nowadays like climate, it's good to make a game with a premise that is quick to explain to people. Oh, yeah.
Like, right? People don't have time to listen to you yap for a whole minute. Like, in the era of for you pages and short form content, your game better be a concise package with a name and a key art and a premise and a core loop that all work in conjunction in a way. I

think that's the main thing. The case of the murder. Exactly. No, I'm I'm not kidding. Like, our next game it's it we're not set on the title entirely yet. We have worked with a working title for a long time, but the key art is just going to be like like a big magnifying glass because every other detective game has that. Yes.
You like you have this magnifying glass and we redesigned our protagonist to have like a hat that looks like detective-y. Just the whole We made We made all the sprites. We were like, "No, like we got just going to put on the detective hat and the trench coat because it's a detective game." And then we have like on the key art we have like files flying about and like it's got like all mystery vibe. And I don't care like this is generic because the non-generic stuff you only get to experience when you actually play the game and all the character and personality and uniqueness we can put in the game. But like the character design, the key art design, the title, we try to streamline for marketability this time around.

That makes so much sense. Yeah, it's like the opposite of what we talked about earlier. That's where you don't want to be oddly specific. That's where you want to be uh generic on top.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think you can be oddly specific in a way that as long as the odd specificity is also quickly transported.
Sure. But from the perspective. Exactly. It's like why a frog, right? Like that's kind of oddly specific, but it also communicates so much about the premise.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. You also changed the capsule out for Between Horizons, I think. They were They were like one of your little regrets that you realized later on needed some changing. What What was the problem with the first one? The first one is just it just communicates sci-fi, which the title also communicates a little bit. Between Horizons, okay, maybe it's like sci-fi-y. And then the key art was also vaguely sci-fi-y. You see like people in generic space uniforms and this ring spaceship in the background. And it could be any like gameplay-wise could be

a could be a 4X game. It could be anything. So we were like, "Okay, we have to sort of bring the mystery more into the key art." So we had our protagonist hold up a flashlight and look off-screen into some unknown, right? And you have in the background you have these screens that like are like maybe some complex information or some We tried to convey that more. And we also just added a subtitle. We We did it with Lacuna too. We just said a sci-fi detective adventure because that's what people know. You know what? I think that your trailer for Thronefall is brilliant because it's just like it's just descriptive. It just tells people what they're going to do. Like nobody gives a that it's a mystery for the ages or what. Just in our game you go and solve cases. You get clues and you walk around and you talk to people about them and then you fill in the I feel like our next trailer is going I'm going to steal this. Uh it's going to be just like it's going to be we're going to do a cinematic trailer and we're going to be a descriptive trailer. And the descriptive trailer is going to be the first one where we just

tell you what you're going to do because people have this literacy and they know what they like. Um and if you just tell them Yeah, just explain it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it makes your life so much easier. And also what I found is that explaining the game in your trailer for- forces you to have a good structure for your trailer as well. It makes you show the correct things in the correct order because you like
um you basically show the footage in the same order in which you would explain it to a person. Yeah, even if they watch it even if they watch it without the sound, even if they don't get your voiceover, Yeah.
still kind of got the explanation because you still show the explain-y things in the same order. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. That's That's That's a good point. I didn't think about that.
I mean, you have do have to account for people watching it without sound though cuz a lot of people
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, I wanted to think that I want to say that I think it also serves as a sort of a lightning rod for bad reviews because you're so up-front about what the game is that people who don't like it will

also just not buy it. And that is kind of good. That's a Right? I think a demo also plays this role very well. I think you I think if we didn't have a demo out for our games they wouldn't be north of 90% positive, maybe. Because some people go in with the wrong expectations. I mean, a lot of people just buy it without playing the demo and then end up not liking it, maybe, and never review the game. But I think people who really are invested and want to know for sure, they just play the demo. And they are only going to buy and maybe review the game if they already like the demo. And all those others will just shelf it. And I think a trailer that's just super up-front and honest about it will exactly not just address the right people, but also shoo the people away who are not going to enjoy it. Yes. Which is something you actually do want to do, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
For For Thronefall, we had the problem that people assumed we're like a classical RTS game where you can place

buildings wherever you want. Yeah. So most of our negative reviews are just people complaining about the fact that they can't place their buildings wherever.
But you say it in the trailer, right? Sure, we say it We say it in the We say it in the We say it in the in the descriptions on Yeah. I think Chris from How to Market a Game already explored this when he uh did this case study on watching people shop for games on Steam and he was like, "People
with an with an eye tracking Yeah, people watch it like a watch a couple of seconds from the trailer and they look at your screenshots and that's how they make your decision. They I don't read anything. It's like Yeah. That's what I meant earlier when I said I think people look at a lot of stuff that's kind of not the first thing we think about. It's like, "Oh, it's similar to these three games that I like that a friend recommended it." And maybe from the screenshots they try to glean from the UI if it's the type of gameplay they like. Uh but that's pretty much it. Like who sits down and watches two minutes of trailer? I think the people who are engaged enough to do that or play the

demo, for those people it's great that you have a very clear Yes.
way of communicating what the experience is.
Yeah, people appreciate that up-front honesty when they go look for it cuz that's when they want it. Yeah. Exactly. And those are the people who are invested enough to write a review, too. Yeah. Like they have enough time on their hands to watch a trailer, they'll have enough time on their hands to write a review. Yeah, good point. On how to make a successful indie game then. So you One thing we kind of got out of this is you want to make sure maybe that your screenshots do a good job at communicating what your game is also. Like that seems rather important for making sure the correct people download the game. Right? Yeah, for sure. Especially the first four on Steam that you see when you like have the game in a carousel cell or when you hover and preview it, there's four screenshots. And I think that those should show off the core experience and at the same time maybe a little bit of variety already. They don't look all the same. They're not too small in the preview window. So ideally it's not super zoomed out. I

think there's a lot of rules to good screenshots and especially the first four. Mhm. Yeah, it's a an art in itself to get those right. You want them also you want all four of these to look very uh friends-y so that it looks like a
lot of variety and so
Exactly. But at the same time communicate the experience. And there's so much contradicting goals that it's really difficult to juggle because on the one side you as we mentioned earlier, you kind of want to make things like unique. You want them to be a bit oddly specific. But then at the same time you want people to instantly know what's going on in your screenshots. So it's um difficult line to work work for sure. I I think the way I think the way games do it is by making the oddly unique thing, like I said, easy to understand. Like look at No, I'm Not a Human. It's a clunky title, but it's like this dude looking at you that looks kind of strange in the key art. The title is No,

I'm Not a Human. It is catchy and weird and unique, but also this is the core gameplay. It's like, "Oh, you have to like figure out if you trust people, if they're humans, if you let them in or not." Mhm. And even though it's oddly specific, it is also quite easy to understand. I don't think it's necessarily contradictory. Just have to be pretty good at it. Yeah. And it's it's something you probably do need to design for a bit. Um or get lucky that your game just um fulfills that criteria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to tell you right now our our games that we have planned now already kind of failed at a little bit. Like they're not completely streamlined with that in mind, but definitely more so than Between Horizons. So I think it's it's them also a good way to have a game be successful is to make a really good game. Yes. Yes, I agree. But also I think knowing these things

and like thinking about which screenshots are they going to be on the start page, which expectations are going to people have, thinking about that rather earlier than later, I think, is a good idea. And even if your game isn't like set up perfectly for this, if you realize this early enough, maybe you can at the very least uh specifically design a couple of scenes in your game to explain the gameplay. Yeah. Or even if you're it's like, ah damn it, my game kind of doesn't explain itself very well, maybe you can make things a bit better by having specifically making some scenes in your game to serve that specific purpose. Absolutely. Absolutely. We we are actually thinking about like trailer scenes also because our games are super talky and static. So, we need to have some action that we can cut into the trailer. So, basically you see at least half the action scenes from our games in the trailer just because something's in motion and the trailer isn't boring

this way. Even we absolutely wear on our sleeve that it's a narrative game, there's a lot of thinking, a lot of talking and reading. People know this. But having a trailer of just reading and people talking just doesn't work even for this type of game. So, we have to have like a minimum amount of action scenes that just look dynamic to cut them together if only for the trailer. That's so true. A lot of games struggle from this also. This is not just a common issue with narrative games, also like card games or like all games with static screens have this problem where it's like how do you how do you make a dynamic trailer when you have a a static screen that not much motion is happening on is like very difficult. Yeah. And for those types of games, specifically planning for your trailer scenes, I think it's a very smart idea. I think that's a good idea that you're doing that. We have to. We have to. I mean, you can make like I think the trailers for the case of the

Golden Idol are quite good. Their problem is that they have extremely static scenes that have very little animation and they just like just zoom across the UI and cut it to the You can make even UI look kind of interesting if if you have a if you have a good hand for this type of thing, but it is a uphill battle for sure with this type of game. Mhm. All right. So, what else do you need to make your game a big hit? Uh commercially uh I would say it helps if the game doesn't have to make a million euros back in the first place to be a commercial hit, right? If your game cost 50,000 and you made 100,000, that's good. So, if you have a smaller budget to begin with, then you have a higher likelihood of having a commercial success on your hands. So, I think making smaller games, scoping smaller, not moving across five years of sunken cost fallacy really helps

getting concepts out early, testing early with people, being honest about what sticks and what just doesn't work even if you liked it. This type of thing I mean, makes good games, but also makes commercially successful games. Is three to four people just the general sweet spot for indie teams or do you think it's hard to generalize? While it is hard to generalize, it is a good sweet spot for our type of games that we're working on now and also I think, and this is my hot take, mid-size teams are struggling in particular at the moment. If you have like 10 to 30 people, your burn rate is really really high, but what you said earlier, when you said you think um when you put more effort into a game, it will sell more units, then you are sorely mistaken, right? So, when you think of breakout successes, they aren't

good games because 20 people worked on them. They are good games because they are good games and people generally don't care if you had to spend five years and 10 million euros to make it because at the end of the day the things that make games good are not tied to the budget and I really think that a small team has a much higher chance because there's like less overhead and less design by committee and less money going around to do something that goes beyond expectations for the small amount of money that went into it than a mid-size team. I mean, and then of course there's like double A upwards. I think they have other ways of monetizing their games with like live service content and skins and what have you and I think that is that is a whole different world, but as an indie um especially nowadays when competition is fierce, people are pumping out quality games everywhere and you see

them fail and you're like, holy like this has really good production value and it it it like Yeah. it like drowned at like 50 reviews. You have to really think twice about throwing a million euros at a concept. So, I think small games, at least in the current climate, and small teams are a good way to weather the storm.
Yeah. I've never really done the math on this. Like what's what's the rough cost you would expect for a person on your team per year? Maybe something like 40,000 euros, 30,000 or what's like the the rough range? Oh. In your estimate, it's not specifically for your company, but what would you say would would be a reasonable number to calculate with? Well, even if you don't pay yourself well, like even if you have like paying your your team a junior salary, everybody gets like 2 and 1/2 thousand euros gross, that costs your company much more than that. Costs over 3,000. That means

the salaries for three people are around 10,000 a month, right? Um so for a 10,000 100,000 20,000 Yeah. For a year of production, you pay around 120,000 and you haven't paid for an office or a Unity license or a Photoshop license or or anything. You haven't paid for your accountant, for your for your yearly tax statements. You haven't paid for right? So, 150k for a three-person studio per year is pretty normal. So, if you work on a game for three years, uh you're going to be out of half a million and you haven't even paid for QA, you haven't paid for localization, you haven't paid for marketing. So, you haven't paid for any freelancers. So, if you need tech art and you don't have that on your team, if you need concept art and you don't have that on your team, that's going to cost you extra. So, I think a three-year production on a team of three people costs half a million euros. That's wild. Yeah. So, and obviously

like making half a million on a game is difficult, but if you 3x that team size, then Yeah. uh it's a different calculation. But there's one rule you should never do math on on video. We broke that rule. There will probably I'll probably in the edit find out that we uh made some math mistakes here, but I do a lot of this math because I'm the business guy at our office at our company. So, that's the unfortunate reality. I mean, also Do we calculate with 10 people or with three people though? Like That was that was three people. Three people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. So, one person's like three at least 3,000 and then 3 * 3 is like 10,000 per month. Yeah, like 120,000. Yeah, okay. Yeah. That's wild. That sounds That sounds so expensive. Half a million for three people for three years, that's wild. That's why I specified earlier when I said that your auto audience is literate in a way because they are literate in the way

that they know what kind of games they like, but they don't really know what goes into making a game. They don't know what it costs, they don't know how much work it is. And I I think a lot of people would be extremely surprised at the budgets of even the smallest productions because uh if it's your livelihood and you're like your full-time job and you have to like pay for stuff, then the salaries just blow up the budget immediately. It's like 95% of your expenses. And in a country like Germany where I mean, thankfully we have, you know, good health care system and all, but that is very expensive too. Um and we have a quite high tax burden as a as a Unternehmergesellschaft, the type of company that we are, we pay like over 30% of of our income incoming money.
Or Steam takes another 30%. Yeah, that's the other thing. The the amount of units you have to sell in order to break even is is crazy when you think about, you know, discounts, regional pricing, refunds, credit card fees,

Steam cut, all that type of thing that that goes away. When I calculate this type of thing, I usually go with like 35% of the sale price Mhm. ends up reaching us. Mhm. And then, you know, oftentimes you split that with a publisher and they get 70% of those 35%. So, you make pennies on the dollar for every unit sold on average.
Yeah, the the 30% I can plus one that rule. That's roughly the the rule of thumb that we arrived at as well.
Yeah. Independently of you, so confirming that. Like if somebody buys a game for 1 euro on Steam, then 30 cents end up on our bank accounts and in the case of uh Grizzly Games, that would be 15 for each cuz we're two people at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this this type of math makes you realize makes you think twice about committing to a project that takes so long, especially when it's not

proven. I I think you're also someone who who really appreciates the iterative nature of arriving at a good formula that is worth your time and you know testing it early and honestly axing stuff before it cost you a bunch of money. So, yeah. That's a good point. A big part of making a commercially successful game is to keep your costs in control as well cuz the the bar for how successful your game has to be rises with uh with what you spend on it. Exactly. Yeah, you're commercially successful if you break even and then some. If that's your definition, then don't make it so hard to break even. Yeah. So, that's why it's like extra important to focus on that core of the experience and uh not have not have any fluff cuz it'll basically a win-win. It makes your game better. It makes your game easier to understand, but it also makes your game cheaper. So, it's like a double win.

Exactly. Exactly. Just focus on the thing that makes it good and people will appreciate that and you won't have to spend money on all the other stuff. That checks out. Anything anything else? What what do you need to make a successful game?
This is going to this is probably going to get me some hate. Um but in terms of your team composition, of course, it's kind of you have to really decide if if you are able to work with people who aren't already seniors themselves, right? Um there's this meme going around about like who wants juniors to have jobs and then who wants to train these juniors and everybody lowers their hands, right? So, um we adopted a policy that we just not taking any interns anymore, even though I really like like like sharing resource and then onboarding people and then giving people excitement for the thing and sharing wisdom and everything. But at the end of the day, a three-person team of really

like experienced people is madly efficient and um and in the past we sometimes brought people on uh who we couldn't dedicate the necessary resources to to help them uh through the processes and onboard them properly and all that stuff. I I really think that that I mean I I definitely don't want to pull the ladder up behind me, but since we are already struggling, right? Um we uh we don't really have the time to to uh hire juniors or train interns and any of that stuff. And I mean, one way to become more knowledgeable is just to do your own thing that I would encourage everyone to do to some extent. I mean, of course, you can't immediately live off your own thing. It's taken a many years for me, too. Um but at the end of the day, that was also a learning. Like really be selective who you work with, who you who is your subcontractors, who

you hire especially. It sucks, but it's it is also a big consideration.
Yeah. And I mean, I I also have an opinion on this. I'm like people typically like to work with people who are as talented as as talented as them or more talented in in in the teams, right? So, it's like it makes the most sense to team up with people who are either as skilled as you or who are more skilled than you. So, it makes sense that if you have made a bunch of successful games, it's not like I get about lots and lots of emails of people who are like, "Hey, I want to team up with with you." And I'm like maybe not. And that's you can look at that like it's like pulling the ladder up behind you or whatever you said, but I don't really see it that way. It's like the best thing you can do to find better teammates is to keep improving your own skills. And I think luckily in the in the indie space, you can do that

quite easily by working on your own stuff and like earning your own skills and that will give you access to other more talented people. Like that it's just the way it works. The more talented you are, the more you'll attract other talented to people who are now work with you then. I I completely agree. It's it's very accessible nowadays to just screw around with whatever tool of your choice and and just just go at it. That's that would also be my advice to anyone starting out. Just like do the thing. Like nothing trains you better at doing the thing than doing the thing. Like not even learning anything abstract. The like if you want to learn programming for games, try to program games. That's right? There's also learning that we've had with people who have good qualifications um and might be better like a better programmer than me, for example, and know more about programming and more more concepts and might even have a degree. At the end of the day, having shipped a few games, you kind of have a better grasp on

what's important about like what can be just held together by some duct tape and a prayer and where it doesn't really matter if it's clean code or not uh because the gamers won't care. If it's not player-facing and it kind of does the thing, then it's good enough. And if you don't have this like academic mindset, a more pragmatic one, that just comes with experience. Even if people have good qualifications and are very intelligent and very good programmers, um having 10 years of of game development experience is just gives you other things. Right. So, you That's what I also agree to. You want to practice exactly what you want to get better at, right? If you Yes. practice something slightly related, of course, there's knowledge and wisdom that transfers over, but a lot of it also doesn't. Like if you're very if you're like a software programmer or something, there are obviously skills you can use in games, but maybe you'll tend to over-engineer

things that dirty code would just would just find, right? So, yeah. And sometimes it's even just knowing that the engine can do that stuff for you. We've had We've had games where we like for one reason or another joined the code base later and we're like, "Why did they write this weird loader or management system or whatever? Like just use the thing that Unity does already." It's so much wasted time to write a feature that is just already in the engine. Man, that's knowing what's possible is becoming such a crucial skill. Yeah.
And and even more even more so now because um you can literally ask an LLM to code something for you, but only if you know that it's possible and if you know that it exists. So, like knowing what's possible is is the biggest thing you kind of need to wrap your head around and like
Yeah, absolutely. I also have like um I co- code with cursor sometimes, which uh

you know, it's like a AI writing code for you and I I feel that it does better in areas where I already know exactly what I want and I know how I want the implementation to be and I know the exact words for the things. And then it actually does a pretty good job.
Exactly. But if you're like, "I want the save system to work. Make it work." And if you're like too vague about it, like that's not going to work, man. Exactly. Yeah. But if you know what's possible, if you know the correct words for it, if you even kind of know what architecture you want to have for it under the hood and you explain that, it it's in it's crazy. It's such a time saver also, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you you develop meta knowledge of what AI is good for and what it can't do in in the experience with that. Like, for example, I found that when it comes to like editor scripting and tools, AI is pretty good. Like those are things that it does

just does for us at this point. Um but there are other things I would never let it like let the AI touch because it would just mess it up and go in circles and fantasize weird in my experience. Yeah, that's true. I'm one more coming to the conclusion that knowing what's possible is such a crucial part of the of the wisdom that you acquire in in any discipline. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's just often times something you just have to learn over time. It's it's rarely taught. Like just that's why just making games is the best way to get better at making games. And exactly what you said happens so often that you write a custom thing and then you find out there's a built-in solution for it or there's somebody who wrote like a very good plug-in that like everybody in the industry uses, but that you didn't know about. Like Yeah. For example, I think a lot of people use Rewired for input in Unity because it's like just better than the

Unity input system, stuff like that. It's like you got to know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or Lacuna was ported by an external studio and they just plugged in Rewired. And we're like, "What was that?" Right? Yeah. And but that's just like you said, that's just something you learn at some point because somebody mentions it or does it in another project. And you're like, "Oh that's cool."
Let me quickly finish scrolling through your article here. Mhm. Focus on your strengths. That's obviously all the good advice for making successful games. So, lean into your strengths. Yeah. It's how we ended up making narrative games because both my co-founder and I have a background in literature. So, I have a master's degree in comparative literature and she has a doctorate. So, we were like the like we're probably good at yapping. We're just going to like write a lot of texts. We're not going to make a physics-based game because we're bad at math. So, I mean, you don't need to be that good at math. Like engine does most things for you, right? Yeah, maybe. We we ventured in that area

yet, and we might never because it's just so far like across the spectrum from where where we are getting slowly getting good at now. What's your opinion on on marketing? Does it Does it even play a role or is it mostly the game anyway? So, I think there was like a time when people were all saying like this basic the common sense advice like oh game developers they always just make the game and then they don't market it and they forget it. That was like a few years ago. I remember this going around a lot and then they don't think about it early enough and they don't launch their sales pages early enough to farm wish list and build hype and whatever. And everybody had an opinion on that and I feel like that is true to an extent, but nowadays it's also my impression that a lot of people do marketing and still don't have any success. Like they they try to get the word out all the time. They post about it. They have social

media managers or they are themselves publishers or PR agencies, marketing agencies and they have projects under their belt that end up dying at 14 mixed reviews and I'm like what's up what's up with that? I thought marketing was so important and it's whole it's your whole gig, right? And I actually talked to a friend recently who basically had a similar experience with a PR and agency and they were like hey your marketing doesn't convert to wish list at all. Like not even not withstanding that wish list might not even convert to sales, but like pre-launch wish list is like your one metric that kind of shows you how the launch might go and they were like you guys you marketing is not doing anything, right? And and they also didn't like in German we say they also were just cooking with water, right? So, they were just like yeah, I don't know like do an Instagram post maybe do

like a mailing list. I don't know like all our campaigns are not working at all at the moment and I think that's a shift for multiple reasons. One is that we have a over abundance of games coming out. The number is super big especially post COVID during COVID everybody had money to throw around. Bunch of productions were being funded. They're all flooding the market now. People's access to tools and the quality that some people can just make alone at home is super high. So, we have a lot of high quality stuff coming out and not standing a chance. Um And I also think that the shift to like for you pages has changed the landscape a lot because you don't really build followings anymore the way you did. Even if you have a big following, they might never see your stuff. Like I swear that a lot of people the last time I saw them is when I hit the follow button on their And that that was like a year ago. Yeah, because the algorithm that who goes on the following page? You will go

on the for you page and you just like get served up stuff and then and then maybe you have 10 million views on that one video, but you have 200 followers out of that. And and who closes Tik Tok and then goes to wish list a game? I feel like it can happen. It can work well for some people if you go super viral, then you have like a critical mass that that enough like that 1% of all people is 1,000 wish list. So, that's really cool. But at the end of the day, I feel like it's harder to cultivate a fan base with this type and everybody jumped on the train, right? Instagram is a for you page now basically just a worse one. And I think that this is harder to build and cultivate a fan base that actually recommends your game to other people because they might never see you again when they follow you. And most people who do see you don't even follow you, which is a blessing and a curse. So, I think the rules have just changed a lot. If you know how the new landscape works, I think doing good marketing

isn't rocket science. I think if you know how to like quickly hook an audience. If you know how the editing works, you know, you have the subtitles with the individually highlighted words with for people who watch without sound or for people who just like something moving on the screen. You have very quick hook and you know the types of hooks. Like you start out with a sort of blatant untruth or with a very provocative question or just frame it in such a way that people want to watch the end. If you just start put a finger down if you and then you talk for 2 minutes, right? And people just want to know. You know, you have these like weird hooks that work well on the on the for you pages. But I'm kind of haven't jumped on that yet because I'm kind of I often feel disingenuous and I don't like it and I want people to like the stuff that we do for the stuff that it is. Um but it's probably wise. I mean

that can also work, but that's also why why I personally have the feeling that the marketing nowadays depends more than ever just on the game itself cuz if if you have a game that's easy to understand and marketable then it automatically works better on for you pages and for you pages and algorithms is where the the visibility comes from nowadays, right? 100% and if you have like don't be shy to just put that premise into every video at the start. Chances that people go over your page and watch every video and are like infinitely low. So, the higher chance is that whoever sees your video sees something from you for the first time. So, just put the thing at the top. Say we're making a game about whatever the This is your first sentence and it's like that's the same for all videos because you have to pick up people who never even heard of you and might never see you again. And if you have a game that

lends itself to that that is really good. And if you don't, it's an uphill battle. I think you can still use all these tricks, but another thing that kind of works in an era where everybody tries to market to you is like authenticity and rawness and like scruffiness in a way where when it's not polished, it's actually kind of going to keep people sticking around. Like if you sit in your car and rant to your phone camera about the games industry I'm pretty sure 160,000 people might like it, but if you just post your cinematic trailer in vertical people feel marketed to. They will just not care. Yeah, sure. And you need you got to need to you need the correct personality for some of these things. Like for some people you can listen for them rant in their car for hours and for some of it it's just like not really that interesting. It's like it depends a lot on which possibilities you have, yeah. I agree, but I also

think that that's nothing that a publisher or a marketing or PR agency will ever provide to you. They don't have the guy that rants into the phone. It has to be like something personal from the developers. And you're lucky if if somebody on your team is that or you can hire someone to be that, but I think the type of like clean cut marketing with a marketing plan and beats and how to build up the hype and leak stuff and reveal stuff and then post all this cookie cutter like engagement bait or which one is your favorite design I think that's just on the way out and I think paying people for that is not worth it. Yeah, I think there's one thing that I think might still be worth paying for and that is like content creator outreach. If you have someone who is like very good at content creator outreach and already has some good contacts and so on. I think that's something that's potentially worth it because that feeds into the creator economy and into the

algorithms in a way. Yeah. Yeah, and content creators they often try to have their own viral moments, right? If you have a game especially like lately this like friend slop titles, you know, like Lethal Company or Peak, they are just meant to be to have viral moments and and content creators go viral themselves and they play these games in the hopes of having a good clip that's going to do numbers on Tik Tok to increase their own following. So, you basically can leverage that. And but that's only if you make a game that is good good for this type of content, which we really don't. Yeah, that's also a problem you have with story based games that they're more difficult on for you pages, right? Oh, for sure. You have like look we made new text boxes today. Fantastic. Yeah, it's like trust me, bro. Like if I were if you stayed on this page for half an hour and I explained the whole premise to you and what the characters' motivations are,

you would be so hooked. How do you convey this? You got to get them with a setting. So, the first sentence would be something we're making a detective game in a sci-fi world where cats have conquered space or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, honestly. That's that's definitely much easier than the narrative from premise. I just want to add because you said creator outreach. Um there are like tools and platforms and services for that for you to do it yourself which is something we're more likely to try out than pay some agency to do that. Like you know, that where they have like oh there are people who plays games that are tagged similarly to yours in our database and they're this and that big and they facilitate aggregating content creators who might be interesting for you and facilitate reaching out and managing the keys and

all that stuff. I think that's actually more interesting than having someone else do that. Yes, there are different tools like that. For example, one that used to be quite popular is Keymailer, right? Stuff like that, but I think there are uh better solutions now and I think the the solutions that are kind of better now are just like data mined databases of actual um streamers and content creators and you just reach out via their normal email. I think that's Yeah. That's the way to go. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's interesting. I think we were like from the conversation we had here, it feels like we're quite aligned on on how we think about making games. It was quite interesting to to find out that even though we haven't really talked before, we have a lot of very similar opinions or arrived at a lot of very similar opinions. Yeah, it's interesting to see. I agree and even though we make very

different games. Yes. I I think the things are that are true about making a good game are kind of universal. Yeah. I even I even agreed even agreed with the with the best game design award. I was like, "No, no, no, Thronefall deserves it." Because I was very surprised to because this was the one time we met before was when we were both nominated for best game design and I thought I was very vindicated that we got a nomination at the Deutscher Computerspielpreis because I thought "Oh my god, like I'm so glad the jury recognizes that it's like a and a half to write the logic for open-ended detective gameplay in like a semi-open world." But at the same time, it's not uh it's like a narrative-driven game at the end of the day, right? It's not really an obvious candidate for this award. So, I never expected to win and I didn't even think about what to say because I was so sure that Thronefall would win. I didn't really expect it to,

really? No, I was a pleasant surprise, I would say. Did you think about like "Oh god, I got to thank this and that person" or something? No. [Laughter] Also, Paul we we agreed if something happens, Paul just does the talking, so I was chilling. Yeah. Okay, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Is there anything we should plug? I'll obviously put a bunch of links in the description, right? Also to the Kickstarter when that goes live and so on. Oh yeah. Anything else you want to shout out? I want to shout out to maybe follow us so you can hear about the new things. One thing that we already have live on Steam right now is the game that we're publishing. It's called The Great Sutsana Ellie. Mhm. Um it's a super unique uh very cool game also for people who are in that niche, who like narrative games and who like a good story and reading and tough choices, that's type of deal. Um and you can follow our socials at Digitals Interactive. We're on Instagram as our main platform right

now. We quit Twitter. We're kind of new on Blue Sky where we have almost no following, but you can join us there. We have a Discord server. If you go to digitals.games, our website, this is where all the socials are linked. Um and there's also the the postmortem that we've been talking about, right? This article that I wrote sometimes I I vent on our website.
Digitals blog, yeah. Nice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. At dot games, it's one of those obscure domain endings. Oh, I almost forgot, Unburied is the name of the Kickstarter, but it it's going to be a while till that goes live. Got it. Nice. Yeah, cool. I'll put that all in the description and
Thank you very much. So, what I was going to say, thank you very much for your time. It was a fun chat.