You (Probably) Can't Trust Game Dev Formulas

The thing that I've noticed with my gamedev career so far, which is kind of counterintuitive and weird, is that the longer I do it, I'm clearly getting better at it, like I feel more comfortable. I feel like a more professional developer, but my understanding of what works [music] and my theories of what makes a successful game is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier.
This is a conversation with my dear game deer friend and former colleague Fredman Almura. We made islanders at university together. After that, he developed some other fantastic games such as Pizza Possome in a different team configuration. He then solo developed Summer House, quite a hit. And he recently released a game called Slots and Daggers, also very very successful release. It's a slot machine rogike. If someone asks me now how to make a successful game, I find it so difficult to answer, especially compared to we were so arrogant when we were like [laughter] making the first crazy game stuff. I felt like I had figured out or at least like I knew some way of making good

games and I felt like I could have given more precise advice on how to make good games probably 5 to 10 years ago compared to now because I know Freedman so well. This conversation really allows us to dive deep and talk about some topics that might otherwise be maybe a bit more difficult to talk about. the foundation of my theory for how to make a successful game is actually to a large degree built on I think on your early beliefs because when I joined Grizzly Games right when I joined you and Paul you had like this existing theory there was a lot about appeal actually like my my initial ideas about appeal I think came from from your early ideas about appeal do you think do you still think about appeal in a similar way do you think like that's a deciding factor in what makes for a successful game or has that also loosened up a bit?
No, definitely like this whole appeal thing. I think a lot of the things that that we talked about with Grizzly games

about appeal and player fantasies and all of the things that you still mention regularly, I think about all of them.
Just my approach to how to create them has become I think maybe more intuition based. I still think a lot about appeal and like what appeal is like how do you get because I guess the the the formula of yours that I like the most is the success of a game is basically appeal times retention. I think you said that at some point like how good are you at drawing people in? And then once they're in, how good are you at keeping them, giving them a good experience, making them enjoy their time, maybe write a positive review, stuff like that. I think that's quite a succinct way of putting it. Like you need to create interest and then you need to deliver on that intrigue that you created in the first place. But that's the longer I'm looking at that formula, the more I'm like, "Oh Jesus, that's a lot of moving parts [laughter] that you can factor into that." Right? So, it's

like a little bit like the advice of saying just make a good game, but then when you good when you look closer, it's like what what what the freak does that even actually mean?
What is a good game? Exactly. [laughter] Exactly. It feels a little bit like we're telling people make a good game that looks good at first sight and then I'm like, yeah, right. What?
Okay. Thank you. [laughter]
Thanks. What's that supposed to do for me? So, um, yeah, I guess there I'm maybe what is happening is the longer you make games, the more ways you find of approaching this,
you know, like intrigue. I think when we started making stuff with Islanders at university, h not with Islanders, with Grizzly Games at university, my appeal model of how to make a game that people want to play was largely based on visuals. I just thought, okay, just make it look really, really visually appealing. give it like that minimalist aesthetic that was really trendy at the time also I think you know like low poly

with saturated nice colors um and then the longer you make games and the longer you play games of other people and the longer you're part of the gamedev community you realize wow there are so many people who are so infinitely creative at creating appeal in different ways it doesn't have to be the visuals it can be the fantasy it can be the mechanic it can be a setting that's really really Cool. There's like so many ways. Um, yeah. And the longer I look at all of those, the less I feel like I can confidently say, "Okay, here's how you do it. Here's how I approach it." I Yeah. Just becomes a bigger and bigger collection of potential approaches.
Mhm. Yeah. It's a it's a similar like especially since I started making this podcast and talked to started talking to more developers, I'm like uh becoming a bit more humble as well because it's like you see so many different approaches and all the different approaches that are working that's like

what what can you even say to someone who's like um I want to start making games.
Sure. But like if somebody came to you and asked you, I want to make a successful game. What would you tell them nowadays?
Yeah. I So what I would tell I think the first thing that I still believe is really really true is make something small.
Like pick a project that feels almost too small in the beginning. Something where you feel like it's so ridiculously underscoped. You should
you should have this feeling of, oh, this is going to be easy.
Because it's not going to be easy. You know, when you when you're sitting at home and you're thinking about your new game idea under the shower, you've got this amazing idea for a slot machine game and you think, "Oh, this is going to be so easy. I'm going to be able to make this in 6 weeks." That's the feeling you should be looking for, especially in the beginning because you're not going to be able to do it in 6 weeks. It's going to take way longer. So, I think that's the first one. Find something simple. Find something that feels almost underscoped. And then, I

guess, yeah, think really hard about how do you create appeal? How are you going to draw people in when they look at this game for the first time? That's something that I still just spend ages thinking about before I settle on a game. And I think lately I've my personal reply to it has become more intuition and taste based. But I think if someone is just starting out with making games, it might be good to just gather references, look at other stuff. like look at a lot of games, see what speaks to you. What do you connect with and then see how you can put a twist on it? Cuz I feel like that's the point, isn't it? Like when I'm scrolling Steam or when I'm on Twitter and I'm looking at other game dev's feeds and stuff like that, the thing that makes me connect with things is always when it has this tiny little edge where you're like, "Ah, this is this is a fresh take on whatever on this visual style, on this kind of gameplay formula, on this type of setting." So, whatever it is that gives you that

edge, really, really look for that. I think that's important. That's the thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about when I'm in this phase of like, okay, a project is done. I'm thinking about what's the new project. I think how can I make something that's going to stand out enough to intrigue people but be familiar enough to not alienate them.
Right. So, this familiarity scale of being familiar but not too familiar.
Yeah.
Mhm. I think you know like recently listened to your episode with Filomina on on Dungeon CLA and she said something that really connected with me about how slots and daggers went cuz she basically said
deck builder rogue likes everyone knows what that is now
but no one had made one before that was with this with this claw machine. What are they called? Claw
called claw machines.
Claw machine claw what's the game exactly?
Yeah. Um, and that's when I started making slots and daggers. That's what I

felt like. I was like, "Okay, I want to make a fantasy deck builder rogike thing, but combine it with a slot machine." Because there were slot machine games out there. There were fantasy deck building games out there, but I felt like in this specific combination, I hadn't seen it done in a way that felt Yeah. satisfying to me.
Mhm. But is there there's clearly a difference between like pointless innovation and like useful meaningful innovation, right? So for example, I can could also take the rog like formula and make a completely pointless innovation to it and be like um the hook I or the twist I put on it is you're toilet man and you have laser eyes. I don't know. This is already this already good again because so bad that it's good again. But I guess
may maybe this is how we find out that there isn't pointless innovation. You just [laughter]
I no let me let me give a different example. For example, I was doing some consulting for a team that made a

Survivor Slike game, like a vampire survivors like game. And the twist they put on the game was that they had a very complicated progression system that really like has a lot of complexity in allowing you to customize your attacks. And the question I was wondering about there is is that the type of innovation that um this genre asks for, right? Because the genre is very fundamentally about
simplicity. Yeah.
So does it make sense to innovate in a way that makes it more complex? You could argue maybe
but I feel like there are some directions where it doesn't make as much sense as others, right?
That's 100% true. I agree with that. I think maybe a good way of approaching it is like look for things that work. Look for things that have been proven independently and then combine them. You know, like in the in the slot machine example with slots and daggers, I feel like slot machines have been proven to work quite well. like they're really

addictive in quite a toxic way, [laughter]
but I feel like even if you, you know, if you take the real money and you take the the toxic addicting mechanics out of it, um, it's still fun to press around on a slot machine that most people find that satisfying and a fantasy deck builder that's been proven to work. So, I think that might be a good approach to look for things that have independently worked well. And when you think about them, they match somehow.
Then you can
Yeah. Once someone says to you a fantasy deck builder slot machine game, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that might make sense. That might be a cool idea." And then combine those. I guess the thing like I guess you just can't take common sense out of it, can you? There isn't a formula where you can Why is the toilet king with the laser eyes bad? I don't know if we can calculate [laughter] that,

but if you're a good creative, I you should be able to tell the difference, right?
That's sort of the satisfying to me. That's part of the satisfying work of creativity also that it isn't 100% formulaic. you every time I try to like fully drill down and find a perfect mathable quantifiable formula, I feel like I'm I'm sort of running into a dead end.
You know what I mean?
You can always be like, but in this in this case, it's not true. And then it's like you have to water down, you have to keep watering down your rules till till they become a bit meaningless almost. I think this is I think this is actually getting exactly to the point of why I find it harder and harder to give advice because I feel like either you make very specific rules and then you're just explaining this one very narrow phenomenon that you're seeing. You know, you can I think after something has succeeded, you can go and make a very specific explanation of why it has succeeded. But then it becomes kind of

difficult to apply it to other things because you've just in this very specific case explained okay why for example slots and daggers or islanders why were these games successful but that might not apply to the next slot machine game or the next city builder or the next whatever thing. So you either make these very specific things or I find myself making these broad theories which then often become so broad that I'm like what am I actually even explaining here? Like
I'm ending up saying make a good game that works.
And I feel like in in between those two extremes I'm I'm finding it harder and harder to find to find really solid advice. And more and more I'm thinking you need to you need to think about this stuff and look at it and test it and figure it out and trust your intuition. Build your intuition like develop your intuition. You know sometimes when we when we talk about creative theory we forget that creative work is not

completely formulaic. So it's almost maybe maybe it is formulaic but the formulas and rules behind it are so complicated that you cannot formulate them simply in like language or something. You basically you have to to you have to train your brain to understand the like the complex rules and that is what you call intuition or taste or something like that.
Yeah, I actually I actually think that puts it really well. I sometimes feel like if you follow all these rules perfectly, they're too many. It's too complicated. The system is too chaotic to to do it on a rulesbased level that you can explain on a podcast. We can definitely say helpful stuff here to people. We can give advice that's really helpful. I think talking about appeal, talking about like things that have worked for us and stuff and they will help hopefully shape someone's mental model. But I think this mental model has to always have quite a lot of space for for intuition, for gut feeling, for lived experience, for that sort of

stuff. That's I find myself valuing that higher and higher the longer I make games.
Right. But when you when we say gut feeling and intuition then I think some people might overshoot and interpret this as oh it's it's like completely luck or something like that. Do you think that game is to a large degree luck?
No, I think you can if you if you have a good process I think you can eliminate a lot of luck. Like definitely I think there's a lot of luck and privilege in how you get into a position where you even get to develop games and stuff. But if we if we put that aside, if you are able to make games, I think there's good processes that you can build to verify if your ideas work beforehand and then you can just like generate enough ideas until you end up with one that's successful. But how to generate that idea and like picking which of the 20 ideas you have under the shower is the correct one. I think there is still something sort of

like fuzzy. There's something hard to grasp in there to me at least.
And what would you say? What what are good ways to develop this intuition and taste so that my brain does spit out the correct ideas under the shower? Yeah, that's the that's the difficult question, isn't it? How do you how do you do that? I think a lot of it has to do with with consuming stuff, with looking at things, like being interested in games, being interested in art, being interested in culture, popular c whatever, like whatever fascinates you. I think if you spend a lot of time exposing yourself to things that speak to you, you refine your taste and your intuition and your ability to make those. Like I read this really interesting. It was I think the intro I think it was the prelude to a book by Cojima, the legendary game designer. And he said I think the book was a compilation of other books that he's read and recommends to people. And the

intro to the book was him saying that he I think every day or like at least multiple times a week he goes after work into a bookstore and he looks at the books and he tries to pick out different books takes them home and reads them and he sees this as an exercise in refining his intuition in picking a good book. So he like based on the limited information that he gets from the book like the cover design, the title of the book, the little blurb on the back reading it, he tries to make a gut decision on is this going to be like a hit book for me personally? Is this going to really speak to me or is it when I actually read it, is it going to be not as good as I hoped? And then he describes this as sort of the craft of refining his intuition. And he says that for his dayto-day where he has to make because he's directing a large team, he has to make like hundreds of these gut-based direction decisions. This is the kind of

work that helps him get better at that. And for him, it's a bookstore, but I feel like that can be anything. That can be music, like digging through, I don't know, record shops or Spotify playlist. It can be going to the cinema and like really connecting with films. me looking at photography exhibitions whatever but I think that's an important work for if you want to do creative if you want to do successful creative work I think it's important to refine this intuition so it surprisingly sounds very similar to how people talk about AI right it's kind of like you need you need good training data garbage in means garbage out right [laughter] if you want to train your own neural net to detect like good game ideas and develop good tests then you need good training data like if you maybe maybe that's a weird analogy. I'm not sure. [laughter]
I actually think it's Yeah, it feels

edgy somehow because of how of how opposed AI sometimes feels at the moment to
creatives being able to make a living. But I it's it's it's a good analogy like the training data that you put in when you're sitting there at your computer and you're making your game
the only thing that can come out is the sum of all of the things that you've put in and all the combinations between those. So yeah,
I think that's a good way of looking at it like improving your training data.
Do you see creativity as like um remixing process or do you see creativity as a creation process?
Remixing 100%. Okay, I I don't know if this is like scientifically true whatsoever, but my mental model of how creativity works is there's a million things in your brain and you can bash them together. And sometimes if what what [clears throat] feels like something truly creative, like a groundbreakingly new thing, is like a really fortunate combination of

two old things that make something seem very new. Or sometimes it's a combination of like five old things that make something new. But I truly like I deeply believe in this model of you can only combine things in your mind. You're not actually coming up with new stuff,
right? You can only combine a slot machine and a rogue like if you know what both of those things are, otherwise you can't have that idea.
Yeah. And then and then there's like these really creative people out there who don't think ooh deck building rogue like slot machine. They think I don't know how is concrete made [laughter] but how is concrete made in Japan for brutalist Japanese architecture and then how does that interfere with the manufacturing of speaker system and then they come up with these like wild and how does Mario Kart factor into that and then you get these like truly creative insane seeming ideas but I think they're still combinations of stuff they're just very out there combinations

right So like building taste is maybe could also be seen as like building your library of things that you can combine with other things maybe almost right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think like for me personally I find it more and more important to be able to make a judgment call on something I like being able when you look at a painting for example or when you look at a at a screenshot of a prototype that you're working on being able to decide whether you like it and then also being able to say why you like it and analyze like what's the thing that draws me to this [clears throat] you know cuz if you I feel like if you fill yourself with tons and tons of references but you don't have a good idea of am I actually drawn to these and why am I drawn to these? It can be it can like be a bit overwhelming. Whereas if you collect a lot of things that you deeply connect to, like a specific type of music and a specific type of visual, then you can go back in and combine those and it I think has a high chance of creating something unified that because you like all of

these things and the combination of them appeals to you, there's a high chance that other people who have a similar taste or have had similar experiences to you might also be drawn to that. What's your model? Actually, I'm I'm interested. Do you think creativity is creation or combination?
No, I I also think it's remixing. I agree to your take. I think you you put it quite well.
Yeah.
Right.
It's kind of this is very much the nerdy nerdy interpretation of this, right? But what what you're saying is almost a little bit like the difference between feeding your brain labeled versus unlabeled data. So you want to like when consuming stuff, you want to immediately label it as do I like this? were not like it and why so that your brain can better make sense of it and better combine it with other things almost
putting little putting little tags on the images in the reference gallery.
You want to tag you want [laughter] to tag all of the incoming information so that more easily accessible.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good way of looking at it. [laughter]
Yeah. I I was almost worried you were going to go in the direction you want to be able to judge stuff immediately and like you should be able to judge people at first glance.
Yeah, [laughter] you need to be able to judge a book by its cover famously. That's [laughter]
Yeah, very good for a sec.
No, I think I think just being able to to make judgment calls and to make them also in like a slightly analytical way. I think that's an important skill that
Yeah, I think sometimes this sort of stuff doesn't get talked about enough in games because we spend so much time rightfully talking about like the technical aspects of game development and then we have developed like a huge language of talking about how to do marketing for games and how to sell games. You know, there's so much content about these two facets of it, tech and like marketing, sales type stuff,
but I think we sometimes I wish we had

more discourse or more content about how does the actual creative work happen? How does
like besides making something and validating whether it's commercially valid, how do you make something in the first place? How do you make the thing that you then validate.
Well, I'm not sure how you feel, but I very much feel like the conversation has started shifting a little bit because I feel like um more more developers are realizing I'm not sure, maybe I'm also part of of that shift. Or maybe it's just my bubble. I'm not entirely sure, but people I feel like are starting to notice that ideas are becoming more important. Maybe that's because execution is becoming easier and easier. So now we're once again shifting to okay the ideas actually do very much matter. So I think that that conversation definitely has started a lot more.
That's actually really true. Yeah, that's a good point about why this is happening.

Like it used there used to always be this saying like everyone has a million ideas for games. It's all about the execution. And I remember us at university talking about that quite a lot that it's so much more about execution than it is about the idea.
Yeah. And like you say like I guess also because we are at a later point in our career now where we don't struggle with the execution as much anymore. It becomes it comes around and it becomes so much more about the idea again like
Mhm.
if I execute this idea well is it going to really connect with people? Is it going to be something really satisfying or is it just going to be I don't know a slightly lame idea but very well executed. Maybe this is the correct point to like dive into the e both idea and execution of slots and daggers cuz um speaking of a [laughter] poor idea I I think both idea and execution are uh quite impressive. So we can we can talk about both of them individually. So was slots and daggers is a slot machine rogue like was that a was that like a shower idea or where did it come from?

It was actually a bit of a shower idea. Like the the initial point was I saw on Twitter I saw this gif some developer some other indie developer I can't remember who it is. I wish I could because I want to attribute it to them but I just can't. It was, you know, the gift with Anakin and Partner where they're talking to each other and I think she says he says to her, um, "The next hit indie game has released on Steam and she asks him, it's not just gambling with Extra Steps, is it?" And then he looks gloomy and then she says, "Is it?" [laughter] So, and for some reason that I saw that like ages ago. That was like right after Belladro took off and somehow it stuck with me because I think the GIF is meant to to like poke fun at that and it's seeing this trend in sort of a negative way but I remember seeing the meme and thinking that's not a negative thing at all. I think it's quite cool that you

can take these gambling things, remove the toxic aspect of of it's about real money and it like draws people in to like an unhealthy degree and turn them into these really interesting engaging games. So that's when I started thinking about, okay, what if you if you get more explicit about that? What? Because some of the some of the games that were coming out at the time, for example, Vampire Survivors to me feels a lot like a slot machine. Oh yeah.
Like the way the game works feels like a slot machine that's sort of hidden. Like not in a shameful way. There's nothing shameful about that. It's like very elegantly wrapped in this like monster fighting thing. And I started thinking about wouldn't it be cool to make a game where you don't hide it, where you just say it's an actual slot machine.
Mhm.
Just be upfront about the fact that you're making a casino type game.
Um yeah. So, I'd been carrying that idea around with me for a while and then I can't remember what the what the trigger was. Maybe I had seen I can't remember

what the timing was. Maybe I had seen the Clover Pit trailer, the announcement trailer, and I was like, "Oh my god, that's genius. Someone is doing it. Someone's making the slot machine game." Maybe it was them that inspired me to actually go and build a prototype um of yeah, something that combines a fantasy game, like a fantasy fighter with the slot machine thing. Why do we see so many gambling games? Like the the meme is it's very funny, but the reason why it's funny is because it's also so true. A lot of the hit games, a lot of the hit indie games are gambling with extra steps nowadays.
They are. They really are. It's like I've seen the term stats like recently
where essentially you're just playing a huge Google sheet or like an Excel sheet and you're slowly optimizing [laughter] different numbers in it. I don't know. It's I guess they're just wellestablished game loops. They're also aesthetically really pleasing. They have this appeal of it's sort of forbidden.
Mhm.
You know, you I guess everyone I at

least think it's a really cool fantasy to play roulette loads,
but obviously I don't because I don't go to the casino that much.
And it's been like pop culture has also really helped, hasn't it? Like James Bond playing what was it called? Casino Royale, stuff like that. It's It's quite a cool thing.
Mhm.
So, I guess it offers a lot of fertile ground for what we were talking about earlier. Take one thing that's worked really well, which for example is roulette, and combine it with something else that's worked really well, but it hasn't been combined yet.
And I guess once Batro had happened, everyone, it had been sort of validated that, okay, this is actually good to combine these two things. people really really want to play something that has the aesthetic of these casino type games, but it has the progression and the satisfaction and the mechanical loops of of a rogue like
Mhm. I think it's very interesting just the the nature of randomness, the fact that it's so addicting. Like I I

remember like we all made like prototypes that have some randomness like some procedural generation. Even in that, it's like so addicting to just click through the worlds and see like which worlds the generator spits out or something like that.
Yeah, that's true.
Makes randomness makes everything like a billion times more replayable for some reason.
Yeah, it does. There's also there's like a psychological effect there, isn't there? I feel like maybe I even learned that from one of your YouTube videos about how to make the platform fund
that there's like a there's this thing that they found out where if you just give reliable rewards, it's way less fun than if you give slightly randomized rewards. If you click a button and you get like a coin, but every now and then you get 10 coins or like a 100 coins,
but it's unpredictable.
Then your brain goes like, "Oh, the 100 coins might be just around the corner. Maybe if I click once more, I get the 100 coins,
right? You get you get f you get a type of FOMO that you would not have otherwise. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe subconsciously that's what's

happening.
It's like gener also like for procedural level generators, you get like this FOMO of if I don't click the button again, I might miss out on seeing a really cool level or something like that.
Yeah. Yeah. FOMO or just like curiosity. You're just like
play one more. What if I go and
what if I get this insane run in the slots and daggers and then
it's like a billion coins from the dice or whatever. [laughter]
Yeah, exactly. And I also think it's a fact that it takes away a little bit of the skill component is
is quite nice for people who are not as into games like myself for example. I'm more of a casual rogike gamer, which I think you can also really feel in slots and daggers.
It's not like the you can't play slots and daggers for 80 hours.
And some of the like combinations of symbols that you can buy are super overpowered just because I'm not the type of player who I haven't played Bellatro for 100 hours. I've played it

for like 5 hours and had a great time with it, really loved it, but then I move on to the next thing. And I think like luck based mechanics and randomness sort of helps people who are not like optimizing for skill still have a really good experience. That is so true. You can also see that in in board games a lot. For example, if like people don't want to play chess with me or something cuz
Yeah, 100%. [laughter] Not that I'm like a gigab brain at chess or whatever, but like the like the people in my immediate surroundings um just averse at chess, so they don't enjoy playing it with me. But like if if we play more luck based games, like if it's like these typical Bavarian card games that are a lot more luck based, then uh that makes it much easier to play across different skill levels. And also levels the playing field, doesn't it?
A lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it much more approachable.
Yeah. True. Also true. Interesting point. Right. So you had this idea and

did you know immediately there was like a good idea? Were you unsure about it or just like let's prototype it? So the situation at the time was that I was working on on like a different game that I was mid production with. So and I'd been working on that for I think six or eight months already. So that was quite deep into production.
And I have a prior the farming game
secret farming game. [laughter] Yeah.
Um, and the I have a prior for abandoning projects as you know from my past. Like I need to always be careful with my impulse to when I feel like oh maybe I should make this other thing
like shiny object syndrome I think you call it where you see the other thing that seems easier or more logical. I've in the past made the mistake of jumping between projects too much. So, I'm always quite like careful when it comes to that, but I just had this I was sort

of stuck on the farm game. And I had this other idea. And then I thought, okay, I'm not going to do it on work time. I actually on the weekend took like two days, took a Saturday and a Sunday where I had no plans. And I made a mini prototype for the slot machine game, which then became slots and daggers. And then it was more to I thought if I make the prototype, usually if you make a game prototype, it's kind of curing because you realize, oh, this is actually way harder than I thought it was going to be, [laughter] and it's not as instantly fun as I think it is. So, I did it more as a way to get away from this nagging feeling of what if I made the slot machine game, what if I don't make the farm game? [laughter] But then at the end of the weekend, after literally two days of work, I was like, "Oh Jesus, this is so much fun.
[laughter]
This is really really fun to play already. Arguably more fun than the farm game is in the current state.
And so because I don't trust myself on this because it's also easy to like fool yourself into this sort of stuff, isn't

it?
I then send it to my publisher, Future Friends, who I've built like a really close creative collaboration with over the years. Like we published Summer House together, and they really helped me on that. like they yeah they just did a really great job on summer house overall and then on the farm game we were collaborating quite closely like I was showing them in progress stuff they were giving feedback on the game design and stuff like that so it's quite like a close collaboration so when I had this prototype of the of the slot machine thing I thought it's good if I give it to them because they actually have money to lose
they won't you know if you show your friends your friends don't really have anything to lose is they can just be like, "Yeah, slot machine thing seems fun. Cool." Future friends, however, they have an invested stake in the farm game. So, if they say, "Ooh, the slot machine game actually seems like it has a lot of potential." I know they're not just bullshitting me to be nice to me.

So, I sent it to them. I think I posted the message the other day on Twitter. It was like a super informal because we already had a group chat and stuff. So, I sent a really informal email, not even an email, Discord message, I think, with a little video of the prototype saying, "Hey, I've got this thing that I've made over the weekend, and I'm surprised by how fun it is. What do you think? Should we, in order to give myself some time to get away from the farm game, maybe work through the creative block a little bit? Should we take 6 weeks to make this slot machine game, just put it out as a super minimum viable product and see how it does on Steam?" And they were like, "Sick. Yeah, we love the slot machine game." I think they were in the process or had signed Clover Pit, so they were like, "We we love slot machine games. [laughter] Let's have a second one."
Nice.
Um, and yeah, that I think that's how it started. The initial idea was, okay, six week project, super super minimalist, just make it satisfying, give it a tiny

closed game loop, and just put it out, see how it does. And did that plan end up working out? Because I think you spend a little more time than six weeks, right?
It ended up becoming seven months. So that didn't work [laughter] out.
But it was I guess the the game was sort of a you could say like a victim of its own success. Like every time we we did the first six weeks, I made it. I showed them the final thing. It was I could have gotten it I think to a publishable state in another week.
And they looked at it and were like, "This is great. we really really like this. Why don't you spend six more weeks on it? [laughter] Just make it a bit more viable because it was very bare bones. It would have had I think like I don't know 30 minutes to an hour of play time.
Yeah.
And after those six weeks we felt like okay everything in here is really cheap. Like the monsters are fast to draw. It's like a pixel art style. It's very stylized. It's very sketchy a lot of it. So we were like okay let's spend another 6 weeks see how it looks after that. So

that was 3 months already. And then after those six weeks, we were like, "Oo, this is actually getting really really fun. Should we spend another six weeks and see how [laughter]
and then it just cascaded into seven months because
so don't don't stop investing while while you're still seeing good returns on your time investments, right?"
I think that's the lesson. I think that's exactly what happened. We felt like, okay, the curve is still pretty steep. If we spend another 6 weeks on this, we get so much out of it in terms of play time and in terms of synergies between different weapons or enemy abilities and stuff like that. So, it always felt like we're not yet at the point where you're having diminishing returns, where you're spending loads of time working on stuff that actually doesn't do as much for the game. And I think once we got to that, we pretty quickly decided, okay, this is it. We still want this to be a small project. Um, let's put it out.
Mhm. So, in terms of idea, I guess if you reflect back to where we started a bit, you had like a you had like a com

you had a com made a combination of ideas and you were like your taste and your gut feeling told you this could be a good combination. And then on top of that, you had like a solid validation process and you're like not purely just trusting your gut feeling, but you're you have like a an actual game plan for validating like validating with someone who's like stakes in it. That that's how the idea side of it came to be in in summary. I guess for example, I think [clears throat] slots and daggers is a good example of this like creative combination process because it draws pretty direct inspiration from a lot of things, but those things are not super obvious when you see the final game. Like for example, there's just a book by Jeffrey Ellen Love. It's called Tales from the Shadowed City. It's like a like an experimental graphic novel, I'd call it. And it's got these really really cool evocative enemy designs in it. They're not enemy designs in the context of the graphic novel, but I've always

I've always been super fascinated by this world that it implies because there's like knights and demons and all sorts of creatures, but there's also coffee and they're smoking cigarettes and stuff. And I was always like, "Okay,
something's cool about the idea of there being a knight in armor, but he's going to a French cafe in the morning and smoking a cigarette." Something about that world that that implies really fascinates me. So that's where the whole out of this little graphic novel, that's where the whole world of slots and daggers comes from. It's this idea, okay, what if there's a world where knights and armor smoke cigarettes? And then at the time, I was really obsessed with how like drum machines sound from like '90s crunchy hip-hop stuff like Dr. Dre and all of these like old beat making things. So I just took that for the soundtrack. I was like, "Okay, cool." It sort of fits in a weird way to have these sleazy you're in the corner of a pub, you're playing your slot machine to have like these hip-hop inspired things. And I'd seen I'd seen the the Bob Dylan film where they're

writing one of his songs, I think, like a Rolling Stone. And there's this cool scene where one of the guys, they're like in the studio. They're already recording, but the song isn't fully what it is yet. And this one guy can't really play anything else, I think. So he plays the organ and he just presses like a chord that starts at the beginning of the song and it gives this whole song its identity. It's such a unique like now when you listen to the finished song, it's driven by this organ sound. So it was this weird gut decision to put the organ in. So I came home from watching that movie and I was like, "Hey, the organ sounded great for Bob Dylan. Why don't I see what a jazz organ sounds like combined with these hip-hop beats?"
And that's what the soundtrack of Daggers is. It's hip-hop beats
combined with a draw bar organ that's in like every song. So, I think this is a good example for just, you know, if you have these things that all really speak to you, they all all of these things really resonated with me and then combining them. I feel like you can come up with something that has quite a lot

of character. I think slots and daggers people when they see it, they always know it's lots and daggers. It's quite a
like clear aesthetic. So all all of these ideas and things you have in your mental library are still useful during execution although like for the smaller decisions like which uh instruments to use and so on
or or is that the so-called execution is what matters aspect that we used to talk about where it's like all
maybe maybe it also is [laughter]
because I guess the idea of execution is what m is what really matters is that the idea that you have this very long series of small decisions that make the final product, right? And how you make all of these small decisions
obviously shapes the product to a to a large degree.
Yeah, 100%. I also think this whole thing of like the ideas matter more
compared to the execution has something to do with you just get better at executing.
But I just don't worry about because I've made enough games now. I don't worry about the execution as much

anymore. like I've I know I can get a coherent art style together somehow,
right?
I think that's why so the execution is still super important. It's just not as it's not my prime concern anymore or it's not as high in my priority as it used to be. But what is execution exactly? I guess before we get into it, what what what is execution? Is it like the series of small decisions? So, if you're saying you don't worry about execution as much anymore, is that like technical skill or does it mean you don't worry as much anymore about making the correct call and like these micro decisions or what is it exactly?
Yeah, good question. What actually Yeah, what is execution?
[laughter]
I guess execution is like making all of these little decisions of what it actually is from a concept where I feel like in the idea stage that's why ideas are so great because you haven't narrowed anything down yet. You haven't excluded any of the possibilities like the idea it's a

fantasy slot machine game has so many potential incarnations of what the final game could be and you haven't decided against any of them yet. So, it's amazing. And I guess execution is chopping away all of these different branches that could be into the one final thing that it is that it ends up being.
Like, does it have a classical soundtrack? Does it have an 8-bit soundtrack? No, it has the hip-hop drum machine soundtrack with the draw bar organ.
Is it 3D? Is it pixel art? Is it illustrate? You know, like
I think that's execution to me, making all these decisions. And that also applies on a code basis. Do you have a really sophisticated code basis or do you write disgusting spaghetti code like me? [laughter] You have to decide against a bunch of different things and then yeah, you end up with the final thing. That seems like a good What's What's your mental model for what is execution? I don't I don't really know.

Like it's probably a mixture of technical skills like for example like programming skills, drawing skills and and micro decisions that you have to make during the process. But I I also have a follow-up question for you and that was something I found very interesting about your reply was that you described execution as like a reductive process. You're like you start out with a lot and you're chopping things away. And I think the the reason that's interesting is because I think it's very easy to look at production as like an additive process, right? You start with nothing. You start with an empty Unity project and you add things to it. You add code, you add assets,
but at the same time, if you look at it from like a creative perspective, it's it's more like
chopping things away by adding things. That's weird, isn't it?
Yeah, it is weird. True. I didn't even notice that. But I to me I guess because I get so excited about new ideas. When you have a new idea, it's so exciting. To me, it always feels like a reductive

process. It feels like a god, it could have been it could have been so magnificent and now it's just this normal game, but at the same time, it's super exciting. I guess I guess those things are both true, aren't they? You're also adding things now. You have a soundtrack that before there wasn't one, and now you have music in the game, and you're like, "Sick." Yes. Right.
The fact that you added a soundtrack, it means that you locked something in and that means you chopped away a lot of other possibilities that could have been
Yeah. To me that feels like execution. That's why they call it execution.
Oh my god. [laughter] Now we know you executed the game ideas, right? So the idea is kind of like a sculptor deciding what to sculpt and then the execution is like chopping things away till the sculptor comes out maybe.
Yeah, that feels right. I think you also often in like in gri typical grizzly games manner I think we have a way to design games in in a more reductive manner sometimes right a lot of your

games are like focused on minimalism islanders was very much about taking the city builder genre and removing things from it [clears throat]
summer house is like a very minimalist toylike game slots and is also quite minimalist do you think do you feel like that I've I've been wondering ing about that like
mhm
to me it doesn't feel as minimalist as the previous games with slots and daggers I didn't as much have this thing of how can I take an existing genre and chop everything away that feels unnecessary like with slots and daggers I was trying to be a bit more yeah plentiful just adding
plentiful more stuff to it
I mean yes and no because you started with a six week prototype like the initial scope was like a six week game right
true I think Still, of course, compared to if you set out to make a 2-year rogike production, it's still super minimalist. Yeah.
Yeah. And you made it completely
I caught you. Yeah. You're you're still a minimalist at heart. I know it.

[laughter]
Yeah. I don't really know what the question there was. I guess I was just wondering how you think about minimalism in games and if it's still something you care about.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I just minimalism in general. I really like avoiding unnecessary like fluff. I feel like it's I always really appreciate when I see something that doesn't cuz it feels like it's respectful of your time, doesn't it? If someone doesn't put padding into their work, whether it's a book that is short and sweet because they had said everything they had to or it's like a game I really enjoy games where like a game for example that I played and really really loved this year was Arctic Eggs.
Have you played that?
Arctic eggs. No, I've never even heard about that. No.
Oh, it's so great. I've really I can only highly recommend playing it to everyone. It's so great. It's this game where you're in this sort of I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I'm just going to give like a super minimal pitch. Do you know it?
Now that I have the Steam page open, I've seen it. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like you're in this weird

sci-fi arctic world and you have to cook eggs and increasingly complex dishes in a pan for these people who who give you these surrealist weird dialogue bits as a reward for cooking for them and then slowly if you've cooked for enough people you get to the next like part of the world.
And it's so great. It's such a good I loved it so much. It feels so weird and so unique and the voice of it is just like really really cool. And the mechanic is also really really cool about the it's like a pan flipping mechanic. Where I was going with this is when I played it I was like this has zero padding in it. This has just got all of the stuff that it wanted to say and then it's over. And then I think there is like a there is like an endless mode where you can fry additional stuff in the pan and it just gets harder and harder. But I just didn't play that. I only played the core game. It took me I think two hours or something to complete and I was like sick. This is exactly I think minimalism in that sense where it

doesn't have to be sleek and you know not minimalism in like the Apple sense where it's a white surface with no detail on it. It can have quite a lot of detail and stuff but once it's said what it wanted to say the thing can end and it's fine to
yeah not draw it out into like an artificially lengthy experience. That's what I still really like.
Makes sense. So, not necessarily minimalism in terms of production, but minimalism in the sense that it's a focused experience that does what it does well and doesn't have any padding and extra fluff.
Yeah, exactly. Not aesthetic minimalism, but like [clears throat] content minimalism.
Makes sense. So you're you're the sculptor and which what are like the cuts you cut away first from your game where you you have this prototype you say like what what did the first prototype look like exactly and where do you take it from there? So the first prototype was actually surprisingly like close to what the final thing looks

like. It had it had the enemies. It actually had some enemies that were that landed in the final game. It had the wheels already. Um it had like a lot of the aspects. It had the little coins flying out on the side. Um, and it had this really basically because I only had two days, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to make the simplest possible art direction." Like the grungiest, sketchiest art direction I've ever made. And so I spent, I think, like 2 hours on my iPad with an Apple pencil just drawing on it. And I found this really cool way of sketching where because I love making little like pen sketches in my sketchbooks. I've always really enjoyed that.
And I've always thought it would be cool to make a game where somehow you retain this like sketchy quality where it's almost like a gestural little thing where you can put it straight into the game. But I've never found a way where you don't then have to go and do like loads of actual illustration. And so I found this setting where um in I think

Pixquare was the app that I used. It's like just a pixel art um drawing app on iPad. And the setting is that it just makes all of your lines straight. You're basically not drawing with a brush. You're drawing with like a line tool, but it creates these single pixel lines.
And so I started drawing with that tool. And so if you look at the designs in slots of daggers, slots of daggers,
slots, slots of daggers,
lots of daggers in lots of daggers.
If you look at the designs in slots and daggers, they have this sketchy quality, but all the lines are like straight pixel art lines. And I see.
So that allowed it to like drawing an enemy takes literally 2 minutes. You're just sketching like you would in a sketchbook. But for some reason, because these lines create these really pleasing, beautiful pixel art lines that you know from other pixel artwork, it looks finished. So that was

the first thing that I discovered. I was like, "Oh my god, sick. I can make a game where everything is just sketches, basically sketches that I make on the iPad, but it looks finished."
And I love this kind of stuff. Like I'm always when I'm when I'm when I'm trying to art direct something, I'm always looking for these self-inforcing styles where there's something about the workflow
that sort of enforces coherence in the style.
And so here I was like really excited about it cuz I was like sick, this is very coherent. It's incredibly fast to produce and I can also use it for all sorts of aspects of the game. I can use it for the enemies, but I can also use it for UI, for the coins. That was the first thing, finding this style. Then I thought again because I really like these art styles that like self-inforce, I thought, what if I light it in Unity? What if it's not a purely 2D project?
Because then you get another
aspect that just like happens by itself. It's lit by the Unity lighting engine. It's got like some perspective on it.

It's casting shadows. All of these things where you don't have to do anything, but it adds extra visual interest. It adds extra coherence and stuff like that
and it makes it feel more plastic in a way, right?
Yeah, it does. It makes it feel like
It does not look like I don't know. It's so weird. When I look at your screenshots, it doesn't even feel like pixel art game. I'm not like it's I can see it's pixel art. It doesn't feel like pixel art. It's very
That's what I wanted. I wanted to have this thing where it's like it is technically pixel art, but it doesn't feel like all of the pixel art games that you've played because there's so much pixel art out there. So,
it being pixel art was almost more like a function of I wanted it to be very fast to make because I knew I wasn't going to have a lot of time with this. And it wasn't a, oh god, I'm going to have these really beautiful pixel art illustrations. I just realized, oh, cool. If I use this line tool, I can enforce a style while being super sketchy. So, execution is maybe also about making like strategically smart

decisions, right? If you're like not as experienced in execution, maybe you would have made the mistake of choosing a more expensive style that's more difficult to make and probably Yeah. Yeah. Ends up looking worse anyways. [laughter]
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's also something that I've really learned over the years is that in so many cases my first sketch was the best design that I was able to produce. I know they always teach you to like, especially in design school, they're like never stick with the first sketch. make variations like interrogate if there isn't a better version of this sketch possible and stuff. But so so often I end up with the first sketch being exactly right.
Mhm.
So that was the idea with this whole project. I thought, okay, I'm going to more than on any other project. I'm going to trust this. I'm just going to stick with what I thought in the first second and do that. So, also all the enemy designs, they're not like I just started drawing and often while I was drawing, I like drew a line and then another line and then I

was like, "Oh yeah, what if it's an egg?" Oh, yeah, cool. The egg has a shield, the egg has a sword and then it's an egg enemy.
And then I was like, "Oh, what if there's like a fantasy race based on eggs?" I haven't seen that in a game yet. So now there's like this
Yeah. And if you go into the arena mode, all of the enemies in arena mode are eggs
and they're called yolk folk,
which is stupid.
[laughter]
So just the toilet man with laser eyes missing here from the enemies.
Exactly. Exactly. And then I think another thing that I discovered really early on was I want everything to be animated. I want every tiny little aspect of the game to have a little animation. either like a physics thing like the coins where it has a rigid body and it animates itself because of physics or I don't know just like a little animation where it plops open or it shakes if you can't use it. All of these little things. I made a rule to myself nothing just appears or disappears or triggers its function without having an animation to it. I think one of the standout factors in the

end turned out to be the incredible level of polish that you achieved in a surprisingly small amount of time, right? Still looking at it solo development for like couple polishing for a couple of months probably only.
Mhm.
How how did you achieve such a high level of polish in such a short amount of time? I just I guess with this one I it didn't feel like a polish face. It was just like the whenever I made something, I made it in final quality. Like
really when you see the video on I think I shared it in that tweet, the first prototype, it already has the animations. The coins are shooting out almost like they are shooting out in the final game. It didn't feel like a decoupled process of I put in a new mechanic and then I polish it. This time again going back to this idea of I tried to trust my intuition and if I thought this mechanic is good, I'm just going to put it in. I didn't really prototype stuff. I just put it in in final

quality, which is this is really bad advice. If you're making any other game, you really shouldn't do that, I think. But here, I don't know. Somehow I just had this confidence of saying, "Okay, I'm just going to only put stuff in when I feel confident enough that this is going to be a good decision for the game." And then I just always added animations, sound, and like final visuals to it pretty early on. And I guess because everything is so cheap, like the animations, for example,
Mhm. 90% of it is done with due tween with this plug-in for Unity where you can just from code you can tell something without having to write like a co- routine and like an extra thing you can just in the method where you call it tell the thing to pop up with like a satisfying little ease animation. So it was cheap like the visuals like making an illustration if I implemented a new mechanic I could very quickly make an icon for it because all of the things the rule was always be very very cheap. Okay. So you implemented like the whole

game first in like this prototype look but then from then on everything was final quality or was the prototype also final quality or
No, the prototype didn't have like the full I added like quite a lot of post-processing and lighting effects and stuff.
Mhm.
But I think from the prototype I got to the finalish look of the game within one or two weeks
and then it didn't change much. Then I just added things in that quality. Okay. Wow. That's like that's super fast for visual development. If you say you developed like the identity of this look in like two weeks, that's pretty pretty crazy.
I should go back and see if that actually. But I'm pretty sure that that's true because yeah, like I said, I didn't do any second guessing with this. I just decided, okay, this is how it's going to look.
Yeah,
it's got this it looks good in this golden light. That was just the first setting that I found where it looked kind of cool. So I was like, "Right,

it's going to be in
golden light." That's [laughter] I realized that the if you crank up the bloom really high, it sort of looks it makes everything feel kind of soft and it almost looks like fog in some areas and it gives the whole pixel art some more depth. And then I was like, "Right, okay. The game is going to have overdriven bloom all the way through."
Mhm. Okay. I see. And there were so many of these little decisions where I just decided on a gut level, okay, this works. Don't touch it again. All the other decisions now have to be based around this fact.
So, right. So, if you lock in decisions and like don't second guess them anymore, that obviously is makes it quite time efficient, right? You're like,
yeah,
okay, this is locked in. Let's move on to the next thing. That
that's how you have to do it when you have to do it quickly. But then again, I think it's also fair to say the reason why you were able to do it so quickly is because you've been making art for a very long time and you have a very welldeveloped intuition on this kind of stuff. Like if I had to develop a style

like this this in two weeks, it would not not look anywhere close to this, I assume.
I guess I guess that's that's why I always try to caveat all of these things with
Yeah.
at this point in our career, I think this makes sense.
Mhm. But if someone was making their first game, I wouldn't I would take more time. I would see if I couldn't get like a bit more out of it. What would you say is like a generally applicable approach to polishing? Is there something like this? If if I'm like, here's my prototype, how do I polish this? Do would you have any advice for me? Yeah, I think really doing this animation thing to me that adds quite a lot for actually not that much time like getting an efficient animation workflow. Something like if you're comfortable with programming, get something like due tween that allows you to add all of these little animations very very costefficiently.
Mhm. Then I also realized when when I'm looking at animations in a lot of games,

I feel like they're too slow. I just realized at some point like I kept making animation times shorter and shorter. Like the magic number for me at least seems to be either 2 seconds or.3 seconds. Like literally I would say
95% of the animations in this game have a duration of 2 or.3 seconds. That just seems to be the correct number for for this game.
And then I'm using this in in Dween. There's this thing where you can add an ease to the animation. So it doesn't linearly progress from point A to point B, but it goes in like an eed curve. So it does this thing like in Disney movies where it goes like and then it has an ease that's called back where it overshoots the target a bit and then comes back to the position. So, my hand going over there and then coming back and that's where it is.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm literally going to say for this game, 90% of the animations that you see

are either scale in or move in with a.3 seconds duration and this ease back thing. And it just makes things look so satisfying, at least to me. I've tried all sorts of other animation timings and settings, but I just realized, okay, that's the one for this game. In back or out back is the ease and with a.3 second thing. So, I think that's one tip that I could give. Look at something like Dween. Look at animation easing and then find the
easiest possible implementation. So, you can give everything an animation.
Mhm.
I think sound is a huge component of how polished something feels.
Oh, yeah. And there, what I've learned with this game is how good these like some of these sound effects packs are. I used to produce way more of the sounds in the games myself. And now for this one, I just downloaded a bunch of these big libraries where you still you have to combine everything and you have to edit it quite aggressively to make it work for your game specifically.

But the source material, I just realized, wow, there's just people out there who have made a pack with like, I don't know, 500 mechanic sounds in it. They've completely recorded every sound that 10 different typewriters can make and put them into a library for you. And that was so helpful because everything in the game also has pretty much everything makes a sound when it moves. So, that was really good getting just a big I think I used they're called Boom SX and they have these packs. I think you guys used them for Thronefall as well, didn't you?
I think Paul told me about the mechanics, sound effects, and was like very enthusiastic about them as well. Yeah,
maybe it was Paul even who recommended um Boom libraries to me.
So, I'm not sponsored by them or anything, but would recommend
or finding anything that's like similar to that. And then screen shake. I mean, we've shake
talked about it endlessly already in the games in the indie games world, I feel like, but like dialing your screen shake

in just right for like when I look back at the first like 100 prototypes that I made for this game, the first 100 builds, the screen shake was insane. Like if you look at the early videos that I tweeted, for some reason, I just put it in my head that the screen needs to shake every time you do something. [laughter] And it was completely bizarre. Like the camera was moving so much. Um, and then at some point I just spent two days reworking all the screen shake in the game and dialing it in just right. And I think that also adds quite a lot if you have like directional screen shake also. So if the coins fly out to the right, the camera
shakes to the right a little bit. If I think there's like a little bit of storytelling in these screenshots even like if an enemy hits you in the face, the camera shakes backwards
and it sort of tells you that something happened. That's not good because your head went like so like screen shake is not screen shake. You want specific screen shade that shake that like fits

the specific situation.
Exactly. Yeah. I think that can really help to make things feel better. This is also something that I learned on this project or that I tried to use quite a lot was at some point I realized you can convey so much information with animations and with visuals that you then don't have to convey in a text way. Like for example, if an item is too expensive to buy, it goes like on the screen. It goes like from left to right. It has like a little animation and that thing immediately conveys to people no you can't because everyone knows head shaking.
Mhm.
And stuff like that. But I try to do quite a lot of things where the sound combined with the animation combined with how things light up in the game gives you quite a lot of info on what's happening intuitively. I think what's interesting and why your game looks so polished is also because not just because of those like the what you just described is like useful polished, right? you polish that kind of provides information, but there's also a lot of

use less polish in your game that has no other reason than look than to look nice. For example, what looks very impressive are these like leaves that are like hanging into the screen in the foreground that like cast a nice silhouette. And also, I think one of the best assets probably in your game is this glass next to the slot machine.
Thanks. Oh, I love the glass. Yeah,
it's the glass that I have standing on my desk when I'm working. I just modeled that cuz I had it there for reference [laughter] because all of the things in the game are so simple to make. This is also something that we used to say quite a lot in Grizzly Games Days about if you're if you make stuff really simple, you can be generous with it because you have time because putting like a glass in or putting these like the sprites for these leaves that are hanging into the into the screen that you just described, they are so ugly you wouldn't believe. Honestly, they literally per leaf took

less than a minute to draw because they're just
No way. incredibly incredibly ugly, but then because the post-processing does something nice with them and they're slightly blurred, you don't really realize. And they also still have this pixel art aesthetic on it. So, yeah, it just I feel like there were so many things in this game that forced everything to look correct. I could be so gestural and fast with things and then it allows me to yeah, be quite generous in Okay, there's a glass. And then again with the glass, I was like, "What if the screen shake also affects the glass?
What if I make the glass shake every time the screen shakes?" And because I had the due tween thing set up, it was super easy. It cost me like 30 minutes to make a little function that makes the glass shake with the screen shake,
right? Crazy. And do you have like custom shaders for how the leaves move or like
Yeah, you do. Okay.
Yeah. To be fair, this is also something that's probably important to mention with this game. Um, not everything that

is in slots and daggers was made from scratch for slots and daggers because I was coming from this farm game that I was working on
and I had made [clears throat] a bunch of like things that translated surprisingly well. For example, the whole screen shake system or this system about foliage wiggling, which is really funny because the farm game is like all about foliage and about like wiggling grass and stuff and then this incredibly complex system which is way over complicated just ended up in slots and daggers to wiggle these leaves in the foreground
and then I had to actually go in and remove tons of features from it because it was eating into performance later on.
Okay. You had like an overengineered system for like the leaves in the
possibly. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. You could have had the I could have initially I was even thinking about leaving that in. You could have wiggled the leaves with your mouse, [laughter]
which you really don't need that because I had to like render custom textures and

stuff. So yeah.
And for the for the liquid in the glass, I think it um also moves a bit. How did you actually do that?
It's just a mesh. It's a like it's a separate mesh in the glass. It's a combination. The the glass is like the weirdest combination of things. It's the glass has a mesh and then there's a surface mesh in there that is like the top surface of the liquid and I'm just animating that. Exactly. Yeah. And then I'm trying to think I also did something where I wanted to make it look like it's you know how like light gets reflected weirdly through water,
right? So, I put like a gradient into the sh like a glowing gradient into the shadow
that was cast by the glass. So, then it looks like ooh it's like this realistically rendered
but it's just really really stupid. And because the camera can't really move in the game, you don't notice it.
That's such a good detail. Wow.
There's so much of this stuff where yeah, you can just be it's quite

forgiving because the camera can't really rotate. Same with the cigarette, for example, that's burning in the top.
The ashtray that it's in
is a 3D model because I realized, oh the ashtray you will see if it doesn't cast shadows. But then the cigarette is just a 2D sprite because that doesn't really have to give lighting information.
Mhm. You were aiming for a very specific vibe or aesthetic, right? The the assets you put around the slot machine are not random. No, I wanted it to be that was this mix of this graphic novel that I was saying earlier about like it's a fantasy world and there's a dagger. There's like a ritual dagger with these like ornaments on it and it looks like a classic elven fantasy dagger or something from Dungeons and Dragons and but there's also poker chips and a cigarette and a glass that probably has Negroni in it or some [laughter] and I wanted what I wanted to do is evoke that same feeling that this graphic novel gave me through

just putting a combination of a bunch of things that aren't often combined. I wanted to evoke this feeling of, oh, there's this world beyond the table where this dagger exists and these cigarettes exist in the same world and there's like adventurers going on and there's some sort of Dungeons and Dragons type fantasy world, but there's also modern elements to it. So, I try to with every element that's on the table, I try to add like a little bit of like an implied reality beyond this game. Mhm. And I think there's also some sound design like you can hear people talking in the background and stuff like that. So the the vibe is very much that you sit like in the back of a bar or something and like play this weird fantasy game.
I realized at some point
that if you put cheering people when something successful happens in the game is so much more fun. Like if you hit a good combo there's like people in the background. I downloaded some like hooligan chants [laughter] and they're going like yeah when you hit when you

hit a critical hit and stuff like that [laughter] or like your player character when you lose the game it goes like because it's frustrating to lose and I thought that would be a fun way to make the game like a bit more exciting. Ah, that's also such a nice detail. You're right. Cuz that changes the fantasy from you're like a depressed little guy in the back of the bar playing on your own to they're actually like people looking over your shoulders and paying attention, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was imagining. I was like, "This is not there." Like a crowd has formed around you and they're cheering you on. They're like, "Come on, you can do it." And then when you hit like a really big critical strike, everyone's like, "Yeah,
yeah. Jonas is back at the slot machine. Oh my god. Let's be gone. He's losing all his money. [laughter]
There are some really cool effects that look really impressive in motion like the the attack effects like the lightning strikes and so on. Is it all just smokes and mirrors? Is uh something fancy going on there? There's quite a

lot of like just simple custom shaders. That's something that I found super effective is I'm not great at making shaders, but I can quickly string together something, especially with shader graph. I know enough that I can make like simple effects. So, that was really helpful to just be able to for loads of effects make a quick custom shader that allowed me to do something. So, for example, for this like the attack animation, a little sword goes and it hits your your health bar and then that sword animates out in quite a satisfying way, I think, where like it gets pixelated out basically.
So, that's just a custom shader where it looks at the Yeah, it like moves a threshold across a gradient and then the pixels disappear.
Okay, I see. I see. And do you are there objects where you like change the material halfway through to have like a specific specific effect or like you

want to now make the dger disappear? So now you use the disappear shader or
I think for most of them I just they're already in this one. It's probably not very efficient.
Most of them just have the dagger shader.
Okay,
that will then be on it all the time or the cigarette shader that's just always there. So I'm not switching out a lot. One thing that I spent quite a lot of time on, um, but I did that for the farm game already, so this didn't really count into slots and daggers development time. I wrote this one shader, and by a lot of time, I mean like half a day or a day or something.
Um, I wrote this one shader that can pixelate particles
in quite a nice way.
Mhm. So, and then I use that everywhere in the game because it just means you can have these
smoke or fire or like impact effects that look like someone's handdrawn a pixel animation. And
that was really nice to be able to have like the cigarette smoke for example or when you hit the enemies as like a

little explosion. It was really nice to not have to actually hand animate pixel effects because those take so long if you have to go in and like frame by frame. I'm also not really good at that. I'm not an animator. So, that was a really helpful little shader graph. I'd be happy to share that online if people are interested.
Um, yeah, that was a good trick to just have a little particle effect that can be pixelated. Can you maybe give some quick [clears throat] advice about colors because I feel like this is something you're very good at. Like the color scheme in slots and daggers is once again very very satisfying and I'm not sure what about it is but there's like the screenshots even have like slightly different color schemes like there's like a warmer scheme there's like a colder scheme I think for for different regions you have slightly slightly different colors also right
yeah exactly there's like a if you go to the swamp it's like a green color scheme if you go to the citadel it has like a burnie red color scheme type of thing

Mhm. um tips with with colors. It's a little bit like with creativity tips, the longer I do it, the harder I find it to give advice because it just becomes more and more intuitive and gut level. I think that like for me the how I approach color is I try to add enough variety that it looks interesting. I usually start making things too saturated. So things have quite saturated, bright local colors because I think it's easier to tone that down using post-processing than to add variety because you can't really add information. If everything's gray and you add saturation, then it's all going to have the same color. M
whereas if everything's super colorful and it clashes, you can just tone down the saturation to the point where okay, now the colors are close enough to each other, but they still have quite a lot of variety because this thing used to be yellow and this thing used to be green and this thing used to be blue. So when

you desaturate all of them and maybe give them like a reddish tint, they're all harmonious, but they still have quite a lot of variety. So this is how I try to approach color schemes is try to think how can you create unity like not unity the engine unity in like a unified visual image. Um and I use post-processing for that quite a lot in it's like your approach is like fix it in post. So you make like everything has like just the everything just has the color it has. It's like cool. The slot machine button background is green. the button is red and then you have just a very good post-processing shader on top that makes everything look right.
It's if you look at this game without post-processing, it's incredibly ugly and it also looks very very different without the post-processing. It has completely different colors. So, this is again one of those things where the color scheme I like to have a color scheme self-inforce itself because you can basically put like a lot of colors

aren't even possible with this post-processing applied because the blues, the greens, the reds, the purples are all super desaturated. So, even if you throw like a like a purple thing into there, it's going to fit into the color scheme because the post-processing pulls the purples down in saturation so much that it ends up making sense. So, I really enjoy that's how I usually design color schemes in Unity. I designed them in this Unity has this post-processing stack where you can add a bunch of effects and I mostly design in there which is bad which I'm trying to get away from to be honest because it means the longer a project goes on the harder it becomes to make changes. You're sort of backing yourself into a corner. For this for slots and daggers it worked but for other games I don't know if I would recommend it to everyone to always work like that. I think it sounds for for some projects this sounds very smart. I'm not opposed to it whatsoever. And

that also means you get a lot of easy variety just by changing how the post-processing, right? That's that means like the the warm color scheme and like the colder color scheme, that's also just post-processing.
Exactly. That's the really nice thing about it. You can then create like these drastic shifts in mood with post-processing. And I think what it does, what people have feedback to me about slots and daggers is that it looks like very unified.
It's it looks like it's all made from one wash basically or painted with one brush. And I think post-processing really helps with that
where if you turn it off, the things look way less like they're on the same table or they come from the same world. But because post-processing is applied like on the whole image, it's not something that applies to individual props. The borders and intersections between these props disappear a little bit into the background. That's why Bloom, for example, is so great. Cuz I

think in games, what you often have is you see in an ugly way, you see the interactions between different 3D models. And I'm always looking for ways to hide them. You know, like in like in 3D games, for example, when something sticks out of the ground, that point where the ground and the model intersect, it always looks a bit ugly because that's not how the real world works. Normally, there would be like dirt and like a rock and grasses growing in these crevices. And I think post-processing is really great for that because it the bloom creates like a soft little blur across objects and then it masks these intersections. So, I think what I would do if it's a bigger project, I would try and design the color scheme first without post-processing so that you don't have to use post-processing that much. Try to make it look nice. applying the same rules like trying to create unity in the image but just doing it with local colors already, doing it with the light colors already and getting like closer to the final image without applying

aggressive post-processing because then you can maybe you're still applying post-processing to tie everything together, but it's more like a 5 to 10% shift from where you were. It's not like an 80%. It doesn't look completely different
because that's the bit that makes it difficult in the end. Like in slots and daggers, if you put anything in that's remotely yellow, it's going to glow like crazy because the bloom picks up on it,
right?
And so you can't or red because I turned down the reds very aggressively. It's actually quite difficult to make things red in slots and daggers. [laughter] So I have to know when there's a red element because I want to signal to you this you can't buy this. for example, it has to have an incredibly specific color so as to not get pushed into the yellows by the post-processing
stuff like that that just gets annoying. So I would on a longer project I would try to avoid going so hard. I see similar approach but keep it a bit closer to the final colors maybe. I see.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Um, I guess there's one more stage that I'd be interesting to know your opinion about, and that would be like the the marketing stage of our project. What are your current thoughts on marketing indie games?
Marketing Indie games. The big question. How do we
big question everybody's wondering about? My game did not sell. What did I mess up about my marketing?
Is it the indie apocalypse?
It is the marketing, isn't it? I so I agree with what I think most people are believing at the moment that it has a lot to do with the initial appeal of the game. Like you can't it's just very difficult to market an unappealing game. If you throw loads of money into that, I think it still won't work because there are too many appealing games out there. And essentially marketing is just trying to get people to pay attention to one thing, isn't it? So, if there's tons of things that they could be paying attention to and those things are more appealing, then no amount of money you

could spend will make them pay attention to your thing. So, I think the the biggest thing for marketing is your initial premise. Is is the game idea interesting? Is the world of the game interesting to people? Is the way you visually present it? Is that interesting? I think that is a huge part of marketing is can you make something that when people see it for the first time it will intrigue them. It will pull them in. It will make them stop scrolling. This is actually I think something that where slots and daggers is that's probably one of the weaknesses of the project compared to other things that I've made. I'd say
like summer house for example. I think summer house has a higher rate of drawing people in. I don't think it's a better game per se, but I think because the screenshots look like illustrations of houses, people often just stop for them and have a quick look. What's going on here? Oh, this is a nice cute house. Whereas with slots and daggers, because it's quite a static, quite flat surface.

You're looking at a table surface with like this weird quite small enemy and then it's quite interfacy.
Like you don't see a lot of world. You see quite a lot of like buttons and user interface stuff. So I think it already excludes quite a lot of people who are not into interfacy games. So this is something that I would like think about more specifically if I wasn't planning to make a six week project. But this one it just happened. But if it was a bigger project, I think I'd be thinking a bit more about the screenshots that that's going to produce. How are people going to see them when they scroll past it? So when you think about marketing, your thoughts do very much start with product.
Yeah.
And not with promotion. Yeah.
Yeah. 100%.
And then promotion wise, for me, it's just been great to work with future friends. They're just really, really good at what they do. Like, they know who to reach out to. They do it in quite a targeted way, I think. Um, what they're also really good at is slots and

daggers, for example. Um, our announcement strategy was because we didn't get into any bigger showcases with it, which I think a lot of developers right now, that's like the done thing. If you have a game that's appealing enough, you try to get into one of those larger video showcases that draw attention to your game. [clears throat]
And the bigger your production is, the more potential your game has, like the bigger the showcase you can get into.
And slots and daggers didn't get into I think anything. I don't know how many we applied to. I don't think we had amazing timing because it was such a short production cycle and it was during summer. All of the big showcases usually happen in summer. So those deadlines had all passed. We couldn't really submit to them.
I don't know if they would have accepted Slo and Dagas either.
So um we aimed for a slightly more targeted smaller showcase which was like it was called Games Forged in Germany. And it was this great Steam event that was mostly targeted I think at the

German market but also visible all over Steam. And it was this really great promotion of games that are made in Germany by like a German team. And what they got was they had I think for a limited amount of time they had Steam featuring somewhere maybe on the front page even. And that was really great because what you're trying to do basically with all of these video showcases is you're trying to somehow convert people from being on YouTube to going on Steam and wishlisting your game. And because this was a Steam internal event that already happened like the people are already on Steam. So conversion is way way better.
So I think that really worked for us. It was a really nice we got quite a lot of wish lists on the first weekend out of that because it was a smaller event to begin with, but it had way better conversion to wish lists. And it was a great event. Like they did a really good job hosting that. It was a really nice. They cut a video showcase for it too

that gave us like some starting velocity. That was all future friends who figured that out and who had um connected us to this to this showcase. And then we did we made a demo which I think is just great still. It's way more competitive than it used to be. I think like two years ago if you had a good demo in a Steam Next Fest that gave you hundreds of thousands of wish lists. Now it's just so competitive. There are so many games in the next fest. It's crazy how quickly the market circumstances changed with some of these things, right? It is like it was different two years ago.
Wild.
Yeah. Whatever works like people are going to massively do that.
Yeah.
In a year. I don't know what's the new thing. That's that's what I'm constantly trying to figure out like what is the because it seems like Steam NextFest is something you still do.
Yeah, for sure. But it's not the it's not the smart thing to do. It's just the

normal thing that you have to do. What's the What do you think? Can we share some secrets? Do you see something? Do you have a theory of what might become big? I think that it's kind of a good thing that the market has this equalizing force in a way, right? Because if there are any new hacks, if they're like new strategies, if they're new tactics that people find, then developers get to exploit them for a very very short amount of time till either they're patched out. Like either Steam fixes them so they're no longer exploitable
or everybody starts doing them and then they just become normalized. So I I think it's probably just not the correct way to think about exploitable tactics. I think it's probably just the correct way to think about playing playing a fair game against the other games and out competing them. Even though I think most game developers don't don't like looking at it in this way. And I think also know it's not like a zero sum game. I think if there are more good games then there will be more people playing these games. I think that's also the

case.
That's quite a wholesome way of looking at it but it's boring. Come on. have to be hacks that [laughter] we have to look to find the hack that's going to make us millionaires.
No, but I agree. I think the the the big takeaway for me after years of making games is you can't really cheat your way. You can do things right. You can make a good demo, but like the things you do right are also the things that are there's no big secret to it. You have to obviously make a good trailer. If you make a trailer that shows your indie games company logo for 10 seconds in the beginning and then starts with a slow pan over the ground and then reveals a character and like 30 seconds in you still don't know what the game's like. That's bad
clearly.
Um same with making a demo, positioning it in next fest, you obviously want to try and get as much attention with your announcement. like use your marketing bullets that you have like the announcement, the date reveal, the demo launch, make little events out of those.

But I actually agree with you. I don't think there's these big hacks. I think it's a bit daunting for new developers to get get started with like marketing cuz it's like how how the hell do I do a press release? How the how the hell do I reach out to content creators? Right?
But it's like not once you've done it once or twice, it's like not super black magic anymore. It's just like do the standard things and make a good game.
Make a good game,
which whatever that means.
Exactly. I was just going to say, which is do the make a good trailer, do the standard stuff [laughter]
is not not super helpful, I guess, when you're starting out,
but there's a lot of there's so many good resources on this stuff. Like how to make a good trailer has been discussed at length.
Yeah. And yeah, I think that's stuff that you can figure out. And really, I think it just makes sense to focus a lot of attention on the game. And maybe, yeah, when you're starting out, maybe also this feeds back into the make small

games. Don't make one thing for 3 years because then if you make mistakes the first time around, you've just like missed your whole shot. Whereas if you make something that was like 4 months and then you publish it and you make a trailer and you do a press release and do all of that, you can learn from those mistakes. I feel like with the early stuff that we put out in university, we got to learn a bunch of these things a couple of times. You know, we did like a press release for our second semester
when Paul and I made ROM with Kina, which was like our little experimental game. And you what was it called? The shadow game.
Abschool.
Abschool. That was so cool. That was such a cool game. And like we did press releases for that, didn't we? You I think you even won like a little competition with it. And there you learn all of these things so that you then when you have an actually good game on your hand, you don't it up,
right? And you don't have to do it for the first time on your 5year project. You do it for the first time on your

three-month project.
Yeah. or if you're a genius, if you have the amazing five-year project idea, then I think it's a good idea to look into getting a publisher. If the game's actually good, you're also going to find a publisher because they're all out there. They're all looking for stuff. People are asking me quite a lot, how
how do you pitch to a publisher? How do I reach out to future friends? The I think the truth is they're obviously getting a lot of pitches right now, but they're also looking for good games. It's not like they're trying not to sign stuff. They're obviously trying to sign the next cool thing. So whether you find a publisher
is like it's a little bit like the marketing question. Did you manage to make a game that attracts enough attention that a publisher will sign it? So
yeah, I think focusing on the game is a good is a good way to go usually.
Yeah, it's it solves a lot of problems and it can So what you're saying is it can even solve the marketing problem if you just don't want to deal with it at

all. If you really just focus on making a quote unquote good game, then in the worst case, you'll be able to get a publisher and have somewhat decent marketing like that.
Yeah. Or great marketing because they usually are really good at what they're doing.
Yeah.
Sure. But I mean there there are different kinds of publishers. It's very hard to differentiate sometimes. Also
hard to generalize. Yeah.
Hard to generalize. And I feel like I might be wrong about this, but my gut feeling about a lot a lot of publishers is also that once they signed you, they often times don't have as much of an incentive to actually do something useful anymore. It's just like you already signed away a percentage of your revenue. They can just focus on signing the next thing and don't really need to try too hard to make anything happen, right? Unless
I don't know. Do you feel like that's how it works? I feel like a lot of I feel like a lot of uh publishers operate exactly like that.
H interesting cuz to me I always think that can't work in the long run, right?

Because they won't make revenue if the game doesn't do well.
Yeah. It must be in their interest to like elevate the profiles of these games. I don't know. Maybe I'm I'm obviously speaking from
You're You have You've been very lucky with friends because there
Exactly. I've had a great experience with Raw Fury. I've had a great experience with future friends. So, I guess that's quite a lucky position to speak from. I would say you've you've you've been in the lucky position that you've uh worked with only like top tier publishers so far. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I'm not sure. I to be fair, I haven't worked with that many publishers either. I'm just sometimes like getting emails and hearing stories from other developers and hearing what they tell behind the scenes and so on. It's just it's not not always glorious. So,
no. True. I also know these stories from from other developers that I'm speaking to. You're
definitely right on that.
But it's it's like everything. It's like
hard hard to generalize. Yeah. Do you have any other feelings about where the

indie game space is moving overall? Like what are the whispers in your bubble or what are people thinking about the problems? Is the indie apocalypse still a topic or
I think the indie apocalypse is always going to be a topic [laughter] because first of all it is probably happening a little bit all the time like it is getting squeezed isn't it that's how it feels like to me when I speak to to friends when I see like how games launched it feels like the whole space is getting squeezed a bit where the people who make loads of money and who are fortunate enough to be part of like the top, I don't know, 10% or something, they tend to make more money because there is a there is still a growing audience and we're only slowly like indie games are breaking more and more into the mainstream. So, there is quite a lot of money being made, but I feel like it's concentrating quite hard at the top of the curve
and the people who are not in the top

10% it looks like are making less and less money. I don't think it's like a huge fall off, but I think just year by year it's less and less what the what the game under the median makes. That's my that's my suspicion. So, I think it's I think there's part of the indie apocalypse that's justified where people are just having a hard time because it's a difficult economic scene to be in.
It's also just the creative like scene in general. I think it's a competitive very very difficult way of making a life. So, I think people are always going to be right to say, "Wow, this is scary and really really difficult to to make a living like this." Um, and then I think there's also always people are going to make mistakes and then it's going to feel like the indie apocalypse is hitting, but maybe it was just a mistake. Maybe something just didn't pan out. So, I think there's like a mix of different reasons for why

why the in apocalypse is always going to be around.
And sometimes the inpocalypse genuinely hits you. Sometimes you just made a smart decision and then something that was completely out of your control went wrong. A genre just completely tanked. You didn't have any control over that. You didn't have any way of foreseeing that and your game doesn't sell anything or whatever other circumstances. So, yeah, I think Indie Apocalypse is going to is here to stay. [laughter] Um,
other things about the What do you think? Cuz what we're seeing so hard at the moment is this like we're seeing these very dopamine heavy games. I think recently it's becoming more and more of a people have really figured out how to make good game loops. People have also really figured out how to polish a game, how to finish a game nicely. And Slots and Daggers like sits very much in that trend of games that I think Thronefall is a similar example or like all of these like bigger games recently, ballpro

all these big things. They're really satisfying on like a dopamine level, aren't they?
Mhm. And the interesting thing is also that in in a way indie games indie games are the ones who are farming this like like these dopamine heavy games. And for some reasons bigger game studios haven't fully caught up to that. I wonder if at some point they will and if they will start making games like this cuz on paper it seems like such a corporate thing to do to just be so formulaic and be like okay we have like a psychological analysis. We know which things make people addicted to all of those things. Let's put it on Steam. Easy peasy. Let's repeat that. But for some reason, in this case, it's not the big studios who are doing that. It's the indies who are doing that. Isn't that weird?
Yeah, that's true. I guess I wonder, are they not already? Maybe they're already doing it. Maybe we're just slowly catching up with them. Maybe Call of Duty is just an amazing dopamine farm. And we've just now finally found a way

to make a similarly satisfying thing, but without spending 250 million on it.
Oh,
and that's by using the roulette table. Yeah. [laughter]
I don't know. Basically, what I'm wondering about is this this curve of
games are becoming more and more reliant on like neuron activation or whatever you want to call it and like tight rewarding game loops. Is this a curve that's going to just continue to escalate?
Are we just going to see more and more of that or is there is it like
a zigzag movement? Because the indie games when we started out making games, there was quite a lot of like walking simulators, very atmospheric stuff, like storytelling experiments, or when it was based around a very tight core loop or like a mechanic, it was often still very quiet and meditative stuff like Monument Valley. I wonder if that's going to come back in fashion a bit or

if that's just over because the other stuff is more satisfying to play. What's your take on that?
You know the Have you heard of like the attention economy where it's like everything is basically competing for your attention, right? So games are not just competing with other games. Games are also competing with like YouTube and Netflix and Tik Tok and so on. And I feel like the attention economy is just constantly becoming more optimized and becoming more competitive. And I
what I'm wondering like this is a theory. Not sure if this is true, but what I'm wondering is if basically in order to stay in this competitive in this attention economy, we basically need these immediately engaging hyperdopamine game loops now to compete with with stuff like Tik Tok and so on. So, you can't have like a walking simulator that's going to have a very satisfying payoff after an hour or so cuz people are not going to they don't have the attention spans and the patience to stick around to it. Because you could also just play something like

Vampire Survivors or Mega Bonk and like get get to the dopamine immediately. Like you don't have to wait for the dopamine kick like for an hour to kick in.
Yeah, fair. Maybe maybe that's how it works. But then at the same time, I also think um because it's an attention economy and a lot of it is based on are you able to initially draw attention to your project
and one thing that creates attention is being different and doing something that isn't being done by everyone. So, I think there's going to come a time where if this saturates enough, if enough people make Vampire Survivors, slot machine games, whatever type of dopamine focused things, it's going to start paying off to make something radically different and maybe something very, very quiet or contemplative again. So there could be a way to in an attentional capacity really benefit from making something that's not super dopamine based. Maybe there's going to be a time where it's it

creates way more attention to make a walking simulator.
I don't think that time is here yet, but
maybe there's going to be like a counter movement. If you look at history, then typically there are counter movements to everything. So, it's like I think it's a fair assumption to assume that there's going to be a counter movement at some point. If it's like complete over stimulation for half a decade, then it's probably going to be followed by people craving for calmer, slower experiences. I can totally see that. But I don't think we've
I don't think the attention economy has peaked. I think it's going to
You think it's going to get a bit crazier?
I think it's going to get way crazier before people are really going to crave slower experiences again.
Yeah. But to be fair, even even nowadays, there's still totally a niche for slower and story based games. So, it's not like you can't do them anymore, right? Just so
people get the context of that, right? You can totally make a you can totally succeed with a walking sim nowadays still. I feel like
100%. Yeah, I actually I'm I'm wondering

what I'm what I'm going to make next, whether I'm going to go back to the farm game. I've that is still like a possibility, but also I feel like I've got a like personally I've got a craving to make something that's quieter
after Slots and Daggers cuz and Daggers was quite I really enjoyed challenging myself to make something that's not this like ambient atmosphericy thing that Summerhouse was. But now I can feel myself being pushed in the other direction again where I've made something that felt
like fast and hectic at times and it's about fighting and it's got lots of flashing lights and stuff. So yeah, maybe for me personally I'm going to take a like take a turn in a different direction. But I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Making a specific type of project almost makes you want to do the exact opposite next, right? Like just to like feel something different.
To feel something. Just to feel something. just to [laughter] feel something.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you could just or you just add gambling and dopamine stuff to your

farming game.
That's the other Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, the farming game is quite dopamine heavy already. So, [laughter]
I mean, it works. It works though. Totally works. I feel like if your game is very good at giving dopamine and it has a good fantasy, it's probably going to do okay. I I'm feel very confident in
Yeah.
making like that abstraction. Hey, should we do a thing? Because we used to We obviously both used to be part of Grizzly Games and we used to after I stopped working with Grizzly Games, we had like weekly calls for a long time because we just wanted to stay in touch. We didn't live in the same place. So, we didn't see each other and we weren't working on the same project, but we were still once a week doing a Grizzly Games call to just chat. And we used to recommend games to each other a lot during these calls. Should we do a mini episode of It's a shame that Paul isn't here, but you recommend one game to me. I recommend one game to you that you've recently played.
If it sucks, you can if it sucks, you can cut it out later.

No worries. You are the one who initially recommended Outer Wilds to me, and I I love the game, though, like my favorite game of all time. I have it as a desktop background, so I'm I'm always keen to hear your game recommendations. Do you frequently take time out of your day to try like a new game? Is that something that's like actively implemented in your routine?
Yeah, it's not super like routine based, but I'm trying to do it regularly.
Okay.
Buying a Steam Deck has really helped me cuz I'm I just hate in the evening sitting on my computer because
I spend so much time on the computer already, so I can't really be asked playing anything
that makes me sit down on the computer. But with the Steam Deck, it's really good. Okay, then I guess go ahead with your recommendation. I think I have to check out my Steam library to see what I
Okay, you have a look at the library. What? Yeah, I've got a good one. I've already recommended Arctic Eggs earlier, but um another game that I played last week and this has been out for ages and

I've always had it on my want to play list and only now got around to playing it. Um it's called Rainy Season and it's really really great. I can't remember the name of the developer, Inasa Fujio. I'm probably mispronouncing that. I think they're based in Japan.
Mhm.
Um, and it's this gorgeous little uh walking simulator. No, it's not. Walking simulator is wrong. It's like a little exploration game where you just spend a day at your grandma's house with your mom and your brother and I think your aunt is also there. And you're a child in your grandma's house. There's not really anything to do. It's raining outside. So, I think initially the plan of the I don't want to spoil too much. Initially, there was a plan for the day and you're not now not doing this. You're just staying at the house and you're just going around having a look at things, interacting with small objects, and then there are these
slightly surreal daydreams that you discover and that's it. There's like

some really cute dialogue and it's just great. It is so nicely done. First of all, it's gorgeous visually, and it also sounds really, really good. Like, it's got great sound design. It's got really, really beautiful music. But the sort of softness of how it plays and the everyday nature of the things that you interact with, I sometimes miss that in games that there isn't more stuff that's about our actual everyday surroundings and about more mundane feelings. Like games are often very high stakes, which is good, which is exciting, but I really enjoyed playing this as an alternative to that.
A case study to the exact opposite of dopamine farming games.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It perfectly fits into what we were talking about earlier. So, Rainy Season is
Rainy Season. Awesome. I I will make sure to check that one out. It looks looks quite interesting. Yeah. I thought of a game that I think I want to recommend to you. It's actually game

from from last week's podcast guest which I'm not sure you've played. It's the game is called East Chade. Have you heard of that one?
No, I don't think so. Let me
You can open it on Steam if you want or I'll send you a link. And it also
it looks amazing.
If I had to describe it in one sentence, it's the closest thing to Outer Wilds that I've played so far.
Really? Oh, you've really got my attention now. [laughter] And it's a very it's completely different vibe. So it's not not really a puzzle game or anything of the sorts, but what it what it is it is an exploration game. It's an exploration game about being a painter.
Yeah.
Wow. [laughter] Is it has this been out for a while?
This has been this came out in 2019. Yeah.
Because I now that you said you're a painter, I remember seeing this like ages ago and then completely forgetting about it again. Really cool. I'll definitely play that. Thank you. That's a great recommendation. Like it's um I'm

not entirely sure how to describe it. Like the developer actually described it as a role playing game. They said it's like a Skyrim but without combat. So if Skyrim had like the combat replaced with a different mechanic and they basically replaced the combat with painting,
right? I'm super interested in playing that. I hope it's going to play on Steam Deck, but I would even sit down on the computer to play that because this question of can you do exploration of like an open world or like a semi-open world without motivating the player through combat, that is such an interesting game design problem, I think.
And if people solve that in an elegant way, I'm always so up for it.
Mhm.
Those are some of the best games, I think.
Awesome. Yeah. Um was really fun catching up with you. We we should definitely repeat this sometime.