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Episode 03: Jason Newman (Isles of Sea and Sky)
286 Plays4 months ago
In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Jason Newman, the developer behind Isles of Sea and Sky. Topics include how Jason started making games, designing an open world puzzle game, and blending different genres together.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dragneck and Friends
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Dragneck and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Seren, the producer at Dragneck and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazleton, the head dragneck at Dragneck and Friends. Hey! Today we're joined by Jason Newman, who you may know from his work on Isle of Sea and Sky. How are you doing today?
00:00:43
Speaker
ah Hello, I'm doing okay very tired. I have a six month old baby, and it's early in the morning now Yes, ah so a little bit of meta commentary for listeners. I'm in the United States, Alan is in the UK, and Jason, you're in Japan. Correct. So it's the amazing trifecta of impossible times ends. We're recording this at 7am for you, Jason, 11pm for Alan and 5pm for me. I have the least to complain about.
Exploring 'Isles of Sea and Sky'
00:01:19
Speaker
So yeah, can you kind of tell us a bit about yourself and kind of the stuff that you've worked on, talk a little bit about Isles of Sea and Sky, maybe introduce it for people who have not played it. ah Yeah, so Isles of Sea and Sky is my big game that I've been working on for probably about five years. And it it came out in May of this year. And um it's a block pushing puzzle adventure game. And it's kind of like a weird hybrid of a bunch of different genres and things like that like it's got Metroidvania elements even though it's a puzzle game and It's got this sort of open world kind of Zelda layout, but it is a traditional puzzle game so the goal is to solve puzzles, but you get rewards and um Unlock new powers and things like that and then the sort of open world Zelda aspect of it makes it cool because if you get stuck on a puzzle you can just leave and come back later you can skip a lot of content and
00:02:17
Speaker
There's a lot of optional content, secrets and things like that. So yeah, that's been my main thing for quite a while. I made another small game, a puzzle game called Triga. And other than that, just hobby projects that nobody really knows about.
Jason's Game Development Journey
00:02:33
Speaker
What kind of got you into game development in the first place? Yeah, so I mean, I didn't really realize this until I was an adult. But when I was a kid, I was always like making games for friends.
00:02:47
Speaker
And like when I was in middle school, for instance, I was always the dungeon master when I was playing Dungeons and Dragons. I loved creating the adventures, things like that. Whenever there was a video game, I would always be messing around with the editor. I started like trying to mod Red Alert, Command and Conquer, if you remember that game. And then like Warcraft 3. And then I got into RPG Maker.
00:03:16
Speaker
and game maker and um yeah I was just making a bunch of games as a hobby and mostly just for friends because I really enjoyed seeing people's reactions to the games that I made. Was there anything you remember doing early on that was like, oh yeah, people really like this? Yeah, I mean, I think there was a lot of little weird games that I made when I was a kid that I think were like a big driving factor that reaction from friends that like kept me going with it because I think if if I made a game when I was a kid and then my friends were like, this sucks. That would just crush me so much that I would never do it again, because that's the kind of like very fragile child I was, I think, um ego wise. But um I made this game where I barely remember what it was, but it was like these mazes that I drew on paper with like keys and locks and things like that.
00:04:13
Speaker
And then I would draw the maze out with sidewalk chalk and on the street. And then like my friends would play as if like it was a video game. We would play it and I was sort of like telling them what's happening. And, um, yeah, like I remember that one for some reason, people really loved that. And then like, yeah, my D and D campaigns. I don't know. Yeah, it was, it always felt like there was pretty good positive reactions back then that, you know, kept me going.
00:04:41
Speaker
Before I was a thin sky, did you feel like you were particularly into puzzle games? Like, why did you make I was a thin sky, a puzzle game as opposed to anything else?
The Appeal of Puzzle Games
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah, great question. Actually, I would say that I wasn't really into puzzle games. Maybe I was more than I thought. But um I don't know. I think a lot of people think they're not into puzzle games because there's like a lot of bad puzzle games out there. Absolutely. and way i I was absolutely seeing the people don't think they're into puzzle games. I mean, there are a lot of bad puzzle games, but i'm i'm I'm not even sure that that's why people identify as like not liking them. think its right I think people think they don't like them even without having tried them to establish whether they're good or not. Totally. Sometimes.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's like different levels of bad, right? There's, there's like subjectively, there's like objectively bad games, a lot of, you know, sort of like hobby projects or whatever that are just slapped up on steam. Sometimes people are exposed to those and they give the genre a bad name, whatever genre it is. Like this happens for platformers too. But, um, there's bad as far as like approachability and like making something for a general audience. Like there are incredible puzzle games that,
00:06:01
Speaker
just for like a general audience, ah a regular non-puzzle fan person, a non-puzzle-pilled person, if you will. They'll like look at it and just be like, nope, not playing that. That looks so unfun to me. So I'm really excited about a lot of like everything that's been happening with puzzle games more recently, where they're just so approachable, like visually right away.
Kickstarting 'Isles of Sea and Sky'
00:06:29
Speaker
where a lot of people are trying out puzzle games and realizing that they do like puzzle games because of that sort of like first impression, I think. So, yeah. Jumping off of that, what are some other things that excite you about thinky game design and are there like trends that you're noticing beyond approachable visual language and like ease of onboarding? Yeah, i'm if you play Isles of Sea and Sky, I think that you'll see that I'm really into exploring genres and sort of like hybrid games and things like that. So I'm really excited about that happening with puzzles and puzzle games, because, you know, there's a lot of like, let's say, you know, there's like ah adventure games or action games, there's AAA action games that have puzzles in them. But most of the time, the puzzles aren't very interesting because they're not designed by puzzle designers. And I really hope that in the future,
00:07:29
Speaker
AAA and AA studios will do things like hire a puzzle designer for the puzzles so that the entire game is like really good. and And then that puzzle designer can say things like, don't have the sidekick, shout out the solution to the puzzle as soon as the player sees it, you know, things like that. But yeah, I see in like, you know, indie um puzzle game world, there's definitely a lot of cool genre bending and genre mixing and things like that to really like expand what a puzzle game can be. That's really exciting to me. And when you started this project, what were your goals for it? What was your vision? It started out as a hobby project. So I would say I really didn't have any goals or grand vision for it. I was kind of just making it for friends, just like pretty much everything else I had done. And then like the pandemic happened and I had been thinking about maybe I'll try
00:08:27
Speaker
ah Kickstarter with this because it had sort of been growing into a more real game and then the pandemic happened and I was like alright why not let's just try this see what happens and it ended up working out yeah um how sort of doing the Kickstarter is not exceptionally common in the thinky puzzle space I think largely because a lot of A lot of games aren't really going to find an audience that's going to be looking for it on Kickstarter. just There's always like audience discoverability in the space before you get to Kickstarter. So how did that all go for you? Both the like promotion and trying to get the Kickstarter funding, as well as like after it wrapped up, having that Kickstarter community, doing community updates. How do you feel it went overall? I would love to hear some of your thoughts on that. Yeah.
00:09:23
Speaker
Man, it's an interesting, I'm full of complex emotions about Kickstarter. um Yeah, you're right that it's a weird genre, I think, to go with on Kickstarter. I didn't really know that at the time. um But the thing I did first was I started posting about the game on Reddit first and trying to build up a Discord community. And um that actually worked out I think there was an audience for it there and having a small discord community built up before doing the Kickstarter. I think that was the key because yeah, I think the key on Kickstarter is like you want to have all your eggs lined up in a row right before you launch. And you want to tell everybody, you know, your friends, your family, and hopefully you have a community surrounding the game. You tell everybody, this is the day.
00:10:20
Speaker
that I'm launching and this is the minute that we're launching and I need you all to be there clicking that back button all at the same time because then that's when Kickstarter's own you know algorithms are going to kick in and be like, oh, this is a very popular project and start sharing it and stuff. So I think that was sort of the key. I probably did not get very much traction from Kickstarter itself due to the genre and everything, but also an important factor about Isles of Sea and Sky is that the look of it is like a very like retro kind of Zelda game and I think that helped attract like a whole new audience and like we were talking about before people that maybe didn't know they liked puzzle games and there was a big demo I think that was important too was that those folks could actually try out the game and be like oh I do like this so yeah overall I have some negative feelings about
00:11:20
Speaker
the, I don't know, the, the way that Kickstarter has run. And, uh, when you're launching your project, they're very much like very helpful and seem like all on your side and like, Oh my God, we want your project to succeed. and Which of course they do because they get a big cut. But then like the minute your project launches, it it felt like they just vanished. I could not get them to respond to anything. There was stuff that they promised that they never did.
00:11:48
Speaker
It was very interesting. And then afterwards, the updating process and all that. I think that's a fun aspect. It can be fun. But then at the same time, there are people on Kickstarter who are sort of like um they like back so many projects and they're like really into it. There are some toxic people on Kickstarter. And after my project had already finished, I was reading online about their ah Some people who run Kickstarter projects who have said that there are certain people from Kickstarter in the Kickstarter sphere or whatever that are on their like permanent ban list.
Importance of Demos in Indie Games
00:12:28
Speaker
Apparently you can ban people from backing your projects because they're so toxic. And I've sort of experienced that too, where I definitely have like a short list of people where if I were to use Kickstarter again, I would ban them from backing because they get a sort of like weird harassment power
00:12:46
Speaker
thing going on where they think I gave you $12, so you owe me ah your life, obviously. Yeah, it's a really weird and I guess interesting dynamic. Yeah, it's absolutely strange. you You talked a bit about the the demo there. I'm curious, did you have that when you were posting about the game on Reddit and trying to build up your Discord or did that come a bit later? Yeah, I had the demo and I think that was key.
00:13:16
Speaker
um because there's so much you know noise in the indie game world right now because anybody can create a screenshot. um Even an animated gif doesn't tell you if the game is real or not. I think like a big demo is what you have to do to prove yourself if you don't have a name, if you don't have any kind of track record, which it didn't. So yeah, with sharing the demo on Reddit and telling people, like join our Discord, um where you can download the demo and talk about it and, you know, give us feedback and things like that. So, yeah, I think that was key was that people could see that it was a real game um that had substance to it. And how long had you been working on the game before you had that first demo that you started posting about? Hmm. Good question. Maybe. Maybe like two or three years. Yeah, I would say that's probably how long it took to get
00:14:16
Speaker
to the the playable demo point. But at the same time, this was like, you know, my first kind of serious project as a game developer, I would say. So um now if I were to do the same thing, I think I could probably concept up a game and have a good demo within a year. I think that's pretty normal. But yeah, back then, um I think it took me like two or three years and I was learning as I was going.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah. But like during that time where you weren't like talking so much about it publicly, were you still play testing a lot with friends and family? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say a lot because, um, you know, I would say more like pastoring people to play the game. And, um, it was pretty much like I could only watch people play it in person because it was kind of like I, my friends and family didn't really have like streaming equipment and stuff.
00:15:13
Speaker
Craig and Dan, who, um Dan is my producer and Craig makes the music for the game. We all grew up together, but um they were some of the first friends that I sent the game to. And then they were like recording themselves playing stuff and they started helping me but a lot with the the game and everything. And so now we're, you know, all working on the game together officially.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah. And where did your instincts come from for like what the game should be and like how you should respond to people playing it and and yeah what what kind of direction you should push it in?
Evolving 'Isles of Sea and Sky' Through Feedback
00:15:48
Speaker
Um, I think that sort of evolved organically. It was like, I dunno, it was just sort of changing over time. The theme was sort of naturally developing. Like at one point I decided, well from the beginning I wanted the game to feel very mysterious.
00:16:08
Speaker
and like the player doesn't know anything and they're trying to figure out why they're in the game or what's going on. you know And at a certain point, I decided that it would be early on, I decided it would be on an island, at least one island. and like I made that change and it just felt really right as far as the like super mysterious vibe and everything. I think like as far as the style of the puzzles and everything, I think that was just like you know friends playing repeatedly seeing people play and just sort of tweaking it, um making lots of changes over time. And then eventually it got to the point where I think I felt confident in like designing the puzzles from the ground up and then being able to predict like, okay, I think this is going to be a really good puzzle or players are going to love this, or here's where there's going to be problems. And then of course, still, I would still do lots of play testing because um I think with puzzle games, especially
00:17:09
Speaker
It requires a lot of play testing to try to get the vibe right or or the difficulty right. And then also, I know you both are aware that sometimes you think a puzzle is perfect and then a player will like instantly solve it with a like a ah super trivial solution that you didn't see. So yeah, things like that.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'd love to hear more about your play testing process and like how you tackled like, cause it's, it's an open world game and that's inherently harder to test than a lot of other games that are just linear. Um, yeah. Were there any particular problems you hit with anything that you feel like you learned? It's like a a nice piece of like advice for other people. Uh, yeah, I would say play test extensively and get recordings or watch people live stream it. Written feedback is almost completely useless. You have to see the player play the game because there's lots of stuff that maybe the player didn't notice. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I am constantly making notes while somebody is playing about like even just like, oh, I think they didn't do this, but I think if they had done this, then they could have tried to do this other thing. And that could be an interesting puzzle. Right. Yeah, definitely. You get all kinds of great
00:18:31
Speaker
inspiration and ideas. And then also it serves as a great motivational tool, I think, too, because but sha yeah otherwise with game dev, you're just sort of you have your nose to the grindstone and you have no idea what you're doing or what you've accomplished. But when you get to sit down and watch somebody play, you're forcing yourself to see something that you created that's like sort of been finished, you know, completed because somebody is actually interacting with it.
00:18:59
Speaker
But yeah, so just play testing extensively to try to get like with the open world aspect, it's there's no right answer.
Designing an Open-World Puzzle Game
00:19:08
Speaker
There's no best answer. I think it's just sort of like play testing repeatedly until it feels good enough. My piece of advice would be to have it be very flexible and feel organic rather than like attempting to like over design it and create like this perfect massive puzzle because I think in that case that's when there's going to be a lot of rough edges and um problems and it's probably possible, you know, you could probably make an open world puzzle game like this and spend 10, 15 years on making some insane mind blowing thing where like everything fits together and and and all that.
00:19:53
Speaker
But I think it will lose, you'll actually lose a lot of players because there will be more points where people get stuck. I think, uh, because everything has to fit together perfectly. And then, you know, when players get stuck, they had to stop playing. So I think it's better to have it be more like organic and flexible and not perfect. Then that way it's very flexible. If the player gets stuck, they can just keep playing. And like I said before, the game has lots of optional content, so you can.
00:20:22
Speaker
still finish the game even if you had to skip a lot of puzzles. Yeah. Did you have that consciously in your mind as you were making this idea that, oh, I could make a lot of interconnected puzzles that would be really satisfying to design, but oh, no, I shouldn't because that would take forever to make? Or was this a realization you had kind of in hindsight? Or yeah, how did you? Probably in hindsight, because I think my number one goal with the open world thing was making the game approachable and enjoyable by a larger audience. um I think that was my main sort of driving factor. Yeah. And one common problem with open world games is the problem of like, how do you direct players to where they need to go or where they still have puzzles less that they can solve or even not even just where can they go? They'll have puzzles to solve, but what are going to be the most approachable puzzles for them to solve? Can you talk a bit about how you tackle that?
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's a huge challenge that I'm still working on. Like I have a big update that's coming soon that fixes a lot of issues with that. There were some puzzles that were sort of like questionable about, can I solve this yet or can I approach this? And um some players actually enjoyed that aspect of not knowing. But after the game released, I think the majority of people, it turns out, just find that like really frustrating.
00:21:50
Speaker
So I went back and made it clear for like pretty much every puzzle if you can even approach it or not. And it's things like if you can even interact with a piece of the puzzle yet, maybe you do one or two moves and it becomes immediately apparent that um you can't really do anything.
00:22:09
Speaker
So yeah, that's one aspect is like making it clear if the player has the tools to solve the puzzle. My thinking was that players would have a lot of fun exploring and a lot of players do. But I think with this kind of game, turns out that most players, when they enter a room, they want to know if they can do anything in the room and if they can, they want to get everything that they can right away and sort of like, you know, mark it off the list.
00:22:39
Speaker
So that sort of goes into also how do you inform the player of the content that's remaining stuff that they haven't done yet. A lot of those problems luckily have been solved, I think by the adventure game and open world game kind of genres. For instance, there's a fast travel that you can unlock in my game, which is.
00:23:02
Speaker
very similar to Zelda, a link to the past where you get the flute and and you can summon the bird and then fly to these different points around the world. So that helps with ah like going back to old places and being like, okay, I didn't solve all this stuff. There's a map in game for each island that shows you what items are remaining in the room. So that helps. There's also like a high level thing spoilers if you're listening and you're gonna play my game plug your ears for like 10 seconds there's a these little red glowing snake eyes in the UI that light up when there are secrets and um pretty much every player eventually notices I think that's the greatest tool in the game for the players that are going for a hundred percent and they're they're looking for secrets
00:23:50
Speaker
and they quickly realize that and um everyone seems really excited about it and they go into different rooms and they're like, oh, there's a secret in here. Yeah, yeah that's a that's a really nice, um it's an approachability tool, but it's kind of a subtle approachability tool. Yeah, for sure.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah, so you mentioned, yeah, people want to, want to know when they get somewhere, out whether a puzzle is possible. yeah And you've, you've got a quite a number of of powers that you get over the course of a game. Sometimes there's a power that like, oh, you need tool X to interact with thing Y and you might not even realize that thing Y is there.
00:24:25
Speaker
when you first go through, but when you get this tool, you're like, oh, well, this is a thing that I can now interact with. right But you also have some power-ups you get over the course of the game that can be used in places where they weren't originally designed for, but they just make a different puzzle a bit easier. um And yeah, how do how do you
Inspiration from Speedrunning
00:24:45
Speaker
feel about that? The fact that you can kind of sequence break the game a bit and just make some puzzles redundant?
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, um so that's definitely intentional. um There are some parts in the game that I am part of this new patch where I am changing some of those because some of them were too trivial, which I think is a little bit frustrating to some players where they go, oh, I didn't even have to work so hard at this puzzle. Luckily, there there wasn't too many instances of that. but like I tried to balance it where um it felt really good to find one of these items to where it almost feels like you're cheating. But I tried to balance it where it's like if this is a really hard puzzle, it shouldn't completely trivialize the puzzle. um It shouldn't just make it solvable and like, you know, by jumping over a hole or something. and Like I said, there was some cases like that that I'm redoing. but
00:25:45
Speaker
Um, yeah, I wanted them to feel almost like cheat. Like, um, I think that's really fun. And I think it also makes, hopefully makes players want to replay the game and try to sequence break stuff. Like be like, how early can I get the cloak and how does that change the play through? And, um.
00:26:07
Speaker
I think I'm heavily inspired by the speed running community surrounding the game. Interestingly, there's a lot of people that are into speed running the game and they come up with all kinds of crazy stuff. There's lots of things that I had to fix that were just too game breaking that they discovered. And then there's other things that they discovered that actually um like left in the game and made official parts of the game. Like I created artwork for some of the bugs that they um, discovered and there's sort of like these essential move sets for, for speed running or speed running tech. That's what they call it. I'm not really a speed runner, but luckily Craig and Dan are into speed running. So they gave me a lot of insight into that as well. But yeah, I, I kind of want, I think in games, it's fun when you earn something and it almost, it makes you think like this feels OP. Uh, that feels fun.
00:27:04
Speaker
And um hopefully it it is actually balanced, but it's just that feeling, you know? Yeah, I think that being able to design around that is really, really cool. And one of the things that you can kind of especially do with an open structure game, like I also see in Sky,
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah. Other than like difficulty and balancing and also play testing. So like other than the things we already discussed, what else about the structure ended up becoming like a surprise challenge? Hmm, that's a good question. I mean, I would say this is gonna sound dumb from the perspective of any programmer or game designer that has ever tried anything like this, but Like the sheer number of interactions is just a it's just like a hellish thing for a game developer. um i I knew for sure that having so many different objects and mechanics was going to be a big pain that it was going to require a lot of testing and there was going to be a lot of bugs. But I think it's even knowing that it's just shocking how many
00:28:23
Speaker
problems there can be from just having so many interactions and stuff and i'm still ironing out so many things and i think even 10 years from now if the game's like in my opinion perfect or something there's still going to be tons of weird interactions and weird little bugs that i will have just said, um you know, this is, I give up on this. Is there anything in hindsight you think, oh this was really good, but maybe I should have cut it for the sake of keeping the scope tighter? Yeah, for sure. I mean, one immediate thing that comes to mind is there was lots of stuff that I was working on close to release, which I should have just
00:29:12
Speaker
ah You know, hindsight is 2020, right? I should have put a lot of stuff that I thought was going to be in the game for sure off on the back burner or off in just an ideas list like long ago and really focused on what the game has right now. I think like this update that's coming out soon represents really what I'm satisfied with as like the release more than what I was working on three months up to release that I thought like, oh, this is definitely going to be in the game. But um there was a lot of stuff that ended up being like I left these hints and things that I thought, oh, this will be cool. Players will see this and think, oh, what's this going to be? This will be some cool future content and stuff. But I i was sort of underestimating how observant the majority of players are because
00:30:10
Speaker
pretty much everyone you know like saw these things, found these things, and were like, what is this? And I'm angry that I can't do anything with this. It was sort of a bad move on my part because pretty much everything else in the game, if there's some hint at a secret, then you can figure it out. You can find it. But um yeah, these were just meant to be like hints at future content, some rooms that are like inaccessible, things like that.
00:30:38
Speaker
And it just ended up causing a lot of frustration where people were not sure if they had 100% in the game or not. And I've already started removing stuff like that. And then in this upcoming update, um I've removed pretty much everything that's a hint at future content that's not like super obviously not actual current content.
00:30:59
Speaker
That's really interesting. Yeah. You tried to do this like, oh, teasing of like future content, but it, it didn't work. Like, do you think there was any way you could have made it work? Or do you think it was just a, like in a game with so many secrets, you should have just gone, no, well, there's enough secrets already. Maybe you should have just dropped stuff that was coming as like a complete surprise. Yeah. I think there's a mix, like, and I think I'm getting to that, to a good point with it now, but yeah, like I should have cut ah bunch of stuff like that all together and there's still some hints at future stuff remaining but yet it's way more obvious um like in one of them there's a little guy in the room that's very obviously not part of the game he's like this little beaver guy and he's literally saying like congratulations you found a secret room but ah you know nothing's here for now so
00:31:56
Speaker
How do you think the launch went?
Launch Reflections and Personal Challenges
00:31:58
Speaker
You launched it in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase back in May of this year. ah We were, we were excited, I mean, selfishly, as the Dragneck and Friends organized the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase. And yeah we really liked the game, so we thought it was a good fit. but But what was your thought on it? Yeah, I mean, I think for the genre, obviously, I think puzzle games are a very difficult genre.
00:32:26
Speaker
I think it did really well for i don't know for what I was hoping, I guess. um It did well enough that I can keep working on it and work on the console ports. um like I think I'll be OK until I launch the game on the Switch, which is cool and exciting. I get to keep working on the game. I wish it did a lot better so that I didn't have to you know be worried about what I'm going to do after that.
00:32:56
Speaker
But yeah, as far as a puzzle game, I think it's it's unless you're making like a double A or triple A level game, I think that's just about as much as you can hope for. It was really exciting. And there was so much positive feedback. um It has really good reviews on Steam and everything. But it I mean, it was also it's it's hard for me to to talk about it because um I didn't really get to enjoy the launch or really be sort of, I don't know, present for it, because at the same time, ah so Dan, my producer, he he was really sick and he had to get like emergency surgery. So it was like, it was just me. I was totally overwhelmed. There was lots of bugs that needed to be fixed, ah which is always the case. but um And then my son, who was just born, he got
00:33:55
Speaker
uh, diagnosed with Kawasaki disease. That was really scary. And, uh, so I was dealing with that and, um, he's okay now, but all that happening during the launch, it was, it was just so stressful and I was had to just not really, I didn't really get to, you know, enjoy it and, and take it all in. And, um, so that was really sad, but looking back on it, I think it did, uh, as well as I could have hoped.
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a ah lot to go through it in a very short space of time. Yeah. um Yeah. And I'm sorry that you didn't get to fully enjoy it. From from our vantage point, are this speaking personally, I thought that it went very well. And I was excited to see so many people playing it. Yeah, for sure. Like, I remember um I don't remember the numbers now, but yeah, the sort of like concurrent players at the time was mind blowing compared to what we'd seen before with the demo, obviously. And then, um yeah, I got a bunch of wish lists and stuff too. Like the, I don't know how all this works on Steam, but it's just kind of funny to me how the wish lists that we got after launch are just so much more than what we were able to collect over
00:35:20
Speaker
like five years or let's say like three years of trying to market the game. It's just mind blowing. So that's exciting. That's just really good word of mouth, I think. Yeah, hopefully it translates to sales later down the line when we have um big discounts and things like that.
00:35:38
Speaker
Yeah, no, I i think it will keeping my fingers crossed. Both for that, ah the longer tail as well as the port.
00:35:52
Speaker
So kind of as we have you here, Drag Nugget Friends is no stranger to working on puzzle games, especially games like open world games. Right. Do you have any questions for us or anything that you'd kind of like to pick Alan's brain about or mine? but Yeah. um Well, first of all, something that's not about games. What are ah each of your favorite food?
00:36:19
Speaker
And then I have a question about games. Unexpected. Yeah. Uh, you can't go wrong with a good cheesecake. Okay. Nice. That's so funny because I so strongly do not like cheesecake. That's so funny, Alan. Um, I, I don't know. I would probably like, there's a restaurant that is like an old comfort food of my growing up. It's like a Chinese restaurant, but like just in general, I'm basics of steak.
00:36:49
Speaker
hey Yeah, I think for me, I would say pizza, but I'm also, I don't know, I'm getting getting on in the years and I feel like when I eat pizza now, it just destroys my body. Yeah, I've developed a strong lactose intolerance in the last two years, which is really not fun for someone who lives in the dairy state.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine. Right. So as far as games, though, um so, you know, a Monsters Expedition, um you guys know that game? That's pretty good. ive i've I've played it a few dozen times. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm curious about that because I feel like it's had this really lasting impression in the puzzle games sphere.
00:37:46
Speaker
where I don't know any conversation about indie puzzle games I feel like it can be mentioned and probably is mentioned and then also especially talking about a game like mine which I think a lot of puzzle games are doing more sort of like freer kind of exploration things like that but did you know when you were working on it that It was going to be so impactful or sort of like become such a, I don't know, like an iconic household name in this, in this space. Did you get that sense?
Alan on 'A Monster's Expedition'
00:38:22
Speaker
i I didn't have a sense it was going go to be impactful. i could I could tell pretty early that it was going to be good, that it was going to be special, and that it had the potential to be cohesive and striking in a way that some of my other games had been to lesser degrees.
00:38:38
Speaker
um I don't know like so through development I kind of fluctuated on like the the best possible case um but I could I could envisage for it and like that various like earlier on in the project like as I was like starting to get out to the protop- oh wow these these mechanics are really deep if we just match this up with like a ah world-class story then this could like be like hundreds
00:39:09
Speaker
100x anything I've ever made. um i'm like That was silly and like not the way to make a good game or to enjoy working on a game. Oh yeah, that's key. I feel like something that we didn't really touch on was the key of enjoying what you're working on, at least a little bit.
00:39:34
Speaker
out. So it it ended up being about 10X, the audience size of the previous games, which I'm very happy with. But like, it's kind of interesting because like, even like this, there's this kind of like tier list of games. And so like, like, yeah, Monsters Expedition did great. But like,
00:39:53
Speaker
Barbara if you did better, Patrick the Powerbox did better. and like like So even though like I'm really happy with how i it did, it's like, well, sure, it did okay, but like it's not it' not the puzzle game. It did the best of anything we've published. I mean, i' I don't say that to say like, oh, I'm unhappy. It's just like, you can always be unhappy with something. You can you can always be nitpick. There's yeah there always something to to to aim for. Cut the self-deprecation out of.
00:40:21
Speaker
Um, no, I mean, I came onto the project about a month and a half before the game was announced, um, kind of early in 2020. And I knew very early on that it was at from that perspective, which again, the game had been in development for years by this point. But from my perspective, I knew early on into my starting to work on the game that it was going to probably If the industry was fair, it was going to take off more than Alan's previous games. It being on Apple Arcade helped. So in my mind, when that was coming out, I thought that it would become perhaps a touch point for the kind of deep and core puzzle experience that mobile players were used to more than becoming a touch point.
00:41:17
Speaker
in puzzle game to design if that makes sense because it was being included in a mobile game subscription i thought that it was going to do very good at getting players that were not used to this kind of game to try this and will would probably be a formative experience for a lot of those people within the genre. But ah no, it's it's success on other platforms, on Steam, on Nintendo Switch, on PlayStation. ah Really exciting to see.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the the Apple Arcade audience is kind of interesting because like a lot of people played it there and I've had contact with like approximately 0% of those people. It's like... So between 0 and 1%, yeah. But possibly closer to 0% than to 1%. Yes, um it is a phenomenally large bucket of people that have played the game, but will we ever hear from them?
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah, so so if the question is like audience size and yeah, like like Apple Arcade, but if the if the question is like impact, then like, I don't know. like Like, how many people did it like really touch? But they're not the kind of person to email game developers and say, hey, I really liked your game. ah No clue. And like, I feel like that audience is also like more detached from like game developers and the games that game developers talk about.
00:42:45
Speaker
So yeah, like that's just a really fascinating aspect of like that kind of segmented audience. Yeah, for sure. um When I first started trying to market the game and I was sort of, you know, learning about games, marketing and things like that as I was going for some reason, like people were like, go on
Understanding Game Audiences
00:43:07
Speaker
Facebook. And um like now I'm like, that's ridiculous and weird, but there is like tons of gamers or people who play games on Facebook that don't seem to be anywhere else. And that was very strange to me um that there's this these pockets of gamers out there who like just are so isolated. And yeah, as a developer now, like an indie developer, it feels very strange, doesn't it? Because you're very close to your community and you
00:43:43
Speaker
Interact with people all the time directly who play your games to in order to improve them and things like that so yeah, it's strange I bet like I Mean, I wonder how console developers felt like back in the day like with the Nintendo and stuff Yeah, and you just shoot a game out there and then like how do you find out about what people thought?
00:44:07
Speaker
Uh, you kind of really, my understanding is you just internalize what you thought went well and what the critics said. And maybe, right and maybe in the nineties, late nineties and beyond, you go to like a forum and you read a few posts, a few threads, you try and get a general vibe and then you go right into the sequel. If you're lucky.
00:44:31
Speaker
Maybe it was good to avoid that back then as well, because once it launched, there was nothing you could do, right? Yeah, there's no patching. Yeah, so maybe you would just feel so bad if if the game didn't do well and players hated it.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, no. One of my favorite examples of game discovery for the silent part of the audience is impossible to predict is last year my mother who plays maybe one game a year.
00:45:02
Speaker
called me very proud that she had discovered a game all on her own. And she was so excited to play. It was this little game called that was cute called Ooblets on the eShop. And then I just kind of went quiet. And I said, Mom, you know, I worked on that, right? And she was like, What? like Yeah, I mean, I'm in the credits, Mom.
00:45:26
Speaker
And she's like, oh, well, I thought I did a good thing and I discovered a new game. And I'm like, where did you find it? And she was like, I don't know. You can't tell me where you found it. shoot She won't play half the games I work on. It's confusing. I love her, but she's confusing. Is there anything, any last things that we want to chat about before we wrap up? I think we covered some good stuff.
00:45:55
Speaker
I feel good about it. Where can people find you online, Jason? Yeah, the game is on Steam, Isles of Sea and Sky. And my developer name on Steam, I think, is Cicada Games. And I'm on Blue Sky. Heck yeah. um Yeah, you can do the Cicada Games um Blue Sky ah profile, which is um at Cicada Games.
00:46:24
Speaker
da b sky social awesome And is there anything real quick that you want to plug coming up? um Yeah, just this big patch that I'm working on, a big update for the game. um Yeah, so that's the main thing that's on the horizon. Oh, and um after this update, and we make sure everything's good, then we'll be launching on itch.io. Ooh, exciting.
00:46:55
Speaker
Yeah, so hopefully that'll be, you know, make the game available to a whole new audience. I thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. Saran Allen, always a pleasure.
00:47:10
Speaker
Absolutely. Thank you for listening to the Dragneck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at googlenoise dot.bandcamp dot.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice, and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.