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Episode 52: Stephen Lavelle (Stephen's Sausage Roll, PuzzleScript, English Country Tune)
363 Plays11 days ago
In this episode, Alan chats to Stephen Lavelle, the creator of Stephen's Sausage Roll, which just hit 10 years old! Topics include how Stephen's Sausage Roll started as an attempt to make a really bad game, his main regret about PuzzleScript, the benefits of making a level editor for Oeuf, and multiplayer puzzle games.
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Transcript
Introduction to Drakknacker Friends Podcast
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Drakknacker Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Alan Hazelden, the head Drakknacker at Drakknacker Friends. And today we're joined by Stephen Lovell, who you may know from their work on Stephen's Sausage Roll, English Country Tune, Puzzle Script, and literally hundreds and hundreds of other games. How are you doing today?
00:00:44
Speaker
Hey, Alan. Good. I'm good. It's very nice here in Berlin. I hope it's pleasant where you are in London as well. Yeah, it's not not a bad day's day today.
Stephen Lovell's Game Development Journey
00:00:53
Speaker
I guess if there's anyone who's not familiar with you already, how do you describe yourself and the stuff you make?
00:01:02
Speaker
ah I guess i i mostly just clam up. or somebody i' using this yeah yeah yeah but okay so i make small mostly well I think of myself as making small games, but I guess I haven't updated myself what I think of myself, what i assess of myself, because i've been working for the past two or three, four years on sort of bigger games. But in principle, spiritually, I make small games, I make small puzzle games, and I make small um sort of games with stories. And right now I'm in a sort of a bigger game phase. um And I'm working on some bigger things. But also I like making tools and little game engines as well.
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah. And probably the um the thing that people in our audience, like this audience, will be most a aware of you from Stephen Sausage Roll, which at the time of this podcast recording going live just would have had its 10th anniversary. So congratulations on that.
00:02:00
Speaker
Future congratulations to future Stephen for me as well. Yeah. Yeah. How how does that feel? ah Okay, so what what do we say? ah Time does and does fly by quite quickly. it's been the game has been very good to me. and It's fun.
00:02:17
Speaker
So I was trying to think of things that I want to do for the 10th anniversary, but I was so busy just getting a game out. whatever, two or three weeks ago that I haven't had. haven't sort of gone all in, but it is nigh on time for me just ah to to revisit it and, to you know, tidy up whatever what loose ends. Because, you know, like technical, that just like bugs and stuff, they sort of build up. There's lots of minor things that I can deal with. But um no, it was really good.
Software Challenges and Transitions
00:02:41
Speaker
Right. Is it in a version of Unity that predated the security update that forced literally every developer on Steam to update their games? No, I did have to apply the patch. I didn't have to apply the patch to English Country, true but I did have to apply it to the sausage game.
00:02:57
Speaker
And they never answered my question about... The other big thing that changed was for a lot of for Unity, this game engine that a lot of people used and use still, there was this option that they added at some point to send metrics usage metrics to Unity headquarters. Right. And that was turned on by default. And you could turn it off. But I make a lots of small games.
00:03:17
Speaker
And at some point, I think it was after GDBHR came in, I was like, hey, can you tell me what exactly this is doing? And they were like, don't worry about it. It's but So I guess this was more serious than that.
00:03:27
Speaker
um Yeah, it's it's funny seeing how it's it's developing. And like when I was getting started with Unity, it was sort of approaching its peak in terms of popularity. And then it was popular for a lot of time. And it's not trendy anymore.
00:03:41
Speaker
But it's still decent, right? to I assume. I haven't looked it i haven't opened it in a long time. Right, you used Godot for Oaf, right? Right, I've been going to Godot for a lot of things now. i Unity is fine, but I think I have this problem with a lot of software if I'm using it long term. Just the annoyances pile up, and I'm not able to divest myself of these. you know I have a couple of bad experiences, and it just eventually I just can't stand looking it anymore. Also, maybe... what was i think the Sausage game was the like the last big game I did in it, maybe...
00:04:16
Speaker
I think I tried, I did like lots of medium-sized things in it, and I have a lot of, ah I'm indebted to the engine. It's very good and very powerful and very light. At least it was when I was using it. But yeah, sometimes you just need a change of scene. I don't know.
00:04:30
Speaker
yeah And it's healthy also a little bit. I feel as a developer, If I haven't learned some new tools or used some new tools for a couple of years, I start to get anxious. I don't know if you have this.
00:04:41
Speaker
um I mean, I'm a bit of a different situation because I have become fairly hands off in terms of like actually getting my my hands on the tools themselves. Whereas you're like still, you're you're like being the sole creative force making every part of your game.
00:04:59
Speaker
And I'm much more like, oh, I'm going to design some stuff. And other people do the programming and like touch the engine way more than me. Gotcha. but Yeah. Yeah.
00:05:10
Speaker
No, I think I have it a little bit with, ah yeah, there's some other developers and like if there are there any new tools, I'm like, shoot, i need to i need to keep my skills up to date. the Although honestly, i haven't updated my JavaScript knowledge at all in the last 10 years and it's still fine.
00:05:26
Speaker
Maybe even longer than that. Right, I mean, JavaScript, you can still use 10-year-old JavaScript in a way that you can't really use 10-year-old Unity knowledge. Yeah, yes. Like Unity will have deprecated almost everything you knew 10 years ago. Yeah.
00:05:40
Speaker
ah But also being a bit slow with some of these technologies, you avoid a lot of the fads. Like I waited out um a lot of like very popular fads in JavaScript just by being sort of stubbornly old fashioned. And that's nice. And then you can pick up the things that stay around for a long time.
00:05:59
Speaker
But yeah, you don't want to get stuck in very archaic habits that might be working against you. For sure. Yeah, and you a lot of your tool work has been in JavaScript, right? Yeah, basically all of it, ah because that's what that's the easiest way. like Doing stuff in the browser is the easiest way for people to to use your stuff.
00:06:18
Speaker
it's it's People don't understand file systems anymore, so why would you ever make a creative you why like making a creative tool that lives on people's desktop? iss just It's just much harder than just having something in the browser. It's really topsy-turvy land right now.
00:06:33
Speaker
So going back to Steven Sausage Roll, I mean, there's lots of things I'd be curious to dig into.
Evolution and Success of Stephen's Sausage Roll
00:06:39
Speaker
think one of the things that's really special about it is um the way that it does a lot with a little. like It never really introduces features.
00:06:49
Speaker
new objects it's just teaching you about new consequences of things that were already there was that a design principle you had in your head from the start or did that become more prevalent as you were developing the game It absolutely wasn't there from the start. At the start, my idea was to make, it I've probably spoken with you about this before, i wanted to make a bad game.
00:07:16
Speaker
I wanted idea of of taking mechanics that i really hate and just throwing lots of them together as a joke. And so one of the things was there's a bunch of the genre games we were rolling objects around like dice rolling games or some other games. And incidentally, there was a dice rolling game in the last Steam Demo Fest that was really nice.
00:07:40
Speaker
called, I think, Badum the Dice. But okay, apart from that, generally, I just have a bad feeling with games that involve like rotating dice around or rotating objects. So i was like, this is terrible. Let's do that. And then I was, whatever, I got to sausage. And then I was like, if the character has a fork, let's design a movement system that's really antagonistic to the player, right? So i was I was trying to put together ideas that I personally really disliked.
00:08:04
Speaker
as as a joke. But then there were consequences from these and I ended up ended up turning into its own monster. And specifically, the development of the game is, as the player plays it, is basically parallel to my own development process. Because what would happen would be I would code in I think so originally it was two d Everything starts off 2D. And my rule of thumb is as soon as you switch to 3D, it's all over schedule. You know, block off a couple of years. Scope creep it has really hit.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's so like you can add new mechanics and add whatever you like. But as soon as you make the switch from 2D to 3D as a puzzle game, it's just, yeah, it's it's it's so reliably reliably a scope increase.
00:08:46
Speaker
who So you go to 3D and then you get all of these. So originally you're just pushing around the sausages and then so and maybe you can detach from the sausages. But then as soon as you're in 3D, it's all like, oh, what happens if you're standing on a sausage?
00:08:59
Speaker
And so then i kind of changed how I was approaching it. Instead of trying to put together bad ideas, I was thinking, so let's let's say you're standing on a sausage and you try to walk forwards.
00:09:12
Speaker
Okay, so there's two things like two options. One, the sausage could just move forwards, like you're rolling on the sausage and you move forwards and that's fine. Or two, you start walking forwards and the sausage rolls backwards.
00:09:24
Speaker
like So you end up moving the opposite direction than what you thought. If that makes sense. and And when you made that decision, did you still have in your head this idea that you're trying to make this a bad game on purpose?
00:09:38
Speaker
No. The switch to 3D came with like, no, i like this is this is really interesting. ah We're going to make the most of this. I think by the time when I was going to 3D, oh, actually, here's here's what caused me to go to 3D. I had the image of like a Jenga tower made with sausages. was like, oh, okay, i have to try. I have to see what happens with this.
00:10:00
Speaker
And it took me, it took maybe another six months to a year for that level to actually turn into a level. Because what do you do with a Jenga tower of sausages, right? It's just a big chaotic thing. But that was actually the image that made me go to 3D. And by that point, I guess I was taking it more earnestly. But ah just to get back to the thing about walking on a sausage. So this became a very key thing. If I have two options, like when you're working out what entails from a system of mechanics, you'll occasionally have uncertainties and you don't know what to do. I was always like, I'm going to go in the direction that has more slapstick comedy value.
00:10:32
Speaker
Right. um So in that case, you're on a sausage. If you press forward, you end up going backwards because that's funny. And there were, that was a really good guide to, it just helped,
00:10:44
Speaker
It was a really good arbitrator of a whole lot of things that otherwise I might have like been... Sometimes you might think, oh, well, which which behavior allows for the better puzzles? you know Which has the most scope for you know fun stuff? And I was like, no, which is the funniest? right And that was that was good, because there was enough scope for puzzles, I think.
00:11:02
Speaker
Sure, yeah. and I think that... That sense of like, oh, puzzle games can be really funny is ah not often discussed, but it is very true. Yeah. Another another joke.
00:11:18
Speaker
like i I think, yeah, there's there's a few very funny moments in Stew and Sausage Roll, especially. like i I keep coming back to the Clover level. where you can like you've got all these really, really hard ah levels in the first world.
00:11:35
Speaker
And then among them, there's this one level that's like, oh, this is actually this is actually doable. um And then you solve the level and then you're like, oh no, to solve the level and then get back, that's the challenging part about Right.
00:11:48
Speaker
and That was a level where i had the you know I was like, oh, wouldn't it be a fun to have a level that where you can do this in? And it's easy to say, oh wouldn't it be good if you had a level where you could do this in? But that i could level, I think, just appeared in in like year three of development. I think it was very close to the end where I was like, oh, finally, I thought of this level. I thought of a good level there where that happens for it, where you have to you know you realize you're trapped after solving it.
00:12:12
Speaker
Nice. And that was one of the nice things about long development, where you can have these problems and you're all like, I don't know what the solution, I don't i don't have like a, I have this idea for a level, but I'll just sit on it for a while and maybe next year I'll i'll have thought of something. And it happened a bunch of times with that game. So working on it slowly pay off.
00:12:31
Speaker
ah Yeah, how, ah this is public knowledge, but like, how how long did that project take from start to finish? It was four years and there were like difficult phases where I wasn't making much progress. There was, you know, I took off a couple of months to work on PuzzleScript, which was also very worth it. And i think towards the end of development, I was pretty, I was worn out and there was one bug that I couldn't figure out how to solve for, think it was months and months and months. And I was just trying to solve this one bug.
00:13:04
Speaker
It was um just to do with the game logic. The game logic, has all of these horrible edge cases. I've had i' like you know hundreds of tests and there was one behavior where I just couldn't get it i couldn't fix it without breaking other things.
00:13:19
Speaker
And then eventually I figured it out. But it was it had like periods of more of greater and less ah progress. But i was it was basically for for four years. And part of that was in Cambridge, UK, and part of it was in Berlin as well. So it was also a transition period in my life.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah. And were you expecting it to get the reception and kind of legacy that it ended up with?
00:13:48
Speaker
No, no, um because a lot of people bounce off it, right, which is fine. And from having done a bunch of testing, I was like, OK, a lot of people don't like it and that's fine.
00:14:00
Speaker
um I'm still going to going to work. You work it up into the best state that you can. And then you see what happens. it was basically unexpected. I think um I'm quite indebted probably to John Blow for ah praising it so publicly before launch.
00:14:17
Speaker
And so when that happened, I was like, OK, OK, maybe people will like this. But in general, it's like if you've you know how this is, right? If you're looking at testing, you get to see like a very depending on what testers you choose, you get to see like ah course they a sort random sample of how people react to your game.
00:14:34
Speaker
And it's difficult then to know what will happen if you have if you're making a puzzle game and a specialist puzzle audience gets onto it or or what. And also back then there was wasn't really a puzzle game community. Right. Not at all. It didn't exist. There was the Caravelle Forums, which are amazing. right That was the main center of puzzle stuff, but that was around a single game series, Droid. Yeah, it's weird to think back. There just war up wasn't... i don't think... There just wasn't this sort of established puzzle community.
00:15:02
Speaker
I mean, it's in some ways, I think this game is influential in like spawning that community. um Thank you. Yeah, i I think that and...
00:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, so you get Baba is You came out quite early as well in this
Influential Puzzle Games and Industry Reflections
00:15:19
Speaker
early cycle. Yeah, I think a few games that people constantly reference to me as super influential is like, Baba is You, Steven Sausage Roll, and surprising to me is a lot of people say a good snowman is hard to build.
00:15:33
Speaker
Ah. Which is also a a similar time period to Steven Sausage Roll. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a... ah i did Because I remember back then where it's all like you're making a puzzle game. and like Yeah, it's labor of love, right? You don't... Nobody... It's not ah it's not a thing that people are interested in, right?
00:15:50
Speaker
Block pushing games, it's not a thing. and I mean, it's it's still not a thing as much as ah my bank account would like. But ah um but it think much more it was it was also a time when um releasing a game on Steam was more impactful than now. Like, there was there was less possibility that you'd release something, and it was like...
00:16:16
Speaker
just going to get ignored um yeah if it's like a certain quality bar. um there were There was just fewer games hitting the production values and the amount of time investment that were getting added to Steam. Like like now you've got like dozens and dozens of puzzle games hitting every week.
00:16:36
Speaker
Yeah, and it's exhausting. Right, and Steam's Sausage Roll would have been the most notable puzzle release for like three months. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I feel it's weird nowadays if somebody shows me a game and they're like, why isn't you know what do you think? Is it going to do well? Or you know why isn't it doing well? And a lot of the time it's it's just like, well, it's not exceptionally good.
00:17:00
Speaker
like ah Make your game exceptionally good. that's That's not really useful feedback, right? It's just really rough right now. um ah I mean, have you had this experience as well where it's just like, what do you say?
00:17:13
Speaker
Yeah, all all the time. or like i mean, that situation is kind of like, I'm i'm i'm fine with that telling somebody like, yeah, this is this is neat, but not quite there yet. um What's more ah upsetting is when I go like, oh, wow, this is this is great. um But it's a bit too janky and a bit too visually ah bland to have like any chance of hitting, no matter how special the gameplay is.
00:17:43
Speaker
like I play a lot of stuff that like I really love, but like if it had come out 10 years ago, there's a chance it makes 10 times as much money as if yeah or like it it It could... like it there's a chance that it finds an audience 10 years ago. But today it's just like, no, like you're go you've poured your soul into this thing. It's good. And sorry, it's not going to get more than 100,000 players. Yeah.
00:18:14
Speaker
Let me just say, want to look at the stats here. so my game was released in 2016. In there were... Oh, for already 4,000 games a year on Steam, and now there's 15,000. fifteen thousand But when I got started, it was like a couple of hundred a year for my first game on Steam, which is just, it's just, there's so much more more games nowadays.
00:18:35
Speaker
ah And lots of those games are like really, really good. It's not just that there's like more slop drowning out the good games. There's there's yeah it's just more people making great stuff.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, and i have I guess I have a bit about this, that as a player, it's probably like last year was by probably my most fun game for playing years. i played One of my best years for playing games ever. Like I just played so many games where I was really like, wow, this is great. This is I'm really obsessed with this game. It happened over and over and over again.
00:19:06
Speaker
And so part partly that makes me optimistic as a player. Lots of good games are doing well. Now, there's lots of games that I don't like. And they're also, so you know, I actually think this is a pretty crappy game and it's succeeding and then whatever. Right. But good games are generally succeeding. But sometimes when I see a game like a game that is really polished, really carefully made, and it just sinks.
00:19:30
Speaker
And I'm like, I do what I can, but I like i don't know what you can do, right? it's just <unk> It's sad when you see games that slip through the cracks, even though they tick all of the boxes. it's not like great gameplay, ah but it looks a bit weird, so I understand why people don't like it's like, this ticks all the boxes. I would like if this was successful. but yeah Yeah. It kind of feels more random now, whether something good can hit.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah. And this I guess this also means that I guess I've... You know, sausages pay my bills, even now, which is sort of miraculous. So I don't... um If I'm releasing a new game... and But also, it's like it's like I release a new game, and if it's successful financially, it's successful financially. But whatever happens, I try to make the game the game good. And I guess that was also my case when I was getting started, right? I didn't... I had...
00:20:22
Speaker
Not much money, and I was like, let's just that's just YOLO. Let's just have fun, try and make a good game and see what happens. And I guess I'm still trying to keep that spirit alive, though the conditions have changed a lot.
00:20:35
Speaker
Right. i mean in some ways, I think the fact that it's so much harder to they make the financial case for making video games as a job makes it so that just doing it for the love of it is still the only viable path to like feeling good about it or like like to to not like burning out and being depressed about doing it. Yeah.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think. Also, I guess I'm in a very specific bubble, right? I don't, I'm trying to think of people who are, i mean, some people are good at combining sort of financial competence with artistic vision, right? They're able to be all like, I have this great idea and it's going to do, I'll be able to like, you know, have a family.
00:21:22
Speaker
And that's a, that's a quite a good skill to have. But yeah, it's weird because I guess one sign that it's quite, In some sense, we had it easy is there's still a lot of people around from when we were starting, right?
00:21:37
Speaker
I mean, people come back and forth, but people are still making games either as hobbies or ah quite a lot of people are are still doing it full time, right? Yeah, um and i think I think some of that is just like if' easier to like keep the momentum than like start something new.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so does this is this a sign that there's some stagnation? Not really, because you still get big new games coming like from people that I've never heard about all the time.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah, some some of the favorite games that I play every year, some of these first first commercial game. yeah Like both both of the projects we're currently publishing are people's first commercial games. and They're great. Which games?
00:22:22
Speaker
ah So wait, when is this going out? um So one of them was in that, He Who Watches. ah Really, really great game. um so is that the gravity turning one? Yeah. So kind of like dungeon crawler inspiration. Right. was just thinking dungeon crawler because all the cubes. You can walk on the walls and you can grab cubes and change their gravity. um it's It's kind of the most three-dimensional thing block-pushing puzzle game I've played maybe ever in a way that's like really really satisfying to you play.
00:22:56
Speaker
ah Okay okay that's that's uh that sounds uh that's interesting because this is what of actually making things 3d is really hard. Right. Uh there's so many problems um I'm trying to think what have you done all this for have you Personally, I worked on puzzles for Bonfire Peaks.
00:23:15
Speaker
Ah, okay. Yeah. That was the most fun I've had doing level design for a puzzle game. And I think some of that was like, it wasn't my project. So like, I didn't have to worry as much. um But some of it was like, oh, three dimensional puzzles, like they can come together in a way that a two dimensional puzzle doesn't have the possibility space for. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:38
Speaker
um Okay, what would you say is the biggest sort of encumbrance, like the the the weirdest difficulty of working in 3D? um I mean, the the tools can be a bit jankier because it's easier to have a really nice 2D tool than a really nice tool for 3D editing. um But thinking about like more on a level...
00:24:04
Speaker
level design perspective um yeah i don't know if i if i felt encumbered um i mean there was ah there was also like a thing of like oh you've got a design level that are not occluding themselves like that's exactly what was thinking that's that's that's exactly what i was thinking because i just getting a flashback to when i started i My first 3D English country tune started off as 2D and I went to 3D and I immediately had all these ideas and i was like, oh wait, you can't see things.
00:24:36
Speaker
Shoot, visibility is like the number one concern. It's like the that's the biggest obstacle for me in 3D puzzle design. Right. Also for the sausage game. Mm-hmm. And i I didn't even really appreciate this until we signed He He Watches, but I think that game does something really clever with being a first person. Like like often 3D puzzle games with a first person perspective, you play them and like, well, sure, this this is a first person game and maybe that's like a a business decision that like, oh yeah, this will sell more than if it was like top down.
00:25:12
Speaker
Like Talos Principle. like just tali principle tali like a lot of those puzzles would be better from a third person godview perspective um you'd just be able to internalize the puzzle and figure things out much more cleanly i'm not sure about that but i uh yes okay because it's all about like line of sight Sure, yes, that's true. there's's There's aspects of like, oh yeah, you you're feeding this laser through this small window that wouldn't read from a top-down perspective. So there's there's there's reasons why it is how it is. But anyway, go on. He who watches, you're kind of on the inside of a room and like all the sides of that room could be used to walk on or put things on. And so that wouldn't work from an external perspective because you wouldn't be able to see three of the six sides of the room.
00:26:03
Speaker
Right. um And so by having a first person player, it allows this kind of puzzle to work. These mechanics that it's got, they work in a way that a different camera perspective just wouldn't, would make it just really janky and awkward to control.
00:26:22
Speaker
um So yeah, I've, I've been surprised by like, oh, this, this actually really gels with the mechanics Oh, yeah. i am Do I have anything to add to that? um So sausage roll is all isometric. And I did some tweaks for visibility. Like if you're standing over the edge of the cliff, it'll like pan the camera at a little bit out so you can see more of what you're standing over.
00:26:46
Speaker
um For the English country tune, because that's much more 3D, like with, you know, you're going around every side of the surface. there has That has like, I think, five different camera systems.
00:26:57
Speaker
um for visibility. As in five different camera systems in different levels or five different levels? Okay. yeah' in different so So there's like a side on camera. There's one that like it's like for sphericals kind of levels that will always just be outside and look towards the center. There's like ah over the not over the structure it's kind of over the shoulder style camera.
00:27:17
Speaker
And that was like that was a good idea. Right. Because otherwise it's you want you want moving around the the levels to be fun. Yeah. But yeah, that was an ordeal. And i I notice it now and a lot of when I'm playing, I guess some 3D platformers, you'll notice there's lots of very subtle, different camera systems at play. I think playing one some of the Mario ones, i I had a good feel feel for that as well.
00:27:40
Speaker
Right, yeah, there's some good... Actually, I mean, I think the ones I'm thinking of are possibly even just for 2D games, but there's some good GDC talks about... like the complexities of cameras and like all the really subtle things they do to make it feel just satisfying and invisible.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah. it's It's a fun rabbit hole. Right. Yeah. Should we move on to puzzle script?
Puzzle Script: Creation and Impact
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think puzzle scripts already had its 10 years, right? Cause I released before, before the sausage came out and I've been working on that today.
00:28:13
Speaker
It's been fun. i Right now, I guess everyone here has probably heard about PuzzleScript. We don't need to do the the intro. ah Probably. I mean, so it's the the way I describe it is it's a browser-based tool for making grid-based puzzle games where the game logic isn't written with traditional code, but with find and replace statements.
00:28:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's basically that that's that's that's it. And it's um yeah it's been very powerful, and it's been very fun to see people do things with.
00:28:46
Speaker
And it was one of these things where I guess I was working on it, and this was based on Tom Seven's
00:28:58
Speaker
Ludum Dare game, T&Y Do you remember that? I do. right Not ah particularly well, but I remember i didn't realize that was an explicit influence.
00:29:10
Speaker
Yeah, this was the... is that that was like If I was to explain T and Wireworld, it's like a proto Baba is you. So it's a big... so Each level is a big sort of Sokoban style screen, but the rules are written in the level with blocks and you can rearrange the rules. And the rule format, I think, is basically the same as puzzle script because it involves explicit movements as part of the rule.
00:29:31
Speaker
And I was like, oh, that looks like it could be powerful. It was an amazing Ludum Dare game. It was like actually a wiki, so you could make new levels and and add them to the wiki. And we're all like connected together.
00:29:43
Speaker
um so I was like, i'm going to try working on this and as a break from the sausage game. And then i was i started working on it. There's so many. It was such an adventure because I hadn't written the proper compiler before.
00:29:56
Speaker
And so I started writing a compiler so that would compile this idea of what the rules should look like in my head. And then I'd written the compiler and then I tried to compile something that had like a syntax error And then it just, it it crashed.
00:30:10
Speaker
And I was like, oh wait, you can't just have the compiler crash when it encounters an error. you have to like give some sort of warning or give some sort of message. And I had to redo everything from scratch. And it was a really good adventure. I learned a lot and used a lot of tools. And then that's where I decided to go to the browser and it really paid off. But so when I was working on it,
00:30:27
Speaker
I had this idea, okay, I should have 10 games in mind that I want, like 10 traditional puzzle games. And I should want that my puzzle script can elegantly describe all of these. So there was like Snake, not really a puzzle game. There was Sokoban,
00:30:44
Speaker
Lexaloffles games, and was it... ah The Chocolate one? and Not the chocolate one, the Zen Puzzle Garden, and also the the one where you're um eating fruits. Yes. can't think of what called. It's one of the Puzzle Script demo games. I was going to ask, like do do those original 10 ideas kind of map to the 10 built-in ones in the Puzzle Script editor? Certainly there'd be like a selection, about half of them are the ones that I would have had in mind. Yeah, yeah.
00:31:11
Speaker
ah yeah Zen Puzzle Garden and nio Nico Puzzle. Yeah. um And that was a really good guide. And so a lot of times when people are thinking about making new yeah know programming languages or engines, I'm like, try and keep a bunch of test cases in mind.
00:31:28
Speaker
So you can like see, ah, yes, this idea helps me make these games or doesn't help me make these games. So I had this idea and I listed the games, I think over lunch, and then I went home and I coded them all really quickly. And I was like, wow, I was able to just code these up in puzzle scripts, get them working great.
00:31:45
Speaker
And then I worked on the editor for a little bit and it was getting close to launch. And when I was, I was getting close to being ready and i was like, it's ready. haven't made any new games with it. i was like, and that's a red flag, right? I've made this game engine. I haven't made anything with it. I've like re-implemented other games, but, and if I was more diligent, I i would have waited until I had made a game with it, like a new game myself. But,
00:32:10
Speaker
Whatever, I wasn't fully diligent and I just released it. And the next weekend, ah ha what's his name? Made Heroes Sokoban. Oh wow, Jonah also.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah, the first the first weekend after launch. i was like, wow, okay, great. It was worth it. i was like the People did some other things as well, but that this game came out really quickly and Jonah was like, oh, it's my first game.
00:32:32
Speaker
was like, great. Okay, good. it's ah it was It was worth doing. Amazing. And then people kept on doing things. um Yeah, it was ah it was really good. And then eventually I did make some things, right? Just for whatever reason, I was drained of inspiration.
00:32:46
Speaker
<unk> great do you Do you think, thinking back to the first things you made in it, do you think there's anything that you, if you had waited to release a tool until you tried making some stuff, is there anything that the first attempt of making something with it would have led you to like change before releasing it?
00:33:06
Speaker
Ah, well, I don't know if you know what my main regret with puzzle script is. i don't think I do. The thing about developing a programming language is that if something's in the programming language, it's in the programming language. You don't want to deprecate it. It's a core part of the language. At least with PuzzleScript, I've put a lot of work into having old games keep working.
00:33:26
Speaker
ah Microsoft style, right? I'll do whatever I can to... like i um If people wrote code that should spout errors, um sometimes I'll contact them and be all like, hey, can we just change your game so that it doesn't... like have things in a completely like wacky order. where like I don't know how you managed to write this, but and it compiled by then, but it shouldn't compile right now. But um in general, I try to keep everything compatible. But there's... um In Puzzle Script, there's the feature of rigid body movements. wondered if... like when you When you described it as a language feature that you can't take away, of like, I wonder if it's rigid bodies. Yeah, it's that. It's just like... and So...
00:34:03
Speaker
This is getting technically into PuzzleScript stuff. So if you don't know PuzzleScript, you don't care about this. So the reason I was so proud of this idea. So normally with a physics engine, if you're doing like a physics engine, you have this sort of notion of rigid body, or maybe you can aggregate a couple of bodies so they all move at once.
00:34:20
Speaker
right It's a standard three d physics engine thing. And I was like, what's the same thing for puzzle games? What's the best way to describe like you know a large extended shape that occupies lots of blocks that I want to move at once?
00:34:34
Speaker
right Because this wants to be talking about the object. And i was like, wait a minute, maybe I could make it a property of the rules instead. And this was such a seductive idea. I felt so smart.
00:34:45
Speaker
was like, yes, yes, things that are properties of objects can actually be properties of rules. And it turns out it just it's just this big, complex sort of kludge of code that's sort of gunking up puzzle scripts in the middle. It's fine. I work around it. I don't touch it.
00:34:58
Speaker
And it's also really difficult it's really difficult to reason about. Right. And as far as I know, nobody really uses it? Zaratustra uses it. a couple of people use it. like It is used. It would...
00:35:12
Speaker
I guess I could contact everyone who's used it and be all like, hey, is it okay if I rewrite your game to not use this? Wow. I think it... Yeah. It has a couple of very esoteric uses. um Anyway, it's in there and in the documentation, I think now I say just don't use it. You almost certainly don't need to use it and I give you a bunch of ways to not use it for different situations. It's a small thing.
00:35:32
Speaker
I've made a lot of games. I don't think I've... ever used it because I've always like it I don't think it works the way my brain works and I can find I've been using puzzle script for long enough that I can always find a more puzzle scripty way to do that functionality yeah yeah it's a small thing there are there are bigger regrets that one can have so it's that that's the the main problem is fine also the there's some names that I chose wrong I think I have the word orthogonal which I shouldn't have used but it's in now so
00:36:06
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. um And yeah, I mean, Puzzle Script has been so influential on me. Like, I don't know if I would still be making games if it wasn't for for it. I think you know this, but it it came out at a time where I was burnt out on programming.
00:36:25
Speaker
and what What would your project have been before then? I'm trying to think. That was Sokobond. Oh, gosh, yeah. Man, that was cool. Yeah, it was cool, but it was not particularly fun being the sole programmer on it. Yeah, and it was also, that was multi-platform, right? It was mobile.
00:36:47
Speaker
It didn't come to mobile until like a decade later. Okay, okay, okay. but i But I was working on the mobile version of it at the time and having a miserable time. Yeah, I never got the mobile version of the sausage game out because I was so depressed about one bug. so I couldn't think there was a bug with like the IDs getting duplicated. Like if you played for whatever, there was like a very small chance that you would end up with something we just teleport somewhere more weirdly. Oh, wow. It was...
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, I got so depressed and I tried it again a couple of years later and I just couldn't do it. And i I just I just felt so miserable. So that's why it was perfect. It was really good. It was a really good version of the game. Except that there's a random chance that your save file will get irrecoverably corrupted. Yeah, um which in retrospect, I think I should probably just YOLO'd it. It was a very small chance and you have multiple saves. um But yeah, that's all in the past now.
00:37:40
Speaker
um So yeah, um I'm happy that PuzzleScript was a ah of use free use to you and also to me. right ah It's ah one of these nice things where I've also used it a lot and benefited a lot from having it available. so yeah yeah ah Are there any notable games that you remember people having made in PuzzleScript that you're like, oh wow, this is like really special?
00:38:07
Speaker
So the Heroes of Sokoban games, 100%, was very, very, very, very special. Actually, I'm just going to cheat by going to the puzzle script gallery very quickly. I have a couple that I i know about as being very good. I mean, the other big ones were everything by Jack Lance.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yep. Just these sort of horrific... Really like very beautiful and sometimes like really horrifically grotesque, but really impressive, like really virtuosic games. It goes one after another, really amazing stuff.
00:38:39
Speaker
um I mean, yeah, that's I'd say Heroes of Sokoban stuff is really nice because it's very simple and very well designed and has a bunch of gags. like i've reused lots of like there's a couple of rooms in here as a soak about and just reuse the shapes a lot just like there's a couple of room there's like i don't know i've developed this sort of running gag with myself and i think occasionally other people pick up of just using the same rooms over and over again in different games Right. I mean, in in the ah Thinking Public Games community, there's very much a thing of riffing off Microban 1. Yeah. And I tried to get in contact with David Skinner, but I think he's just not ah available. I think he was, all yeah, i couldn't I couldn't figure out how to get in touch with him. But um I'd like to think he would be happy to know that a lot of that has had this really large influence on the game developing community, probably completely unbeknownst to him.
00:39:28
Speaker
ah For people who don't know, David Skinner is ah a Sokobanist who made lots and lots of levels. I haven't played any of his harder levels. I just really like his simple levels. That's like enough for me.
00:39:40
Speaker
um Did you see that um somebody recently made a player called Sokoban Notebook? which is like a it's kind of a better UI for vanilla soccer band where you can run entering inputs one by one. You can kind of let go like, oh, I want to drag this crate like over here and over here. and You can just drag it with your mouse and you can like make notes.
00:40:08
Speaker
And you can like, there's some advanced features I think where you can like, create parts of like, oh, well, I'm going to want to do this eventually. So I'm going to like plan out like, oh these are the inputs I'm going to need to do at this point. um And i I found that this tool from playing soccer band games made those kind of harder, more complex soccer band levels feel much less annoying in an interesting way.
00:40:37
Speaker
So when you're talking about dragging crates around, is this arbitrary dragging and then you justify it later? Or is it like you drag it and it generates like the the player code to move the crates? think by default, it you drag a crate around, it will generate the player inputs. It will push that way. But there's also modes where you can go like, OK, well, let's say I don't like pretend the player can just walk through walls. just like drag this and then you can kind of see okay well i need to do that then what would need to work around that yeah no no i haven't heard about that that's interesting because i remember like there's a whole world of people who are playing soca band games and only soca band games and that's not necessarily i don't know any people in this community i don't think right it's its own world uh And I remember playing a tool using a tool like this years ago. And I remember had this one feature where it's all like, let the player if the player goes into a dead end, pop up a notification. right If you get to a dead end state, pop up a warning. And I was trying to play a level and it kept on popping up these warnings. i was like... i
00:41:41
Speaker
It's too far away. I can't tell how I've screwed things up yet. It was really entertaining. like I just i go into i push a crate into a room and it's like, nope. and i'm like come on It was really weird to get these notifications that I'd screwed up without being able to tell how. That was entertaining and that you turned that off pretty quickly, I think.
00:42:02
Speaker
um But yeah, this what you're talking about seems also very through design, like what's the word, like a IDE, e or I don't know, like it it does all this, like everything, right? It's like an environment for for solving Sokaban. So that's interesting.
00:42:15
Speaker
And one of the things I found interesting about the the whole world of people solving um Sudoku stuff, you know fancy Sudoku stuff, is that also shows you as a player how you can think about solving Sudoku stuff.
00:42:30
Speaker
And actually, this is getting into... um all right, can you guess who I'm thinking about right now? ah No, no give Give me a little more.
00:42:42
Speaker
ah Pen and paper puzzles. Blush? Locked digital? exactly Blush. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Letibus stuff, um which is amazing in that respect as well. Right. Yes. His games teach you the logic of them, often in a wordless, instructionless way, in a way that's really, yeah really nice.
00:43:04
Speaker
And also as a player, at least my experience was, I think my best experience playing them was actually playing them on an iPad as PDFs and annotating them. And you end up developing this really sort of really rich system of annotations to try and encode all the fun stuff that you can think of in the level.
00:43:23
Speaker
And yeah, And you have like this visual rich visual language, and then you also have a rich sort of inner monologue about what you think is happening in the level. And like am I satisfied that I've actually solved this level?
00:43:35
Speaker
Right, yeah, but because that's that's something interesting about paper puzzles, is that you like you can solve them and be like, well, I'm pretty confident I didn't make a mistake. But like did i make a mistake?
00:43:45
Speaker
Right. you don't want to Ideally, you want to be certain. And ideally, the game-divided designer will let you be certain. But yeah, and this is one of the reasons why I was a little bit skeptical about the digital version of was it Locke? um But then it was I played it and it was great.
00:44:04
Speaker
like It's a really good digital version. It's missing a little bit of this sort of, because the computer is able to tell you if you've messed up or not, you you're losing a little bit of the the magical inner world simulation.
00:44:15
Speaker
but it's still great. Yeah. It definitely has different strengths than the paper version. Yeah. But, um, I was, it's definitely like way better than I would have like on the upper end or what, of what I would have expected. So it's really good work. Yeah.
00:44:31
Speaker
And i I definitely think out of his games, it's probably the one that's most suitable to a digital adaptation. Definitely lots of other paper bubbles. You could do a digital version of them, but they would be that the digital version might not hold up as well in its own right.
00:44:49
Speaker
Yeah. In general, like porting... I guess I have a problem with a lot of board games where I have no time with a lot of the time for board game ports, because a lot of the stuff that makes a board game elegant isn't what makes a video game elegant.
00:45:03
Speaker
and This is why I really appreciate um the board game version of Wilmot's Warehouse. Yes. very it doesn't It does the job well. Totally different game. yeah um It's a different, but it's, yeah, it's like, it's it's a successful port. And I kind of wish, ah I mean, it's it's hard. It's hard, right? that's ah they They managed to do something that was hard.
00:45:23
Speaker
So that's that was good. I recently played the board game Chronicles of Crime, um which is kind of a detective game where you get these scenarios and they reuse these components of like, oh, his's here's a deck of cards, which are just like different people. And they've got QR codes on them. And you've got this app that like, you know, scanning these cards and then you can like get instructions. well Okay, now you can dig through this other deck of cards to find this other card. And like, it was it was it' interesting. But like my main takeaway from it was like, oh, this is kind of just a video game with awkward components rather than a board game. It wasn't, it didn't feel like a board game.
00:46:03
Speaker
and But it was a physical game. It was a physical game. like You can't play it without these physical components. yeah But you could also have a digital version of this where it's just like automating a lot of stuff. And like that version of the game, like ah I guess the physical components didn't particularly justify their existence to me.
00:46:25
Speaker
Yeah, I remember playing a card game called dead'sma i think it's called Dead Man's Chest. It's a really cute um card game, sort of a bit a bit like a... It's a push-your-look style game. And the standard mode has a thing where you're... you know At the end of the game, you you tally up your scores and you find out who's the winner, right?
00:46:44
Speaker
Very normal. But in the and the rules, it gives an alternative mode where you're doing this at the end of every turn. And I was like, who would ever play this? You don't want to be like counting up all your cards every turn. It's just like it's the the bookkeeping is horrific. And I was like wait, wait, wait.
00:46:59
Speaker
There's a video game version of this. They have this for feature parody with a video game. Fine. it's It's completely unsuited to the board game, but at least I understand how it got there. um but yeah um but yeah willman's warehouse is is an absolute success story in uh in both of its versions um so it's it's nice to see people doing it really really well and lock also pretty good you mentioned jack lance um a little bit ago i'd love to hear like your side of the story of the game pushing it
00:47:33
Speaker
Wait, which one is... Is pushing it the one where you're going right? No. No, um it's the game where you you have these objects that the pistons. The pistons, yeah. Right. um I'm still supporting that. I think I fixed it, but there's an out for... i mean, how much should we say about it?
00:47:51
Speaker
I think we should just spoil the the whole thing. Okay, the spoiler warning. This is the one that ends up being like a JavaScript injection bug, right? Right. It just like it goes completely off the rails. ah Yeah, like because yeah it starts as like, okay, this is PuzzleScript game. um You've got these pistons that like will push you over. And then it starts having levels where like you're using these pistons to get things at half-tile offsets, which is the thing you can do in PuzzleScript. Yes. You just have to do it by actually having twice as many tiles as it looks like usually. And like then it's just like rotations start getting added and stuff. And it just goes all the the wall. And if you look at the source code, it just looks like it's like 50,000 lines of stuff and then it gets cut off.
00:48:34
Speaker
So it like gives you like the first 50,000 lines of code and you're all like, wow, this looks monstrous. then you're like wait a minute, it just cuts off here. And then you you scroll up and you realize, oh this JavaScript injection, that's funny.
00:48:45
Speaker
And so as a developer, it was my responsibility to fix this bug, but I have an out if you're accessing the the source code of this game where it it allows the JavaScript injection because this game deserves deserves its place.
00:49:00
Speaker
Yeah. Did he give you a heads up that he was oh that he did this? um I think he let me know about it, but I don't know if it was in advance. But i was it was funny. I was like, oh, that's great. And like it's not a serious thing. It would just allow people to execute whatever JavaScript they like. So it's not it's not like... I can't remember if he told me before or who really stood it up. But yeah, it's a pretty minor thing. Yeah.
00:49:24
Speaker
PuzzleScript doesn't do much on its own. like this I don't have servers for PuzzleScript. Everything just gets sent to GitHub. Right. i Yeah, that's a really clever ah solution that has gone on a bit more awkward over time once they disabled anonymous gists. Yeah, that really um cut off.
00:49:47
Speaker
a lot of puzzle script development. I think it probably reduced it significantly um because you don't have this viral thing of people easily being able to share games, which was effortless when we started it off. And I've thought about various different solutions to this, and maybe it would be fine to just host the stuff myself.
00:50:05
Speaker
Um, but I think there was a definite like downtick in shared content and there's more like people put stuff on it or whatever, and that's fine. But I just, thought I would be nice if there was a solution that wasn't monumentally burdensome for me.
00:50:18
Speaker
Right. Potentially. Um, I mean, it's probably fine, right? It's probably fine. It's probably fine, but what if it's not fine? Right, and if it's not fine, then I guess I just have to close off that. And I could still... right, let's say I allow anonymous sharing.
00:50:33
Speaker
I allow anonymous sharing. Great, and then it works for a couple of months, and then somebody finds a way to really do terrible things with it. Then I'm like, okay, okay, okay, I'm going to go back to GitHub, but I'll still have this fallback.
00:50:44
Speaker
if you I can still have this static database that I can serve from. So it's... But... Yeah. Or I could have accounts and and do the whole, but then suddenly I'm like... Then it's not as seamless as... It would still be probably a little bit better because the GitHub thing might turn people off.
00:51:02
Speaker
Right. It would be better than forcing people to sign up to ah have a GitHub account and then jump through some weird hoops to link that GitHub account with your puzzle script. Yeah.
00:51:13
Speaker
um The other thing that I remember looking into was like Pastebin. Not Paste. Yeah, I think it was Pastebin. They have APIs, but I do not trust. i don't know I don't know what they do, right? they're yeah they're I mean, GitHub is sketchy in its own ways, but um I wouldn't have any problem. Probably if GitHub is hosting something, it's probably going to still going to be hosted in five years' time.
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I don't know what has to do with Pastebin. So yeah, um I've been very careful whenever I come across a nice puzzle script game to download it and add it to my like personal database.
00:51:46
Speaker
um So i'm doing that I'm doing some archival work on my side. But yeah, it was very frustrating. though This was before they Microsoft bought them. I think they were just trying to like tie up some security things.
00:52:00
Speaker
and Christ Centres before they got acquired. Makes sense. Yeah. do you Do you want to talk a bit about OOF or any of the games you've made since Stephen's sausage roll?
00:52:12
Speaker
um what can i say about oof um that might be relevant so i was working on it as a single player sort of actiony adventure game it's so this is not a puzzle game it's a 3d platformer and um i was working on it and i had a yeah i like making tools i like making engines and editors so i'd made a nice editor for it and then this is This is entirely the fault of Steam Next Fest. So the game was finished in November and Next Fest was in March. And I was just twiddling my thumbs.
00:52:44
Speaker
And I've already had like a minor like rant about how people don't know how to use file systems. So I was like, why on earth would I add an editor to a game? People don't know file systems. But then I was like, you know what? Let's give it a try. I'm doing testing. And in my head, I was like, oh, maybe some of the testers will use it.
00:52:58
Speaker
And that would be like that will be good for my motivation. right And I'll get to see. So I added that in November. And then basically nobody used it until launch. But then at launch, people started using it. And that was great. and But that was so adding an editor.
00:53:17
Speaker
And then I added um network play. Also, I was just really, i I was twiddling my ied game. I was kind of bored. And I ended up with this feature creep. The networking also was really worth it. ah But and then I was talking to Jagriff, who did Gentoo Rescue.
00:53:33
Speaker
And you know that puzzle game? yeah Yeah. Yeah. And so he does lots of live streams where he's playing through community levels. And I was chatting with him and he was all like, oh, Steam Workshop is nice. I mean, you can just do it after a launch if people want it. But just seeing somebody who was actively engaged with...
00:53:50
Speaker
um community levels, having lots of fun. And also, twiddling my thumbs, I was all like, okay, let's add Steam Workshop. 100% paid off. I think it like just like having anonymous sharing and puzzle script right off the bat helped a lot.
Community Engagement through Game Features
00:54:04
Speaker
Having people be able to just upload and share stuff on Steam really, really helped. And I think if I added it later, it probably... it wouldn't have like, i don't want to say blossom, but you know, it's, if it's growing right from the start, it can get them, get to a much better size.
00:54:21
Speaker
Yeah. so I'm, I'm really happy that I added that before launch and having done this, I've generally, because generally when I release games, I like, I do tools and I do games and they're separate things. My, my engines and tools are separate things. i I make games with my engines, but like, I didn't include this, the level editor for the sausage game. Right. But I was like, no, no, I did puzzle script though. like If you want to do like,
00:54:43
Speaker
Be happy with puzzle script, right? um The sausage game was just the editor is good, but it's not tied up for like human use, for like like modular use.
00:54:56
Speaker
It has a whole world building procedure built into it. um But for this one, just having so much fun playing the game. And I don't know, you you know this experience. You work on a puzzle game for a while and then you release it.
00:55:09
Speaker
And puzzle games are difficult to replay, right? They're not as very rewarding to replay a lot of the time. So if you're working on a puzzle game and you release it and you're like, good, have fun, everyone. I'm not able to have fun with this anymore.
00:55:23
Speaker
um i've I've had two phases of this. ah The first phase was with English Country Tune, that first big 3D puzzle game. i I had a principle where I was like like, I'm not adding any automated testing to this. This is handmade. I'm going to play through every level. every time I'm going to play through the game every time I update it, every time I change anything. i want to have like a really intimate relationship with every level where I can say everything is 100% handcrafted. The Sausage game has automated testing out the wazoo. because like I was like, I'm never doing this again.
00:55:56
Speaker
I still play this sausage game a lot, but just having one button that can just play through the whole game. um Yeah, it's like I'm never doing that again. ah However, having made an action-y platformer, I'm enjoying playing it now. I'm enjoying playing the levels that people make. And I think even if I yeah if i had released a ah puzzle game, i think there's ah a puzzle game design level design can be really tricky.
00:56:20
Speaker
Maybe I had a bit of worry with the sausage game that people would make hard levels and I wouldn't enjoy them. And... i I definitely have a level of skepticism for puzzle game level editors. that's like I don't trust the community to make good enough levels that it's worth the immense amount of effort that making the tools good which would be.
00:56:50
Speaker
um Not that there wouldn't be some good levels, but the percent of good levels versus bad levels, however you want to define bad levels. Some would be bad because they're too hard. Some would be bad because they're like kind of nothing levels. But like, like ah I, it's tricky as a percentage of content getting created, the gems, I think for a puzzle game can be a much smaller percent than maybe for an action game like puzzle.
00:57:17
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. and And this is why I think that my general thing where it's all like, hey, make something in PuzzleScript is actually good advice. I think that's good, responsible advice. And also, if you make something in PuzzleScript, it's your game.
00:57:31
Speaker
It's not my game. It's your game. You can do whatever you like with it and people do whatever they like with it. So I think rather than getting yourself tied up with a pre-existing system, um with the with the OOF, the the egg game. Yeah, people have just made really nice things, really good things, really mechanically interesting things.
00:57:50
Speaker
And it's hard for... Like, when I'm thinking of whatever I want to do for my next game, it's all like... I've had so much fun playing this game multiplayer, and I'm i'm still having fun every day. I play it multiplayer. I'm doing a I'm working on a multiplayer map editor for it right now, and I've been testing that. That's also been a lot of fun.
00:58:06
Speaker
And it's weird that it's just... ah Now I'm starting to think in the future, if I do something, i'll do I want it to be editor first? Do I want to go full, like, knit stories?
00:58:19
Speaker
Right. and it's what to so what what would What would something that kind of puzzle scripty be like if it was also a game? ah Oh.
00:58:30
Speaker
no no Not necessarily TMI world. But like, ah I mean, like, or like dreams as a reference point. like Right. um Yeah. But a TMI world is actually kind of like that. Because this is this, it's basically every single screen is a puzzle script game and puzzle script level in one. And you can set the outputs to link the other ones. Yeah.
00:58:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's tricky. I also, I guess, yeah, it's very difficult. I find I like small, I enjoy small standalone games. And a lot of the times if there's like a for group, like collaborative game projects, a lot of the time I'll find if I'm playing it, it's like, oh, I like this bit.
00:59:15
Speaker
And that's, that's it. And I don't, that often I don't get like the, the synergy or the, you know, the, that they're building upon each other. There's just like, no, no, I like this one bit. This one bit is good. And the rest is sort of unrelated.
00:59:28
Speaker
So yeah, actually i'm almost getting a flashback to love. Do you remember love Eskel Steenberg's game? sure. i haven't thought about that in a while. Did that ever come out?
00:59:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It's like with all sort of essentially multiplayer games, it really relies on a network effect and I don't think it got enough of a player base. But the reason I'm thinking about it is for people who don't know, this was like a very nice looking 3D organic world where you you basically be able to build up bases with your friends and the bases had very carefully engineered defense mechanisms.
01:00:07
Speaker
And so it was all about like building up your own base to be an impermeable fortress and then trying to break into the bases of other people. And adversarial puzzles could go wrong so quickly.
01:00:20
Speaker
Like if you're trying to like you to solve this puzzle to break it and I'll just make the nastiest hardest puzzle ever. right right there were There was something, like that I think there was maybe a couple of things like this, but one in particular I'm thinking of. And if I recall, puzzles kind of devolved into like, oh, well, the hardest possible puzzle to design is just a combination lock.
01:00:43
Speaker
Like something that is equivalent to a combination line. And that's not very satisfying either to design or to play. So figuring out the incentive structure so that people are incentivized to ah design interesting puzzles with an adversarial um framing and structure is tricky.
01:01:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he presents maybe a if it's like a a locked door thing, you present two locked door puzzles and the person gets to choose which of the two is worth solving.
01:01:17
Speaker
um I remember one of the, this is very random. um I'm just trying to think of like sort of competition systems that worked really well. And I was playing a Roblox game with some friends, which was a dress up game where you're just like, you're putting on a costume, but it was competitive.
01:01:36
Speaker
And it worked really well. So it was all like, okay, you have five minutes to put together a costume. The theme is underwater princess or whatever. And then you're putting together your costume. And then there's like a catwalk phase where everyone just walks up and down the catwalk. And then all the other people vote on who is the best costume.
01:01:54
Speaker
worked really well. I hadn't really ever thought that you would be able to gamify dressing like a dress up game. But yeah. um What are the other multiplayer, puzzly games?
01:02:06
Speaker
I've never played Myst Online. I assume this is multiplayer and puzzly. I have also not played it, so i don't know. um I feel like a lot of games like that would be kind of ARG as puzzles where like you just need a lot of
Collaborative and Cooperative Puzzle Experiences
01:02:25
Speaker
heads together. um yeah the original concept for Islands of Insight was very much multiplayer puzzle in a way that like the final game...
01:02:34
Speaker
ended up removing some very sensible parts of that original idea to make it like a sensibly scoped game, but one that was kind of like a... yeah didn't Didn't have some of the things that were most interesting about the original idea for that game. Yeah.
01:02:51
Speaker
yeah what are the So I was just trying to think of multiplayer puzzles, and I guess the whole world of escape rooms has blown that open. Yeah. um i Yeah, escape rooms are pretty great. even um i don't know if there's any computer ones that I really like. I remember, I'm going to say something negative right now. I'm going to say something never negative about a a puzzle game whose name I can't remember. it was an escape room game where at some point there's a puzzle where it's a real-time puzzle where one person is in a garden with a giant chess set during a blizzard and the other person has a list of moves. Yeah.
01:03:27
Speaker
trying to describe. And while you're in the blizzard, like your field of view is constantly shrinking and you die after a couple of seconds. And if you're not chess literate and the person is just trying to communicate to you where to move the knights and the rooks and whatever, it was just hard. It was just the worst. It was like enjoyably, entertainingly unpleasant.
01:03:45
Speaker
<unk>s Right. so Yeah, I feel like i feel like this... that That class of escape room things where got like okay you've got two players and it's kind of like a lot of communication puzzles. It's like, okay, one person can see something and somebody else can see something else. I feel like the escape room multiplayer things i um have most enjoyed have...
01:04:10
Speaker
been less like relying consistently on that and more like oh there's some reason why multiple people in the space is required to execute this action or to like do something and like there might be a bit of like okay well this person has this information that the other person doesn't but um i feel like person a has this information they need to communicate them to person b is like a framework that like gets old quite quickly for me i think I haven't seen an escape room mixed with werewolf.
01:04:43
Speaker
If you can guess who has the information, you can get to kill them. Interesting. It feels like it would be a good... I did play a real-life escape room once had like a hidden traitor mechanic. Ah.
01:04:57
Speaker
It felt like kind of tangential, but like I could see ways you could make it more important. Yeah, multiple-player puzzles. It's hard to even... I mean, I've had so much fun playing huzzly things with people um into the breach, playing that multiplayer. Sure. We did this great thing where we had a, I think there were a group of maybe six or seven of us in the evening at at at a friend's house. We put it on at the hardest difficulty.
01:05:28
Speaker
And many of the people had never played it before. And we spent like... between 10 and 20 minutes for each turn, just deliberating what to do. And we made it like really far into the game without taking any damage.
01:05:42
Speaker
And it was this really amazing feeling of collective intelligence. And then ah a friend whose whose house it was was all like, oh, the next day I was all like, I'll try keep playing. I just died straight away. So it was so magical just being able to talk through things like that in battle station mode. And I think I've had that with a couple of friends doing, can't think of what,
01:06:07
Speaker
Some sort of some puzzle things and it can be really fun discussing things. But what would that mean for a of ah like a computer puzzle game? I'm not sure still. It's right. Yeah, because there's there's lots of single player games which ah work well with that format of like, oh, everyone's just discussing this game. Like i I've experienced this with my games at um events.
01:06:29
Speaker
Just like, there's the game, there's a controller, but while people are waiting to play, they start like leaning over the shoulder and going, oh, what about this? What about that? And that's always lovely. But a game, I don't know what a game that leans into that would be. Yeah.
01:06:47
Speaker
Actually, the best multiplayer puzzle game I've played in the last year, which isn't a multiplayer puzzle game, was Lingo and Lingo 2. Do you know these? I'm aware of them. I haven't spent much time with them myself.
01:06:58
Speaker
um Yeah, they it's like The Witness, but with with word puzzles. Slightly, occasionally crosswordy, occasionally cryptic crosswordy, but never like really cryptic crosswordy. And that was like absolute magic to stream.
01:07:11
Speaker
um because you know I could try and do things and I could try and guess things and people were watching could try and give hints or they could also guess things as well, which meant that we never got stuck for that long. It was just it was the perfect game for streaming. i had so much fun. um Yeah, so that was a surprise a surprise winner, but I would definitely... like um you know People are looking to play a game as a couple. like i recommend this game to people. They're like, I think I just played through...
01:07:39
Speaker
I don't know, like one of the Myst games. And I was like, you will love Lingo too. you you like Given that you're okay with words, you'll love Lingo. And they had a great time. um I remember two friends of mine, mutual friends of ours actually, were playing through The Witness together. And they were having a really good time until a certain point. You've played The Witness. Can you guess what point they stopped playing?
01:08:05
Speaker
ah when, I mean, the the point where the game gets bad is where you've gotten to the normal ending and you're like, oh, I want to find all of the environmental puzzles.
01:08:16
Speaker
No, that's not it. ah they The game completely fell apart when they reached the top of the mountain. Because at the top of the mountain, there's these statue puzzles which rely on you looking at stuff from a very specific angle.
01:08:30
Speaker
And that means that if you're not the player holding the controller, there's nothing you can do. There's no feedback. There's no real... You can't offer any tips. It's just one person sort of like sure trying to figure out the right the right line of sight. And there is they just they just stopped.
01:08:46
Speaker
And I was like, oh, i I wouldn't have thought of this as being such a, like a, it's not bad if you're in single player, but it's absolutely disastrous for what's otherwise a really fun, like just pass the controller back and forward occasionally. okay Right. And there's there's an element of that type of puzzle, which is...
01:09:03
Speaker
Less a puzzle that you solve by reasoning it out and more a puzzle which you solve by kind of like feeling out like, oh, well, if I move a little over here, then that is, yeah it' it's a very internal process of figuring out like how the line of sight changes as you move around.
01:09:22
Speaker
Yeah. So it's just, ah yeah, I guess if you change how you're playing a game to like a different way than it's intended, then it can have some interesting fail states. But yeah, i guess I guess it's like puzzle games often work very well in this way. So thinking about like what are good co-op puzzle games, honestly, it's just like what puzzle games can you play with a friend and have a good time?
01:09:43
Speaker
And there's lots of those now that I'm thinking about it. Before we wrap up, did you have any questions you wanted to ask me? ah Yes, yes. So, ah you know, my favorite game of yours.
01:09:57
Speaker
it Shitsnake? No, no. um it is i wouldn't I wouldn't choose anything so minor as that. No, it is the the Majestic Monstrous Mini Mazes, which i I return to once every couple of years.
01:10:12
Speaker
always have a great time with it. I don't know if I've ever finished it. always just play it for a bit. I mean, think the beginning of it is stronger than the end of it. Um... Because the gag is still establishing itself? The gag is still establishing itself, but I think the puzzles are just better at that point.
01:10:30
Speaker
um Because the the scope is tighter, ah whereas like the last couple of layers... like i I designed that game and i released it like five years after I originally designed it, because like I never got to a point where I was like, oh yeah, this is done.
01:10:48
Speaker
I just kind of ah was like, okay, well, ah I've designed the first bit of it and like the the last bit of it, well, this could be better. Like i I can see ways that this could be more interesting and I just never returned to it. And so I eventually published it as this like kind of like snapshot of, okay, well, this is playable. This is this is good. This interesting. But like it's the the latter half of it,
01:11:11
Speaker
doesn't meet the standards that I'd set for myself. um Right. I guess the design, just the complexity increases a lot with the design and it's harder to to get a grip on it. But it's still a very, it's a very, very jolly game. um So yeah. Did you have a question about that?
01:11:30
Speaker
ah Or was the question just, what is, do do do I know what your favorite game of mine is? Yeah. i don't it's not even like It's fine. It's good as it is, right? So it's not like... I guess the jokey question is when it's getting a Steam release. um But like what else could you do in this direction?
01:11:52
Speaker
I mean, I think I have made several games in this direction, which is like... Interconnected world full of puzzles that affect each other. um Like I think yeah Monsters Expedition...
01:12:05
Speaker
gameplay wise it's a very different type of thing but in terms of like the puzzle like like there are game there are puzzle games where making the game is a puzzle in of itself and monsters mini mazes was definitely one of those and monsters expedition was one of those um so yeah i guess with monstrous mini mazes they're much the the the hierarchical levels are are much more s starkly superimposed right uh but yeah um Yeah, like because you like metagames.
01:12:37
Speaker
I You like how things are tied together. This is one of one of your things. Yeah, I mean, it maybe it's how I show off as a designer. Yeah, so maybe maybe, is this the first game where you really did that?
01:12:48
Speaker
Ooh, maybe. Right, because the the the atom, the molecule game is just, you know, single rooms. Yeah, so A Good Snow is Hard to Build has some of this.
01:13:01
Speaker
Right, but that's a new game in comparison. Yeah, I don't... Monstrous Minimazes. I don't remember when Monstrous Minimazes... mean, that was a Flash game. It was a Flash game.
01:13:12
Speaker
But so Dixie Man's Hard to Build. ah But yeah, you're ah it's it's it's interesting that you are one of these like likes metagames
Reviving and Innovating Puzzle Games
01:13:22
Speaker
people. Like um Jack Lance is one of these likes metagames people.
01:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, i ah apologies to anyone who wants to play Monsters Mini Mazes now, because it's a Flash game, so it's kind of awkward to play. i believe it's probably... is it called Ruffle? Whatever the Rust thing is, works really well.
01:13:42
Speaker
All of my Flash games are resurrected. Okay, that's good. I think I looked into it a couple of years ago and it wasn't quite there yet. Right, they only had ActionScript 2 support. Now it's basically everything unless you're doing fancy shaders. Okay, perfect. It's um great. if If you try and play it before I've gotten around to doing anything with Ruffle, I think it's also on Flashpoint, which is this really cool yeah archive where you can just download the player app and then it downloads basically any Flash game ever.
01:14:10
Speaker
Yeah, well, I actually, thinking now that i'm thinking of your other games, you did the cool ah vine, or was it that you're pulling my leg? I remember really enjoying that. It had a really nicely integrated sort of world versus individual puzzle structure.
01:14:25
Speaker
Yes, that was... Did that have the plants in it as well and the sunbeams? I think there was a different Puzzlescope game you're thinking about. like it It had sunbeams, but it didn't have plants. There was a different Puzzlescope game which had like diagonal light beams.
01:14:42
Speaker
That game that was a Puzzlescope game, so that was definitely later on. um will you return to side-on puzzle games there we go i I really like side-on puzzle games I think ah gravity gives you a element of asymmetry that is really valuable for puzzle games and I i really felt like playing um the Zelda game Echoes of Wisdom um that felt really like puzzle scripty like because it's got a lot of
01:15:17
Speaker
side-on puzzle rooms. And I was like, oh, this is like a really like interesting design space. Because you've got like an overworld, and then in the overworld, there's a bunch of caves you can go in. it and a lot of the caves are just like standalone puzzles.
01:15:33
Speaker
And was like, oh, structurally, you could make a puzzle game with this kind of game structure. Yeah. I don't know it how how often I'll make like a 2D puzzle game with gravity because you kind of get a lot of the same benefits from just having a 3D game.
01:15:52
Speaker
And then you can kind of decide, like, okay, is this is this puzzle, how much is this puzzle going to make use of gravity? Whereas yeah with a 2D game with gravity, every puzzle needs to use gravity.
01:16:03
Speaker
yeah And that is kind of constraining in a way that like some puzzle designs work for and some don't. um yeah A game with like Sidon with Gravity. ah Oh, it's left my brain now. ah What was the game I'm thinking of?
01:16:25
Speaker
it was a Pico 8 game. Oh, Magic Cube. Oh, that's her that is, i want to say horrific, but in a really good way. i haven't made, I've made so little progress in that. It's bafflingly difficult. It is very, yeah, it's tricky.
01:16:43
Speaker
i I think it rewards perseverance. Yeah. ah I want to be clear about this. it The levels don't look that complicated, but for some reason, i find it so difficult. And it's it's like, what is going on and what's going on here that these really simple, elegant-looking level designs of such have such a challenge in them? It's a real feat of design.
01:17:05
Speaker
Yeah. Great, great use of gravity in that one. Yeah. um Okay, before before we wrap up, I think there's two more things I wanted to chat to you about. um One of them is ah very silly.
01:17:18
Speaker
um You consistently in this conversation, you talk about the sausage game. How do you feel about the game being called Stephen Sausage Roll?
01:17:30
Speaker
um Yeah, it's says it's like it I'm happy with the name, but it's just physically just it's a bit personally awkward to say it. um my My one related bit about this was, remember the the Frozen Synapse developers?
01:17:46
Speaker
ah They were working on a turn-based American football game, which they called Frozen Endzone. yeah And they renamed that before launch because they got really tired of the the friend zone, the abbreviated form of it.
01:18:01
Speaker
but You can't deal with it, sorry. But I don't know what the real game is called. I still remember Frozen Endzone. Yeah, I i i remember Frozen Endzone. I didn't even remember they renamed it. Yeah. So um it's like I'm happy with the name and it just causes some personal embarrassment. That's fine. I can i can deal with that. That's my problem.
Game Jams and Their Influence on Developers
01:18:22
Speaker
um And then the the other thing I thought that is worth talking about at least a little is we haven't yet talked about the Cambridge game jam scene that you were like so instrumental to like setting up and that was so ah pivotal to my early game design journey.
01:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, that was that was a really great time. um For people who don't know, guess we very quickly chat about chat about this. um Terry, so basically Terry and Hayden kind of started it off. think they were the the nexus to begin with. Terry had just released V, and and when he was working on on V, it was like in a he was working like at a bank at the same time. He quit his job to finish off working at it, and then I think he moved to Cambridge.
01:19:10
Speaker
And Hayden Scott Barron was there as well. We'd all gotten to know each other via the various TIG source related game jams, right? And at that point, then had just got a job in Scotland for a games company. That was my first job.
01:19:28
Speaker
And then... I was chatting with somebody about this. If the company the company went bust, it released a game and it went bust. it was like a big company with 300 people. If that company hadn't gone bust, would I have had like the gumption to just hand in my resignation letter? I don't i don't know. um But anyway, that company went bust and I was chatting with Terry and Terry was like, hey, come move down to Cambridge. We'll just get somebody else and we'll get a house together. And we got Sophie Holden on board.
01:19:53
Speaker
And then we yeah we yeah we we just had a sort of a games commune for a good three or three or four years maybe. And there was just a really good scene in Cambridge. um Cambridge has a couple of good game development companies and The university, but in principle, there's also the universities there.
01:20:13
Speaker
and It was really lively and really good. Yeah, it was very good environment. You'd organize um these jams where something like 30, 40 people would squeeze into a cafe. This cafe, yeah. um And it would be like 30...
01:20:34
Speaker
three days of hanging out and making games. And one of the things that I don't think I've seen anywhere else was like this concept of like three hour game jams.
01:20:46
Speaker
Right. you You get a theme and you're encouraged to make something tiny in the next three hours. Right. I remember back on those times that I was very... willing to put pressure on people like general pressure but i was um very opinionated back then about that in a way that i probably would have more difficult being difficulty being nowadays um but i'm happy that i did it i had a lot of fun for the three hour game jams and i'm pretty sure other people some other people did as well Yeah, it's one of these things where I guess as a younger person, you can be be more brash. And ah then later on, like, I'm just like, oh, maybe I want to. Nowadays, I'd be all like, oh, I hope everyone's having a good time rather than everyone make a game in three hours. Or, you know, you can do something else if you want to, I guess. um
01:21:29
Speaker
And I was also very and I guess I still am like I i get tend to get. Boards during presentations. Interesting. Yeah. i When I attend conferences, I very rarely go to talks because I similarly like i don't get a lot out of it. If I want to watch something, I'll watch it on YouTube later.
01:21:52
Speaker
Yeah. And also, I think it's one of these things that as people who make games, we know games quite well. And it's kind of a lot of people who are giving talks. They're giving talks maybe for a more general audience. And it's like, if I want to learn something new, I'll just watch you talk about something that's not about games. So it's it's just ah it's a weird, i' ah I'm a tough audience when it comes to games talks.
01:22:13
Speaker
oh no Yeah. But yeah, there was so much good energy in those jams. I met so many cool people. ah Yeah, it really kickstarted my, ah even even my aspiration to like make interesting games. I think a lot of that came from that community. um Yeah. those Those jams and also like you organized jams for Lundare several times I came down to Cambridge for.
01:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's interesting how these events can be very pivotal and character-forming, right? Because even though I'm not involved with the Cambridge scene anymore, even though I don't post on TinkSource anymore, that still is very much like it's part of my DNA now. And I i still, you know, I'm in touch with lots of people from those times. So it's, ah yeah, it's very good if you can get yourself involved with a really healthy, healthy scene like that.
01:23:06
Speaker
Because, yeah, if we didn't have that community... Who knows what would have happened? I mean, some people would still have like the... the Like Terry always wants to make games. Right. So Terry would definitely have made games. I don't know if I would have ended up making games.
01:23:18
Speaker
I could have ended up doing something else.
01:23:22
Speaker
I think if i if I had still tried to make... Well, I was i making games before I found that community. But if I had stuck with it, I don't think they would have been as good if it wasn't for the influence of the people how I met through those communities. Yeah.
01:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, they're there. Yeah, it's ah like even I guess it's just like the concept of sort of indie games back then and a lot of different people doing doing very different things. It was good. It was good was good times.
01:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice. It's nice to. It's nice to be part of or, you know, to hang out and to see very active and vital scenes nowadays as well. There's there's lots of people doing doing cool things.
Conclusion and Credits
01:24:05
Speaker
Yeah. Great. Well, on that note, was there anything else you wanted to cover before we call it? No, I think that's i think we've ah we've covered everything. It was very nice chatting. Yeah. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks. It was good to talk about puzzle games for a while, right Because I've been in Action Game Land for the past the past year. so it's good.
01:24:23
Speaker
It's good to think about puzzles again. Well, I'm sure we haven't seen the last puzzle game from you. Certainly not. Certainly not.
01:24:34
Speaker
all right Thank you for listening to the Dragnet Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla let Snow, who you can find at gulenoismusic.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam Nagrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawodniak.
01:24:48
Speaker
Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
01:25:01
Speaker
you