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Episode 00: Pilot with Syrenne McNulty
284 Plays5 months ago
Join hosts Alan Hazelden and Syrenne McNulty as they kick off the podcast with a conversation about Syrenne's experiences getting into the games industry, getting into production, and eventually moving into thinky puzzle games.
Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast was edited by Melanie Zawodniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice, and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dragneck & Friends Podcast
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Dragneck & Friends official podcast.
Meet Seren McNulty: Producer and Game Developer
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm Alan, also known as Dragneck, and for today's pilot episode, I'm going to be talking to Seren, the producer at Dragneck & Friends, about her experiences in game development, her time with Dragneck, and more. Seren, how are you doing?
00:00:40
Speaker
doing pretty well. Excited to get the podcast off the ground. Yeah, thank you. So can you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and some of the games you've worked on? Yeah, like you said, I'm Seren McNulty, my pronouns are she, her. I have worked on everything Dragonic has done since the Monster's Expedition. I've worked on games like Escape Academy and Manifold Garden and Beast Breaker and Art of Rally and Garbage Pail Kids, NES, and Star stuff, and Snakebird Complete, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Just over the last, I don't know, 12 years? 11 years? Something like that?
Game Jamming Origins and Wii U Development
00:01:24
Speaker
And how did you get into it initially?
00:01:27
Speaker
So in 2007, I started covering games, largely in a freelance capacity, reviewing games, working with different PR companies, pitching to different outlets, found some stable work there. And then I started kind of game jamming myself around 2012, because I had honestly, I was the console generation at that point was just kind of changing over away from the 360 ps3 generation into the ps4 xbox one generation the wii u was coming out and i was very much taking stock of where i was at
00:02:07
Speaker
And I felt like I had a blind spot in like the creative process of how games are made and like the production process and all of that. So I started game jamming and just trying to experiment with a bunch of different stuff. Trying my hand at coding, trying my hand at game design, trying my hand at production.
00:02:25
Speaker
And around this time, I mentioned the Wii U was coming out. The Wii U was flopping, like really dramatically. And so Nintendo, in a panic, opened up Wii U development to first time game developers. This is right around the time that Unity, this is 2012, 2013, this is right around the time that Unity is really proliferating in the indie scene. And so they basically opened up a program for Unity and HTML5 developers to I was going to say, one of the things I remember about Wii U development is, yeah, they had this weird JavaScript framework for games. Yes. Did you experience this firsthand? Yes, I sure did. I built a game in it, well as ah and I shipped a game in it. Anyways, they were aggressively trying to expand into being developer friendly because they were desperately trying to expand it into having a video game that people can buy.
00:03:16
Speaker
look up the way you launch everyone. It was a disaster. So kind of on a whereby applied mostly because I thought it would be a great goof. And I didn't think it would go anywhere. And then like a month later, they said, Yeah, okay, you meet our bar of standards. Sure. And I was like, What do you mean? Sure. Congrats.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. You're a real developer now. Nintendo says so. And and like what was your experience at this point? What had you been doing? What did you show to Nintendo that filled them with such confidence? Nothing. like But you' you'd be making game jams. Yes, but I didn't show them anything. OK, sure. Wow, amazing. i was It's like, what have you worked on? Game reviews. What like what are you... ah So you had been making games, but you you didn't even mention that to Nintendo.
00:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, there was nothing to show. It was literally like half-finished prototypes of generic game templates. And so, ah yeah, Nintendo lets me in. Amazing.
00:04:19
Speaker
This is funny because I literally don't think you know any part of this story. No, I know none of it, which is great podcast content. Yes, so i get so I get in and very quickly I'm like, why should I try to take this more seriously, huh? It's like the bit is all well and good until suddenly someone calls you on your bluff.
00:04:40
Speaker
And I very much could have just sat there and not done anything with it, but I'm like, well, this is a very specific opportunity. I should make the most of it. And if it goes nowhere, it
First Game Development and AI Challenges
00:04:50
Speaker
goes nowhere. And so I wanted to kind of expand on one of the templates that I had built myself, but I really also wanted the opportunity to sort of challenged myself to do at least one interesting thing with the template. It was like, okay, if I make, I don't, like, I don't want to make just a generic block pusher smoke up and I want to do something more interesting. I like something like that. And so the project that I ended up kind of seeing through a bit more was a runner because again, well, it was something that felt very achievable for a first time.
00:05:29
Speaker
And so what I ended up trying to do instead, kind of the twist was I took a... Uh, I basically made an auto-completing AI because the runner was procedurally generated. And like originally I was just trying to cheat it. And so I was like, well, how can I do this with the least amount of work? And so I basically set in a range of like minimum height, maximum height for my platforms to spawn in and like all this other stuff. And I ended up in situations that were legitimately uncompletable.
00:06:05
Speaker
And I was like, well, that's not fun for me. So that sure as hell won't be fun for any player. And so what I ended up doing was I ended up making a computer controlled player three screens to the right off screen that is completing things as they spawn in. And if if they fail, it deletes it and recreates um like a prefab, like a guaranteed one, so that it's always completeable. And I was like, okay, that feels like an interesting challenge that I made for myself. I took that, I made ah two other variations, one where you have a double jump and one where there's pickups everywhere that will either speed up the whole game or slow down the whole game to make things more challenging.
00:06:50
Speaker
worked through that, launched that commercially, again, like went from prototyping to, I'll flesh out one of these prototypes, sell it for two bucks, to, oh, now the real part of calling my bluff is I have to learn how to ship a game on console, something that very few indies had done at this point.
00:07:15
Speaker
This is before like Xbox and PlayStation had pushed to make moves into working with small teams. So the amount of indie games that were actually on these platforms were very, very, very small. So a very different era of the industry. And so I was just like, okay, I'll figure this out.
00:07:38
Speaker
And it turned out that was my favorite part. That was the part I was best at, was not putting the game together, not programming it. I got a hit in the programming. But you you enjoyed the process of taking something thing and getting it to ship.
00:07:55
Speaker
Yes, and figuring out, I didn't have a whiteboard at the time, so a friend gave me literally just a basically a giant piece of wrapping paper that I taped up against the wall so that I could write on, and I just wrote out a list of everything I needed to do from where I was in the project to the game is available for purchase.
00:08:17
Speaker
And I just made that checklist. I wrote estimated times. I was way off. I got the process right. I got the timing wrong. But I figured that out, and I kept adjusting that and and working with that. And then I had shipped a game. And by the time, once you ship a game on console, and very few people had actually done that, suddenly other companies are taking notice.
00:08:42
Speaker
So quickly sign on as a PS4 and Xbox developer. And I never actually self-published anything on those platforms, but
Transition to Console Development
00:08:51
Speaker
having the knowledge required to ship as well as the materials like hardware. So you didn't, you didn't ship anything on those platforms, but were you going through the steps of like learning the systems and learning the APIs? Yes.
00:09:03
Speaker
I was learning the systems and I had hardware, yeah which meant that I was able to contract my services out to other developers as not only do I know how to ship on PlayStation, I can help you test your PlayStation build, which is rarefied error in the indie space, especially at this time. Again, this was a very right place, right time for me to develop that exact skill set.
00:09:25
Speaker
And so also somewhere in here, I really decided I hated programming by... So the Wii U game was written in HTML5 and there was a... I could talk about this because they've talked about it publicly. They had a internally developed middleware called the Nintendo Web Framework that was essentially HTML5 to C++ plus plus wrapper.
00:09:50
Speaker
exclusively for Wii U, and that was a weird experience, but it worked. Long story short, I ended up shipping a revised slash like significantly overhauled version of that runner game on 3DS, which does not have enough anything to do that. It has 64 megs of RAM, I believe.
00:10:11
Speaker
and And so was there also a web framework for the 3DS? No, and Unity didn't work for the 3DS, so that was C++. plus plus And you were coding that? Yeah, I had help, but yeah. Fun times. 180 frames per second.
00:10:28
Speaker
I mean, that's ah more than you need. 60 for the left eye, 60 for the right eye, and 60 for the bottom screen. That's excessive, but OK. It's very funny, because when I called Nintendo out for this, they said, well, the device wasn't designed to do that. Wait, so what was the device designed to do? 30? Yeah, 30, basically. like It had a refresh rate of up to 60, but they were like, surely no one will.
00:10:54
Speaker
Or at least not in 3D, because again, you're like when you're rendering it in 2D, not to get too boring into the technical details of 3DS, but when you're in 2D mode, ah the top screen is displaying one viewport. And as soon as you enable 3D, suddenly it's displaying two viewports on the top screen at the same time and a viewport on the bottom screen. So you have basically have three cameras in your project. So for somebody who was realizing that they don't like programming, what was it that ah pushed you to try and push the 3DS to these these these extents? Or was it that the process of doing that made you realize, oh, I'm not enjoying this? ah It was more it.
00:11:37
Speaker
I knew before I was doing it that I didn't enjoy this. Again, like I said, I had helped. Thankfully, ah there was a developer in Austria that helped with a lot of it and like with engine stuff. And that was very helpful. But the other thing was I wanted to shut someone up.
00:11:51
Speaker
A powerful motivator. That was spite and pride. So that is the honest answer. And I will admit that to you a decade later. But I did not tell anyone that for a while that that was the actual reason. Except Nintendo, because Nintendo knew immediately why I was doing it. And they called me out for it in an email, being like, you don't have to do this. Literally, this is like, anyways. So over the entire course of the 3DS development, was there no official Nintendo games that hit that 60 FPS on all three screens?
00:12:22
Speaker
bench but There probably was. I'm sure Mario Kart did. I don't think about it. um Yeah, ah it's ah quite a feat regardless.
00:12:34
Speaker
Thank you. What's the gap here between starting to cover games, to starting to do game jams, to doing the Wii U stuff, to the PS4, Xbox, to the 3DS? How much time is elapsing in that that period? So, our covering games starts at 2007. That doesn't actually stop for a while. I'm still doing game jams and like releasing stuff because it's it's very much like a like the releasing games thing is a hobby for me for a while. Even when there's a commercial release, like this it's not what I'm considering what I'm doing full time. So I go from the game jams start in 2012, Wii U development starts in 2013, both the Wii U and 3DS versions ship in 2014. I believe
00:13:20
Speaker
anyone could look this up and fact check me, but I believe top of my head, Wii U version ships in May and the 3DS version ships in November. So very fast turnaround on the 3DS. In terms of PS4 and Xbox assistance, that basically starts, like I think, January 2015. That's right after. And that pretty much catapults me into the rest of my entire career, is I ah work with a local developer, FlipFly, who made a game called Race to Sun. Friends of mine, ah very great people.
00:13:57
Speaker
and ah work with them on some versions of Race to the Sun, but also they work on a game that they're helping another developer with called Absolute Drift Zen Edition, made by FunSelector.
00:14:13
Speaker
And then Aaron from FlipFly recommends me over to Lars from Level Up Labs, who has me on contract to help with the PS4, Vita, and Xbox One versions of Defenders Quest. That ends up taking about seven, maybe eight months, as that ends up being a lot more full time than I expect. But that is also because There are some like major tech stack changes coming with that. And that is much more involved than just release management and testing. That is like basically guiding him through the console version development. And then he starts recommending me to people. I start getting more work. I end up off of the reputation of helping Defenders Quest, I end up working
00:15:00
Speaker
with William Scheer on Manifold Garden, off of working with William Scheer, I start working with Steve Swink on an unreleased project called Scale. And my impression is that like during this period, 2015 to 2020, you're often not on like one project specifically, but you're just juggling a bunch of projects.
00:15:24
Speaker
um Yeah, I'm really kind of taking availability. like There's a lot of projects I've worked on. I've worked on Ooblets. I've worked on 20XDX, I think is the official pronunciation. I've worked on, there's just a lot of projects that I touch in, like we're at a different capacity, so I'm not even credited on all of them, ah but like a lot of, like hey, do you have two weeks right now?
00:15:50
Speaker
And me thinking, yeah, sure. i I can, I can do a two week commitment. I have the bandwidth and then this is actually like helping me support family. So I will do this. So I end up with this very disproportionate resume size.
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, and like, what interested you about working on larger games? Was it just like, oh, this is the work I can get? Or like, did you did you think about like, oh, maybe I should go and find like a really stable job somewhere? Or like, yeah, how how was your thinking on that? I mean... Or did it just happen?
00:16:27
Speaker
A lot of it was like momentum. So with Lars and Defenders Quest, that was I didn't exactly know that what the project scope of that was going to be when I started. ah That is not to say I regret anything.
00:16:44
Speaker
but that is like that, that sort of just built from the momentum. Around this time, I was like looking forward to Manifold Garden as a fan. So I've been following William Cheer on social media and he put out a tweet asking, it was like an innocuous tweet, asking if ah there was such a thing as like a proofreader for video games that could come in and tell him like an editor that could tell him, basically, hey, this part's not good, this part is. And I basically just responded, being like, yeah, I know some people, here's here's some names. And then he's in my DMs like three minutes later, saying, wait, are you the siren that worked with Lars? I've been meaning to reach out to you.
00:17:28
Speaker
And I was like, okay, this is weird. And so I started working on that game. And and then I was the person who was working in on the Manifold Garden. And so that parlayed me into other things. And I've also just been very fortunate that a lot of the indie scene, you know, talks to each other. And so when I get a sort of When people feel like I do a good job they tend to recommend me to other people Which means that I for a while there was getting a really consistent influx of work requests and for that first year I was taking it on everyone that would ask and then I started to get a little bit more picky choosy about like I Really don't want to work on this kind of game and then for a while 2020
00:18:19
Speaker
why Yeah, mid-2021, I was like, all right, I'm done taking on new clients, haha. And then a couple new clients came like at the same time that I was too excited to work with to say no, because I'm like, oh, but I want to work with you. And so I ended up playing myself a little bit on that. But so it goes.
00:18:42
Speaker
Cool. And then I want to ask about your history with with puzzle games. um like Actually earlier you said something about how when you were making a game for the Wii U, you said you didn't want to just make a generic block pusher. Were you playing generic block pushers at the time? like is Is that the kind of thing thought that would would have crossed your head? And obviously you worked on Manifold Garden. But yeah, what's what's your history of puzzle games?
00:19:08
Speaker
i mean My history of puzzle game, this is going to sound ah very generic. My history of puzzle games, I mean, it starts with Tetris. Okay, I mean, that's an arcade game rather than a puzzle game, but we'll we'll go off over that. That's an official dragneck position on Tetris. But no, no, it's it's a puzzle game. It's just not some genre that we work in. So i mean I had also, like growing up, had done a lot lot lot of logic puzzles, logic puzzle books, a lot of deductive and inductive reasoning, ah you know the classics. like The person in the red shirt must be seated next to the person in the green shirt, but far away from the person in the blue shirt. The person in the blue shirt got in a fight with like whatever.
00:19:55
Speaker
like All of that kind of stuff and a lot of stuff that had sort of wired my brain to think this way. Also relevant, my mom was a math teacher. Sure, yeah. And was teaching me ah high school and college level math in ah while I was in elementary school, which that's a whole other thing. And so at first I get into a lot of puzzle games, not inherently by seeking them out, but by finding them in the context of other games, right?
Puzzle Game Development Journey
00:20:25
Speaker
like Pokemon has a lot of Sokoban sections, or when I play Animal Crossing I can play Wario's Woods inside of it, or there's like a lot of different contexts for this. I really start getting into playing bespoke puzzle games, like the kinds of games that we work on.
00:20:47
Speaker
around probably around 2004 with like Flash and some stuff on Newgrounds and Congregate. Then in the next couple of years as like Xbox Live rolled out PlayStation Network had its digital games with games like Echo Chrome, WiiWare had games like World of Goo, a lot of stuff that kind of kept me coming back to that. Again, this is not inherently the genre that I Growing up aspired like this is my favorite genre. This is the genre if I work in games, I will like
00:21:24
Speaker
hardcore work in puzzle games one day i kind of just found myself in that uh it makes sense with how i was raised and the way my brain works but yeah and then in terms of working on games one of those early game jam projects i was working on was a half-finished silkabon it was literally nothing special again that was just to teach myself some very, very basic fundamentals of things like players interacting with objects and then objects responding to movement of the player character, which is handled by the player controller. But yeah, and then I kind of just fell into it with ah another game I didn't mention. Flip Fly worked on a game called Evergarden. I remember that. Criminally underplayed for how much fun that game is.
00:22:18
Speaker
And then, yes, from there into Manifold Garden, and once you're into Manifold Garden, it's very easy to get typecast, it turns out. Especially when you start working at Dragneck, it becomes ah basically your typecasting.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah. And so you're saying you enjoyed puzzle games. How do you find working on puzzle games versus playing puzzle games? I think it's a very different mindset. So when I'm working on puzzle games, it So as as a producer working on puzzle games, it really kind of very early on taught me about ah mechanic lock versus content lock because in my head prior to this point, I had been very focused on content lock as a part in the game development process where
00:23:08
Speaker
It's not pencils down, but it is essentially like, all right, no new levels, no new areas, no new whatever. We're going to take what we have, polish it up, and then debug and then start the release process. In terms of like puzzle games,
00:23:25
Speaker
You really need to have mechanic lock a whole lot earlier, otherwise Alan will come in and say, but we haven't fleshed out and explored all of these mechanics yet. Yeah, that's actually an interesting thing. Like, with with puzzle games, I feel like a lot of the time, like, yeah, you need the systems to be done, you need the the bugs to be weeded out. But for For some puzzle games, it is possible to add levels and iterate on levels very late into the process. I mean, later than you, a producer, is very comfortable with, just because if the core systems are working and are reliable and are stress tested, the cost of editing this one level to make it a better level is, oh, now you need to make sure that that level is still completable, that you didn't break something at the last minute.
00:24:13
Speaker
but Exactly. It's something that ah I as a designer like really appreciate. I've never let myself make a game where like oh the level design affects the art, so you can't make a level change without needing to go through this entire iteration pipeline of sending it back to the artist, and that could take weeks. and then You've got to implement it back into the game and that's some work because as a designer i'm like no i need to be able to to edit things when i do a playtest and i say oh this thing is is bad and it could be good.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, and so that is a very different, and that's that's a thing that is a lot more centered on puzzle game production than a lot of other game production. And so that's like just one of the quirks that I had picked up through that process. The other thing is when I, and you know, sorry to everyone for anyone who's illusion I'm bursting here. I will say i'm ah when I'm playing a puzzle game,
00:25:13
Speaker
I am so much more patient with very difficult puzzles because I can sit there and I can have the intended experience. I'm not about to sit here and say that I'm not going to delay the game because when I'm trying to test the the game before release, I can't solve the last puzzles. I'm just going to basically demand to see the answer key because I need to work and it's a job and I didn't make the puzzles. And frankly, it's not entirely my job to know all the solutions to all the puzzles or figure rather to figure them out off top of my head.
00:25:55
Speaker
a lot like my job is a lot more about like running through the contents of the game, making sure that it all works, especially on different platforms, verifying that you can get a complete playthrough verifying that a patch didn't break fundamental mechanics. So that is probably the biggest way that being a player and being a producer significantly differ.
00:26:19
Speaker
is if I'm playing someone else's game, I can just sit there for an hour on one puzzle, have the Eureka moment, and then be delighted and move on. And is there anything you've worked on that you do particularly wish that you could have had a fresh experience playing it? It's a good question. Honestly, Sokoban Express I think Sokoban Express, and that's a different one, because Sokoban Express was so much iteration over those years. For people who don't know, Sokoban Express was published by Director of Good Friends, developed by Jose Hernandez in Venezuela. ah It took about three years to make.
00:27:07
Speaker
And we were getting builds, you know, three years ago, like ah towards the start of the process. And a lot of the design ethos and design philosophy was consistent through all of it, especially because we picked it up from Subatomic Wire, which was a free game that he had made earlier.
00:27:27
Speaker
But I do think, I am kind of jealous of people that get to sit down with that full and final version, especially because the version that shipped is fundamentally better at allowing the player to quickly make a mistake and react to it than some of the versions that you know we didn't ship. right like we should we We've spent a lot of time iterating on what UI features would be useful to communicate state about the game.
00:28:03
Speaker
Exactly. And like, yeah, we shipped the good version of the game, we did not ship the versions that were less good. And because so much of my experience with that game ended up with the versions of the game that were much less communicative,
00:28:20
Speaker
I am kind of jealous of people that get to play the final version of the game for the first time because it's a great experience. It's a fantastic game and it communicates things so elegantly and so well that I just wish had been communicated to me two and a half years ago when I was solving these puzzles. Actually, on a related note, how do you feel about the final art we shipped with that game, Thorin? This is a gotcha question. I'm just curious.
00:28:51
Speaker
I like it. it is It stands out on store carousels and it ah manages to be cartoony while retaining some of the feel of the original game. You're not going to get me.
00:29:06
Speaker
No, just art is one of the things that we we tweaked fairly late into development. We did a complete art overhaul, ah which Seren didn't feel was necessary. I felt was overall a worthwhile change. i'm like It's good art the art. I'm not saying that we went from good art to bad art. The the new art is good.
00:29:25
Speaker
i just also, I don't know. I'm nostalgic for Sokoban, man. I played that game before I knew you. that like Shipping with that art style, I think it would have been totally fine, but so it goes. And overall, like what feels like your favorite part of working on a project?
Creative Success in Game Development
00:29:43
Speaker
What's your least favorite? ah My favorite part, if I'm on the project for long enough, I almost always get to see this. ah Sometimes when I was freelancing, I would literally only come in for the last two weeks of a project. I would just basically be a closer of like, hey, we have a release date that we need to hit, ah please help. And so I would, this part had already long since gone, but kind of the moment where people internally feel like they've nailed it.
00:30:13
Speaker
Like when people feel like, oh, yeah, this is it. This is what we were trying to make. It's this is what's it been in my head this whole time that I feel like been trying to get onto the page or in this case onto the screen. It works. This is exactly what I wanted. And then from there.
00:30:32
Speaker
being able to sort of expand and polish it up and kind of, once once you hit that part in the creative process, the rest largely snowballs in terms of like how fast things develop after that. And so I'm very, very excited whenever I get to see that. I'm even more excited when something I do either directly or indirectly helps lead to that moment. But that kind of is,
00:31:02
Speaker
and Well, it usually happens on projects and players just don't get to see that. and But it's like one of the most special moments and it's never at the same point in every game. Sometimes it's unpredictable, but it'll happen. But when it does, that really makes the whole thing feel worthwhile. Cool. And finally, what have you been playing recently?
00:31:25
Speaker
In terms of thinkigames, I've been playing World of Goo 2 and Arranger. I have also been playing Steamworld Heist 2, which is a... It's not a puzzle game, but it's a thinkigame. And that is a game that I... That is a dangerous game, which is a subgenre of game in my head of, don't play this if you need to go to bed in the next couple hours.
00:31:52
Speaker
because you will stay up and then when you stop playing it will dominate your thoughts. That game just understands game progression and like core gameplay loops so, so well. ah Really loving that. I like the term dangerous game. ah in in my in my In my head it's like a slightly different ah type of game to the kind of thing that I call a time sink game. yeah Like a time sink game is a game that you'll put a lot of time into over like a a long period of time, where the dangerous game is a a game you'll put a lot of time into in a short period of time.
00:32:29
Speaker
Yes. And when you're not playing it, you're thinking about it because you just want to get back in there and do another level, solve another puzzle, do another- No, no, no. Think about a game when you're not playing it. That's just a good game. That's not always true. Sometimes. In terms of non-thinky games, I am continuing to play Final Fantasy XIV online. This is my sort of
00:32:59
Speaker
I don't know how to phrase this other than, this is my code of depressed person, do this type of game. And I've also been playing through, I'm almost done with the English version of The Legend of Heroes Trails Through Daybreak, ah which The Legend of Heroes Trails is my favorite video game franchise. So very excited on that one.
Current Gaming Interests and Calendar System
00:33:23
Speaker
But yeah, that's where that's what I've been up to recently.
00:33:27
Speaker
ah I'm sure that that will change. I play through games distressingly fast as some people have called out. So we'll see what I'm playing in a couple of weeks. Cool. And anything you're looking forward to in the near future?
00:33:47
Speaker
Yes, I look forward to things to the point where I have a separate calendar in like on my calendar app for new game releases.
00:34:02
Speaker
that I'm particularly excited by. So I will say that the big games over the next month that I'm excited about, as of the time we record this, Star Wars Outlaws, Astro Bot, UFO 50, and Zelda Echoes of Wisdom, in terms of what are some other kind of thingy games I'm very excited for. Tactical Breach Wizards comes out tomorrow at the time of recording. I am deeply excited for that.
00:34:31
Speaker
I continue to be excited for Lab Rat. I am pretty excited for Waxheads. I'm excited for Battlesuit Aces. There's just a few of these other thinky games that I'll be there day one. well we'll We'll see. I'm excited to play them. Nice. How many games on average make it to your your calendar of looking forward to this?
00:34:59
Speaker
On average, like... four games a month, ah but that number gets really inflated with August and September. Sure. and And I guess like a lot of people, a lot of game developers have like the the games backlog of like, oh man, actually but do you do you actually get to most of the things you're excited for? No, not at all. I prioritize, I triage games. There are a lot of games that I play
00:35:32
Speaker
I put an hour into, an hour and a half into, and then I feel satisfied with. and Sometimes I'll feel very bad, especially if it's a game that like has gotten a lot of positive attention and like a lot of discourse. like A good example of that is Bellatro. I was excited about Bellatro and then I played it and I was like, this is good.
00:35:52
Speaker
And I think I can move on at this point, or like, Can of Wormholes is one that I know you in particular are really, really fond of, and I had a really good time with it, but I did not feel compelled to finish it. A lot of narrative-driven games that I'm very excited about, those tends to get the priority for me in terms of what I go in and spend a lot of time on because those are games where the conclusion meaningfully changes the work more often than a lot of other types of like replayable games. Sure, that makes sense. Like a a narrative game can often be like building towards something. Exactly. And it's like it's like, for example, if you're reading a mystery, and then you stop halfway through, it's like, yeah, okay. Yeah. But you've missed what it's all building towards. Cool.
00:36:40
Speaker
All right, well, thank you for your time. Yeah. Where can people find you online?
How to Connect with Seren and Dragneck & Friends
00:36:45
Speaker
And do you have anything you want to plug for the audience before we go? Uh, yeah, do not perceive me. Too late. I'm joking. Uh, you can find me on blue sky at seren.com. Uh, that's S Y R E N N E dot com is my handle on blue sky. Uh, and you can subscribe to this podcast feed that you're listening to right now. The draft deck and Fred's official podcast, where I will be one of your regular co-hosts alongside Alan. So you'll get to hear a lot more of me.
00:37:19
Speaker
Perfect. All right. Well, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Dragnegan Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp dot.com. Our official 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.