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Dungeon Crawler Carl Reveal | Multimorphic P3
1 Playsin 15 hours
Stephen Silver, Ian Harrower, and Wesley Johnson join us to talk about Dungeon Crawler Carl and what it took to distill it down into a pinball machine!
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Transcript
Introduction & Shoutouts
00:00:06
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. I am Josh Rupp. With me, my co-captain. Scott Larson. And we're talking dungeon crawler Carl today. But if you want to buy a new pinball machine, where are you going to get it from, Scott? Yeah, new and used pinball machines. I can call many flipping out pinball. Also, if you have moths that you want, really, you can reach out to them. Pretty much anything that you're itching for, they can certainly scratch it. And they've always been really helpful with everything that I need for pinball machines.
Promotions & Special Guests
00:00:34
Speaker
If you want to specifically get Dungeon Crawler Carl or Ender's Game, reach out to multimorphic.com and you can add to your shopping cart there to get it into your home. Also, will you do me a favor and let Jerry and Sarah know that Loser Kid sent you? I'd appreciate it.
00:00:48
Speaker
All right. We've got three special guests on today. We've got Steven Silver, Ian Harrower, and we have Wesley Johnson on with us today to talk all things Dungeon Crawler Call. We'd also like to point out really quickly, if you're here for Ender's Game, there is another podcast that we recorded it specifically on Ender's Game.
00:01:05
Speaker
And so if you want to focus on the Ender's Game aspect of that, please go ahead and listen to that podcast. Thanks again, Steven, Ian, and Wesley for joining us how are you guys doing today? Doing pretty good. Thank you for having us.
00:01:15
Speaker
I'm glad to have you guys on.
Securing the License & Designing the Machine
00:01:17
Speaker
i assume you guys are big Dungeon Crawler Crawl fans. How did you how'd you get involved? Stephen, let's start would start with you. We're always talking about future licenses and stuff like that, and the opportunity came up for this property.
00:01:28
Speaker
And Jerry came and talked to us about it and pitched the idea, and i was like, I had heard of it, but I hadn't read it yet. And so we kind of dove into it and started reading the books and seeing what it is. And you once you dive into this world, it hooks you.
00:01:43
Speaker
And we were like, OK, this could make an incredible pinball machine. And everything worked out that we were able to secure the license and get going on it. And we had we were in the process of designing this other play field for Ender's Game.
00:01:59
Speaker
And we were looking at it. We're like, these this is... perfect for what we want to do all the stuff we want to do in did you call it carl all this stuff the the whole idea of changing floors and and changing the the layout and everything like that works really really well and we saw an opportunity especially since this would be our first mature adult theme that we're doing that that has more mature language and and other things like that and we're saying it's a very good ah dual launch that we can do.
00:02:30
Speaker
we're We're excited about it. We were super excited about getting the property and all of us have become huge, huge super fans in the process. And Ian, how did you get teamed up with Steven?
00:02:41
Speaker
I was deep in Portal when Ender's Game was being designed, when that play field was being designed and when these conversations were going on about the theme. Jerry talked to me early on in the process and much like Stephen had said, I didn't really know a lot about it. I sort of heard about it.
00:03:01
Speaker
It was definitely ticking up. There was like a trend upwards in like the sort of social recognition of the story. um When I finished sort of the main deliverable 1.0 of Portal, I started listening to the audio book to kind of see, is this something I would be interested in? And just sort of got hooked right away, plowed through all of those books that were out at the time.
00:03:26
Speaker
um And then we just sort of got into conversations around, is this is this something we want to do? Do we want to do the dual theme? ah Do I want to try to solo develop it?
00:03:39
Speaker
How would we approach an audio book as a deliverable? And everything just sort of aligned. And ah they brought me on to write software. And like all things like Portal, I like to take a lot of ah my opinions forward and express them and drive things forward. So Stephen's like, all right, Ian, you can you're co-created director. You're doing all this anyway.
00:04:04
Speaker
You're not going to let me get away with these things. So your your name's going on this. That's roughly how ah the conversation went, I think. And Wesley, you're local there to P3, and you're the new kid on the block, as in this is your first game. How did you get roped into dealing with Dungeon Crawler Carl and making the rule set for it?
00:04:22
Speaker
and So I've known Steven for a bunch of years now. We've been friends and I've always just extended, you know, if there's anything that I can do to help, just let me know. And I, you know, whatever it is,
Developing the Rule Set for the Game
00:04:35
Speaker
I'll do it. And the, you know, this all happened with the dual release and,
00:04:41
Speaker
Colin McAlpine was committed to Ender's Game, and so they needed someone, not necessarily for my tournament experience, but more so for the the vast pool of knowledge of rules sets and stuff that I have related to my tournament experience. They needed someone to join the project to bring that and to help develop the rules for the game. so It is my first game, but I've been, as you are to do in pinball, like I've been doodling down rules for years. I've been drawing layouts on napkins for years. So it may be my first official game. It's not the first time I've thought about this, though.
00:05:23
Speaker
When you have this story that has this this complex layer of ridiculousness and and these these ludicrous ah demons and boss people that you're fighting, how do you approach that as a game? And Wesley, maybe this is is a question for you. On the rule set, you're like, okay, so how do I build a rule set that keeps people engaged in the story with the call outs, but also makes sense with the way the layout of the machine is?
00:05:52
Speaker
My approach to the rule set generally is just trying to be true to the narrative and to be as fun as it can be. Those are like my number one and two rules. Really fun is first and the narrative, adapting the narrative comes second.
00:06:06
Speaker
And then making all of that into pinball is is in service to those two goals. um So
Adapting Stories to Gameplay
00:06:13
Speaker
to me, it's more so like, how can I how can i be true to the events that happen?
00:06:20
Speaker
And then that becomes a fun thing to play. And then as Ian develops the code, then it becomes a celebration of the source material with Jeff's call outs and the call outs that we can pull from the audiobooks.
00:06:34
Speaker
So at the end state becomes, it's a game that presents the property in the best possible way for both fans of that property to hit all the highs that they want, all the all the scenes and the joy and elation that they want, as well as you know the the dopamine hit of Jeff's call-outs and all the things that you want to hear from that that perspective. Yeah.
00:07:03
Speaker
And then, you know, just the the overall building of the game from beginning to end. This is probably a great point to touch on. We will be having content from all seven books, not the eight that are out, the seven that we started development with, which is through Faction Wars.
00:07:21
Speaker
So we're going to have one one floor and or one book with the floor the major floor that is part of that book as a selectable from the plunge.
00:07:34
Speaker
So as a player, you have the ability to control your destiny both from you know start of game and then also ah throughout the game, you'll have opportunities to select other floors if you would like to.
00:07:48
Speaker
Uh, so it's just really, again, everything that you want to experience from the property in a playable format. Sorry. I'm like, I want to ask a question, but I don't want to ruin it for Scott.
00:08:01
Speaker
Scott, plug your ears. just It's okay. Go ahead. ah So can you break the seventh floor though? Oh my gosh. You're the worst. Okay. No, no, don't ask the seventh floor.
00:08:12
Speaker
That's a good question, because like there you run into a situation sometimes where there's more than one floor per book. Yes. Right. And so we decided to break it up by book instead of by you're still going through the floors, but that we like The one we have now is covering the first book that you you see a lot in the trailer.
00:08:32
Speaker
And that's both the training floors, floors one and two are covered in that. And in the book, they describe them as looking similar and being the same. So that's our plan for going through those books when you're going through the selection. If you see the selection page where where you can select where you want to go next, it's it's choosing which book you want to go to. And our plan is to cover the major the major plot points in each of those books.
00:08:58
Speaker
How do you kind of decide what does and doesn't make it though? Cause there, there is a lot of content to these books and book, uh, book seven is massive. Fraction Wars is huge.
00:09:09
Speaker
It really is daunting. It's the one thing you hear everybody talk about with these books. It's like there's so much to choose from. Like I said, there's over 200 named characters that he had in there that that ah all had speaking lines in there.
00:09:21
Speaker
And so, I mean, we we spend a lot of time in meetings discussing all the details of what what's important and what's not and what we can boil it down to, to what what we can make a good, fun game that's still true to the main story arc of that book.
00:09:36
Speaker
Yeah, I'll piggyback that answer a little bit and say, have a good example for you. So narratively speaking, the book one event that revolves around a certain antagonistic pair of crawlers, I'm trying to stay spoiler free. Frank and Maggie, names aren't spoilers, right? ah So that is very important to the narrative story and the events that take place.
00:10:01
Speaker
But if you really read close into it, There's not really a lot there to turn into gameplay or impactful and fun gameplay. So that isn't something that we're going to have as like a mode or anything like that. It is going to be present in the game in some way.
00:10:19
Speaker
so we we have plans to kind of cover situations that fall under that umbrella where by all accounts it deserves to be there but it also isn't necessarily the fun pinball that we that we need to make the game and you know that's something that we're gonna have to do for all of the books and distill them down in that way into both the things that become fun gameplay and also include the things that we feel should be there from a narrative perspective We're also very much balancing this being true to the story and adapting things so that it will work with gameplay.
00:11:02
Speaker
And a good, not not very spoiler-ish part of that, because it's like chapter two of the book, is the encounter with the goblin murder dozer.
00:11:14
Speaker
um which we have chosen to reinterpret as a boss battle so that it fits into our code structure. And that event happens ah before Donut gains her abilities.
00:11:32
Speaker
But we're kind of glossing over that and adapting it and saying, for the pinball, for the pinball this will work.
Enhancing Game Immersion with Audio
00:11:40
Speaker
um Because the true boss battle that they encounter...
00:11:43
Speaker
at that time doesn't work as a pinball mode. And so, you know we're we're taking liberties, but we think that fans of the story will understand why we've made the choices we have, because we are fans of the story, and we're also fans of pinball. We want those two things to come across.
00:12:01
Speaker
Is Jeff recall recording new call-outs, or are you going to be ripping them from the the audio version? You're talking to somebody who has gone through 10,000 hours of audiobooks looking for a call-out. Yes, the answer is yes. We have access to...
00:12:17
Speaker
all the content from the books, but we also have access to Jeff for custom callouts. So we've gone into sessions. We've gotten, uh, Jeff reading off custom callouts and, and we have plans to continue doing that. And it's absolutely amazing what this guy puts out. And it's, it, everybody's going to be super happy that if you, if you were coming to this from the audio books world, you're going to be extremely happy because it's just, it's Jeff's all over it. It's, it's,
00:12:46
Speaker
I smile every single time i hear this game play because you keep hearing these call outs come out and and Samantha saying stuff to you and all these other things and these great characters that people love. And it's it's a you you you will have the characters that you love and in in this game.
00:13:02
Speaker
We've also gone ahead and re-recorded some of the book content um to make it more appropriate. One of the interesting things that I didn't even like, it didn't even occur to me. I didn't even notice it was that in book one, ah Jeff reads the text messages in Carl's voice.
00:13:23
Speaker
So when donut texts him, he reads it as Carl reading donut. And in later books, he starts to read the text messages in the voice of the character that sends the text message. And so we wanted to be consistent and there's one of the events in the first book, they talk through text message because it's too loud.
00:13:43
Speaker
um And we wanted to use some of those call-outs because they're really funny, um but they were in Carl's voice instead of Donut's voice. And so we re-recorded some of those so that we could bring them into the game that way. Please tell me one of the call-outs B-B-B-B-Boss Battle.
00:13:59
Speaker
That's more than one of the call-outs. Well, there's also, i laugh every time New Achievement comes on, and every time Samantha's like, I'm going to kill your mother. Yeah. What's great is we've got the ai as a character. And having just come off of Portal, I really love robots that are mean to you. and like So you you've got this amazing character that can back can boost you up and tear you down and insult you and do all sorts of stuff. And and the the AI is such a a great voice and great character throughout the game to be interacting with while you're doing all this stuff.
00:14:36
Speaker
But we've also got Donut and Carl talking to each other. and And when you got other team members, they're coming into the the the battles and things like that. So yeah, it's like I said, it's this is it it was really a treat to work with Jeff on this and and watch him work. And they the game sounds incredible with the call outs.
00:14:57
Speaker
So we've talked about boss battle a couple of times now. It is something featured predominantly in this game. In the book, it's kind of like sometimes I stumble upon it, sometimes it's deliberate. How did you build the architecture around the boss battles? And then also I noticed there was stacking of boss battles. So if you could kind of hit on both of those, I'd like to know.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, so when we sat down to talk about a distillation of what book one is from a gameplay aspect, it's like there's a lot of ways that you could go with it. um But the way in which you come up with the cohesive gameplay experience is...
00:15:34
Speaker
That's where they're going into not just boss battles, but you know individual battles with different enemies and such. So we have all of that in there because to qualify the boss battles, ah you are basically killing some of those prerequisite enemies that are associated with that boss that they're grinding before they actually face that boss character.
00:15:58
Speaker
And there's a mechanic in the game where you can loot their corpse by rolling over the screen. We have the ball tracking, the P3 ball tracking in place for that. ah But yeah, so the if I'll be real with you, the the inspiration that I took with the the rules for Floor 1 and Book 1, was kind of Monster Bash. So I looked at it. I was like, we have all these boss battles.
00:16:22
Speaker
They're all kind of monsters. This reminds me a lot of Monster Bash. Everybody loves Monster Bash. It's also, keep in mind, the training floors, right? So we're also kind of training the player to play our game as well.
00:16:38
Speaker
And so we need an approachable rule set. So we came up with the boss battles that we were going include the six the six, the six major boss battles that we have in the game and assign those to different shots around the play field for qualification, very similar to how monster bash works. You know, you shoot your shots to qualify, But we made one one big deviation in order to um make more fun out of it. And that is you don't just keep hitting the shot to start the same boss that's on that shot. You qualify it and there is one specific shot that starts the boss battles.
Gameplay Features & Strategy Elements
00:17:21
Speaker
That way we can give players the ability to shoot the shot to select their boss. But hey, you shot two shots to qualify two bosses. What happens when you start?
00:17:32
Speaker
you You battle them both. They stack. And so the player has the ability to control their destiny by choosing if they want to do one boss, a stacked boss battle with multiple bosses. And if you are accurate, you can choose exactly which one or ones that you want to play ah at one you know in one battle at one time And, you know, the the the ability to be able to battle them all at once gives you some obvious benefits in that there's going to ah there's going to be shots that are on the same... There's going to be progress shots that are on the same physical shot.
00:18:14
Speaker
So you get progress for both of those battles if you hit that shot. So there's some obvious overlap there that is a benefit. But there's some other benefits that we have in terms of risk reward that we are we're still implementing and are yet to come.
00:18:30
Speaker
Like, yes, the floors one and two are very heavy. Like, here's the boss here's the boss battles that you're going through. But one of the the the benefits of this being on the P3 is when you change to go to another floor, we can we can change the entire environment. we can We can basically build whatever we want there. So then floor two, we might have a different kind of structure where it's more about the the two different quests that are going on that you're completing and things like that.
00:18:54
Speaker
And if you think about it, there's a ton of content to do this game. It's also a ton of stuff to play through for as the player, right? So as you're trying to strategically go through and decide how you're attacking each floor, there will be different strategies to handle each floor as you're going through. And so having the ability to stack certain ones together, and there's some really fun, crazy stacks that happen in this game when, when you, you get them together. And and again, it it all works together. Like you're, you're hearing the call outs from everything at the same time. And it, for the different things that you're doing through the different boss battles and it's it's it's great.
00:19:27
Speaker
And all of it working together is big big thanks to Ian. That was no small task. I have to say that I love that you guys went with monster bash. So I appreciate that you're going at it from a a beginner standpoint, but also bring in the depth for the advanced player. Right. So that way someone walking up to this for the first time, playing pinball for the first time and who knows how long or ever it's going to want to walk away feeling like that was amazing. But also the experts can be like,
00:19:55
Speaker
This is such a great game. i definitely have to have this in my collection. So I applaud you for that. One other thing I wanted to ask to about the code before we move on is this game is, ah or this book is obviously a lit RPG.
00:20:09
Speaker
How did, did you tie in the RPG elements to this? Or is it something you're just like, we it's it's too much. We can't fit it all. So the focus is definitely on the narrative, right? the The whole game is centered around you are playing as Carl. You are Carl.
00:20:23
Speaker
So we can't go so far as to give you so much choice and options that you are able to do things that he never did necessarily.
00:20:34
Speaker
But also we recognize that people want some of those RPG elements, not just be because of the the IP, but also because it's fun, right? And as I mentioned in the beginning, I'm all about fun. That's number one and number two. So what we have in this to bring in some of those RPG elements is we we do have a a whole mana system and a casting system. So there's four targets on the upper play field that spell M-A-N-A for mana. And you hit those targets as you play, and that collects and builds your mana meter.
00:21:10
Speaker
And that is a physical meter up in the top left of the playfield that is consisting of pinballs. So that comes into play later because we can actually do interesting physical things with that mana meter.
00:21:24
Speaker
But when you build your mana, you can hit the button on the left side and it will open up your casting system. So every major shot will have some sort of spell or scroll, something castable assigned to it, such as the magic missile. we mentioned We mentioned the fireball or custard, I believe. and some other really fun things from book one.
00:21:49
Speaker
And you can spend your mana to do one of those casts. And those casts are generally some sort of player assist feature. Magic Missile, for example, is a physical shot spotting mechanic.
00:22:03
Speaker
Fireball or Custard is a real dice roll 50-50. And if you get Custard, we take a little liberty here. And instead of healing your enemy, we actually heal you so that we're not punishing you for it necessarily. But if you get Fireball, it acts as a shotgun type of shot. So whatever the next shot you hit, you'll hit also the shots to the left and right of it.
00:22:27
Speaker
um And then there's going to be there's going to be other RPG-lite, RPG-esque elements to the game. We have the looting that I was talking about, which then factors into the loot boxes that I'll let Ian talk more about later.
00:22:41
Speaker
But we do give the player the ability to to take the fun aspects of the lit RPG that still work within the narrative and don't break too much in terms of things that definitely never happened in the story and give the player the ability to make those gameplay features.
00:23:03
Speaker
Like many games, we almost one of the first conversations we have is Do we want people to progress through this in a linear manner so that we can tell the story the way the story is told?
00:23:15
Speaker
Or do we want people to have autonomy to move around, to experience in their own way? And almost certainly we come to the conclusion that we don't want to force people into a linear path because we don't want them to have the same experience every time they play it.
00:23:34
Speaker
And so I think the concepts, as much as we were excited around a lot of the concepts of like leveling up and experience and things like that, as soon as you start changing the order in which you visit the books and changing the order which events happen, we didn't want to create prerequisites that you had to do something before something else happened. We didn't want to create prerequisites where the number, the level that you had mattered locked you out of modes.
00:24:02
Speaker
So we, We did discuss a lot of those, but our core mechanic was let's focus on the pinball, let's focus on the story, and let's focus on telling that versus a saved progression system.
00:24:14
Speaker
So this would probably be a good time to talk about the the layout. So now for those of you who haven't seen it, i mean, this is an interesting layout because you have your typical P3, which a lot of features are backstacked, you know, the last two thirds of the last one third of the game, excuse me, but you have this giant interactive spinning disc, which totally modifies the shots and also has ways that the ball It's a two-tiered disc, so the ball can actually come on top of the disc too. So why don't you discuss, take us through the layout of the machine and tell us the philosophies on the reason why you chose to set the the shots the way they are and how that interacts with what you're trying to do. One of the things we really wanted to do was was to have this big looping shot that you you shoot around the... It's one of the coolest things ever. You shoot around the left, that discord lower bitt that disc loop, and it loops across the playfield around to a loop that can only be hit from that from that loop around to feed that upper flipper. And it's like, well, that's pretty cool.
00:25:18
Speaker
But... how can we get more use out of this something different and so we started playing around with this disc idea because we also wanted to be able to feed the shot and be able to feed it to either either flipper and as we started playing around with it we're like hey if we rotate this around too we can put it into what we call position b to where you can set it up and you can shoot up that shot and it will loop around the outer left orbit And so we can do a lot of different
Unique Layout & Gameplay Elements
00:25:46
Speaker
shot paths. We can have that loop feed directly into Mongo's cage. We can have it feed into specific scoops.
00:25:53
Speaker
um we You can flip it around to where you're shooting around the other orbit with it. And it's got these, we we put targets on the back, which which allows us for this really close to the flippers action, where as you're hitting those targets, it's going between the slings and those targets. And it's incredibly fun. And we've got this, um we've got not one, but two cannons in the game. We've got one cannon that's on that disc that we can aim at different places around the play field.
00:26:18
Speaker
And then we've got another cannon that we can shoot out and we can aim it at the targets we can aim it at at other things. And so... We just, one of the things we were doing is we were putting this together. We're like, man, we can, we can, we've got the mana stack. we've we've We've got, you know, we can do magic missile. we We just started putting all these things together that we could do with this disc. And we love the fact that the, you know, you' you've got this, this dungeon that changes, changes itself completely on every floor and we can drastically change the, the, the play field and how it runs with all these different modes. And one of my favorite things in the world is when you start Ball of Swine and we just we just freestyle that that. That disc just starts turning during that gameplay. And it it's absolutely bananas. And it's just a ton of fun when you're going around there and you're working around that disc that's flipping around as you're trying to hit shots. If you hit those targets on the backside, you're making progress towards later in the mode and up making it easier. Yeah.
00:27:18
Speaker
um I just absolutely love that disc. I love that we can divert these ramp shots to either one of our in lanes. And we've included some stops on those in lanes so we can stop the ball on either in lane. So any shot that feeds an in lane now can can have a stop to where we can stop it and set up a motor something like that.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so between that and all the upper flipper geometry that we have, ah it's a really, really fun layout to shoot. It's one of the most fun I've had shooting on our layouts. And so I really love it a lot.
00:27:53
Speaker
It's super flowy, but it is a challenge. You know, it's not it's not easy, which I think aligns a lot with the Dungeon Crawler Carl property, right? Like Carl doesn't have it easy. It's never easy for Carl. So a slightly more challenging layout that feels, it's got that adversarial sort of nature to it that nothing's a give me, you have to earn everything, I think really works well.
00:28:21
Speaker
Speaking of the flowy watching this gameplay, it seems like the shots are just always coming back to you. So i do appreciate that you guys figured out how to put stops in the lanes above the flippers.
00:28:33
Speaker
So that way it gives us a little bit of breathing time when it needs to happen. going on sound, was it pretty easy to work with Jeff and, and incorporate this and and how do you take something that's as epic as this and try to do it justice? Cause I mean, with Jeff, you got mostly vocals. There's a little bit of music later on, but not a ton.
00:28:53
Speaker
How do you, how do you create the ambiance to match what's going on with the books? We're working with Matt Kern again on music and sound design. He worked with us on the princess bride and did did excellent work with that.
00:29:05
Speaker
And so we've got a bunch of terrific sounds going into game and, but yeah, I mean, it's just that there's so much to work with, with the books. I mean, we've got it to where we have to search the the entire transcript to go through and find all the little pieces and, and pull all those sounds from the books that we need. And,
00:29:26
Speaker
We keep going back to that well of going to try to find specific things. It's like, oh, there's something on this later book that we can pull over and and and use to to fill out this story.
00:29:37
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, Jeff is absolutely incredible to work with. Like I said, you you get in there and you start recording with him and you just see him I was, I was, had some stuff set up to play for him to remind him of what the characters were. He's like, no, no, I live in these characters. I've got them. And just seamlessly can switch from Carl to donut to Imani, to Brandon, to Samantha, to the AI and come back and forth between all of them is, is absolutely incredible. It's the most talented voiceover person I've ever worked with. And i've
00:30:11
Speaker
recorded with a lot of people in my career and it's just absolutely incredible to see what but he can pull off we wrote a bunch of custom call outs uh some sort of easter egg joke new achievement call outs and that and a bunch of them have like pop culture references and that and i was listening to ah the recordings as i'm putting them in the game and So listened to one of them and I'm like, wow, this, like he transitioned and nailed the voice of the pop culture reference, like 100%. And I'm like message Steven. I'm like, is this your doing Steven?
00:30:47
Speaker
And well, Stephen, what was your reply? so this ah like when we're doing When you're recording with Jeff, if he comes up and there's a reference, the second he gives a reference, the whole session stops as he goes right then and he goes and looks up online and you save exactly what that is so he could get it exactly perfect the way it it the way it's supposed to be. So we had a ah couple of times with that. He's like, oh, I know what that is. Hold on. And he goes and looks it up and he he sees it. It's like, OK, cool. He goes back and nails it exactly the way that you'd expect it to be read that way. And it's absolutely incredible. This is actually quite consistent with the way, at least the the art art direction. And let's talk about the sculpts.
00:31:27
Speaker
ah So they look really good. And you have Samantha, you have Princess Donut, you have Mongo, and you also have Carl. So talk about the art direction and how you guys presented this.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, so we got really lucky to be able to work with Luciano, who did all the cover art for all the audio books and all the original books before the A-series. And he is such an amazing talent. All this art behind us is is all Luciano's. And so he did all of our cabinet art and everything like that.
00:31:57
Speaker
And then we worked with Brad Albright, who worked on Portal. He worked on ah the Ender's Game. And he also worked on this game. So he's doing our under the glass art and and putting it all together along with we've we've worked with Renegade Games. And they had a bunch of assets too.
00:32:14
Speaker
that we used. it It really all came together, but we got the opportunity to, through Brad, we got the opportunity to connect with ah with Davey Price as Stumbler Pinball, and he's he's been known for doing amazing art. And it it we gave him some ideas. We had some sculpts that we were like for references that were from some other toys and stuff that were being made. And they were just like, oh, we'll just do it all from scratch. And they came and just came up with Absolutely incredible sculpts for these things. We've got Donut where her her sunglasses will will light up and and we can light them in different colors and do that lighting effects when she's casting spells.
00:32:51
Speaker
We were able to get Samantha suspended where she's floating over the game. So when you hit that ramp, sheet she will shake. and And when you're getting the Samantha skill shots that aren in the game, yeah you're hearing her and talk to you and she'll be playing a much bigger part in game. We've got Carl running and and we light up with explosion effects behind him whenever there's explosions going off.
00:33:16
Speaker
And we've this Mongo sculpt that we've got in game is absolutely incredible. like The details on the teeth and everything are awesome. And the big one is this big, huge like dungeon wall sculpt that we've got in the background that's kind of encasing all of our stuff back there.
00:33:30
Speaker
and with the the torches and everything. So it was really awesome to work with Davey on this. And his team is so talented ah to like from the painting to the sculpting, the modeling and everything that it is a really awesome experience to be able to bring those into this game and work with them.
Artistic Direction & Visual Storytelling
00:33:48
Speaker
But it's just like every time, i you know i just am so blown away by the talented artists we get to work with to to pull this out. This game looks absolutely incredible.
00:33:57
Speaker
I have to say, Davey Price is absolutely amazing. Stumber Pinball, too. The fact that you guys got him on here, I love that that Princess Donut's eyes light up when you're playing. Like, just the little touches that he has done. It is fan fantastic.
00:34:14
Speaker
um One thing we really haven't touched on yet, which is kind of one of the big questions, how mature is this game going to be? I know there's a family-friendly mode that's going to kind of be incorporated. How how do you cut it still be family-friendly without taking away 100% of the feel of the books?
00:34:30
Speaker
And the last question, how many Metuses did you make Brad Albright draw? You don't have to make Brad draw Medus. He just sits there doodling Meduses all the time. You better watch out. Don't fall asleep around the guy.
00:34:41
Speaker
So the game, we're doing it true to the book, but we will have a version that's bleeping out the words. And so you can, if you want to, ah turn on that mode and have it a little bit safer for you know for younger audiences and stuff. But also, like I said, if you if you are looking for a family-friendly theme, Ender's Game is perfect. like it's It's a great story for families. It's story. only difference you're you're saying is that the layout is, it uses a similar layout.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah. These two games play very, very differently. They have different rule sets. They are very different experiences. And then in addition to that, you've got access to all 27 other games that are available on the system.
00:35:24
Speaker
If you want to dive into those later on, if you want to go get a princess bride down the road, if you want to go get a portal, if you want to go get a heist, any of those games down the road and all the software games that come along with that as well. And this, this, uh,
00:35:37
Speaker
the the platform keeps growing like crazy. So it's definitely a great, great time to dive into the platform with these two games. So when Steven was saying how differently that Ender's Game and Dungeon Crawler Call play, very, very intentional, like not just from, not just from, hey, let's just make sure that they're different, but Colin McAlpine, rules designer on Ender's Game, and I have both purposely made sure that we have not paid attention to played or really...
00:36:06
Speaker
tried to keep from knowing anything about each other's games so that if we arrive at where some feature or a gameplay mechanic or some event is in both games, it's probably natural and makes sense and is honest and not just thrown in there.
00:36:27
Speaker
So, you know, there's there's a conceded effort on both of our parts to make sure that we're siloing ourselves and sandboxing so that the games each are honest to their properties and just are just filled with things that make sense for those properties rather than, hey, the disc is there and we should do all these things with the disc. Like we make sure that that those things make sense for the game that they're in.
00:36:55
Speaker
On the subject of since the censored call-outs, one of the things that we found really humorous when we first did it was like we first sampled bleeping out some of the call-outs. And we played them. And people are like, huh, these are almost dirtier when you bleep them.
00:37:13
Speaker
Wait, Josh was doing his playthrough video for Ender's game. And I took a piece of it. And I was putting some bleeps in there when he was doing his stuff. And it just puts that game in a whole new light. Yeah. So this game won't be shipping for a little bit because of how recently you got the license. This this game obviously doesn't have all seven books in it.
00:37:33
Speaker
What is the vision for the future of the code? And what can we expect by time we can receive this
Future Plans & Updates
00:37:39
Speaker
module? When when this releases on ah Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we will be at Gen Con. And the code as will be experienced there is book one.
00:37:51
Speaker
It's a pretty complete experience of book one. um It's got all of the main modes. It's got two multi-balls. It's got spellcasting. It's got a lot of call-outs and more and more call-outs coming into it every day as I work on it.
00:38:08
Speaker
um And there's a lot of call-outs. in In just this floor, i won't like quote numbers in that, but there's a lot of call-outs.
00:38:19
Speaker
um For Expo, we will have... more floors. um I'm not going to commit to what the number of more is, but the next big show we're committed to is to have it at Expo, and we will have the ability to select floors and play more of the game there. And our goal, as always, is to have a as close to complete experience when we ship to customers as we can.
00:38:48
Speaker
um whether we you know maybe we won't have the wizard mode in there i hope to have the wizard mode in there we'll see how things go ah coding is an interesting thing where some days i think i'm great at it and some days i think i'm horrible and some days i established stuff where I'm like, oh, this is great. I can now plow through all of these modes and it'll take me no time to implement this. And then I spend two days ah rewriting like one little thing because it didn't work. So, you know, it's it's variable, but we have we have time and the goal is going to be to have a complete experience when it comes to customers.
00:39:24
Speaker
We have a long track record of shipping very mature ah software in our games. right And that's one of the benefits of you know we take pre-orders and we we buy the parts based on that, and we start building them out. you know It's a very responsible business model that goes through. But then by the time that customers get these games, we we typically have a very, very mature ah rule set, a very, very mature software ah in the game already. It might not be complete, but you most people who are seeing that game and playing it feel like, OK, this is something that is a pretty complete game.
00:40:03
Speaker
Well, OK, one feature I don't think we've really talked about yet. ah What is custard versus? Sorry, I've gone on my notes here. Let me re-ask that. Okay. One feature we haven't talked about yet that I have been curious about is I keep seeing fireball versus custard on this game.
00:40:21
Speaker
how does How does that work? Within the book, it's a scratch. there Oh, that's right. Both Donut and Carl were awarded ah scratch tickets. Yeah, like a lot of scratchy things. So that Carl's is fireball or custard. It has six scratches that they can use. And when you scratch it, it will either... i don't remember. remember the level, but it casts a very high level fireball.
00:40:44
Speaker
um Or it casts custard on the enemy, so it heals the enemy. And as Wesley was describing, we decided that healing the enemy both would be complicated from a rule structure standpoint but also we don't want to disadvantage the player we don't want to make it so that you don't want to cast this so we have it heal the player um when you cast it and fireball if you randomly get fireball in the 50 50 chance it is like a shotgun in final resistance when you make the shot at words the two shots beside it um
00:41:16
Speaker
it will we are not holding to the six scratch usage um donut also got a scratch ticket at the same time hers is much more complicated and has many many many more possible outcomes and it's far too complicated to put into the game so yeah to piggyback on the whole concept of the floors and books being different experiences uh our rules design is such that we're we're wiping the slate when we shoot when we change to a different book We're going to carry over core things. There's going to be some carryover. There's going to be casts in every book and on every floor.
00:41:49
Speaker
But the cast themselves will change to be appropriate for the narrative events that happened in that book. um our One of our multiballs, Mongo multiball, Clockwork triplicate, those will all carry over.
00:42:03
Speaker
But other than that, we're not going where every book, every book experience in the pinball game is going to be boss battles. is not going to be that at all. Every floor, as you said, with the books themselves that Matt has written, there's there's a there's a gimmick to the game of the dungeon on each floor. And we're we're trying to stay true to that with the rules design in terms of you know carrying over what makes sense and wiping, starting over from a clean slate and building...
00:42:39
Speaker
a rule set that stays true to the gimmick of that foreign and book. I just want to say like the rules we have in the game right now, thematically integrate the mechs in an incredible way. Like Steven talked about the ball of swine rolling play field has this cannon that we decided we're going to make this, turn this into a kickback and that kickback going represent your stomp.
00:43:03
Speaker
And it's just like everything in this module just feels like the universe and It's creative and interesting and it's selling that story and immersing you in that theme. And as someone who has become a huge fan of the book, it's just so much fun to play because I just feel like I'm in Dungeon Crawler Carl.
00:43:26
Speaker
I'm hearing it and I'm experiencing these unique things. And so I hope people just get out and give it a chance and play it at a show and,
Closing & Listener Engagement
00:43:35
Speaker
you know. go to multimorphic.com get information about all of our distributors or order directly from the company. Hopefully some new people come into pinball because they're huge fans of the franchise. And hopefully a bunch of pinball people are going to learn about this franchise and experience the books.
00:43:51
Speaker
I just want to say always be foot buffing. Make sure you get your cuticle cutters. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you guys all coming on. If you want someone to get ahold of you, that's what is the best way to do that? Get more information at multimorphic.com. We've got, like Ian said, we've got the list all of all our distributors. We've got all the information about the games. well will You can see that game and all other, all 29 games on the system.
00:44:15
Speaker
And we're on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Shout out to Kevin Manning. He's been doing our social media and and marketing for the last year or so, and he's been killing it on our reels and doing tons of stuff like that. So yeah, give us a follow and see the stuff that Kevin's putting out. It's great. yeah You can always join the P3 owners and fans Discord. Many of the people who work on the games are on there, hang out. There's no guarantee they'll reply.
00:44:45
Speaker
i'm the admin and owner of it before i joined the company, so I'm going to be there and... So if you have questions for me, you can find me there. Awesome. And if you want to get hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com. On all the socials at LoserKidPinball. If you want to support us, go to Silver Ball Swag. We got t-shirts. We got a new hat there. The Upside Down Loser Kid, which is trending right now for hat design.
00:45:12
Speaker
And also you can support us via Patreon.com slash LoserKidPinball. Scott, give us our last words. New achievement. New game bot.
00:45:25
Speaker
you