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Episode 15: Lukas Hort (Map Map: A Game About Maps)
213 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Lukas Hort, one of the developers behind Map Map: A Game About Maps. Topics include the development of Map Map: A Game About Maps, how cartography puzzle design intersects with level and world design, and being selected for the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the Drakknack and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them.
Guest Introduction: Lucas Hort
00:00:28
Speaker
I'm Sorrent, the producer at Drakknack and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Drakknack at Drakknack and Friends.
00:00:35
Speaker
Heyo.
Meet the Peepapo Games Team
00:00:37
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Peepapo Games, or at least one member of Peepapo Games, who you may know as one of the recipients of the 2024 Dracneck New Voices Puzzle Grant.
00:00:50
Speaker
We're joined by Lucas Hort from the team. How are you doing, Lucas? Lucas Hort Hi, yeah, I'm doing great. Thanks for um having us here. Or me, sorry. No, you're fine. Of course.
00:01:02
Speaker
ah So can you kind of introduce yourself and a little bit more about you and a little bit more about the team? Of course.
Game Overview: Map (...)
00:01:10
Speaker
um I'm Lukas. I am the game designer and level designer at Pipapo Games and I'm also one of the four co-founders.
00:01:18
Speaker
and With me in the company, we have ke Clara who's doing environment art and production management. We have Laura who's our art director and we also have Anika, who is our lead programmer.
00:01:30
Speaker
And yeah, together, we've been working together for quite some time now and are working on our first commercial project at the moment, which is called Map Map, a game about maps with which we enter the, or got accepted in the Dragonair Puzzle Grant.
00:01:47
Speaker
um Yeah. Awesome. Can you explain to our audience, what is Map Map a Game about maps? Like, what's it about? What are the philosophies of it? Just like, really get into that?
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So in MapMap, a game about maps, you are part of a crew of adventurers looking for the legendary lost treasure. And you are um exploring a vast ocean full of many different islands. And you're the cartographer. So it's your task to visit these islands first and make maps of them.
00:02:19
Speaker
You get tasked from your crew members like... Mark the position of an old temple, mark the position where a photo was taken, or maybe mark something out of a treasure hunt. And then you go onto these islands and start with a map only showing the outline of this island and nothing else.
00:02:35
Speaker
So you go around, explore the island, look for clues to orientate yourself, search for, for example, for the old temple. Once you've found the old temple, it's all about determining its position as accurately as possible onto the map.
00:02:50
Speaker
So in the beginning of the game, you do this mostly by eyeballing and estimating. But over time, you unlock more and more tools which which help you to measure more
Puzzle Design Philosophy
00:02:58
Speaker
accurately. For example, at some point, you get like a telescope which can measure the distance to any point you can see. And then you get a divider tool or sometimes it's called compass in English. So I don't know which word you normally use, but it's like this...
00:03:13
Speaker
spiky thing you also use to draw circles um and then you can use that to transfer the distance onto the map and in the end you just place a marker pretty similar to GeoGuessr and then you see how close the position you marked on your map is to the actual position of for example this old ruin on the island and in general it's pretty much a linear puzzle game in terms of progression and story, but the puzzles themselves are very open and very sandboxy because you just get a growing set of tools and then there's never just only one way of measuring or determining the position of the target you're looking for, but you can always just...
Founding Peepapo Games
00:03:58
Speaker
have a lot of creative problem solving and just think about, oh, how do I want to ah find the position of this object? And that's one of the USPs of our gameplay and also one of the biggest challenges when doing the level design for our project, because you have to like always keep in mind that you have like many possible solutions, but that you don't have one solution that always works. So you don't have any dominant ah strategies in the level design.
00:04:24
Speaker
Cool. And can you talk a bit about how you met each other and um how you started working on the game? as Sure. So we met each other at the Games Master in Hamburg. Hamburg is a city in northern Germany.
00:04:41
Speaker
And actually, three of us came from the same bachelor university, which is in Darmstadt, which is in the middle of Germany, which was says university or a study program called Animation and Game.
00:04:55
Speaker
So three of us already had like three and a half years of game experience in university. And i um always wanted to found an
Development Challenges and Progress
00:05:05
Speaker
indie studio and founded my first indie studio or not.
00:05:09
Speaker
I don't know if you call that founding an indie studio. But after my bachelor, I already registered a company and released my first game. ah That was financially speaking, ah not that well.
00:05:21
Speaker
And I was thinking like, OK, how do I want to continue now after I've completed my bachelor? So was thinking, do I either take on a job in the industry? Do I just try to quickly get some money as an independent worker?
00:05:34
Speaker
Or the third option, which was the option I choose, was I could also just you know join this Games Master, which also has a focus on actually founding an indie studio and just see if I can possibly meet some people there.
00:05:48
Speaker
And yeah, that's how I moved to Hamburg. And then I met or we all met in that university.
00:05:59
Speaker
And that was actually because in one of the first lectures at our study program, they asked like who is interested in actually founding a company. And we were some of the few that were interested.
00:06:12
Speaker
Then we did one smaller project together just to see if we work as a team. And that worked out really well. And afterwards, we started to work on our big university project, which actually was our plan to use that project and then release it as our first indie title commercially.
00:06:32
Speaker
But after working on it for around a full year, even though we're like we still had other university courses on the side, so it wasn't full-time work on it, and we realized also just through talking to other indie developers here in Germany or here in Hamburg,
00:06:48
Speaker
that our project was just too big and too ambitious for our first project. I mean, it it could have worked, but we would definitely needed a publisher and work, like, first of all, work on a prototype for quite some time and then see if we can find a publisher and then work on this project for, like, three or four more years. and That just seemed, on the one hand, too risky for us and also just too much of a commitment for that game.
00:07:16
Speaker
And so we decided to pause this project we were working on. It was a bit of a Hades-like project we were working on before. So it had we had a combat focus and ah boss fights and also linear progression and story and all that stuff.
00:07:33
Speaker
And, i mean, we it's I think it's this thing you always tell yourself and always tell others, like, do a small project, always keep the scope as small as possible. And somehow we thought that this project was actually quite small.
00:07:48
Speaker
um But, yeah, after a year, we realized it was actually a little bit too big. and then we started to brainstorm for quite some time to find a project we all enjoyed as a team of four and also a project that doesn't have a scope that big and then after ah quite some time we um agreed on ah the base concept for map map so when map map started the only thing we had was the score gameplay loop of starting on an island only with the outline and then just placing a marker and getting to the position as accurately as possible.
The Quirky Game Name and SEO Concerns
00:08:25
Speaker
And yeah, from there on out, we started to develop on that project. I think it's been bit over one and a half years now, I think.
00:08:38
Speaker
like I've lost a bit of the of ah feeling for time since we started on that project. but ah has been going quite well so far. We are currently getting financed through the city of Hamburg.
00:08:52
Speaker
Here in Germany, we actually have quite the, at least compared to other countries, we actually have quite the good public funding system. and for smaller projects. It's a bit random because it's state-based. So here in Hamburg, we have okayish funding, but other states like Berlin Bavaria have like much better funding options.
00:09:15
Speaker
But yeah, at the moment, we are getting funded from the state, which is really cool. We just moved in our first own office and are now working full-time. ah ah We have a four-day workweek and are using that time to work on MapMap.
00:09:32
Speaker
That's awesome. How did you come up with the name for the game? That was actually just a temporary name because we just were thinking, okay, we like... Story is old as time.
00:09:45
Speaker
Yeah. And we just really liked it and just kept it is it because like such a funny sound when you say it and the characters in our game actually talk like that. They're like, mup, mup, mup, mup.
00:09:59
Speaker
So, yeah, and it does actually add in conically or it does make sense if you play the game because the map map now actually is pi like a legendary big map of many small maps.
00:10:13
Speaker
And...
00:10:16
Speaker
ah
Marketing and Audience Engagement
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, and it's your goal to like complete it So, well, it does sound... I don't know how it sounds for people that don't know that it and just hear it for the first time and because I am way too deep into this project to still like to still be able to look at the project from such a disconnected view. um But yeah.
00:10:37
Speaker
How do you guys like the name? Like when you first saw it? Yeah. I mean, it stood out. If I'm being transparent, was ah it was a fun name to say um ah to each other.
00:10:50
Speaker
It was like, a oh, this is this is what this is what the names game's called. Okay, map map. Game about maps. Map map map. I mean, I kind of feel like... Map Map, that's the finest. That's the game. It's really leaning into it with the subtitle that takes out that extra level.
00:11:09
Speaker
but Because I feel like Map Map on its own would be a functional name. It would be a bit too boring, a bit too bland. But with the subtitle, I don't even think twice about Map Map and that that being like a name.
00:11:22
Speaker
and i Because, like yeah, just the whole name. Yeah. Yeah. And like my only reservation, I think, with that kind of name is how it shows up on SEO.
00:11:33
Speaker
And like when someone is searching for it, like someone might have to also type in a game about maps. But I do think that even the subtitle is catchy enough that it should be less of a problem.
Level and Puzzle Design Strategies
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually a really good point and something we haven't really thought about much when thinking about the name so far. So interested to see how it plays out in the end.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, like whenever we Google map map now or map map game, we just find articles about maps in games. I was going to say search engines, unless they know it's a proper noun, I don't think that they are going to take into account that it's the same word twice.
00:12:15
Speaker
I think it's just going to remove one of them and just think that it was a typo. Yeah, possibly. like But then again, I think we just need to get like popular enough so the search engine realizes that people are not doing so many mistakes without actually looking forward. But that's ah it's a marketing issue, and that's one of the big things we need to address now at the moment to see how we actually reach our target audience with this project and see how many people are interested in playing ManMap.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah. So digging in i a little bit, I think, like, what is the design process of building out levels when cartography is the main mechanic?
00:13:05
Speaker
it's um It's actually quite interesting because and when designing the levels, I want to make sure that they look like completely normal islands that you just want to explore.
00:13:19
Speaker
But once you've understood how the game works, you like see the world with a different set of eyes because you think like beforeโฆ you understand how the game works or how it plays. You just see, oh, there's a nice tree, there's a stone, oh, and there's just a little mountain.
00:13:37
Speaker
But once you've, like, internalized the game, it's like, oh, okay, like, this tree is exactly north from that, so that could be a great reference point. And, oh, no, that's a mountain, so but I can't measure, like, up because that would dilute the distance because I want to, like,
00:13:54
Speaker
Right, because the map has the the flat distance. Exactly. But if you're looking at a telescope up at the top of a mountain, that's going to measure the diagonal distance.
00:14:06
Speaker
Mm-hmm, exactly. Like in the end, you get into a sextant which can remove the diagonal thing and then you can measure from everywhere with just the flat distance.
00:14:18
Speaker
But other than, it's like, it's so interesting because you just hide that it's actually a puzzle game and just looks like every other normal exploration game.
00:14:29
Speaker
But the levels are actually designed very far thoroughly. um That's a really hard word to say. And yeah, I think that's really interesting. And then again, as I already mentioned, it's a lot about just giving the player the opportunity to explore and find their own ways of measuring and fire determining this position.
Ensuring Player Engagement
00:14:51
Speaker
and But then again, just thinking about, okay, like what would probably be the most common ways players try to um finish this task and then just blocking off that option and seeing how they react to it.
00:15:09
Speaker
And yeah, it's a lot of fun, but it's also ah lot of work, especially combining interesting exploration with working puzzle designs. It's like...
00:15:20
Speaker
and also and then including all the story elements we have to we have included in our project. It's a nice challenge. And for the puzzles, do you generally have single solution in mind? You're like, oh, we want them to make this deduction, and then you'll be like blocking off alternate ways of solving the puzzle to focus on that? Or do you actually want there to be multiple ways of solving the puzzles? And you might have like, oh, they could do it this way, or they could do it that way. yeah like how do you design or iterate on the core puzzles?
00:15:52
Speaker
it's It always depends on which puzzle it is at the moment, especially with like the onboarding puzzles where and we want to introduce new mechanics or new specific ways of how players can measure. There's often only like one way that actually makes sense.
00:16:10
Speaker
But then in the end, we can't control if they are actually doing that. They can just open the map at any time and just guess anywhere if they want to. But then there also just some of the ah what I like to do is just sometimes just more or less randomly place some of the targets because it also turns into interesting challenges from time to time. And then especially if you have like many options and you know, oh, I can measure from here or from there or from that point of there or just the direction.
00:16:41
Speaker
That actually creates a really interesting thing of just not thinking about how to solve a problem, but most people then try to find the optimal way of finding this problem.
00:16:52
Speaker
um yeah And then we introduce different new puzzle mechanics throughout the game. and they Generally, it varies like how strict the options are if you want to measure accurately.
00:17:07
Speaker
So, yeah, what I really want to do is try to get the player to understand how to just get a feeling for good solutions so they can look at like this interesting landmark and quickly determine if it's something they can use or they cannot use because, oh, it is tried prominent, but it is like,
00:17:30
Speaker
not exactly north of the thing I need to mark. And then it's like harder to make the line on the map because we have like a grid which is aligned with the north to south and the west to east side.
00:17:47
Speaker
There are many little things you actually need to and think about, which normally you don't think about in ah other games.
Playtesting and Feedback Iteration
00:17:55
Speaker
and So, yeah, just trying to explain those to the players so they get a feeling and just can quickly understand and identify which parts are good as reference points and which are not as a big part of a level design.
00:18:13
Speaker
And how do you balance the, think, like, with that, the pace of discovery, right? ah Yeah.
00:18:25
Speaker
being able to consistently feel like you're exploring new things and the things that you're finding are satisfying and the things that you're finding let lead to satisfying deductions for the cartography system. Like, how do you think about that in terms of like pacing and like, not literally narrative structure, but like the game design narrative structure?
00:18:54
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah, that's ah mostly testing, I would say, just to see like how long each mechanic or each new idea is actually engaging and how much time we need for the player to actually understand it.
00:19:09
Speaker
And generally, because the it's also interesting to see how long people can have fun with just our base gameplay of just having the...
00:19:20
Speaker
standard tools and just needing to mark locations on differently shaped islands because and that varies a lot as well. So some people can play our base gameplay without being introduced to new variations or mechanics for a long time and are just really engaged and other people want Every second, I don't want to have like something new.
00:19:43
Speaker
um And we are still thinking about how we do that if we have like just adding more optional requests and then the pacing of the actual campaign is quite fast, so nobody is left behind.
00:19:57
Speaker
And I also think it's especially with the with the first islands we are currently working on, it also is interesting because at the beginning of the game you don't have any tools. So you only have to guess more or less ah where the position is on the island. And that can also be fun for multiple islands.
00:20:19
Speaker
But the thing is, then I'm a bit afraid that people might think, oh, that's all the game is about. So just having a faster pacing at the beginning and then potentially wasting some of the potential you have with islands where you don't have any tools, just to make sure the players at the beginning actually understand, oh, there's more to this game than just guessing where I am on this island. like and we and At least in the current demo, we quite quickly introduce landmarks, which ah once you've discovered them, are precisely marked on your map.
00:20:58
Speaker
And then you also quickly get counting steps. So I think that's like on the third island, you already have counting steps, even though there's like more potential for other quests and having a like this, how much content you get out of each stage with the tools of the player.
00:21:17
Speaker
But then again, how you pace the game is just also a challenge and something we need to test out even more in the future to see how we do it best.
00:21:28
Speaker
Or if we just add like an optional challenge mode for people that like core base gameplay and then the pacing of the campaign is more designed for people that just want to quickly have new twists on the gameplay.
00:21:45
Speaker
that yeah that That makes a lot of sense. How are you finding playtesters? Are you just working with people locally? Are you trying to reach out to people online? um We are going to start with like a more intense playtesting phase. So we're actually currently looking into how we can reach people that are interested in playtesting.
00:22:06
Speaker
If you are currently listening to this podcast and you are interested in playing or testing MapMap, feel free to reach out to us because we are always searching playtesters and especially you like tissue testers that haven't played our game yet.
00:22:20
Speaker
But the cool thing about Hamburg, where we are currently based in, is that we actually have tried the active indie community. So there are quite a lot of indie studios that are currently at the same stage as we are.
00:22:33
Speaker
So we can also reach out to them and just help each other out testing our games. We're also still connected to our university and they also hold regular play testing sessions, though those are like...
00:22:47
Speaker
pretty short playtesting sessions. And I think what we need most at the moment is like people that are going to play our game for a full hour just to see like how long which mechanics can actually be engaging.
00:23:00
Speaker
and yeah And then just reaching out on Discords. I mean, we are now also on the ah cool Dragneck Discord. We will be posting there if we need any support. or like other um either German-based ah game discords or also game design discords.
00:23:18
Speaker
Yeah, we will just be reaching out to as many people as possible and just try to see how we can best approach playtesting. I don't know, like, if you have any tips on any, yeah, how do you normally playtest?
00:23:35
Speaker
I mean, the thing you you mentioned is like the problem with playtesting, which is it's a lot easier to get testing on the first 20 minutes than it is to get playtesting for like the final chapter of a game because you need somebody to have played through the whole campaign to to get to the end.
00:23:56
Speaker
And a lot of playtesters will just ah like stop playing after a short while. i think the the format you playtest in can affect that. like If you're doing a lot of playtesting in person, then you've kind of always got an upper limit to how long you can play.
00:24:13
Speaker
like If you're at an event, there's just going a lot of throughput and nobody's likely to want to play for more than like half an hour because they'll be wandering around and playing other stuff. But so we've we've probably had most success with people who are like excited for a game and we can just send them a build and they can record the screen and they can just record the whole game in as many play sessions as it takes them.
00:24:38
Speaker
But certainly finding those people is tricky. like A few times we've just like posted, like hey, we're we're looking for playtesters, fill in this form if you're interested. We'll like reach out to existing people in our community who we know have played previous games of ours and like given good feedback and gone, hey, you did ah you gave us some great feedback on that game. Can you try this one? So just having made more games means that over time I think it gets a bit easier.
00:25:03
Speaker
But at the same time, people are busy and so you can't always rely on Like, oh, we had 50 people play that last game. Well, we'll definitely have 50 testers this time. And then also, even though it is always very hard to get someone to test the back part of a game, if you're overhauling how the onboarding works...
00:25:22
Speaker
you cannot go to any return playtesters at all. Whereas, for example, if we have playtesters for Sokobond Express is a game that we put out last year that was in playtest for a while, and there were a lot of playtesters that played little bits and parts of it, and then towards the end when it was like, this is the cohesive version that we're thinking about shipping. Please look for game flow and also like unintended solutions, but also most importantly, like bugs and everything else.
00:25:51
Speaker
ah people were able to come back and like look at it in that sense because we work we had already like kind of nailed down the onboarding. But like early on, we were changing that first world quite a bit and we were changing some ah a lot of the HUD and like the UX elements to make it more apparent what was going on in the game.
00:26:16
Speaker
And that was definitely a i think Alan and I put out the call for more playtesters like three or four times for that game specifically.
00:26:28
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, I can definitely, like, especially for the onboarding process, you really need to, like, keep some fresh playtesters. Yeah, you can't just use everyone all up front Yeah, it's like whenever people currently ask, oh, can I finally try your game? Even like some friends of us who have now never played our game, we always say like, okay, no, not yet. Because like the only playtest version we have at the moment is the version we all already exhibited ah different venues. And it's like only 10 minutes long. it's already Already know the problems with this.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's... um That said, I think a problem I've seen us do this, and i've seen a lot of other people do this, is go like too far in the opposite direction of thinking like, oh, well, no, we're not ready for playtesting until we've done x And like when you do it's like, well, we're not ready for playtesting until we've done. Why?
00:27:24
Speaker
Because you keep thinking, well, like, we've fixed that problem, we haven't fixed this problem. And, like, so we don't want to waste playtesters. And you can find yourself all of a sudden, like, oh, we've gone six months without a single other soul playing this. That's no good. That's bad.
00:27:41
Speaker
and so I think it's good to try and, like, keep people in reserve, but it's also good to, like... have some kind of threshold of like, regardless of that, we should be retesting it like at least every couple of months, because otherwise, you can come back and like, okay, we're finally ready.
00:28:01
Speaker
And oh, the change we made like five months ago. no that's no good. Back to the drawing board. Yeah, I also have like the same ah thought process from time to time. And like, oh, can we already playtest? But like this level isn't like what we actually want to do. And then it feels a bit like wasted, even though you still yeah get so much valuable information out of it.
00:28:25
Speaker
Even like testing like unfinished things. and Things you think need to change anyway. yeah and I think there's there's definitely... um reasons to playtest often and reasons to like yeah hold off until you hit certain bars but whenever those things are in tension i think i try to default to playtesting more rather than playtesting less because like okay you're going to burn through some playtesters but like worst comes to the worst you can always find some more playtesters Yeah, that's true.
00:28:56
Speaker
i think that's also like deep inside. I think everyone knows that you just need to do as many playtests as possible. But then again, it's just also a lot of time you need to spend on just finding and acquiring these playtests and then also analyzing the results and stuff like that um definitely and while we are talking about playtesting were both of you in the jury for drag neck and if so did you play our demo and if so
Host Impressions and Networking Success
00:29:26
Speaker
how what were your thoughts on map map if you've played it uh yeah we both played it think the main takeaway was just oh this is really charming
00:29:35
Speaker
Oh, nice. Yeah, I was charmed. I was impressed with the potential of the mechanics. I mean, you know, not not to get too into this, because it's it's not the point, but when you are viewing on a jury, you tend to come at things from a different perspective and a different lens, and also a different amount of time.
00:29:59
Speaker
And so for me, it was a lot of like, oh, This feels ambitious but achievable. This feels like there's a really satisfying mix of the world to the cartography elements.
00:30:14
Speaker
And yeah, I really enjoyed it. Nice. Did you see ah like pictures of it before? and Because one of the issues we currently have and are working on is that people see our game and hear what our game is about, but they can't really imagine what it actually plays like.
00:30:32
Speaker
And it's always interesting to hear how other people experience it so we can get closer to being able to well or to goodly. No, it's not good.
00:30:44
Speaker
I don't. I don't know which word I want to use here in English, but how to well communicate our game and make sure yeahly effectively, thank you, to effectively communicate our game and say, yes, it is a measuring and ah it's an accurate game, but it is fun.
00:31:02
Speaker
Trust me. I mean, no. So at least for me, my first time, time hearing of the game slash knowing of the game was the application um and the applications didn't like didn't ask for screenshots so the first time i saw it was a video and then played the build so Ah, okay.
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah, and I can't remember if you shared a trailer video or more of a gameplay video. um But yeah, and I think it was like very very clear from whatever video you submitted, like, oh, this is the gameplay. Okay, yeah, I can see what you're trying to do. Ah, okay.
00:31:47
Speaker
Certainly it's a probably a trickier problem with screenshots, but it's a problem that a lot of games share. So I think... like as As long as your video can communicate pretty quickly what what your game is, think you're probably doing right.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah, video, GIFs, I think will work reasonably well on social media. If I had secret tips on how to maximize ah screenshots for a game that you would kind of need to play to understand, then some of our games might have sold better.
00:32:24
Speaker
But... You know, so it goes. I think the other benefit you have for screenshots is your game is just very polished and it it looks great. It's pretty, it's colourful, you have characters.
00:32:37
Speaker
So like it kind of like, sure, maybe from a screenshot you can't tell what the gameplay is, but you can tell from a screenshot, oh, this is a pretty game. And that's not nothing. Yes, that that is a leg up on other games in the thingy space.
00:32:52
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine, especially in the puzzle area. That's true. But then again, it's interesting to see, like, if someone and looks at our Steam page and just sees, oh, yeah, pretty environments, I want to explore pretty environments, what are they going to think about our gameplay? Because then again, they are like, it's just puzzle gameplay.
00:33:09
Speaker
Well, it's a puzzle game about exploring pretty environments. Yeah, true. True. I think it is generally a good thing and not a bad thing if you can trick people into playing a puzzle game.
00:33:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I think so, too. and That's also what we hear when we like exhibit. We were at Gamescom this year, for example, and the resonance aura is really positive.
00:33:34
Speaker
And I think if we would promote it as, oh this is a puzzle game about... accuracy and navigation, a lot of people that enjoyed our game wouldn't actually play it because they even before trying it out, they're like, oh, no, I've never tried to read a map. Oh, no, this is not something I'm good And I think that's probably true for a lot of puzzle games because a lot of puzzle games are just fun and a lot of other games are also just glorified puzzle games, but they just communicate differently.
00:34:05
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's... It's a ah whole thing, and then convincing someone after they like a puzzle game, whether they were tricked into playing it or not, that they should try another puzzle game is another uphill battle.
00:34:20
Speaker
So, um, how did you hear about the Draconex New Voices Puzzle Grant? ah That's actually, um and we heard it from someone who received the puzzle grant last time. you It's Charts Between, I think?
00:34:35
Speaker
ah Yeah, Charts Between Us. Charts between us. Yeah, we met someone from that team at the Hamburg Games Conference. They were taking part in a pitch competition and they played our game and enjoyed it and said, oh yeah, that's something you might want to submit to ah the Dragon Hat grant.
00:34:55
Speaker
And then at some point we saw that it's open once again and directly applied. Wow. So, yeah. So that's ah definitely a good lesson to always attend as many conferences as possible and just network because like I don't know if we would have found out about it otherwise, to be honest.
00:35:15
Speaker
So once again, I don't remember your name, but thank you, person from Charts Between Us, for giving us this tip. Yeah, no, that's wild. that's wild I think that's the first time I've heard of people just talking about our grant at a conference.
00:35:34
Speaker
this but I would be surprised if nobody would, because it's a really cool grant. just I mean, of course, you get some money, but also just from a community standpoint, like being able to connect with other ah puzzle game designers, also what you do with coffee talks and stuff like that.
Future Goals Under the Puzzle Grant
00:35:53
Speaker
It's really, really cool. Well, thank you. So as we are recording this, it is the end of January. This will probably go out in February.
00:36:04
Speaker
What are kind of your biggest goals for the Puzzle Grant this year? for the duration of the puzzle brand. So first of all, we need to finally ah talk with our mentor.
00:36:20
Speaker
It's been a really busy time and we are currently trying to find a date to just exchange and see how we how they can help us. And then generally, like, puzzle grants a year, right?
00:36:35
Speaker
And ah we have a lot of goals. I just need to quickly think about which of them I can share here publicly on the podcast. Yeah.
00:36:48
Speaker
We definitely want to, like, one of the next internal goals is just have to, like, have the first crappy playable version from start to finish.
00:37:00
Speaker
Just, like, to have, just to get a feeling for how, yeah, just for pacing what we talked about and just a really crappy one and then just... building up upon that to get a game that's as good as we can make it.
00:37:16
Speaker
And yeah, just completing the story, trying that most of the tools are now actually included. Also, the map map is now We just created a new demo, which is like twice the size of the one YouTube played. Awesome. And we, yeah, we submitted it to like the biggest German video game award, which is really cool. They have a prototype category, which even if you only get nominated, you get 25,000 euros. If you win, you get 50,000.
00:37:49
Speaker
So we are interested to see how that goes. And we made a new version for that where we polished a lot of um features already. Now we also have the map map, which is so cool because it's like an overview of all the maps you had in the game.
00:38:03
Speaker
And you can like you can draw on the maps, you can add stickers to the map, and all of this is also saved. And you can see all of that on the map map. And it's just such a fun feature.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, but other than that, honestly, think most of the things we are planning for this year are not public yet. And I don't know how much I can say without, yeah.
00:38:25
Speaker
No, that's plenty. You're you're good. ah Yeah. um But there are going to be quite some cool new announcements this year.
00:38:36
Speaker
Definitely. Hopefully. Like, let's see how this year goes. I mean, you never really know.
Podcast Wrap-up
00:38:42
Speaker
Well, while you have us, do you have any questions for us?
00:38:48
Speaker
Any questions for you? h I mean, I already asked you about your play test experience with map map. Do you have what is your go to tip for coming up with game mechanics?
00:39:08
Speaker
um Coming up with game mechanics, like the first concept is a whole thing, but like once once I have something that exists, um I tend to think on a very like practical level, of very like embodied in the world level, and like, okay, what what do we have?
00:39:27
Speaker
And like what makes sense that would be here that isn't currently a gameplay mechanic? Like, I mean, you you've obviously got a lot of scope for just like finding real mapmaking tools and like going, okay, well, we can add this one or we could add that one.
00:39:43
Speaker
um Yeah, I'm trying to think what that would look like for your game specifically. Because for my games, it's often like, oh, well, this is set on an island. What's on islands? Trees are on islands.
00:39:54
Speaker
and Or if I've got these these two things and they're independent gameplay systems, like what does the overlap of these things look like? How does thing X interact with thing Y? And I like i will first and foremost go to like the real world. like what What does a real thing X do? What does a real thing Y do? If you were just playing this out in reality, what would happen?
00:40:13
Speaker
And obviously games are very like abstract systems a lot of the time, but i find it helps me to think about them as non-abstractly as possible as a starting point for, oh, and then how can i then translate that to a video game system? I don't know if that's particularly helpful.
00:40:30
Speaker
ah ah Definitely interesting. Like just always interested to see how other game designers go about approaching the mechanics. And yeah, thank you.
00:40:43
Speaker
So thank you. ah Where can people find you online? ah First of all, of course, you can find our game project that on Steam. Just search for map map. And other than that, we are as Peeper programs. We are on all social media platforms.
00:41:01
Speaker
And if you want to get in touch or share your feedback or your ideas, feel free to join our Discord server. Awesome. Well, thank you very much. ah for joining us. This was really exciting conversation and I feel like it went really well.
00:41:16
Speaker
And thank you for listening to the Drackneck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis.
00:41:29
Speaker
Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawadniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.