Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 33: Robin and Jeremy (The Roottrees are Dead)
248 Plays22 days ago
In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Robin and Jeremy, the developers behind The Roottrees are Dead. Topics include the origins of the game, the remake on Steam, and genre classifications.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the Drakkneck and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Seren, the producer at Drakkneck and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Drakkneck at Drakkneck and Friends.
00:00:34
Speaker
Hello. Today, we're joined by Robin and Jeremy, who you may know from their work on The Root Trees Are Dead. How are you doing today? I'm good. Pretty good. a little tired. It's a tiny bit early for me, but we wanted to make sure that this time works for everyone. Awesome.
00:00:51
Speaker
Well, we appreciate the scheduling of cross-continental podcast recording, as usual. um Can you introduce yourselves with you know maybe name, pronouns, some of the what what you've done on different projects?
00:01:05
Speaker
Sure. I'm Jeremy. ah He, him. I was the lead designer ah Original designer of the itch.io version of The Root Trees Are Dead.
00:01:17
Speaker
I've been a game developer for a really long time, about 16 years now. But that was my first sort of solo release. And Robin, who's also here, I'll let him talk in just a moment.
00:01:32
Speaker
yeah He's the the one that reached out to me to make the Steam version. So most of our listeners, i imagine you're going to be wanting to thank him. Okay, I'll go now. um Yeah, I'm Robin. Also, he, him.
00:01:44
Speaker
I'm actually fairly new to game development. I did make a web-based role-playing game some time ago, but for the most part my career, I've been doing web and UI stuff. And yeah, I reached out to Jeremy and said, and I guess we'll get we'll we'll get into this, so we might want to circle back. But like yeah, like I saw his game and I loved it and helped bring it to Steam.
00:02:05
Speaker
And then he was generous enough to give me a co-designer credit because of all the work we did on the game.
Jeremy's Journey into Game Development
00:02:10
Speaker
Awesome. What got y'all into game development in the first place? So I've been... ah It's kind of a weird story where I played a lot of video games as a kid, and when it came time for me to look into what I was going to do for college, I had no idea. um i had also been in musicals and stuff, and I thought about getting like a musical theater degree, but...
00:02:34
Speaker
My parents, my dad and my stepmom, who are also into video games, I guess they saw some kind of advertisement somewhere. One of those really cheesy old advertisements that we all used to make fun of for a College that was offer video game development as a a degree and I said hey, how about this and I hadn't really given it much thought I'm kind of a laid-back easygoing kind of guy and I was like, oh yeah, that sounds kind of interesting and I looked into that and so I went to one of those cheesy schools that we all used to make fun of and
00:03:07
Speaker
and um I kind of got lucky. A lot of people that get into the games industry, especially back then, it's because they knew someone. And I just happened to make a ah friend in college who happened to have some connection into the industry And, you know, it just kind of happened from that. um Friends of friends recommend each other.
00:03:30
Speaker
And that's how I got into the games industry. So I can't say i always wanted to be a game designer or anything. But when it came time to figure out what to do with my life, it sort of dropped in my lap.
00:03:41
Speaker
And it seemed like ah as good a thing as any. And i really do enjoy doing it now. so And what kind of games were you working on before Roo Truth? Oh, so before Rear Trees, like I've worked on a few different things. A lot of them, though, are racing games. So when I first started, my first actual industry job was at a place that doesn't exist anymore called Big Bang Entertainment.
00:04:08
Speaker
And we were there's there's a one major
Robin's Passion for Games and Career Shift
00:04:12
Speaker
studio that was in Phoenix, Arizona, which is where I lived, called Rainbow Studios. And Rainbow Studios, they were laying off a bunch of people, as you do in the games industry, and they happened to lay off a whole team all at once.
00:04:27
Speaker
And this whole team said, hey, we're a whole team of people that can make a video game. So how about we form a new studio? And that was Big Bang Entertainment. And Big Bang Entertainment, they had connections.
00:04:38
Speaker
They worked with ah the people that worked at Big Bang had worked at Sony before. And so my first industry job, I was kind of a junior designer at Big Bang Entertainment working on racing games.
00:04:50
Speaker
And for whatever reason, just getting that experience as my first experience meant that I kind of looped back through a lot of racing game studios after that. So I did work eventually at a place called Rainbow Studios. They made MX versus ATV.
00:05:06
Speaker
I worked at a small studio called 2XL Games. They made some motocross games. It's been kind of all over the place, a lot of miscellaneous stuff here and there, but racing games have always been at the core of that, which is funny because I don't play a lot of racing games.
00:05:22
Speaker
That is funny. ah For me, I've always loved games. I ah actually don't really, like I guess when was very young. So what happened is my dad worked for IBM, and when the first IBM Home PC came out, the 50, I think 5150,
00:05:37
Speaker
He took the employee purchase plan and bought one at great expense. I think he said it was about $3,000 of like money. So that like an enormous amount of money. enormous amount of money And i took to it very quickly. And we had this game, King's Quest, which i some people might have heard of, if especially if you're on the older side like me.
00:05:59
Speaker
And I just was obsessed with it. And honestly, I never really stopped. Like people told me, like, when you get older, you'll stop playing games. But if anything, I play more games now. Like I just, I'm always playing something. I usually have something I play with my wife, something I play on the side.
00:06:12
Speaker
um So for me, I always tried playing, you know, tweaking with games and learning to make games. But when I was like, um you know, when I was in my teens, Toronto, where I'm from, they there wasn't many game studios. Like it didn't seem to be an option.
00:06:27
Speaker
The Canadian gamed dev scene, which I think started more with like Ubisoft in Montreal, was like more in my late 20s and stuff. So I ended up getting into web development, which I really liked. And then I took like a 20 year detour, basically, where I made a lot of web apps.
00:06:40
Speaker
um And I worked on a fairly successful piece of software called Discourse, not to be confused with Discord, which a lot of people do, but it's Discourse, the open source form software. And I worked there for like a decade and, you know, came from like I was like the co-founder up until like 80 employees.
00:06:59
Speaker
And um I was in a very privileged position to sell my shares when we did a funding raise funding round. I sold a lot of my shares and was able to then and say, OK, I want to get back into game development.
00:07:11
Speaker
And that's kind of where I started. And I was working on my own prototype at the time where I played the root trees are dead. And then that's when I reached out to Jeremy. So like for me, it's honestly like professionally, it's quite a new thing to make games, but not so much software.
Admiration for Puzzle Games
00:07:27
Speaker
And did either or both of you play a lot of the detective-y games? You mean like Obra Dinn? Like Obra Dinn, Golden an Idol. Look, I love those games.
00:07:40
Speaker
I know I'd let Jeremy answer as well, but like I think we're both big fans of Obra Dinn. That game really was something special for me. like I mentioned I loved Sierra games growing up and point-and-click adventure games. like Those were my big thing.
00:07:54
Speaker
And so I always liked games that had like a narrative and puzzles, and I still do. And when Obra Dinn came out, it introduced what I thought was a really novel mechanic, which is, you know, you're solving a puzzle, but you have to lock in certain amount of things at once to get it correct.
00:08:10
Speaker
And I'd never seen a game that did that before. Like, I'm um um pretty certain Lucas Pope came up with that concept, and I love it. And, you know, when I saw Golden Idol came out, which I found out Because I was getting into the Godot game engine, and that's actually how I found out about that game. ah They were like, oh, this game in Godot is somewhat successful. I'm like, wait, it's another Obra Dinn? This is exactly my jam. So like for me, it's like probably my favorite genre of game, and why I was so taken with Root Trees Are Dead once Jeremy put it up on Hitch.
00:08:36
Speaker
So for me, I play a lot of puzzle games. It doesn't really matter so much what the exact genre is. So I did play Obra Dinn, but I played Obra Dinn mostly because...
00:08:48
Speaker
As one does, whenever you finish a puzzle game and you want to play another puzzle game, you go out there and say, hey, I just did this. What do I do next? That's kind of a staple in this genre. And everyone, of course, recommended Obra Dinn. So I checked it out and I really liked it quite a lot.
00:09:04
Speaker
um I hadn't played any other games like it before, but I would also say that before Obra Dinn, there weren't any other games like Obra Dinn. It's kind of a new genre now, a Now, there have been other detective games like, you know, um ah the Sherlock Holmes games, the I think Nancy Drew games. I haven't played any of those really, ah but I've played, i would say, almost all of the major puzzle game releases. Anything that gets a lot of ah hype or a lot of critical acclaim, I played pretty much all of those with some exceptions. and
00:09:38
Speaker
that's how i got into obradin and that's where root trees came from so i would say it's not necessarily my favorite genre but i enjoy it quite a lot my favorite genre is probably more like mist likes you know ah mist is i think the first fully dedicated puzzle game that i remember playing if you don't count things like tetris which is a very different type of puzzle but mist and than way later in life Riven and the other sequels to Myst.
Influences on 'The Root Trees Are Dead'
00:10:07
Speaker
That's my jam. Obra Dinn doesn't really fit in with that, but I put it more in the same headspace that I use when I play things like Sudoku or those logic puzzles that we all kind of grew up with in school where, you know, you have You're given ah bunch of hints and you figure out which person wasn't in which room and which pet they had or something like that.
00:10:31
Speaker
And so when I played Obra Dinn, it was an extension of that in a way that I'd never seen. And I really, really looked liked it a lot. And I still think that it's the best one of that type. I don't think anyone surpassed it yet.
00:10:44
Speaker
I don't know if anyone ever will. um It's hard to beat the first one. Yeah. Yeah, so that's where my history with Obra Dinn came from, and that's also where Root Trees came from.
00:10:58
Speaker
I'm not shy about saying it's a direct, I don't want to use the word ripoff, but it's a direct kind of ripoff of some of the the things that I felt while playing Obra Dinn, so...
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah. did you Did you play that and immediately go, wow, I want to make something like this? Or did it like come a little later? You were starting a game and you're like, oh, I could do something like that. like How did the initial idea, where did that come from?
00:11:23
Speaker
Oh, so it came actually quite a bit later, maybe a couple of years later. so there was ah i do every year i do the global game jam and i've been doing it i think something like 13 years and in a row now so i've i've been in all of them for 13 years and the way that it's been going more and more recently i say starting about four or five years ago i would make a game over the 48 hours that we're given and then
00:11:55
Speaker
I'd take about a month because you get attached to a game that you make in that 48 hours, even if it's not great. I take a month and sort of make it better. You know, do all the things that we had on the whiteboard when we were designing our our Game Jam game.
00:12:12
Speaker
I do those things and then I'd release it either to itch.io or for a while was just to the Global Game Jam website or I'd show it to my friends or whatever. and In 2023, the theme for the Global Game Jam was Roots.
00:12:28
Speaker
And I was just trying to think of what to do for that. I don't know why, but I'm very glad that I did this. I don't know why i made Root Trees are Dead, but it came directly from that. The the title even, Roots, Root Trees, came directly from that.
00:12:44
Speaker
um I just sort of had that flash of inspiration. I was like, well, what kind of games do I like and what could I make on my own? um And we'll we'll probably talk in um just a minute when I say on my own. I mean, with help from ah friend who had access to Mid Journey.
00:13:00
Speaker
um But what can I make? in a short time period that is a very logic game that fits the theme of roots and that's just where root trees are dead came from it was originally intended to be much more logic based so the whole idea i thought of is okay a family tree has these certain inherent connections of names being passed down in certain ways and if you know that there's ah you know two parents and four kids and you see
00:13:33
Speaker
five names of the same last name you can go oh maybe these fit in this spot it was all meant to be ah big logic puzzle based around the rules of family trees and it definitely as everyone listening to this knows who's played it spiraled spiraled way beyond that so now there's a lot of clues like okay you have to do contact clues for reading and things like that but originally it was just supposed to be ah family tree puzzle Now, for those of you that have played the Steam version and unlocked the secret game in there, Family Doku, that is a better indicator of what was originally in my head when I envisioned the root trees are dead and what that would be.
Development Process and Evolution of Game
00:14:20
Speaker
And do you think there was a moment when it's like shifted? You're like, oh, I've added a little bit of this thing and suddenly this is like way more compelling or like, yeah, how did it shift from what it started as to what it is now?
00:14:33
Speaker
It kind of shifted by necessity. So there were definitely clues in the original. um is said ah what are the What is the spoiler policy here? Are we assuming everyone listening to this has played Rue Trees?
00:14:46
Speaker
Oh, we can go full spoilers if you'd like, and we can just put a spoiler warning in the episode description. We don't have to. I'm just trying to be careful because I'll use in one example.
00:14:58
Speaker
ah I'll try and keep it vague. Okay. for example one of the first puzzles i came up with ever would that there be a musician in the family and the musician would have an album cover and on the album cover would be a reference to a magazine but the reference of the magazine would use slang um and so you'd have to not only try and seek out the article in the magazine, but you'd also have to search for the name of the slang of the magazine to figure out what the magazine actually is.
00:15:33
Speaker
So that's a very simple puzzle and it is in the final game now. it's I don't think anyone struggles with it, but it is one of the original things that I came up with.
00:15:44
Speaker
And that kind of thing was just supposed to be the the light puzzling that happened outside of the logic of the the games. And so the more that I had this giant family tree and the more hints that you needed to solve it, the more i kind of delved into that territory of requiring large amounts of information almost by necessity. Because would the tree has, i think, like 50 main people on it and a bunch of side, like optional people that you have to fill out.
00:16:20
Speaker
And there was just... far too many places that everyone could technically go just based on their last names and based on that logic that I originally had the idea of. So It just kind of grew out of what I needed to happen.
00:16:35
Speaker
And also, the more that I started writing that stuff, the more sorry, I should clarify, the more I started writing things in universe about the family and the things that they were doing and though the connections they had to each other, the more I enjoyed it.
00:16:50
Speaker
And so it just kind of ballooned from there. ah So started by necessity and then just kind of became fun. But there was a point where you decided, like, you took it from the logic puzzle, you added a text box.
00:17:03
Speaker
Like, that's a major change, right? Like, that you could, and I'm talking about searching the web. So that was actually there from the beginning, but it was just meant to have ah much smaller...
00:17:15
Speaker
Footprint. ah So like I said, the whole the whole magazine thing, you still were supposed to originally see the album cover go, oh, there's going to be an article in a magazine I could use from somewhere. I have to search the Internet to figure that out.
00:17:27
Speaker
But if you look at the original, original prototype, the window was tiny, like there wasn't going to be a lot of information and even the captions on the the photos, because it did involve photos of people.
00:17:41
Speaker
The captions on the photos were really simple at the beginning because I didn't think we would need more. It was going to be like, oh, gather it again like we do every 20 years. And that was like the whole caption.
00:17:52
Speaker
and ah But as you if you've played it now, you know that the captions and everything about the family, there's full performance. diary entries, things like that. There's a whole lot of information about this family out there.
00:18:06
Speaker
And you cross-reference all of it with each other. And that's kind of the, became the fun of the game. um At what point did you decide that there needed to be a lot of different...
00:18:20
Speaker
a lot of different places for the player to go gather information, like on a computer and like on the, on the photo captures, like all that stuff. Like did that come out of the necessity of continuing to need more information or was that like always a key part of the experience in your head?
00:18:37
Speaker
From the very beginning, I had the internet, a library and magazines. All three of those were there from the beginning because I felt that that would be Those would make the most sense for what a player in the 1990s would be searching for.
00:18:54
Speaker
I would say that that was there from the beginning, like I said, and and it was supposed to be in a less a lessened state than it is now. I guess, yeah, I don't really have much else to say when it comes to that because it's just it was there from the beginning.
00:19:11
Speaker
But I didn't know the extent of the amount of content I would end up having to write, which Robin can attest to is a very large amount. Yes. I think this is like, um it's' it's interesting. I was thinking about this recently because we just went through jump ahead chronologically. Like we're about to launch translations into three languages very soon.
00:19:28
Speaker
And um it's about 100,000. It's over 100,000 words for the game. So it's a novel, essentially. yeah. I think there's this thing in writing where a lot of people are encouraged to be concise and stuff like that. But this is one of those cases where like I think verbosity is an advantage because it fills in the world.
00:19:48
Speaker
And one thing I've always been impressed with Jeremy is his ability to just... Right and right and right. Now, there's a little bit of me, and especially with Roo Tree Mania, I filled in some of the world building, and I actually had a super fun time doing it. But it's like, you know, when I sat down to write some of the articles, almost all about side stuff, like um just extraneous world building kind of more stuff, like just how time consuming it is to write all that stuff and come up with a clever idea, like for each article, you know, like what is the interesting aspect?
00:20:20
Speaker
Like if a user... searches this, I want them to find something interesting. And that's, it's very time consuming. And I really appreciated that you were able to create so much of it. I mean, honestly, immersive is such an easily thrown around word.
00:20:34
Speaker
But like, by having not just necessary details, it does, like, I think really enhance the experience personally. And that's, that's one of the things that I really liked about this game outside of just the, the the sort of logicality that you have to apply.
00:20:49
Speaker
So one of you one of my questions as you were as you were talking about the design process, to what extent were certain mysteries, like certain people on the family tree,
00:21:04
Speaker
sort of like, did did the answers come first and then the rest of like the world around it was built to as a vehicle to deliver the information versus, well, it would be really good if there was a book that said this and like this is this.
00:21:21
Speaker
And so that's something that we need to throw into one of the characters. So a lot of it started... Actually, I'll say all of it. All of it started with the tree itself. The way I went ah about designing the game from the ground up is that I had no idea really where to begin, except that I knew I needed the tree to have these logic pieces in it.
00:21:41
Speaker
And I wanted some of those logic pieces to be kind of simple because that was the original idea. And so I built um a tree. I just started at the top and...
00:21:52
Speaker
was like, okay, I'm going to just take a piece take it piece by piece. This person at the top is going to have five kids. And the reason they're going five kids is because I want the tree to expand a lot as I go down through the generations. Like, that was it. That was the only reason that there's five kids at the top.
00:22:07
Speaker
um And then i started coming up with interesting patterns below that. So um I'm going to... Very, very minor spoilers. You don't have to turn this off.
00:22:19
Speaker
But there is someone, one of those five kids, has the most kids out of any of the rest of them. They have four. And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be funny if these...
00:22:30
Speaker
this this person with four kids, each of those four kids hated all their siblings and they're like, I'm never having more than one kid. So they each have one kid below them. So, and that happened like on the tree.
00:22:42
Speaker
It didn't happen in the story, but originally in my comprehension of the story, when I was building the tree, was like, okay, so one of them has four kids. Each of them is only going to have one kid by design.
00:22:53
Speaker
And and the
Player Feedback and Story Transformation
00:22:54
Speaker
the simple explanation would be at some point, the player finds out that all of them hated having so many siblings and they're like, We've made a pact that each of us is only going to have one kid that never ended up being part of the final story. But that's kind of where I started from. i was just like, OK, let's make an interesting tree, come up with explanations for why these people have the kids they do and try make it so that, OK, if there's maybe one only one person that has three kids.
00:23:19
Speaker
These people have a couple of kids over here. These people have a couple of kids over here. I'll design a puzzle at some point that lets you figure out which pair of siblings belongs to which person. And so that's where I started because I didn't really know where to begin. So I decided to to start with what the player would be filling out.
00:23:36
Speaker
And then as I went, I did come up with certain things like, okay, the the people at the bottom of the tree, because this takes place 1998, ninety eight some of them will have internet presences so you can start working from the bottom of the tree and then work up from there but the people the top of the tree in 1998 the internet kind of sucks how am i going to get you engrossed into that section and i thought okay well someone could have had some kind of published information about their family gossip things like that and that's
00:24:11
Speaker
that did end up making its way into the final game. So I would say started with a tree, added some big pieces in my head that I knew I wanted to kind of get you engrossed in the tree, and then built those and tested it. And it very clearly wasn't enough very quickly. And that's where everything else came from, though, is that core in the middle.
00:24:34
Speaker
And how did you figure out where the player should start? Like which which part of the puzzle they should start out with? So the story of the the game begins with a cut scene that says three people who are very, very rich died in a plane crash.
00:24:53
Speaker
That was always there. I don't know why I chose that. um My girlfriend watches a lot of YouTube stuff about plane crashes. I guess that's probably where that came from, honestly. Shout out to Mentor Pilot.
00:25:07
Speaker
It's a YouTube channel. um And so... I started with that because originally the entire motivation for the game was going to be financial.
00:25:17
Speaker
So it was all about, okay, these people died. They were very young. They didn't have a great will. They're very rich. And the money is going to be spread to the rest of the family. And that was kind of a...
00:25:29
Speaker
an Obra Dinn homage. um In Obra Dinn, you're playing an insurance adjuster and at the end you do sort of do some paperwork that affects what people earn.
00:25:40
Speaker
And this was going to be similar to that, ah but in terms of genealogy. And so that was always there from the very beginning and informed some of the other decisions. So the reason that I start with the tree at the bottom. So the the first thing you do in the game is identify those three people that died in the plane crash.
00:26:02
Speaker
That came directly from the story that I came up with, and it also was a It made sense as a jumping off point that if these are the most famous, richest people in the family, that it should be very easy to put them in.
00:26:13
Speaker
And that's that's where that began. I can say as someone who played the game you know after the Itch version was released, that the the beginning is really enticing. like Just even the title, which we never... I think we had a very brief discussion about whether we would change the title and we decided, like no, it's just such a great...
00:26:30
Speaker
title to go with. um But it's like the root trees are dead. Like it starts with this. It's like something horrible has happened. And I think like a lot of people when they want to play a mystery game, they're like, oh, this game is going to be about solving the mystery of a plane crash, or it's going to be about figuring out who these people are.
00:26:46
Speaker
And I don't want to say like bait and switch in a bad way, but it is I think it actually was really smart because if the game had positioned itself as this is a game about just figuring out like solving a family tree to help out a mysterious person, that's less exciting than this starts with a ah plane crash thing, which actually ends up being a very small part of the story.
00:27:09
Speaker
you agree with that, Jeremy? Like, was that intentional? It was not intentional. So, but it, I agree with it. Yes,
Game Jam Origins and AI Art Impact
00:27:15
Speaker
yeah definitely. The way the game begins, which is the plane crash and someone coming to you, was supposed to be in the middle of the night. I think I've, I've said this in a few different places. So if you've read anything, I've talked about this story. I apologize to everyone out there. Who's about to get a, a duplicate answer, but I was inspired by the movie arrival, which is, ah a movie about aliens coming to earth.
00:27:40
Speaker
Uh, that's not a spoiler. it's in the trailer. So, um, but in arrival, what's really interesting is the main character is a linguistics professor at a college and she gets approached in the middle of the night by a guy in a helicopter that lands is like, Hey, we need your help. And I, for whatever reason that has always stuck with me, what situation has led to a linguistics professor receiving a helicopter on their lawn in the middle of the night saying, we need your help.
00:28:07
Speaker
And I was like, well, what could do that for a genealogist? And so it was originally the story was all about the financial stuff. And when I put the first prototype, not even the whole story, but just a first prototype with many of the people lock inable.
00:28:27
Speaker
That's a weird phrase. And many of the people able to be locked in. I quickly received a lot of questions of like, why am I doing this? I sure it's fun. That was my answer. I was like, well, is it fun?
00:28:40
Speaker
don't Don't you want to keep playing because it's a puzzle? Like, yeah, but why? and I was like, OK, I guess I have to answer that. And so. it does shift the story by the end of the game is very different than where you started in the headspace at the beginning of the game and i do think of it as a bait and switch i was really worried about that by the way when i when i finished the story one of the concerns i had is would people that started the story and were interested the story at the beginning by the time i got to the end go this game it's different than i thought it would be this final mystery especially which i won't get into but the final mystery
00:29:18
Speaker
is not what I thought I'd be working with. I thought people would maybe be turned off by that, but it's been the opposite. People tend to like how the story shifts partway through and becomes what I'd call more personal and less financial.
00:29:33
Speaker
So... Yeah, I think um from a marketing perspective, selling a game called fill in the root tree family or something, or the root tree family, is is much more common as would be much harder than the root trees are dead.
00:29:46
Speaker
You know, starts off with a bang. I really like that. Yeah, I think that's true. And also, like, you get this really nice moment after that tutorial area where you, like, sold these three people.
00:29:57
Speaker
And then suddenly you see the scope of the whole tree. It's like, oh, wow, this is so many people. that like If you just started with that, it would land very differently, I think.
00:30:09
Speaker
Yes, I was worried about that too. i I lampshade it for sure. i
00:30:16
Speaker
Because that was what I was greeted with by my playtesters. It's like, oh my God, what are you getting me into? So I put in a thing, um the character who comes to you and says, by the way, this family tree you're about to see, it's a lot.
00:30:31
Speaker
Oh, but I'm sure you'll be okay. And I thought that that joke was enough. And I think it works pretty well. But yeah, the moment that that whole tree unveils, it's a big moment. And I was worried people would turn off the game when they saw that.
00:30:44
Speaker
I think, um I'm a fan, this this will probably come up later too, but like I'm a fan of crossword puzzles and I play them most days. And ah one of my favorite things is when you start with a giant puzzle and you're like, this seems impossible.
00:30:58
Speaker
And you just fill in what you can. and then you realize by filling in what you can, you can just still ah fill in other things. And the game kind of works along the same mechanisms of that. It's like, this tree, is this seems impossible, but as you just fill in what you can. And then once you know that, you can know other things and stuff like that.
00:31:14
Speaker
But I have heard some studies have shown that people who are new to crosswords, like they'll start with a big puzzle. And if they can't get an answer and say the first five or 10 questions, ah sorry, five or 10 clues, they'll quit and walk away.
00:31:28
Speaker
And that's a big problem because like a lot of puzzles are designed that like you actually can't, you're not expected to know those until you get some of the down or whatever. Like people think it's like trivia. It's like either they have it or they don't. And what they don't realize is by having some letters in there, they can fill in the rest.
00:31:44
Speaker
And I think that's, it's really good what you did because if you would, yeah, if the game started with that, I think some people would be like, my brain isn't up to this. But by starting with just three sisters,
00:31:56
Speaker
it makes it much more palatable. And even then you you do a little more because there's the notable root trees, right? You're like, your first goal is these three and then your next goal is these 10. So don't even worry about the rest of the tree. Just start with these 10 and then see where that leads you, right?
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I think by that point, um you've just got a sense of like, oh, it's really satisfying to fill in these parts of the tree. And so like even if somebody was not engaging with the story, think like the act of filling in this tree is very Moorish.
00:32:25
Speaker
And so it would be compelling, even if the story was very bland, once you you've kind of gotten hooked at that point. For sure. ah You've touched on playtesters. I'd love to hear but it's about playtesting the original game, but also like did you do a lot of playtesting for the remake?
Playtesting and Community Engagement
00:32:44
Speaker
Yes, actually, and there's a lot of crossover between those two things. So the way that I handled playtesting is, like any game that I work on, the first person that I go to is any friend of mine that will say yes to playtesting a game at the moment.
00:33:00
Speaker
So um at the time... I think my first play tester was Nick Vaccaro, who's another puzzle game developer. He developed a game called Valley of Shadow.
00:33:11
Speaker
And he and i we get along really well just conversationally. We we talk about puzzles a lot. And so i was like, hey, I have a new thing. Would you be to check it out? And of course, he he said yes, because he's a great dude.
00:33:25
Speaker
And when he played it, I think it's the first time I've ever put a like a solo game jam game in front of someone and they've been super hyped. i that's It was a new thing for me. A lot of my game jam games really suck, as game jam games do.
00:33:43
Speaker
ah But this one went really well. And so it was just a tutorial and a little bit more. And he was invested already. And so I was like, OK, that's a good sign.
00:33:55
Speaker
So I started working on it more. I had him play through as much of the game as i could make but at some point especially with puzzle games and thinky games so once you've played through something you sort of learn how his tricks work and also the evolution of a game you know if he if he ran into a problem and i made a change when he goes back to the game and sees the change i made that is a clue that your average ordinary player would not get they oh this has changed it must be important
00:34:27
Speaker
You know, so at some point I needed more play testers. I approached more of my friends. Some of them liked it. Some of them bounced off of it because it just wasn't their style of game. And then when I got to the point where I was pretty happy with the story.
00:34:42
Speaker
And being fully possible to to quote unquote beat the game and solve everyone, then I started approaching people I didn't know. And the way that I did that was I just went to Reddit, the Obra Dinn subreddit and said, hey, I'm working on a game.
00:34:57
Speaker
For people that like Obra Dinn, do you want to test my game? And then a bunch of people volunteered and I grabbed them. Now, for me, I find it to be really important, almost as important as the fact that strangers are playing my game, that I can see what they're doing while they play. So I only got...
00:35:16
Speaker
volunteers that would be willing to record their screen. Now, they don't it didn't have to be like a Twitch stream. They didn't have to be on camera or anything. But I wanted their thoughts aloud and what they were seeing. And the reason for that is because especially in a game like this, seeing what they were searching for was just as important as seeing the things that they found successfully. So that their unsuccessful searches were just as important, if not more important,
00:35:44
Speaker
than their successful searches that allowed them to beat the game. And a lot of my playtesting was seeing things that people would search for in the game and going, oh man, in this world that I've created, as as the curator of this fake world that doesn't really exist, I have to decide if someone would have searched for that, should they have found some information about, ah for example, okay, I said someone was an architect.
00:36:10
Speaker
Well, if I say they're an architect, then theoretically they've built buildings. So if someone searches for someone's name, there's probably some record, no matter how old this person is, of the buildings that they built somewhere, some historical thing.
00:36:23
Speaker
So I should add a small blurb that might be a minor hint towards this person. A lot of, you know... We talked earlier about you you know the depth and and how much I've written.
00:36:35
Speaker
I've basically written a full book, and a lot of that came from someone searching for a thing that I never thought about, and I'd have to assess, oh, maybe i should add something into the game because it would have existed in this world that I've created.
00:36:49
Speaker
And so we had all these play testers. They played through the game. They were enjoying it immensely, which was awesome. I watched every single one. I've watched so many people play this game throughout the process of development.
00:37:03
Speaker
And then when it came time to do the remake, i approached all of them again first because I
Remake Challenges and Budget Considerations
00:37:10
Speaker
trusted them. I'd seen them play. um i had seen how they played and we could use that as a comparison. So I think the first thing when Robin was looking for play testers for his version, I think I hit up everyone that had play tested the original game. is Does that sound right?
00:37:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. I did do a small play test in person at, um why is the name, Nariscope. I brought the game there and that was like kind of the first time someone had played the new interface and you know I watched a bunch of people.
00:37:38
Speaker
And that was interesting because like you said, like i someone ended up playing it for over an hour and I was like, wow, that's a lot for a game that's just sitting on... a laptop in a cafeteria, you know, like that was really, i was like, Ooh, maybe we actually made a good game.
00:37:51
Speaker
You know, was that feeling. But ah yeah, we mostly did that. I had a few friends as well that had been excited about what I was working on and we brought them in, but I think we staggered it.
00:38:02
Speaker
Like, I think, Here's the thing, like if you gave all the testers access to the game at once and they all hit the same roadblock, you know, that doesn't give you a chance to fix that and adjust it. So it's actually beneficial to have people at various stages in the game playtesting it at once, especially when the game is going to take them, you know, 15 hours, including Routremenia, maybe more.
00:38:22
Speaker
And then it did come time where would need people that hadn't played the original two, because it was a really important thing to make sure that we hadn't accidentally made at the original game harder with the new interface. And we didn't ever run into that problem, actually, I don't think.
00:38:37
Speaker
ah But we for that, I believe the first thing we did was ask our current playtesters if there was anyone that they knew and trusted that hadn't played the game before. And we got a few people that way, if I remember correctly.
00:38:52
Speaker
Yeah. And then from our Discord, we got, I think, there was some trusted people, that people who had shown a huge interest in the first game and were active members of the community. We also reached out to them.
00:39:03
Speaker
And that was a Discord um for the new game that you, like, after you'd announced, hey, we're making this, you just started that up and people came. So I actually made the Discord as part of the original game. okay.
00:39:16
Speaker
It was just... I made a Discord because I had been part of... Like I said, I brought up nick Nick's game earlier, Valley of Shadow. And then there was another puzzle game developer named Mason...
00:39:29
Speaker
I want to say his last name Romali. It might be Romali. I apologize if I got that wrong. He made a game called Way of Rhea. And I was part of his Discord too. And it was really interesting to be part of these Discords where I could actually talk to the creator of the game after I played their demo or their playtest.
00:39:44
Speaker
I really liked that. And so I made a Discord for Rootries because I figured, oh, people are going to want to come ask for help. And I put the Discord link in the game because that's what I had seen before.
00:39:55
Speaker
But then as kind of a joke and also just to see if people were actually playing the game. um there's a There's something in the root trees are dead. I won't say even how you get there or what it is.
00:40:10
Speaker
But it says, if you see this message, go to the Discord and type something. um And I put that in there just to see if anyone would do it. And it turns out a lot of people do it.
00:40:23
Speaker
So a lot of people came to the Discord just to type that message. And it was really cool to to watch all these people just kind of pop into the Discord. Some of them stuck around, some of them didn't. But it gave me this sense that, hey, people are actually playing and enjoying my game. Because in order to find that, you have to do some weird stuff. It's not like it's just not part of the main part of the game.
00:40:43
Speaker
um You have to think outside the box a little bit. And so that's the Discord community kind of built up from the original HIO version of the game, just based on that silly little message I put in.
00:40:55
Speaker
And then we had this built-in community of people that were excited. When I made the announcement that we're making a remake, we already had a probably, if not a couple hundred or a thousand people in the Discord at that point.
00:41:09
Speaker
think it was about a thousand, yeah. It's pretty awesome, yeah. It's interesting because I just yesterday had a and a call with another game developer who's made a very popular puzzle game. And they said our Discord is twice the size of theirs. And I'm like, that and literally ble that blew my mind. I was like, I had no idea that it was so much bigger. And I think, Jeremy, I think our conclusion is you accidentally stumbled on a huge marketing hack by encouraging people to interact with our Discord, let's say.
00:41:34
Speaker
And... Yeah, that was really cool because when you're making a new game on Steam, the number one metric they tell you to push is the wish lists. And we were able to you know go into our Discord and say, hey, look, there's this remake coming out.
00:41:48
Speaker
The best way you can support us is to wish list us. And that was that was key in helping us reach that initial hurdle. I'm curious with the remake, like when you when you originally saw the game, you're like, oh, wow, I really want to turn this into a polished commercial game without the AI art.
00:42:04
Speaker
In some ways, the scope of that is fairly clear. But I'm curious if there was anything that came up during development that was like unexpectedly like involved or like went differently to how you're expecting it to.
00:42:16
Speaker
It's a good question. I do think the scope was pretty clear. And that's one reason why i was enthusiastic about doing it. Because, you know, Jeremy hit on that he tested the game extensively. So by the time I played it on itch, it was like, the game was very solid, the the base design was very solid. And I think what was holding it back,
00:42:35
Speaker
was two things. One was the AI art and one was the interface. And I was like, and by the way, the interface is good. Like, it certainly didn't stop many people from playing it. But I was like, i you know, I come from a background in interface design and I had some ideas about, you know, how to improve the game. And some of that is, you know, like the hint system and the way to highlight things in the notebook and stuff like that. So,
00:42:55
Speaker
Even but the very early on, when I was speaking to Jeremy, we had a call and I was like, I think we could have a hit system. I think it could have a notebook that does this. I think we could have a 3D room that you can interact with. like I think that first call, we discussed every single thing that I wanted to do.
00:43:09
Speaker
It's possible that over time we did add to it. But yeah, I'm trying to think of like any snags that we might have hit. I wouldn't call it a snag, but I will say that I think the biggest question mark for both of us, especially it it ended up being on your plate, because to give a very minor ah background, I was not able to work on the Root Trees remake.
00:43:32
Speaker
I'd rather not talk about the details of why, but i'm not able I was not able to work on the Root Trees remake. And so... When it came time to do that, I had a very limited amount of time that I'd call to pass it off. I call it a handoff period where I had to get Robin everything, all the code, everything.
00:43:51
Speaker
And also not only that, but my feedback and ideas for the directions of the game. But then we had a lot of discussions of are people going to play a remake of a game that is still out there for free?
00:44:03
Speaker
we We knew we weren't going to take down the original. That was part of our... Both of us were in agreement on that. But the question was, how do we get people that have played the Root Reads Dead to for free to pay money to play it again? And how much should it cost? And those were some pretty in-depth discussions.
00:44:20
Speaker
And the conclusion we came to was, oh, we want more content. And I don't think either of us knew what that meant exactly, but we did know we wanted more content. And so it turned out that Roo Tree Mania, it was a lot larger probably than Robin originally envisioned.
00:44:39
Speaker
Definitely. And that was my fault. You know, once I, like you said, once I get writing, I kind of just keep writing. And so I did a lot of that within month and a half, two months, and got it into a playable, testable state in the original version of the game and gave it to Robin and he played it and he, think,
00:44:56
Speaker
You could talk about the rest, but yeah. Yeah. Like when we discussed adding extra content, I i thought we're going to add four or five people to the tree honestly. i thought I thought it was just going to be a little bonus, you know?
00:45:09
Speaker
But Jeremy for whatever, like... um just For whatever reason, you can say it, for whatever reason, this is how my brain works. For whatever reason, Jeremy just, when he he got started and he just kept doing it and he just kept working and working. And I think there was this zone, this oh no zone, where it was like,
00:45:28
Speaker
Okay, because here's the way the... i'm I'm totally comfortable talking about how the, you know, financially how the game works. Absolutely. I was putting up the money for the art, um which was our biggest expense.
00:45:39
Speaker
um We wanted, because it had AI art, we wanted a professional illustrator. And that was our single most expensive expense. I didn't, I was in a fortunate position that I didn't have to pay, you know, myself.
00:45:51
Speaker
I was working just in my own spare time. So I was like, programming is free, but art is expensive. um And we did end up doing voice acting, which was probably our second most expensive thing. But it was a smaller compared to the art because there was,
00:46:03
Speaker
actually don't recall how many pieces. I think it probably roughly 30 bespoke illustrations in the base game. And yeah, so there was this thing that each illustrated piece by Hennig was going to cost a significant amount of money. So it's like, oh, yeah, five extra pieces. Yeah, we can budget for that.
00:46:20
Speaker
So Jeremy was somewhat aware of this when he was creating, you know, drafting up this new content. But it got to the point where it's like, I think we ended up with 20 extra illustrations.
00:46:31
Speaker
And it was this thing like, well, this is a significant expense. This is almost doubling the budget that we had set out for the game. So when I was playing it, i there's there's this scary aspect, which is like, you know, I'm already assuming some risk by putting up the money and paying for this game that might never make its money back.
00:46:47
Speaker
Now am I prepared to double that? You know? And that's scary. So Jeremy did did do a good job of trying to use some tricks in Root Tree Media to use less art. And it's interesting because the amount of articles that you search...
00:46:59
Speaker
is about the same in both games, but the artwork is about 20 just 30 pieces. Yeah. So part of the actual design of Roo Tree Mania, i would say somewhat came from the fact that I was worried every time I added a new piece of art that it would cost Robin more. Because I didn't... My goal was not to balloon the scope of the game in terms of budget.
00:47:20
Speaker
So some of the tricks Robin's talking about, Roo Tree Mania has a lot more of a spread out feeling. A lot of people have noticed this. Like, you know... you get these pockets of different people and they don't overlap with each other. Whereas the main root tree family, there's big pictures full of tons of people and those end up being the most expensive pieces to make. They take a lot of time.
00:47:43
Speaker
You have a lot of, you know, you make sure that they're laid out in interesting ways and that there's a ton of people in them and an interesting background. And so for Brewtree Mania, there's a lot more pockets of people that do, they'll never interact with each other. They'll never overlap. And that was part of the design came from the fact that I knew that those art pieces would be less of an issue to do and to cut. If we, if we needed to cut any of it because of scope, we could just cut this section of the family and be done with that.
00:48:12
Speaker
So that's part of where Retrieve Mania's design came from. And I do apologize. It all worked out. and Yeah, but there was a moment where I was like, OK, let's play this and let's see. Let's see what you've done, Jeremy. And I was like, of course, I liked it.
00:48:25
Speaker
I loved it. fact Like I had it I'm just like I love these kinds of games and there was just more. And I was really excited to have more. ah Now, it was rough around the edges because, you know, the first time I played Root Trees, I was playing a tested version. And Root Tree Mania was literally the first player. because it And it was rough. Like, it was shoehorned into the original game engine as a way so that we could work on it in parallel. Because actually, not even in parallel, because I think at that point, the Godot version of the game, which is a ground-up rewrite, I don't know.
00:48:50
Speaker
Like, it was ah it was a very loose prototype at that point. It was not suitable to be played. I think it was just the room. Just the room you could move around in and maybe a computer you could search for stuff on. I did get the computer and searching very quickly, you're right. But the family tree took a very long time to get right.
00:49:05
Speaker
Especially with all the pop-up windows and all that context and stuff. So yeah, it was like, we have to do this in the original engine. And it was rough. There were some issues. Like, some things were too hard. something I remember blasting through something it was too easy. So it ended up you know taking a fair amount of work. But I was still like, this is good.
00:49:21
Speaker
Okay, let's do this. like And part of me was thinking, like, I'm already in on this game, like, I'm already spending a bunch of money, you know, let's let's just make it the best I can, because I'd rather make a good game and have it fail financially and be at least like, well, that was good, then be like, well, I didn't take as much risk as I could have, and the game wasn't as good. i don't know, I would have had second thoughts about that. Now, obviously, spoiler, it all worked out.
00:49:41
Speaker
Yeah, it was all fine. You don't have to spoil our real life things, I don't think. Yeah. um You touched on the AI art a few times. Do you want to talk about that for people who don't know the story and might have ah bristled at that?
00:49:58
Speaker
Yeah, sure. um There's no getting around this. I guess I probably should have mentioned this before, but for people that don't know what a game jam is, if there's anyone listening that doesn't know what a game jam is, You make a video game within a very short time frame.
Ethical Implications of AI Art
00:50:12
Speaker
And I am not an artist at all. And so I had this idea for this game. And part of the actual design of the game came from what kind of art assets can we get within less than a week that would allow me to make this game about a family?
00:50:27
Speaker
And the answer um it was that my friend a studio i was working at at the time had been like, hey, this Mid Journey thing really interesting. There was a website for a long time. it might still exist called this person does not exist calm I think and that was always like amalgamations of people that it was art of people that don't actually exist like they look like photos But they're people that don't actually exist and he was like hey I can do something similar with mid journey and I was like, oh, that's interesting so unlike this person does not exist calm with mid journey you can give them I could say like I want this person to be a redhead or whatever and I want them to look like they're from the and
00:51:07
Speaker
And he said, yeah. And so for us, it was like this interesting new toy at the time. We didn't really know much about it. And so he I said, well, hey, what if I build this game where it's this family and can you get me a art?
00:51:21
Speaker
And he said, yes. And so i had this whole family tree. I started making quick descriptions of each one and he'd generate ton of different people. And then I just used the one that I felt was most representative of what I was going for.
00:51:36
Speaker
And that came out of the fact that I needed to get it done very, very fast. And I um i am not an artist. If you were to look at any art that I've ever made, it's terrible. And so this was like every other Game Jam game that I had made intended to just be this personal project that I wasn't even sure I would probably release it.
00:51:55
Speaker
ah for free and no one would play it. No one on earth would ever check it out. um Just like every other game jam game I've made. And so when it came time to, for the game jam was judged, a lot of the judges were like, Hey, this is really interesting. You should keep working on this. And I said, okay.
00:52:13
Speaker
So I did. And it never really crossed my mind to replace the AI art because I was never going to sell it because of the AI art. And I could never afford to replace the AI art.
00:52:29
Speaker
So I never would feel comfortable selling it. ah Basically, came the spiral of I'm not even going to really touch the art. I left the the art that's in there for the most part with maybe one or two small exceptions is the same art we had after that first release.
00:52:42
Speaker
weekend And so the art just kind of became an end to a means for everything else in the game that I did do myself. So I wrote all the stuff. I programmed it entirely. You know, Robin mentioned earlier the interface.
00:52:54
Speaker
It was functional. was very rough, but it worked. um And that was because I'm not a great programmer either. My entire career up to this point has just been as a designer. So all the programming and all the art are the two pieces that I normally don't do in my day to day job.
00:53:10
Speaker
and I just kind of used what I could to get this game into a state where it was a full game. And even then, but One of the reasons I earlier I mentioned the whole Discord thing, one of the reasons I put that Discord thing in I didn't know.
00:53:26
Speaker
ah had no way of knowing if anyone would play this. My entire marketing was going to so the Obra Dinn subreddit and going, hey, i released a game. Please, for the love of God, check out my game that I spent 11 months working on.
00:53:39
Speaker
And I didn't know if anyone would. Luckily. it went really well. And if I had the knowledge that it would go really well and people would be that interested, I would have paid an artist 100%.
00:53:49
Speaker
ah hundred percent But for me, not to get too much into my past, even outside of games, I've had these huge passion projects that I've worked on that have taken months and months and months.
00:54:04
Speaker
And part of that the what's in the back of my head when working on those things is When I release this, I'm putting all this time and effort in so that when people experience it, they will enjoy it.
00:54:16
Speaker
And then I would release it and nothing would happen. Like no one would care. And i was like... crushing. um And so with Rootree is I was already in the mindset that there's a very real chance. I want to set up my expectations that no one will play this game.
00:54:33
Speaker
I spent 11 months on it and I got into a state where I was really happy with it and people that I play tested with were really happy with it but that is no guarantee that more than those play testers there's no way to get it out into the world in a way where people can experience it and so i never spent any other time on the art or even the programming like there's a lot of programming choices i would have i would have gone back and fixed some things if i had known um but you don't know until you do something and so
00:55:04
Speaker
When Robin reached out to me, the game was already ah success, but it was a success in the way that, again, I wasn't making any money off of it because I wasn't trying to make money off of it.
00:55:15
Speaker
To me, the success was that, hey, people are finally enjoying a thing that I built for the enjoyment of people. And that was great. But during those many months of development, yes, the AI art, like the discourse,
00:55:31
Speaker
became intense and I was in the games industry and I was talking to artists and they're like, hey, you know, the way that this works is really unfair to artists. and And these are people that I'm friends with and I respect a lot of them. And i was like, OK, that's interesting. So I get it. I understand where your concerns are.
00:55:49
Speaker
Still, I can't pay for this because I don't think I'll make any money back. So I will never charge for this game. um that's that's The conclusion I came to is I will release this game for free so people can experience the stuff that was quote-unquote handcrafted. That's all the engineering and all the writing, which is a significant amount of writing.
00:56:07
Speaker
But I'll never charge for it because... I don't want to profit off of the backs of all the the people whose art was stolen to make the art in the game. And that's kind of where it landed at the end of the release of the Itch.io version.
00:56:21
Speaker
I've spoken to some people, or like I'll say like I've read online community, because like some people bring up the AI art with this version, especially because there's concerns, oh, does the Steam version have it? and we have to be like No, it doesn't. We've fully replaced it.
00:56:33
Speaker
But some people take a hard line position, which is like, there's no ethical way to use AI art and stuff like that. And I believe that there's no ethical way to charge for it. And I think Jeremy agrees, like, you know, well, he said said as much as just now that, like, it's unethical to charge money for it.
00:56:50
Speaker
But as a prototype, like, the the truth is the game literally would not exist. without the AI art. Like, it's the game, you couldn't have played it. So for me, the way I look at it is like having an awesome game versus not, that's pretty cool.
00:57:05
Speaker
But I see why he released it for free. um And that was one of the major obstacles to putting it on Steam was like this thing, like, well, at the time, Steam didn't allow AI art But also, we just didn't feel that it was right.
00:57:19
Speaker
But yeah, it's kind of crazy to me that like, so like, I guess I respect on some level where some people like they take like a a hard line, like, I just think this is bad overall, ah rather than a more nuanced thing. Like I respect their consistency.
00:57:32
Speaker
But I also personally would prefer to have a game than not have a game. Definitely. Yeah, thank you for going into that. um No, it's not. Not as happy and exciting a topic as some of the other stuff we talked about.
00:57:44
Speaker
I think it's important to talk about, to keep you know keep talking about it. I wanted it to be very clear, like and i try I've been trying to be very clear from the beginning, that I think that there is an opportunity for people to do something similar to what I've done in the future.
00:58:00
Speaker
But I'm very, very much against ever charging for it. I think you're making the decision that if you use AI art, you do not make money off of that. That's my my stance.
Game Genre Classification Challenges
00:58:11
Speaker
And I think that it will lead to more eventually. it may lead to more situations like this where someone. out there who can't do art for whatever reason. ah Maybe it's just a lack of talent like me, ah or or maybe it could be like a something else. um I think it's going to lead to some interesting stuff.
00:58:31
Speaker
And that's, you know, Robin and I are in agreement that I'm not fully against the idea of it existing, but I am definitely 100% against the idea of anyone trying to use it to profit because you are basically stealing when you do that.
00:58:46
Speaker
So. Yeah, complex, but think that's a pretty reasonable position to have. Do you have any questions for us? You know, one thing that comes up frequently is, what do you call this genre of game?
00:59:00
Speaker
And, you know, I've spoken to other game developers, and I've discussed it with Jeremy, and it's actually super hard to come up with something that seems to cross, like, that seems to satisfy all the requirements. Yeah.
00:59:13
Speaker
I know that you, I believe you've come up with the term thinky games. And this is, I would say Root Tree is absolutely a thinky game. But I've heard some people say detective game, Andrew Plotkin, game designer, work on Inform and who ran Naroscope. He came up with, I like the term static deduction, but that might be a bit too much. Some people say deduction, but then you think of games like werewolves. so I'm just kind of curious, of what do you think what what do you think would be a good term for this type of game?
00:59:42
Speaker
Internally, we shorthand to Detective Game, although i you know there that's not a perfect description for the reasons you've laid out. I personally like Deduction Game with the caveat that it's we're not talking about social deduction games, which is like what an Among Us is.
00:59:59
Speaker
That is a social deduction game. That is, you are solving things in a multiplayer context, but like in a and a single player context, yes, it's a deduction game. Yeah, I don't know.
01:00:11
Speaker
I mean, Thinkie is definitely a broader... It's a useful term, but it's not a particularly descriptive term. Yes. i The way I always think about Thinkie is that it is not a genre of games so much as it it is a mode of play.
01:00:30
Speaker
It is the type of gameplay experience where the game is happening in your head as you're figuring things out more than it is like Alan and i disagree over this, but like I would also call Tetris a puzzle game, but I would never call it a thinky game because that is a very dexterity driven game.
01:00:50
Speaker
Alan would not call it a puzzle game. That is that that is the official, the official Dracneck podcast position on Tetris is it's not a puzzle game. Yeah. I don't Podcast intro says I'm your host every single time.
01:01:03
Speaker
Anyways. Yeah, i I call these games detective games. um There's something interesting where like detective has, um it's got as much of a thematic tilt to it as it does a gameplay implication.
01:01:19
Speaker
And I think some of the reasons why detective game as a genre name doesn't fit with people can sometimes be that like it implies something about that theme that's not always there.
01:01:31
Speaker
even if it's always there for the gameplay. um But I still think it's the most descriptive and like self-explanatory genre name for this the space.
01:01:42
Speaker
I've seen recently people trying to push the suggestion of fill-in-the-blank games, and I find that interesting, but it hits the same thing as like static deduction options.
01:01:56
Speaker
to me of like, sure, I can see how you, if you know what that genre means, you could see what the through line is. But I don't think you could say, fill in the blanks to somebody who doesn't know what that term already means and have them get it.
01:02:12
Speaker
Whereas I think with detective, it's much simpler to go like, oh it's a detective game. like And somebody can hear it and go, okay, like like I can get the kind of gist. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think it's interesting, like,
01:02:24
Speaker
About your final point there about, yeah, whether you would understand it. Like, I'm thinking of a a fairly new genre. I guess it's not that new anymore, but Battle Royale. Like, that, it wasn't clear to me what that meant. Well, it's based on the movie, right? Yeah, the issue that's just based, literally, there's a movie called Battle Royale.
01:02:40
Speaker
So if you haven't seen the movie, but I mean, yes but that serves a point. Like, you just, it's not intuitive. You don't intuitively understand, just based on. Oh, yeah, 100%. I'm not sure how important it is to name a genre.
01:02:52
Speaker
i I feel like what's really interesting, even ah amongst the games in the genre, like Obra Dinn and Golden Idol, and now Root Trees and like some of the other ones. ah But people don't agree on which ones are good because there's like differences between them, right? So someone could be like, oh, I really enjoyed Obra Dinn. What should I play next? And that the the logical answers are the big ones in the genre. But there are people that liked Obra Dinn that don't like Golden Idol. And there are people that like Golden Idol that don't like Root Trees. And there are people that like Root Trees that don't like Obra Dinn even, which I thought was crazy.
01:03:27
Speaker
And it's because usually my answer is, well, what part did you like about that? You know, why why did you like that game? Because if you some people are like, oh, man, i't I can't stand walking around the 3D world in Obra Dinn. I just I can't do it.
01:03:42
Speaker
OK, that's fine. I understand that. And so I think just. Lumping things together because they have similar mechanics is less important than figuring out what someone's actually asking, I guess.
01:03:55
Speaker
And I know that it's nice to have a shorthand for a genre, but I don't think it's that important in the grand scheme of things. So we i think everyone could just call it whatever they want and it's fine. I agree with that.
01:04:07
Speaker
So what's next? You're remaking ah Type Help?
Announcement of Next Project
01:04:12
Speaker
We are. Yes. So just like how Robin reached out to me and said, hey, Root Trees is cool.
01:04:21
Speaker
What if we remake it? Robin and I had ah some discussions. We really enjoyed working together whole lot on the Root Trees remake. um And so when it came time to figure out what to do next,
01:04:34
Speaker
one of the discussions we had was hey this game came out we both played it type help i i think i got it from robin or something like that uh it's it definitely was kicking around in the the root trees discord and in the places where we discuss games and so i checked it out and i was like man you're right that is a really good game uh and he and so we were like well what if Is there room for improvement?
01:04:57
Speaker
Probably. It has no art, has no music. It's text-based, which turns some people off. It didn't bug me or didn't bug Robin, I don't believe. But is there room for expansion and improvement? And we both said yes. So what if we just reach out to William Rouse, who's the creator of TypeHelp, and see if he's interested in doing something similar to what Robin did for me for Root Trees.
01:05:19
Speaker
It turns out he was very interested. So that's what we're working on next. Yeah, I mean, it's... We'll see if... So that we did it once. I mean, it's hard to learn... It's hard to take too many lessons from one success because I think it's like, it's a sample size of one.
01:05:34
Speaker
But the approach of finding ah really good game on Itch that already has a little bit of a buzz that people are you know really enjoy, that's been proven... The puzzles are good and stuff like that. And then remastering it, it worked once for us.
01:05:46
Speaker
So we're going to see if if it works again. I think it will. I think like Jeremy said, like I actually was very happy to believe play a text game, but I think there's a certain amount of people that if you put a text game on Steam, would just never buy it.
01:05:58
Speaker
You know, like they want to see a picture. or They want to see you know some things. And then we had, we brainstormed some ideas of like, well, if we were going to add images and sound to this. How would it look? How would it feel? And I think we came up with a really cool concept and William was on board.
01:06:13
Speaker
So yeah, we're working on that. It's kind of an interesting way of like, you know we're very, youre a very small team, you know, like, and, and I'm not sure I ever want to be a bigger one, and this felt like a natural stepping stone.
01:06:26
Speaker
Like we had ideas for other projects. We had we actually met and brainstormed for several days of like um what we could work on next. But there was something attractive about this in that it was like in our wheelhouse.
01:06:38
Speaker
It's like a similar game. A lot of people who like root trees like this, so appeal to that. It's similar like a similar concept, a similar solved thing. So it felt like You know, like people say you should crawl, walk, run.
01:06:51
Speaker
You know, it felt like maybe the next obvious step. So yeah, so that's what we're doing. And i so far, the community reception seems to be really positive. the People are excited that we're working on this game.
01:07:04
Speaker
So yeah, I'm hoping it works out. Yeah, I think it's interesting with the, with root trees, like Jeremy was like kind of hands off for a lot the development. And now with, um, instance at galley house, you're both going to be actively working on it at the same time.
01:07:21
Speaker
ah and also you've got William involved as well. So yeah, like it's going to be a bit of a different development vibe. It will, but William has a full-time job.
01:07:33
Speaker
And ah just like I did ah during Rootries, he is definitely involved. um you know And especially at the beginning, there's a lot of conversations. But he can't be as involved in the day-to-day going-ons. And so the thing about game development, like this, now we're getting into the weeds, but there's a lot of what I would call kind of busy work, tedious stuff. um So...
01:07:58
Speaker
Robin is going to be doing pretty much all the same things that he did on Root Trees and in terms of programming and building the game and and putting it together and making sure things function.
01:08:10
Speaker
But what I'm able to take off of his plate is a lot of the stuff like... um
01:08:16
Speaker
right Right now, for example, I'm recording. So that the game is, for those of you that don't know that have never played TypeHelp, it's a game about dialogue. And in the original, it's about reading the dialogue, um like a transcript. But we are switching that up to being about listening to the dialogue.
01:08:35
Speaker
And so we will be recording with professional voice actors. But to get the game functional... We want to have the dialogue. And so there's 1,600 voice lines.
01:08:46
Speaker
And right now, I'm recording all of them. You're going to be able to play the game with... ah and not Not you, as in the the people out there. We're never going to release this because, dear God.
01:08:59
Speaker
Jeremy DLC. Let's make it happen. The Jeremy DLC is not coming. Optional setting. No, please. oh God. No one likes to hear the sound of their own voice. but I don't know. April Fool's patch. You don't want to hear me play all the characters.
01:09:15
Speaker
um But yeah, so it's that kind of stuff. So Robin doesn't need to do that. And that you know how much time I'm saving him. that That kind of thing is what we're working on. Now, obviously, I'm also a game designer.
01:09:26
Speaker
So when it comes time to change up the things that need to be changed from the version... Like they the interface and art and how it's displayed to the player and how people are going to experience things.
01:09:38
Speaker
That's all stuff that I have input on. But I want to be very clear that just like when Robin was making changes to root trees, he never just made a change. He would come to me and be like, hey, at the beginning of the process, here's all the changes we're planning on making.
01:09:52
Speaker
And then we would work through them together. And he did do some of the work completely on his own. Like the note taking system was all Robin essentially. And it's one of the best parts of the new game. But for everything that was and interpretation of the stuff that was originally in the story and originally had to do with the characters, I was heavily involved with that. Just like William, that's his focus is making sure that we don't destroy his game.
01:10:19
Speaker
yeah So, um, there's a lot to do. It is a little different, but I don't think it feels that different. I mean, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but right now I'm just trying to do the things to keep Robin from having to do the things that are time wasting.
01:10:34
Speaker
I agree. um But it's also, you know, time wasting is, that's that's a negative way to look at it. Like, it's all beneficial game dev stuff. Like, another thing Jeremy's helped out with is like briefs, like we've had to do, you know, for casting the characters for um the the details of the rooms. Actually, that was somewhat collaborative, like ah figuring out the layout of Dally House and how the art should work and you know getting that already. So that there's actually a ton of work and it's all beneficial.
01:11:01
Speaker
It is interesting what you said, like, I remember during root trees, like, like, for example, the first interface I had for the family tree, I did it like, It didn't look like a corkboard at all, like their version. It was like like an art deco style wallpaper.
01:11:15
Speaker
and it was more mystery vibe, you know, like I was thinking like 1920s mystery and it looked okay. ah But some of the initial prototypes I did for filling in people were just like, just honestly not good. And I think it's like, sometimes it just takes a few tries to do things. So like, I'm like, oh, this could work really well. I have an idea. Then I, you know, pop it down, try clicking. And then it's like, oh, it actually doesn't feel good.
01:11:36
Speaker
So there was a fair amount of that. And I think Galleyhouse will be the same. Like, I just feel like I've always, well, I honestly have always thought that quality is really a function of time. And like there's people who will say, oh, I'm bad at user interfaces. And I'm like, well, how much time did you spend on it?
01:11:51
Speaker
Because like I'm probably bad at user interfaces too. I'm just willing to keep at it until it feels good you know and constantly you know try this, try this, try this, try this. And then just keep shaving off, you know sanding off the hard edges until it feels reasonably good.
01:12:08
Speaker
And I think that's what Galleyhouse is going to be for the next like while. Awesome. Where can people go to check it out? Where could people follow you? I'm mostly active on Blue Sky as Evil Trout.
01:12:18
Speaker
um But if you want to sign up for our mailing list, you can go to eviltrout.com.
Supporting the Developers
01:12:23
Speaker
We use it sparingly. So don't worry about us spamming you too often. We'll only use it when we have a big thing to announce. But the number one thing you could do right now is wishlist the Incident of Galley House on Steam. like That's the easiest way to support us.
01:12:36
Speaker
And if you do want to just get in touch with us and talk to us, I guess the best way to do that is through our Discord. Now, the The way that you can find that is through the root trees are dead. We've been I've been trying to be pretty careful about not posting the discord link all over the Internet, because I know that's how you get random spammers that come in and like try and scam your your people um scam scam the people in your channel.
01:13:01
Speaker
But if you are in either the the main version of the Root Trees are Dead on Steam, or even in the Itch.io version, there should be a link to the Discord in there. And we're always just hanging around, willing to talk. like you know People can pretty much ask us anything.
01:13:17
Speaker
so Remarkably accessible. Yeah. Also, yeah, I just love this style of game. And like there's a bunch of people who work on prototypes and stuff and say hey, try my game in our other puzzle games channel. And I love to do that. So if you're making a game like this, I'd love to try it.
01:13:34
Speaker
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining and for chatting with us for... all things deductive games. No, thanks for having me. And thank you for listening to the Trackneck and Friends official podcast.
01:13:48
Speaker
Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com. Our podcast artworks by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawadniak.
01:13:58
Speaker
Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
01:14:11
Speaker
you