Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 41: Alan and Adam deGrandis have a rambly chat
201 Plays4 days ago
In this episode, while Syrenne was on a much-needed vacation, Alan took the opportunity to chat to Adam deGrandis for an hour about all things game dev!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to DracKnack and Friends Podcast
00:00:13
Speaker
you
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the DracKnack and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Alan Hazelden, the head of DracKnack and Friends, and I'm taking over the show.
Meet the Guest: Adam DeGrandis
00:00:33
Speaker
Thren can't join today, ah but I'm joined by Adam DeGrandis, you may know from his work on A Monster's Expedition, The Electrifying Incident, and Spook Express.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello, everybody. And hello, Alan. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Unfortunately, Saren can't join us. So it's just the two of us.
Sustainable Game Development
00:00:55
Speaker
And i thought it might be fun to chat about like making small games sustainably, because we were chatting recently about the stuff you've been doing away from Dracknack.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, actually, okay so yes. Away from Jack Nick, you know, i I do a lot of work with other studios through my contracting company, Chickadee, but also um i make small games with my pal, Ash. we ah We sort of spun up a studio as a, I don't know, at legal hoop jumping, right? That like, oh, if we want to sell in the stores, we have to have a legal entity. So we have Ash and Adam's games. And we very intentionally don't take on projects unless they will take less than 12 months.
00:01:42
Speaker
And increasingly, we're trying to get it down even smaller than that, like closer to six or maybe even three, depending on like what the idea is. and And we have a bunch of like strategies around that.
00:01:54
Speaker
Or we have a bunch of ideas for strategies around that, and we'll see how they actually play out. ah Yeah, and you're currently making your second game under that banner, right? Yes. So we're doing um a So these are very...
Exploring "Existential Treads"
00:02:08
Speaker
i don't know what the crossover is between Dracnek fans and people who like the games that we make.
00:02:15
Speaker
um But we're doing sort of ah like a retro top-down vehicle shooter mashed together with a tower defense... game mashed together with a settlement building game called existential treads.
00:02:28
Speaker
And it's about ah building a settlement in the post post apocalypse. So the po post apocalypse happened and people finally got tired of being bummed. So this is ultimately a hopeful game. Let's read. Let's like make a new community. Let's rebuild stuff. Um,
00:02:43
Speaker
um But then the like really dumb rogue a i that started the apocalypse, you know, way back when, who knows, it's it's sort of undefined, um is still around being dumb.
00:02:55
Speaker
And ah you have to defend your settlement um from waves of attacks from this, from all of these like little robots. And so that part is like a action defense game, tower defense sort of thing. It's all very good, um but it it is intended to be I think like from um beginning to end, if you do a full run, don't know, it's probably between three and four hours
The Appeal of Short Games
00:03:22
Speaker
playtime. And that is for us, like right in the sweet spot.
00:03:26
Speaker
You know, we're both in our forty s We both have kids and we both have responsibilities. And looking at games to buy, there's so many games that look amazing, but they're, you know, like 40, 50, 60, 60,
00:03:43
Speaker
80, 90, 100 hour games. And I mean, I don't know about you, Alan, I actually am interested in hearing your take on this, but like um the prospect of that sort of time commitment now is just so. Oh, absolutely. I i do not play games that seem like a big time commitment, like like blueprints. Blueprints sounds great. Like, Blueprints is, like, exactly my my jam in theory. Like, oh, all these puzzles? And then you go, well, yeah, but like, it's all these puzzles, but ah to to really get into it, you're dedicating at least 40 hours, and then to really, really get into it, you're dedicating 100 hours. I'm like, no, no, no, thank you. I'm just, I'm going to play the demo for, like, 45 minutes, and I'm going to get a sense of it, and then I'm going, hmm.
00:04:30
Speaker
yeah okay sure Yeah, there's a handful, not even a handful, I would say increasingly, maybe most, the majority of games that come out. I
The Challenges of Playing and Making Large Games
00:04:40
Speaker
love games. I love people that make games.
00:04:42
Speaker
I love hearing the stories of all the games that get made. And I love seeing games that like I would never make. right It's so cool that there's so many different things. But increasingly, i would just rather have a developer tell me about your work, right? I want to hear i want to hear the like war stories. I want to hear what inspired it. I want to hear, you know i guess, ultimately, like podcast interview stuff.
00:05:06
Speaker
um And then like ideally, I think I would watch them you know, play the game for an hour and like, you know, tell me about all of this stuff. That would be incredible. But I usually play games in the like hour or two before i go to bed. And so, you know, starting starting something huge when I'm like trying to wind down and I don't know, it's just so the challenges of getting older are real, right? Like I just don't have...
00:05:33
Speaker
I used to love diving into huge games when i was in my twenty s and now I'm just like, this is this feels like feels like a lot. Yeah, I mean, like that kind of takes me back to what we started at. It was like making making small games with small teams. Like, you're you're making existential treads with like a two-person team. And that, to me, that feels like a young man's game. yes Sure. Sure. So, like...
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, how do you how do you find the energy to make a game with just a single other person, keeping you honest? It is... um And I say this as somebody who's increasingly realizing I can't do that anymore.
00:06:14
Speaker
like yeah Cosmic Express was basically a three-person project. ah Spooky Express was basically an eight-person project. And I would love to be able to make a game at the scale of Cosmic Express again, but I just don't know how to do it.
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah. um So credit first of all, credit where it's due. um We have an awesome composer that we work with named Chris. um he's He's local to me. We sort of found him by accident. he He's a guitar teacher and you know musician. He's in a bunch of bands and stuff. And he was interested in breaking into games. And one of his...
Collaboration in Game Music
00:06:51
Speaker
I don't know, friends from the metal scene who is in, who's also somehow in the Boston um game dev scene, like dropped his, ah one of his metal bands actually into a big, there's a big regional um Slack Boston post-mortem.
00:07:07
Speaker
Um, and I, uh, listened to, uh, I listened to the album that was there and I'm like, oh man, this is like, I'm ah I'm a metal guy. I, it it was really, really good. And I just, I reached out just to say like, Hey, your friend dropped your album. It was really, really good.
00:07:23
Speaker
don't like out of curiosity, like, what are your rates? What do you, you know blah, blah, blah. And I was sort of just expecting to toss that information in the back of my head for like, maybe later. Um, but because he was trying to break in, he was, you um charging ah like a really competitive rate. And we said, oh my gosh. And so this was on the previous our previous game. This was on a movement shooter first person action game we did called Gobsmacked.
00:07:44
Speaker
But we've been working with Chris ever since. He's really, really good. So he handles all of the composition. And occasionally, if there's like specialty um sound design work, he'll do that too. But the majority of the game is just me and Ash. And um part of it, so it's a few different things.
00:08:00
Speaker
um One, we are really ruthless with scope and with just like We're never shy about um taking the hatchet to a design and saying, this isn't needed. Or like this this is a cool idea, but it'll add three months.
00:08:19
Speaker
Or but even more ah ah more likely, it's this is a really cool idea, but it's really tough to say when it would be finished. um So we say, hey, that's cool. We can like save that idea for later.
00:08:34
Speaker
Maybe we can prototype something on it um in the future, but not for this one. um As a sort of philosophical matter, I'm a big believer in the notion that design is not what you add, but what you can take away.
Designing Games with Time Constraints
00:08:48
Speaker
um So we are... Even after we have ideas and we prototype them, we tend to be really ruthless with chopping up the stuff that isn't needed or that we just like don't want to produce. right This is a cool idea, but yeah it's also good without it. So let's do the version that saves us two weeks.
00:09:10
Speaker
um And how how do you feel about the concept of content? Because like i'm I'm thinking of this from puzzle game perspective and like puzzle games like need levels. They need they need puzzles. um um That takes time and iteration. But like you're making slightly more systemic-y, systems-y games, yeah which do have content, but like maybe there's like less need to like grind out a lot of it. Yeah.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah. So that, I mean, and that's, that's another aspect, right? That there are with this model and this approach, there's simply genres and in kinds of games that we just probably won't do, even though we would love to do them. And frankly, I think we would like be good at doing them. um Games that require um tons of hand authored levels or hand authored anything.
00:10:01
Speaker
They're probably not ones that we're going to do anytime soon. um We actually talked, I don't know, in the last week or two about what would we do if one of our games like hit big?
00:10:12
Speaker
And um neither of us are interested in growing a studio. We very intentionally want it to just be us, but um we did say... you know, if we had a hit and suddenly the coffers were full, we would start to maybe consider um projects that, um you know, we did, we we could do like very intentional um collaborations with people like we do with Chris where, hey, for this game, we actually do need a leveled signer and, you know, we'll bring them on for three or four months or like, i don't know, whatever the case, I'm sort of shoulder shrugging here. But um yeah, it does mean certain games are just off limits. I think though
00:10:50
Speaker
the Like, to speak to puzzle games, I think there's still, ah you can be really intentional about how you wrap mechanics up and how you deliver mechanics. And yes, at some level, you do need just a bunch of content. But you know if that's the case, hey, we're going to need all of this one type of content.
00:11:14
Speaker
i I think it's actually kind of a fun creative challenge to then say, okay, um what can we scope down then to like balance it out? right Because on one hand, I think we would all love to make make games and ship games that were every single aspect was like polished to the nines and like a perfect example of the craft. And I don't know,
00:11:34
Speaker
like more and more and more, but there is... um And this gets back to the the one of the comments I made when we started, which is like, I just want to hear people talk about how they approach it.
00:11:47
Speaker
Because what I think is more interesting than a game where...
Game Endings and Player Experience
00:11:51
Speaker
like, oh, the levels are all super interesting, and the sound is incredible, and the art is incredible, and the narrative is incredible. Like, where everything is incredible is like games that are really cleverly economical.
00:12:02
Speaker
You know, like, oh, man, like, whoa, what what an example of clever craftsmanship, right? That gets me really excited as a maker.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, and like I think there's a thought I had while while listening to that. It's like perfectionism is not the same thing as polish. Yes, yes. You can... you can i mean, perfectionism is like a very tricky thing to to have while trying to make a very small-scoped thing that doesn't blow up. But like you can still have you can still listen to that perfectionist voice while making sensible trade-offs.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And I think it's like thinking about what's the version where everything is like, like perfect and polished to the nines. Okay, let's hold that in our heads. Okay, now, here's the statue that we're imagining. What actually can we like chip off?
00:12:59
Speaker
Right? Because this thing that we're imagining that would be cool, but it's ultimately not necessary. And Alan, I'm sure you have noticed because you make games with tons and tons of levels, like, you know, what percentage of people actually see that, like the stuff at the very end or see the, like, even like super top tier content and the people that do see it, like, who boy, I am thankful for those people because they're like the super fans, right? They're the people that, um,
00:13:29
Speaker
It's always nice to like put something out in the world and have someone love it so much. really it it It just makes it feel so worth it. All of the toil, it makes it feel so worth it. but There's ah like a real practical sense of if someone if you make a 20-hour game and most people only see the first four hours, you know just like throwing numbers out, okay, well, when you think of that like really perfect version, it does mean that you can chop a lot out and you're still shipping something that most people are going to be totally pumped with.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I think a look about this a lot with regards to the the reward for beating a game. Yeah. That... in some ways is the most important moment in your game. And in some ways it's the least important because only so many people are going to see that.
00:14:17
Speaker
And everyone else, the more time you put into that, the more time you're not spending on like the first 20 minutes. Yes. what is What's the first game that you ever saw that did like tiered endings where there's effectively like an off ramp after five hours and then another, like you do it through all of the Drakknack games now.
00:14:38
Speaker
Where you have all of these different tiers. But what's the first game that you saw do that? I don't even remember. I can't remember either. I feel like it's it's really been around for more than five years. Even still, like COVID time stretches. Like, oh, that was that started five years ago. That seems weird, right?
00:15:00
Speaker
both not enough time and too much time. And it was probably before that that I started seeing that, but not much before. Yeah, i mean, we've we've got that in Sokobond, and that released in... Oh, for real? Yeah, we've got, like... So you're playing through the periodic table, and then when you beat all the levels, ah you unlock the, like... I forget what the name is, but, like, there's two those two rows at the bottom, right?
00:15:24
Speaker
You get those as bonus levels. So that was 12 years ago. Wow. Wow. well And I like that was not innovative at the time. it was just like, oh, this is a practical thing to do.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I guess that's sort of it. Like ah that's a good way of framing it. This is a practical thing to do. um But it's also a very, it's one of those ideas and one of those, i don't know, designs, approaches, whatever, that is both really developer friendly and really player friendly.
00:15:53
Speaker
Right. And I don't know how many other examples there are of that. I mean, I guess you could say, oh, it's just good design. It's good game design in a super broad sense that good game design should be both good for the player and good for the developer. But so frequently it feels like, um you know, you're doing you're doing things to please the player and it's on our side, on the developer side, it's like, that's a lot of work.
00:16:16
Speaker
And it's going to be worth it because this it's going to, you know, be really fun to behold. But hoo boy, this is a lot of work. Yeah, I mean, i don't like I think for puzzle games, I don't know how much time saving we get from like pushing content to post game, like because you still got to iterate on those puzzles, you still got to yeah um refine them, you still got to... i like like it It pushes the the end, like it in some ways makes the ending more important to get right because you're you're making it so that more people get to it. um
00:16:50
Speaker
But I mean, even even that, I think i think like my general advice is just like make make whatever the easiest ending to do is that will be like minimally rewarding. yeah um And if if you work on a game long enough, maybe you'll like get to a point where it makes sense to go back and do something slightly more exciting than that. But I think players just want to be acknowledged. They don't really care what the acknowledgement is.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, acknowledgement. That's actually... um So in my intro to game development course that I teach, I say the simple... Break down the... Like the simplest structure of a game is tell the player to do something, give them space to do it, reward them when they do it, right? it's that's the That's the flow in the simplest sense. And we we explore that concept using a project where they make a game where all you do is click ah a click a button that's on screen.
00:17:46
Speaker
And so it's sort of, I mean, it's effectively ah like a clicker game, but without even like tallying up the number and like getting bonuses for clicks and whatever. It's really just make this one interaction interesting instead of like think about it as the end of the how are we going to end this game it's like well just you know make a simple enough acknowledgement that is like true and like pure and heartfelt it doesn't have to be elaborate i think it just has to be honest to some degree yeah for sure and for these for these small games you're making um i guess how how long do you try and get at the core of something
00:18:28
Speaker
m Like how long does it take
Prototyping and Game Development
00:18:30
Speaker
to... Yeah. Like how quickly do you want to have a sense of how, like, is it is this is this good? ah yeah is this Is this the core of the game or is this something to throw away and move on?
00:18:42
Speaker
I mean, so that is, um that's another important part of our process where we try to be pretty thorough and robust with our prototypes. And we try to be really intentional with what we're trying to say, what what the core experience is for a player, right?
00:18:59
Speaker
What's the core fantasy? And like we had we had an idea for a, right after gobsmacked, an idea for another shooter that was um a shooter where you control time.
00:19:11
Speaker
So it's a movement shooter, um but you can like slow down time. And we're talking about like other things like, and it was sort of like against the, it was a little bit of like a vampire survivors like sort of thing. um But first person and we iterated, we probably worked on that for about two weeks.
00:19:29
Speaker
um And we try in, in that two weeks, we tried a bunch of different ways to make it click. And it was, there were parts that were cool, but it just didn't click.
00:19:42
Speaker
And we said, oh, too bad. Like, that's fine. We tried we tried it. we We got the idea. And I think both of us are like, we got the idea out of our system, right?
00:19:53
Speaker
And there's you know maybe another team that could have done it well. But you know for us, it really is, let's give it two or three weeks. Yeah. This approach sort of plays, you know like prototyping, obviously that's something that we all do, but um Ash is ah a really fast at writing things that are playable and not buggy. And he's also, he's not an artist, a visual artist by any means, but he's really good at blocking stuff out that's really communicative. Yeah.
00:20:23
Speaker
So is your role during that initial prototyping phase mostly as feedback for what Ash is doing? Yeah. we So we design collaboratively. that That particular idea started with something I pitched and then we like sort of worked on it together just in text.
00:20:43
Speaker
And then once he starts coding, it really is like the Ash show. That's that's one of the places where he is probably more crucial than I am um because he's the one actually building it. And he'll do an iteration. He'll send me a build. I'll play.
00:21:01
Speaker
We'll talk about it. i'll take I'll maybe do so take screenshots and do like... quick sketch overs of like, ah you know, what if it was more like this? I think it would have more impact, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
00:21:12
Speaker
um But he, he's mostly the one, you know, for that first two or three weeks, it's mostly the as show and he's really good at it. um He's also, it's one of those things. And i mean, Alan, you know, this you've surrounded yourself with a bunch of people that are like really great to work with.
00:21:30
Speaker
You know, when you find those people that you just click with, and you know you sort of share a sensibility with, this sort of thing goes so much faster because you're not um you're you know generally moving in the same direction just naturally, which is nice. So yeah, if we can't get a good gray box version that feels promising after two or three weeks, we just say, forget it. And um you know we've got some like other ideas here.
00:21:57
Speaker
ah Existential treads is like more done than not at this point. We've got another, we've got another i don't know three months. um We're shooting for a February 2026 launch.
00:22:10
Speaker
So probably by mid July, we'll start or July, January, we'll start um prototyping new things and yeah, looking forward to it. But it's, yeah, sort of in the same spirit of like, here's this idea, what can we like chop off, chop away from it and still have the, like the main thing. It's really how quickly can we prove that, you know, this initial idea, this initial prototype is worth pursuing. And we're super willing to just say, nope,
00:22:40
Speaker
Didn't work out too bad. And have you been in the situation yet where something has been compelling, but you've been like, oh no, this is, this is bigger.
00:22:52
Speaker
like this is, this is better than I thought it was going to be. Oh no So that is such a funny question. And yes, like, So recently, this is like within the last month, we were talking about a different idea that uses time manipulation.
00:23:09
Speaker
And it feels like it's basically like sort of a reframing and a you know sometimes you have an idea, but you're you don't realize until later on, you're sort of thinking about it wrong. You're looking at it from the wrong angle.
00:23:22
Speaker
And we've been like revisiting the time manipulation stuff And we have
Creative Game Concepts and Feasibility
00:23:27
Speaker
an idea that... Time manipulation's cool. Yeah, it it's cool. Time loops are a lot of fun. um and we have we have an idea that we want a prototype. There's ah actually a handful that we want to prototype in January, in probably the months after. But when we think about this new idea, it's like, oh, that's really cool. But that definitely feels like it's more than a 12-month game.
00:23:49
Speaker
And so what do we do? We'll still prototype it, but it it still may end up as like... Nope. Too big. Can we make it smaller? Maybe. That'll be the test. But I don't know. i Knowing neither of neither of us want to get stuck, there are so many indie stories out there of developers that, and I guess actually at all, like AAA too, like this is not just a small teams thing.
00:24:17
Speaker
um where you're like, oh, cool, this is going to be a one-year project or a two-year project or a three-year project, and ends up being a six or seven or eight-year project. right like we You and I both know plenty of people that fell into that trap.
00:24:29
Speaker
And Ash and I just... that's Nobody wants to do that, but I think for both of us, that is like a really... That's an acute hell. We just simply do not want to that. I feel like while you're making games and you're just kind of making them for fun, like the stakes are low, nobody really cares. It's kind of easy to go like, no, we're just not going to make big games. Yeah.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yes. Yes. the moment you get some kind of traction, at the moment you make something that like is like a moderate success, you're, you're kind of on that treadmill yeah of like, well, can't make something that people are going to like less than laughing.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah. Kind of make something better. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't, how do you, how I'm curious how you deal with that. If you feel like being, I mean, this is your podcast and you've probably talked about things like this, but you know, it feels like you maybe have to be, make yourself vulnerable to talk about these things. But I am curious what your thoughts are on that.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think you just gotta ignore that voice to some degree. yeah um And like, i mean, you you can kind of see this with Dragnet, like we've not made a game as big as Monster Expedition, since Monster Expedition. yeah And I don't want to make another game that has the same Like that that game was three and a half years to make. And then we kept working on it. After that, we did some additional content. um Like that was a long game. It was a slog. a lot of it was not fun. yeah And i don't want to repeat that.
00:26:15
Speaker
but I want to make a game that's as big as that, as good as that a game. yeah But I want to do it in a yeah, but that's not possible. And like, I just have to like accept this trade-off of like, well, yeah, it would be it would be nice to make ah another game like that, um but it would also not be fun.
00:26:34
Speaker
So unless I can find a way to do it without compromising the enjoyment I get from making games, Yeah. yeah Then I just have to rule that out.
00:26:46
Speaker
um i'm I'm wondering if... so I mean, I'm thinking back to Monsters Expedition and like part of that was we didn't we didn't fully know what the game was. No.
00:27:00
Speaker
Right? and I mean, so I i do think there's... Once we knew what the game was, it came together pretty quick. Yeah. Like comparatively. And i i think I think the level design side of it really benefited from having that long iteration time. Like while we were working out what the identity of the game was, yeah um we were iterating on the puzzles, which were kind of like tangential to that.
00:27:29
Speaker
Yeah, i guess that's true. yeah ah But like, we didn't need three and a half years of public iteration. Sure. So, I mean, I'm thinking about, um have you talked on previous episodes? Have you talked about the like the process for um electrifying incident and Spooky Express?
00:27:46
Speaker
um Like some, but like we can talk about it more. Well, so one of the things um I'll, I'll talk about this in case you haven't mentioned this specific thing. Like one of the things, and it was definitely ah like super, super duper true with electrifying incident is that like you had, know,
00:28:06
Speaker
Like both that and electrifying or Spooky Express, like we knew what the game was, right? We knew like you knew. you And in the case of electrifying incident, the game was totally playable back to front in puzzle script.
00:28:20
Speaker
And I think that's like, that's huge, right? because And one of the things with Monsters Edition is we're just aiming too high. we We're trying to make parts of it more complicated than they need to be. yeah and if we had just gone like it's just a simple puzzle game um we don't need to like reinvent the wheel it can just like it can just be the thing that's nothing more than this thing uh we would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble yeah sure and ah and i mean there is though there's something to be said about
00:28:54
Speaker
um I see this in my students and I've certainly seen it in myself too, that like sometimes you just need to learn the lesson in the hard way.
Learning from Past Projects
00:29:02
Speaker
That's the way that it's going to stick. It becomes just part of your creative journey as a maker. It becomes really important texture and it informs how you approach stuff in the future. Without climbing that mountain,
00:29:15
Speaker
without climbing that mountain you know, you don't you don't know to look for like the beautiful river valleys instead, right? So, I don't know. It it was a slog and I i mostly watched the sloggy parts from a distance, right? there wasn't there was There was a little bit of a slog around um like the visual design of it, but, you know, I saw like... I mean, you were involved in the narrative conversation, so, right? I'm sure, in the narrative stuff, that was a big one, but, um i you know, I think of like...
00:29:48
Speaker
And is true on so many games that once the art is done, like the programmers are still there fixing bugs and trying to get it, trying to pass cert and like, do you know, do all this stuff that it's like, oh man, good luck, everyone. I'll see you later. Like, um but it's, I do personally think that doing something of that scope and of that level of polish and like, I don't know, like,
00:30:16
Speaker
how would I say intended prestige? I like trying to make, trying to make a game that belongs in like the books, right? um That intent. I think now that you've had that experience, now that we, we both have had that experience, I think you could do it in two years.
00:30:32
Speaker
If, if um you know, this gets back to the, the thing that I do with Ash that, you know, You really know what the idea is. You know why it's good. You know who the audience is. And like you can have like a robust prototype. that yeah like okay i i think I think for puzzle games, it possibly needs more time as a prototype before you can feel confident about the scope of the full game.
Puzzle Mechanics and Creative Collaboration
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah. um Whereas with something that's more action-y, you can probably have a sense of like, okay, well, this is satisfying and like this is the shape.
00:31:09
Speaker
this is this This is how long it will take to take this prototype and make it bigger. With a puzzle game, you need to have a sense of how much depth is there? Yeah. the Plum.
00:31:20
Speaker
And like, I don't think we, we knew how much depth there was in most of expedition until we're like a year and a half in. That's probably true. Yeah. I'm also wondering, this is a question for you. We've never talked about this before. I'm curious, like what, if you're prototyping, um, like um a puzzle mechanic that you're like, Oh, okay. I'm going to I think I can maybe build a a whole game around this.
00:31:43
Speaker
how like How do you approach that? Because there's there's it seems to me there's stuff that like, okay, well, I've got to play around with this primary mechanic. But then as you're playing around with that, you maybe get an idea for a secondary mechanic that would be really complimentary. But then like, okay, well, cool. Now I've got to spend time on this.
00:32:01
Speaker
And is there like an exploration phase where you're just like, how controlled is it? How loose is it? I'm i'm curious about that whole process. It's less I will have like ah an idea for a mechanic that's complementary and more that I will have an idea for um something in the setting that would be complementary. Like with with Monster's Expedition, it's like, oh, here's here's the trees and oh, here's the big trees.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, sure. or what's another example? Like with with Spooky Express, it was a lot about like... It wasn't, we want to have this mechanic, let's find it a framing for that. It's like, oh, what other Halloween monsters are there?
00:32:44
Speaker
How would they behave? Yeah, sure. And like, I guess actually Lucas came up with the cultists turning into the demons. So I don't know what was going through his brain when that happened. But it's like very much a a thing I like, I can see how I could have done taken that to a similar design space. Or we we have lots of ideas for other monsters it's like ah and that that that were ideas but didn't make it into the final game. It's like, okay, what's what's this character archetype and what would that mean mechanically?
00:33:17
Speaker
yeah And sometimes that will be like, oh yeah, this is great. This this combines with all these systems. And sometimes it be like, yeah, well, yeah, this is its own standalone thing. But if it doesn't like interact with every other piece, it's like, yeah, okay, well, let's put that to the side for a moment.
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. that You talking about Lucas also made me wonder how um how does the process for you, how does that process change when you have a collaborator, when you've got a design partner on something?
00:33:46
Speaker
um I mean, I like it was it was just great, like having Lucas so we could bounce ideas off each other so he could make puzzles and then I could give feedback on them or I could make a puzzle and he could give feedback on it.
00:33:57
Speaker
I think we were kind of meant mentioned this earlier, like I'm i'm feeling like kind of. ah like old and like tired and like going slow and lucas lucas helped me like work at the rate that i would have been able to work 10 years ago sure sure um and yeah on spooky express it was a lot of i was focusing on the big picture and Lucas was getting into the weeds on like fleshing out the specific puzzles and making sure that we were exploring the mechanical depth we had. And I was going like, okay, well, like this edge case like this edge this edge case implementation is more interesting than that one. Or like, oh, we need to um like make the difficulty more approachable in this section. Or like, oh, I think that we the structurally it would be better to structure put this section before that one.
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's super interesting. And I suppose that's like, you know, that's that probably mirrors, you know, obviously this is a very small scale and I've never worked AAA, but my like my impression is just, yeah, sure. That's creative director. That's actually that's like real art director stuff, right? Like that's. um you know obviously on you know on your titles and on like most small titles that I've worked on, you know I'm the art director, but my like my hands are super covered in paint as well. like I'm making plenty of assets you know by myself. And i I don't know how much you remember this from Monster that Edition, but there was a period of time where we're like, and there's so much to do. ah
00:35:33
Speaker
Alan needs to focus on puzzle design, so let's let somebody else take over creative direction. that... that went quite badly because I couldn't let go of creative direction. like like ah I really enjoy puzzle design, but it is something that on a practical level, I can let other people do in a way that I can't let go of creative direction. Yeah. You know, i think... So I'm... i um I totally agree with you. I'm like cut from the same cloth because I'm um consulting on another project right now.
00:36:10
Speaker
And the projects is like really, really cool. But seeing how... And the the art director on it is like really, really good too. um Everybody on it's really, really good.
00:36:22
Speaker
But it's being... They're still sort of like in the pre-production phase. They're basically building a ah like a vertical slice. But...
Art Direction and Team Dynamics
00:36:30
Speaker
um I often think, oh, if i was on like i would have I would have a way tighter grip on this thing if I were art directing it. Not because that would be a better approach.
00:36:42
Speaker
That's just because that's who I am as a maker. right i I need to be touching everything in order to have a sense of the overall flavor of the thing we're making.
00:36:54
Speaker
um and And also in order to have a sense of ah like what's the right decision at at any given decision point, what's the right decision. I need to like be touching everything in order to be able to be like, okay, it's this way. And, but occasionally though, um I mean, not even really occasionally on a game of a certain size, you need more people. And like on, you Monsters Expedition, I brought on two former students of mine that were both like incredible modelers and like we cranked out all of the exhibits and it was super, super fun. And seeing them, know,
00:37:28
Speaker
like i can I can model pretty much anything pretty quickly and it's fun. I love modeling, but I don't need to do it. right I can have a movie on on my other screen and still be 100% productive because it's just not technically or creatively ah ah really challenge anymore.
00:37:48
Speaker
But then you see like a junior artists artist or like a more artist And they still sort of have stuff to learn about that part of the craft. And it's so exciting watching them like dive in. And you know like it's it's fuel. It's fuel for progress for them. And that is so exciting to witness. It's one of the reasons I love teaching too, is that you see these like younger people that don't know what they don't know yet and um still have a bunch of like things to learn the hard way and all of this kind of stuff.
00:38:19
Speaker
But it's like, oh, man, like... When you watch those like light bulbs go off or you can tell they really leveled up or something, it's just like, oh man, this is the human element in all of this technology. It is so beautiful to behold.
00:38:34
Speaker
So collaboration. I guess that's what we're saying, listeners. Collaboration. And do you... like Obviously there's a lot of benefits to just working in two person team, but like you do get less collaboration there. So like, how do you like do you just get more of it and but it balances out? oh I think for us, um, you know, because, because the games that we want to make are so so ultimately so small and Ash and i um,
00:39:06
Speaker
you know, share a sensibility. Like we really love working together. That it that goes a long way. Yeah, it it so truly does. Right. How long have you been working with Ben? Did Ben work on Sockapon? Ben didn't work on Sockpons, but we've been working together since A Good Snowman. so We started that game.
00:39:25
Speaker
end of twenty thirteen yeah Yeah. So, I mean, like having, having that person that you're like, Oh, holy heck, like i want to work with you for the next 10 years that, Oh, it is worth so much.
00:39:39
Speaker
And someone actually, someone played the existential treads demo recently and said they loved it. And it reminded them of like the golden age of like web games of like going on new grounds or armor or congregate or whatever.
00:39:55
Speaker
And you know just like trying a bunch of stuff. And you find that like one weird game that you end up playing for four hours. And it's just like, oh my God, this is so fun. And we're like, oh, wow. Yeah, good that is absolutely the type of stuff we make. It has that spirit.
00:40:09
Speaker
And so at that scope, yes, we don't have as many voices in the mix, but we have two voices and we balance out each other's, neither of us have like terrible, terrible impulses, but we balance each other out. You shout at each other when you're going down, when you're going Yeah, I mean, that's exactly- make this so much better. We, so, so Ash often, Ash loves novel mechanics.
00:40:38
Speaker
And um he will often, when we're looking at a design problem, this is actually, we were working through something like this this week. when we're looking at a design problem, he will often suggest this like mechanically novel way of solving it that is like in a vacuum. it's It's like an interesting little like mechanical toy box, but it sometimes is like, yeah, that's cool, but it's such an abstract way of solving this problem. um We can just give the player a little bit more information and they're going to know what to do. We don't have to totally...
00:41:14
Speaker
totally but ah you know, knock down the house and like rebuild a new thing here. um But then he, the thing that I often do is i will come up with ideas that are just like right from the jump too big.
00:41:29
Speaker
And they're still by like, you know, you know, most other game standards, they're still pretty small, but for us- They might be fine for a six person team. That's exactly it. it's It's like five or six person team, not two person team. And he's like, dude, this is really cool, but this is going to be a lot of production work.
00:41:48
Speaker
And after like, I don't know. I wrestle with that for like two or three hours and I'm like, you're right. You just saved me for myself. Thank you. Um, there's actually, there's a joke about that in the tutorial, uh, the intro for existential treads where there was this, I had, I had storyboarded out this, uh, like animation as an intro.
Balancing Art and Production in Game Design
00:42:12
Speaker
It would have, it was not that long. It was like, I don't know, between 30 and 60 seconds, but still in order to actually produce that to completion, that's,
00:42:20
Speaker
probably a couple weeks work. And it was like, oh it was really cool. And it like totally laid out the world. And it was even, even for what it was, it was pretty concise. And he said that this is really cool, but that's going to be a lot of animation. And then ah we ended up,
00:42:39
Speaker
having all of that information just being ah just being um communicated via overhearing conversation between two little like NPC guys. And they they're silly little cartoon-looking guys. They're just like two little guys standing on screen.
00:42:56
Speaker
And they one guy explains like the state of the world. And the other guy says, um thank you that was a concise and cost effective way of explaining our situation and then the game starts and that like that took us we did that in a couple hours and it was funny and um some we've had players laugh like tell us they thought it was funny but really that's you know like we're really playing to the back of the room on that one that's like a like a joke for all the game developers so um yeah
00:43:30
Speaker
We balance each other out. And we've we've been talking a lot about doing creative direction quickly and like finding the core of the game, the scope that makes sense to make. We should also talk a little bit about doing our direction quickly.
00:43:43
Speaker
Sure. sure um Yeah, geez, where to start? I actually have a talk about this that I've been like trying to prep, and maybe I'll do GDC, maybe I'll but i'll do something else.
00:43:56
Speaker
um Submit it wherever, but there's this framework. Yeah, GDC isn't cool anymore. I know. um that's kind of It's also... It's the costs. like I don't buy a ticket. I haven't bought a ticket in years, but it's also still like the plane and the hotel and everything. and If fewer people are going, and especially... like the state of this country. Now, few fewer people internationally are going to come. And like the whole reason I go is just to say, hey, to all of the people I don't live near.
00:44:24
Speaker
And if those people aren't going to go, it's like, ah well, I don't know. Maybe I'll find a different event. But um there's a framework that sort of ah um I came up with organically just doing this enough times for clients that I call the visual development triad.
00:44:42
Speaker
And so if you think a triangle ah think of a triangle, And um at the three points, there is visual communication, there is um marketing, and there's production.
00:44:54
Speaker
And so visual ah visual communication is like um you know when you come up with an art style, you're trying to create effectively a visual language that communicates the like nouns and verbs of play, right? So the designers coming up with nouns and verbs of play and me as a visual designer need to come up with visual nouns and verbs that mirror those. So players, you know, the goal is a player can look at, you know, a screenshot or a video or whatever. And in like five seconds, understand what they're, what they're looking at and like what the goals are, what the, what the vibe is. Right.
00:45:31
Speaker
um So how well does the art work? um communicate, signal, et cetera, like the goals of the game. That's visual communication. Marketing is like, um you know is this is this art style desirable to its target audience? Will the target audience look at this and be like, oh, whoa, what is that? And like click through or stop scrolling or hit wishlist or whatever. right It has to look like something that the target audience wants. And then production, you know while you're thinking about how to best communicate the nouns and verbs of play and how you're thinking about how best to appeal to the target audience, you know you still you're going to have to make all the art in the game. And if you come up with something that's like you know too detailed that you know everything is expensive to make, it takes too long, well, that's actually not a good art style for for the project. Or um if it's, I don't know, too detailed to run on the target,
00:46:29
Speaker
um ah hardware. Okay, well, that's also not a good art style. And so coming up with an art style is the act of balancing these three needs.
00:46:40
Speaker
um And in the center of this triangle, you know's it's maybe not like the perfect art style, but ultimately what you're looking for is like the the very good and definitely workable art style, right? Because it gets back to that conversation about perfection, perfection.
00:46:55
Speaker
I don't know. Most people i don't think can really tell the difference between like say 75 or 80% art and like 95% art. It just looks like amazing art to them.
00:47:06
Speaker
um You know, past a certain point, you're really just polishing things that only like practitioners of the craft will notice and be able to like really articulate and appreciate.
00:47:19
Speaker
um So part of it I think is just how to do it fast is you so you sort of have to kill your ego a little bit and say good enough can seem like sort of a bummer. Even now, as I say it, it's like, well, it's a bummer phrase. like It feels like such a wet blanket. But really good enough is like,
00:47:42
Speaker
often good enough, like shoot for good enough, you'll be able to make the game faster and then you'll be able to move on to the next one. Yeah. And ah I think like in reference to your, your triangle, good enough isn't even a point on that triangle. Good enough is like a height on that triangle, right? Yeah.
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, I think ultimately, you know, how do you make art fast the way sometimes, sometimes a, a client or someone that I'm consulting with will ask a question and my response will be, you know, this is the type of question that you asked,
00:48:13
Speaker
um if you ask 10 different art directors, you're going to maybe get eight different answers. And there's going to be crossover between them. But at some point, everyone plays to their strengths. And this is you know my my strength because 99% of my career has been in indie games or small games. And like nobody ever has any money, or at least not the money that they want.
00:48:36
Speaker
And so you i have gotten really, really good at you know listening to what a game designer is you know intending with um the with their design, with the like what's the what's the core player experience, and then just trying to find clever ways of making the art for it. And um it's always been because you know if budget's tight, okay, well, this is we're not going to...
00:49:00
Speaker
We're probably, anyway, not going to be able to do an art style that is going to wow people in the same way that, like, I don't know, Rockstar or Ubisoft or whatever other, like, you know, AAA company with effect effectively infinite money is going to be able to do, right? So you're trying to make something that looks good.
00:49:19
Speaker
um but it's like fast to make you're trying to be clever maybe with production and that's that's my strength and so yeah how do you do it fast you're really really intentional intentional about what you're making and um you're not afraid of good enough um good enough is like that's the goal and did you have any takeaways specifically for puzzle games about Yeah, i I'm like sorry, Alan, go ahead and finish the thought. Well, yeah, just just what what good enough means for puzzle games or what like like also legibility means for puzzle games. Yes, yes. I mean, like so I discovered, i didn't work on a
00:50:02
Speaker
ah I didn't work on a puzzle game before Monsters Expedition. That was my first one. and And initially you were like kind of frustrated by... oh i don't want to say... like i like Frustrated is like my playful spin on it. Of like her the the kind of awkward constraints we had.
00:50:22
Speaker
i And it's funny because I i came to like love those constraints. um So I got my start in... ah My professional start in graphic design. I was a graphic designer in the late 90s. I went to college 2001 to 2005, and all through college I worked as a graphic designer.
00:50:43
Speaker
um And so my like my initial creative professional experience is in these like very, very tight information systems.
00:50:54
Speaker
um where you're not... in this the The studio that I worked with wasn't super big on like big flowery like flourishes or anything like that. It was like very tight, clean design.
00:51:06
Speaker
um And so i i sort of already thought about visual design in this very tight way. But when I came onto Monsters Expedition, i you know I was thinking like, oh, it's like trees and grass and water. There's this opportunity to be like...
00:51:23
Speaker
you know to try to find a balance between this like really tight legibility and like organic beauty. And um you this is you insisted at the time, legibility really like legibility needs to be the thing, right? it the um Organic Beauty is probably going to get in the way. you didn't like you didn't It wasn't like a hard slap, no, but it was a sort of a a stern, i really think legibility should be the thing, but I'll let you explore.
00:52:01
Speaker
And you know I did explore. And then eventually arrived at, oh, Alan was just right. i I did all of this exploration and now I know I can just listen to Alan on these matters because he's he's not, this isn't ah this isn't a case of...
Simplicity and Essential Design Elements
00:52:19
Speaker
I mean, what while you were exploring, were there anything was there anything specific that you found like, oh, this is a problem for legibility in a way that wasn't really obvious? Yeah, I mean, yes. So, you know, case in point,
00:52:32
Speaker
um like the trees, right? You know, originally um as I was drawing stuff up, you know, the trees had these like really knotted um like curvy roots and like the, the branches and stuff were expressive and it became all of that stuff just drew attention away from the cylinder trunk.
00:52:58
Speaker
And even the trunks were more wobbly when I, in my very first attempts and, um, and it became clear to me like really early on, Oh, this just players need to look at this and it has to look rollable, right? That that's part of that five second read that I was talking about before you look at this and here's a tree that's upright and here is a trunk that's been knocked down and it looks like a perfect rollable cylinder.
00:53:30
Speaker
And a player has to be able to look at that screenshot and understand, oh, this one on the ground is one of these other ones that was just knocked over. And that's what you do here. I'm knocking over these things and they look rollable.
00:53:42
Speaker
So like pretty early, that was obvious. And I kept... sort of shaving off like some of the like or organic stuff.
00:53:53
Speaker
you know Okay, this one's a little less organic. This one's a little less organic. This one's a little less organic until finally we ended up with um you know where we where we ended up. There was also... it like you know my original mockups, there was more sort of um miscellaneous detail art around. There were you know some smaller rocks on the edges. There were like some kind of fern things on the edges.
00:54:17
Speaker
And all of that stuff got cut, like and rightfully so, because it just... The thing that I love about making art for puzzle games is it is... Jeez, what would be the way to put it?
00:54:31
Speaker
You really want to just focus on the essentials. what are the What are the things directly related to the puzzles? And then everything else, don't worry about it, right? Or you don't have to anyway. There are plenty of puzzle designers, I think,
00:54:43
Speaker
um you know, that will try to have, you know, more rich background art or something like that. But the thing that I came to love um is like, no, you you don't, for this genre, you don't have to do that. You don't have to worry about making a super rich background. You don't have to worry about, you can really just focus on the essentials. And then the creative challenge, which I find really interesting is, okay, you've got four things in this scene.
00:55:09
Speaker
How do you make this game look amazing? Because we don't have we can't rely on stuff that's going to muddy up the scene or blur it or make it hard to parse. It all has to be so, so clear.
00:55:21
Speaker
Cool. That's your challenge. Make that look good. And it's a really fun challenge. once Once you kind of find that flow and embrace that those tight restrictions, that super tight sandbox, even though the like the boundaries of that sandbox are are so small, like any sandbox, if you like shrink yourself down small enough, it's like infinite creative space.
00:55:45
Speaker
And it's really fun for me anyway. There's probably plenty of other people that would be frustrated with it. But for me, hoo boy, like yes, embrace the simplicity. make Make a beautiful looking game with as few parts as possible. So cool.
00:56:01
Speaker
Nice. Anything else that you want to cover or should we call it here? I mean, I think we did it. This was a really fun yeah conversation. And later later when it comes out, I won't have to say, i was like in a fugue state the whole time. It was like a beautiful odd fugue. I have no idea what we talked about. We had a wonderful conversation about puzzle design.
00:56:24
Speaker
I love this. Great. ah Well, thank you for listening to the Drackneck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoisemusic.com.
00:56:36
Speaker
Our podcast artwork is by you, Adam DeGrande. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zewodniak. Please rate it and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations. Thank you.
00:56:56
Speaker
you