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Episode 36: Adam deGrandis (Spooky Express, A Monster's Expedition)
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In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Adam deGrandis, the art director on Spooky Express and A Monster's Expedition. Topics include the development of the games, his time teaching, a dive through some gaming history, and a surprisingly long tangent about music.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Drakknek 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 Drakknek and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Drakknek at Drakknek and Friends.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hey there.
Meet Adam DeGrantis
00:00:36
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Adam DeGrantis, who you may know from being shouted out on every single episode of the podcast, as well as their work on games like A Mothman Expedition, The Electrifying Incident, Spooky Express, Ash and Adam's games.
00:00:49
Speaker
Just so many games, so much wonderful artwork. How are you doing today, Adam? Oh my goodness. I am so great now. I was great before too, but I'm very great now.
00:01:00
Speaker
Thank you for that wonderful introduction. Of course.
Adam's Artistic Journey
00:01:03
Speaker
So beyond what I just said, can you sort of tell the listener a bit about yourself, who you are, what you do?
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I am an art generalist and art director. I've been making games professionally since 2004. The first... the very first game work I ever did was modding, was creating ah Doom levels for me and my friends to deathmatch on in middle school.
00:01:30
Speaker
And that should tell you something about my age. It was a new game when I was doing that. ah Yeah. Art generalist, art director. When I got started, i went to a very traditional art college.
00:01:44
Speaker
I had a very traditional arts education. um i was in a sort of nascent digital art ah program then, And everybody was doing like different stuff.
00:01:54
Speaker
um There were people doing like video. There were people doing web. This was before Web 2.0. So like the web was interesting and weird, and people were still figuring out what could be done with it. um And i wanted to make games. I was the one person in my small department that was making games. And there wasn't, like I said, 2.0 wasn't, you couldn't just like type in, how do you make games? How do you model? How do you do whatever? And get you know dozens and dozens and dozens of tutorials on it. There was...
00:02:21
Speaker
I remember there were literally two tutorials about three d modeling on the internet at what at that time. And ah one was step by step, the other was sort of like a high level overview.
00:02:33
Speaker
So um I pretty much taught myself how to do all of the games skills that I have now. So modeling and painting and rigging and animating and VFX and all that kind of stuff. i i'm I'm mostly self-taught with that kind of stuff. I know how to draw and I understand composition and form and the elements of design, all the stuff you get from a very traditional arts education. That's what I got from college. But game skills, I'm self-taught and it was very hard to do it that way. It was a lot of trial and error.
00:03:05
Speaker
But one of the one of the things that I got from that, and I didn't realize I was getting it at the time, but one of the things I got from that was an appreciation for how ah one step of the process flows into another step and how it sometimes flows back and how just how the whole tapestry is woven together.
Joining Drakknek and Indie Game Era
00:03:24
Speaker
And it gave me a very holistic view, both of games, game art really specifically, but sort of games like at a macro level too, right? that That design and narrative and sound and art and everything have to be woven together in a very intentional way.
00:03:41
Speaker
in order to produce the effect and in order to give someone and an emotional response or make someone have an emotional response to the work. Right. So I was teaching myself how to do this stuff in the early aughts and just right place, right time. I happened to catch like the dawn of Indy and the dawn of like, um, or not the dawn of small teams, a return to small teams, right. Um, game teams had been ballooning, um, even back then.
00:04:07
Speaker
And then suddenly there were there were tools available to ah small teams. There were ah opportunities being presented to small teams. There also just small teams that said, hey, the current publisher model sucks. And let's just, we don't know if we're going to be able to figure it out, but we think we can.
00:04:25
Speaker
Online distribution, obviously, ah mobile was a huge thing. Web games, all that kind of stuff. Again, just like sort of right place, right time. And then I mean, I'd been making games for ten over 10 years and then um met Alan at GDC. And Alan, what year was that?
00:04:43
Speaker
2019? 2018? I think it was 2018. 2018 sounds right. Yeah, that sounds right. And then, I mean, as far as Dracnik goes, in my relationship with Dracnik, the rest is sort of history. could have been 2019.
00:05:00
Speaker
I can't remember it was that. No, no, no. but have so Yes, it was 2019 because then I came to London in the fall of 2019. So it would have been, so I think we talked about Monsters Expedition that spring at
Creative and Emotional Challenges
00:05:14
Speaker
GDC. So you joined like less than a year before I did?
00:05:18
Speaker
and Oh yeah, I guess. that's That's wild because it looked so visually polished when I joined. Oh, well, thank you. It was a miserable experience. such a It was such a hard... I was i was really burned out from um the work I had been doing before.
00:05:39
Speaker
but Burned out to the point that I didn't realize I was burned out. It was just sort of like, oh, this is just what life feels like. all this how it It's just always been this hard.
00:05:52
Speaker
It's like making stuff. and so it took It took a long time. It took a long time to like land on the look. And I'm, I'm, I love where we ended up, but it was a trial.
00:06:03
Speaker
Why, what do you think that was other than just games are a nightmare? Yeah. You know, so I say to my students, so for the listener, I'm also now a college professor. I teach actually i teach at my alma mater.
00:06:17
Speaker
Um, I teach all the courses that I wish I had when I was a student, which is kind of a fun turn, but I tell my students that I didn't, I didn't realize this back then. I realize that now that part of the creative process for me, like when I'm coming up with an art style for a game, i understand now that 60% of that time is going to spend just in a like deep, visceral self-loathing.
00:06:42
Speaker
And it's just like, ah that's just part of the process. And i i can i can feel it and I can move through it and it can just be...
00:06:55
Speaker
I can recognize it for what it is. This is me trying to do something that is challenging. And every, because coming up with doing that work, doing the visual development work, it's really, really engaging work.
00:07:13
Speaker
But it also, it, by its very nature, it's wrong for 100% of the time, right? If you're still working on it, it's because it's not good yet, or it's not what it's supposed to be yet.
00:07:27
Speaker
And you only stop doing that work once you cross the finish line, once it's good. And so, and it takes a long time. So you're spending weeks, ah just tons of time ah working on something that is to be glib bad.
00:07:46
Speaker
And like, because you're, you're not there yet because you haven't crossed the finish line. there's going to be, i mean, if you're me anyway, there's going to be a voice in the back of your head that's just the whole time saying, this is it, man.
00:08:00
Speaker
This is when you find out your whole career has just been 20 plus years of incredible luck. This is when you find out that you're you're not actually good and you don't actually know what you're doing.
00:08:12
Speaker
and yeah i know And now I know, I just have to say, like that's not true. right Objectively, that's not true because I have... Titles and a whole list of titles, dozens and dozens of titles that I've helped launch.
Balancing Personal Life and Creativity
00:08:25
Speaker
um And that look, in my very humble opinion, look very good. But yeah, it's just ah being a a creative professional. It's like two things. It's more than two things. But for now, it's two things, right?
00:08:40
Speaker
It's you have to learn the skills to actually do the work. But then there's there's like a whole mental component. There's like a bunch of like soft skills and stuff like that. And those are things that are a lot harder to learn because like if I was to teach someone how to model, okay, those steps are really clear cut, right?
00:08:59
Speaker
I can teach a class and then I can teach someone how to draw. I can teach someone how to play guitar. I can teach me. There's a bunch of just like skill-based things. You can do this. But once you start dealing with like,
00:09:10
Speaker
I don't know, some of the more like squishy or soft skills stuff, like even like how to be a manager, how to be an art director. The first project I ever art directed, which was in 2007. Hoo boy, I did not do a great job as an art director, but that's because like some things, mean you just gotta to like, gotta learn on the go.
00:09:28
Speaker
You're dealing with other people and it's just harder. So managing those, um those more emotional aspects of the process of the creative process is,
00:09:40
Speaker
It's just you have to do it enough times to understand like this is how this process is going to feel. And not every part of the process feels good, but that's OK.
00:09:52
Speaker
It doesn't feel good to be in a tiny boat getting whipped by huge waves, but sometimes that's just what life is. And you'll make it through.
Technical Challenges in Game Development
00:09:59
Speaker
Right. And do you think there's anything that you can do as a team to make that process of finding and honing an art style less painful? Like i I, know for sure that during the period that you were working on the like laying out the art style for Monster Expedition, so much else was in flux that wouldn't have been helping. but like Both for Monster Expedition more generally, like what what can you do to to ease that process? It's going to be painful every time, but like it doesn't always always have to be maximally painful.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've learned that for my own process, having a lot of voices early on in the process is a great way of just getting a bunch of ideas on the table and pretty quickly you can sort through.
00:10:54
Speaker
ah okay so you can sort through um the good ideas and the ideas that are like still good, but maybe not for this project. But having having more thoughts about that stuff than you yourself would be able to generate, it makes it a lot easier to, geez, what's the way to put it?
00:11:14
Speaker
So for me, ah ah you know, that self-loathing that I talked about, part of it, a big part of it is just, you know, that thing of like, oh, I'm not there yet. This is not yet good. And it's because like coming up with the ideas takes time and you've got to like come up with an idea and then test it. And then like, nope, this is wrong.
00:11:33
Speaker
Come up with a new idea, test it. Nope, this is wrong. And eventually you get to like, oh, this is still wrong, but it's more right than it was last time. And you can sort of hone in on the correct path.
00:11:44
Speaker
going that way. If you get just a bunch of ideas right at the start, you're going to be getting a, there's just a lot of like, um, there's a lot of stuff to churn through. There's a lot of stuff to behold and to consider. And that's good because you didn't have to take the time to think through all of that or to generate all of that yourself.
00:12:02
Speaker
Um, but then also you're going to get ideas that you never would have thought of And that can be helpful because it will then send you down paths that you never would have been able to walk down.
00:12:16
Speaker
Right. And you'll end up in places that are really, really surprising. Well, something that I say to my students is just to like, because coming up with an art style, there's, there's also just like so much to consider.
00:12:27
Speaker
you know you have to be thinking about, like okay, well, is this going to speak to the audience? Is this going to help us tell the story? Is this going to, like, mechanically, does this signal everything that we need? Like, there's just so many things that you have to check for.
00:12:40
Speaker
Let's just say, like, okay, we have to design a prop, like a specific prop in the game. Let's say we need to design a lantern. The character is going to carry a lantern for part of the game, and we need to design the way this looks and blah, blah, blah. um When we start designing that lantern, I always start with just like a whole mess of thumbnail sketches, really quick drawings. I, if I'm doing thumbnails, I very intentionally don't spend more than five minutes on any given drawing. Usually if I can keep it down closer, like two minutes, that's good.
00:13:10
Speaker
Um, you're really just trying to find like, uh, just like the very high level vibe. What's like the form, what's the silhouette. You're not really thinking about details.
00:13:22
Speaker
And when I teach my students this, Because when you start learning how to do this stuff, there is going to be usually a like a drive to make every drawing good because you're trying to look impressive. You're trying to make like nice art. And the thing about thumbnails is they don't look nice, right? They're napkin sketches. You don't show them their internal work, right? You're not showing them to the public.
00:13:45
Speaker
um You're really just... The point of concept art is... I have an idea in my head and I need to get it in your head in as few lines as possible. Right.
00:13:57
Speaker
Um, because the time that we're spending, if you're doing it professionally, anyway, the time that you're spending drawing, like if you can communicate an idea with eight lines, don't spend 12 lines on it. You just, you know, burn the money on those four extra lines.
00:14:09
Speaker
So, uh, oh my goodness. So this is, this is a perfect Adam teaching example. I was answering a question and I just forgot the question that I was answering because I started to think about concept drawing and how much I like it.
00:14:27
Speaker
What was Alan? What was the question you asked me? Was it how to make it less painful? Yeah. Make it all concept up. Yeah. As long as you make everything napkin drawings, you can have just a really enjoyable time doing everything.
00:14:42
Speaker
And you don't have to worry about doing any of the bad stuff. Don't ship the game. That's the way to make it less painful. Just don't ship a game. Hey. I think we all know Oh, I'm out of a job.
00:14:56
Speaker
I feel like I had a really good answer for it, though. The actual thing that I was building to. Well, guess doesn't matter. It's in the ether. This is a great podcast right off the bat. Where are we you at? 10 minutes? No, this is great.
00:15:08
Speaker
10 minutes? Look, this is... but Sometimes you get good energy out of this. So, with that in mind, do you have any specific stories from Monster's Expedition, other than, you know, the the general working on it while feeling burned out, that...
00:15:29
Speaker
Maybe like i either like standout memories that you haven't blocked due to trauma response or um like any examples that like kind of can illuminate what we've what we've been talking about. Yeah. i So i I had a great time on that project.
00:15:49
Speaker
Besides the like um like being burned out and trying to come up with a thing. I think the other thing too. So actually i can sort of pick it back up when I was. I'm trying to figure out the art style for that game.
00:16:01
Speaker
i wanted it to be good, right? ah ah A huge part of the pressure on that project for me at that time was just like I was talking about with my students, right? That like, you know, if you tell them draw, we're going to learn how to do concept art, um do the thumbnails, don't spend
Lessons Learned in Game Development
00:16:16
Speaker
more than five minutes on any given drawing.
00:16:18
Speaker
Here I was trying to come up with a cool art style and I wanted it to be good. And there was always this enormous, pressure. And I think there was like, I put that pressure on myself because, you know, I had just come off of ah working with a team who I love. I love everybody at that particular team, but it was like not a good fit work-wise in terms of what they were asking for and what I think I tend to be good at.
00:16:48
Speaker
Um, that, and also I had, uh, I, I, very small and not technically newborn anymore, but like a, like a toddler at home. And that's like, you know, you're learning how to become a parent and that's a whole crazy shift. Any, any parents listening understand like, Oh, having your first kid, you know, sort of a soft reset for you as a human.
00:17:09
Speaker
And I really just wanted to be like, no, I want this to be good. Right. I want to prove to myself that I can still do this because it was sorting. It was starting to feel like, I don't know, man, maybe I just can't do this anymore.
00:17:22
Speaker
So there's a lot of that pressure on me, but then that I was putting on myself. um But then ah remember I figured out the air quotes figured out sort of like cracked the art style. I i had told Alan, I need to just take a week off.
00:17:37
Speaker
Like I'm, you know, just bashing my head against the wall, trying to make this then work. And it's just not working. And I think I need to just like take a breath and step away yeah and give myself some time to, I don't know, clear my head.
00:17:52
Speaker
But then on that week, I kept working, which is a very Adam move. um But it like just the fact, like no, this is a week off. This this doesn't count. like It sort of reduced the pressure, i think. And I was able to like make some, I think, important connections, um visual connections that you know were floating around, but I just wasn't finding because I had the stress on me.
00:18:16
Speaker
So I remember that week very, very vividly because it was the first time in... really probably months that I had felt like I was competent and I was doing the thing that I was trying to do with a level of skill that, you know, it's like, uh, do Arthur, if you play instruments?
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah. I've played dozens of instruments. Dozens. Really? Yes. And I play none. Okay. Well, certain plays dozens. So you, I think you can play none. Every, every instrument in a band and orchestra.
00:18:50
Speaker
Holy, i can't believe we've never talked about this. this is This is a sidebar and I want to come back to it. But the the thing of like, the reason I asked was because like, you know, if you're trying to play a difficult piece of music, you can like keep practicing and keep practicing. And it's like, sometimes like my stupid fingers will just not do the thing that I'm trying to make them
Personal Touches in Game Design
00:19:15
Speaker
do. And I will try to play a piece of music like a hundred times.
00:19:19
Speaker
And if I just like say, okay, screw this, man. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to just step away. This doesn't matter to me anymore. As soon as I like take that breath and then i start to play it, i'm like, oh man, okay, cool.
00:19:31
Speaker
Okay. This actually feels good now. And like doing that thing that you tried to do so many times to be able to actually finally do it. Oh boy, that feels so good. um So that was really good. I will probably remember that week.
00:19:44
Speaker
Well, probably not till the day I die because who knows, but I mean, maybe I'll die tomorrow and then it would the last day of my life I got to tell this story. let's get suck okay ah It would be so funny, though, if I actually did now. no yeah He knew. Anyway, doesn't matter.
00:20:01
Speaker
So that was a good that was a good time in that project. But then also um on that project, we had a few other artists. um help out to make all the exhibits because obviously ton of exhibits in the game that has exhibits in the title.
00:20:14
Speaker
um over Almost 200. Almost 200. Oh, and then all of the snowmen and stuff like that too. So there was like just a bunch of like assets that needed to get made and I actually had two former students help out with that because it was was all like modeling and it's all... There's like levels of production work that are...
00:20:35
Speaker
you know after you've been doing this for a bit you can say like oh this is really good for a junior artist or we're gonna need a lead for this so we're gonna need you know whatever and the exhibits were like perfect like junior to like mid-level modeling assignments and so i got to have one former student who had graduated a while ago and i had actually worked with them on a handful of things um in the meantime and then one who is a pretty newly um graduated.
00:21:05
Speaker
And just to be able to like, one of one of my things with being a professor, one of the things that I've always tried to do is be an on ramp into the industry, or whatever, just like into having a practice as a as a as an adult.
00:21:19
Speaker
um So in these two people were very special to me. So I was, I was very, very happy that I got to actually do that thing that I try to do. you know Yeah, and we're working with another of your former students on Electrifying Instance and a Spooky Express.
00:21:34
Speaker
Yes. You're keeping doing it. and i ah And thanks to you, actually, i don't know if I've ever actually said this, Alan, but i'll I'll do it on tape so it's actually we can always refer back to it.
00:21:47
Speaker
You are always so good about you know whenever there's a task that needs done on on a Draknek game, if it's a task that I think a junior artist can handle,
00:21:57
Speaker
you have never once pushed back and said like, oh, no, I don't think let's get someone. i i would feel more comfortable if someone more senior was working on this. You have always just trusted me and said like, yeah, if you think they can do it, awesome. Let's bring them on, which not every director would do that. So I do appreciate that.
00:22:15
Speaker
That's a sign of how little I know about
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, maybe i just so I really just I just screwed myself for the future, I guess. Now you're going to question it every single time. Like, is this one of those things, Adam? You have yet to lead me astray.
00:22:33
Speaker
Okay, that is true. I feel like I've got a good track record with you. And ah this, the Phoenix was a guest, correct? Yeah, Phoenix has been on the podcast before talking about ah knowing you.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yes. Yes, good. Hopefully all good stories. So, small bit of transparency ah is that I alllan and i tend to have like a running dock on the side with like follow-up questions and there's one here that just says fog and fog yeah for a monster expedition and boy howdy do i remember the fog in the lat especially the last two weeks yeah maybe you've blocked that out adam you know i think um that game was so every
00:23:25
Speaker
Every project that I work on, and this is this is actually good usable advice for everybody else. ah Every project I work on, I try to do at least one new thing to keep it feeling fresh. And on Monsters Expedition, that was the first time I authored any sort of shader.
00:23:44
Speaker
And I remember the way that I did it on Monsters Expedition had to then be cleaned up but after I was kind of like off the project.
00:23:55
Speaker
And the fog was part of that, but also there was a lot of... i And correct me if I'm wrong, because again, I was like quasi off the project at this point.
00:24:06
Speaker
But there was just a lot of like cleanup to get it to... like Be performant. Be performant on mobile and Switch. Yeah, well, Switch is funny enough.
00:24:17
Speaker
um I mean, I don't think we've ever explicitly talked about... the release platform plan and strategy for that game and how there kind of wasn't one for half the time.
00:24:29
Speaker
um that game That game launched on Switch like nine months later. But it, so the Switch version absolutely benefited from the optimizations.
00:24:41
Speaker
But what was, what actually was ended up happening was because it was on our Apple arcade, it needed to support ah the iPad mini four,
00:24:54
Speaker
which is thankfully is no longer needed to be supported by anything yeah absolute disaster of a device yeah it is an iphone 6 chip but it's rendering like 1440p yeah seren this is so funny like this Exact same thing, not the same devices, but this exact same thing ah caught me and my partner, Sarah.
Emotional Impact of Games
00:25:24
Speaker
ah So I make art. I do all of my art contracting through a studio that we started called Chickadee. And when we started Chickadee, it was to make our own small games. We wanted to make small comedy games. Mm-hmm.
00:25:36
Speaker
Um, and we, the first title that we did was a mobile title and we ran into a very similar thing where we did not have, geez, I'm trying to, this was 2014 now. So I'm trying to remember.
00:25:49
Speaker
Um, but basically the iPad version was using like, ah like blowing through texture memory in a really, really weird way. But yeah anyway, yeah, it's like that type of thing that you're like, oh, okay. Because at the time, they didn't have more advanced chips than the iPhone.
00:26:06
Speaker
Yes. But they were attempting to do much higher scale rendering. Yes. And so this this ran into an issue where ah for those who haven't played Monsters Expedition, ah the world map is covered in fog. And that's kind of like a...
00:26:22
Speaker
at the beginning of the game, it kind of obfuscates where you're going. And towards the middle of the game and towards the end of the game especially, it really is just like a here's where you haven't been.
00:26:34
Speaker
And the fog is Like Adam said, it's it's shader. It's kind of obfuscating in real time. And that means that when you zoom out to the world map, it becomes very dynamic.
00:26:46
Speaker
Now, the problem is when you are... It is trying to, on on a very weak device, at a very high resolution, try to render the entire world map and also the programmatic fog shader.
00:27:01
Speaker
yeah And so... And, like, it's all trying to be dynamic. And so in... ah You know, we ended up faking it for the low end mobile devices. We literally wrote a hard cutoff where we found basically the least powerful device that could run it acceptably without faking it and hard coded in every device below that as you're not going to run the shader. You're going to run not quite a texture, but close to a texture.
00:27:35
Speaker
Oh, that's really interesting. Well, I can't remember what we did for the fog. So the the map itself literally is a texture. Yes. I remember that because I had to do, like, clean up on, like, some stuff. Like, I think it's it's the the... Everything is a texture, except, like, the parts that can move, like the trees and the logs.
00:27:56
Speaker
They're actually rendered, but they're being rendered on top of ground that he is just a flat texture. Yes, and and definitely... Definitely a couple players at launch were like, wait, what?
00:28:08
Speaker
It does not look good. so and No, but it's it's it's it's not ideal. ah But here's here's the problem. ah And i will I will say this as NDA friendly as I can.
00:28:20
Speaker
When you have a very clear directive that you're not allowed to compromise on resolution
Artistic Integrity vs. Audience Expectations
00:28:30
Speaker
or frame rate,
00:28:32
Speaker
that it needs to be hitting device native resolution and you are not allowed to dip below a certain frame rate threshold ever at any point during your game outside of the initial loading screen, ah then yeah, we needed to make a really clever compromise.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. oh Actually, the other reason we needed to do this awful hack was memory. Oh, I mean, yeah, it was also the devices were running so damn hot on top of that.
00:29:06
Speaker
But also it some devices just couldn't handle the whole game being loaded into memory at once. So they would crash. ah Yes, there was there was a lot of making sure that things were stable.
00:29:17
Speaker
ah trust Trust me, everyone who was relevant on the team got quote unquote gifted a very weak iPhone. Or iPad or something.
00:29:28
Speaker
um So that people could keep playing and testing it and bashing our heads against this. As well as the Apple TV 4K, which now has like a decent chip in it. At the time, it basically had the same chip as the iPad Mini, but was attempting to render it 4K.
00:29:43
Speaker
Oh, wow. Which, also nightmare. Yeah. Yes. I actually used my Apple TV that we got for Monster Expedition. Yeah, i ah I will say that ah the... Although I don't play games on it. I don't know why anyone would play games on it. I never play games on it, but I do use it for for what it's worth. It has a very...
00:30:09
Speaker
it's it's It's very effective at streaming from certain ah services like Disney Plus or Apple TV. Anyways, that I'm not trying to promote any of that. If you want to buy an Apple TV, let it be your prerogative. But I do not recommend playing games on it if you want a stable experience.
00:30:26
Speaker
um and You know, like like just trying to make it run on low end devices and trying to meet the you know letter of ah you know a contract and all that kind of stuff. I mean, like that stuff in the moment.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's so stressful, but it does... I don't know. I think there's something fun about amassing those stories, right? Like, I remember on one of the first games that I worked on that launched that launched was a XBLA launch title.
00:30:59
Speaker
Oh, my God, yeah. On the 360. Wait, I think i think your and NDA probably does expire this year. It's 20 years. Yeah. ah That's really funny. um I mean, I can talk about it. It was it was um a game called Marble Blast Ultra.
00:31:15
Speaker
um So it was sort of a ah like Marble Madness, but 3D and I don't know. ah Monkey Ball is effectively the same thing, but has cute characters in it. So it's probably the better known title. But yeah like back then, like for XBLA, like all games had to be under 50 megabytes.
00:31:33
Speaker
Sure did. And so like... there was just a bunch of work. They had to be under 50 megabytes, but then also like, I mean, like shaders. Yeah.
00:31:44
Speaker
You know, there was not an expectation, but there was, you know, if you could get like real time reflections and all this other kind of stuff, it's like, oh man, that's like the new hotness. People are going to see that and like, whoa, this was really, really cool. I can't believe my I'm doing this on my TV.
00:31:59
Speaker
So there was just like a bunch of, Like we had, um we were using PNGs, I remember, for all the textures in that game. And then PNGs with alpha channels. And then we were coming in over the 50 megabyte limit. And we had to move to this really weird format called JNG, which was JPEGs with alpha channels. What?
00:32:22
Speaker
yeah i know all of the textures were lossy they were like you know frankly but we could have l yeah but we could have l channels on them and they were tiny i mean that was the whole point right they were like super super tiny because they were lossy files but it's just like one of those things like oh man that was so what a weird moment in time right like did you ever work on ah a we wear title by the way No, i worked at it I worked at a studio in 2007.
Philosophy of Game Development
00:32:48
Speaker
This is actually that that first time I art directed. This was at ah yeah at this particular studio um that was doing um downloadable console games.
00:32:57
Speaker
And i worked I helped them launch one for the 360, and then I worked on two more... that were 360 that then went to Wii.
00:33:08
Speaker
But that was after I was only at that studio for six months. It was got sort of a bait and sweat, although it was in Wisconsin. So I was in Green Bay. I know exactly. what yeah I'm not going to say that one on. um Yes, but I'm recording, but you probably know.
00:33:22
Speaker
I know exactly who that studio is. Yes. So the fascinating thing about that hilariously, is ah Nintendo pushed the person who launched XBLA to go help co-launch WiiWare. Oh, i didn't know that.
00:33:38
Speaker
And they were like, 50 megs? That worked so great, but we're not HD. Let's do 40 megs. No way, for real? And then it was hard-coded into the operating system, so they could never make an exception on a game.
00:33:51
Speaker
Oh! That is wild. There are like they're like games that Nintendo brought around. Like Super Meat Boy was a game that Nintendo brought around to press for like months and months and months as like, look at what WiiWare can do. And it never ended up being able to ship on WiiWare just because of the file size limit.
00:34:09
Speaker
Oh my goodness. That's so... What an interesting decision to hard code a limit like that. It's because, including so ah operating system memory, the Wii only had 512 megs of storage.
00:34:21
Speaker
Sure. yeah And they were like so concerned about any one title... taking up your entire thing which eventually if you downloaded rock band dlc did exactly that yeah sure because there wasn't a limit on dlc like totals yeah um and so you ended up in this situation where when they were designing it they literally looked at the size of the largest nintendo 64 game that would launch on the virtual console so the so the n64 emulator for the wii plus that and that was 40 megs and they were like great that's going to be the hard cap file size limit nothing will ever need to be over 40 megabytes wow based on a 64 title yes i i will say there are a lot more that that is like the least messed up thing about we wear
00:35:16
Speaker
Other real quick lightning round fun stories include in order to develop, you needed an office. And there was someone at Nintendo's full-time job was scouring Google Maps to make sure that people actually had offices.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah, I remember. i I feel like Nintendo wasn't alone in that. I feel like yeah they that might have been also Microsoft. But then also, their way to try and prevent shovelware, which As someone who's intimately familiar with every WiiWare game did not work. Yeah. They refused to do payouts until you sold 10,000 units.
00:35:53
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Whoa. They would withhold... And then they would pay out ah as soon as you sold 10,000 units. But the first 10,000 units, if you launched your game and think about the Wii audience, how many of them are connecting to the internet, going to the Wii Shop channel, putting in their credit card and downloading a game?
00:36:13
Speaker
That's crazy. You need 10,000 or else you will never see a dime on your game ever. It's... Is that like public knowledge? I feel like I've never heard this. Yes. The the person, i can say this because the person who created both WeWear and XBLA is now like a consultant and has very publicly apologized for this policy.
00:36:33
Speaker
Wow. It was like, we had good intentions at the time, I swear it was meant to be a low number. Because, like, my understanding, and this is, my my source is not saying it all out loud. Sure. But my understanding is that more than 50% of games on WiiWare failed to hit payout. Wow.
00:36:52
Speaker
I mean, I'm not surprised. Yeah, that's such a huge number. Yeah. So, like I said, the 40 meg limit was the least messed up thing about WiiWare as a service.
00:37:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. um I worked on one title at the very end of WiiWare, and like i had I had been like paying attention to WiiWare the entire time, but like even just seeing, like, 40 megs sounds tiny, and then you have then you have to remember, this is on console, so you're bundling in all the necessary like console wrapper and stuff, and like the bumpers, and like the manual, and things like that, that counts against your 40.
00:37:31
Speaker
Oh, dang. Yeah. Talking about file sizes reminded me about another thing that was fun about developing for Apple TV, which is we couldn't save to disk on the device.
00:37:45
Speaker
No, because there's no local storage for saving. The only thing you can do is save to the cloud. ah ah it Yeah, that's a – so ah sorry if you lose internet connection midway through your session.
00:38:00
Speaker
What a not good device for games. Anyways, I don't want to burn bridges with Apple, but I will happily burn bridges with the Apple TV team. I don't want to work on an Apple TV game ever again.
00:38:12
Speaker
like I can say that for sure. There's a couple of platforms like OUYA and like that. There's like a few platforms. I'm like, yeah, sure. Whatever. i'll Who's out here trying to defend these platforms that for games in 2025? Yeah.
00:38:24
Speaker
So what'd you go do after a month his expedition? Did you go rest? No. Damn. What did I do after that one? Oh, uh... I mean, we shipped six months into ah global pandemic, so kind of all bets are off. And then we brought you back for the expansion also.
00:38:44
Speaker
Did you? What was the expansion? We added a bunch of exhibits. I have no memory of this. this is So here's the thing, like, pandemic plus raising a small child...
00:38:57
Speaker
I have to like, so one of the things I'm doing this summer is updating my portfolio for the first time in five years. The last time I updated it was probably Alan to interview for Monsters Expedition.
00:39:09
Speaker
And it's all, there's like a three-year period where it's all just, mush and I've got to like sort of sort through. what What exhibits did we add for the... So we shipped with about 120 and twenty yeah yeah then we did a content update for the Switch release.
00:39:29
Speaker
Well, it timed to the Switch with time to everything release. It was released everywhere. And that was May 2021. And that brought it up to 160. ah hundred sixty Yeah. So I'm wondering actually if would it would it have been that we did all of the exhibits that going know we knew were – No. we added. There were some that were like on the cutting room floor that like were not cut because of like – we think this is not good enough. Yeah, sure. So there were a few, I remember that there were like maybe five to 10 that were ah modeled and and not final texture that you finished up, but then you did the rest.
00:40:09
Speaker
Oh my goodness. I i wish I had the list. Possibly some of them were the same people who like were helping with the ah the exhibits, your former students.
00:40:20
Speaker
Yeah. um But I'm sure, I'm sure you touched them. Yeah, no, I textured every at very least I textured everything because they only did the the initial model. Usually actually on that game, the process was um they would model things. And if they needed a ton of edits, which I think really only happened, I could probably count it on one hand, the number of times that happened, they always turned in really good work.
00:40:45
Speaker
But if they needed major edits, I would say make this major edit. But if it was just like, oh, we've got to clean up this region here and I'm going to reduce the poly count over here. That was stuff that I, cause that's like 30 seconds of work. I would do it myself.
00:40:57
Speaker
Do you, do you want a quick example of one? Yeah. Give me an example. Fountain soda, open parentheses, fuel edition. Much like humans, each mode of human transportation had its own soda preference. The options at this particular dispenser are from left to right, leaded, unleaded, diesel. Oh, sure. That's so funny. I mean, I, yes, I remember that. I do not remember that it was for an expansion.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah, that came that came out post-launch. That was it six months later. So funny. Actually, like, yeah, like eight months later. Yeah. There's, I remember, um what, actually, I'm curious, what is and you don't have to give a single one, you can maybe, like, shortlist.
00:41:32
Speaker
What are your favorite exhibits from that game? Oh, so this this was this was a tough one because when we – I'm to plug this. For the first time ever on this podcast, merch.draknek.org.
00:41:45
Speaker
Turns out you can actually buy merch of Draknek and Friends stuff. Weird. I mean we we made shirts of some of our favorite exhibits. I think it's it's so, so like basic.
00:41:59
Speaker
But the pile of unread books is so funny. Yeah, sure. I love that one. And Adam – that ah that The plaque the that's future-looking, it says 2025 on it. Oh my goodness.
00:42:12
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, that's like... that's like ah you know You look at like the old like ah like Looney Tunes cartoons that talk about... Like Duck Dodgers in the 21st and a half century or something. and It's like, oh, that's those years are in the past now.
00:42:26
Speaker
Cool. ah I think that for me, there's also a um like Look, I trauma bonded with Mike ah yes sure the over the watermelon one.
00:42:42
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Wait, I can't i remember the asset. I can't remember what was the what was so like joke. So the the joke is that the word watermelon got its name from someone who looked at it and yelled, wow, what a melon.
00:42:58
Speaker
Now I want you to think about how that translates into every language. No, I know that it's so funny. So this game came out in Arabic. Arabic is a right to left language.
00:43:08
Speaker
The only way the localizers could handle language was by inserting... watermelon and what a melon into English, which means that it goes right, left, left, right, right, left, left, right, right, left, left, right. Oh my gosh. And that is hard coded in and neither of us read Arabic.
00:43:27
Speaker
And so we were just, the two of us just kept staring at the source sell from the translators and the game and going back and forth be like, this looks right.
00:43:39
Speaker
This is it. We finally did It took like yeah three days of work to get that one to show up correctly in Arabic. So like I, the two of us, like that is the one I remember the most. Sure.
00:43:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So much work for just like one Like, i I like that joke. Is it worth three days? I don't know. But you're not going to write a new joke, right? So it's like, okay, here you go.
00:44:02
Speaker
Yes, I really, truly hope that anyone who played that game in Arabic got to laugh from that joke. If they did not laugh from that joke, then it was all for nothing.
00:44:14
Speaker
I can't remember. Did Reverse Mermaid actually make the cut? Yes, it is. I think that was one of the ones maybe that was added in the update. No, it was not. That was that was in at launch because that we have a Steam emoji of the Reverse Mermaid. and Okay. Okay, great. ah The only Drakknight game that has Steam emoji.
00:44:32
Speaker
um I can say that my students, because I've showed... I very purposely try to not show ah work from the games that I've worked on because it feels like...
00:44:44
Speaker
holding them host like hostage. first i don't know. Just like, yeah, look at, look, we're going to look at my work now and there's nothing you can do about it. Right? Like you're paying to be here and I'm going to show you my, I hate doing it. It feels weird.
00:44:59
Speaker
um But we have looked at exhibits from Monsters Expedition, and I can say that um Cool Skull is a big is a big fan favorite among students, usually. Cool Skull is great. I really like this bird because it's early enough in the game sure that it like everything is an exhibit, everything is an exhibit, and then the one exception to the or like the two exceptions in the entire game to this isn't an exhibit are we won an award,
00:45:26
Speaker
And look at this cool bird. You better not chop down this tree. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. I was actually just playing the game again last week. And I came across that. i This bird. And I'm like, oh, yeah, right. That's good one. I like that. um what What led you to replay the game?
00:45:43
Speaker
Well, so I'm redoing my website and I had to um record footage for a new animation reel. And so it started as okay, I'm going to go in and capture the footage I need, and then I just started playing the game.
00:45:59
Speaker
i was going to say, i guarantee that somewhere on one of our servers, we still have all the B-roll for when we were submitting to awards. Oh, yeah, should I ask? I didn't.
00:46:10
Speaker
I've got two. Do I have two? I have at least... I do have two. I've got... No, I've got three. Um... like bits of inside information about exhibits. I'm actually looking on my on my second screen. I've got it. Yeah.
00:46:23
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Tell us the secrets. OK, so there's a teddy bear yeah as an exhibit that is um my daughter's favorite teddy bear. That's her favorite stuffy. That's a real life stuffy.
00:46:36
Speaker
And when I started in games way back in the early aughts, I would always put in a little like Easter egg piece of art for my girlfriend at the time, now wife.
00:46:49
Speaker
And now i do it with, since my daughter was born, I do it for my daughter. So her stuffed animal is in the game. That's the first one. Second one, ah there's, I can't remember what the joke is, what the exhibit is, but there is, oh it's the car boot sale.
00:47:08
Speaker
I can't remember what the joke is, but there's like a bunch of like paintings and like knickknacks on a table. And those paintings are actually photographs of paintings that my grandfather did. My grandfather was a mechanical engineer his whole life, and then he retired and took up oil painting.
00:47:22
Speaker
And so, I mean, like they're tiny on screen. You can't, you can just tell that they're paintings. You can't really make out what they are, but they're my grandfather's paintings. That's two. And then what was the third one? I'm looking at the thing. And the third one is, and the third one is.
00:47:38
Speaker
That Kraken is actually your best friend.
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, he's divorced. So we like he's ah no, he's fine. um Oh, right. The crushed cars. I can't remember what the joke is for that one, too. What's the crushed cars one?
00:47:54
Speaker
It's like I think they confuse it for like Ikea flat pack something. Yes, I think that's it. That was ah car model I made years and years and years ago for like as a third party asset to like sell.
00:48:10
Speaker
And then I was like, oh, man, I need a car. Baby, I got one. Let me plug in my archive drive. Yeah. Love that. And you didn't even charge us a premium. No, absolutely not. My favorite exhibit, my favorite piece of art got cut.
00:48:24
Speaker
I can say that. i Was it the frog? No. No. Wait, the frog got cut? I think there's a frog in there somewhere. We have, because we've...
00:48:37
Speaker
there was a There was a frog exhibit. Okay, there were two. One of them was was living, and the and people felt weird about like holding it in captivity.
00:48:47
Speaker
Sure. So we we we cut we cut it because it felt... Because all of the living characters in the exhibit yeah are very, very specifically called out. They just live here. like The entire museum was built around that reverse mermaid.
00:49:02
Speaker
yeah you correct Yeah, right. right um Whereas the... And like the owl just moved there. Yeah. um But like... And the leeches, who knows?
00:49:13
Speaker
Sure. But I remember like... Pip had, Pip the writer had, um was having second thoughts about like that feeling too, too like captivity like. so and Is this why we pivoted with the friends?
00:49:32
Speaker
i We pivoted with the friends because we needed assets hurriedly and we were at the end of development and we were running out of texture memory. Yeah, I think also there was a, um because originally each like biome had its own friend.
00:49:47
Speaker
and the freaking gnomes all right the gnomes that haunts my dreams listeners they were gnomes at one point yeah there were uh i think it was a combination of we need these like now and also the snowmen are a fun nod to good snowman so um it was sort of like yeah two birds with one stone let's just make him snowman um yeah What were the other ones? There were the gnomes, there was the... was frogs in the swamp. Yeah.
00:50:17
Speaker
Frogs in the in the water environment. Yes, yes, scarecrows. That was this... I was sad to see the scarecrows go because the animation when the scarecrows got hugged, I really, really liked.
00:50:29
Speaker
I really liked that too. We should see if we can't rescue that 3D model for Spooky. it's just not it's It's not really a fit. We do have Scarecrows, actually. We've already got Scarecrow models. I know we already have. I'm just like, I remember that too.
00:50:45
Speaker
Did we keep the Scarecrow as like an exhibit? We, uh, maybe. We might have. i I don't know. I have strong memories of it, but I think that just might just be because I really liked it.
00:50:58
Speaker
There was for the for like the desert, there was a um like a dinosaur fossil that when you hugged it, like a skeletal thumbs up would come from the rock.
00:51:09
Speaker
was It was kind of funny. Fossil friend was so weird. Yeah, i know. it It was it was the weirdest one, I think. Yeah, fli po ah so such strong concepts. See, this is the thing. It's like, yeah, unfortunately, this was – I remember being the unfun producer at this time because this was also fun. But I was i remember just being like, we need to cut this down.
00:51:30
Speaker
Sure. kind Because like the the time estimate of getting everything to be in a really great state for that was after QA. Yeah, sure.
00:51:41
Speaker
My my favorite exhibit that got cut was cut because it was one of the things that came back from ah this is going to play well in China. And so we should go. It was Ghost Dinosaur.
00:51:52
Speaker
like I remember Ghost Dinosaur. Yes, that yes, that was in terms of it i don't actually remember the joke. I just remember like when I finished that piece of art, I was like, yeah,
00:52:05
Speaker
Adam DeGranus, you've done it again. Like, ha ha ha. Sometimes when you're releasing a game globally, you do really got to think about yeah what are the cultural taboos of different regions. sure Sure.
00:52:17
Speaker
I mean, if you want the footage of the ghost dinosaur for your animation reel, we can probably find an old version of the game. ah i have I actually have ghost dinosaur in, um not in my reel, but in my, ah there's ah it's part of a picture, part of ah like a big picture.
00:52:33
Speaker
um collage them all the different exhibits that i worked on um i'm yeah i'm glad ghost go sinus saw our rules uh so we spent a long time talking about monster's expedition which was tremendous but we haven't talked about electrifying or spooky and we're at the 58 minute mark but we also haven't talked about the games you've been working on like ash we can yeah we can we can just we can lightning round it For sure. Sure. i mean, yeah, let's let's let's do it.
00:53:01
Speaker
So, After Monsters, you worked on ah Desktop Dungeon? ah So, there I worked on one before that. So, I worked on um a cooperative deck builder called Battle Bands. And that was pretty cool. That was made by a local local local to me um where you um play with three other friends. And, you know, it's and it's a deck builder, um but you're collaboratively, like, building...
00:53:26
Speaker
um songs, like song sections. And each player, there's a bassist, there's a guitarist, there's a drummer and a keyboardist. And they all have different decks. And so you're sort of trying to like synergize strategies and stuff like that. And you're doing it against um another team of four players.
00:53:42
Speaker
or against there was like a campaign that had NPCs and there was a bunch of that that was a bunch of really real ah really cool art it was sort of inspired by like concert posters like show posters and i don't know so it had sort of the whole game sort of had like a little bit of like an adult swim vibe um so that was a lot of fun it didn't ah people who played it really really liked it but I mean even back then you know find an audience for a Um, cooperative, uh, competitive game was hard and it didn't quite find its audience, which is too bad.
00:54:16
Speaker
Um, and then after that was desktop dungeons rewind, which was, if you don't know desktop dungeons, sort of cult, uh, favorite strategy puzzle game from, um, 2012, 2013, I think.
00:54:31
Speaker
And this was a, like a big, uh, that was a 2d game. This was a big, like a big 3d remaster and a bunch of like new stuff was added. And it was sort of when we redid it, that's another thing that was sort of an interesting game to work on. It was the most aggressive schedule of any project that I've ever worked on.
00:54:50
Speaker
um Wait, more aggressive than a Electrifying Incident? ah be I mean, I would say yes, because Electrifying Incident, the scope of Electrifying Incident fit into that time frame.
00:55:03
Speaker
and ah start to finish DDR was nine months or was supposed to be nine months. We, we drifted a little bit, but that was a, the amount of stuff in desktop dungeons was shocking.
00:55:18
Speaker
So very, that was a very crunchy project, unfortunately, but it was cool. Like we, there were conversations about what to change from the original game and um certain people on the original team wanted to change things that I felt were like, really like, no, you can't change that. That's like one of the cool parts of the original game. And they were like, no, that was like a compromise that we made back then. We didn't want to do that back then. We're going to make the game that we sort of wanted to make back then.
00:55:47
Speaker
And so we, we changed some stuff and I, Uh, fans of the original sort of griped about a few of the creative decisions we made on the remaster. um but I still look at the, what we did in the remaster. I'm like, man, this is a really good looking game. And it's also just like, it's the mechanics of that game are still like exquisite. It's a really fun, sort of weird strategy game.
00:56:08
Speaker
And then, um, when I was working on that game, i met my current, uh, just collaborative brother, dude named Ash Peter. Um, he was the code lead.
00:56:20
Speaker
Uh, and we just, we got along super well. We worked well together. we share a design sensibility. Um, so after, ah desktop dungeons, which again was like a pretty crunchy project. We said like, Hey man, how about after this? We just, we take some time. We like jam on some stuff. We just like enjoy practicing the craft and we sort of see what happens. We just like, you know, have fun making games and,
00:56:46
Speaker
ah We prototyped some stuff. And then one of those things was like, oh, that was actually pretty good. And we kept working on it. And we we very intentionally said at the start, like, we are not going to take this seriously.
00:56:57
Speaker
We are going to like, this is for fun. Let's just like not treat this like a real project. And then after, i don't know, maybe two or three months of working on one of the prototypes, we were like, yeah I've got a confession. I'm kind of taking this seriously. And he was like, yeah, I am too.
00:57:15
Speaker
And so we decided to like, okay, well, let's keep working on this, see where it goes. And it we finished it. We created a studio. it's It's just us. It's called Ash and Adams Games.
00:57:25
Speaker
And really the studio is sort of just a legal, I don't know, bit of hoop jumping so we can like release on Steam and stuff like that. um But now we're working on another title called Existential Treads.
00:57:37
Speaker
And ah the first game, and Adams Gobsmacked, that was a chaotic kind of throwback-y arena shooter or arena action game. There is shooting in it, but it's not. You can also, you play as this little hyperactive goblin in a post-Human's Earth and you're running around and climbing on walls and kicking stuff and occasionally shooting things.
00:57:59
Speaker
And it's good. Like Ash and I, we both want to make ah small, short, like you play them for two hours and you're like, wow, what a cool game. I'm done. I can go do something else, right? And you can just spend time thinking about the game or you can go back and play it again if you want to. But we we very intentionally aren't trying to make stuff that just overstays its welcome short and sweet.
00:58:20
Speaker
And so that was sort of retro shooter. And now we're working on Existential Treads, which is a little bit of a retro, like top-down um tank game.
00:58:31
Speaker
combined with but a settlement builder. And it's all about, it's very fun, bouncy actions. It's got sort of like the playful obnoxiousness that gobsmacked had. That's one of the sensibilities I think we share.
00:58:43
Speaker
But then also it has this ah settlement building component. And it's really the game. I would say the game is about community and about cooperation and working together and and building a place where everybody is welcome.
00:58:57
Speaker
And then you've got a bunch of explosions also, which are, that's, kind of something very heartfelt and then something obnoxious. I think that's that's really the gestalt that we are really exploring.
00:59:09
Speaker
And there might be another game after this. We're actually finishing up a demo by the end of this month, a public demo. So it'll get out there. um People can play it. we ah Just like we want to make games that don't take too long to play, we very intentionally don't want to make a game that takes longer than 12 months to make.
00:59:29
Speaker
um So there might be more after this, but like our agreement right now is we finish what we start. But before we start something new, we say, do we actually want to do another one?
00:59:40
Speaker
And this time we did. I suspect that we'll want to do ah at least one more, but we'll see. It's fun. It's nice to be able to, um you know, i I teach, I work with Alan. I i have other um teams that I work with and that's sort of how I make a living.
00:59:55
Speaker
My work with Ash is really just let's make games that we want to play. If they sell, awesome. If they don't, that's okay. Let's just like practice the craft and see and and build a body of work for right now. Time is crazy and it's always moving. And who knows if we'll have another chance to just make things for the joy of making them, right?
01:00:15
Speaker
and um So we're kind of living in the moment and doing that. And if one of them becomes a hit, amazing. But if they don't, we still have like a body of work that we can say, wow, look, the we think these are great games and I'm so happy we got to make them with each other.
01:00:31
Speaker
Awesome. And then, yeah, you came back on for Electrifying Incident in ah your favorite game engine. Yeah. Yeah. You can gripe about Goddard if you want.
01:00:41
Speaker
I don't, I mean... Yeah, there's not ah there's not much to say. i'm the the I like the spirit of what they're trying to do, right? Like I think open source software is awesome philosophically.
01:00:57
Speaker
I'm totally on board with that right now. The way that like engines usually are at the start, they're real they're made for engineers and the tooling is not quite there yet for artists.
01:01:11
Speaker
And it sort of seems like the Well, no, I don't want to, because it's like ah thing that I, ah this is another only thing that I try to tell students that it's really easy to complain about stuff on the internet. And I certainly have complained about Godot on the internet before.
01:01:29
Speaker
It's occasionally a joke on our team calls, but how decisions get made within an organization is not always like obvious. And You know, to like think back to, you know, desktop dungeons, there were people who complained about like, oh, why'd you change X? Why'd you change Y?
01:01:46
Speaker
But like, if those people were in the conversations that we had over, you know, weeks and months, um maybe they still would say like, oh, that's, I'm still bummed that this thing got changed, but I think they would understand like, okay, well, you know, they, this is how they were weighing stuff. This was, these were all the inputs and this was the output they got from it. Right.
01:02:08
Speaker
And so I look at what the folks making Godot are doing and like where they end up and, you know, what they choose to prioritize and stuff like that. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I i wish ah I wish the parts of the engine that I had to interact with frequently worked differently.
01:02:25
Speaker
But I don't think that like like they know what they're doing. Right. And I'm not privy to all of the conversations. And so i don't know. My hope is that they have what I refer to as the Blender 2.8 moment, where they're like, okay, let's make a push for greater market share. let's Let's do a big overhaul of certain things that are, it's going to be painful to do this overhaul. It's going to take a lot of work, but we can fix UI, UX stuff. We can make changes to our foundation, right? I don't mean like the foundation that runs the thing. I mean like structural foundation, right?
01:03:03
Speaker
And it's going to make future stuff a lot easier to do or ah make, you know, ah increasing market share more likely. um Because right now it does feel like this is for engineers, but in my opinion, not too many other folks.
01:03:20
Speaker
But I will say, like, my experience working on electrifying incident was just like chainsaw noise emotionally.
01:03:31
Speaker
And then like on Spooky, it's, I don't know, like a rattling fan. you know It's way it's it's less like... it's like i wish What do you think the difference between those projects was then?
01:03:45
Speaker
I mean, it's really just like time spent, right? like It's still the same engine, effectively. between those two things. But now I i just have more time under like the, the way, the way Godot is structured and the way the art tools are set up in some cases, it's like really just not what one would expect.
01:04:10
Speaker
It's not what I expected. I shouldn't put it generally. Cause that's sort it's like this passive, don't know. It's my only passive aggressive thing to do. You know, I've like worked with a lot of different engines and,
01:04:21
Speaker
ah My start in games, like back when I started, like there weren't editors. I mean, there were editors, but like the first few games that I worked on and I did VFX, those were typed scripts, right? like I'm not someone who needs super fancy tools.
01:04:40
Speaker
Some of the tools in Godot are just like, third in my opinion, some really odd decisions were made when designing these tools. But now I understand those on this one, right? Like diving in and saying, hey, we're going to six week project, figure this out. It's like, okay, well, cool.
01:04:58
Speaker
Like this is really not what I expected. You know, the timeline on Spooky is Spooky Express is longer. So I've got more time to sort of figure it out. And I still think there's a lot of those weird decisions, but I've been wrestling with them for a little bit now. and So I understand like, okay, well,
01:05:17
Speaker
This is still weird, but I know I can push this button here and then I can do this and I can do this. And then, you know, the thing happens that I'm trying to make happen in my And to their credit, they're really good at um regular updates.
01:05:30
Speaker
So I do keep my eye on like whatever they're working on for each you know point release and stuff like that. And don't know. Got a vigil candle lit for like, oh, maybe they'll add this feature and eventually one day that will happen.
01:05:45
Speaker
And hoo boy, I'll be so happy. If there's one thing that Godot could change that would make your life, it would make you sing, what would it be? Sing. i would honestly, the biggest thing, you know, right now their visual shader editor doesn't have, you can do a lot more if you're typing shader code than you can actually do with the visual editor. Like the visual editor just has stuff that you can't do in it.
01:06:14
Speaker
um Not without, I shouldn't say that because it's not technically right. There are ways you can do it. You just sort of have to go around Robin Hood's barn to make certain things happen. And it's like, yeah, man, if if the visual editor was just like a one-to-one visual version of the shader language, that would be great.
01:06:35
Speaker
if If that happened, I'd be like, okay, sweet. I'm, I no longer feel like I'm on crutches. Cause that's, that's the big thing, right? Like for me, one of the the frustrating thing is that, you know, i feel like I am capable of making, of designing an art style and, you know, making, uh, making all these assets and, you know, making it happen to a certain level that I'm very, very happy with.
01:07:03
Speaker
But then in the engine, the engine fights against me right to and i can't ah a game in godot right now just feel like man i can't do my best which is frustrating so that's a big one i think the close runner-up is just like if they overhauled just totally overhauled uh how particle systems work i would be so so happy because there's just a bunch of that's that's one of the places where i'm just like man i I know this was done for reasons, but I really, i i wish I could read a transcript of the conversation that led you to make your particle system work this way. Because it it just feels like certain stuff is omitted, certain stuff is there. The way everything works is like, I don't know.
01:07:51
Speaker
Every time you want to make a right turn, you've got to make three lefts. That's what it feels like. It's just like, it's weird. I don't know. It's weird. How about you? i know on the team, I'm the one that's like usually a grump about the technology. But is ah Alan, is there anything that like you've seen that's like, oh, that's that's weird. I wish that worked differently.
01:08:10
Speaker
Hmm. I i touch Godot less than some other team members. Sure. um I think something seen is like, think, and I think we could restructure the project to mitigate this, but I think the way we currently have Spooky Express set up, a lot of different types have changed it, might touch the same file.
01:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, sure. And so like merging, I think some things is like more painful than it needs to be. Like, actually, like even just like, touching nothing sometimes it just like makes random changes to the files like like oh this this uid used to be in this file and now it's not or like is here now when it wasn't before i'm like what what what changed like yeah so there's some weirdness there which makes like diffing changes yeah more painful than it should be really yeah So that that's a big one that I see a lot of the time.
01:09:05
Speaker
Trying to think if there's anything else. That's the first one that comes to mind. so Sure. Yeah, I think that, you know, I've noticed that kind of stuff too. And I i feel like one of the reasons that I'm, I feel like I want to qualify any critique I make of the engine is that I just, you know, every engine has a grain to it, like a piece of wood. And I just don't,
01:09:29
Speaker
I don't want to make complaints that are overly bold and then have it be pointed out like, hey, numbskull, you're just doing doing it wrong. It's actually super easy, which, you know, is totally po like, you know, opening the project and then closing it and saying, do you want to save your changed files? I'm like, I don't think I touched anything. So no question mark. But like really so much of my time with Godot is spent just shrugging my shoulders like, yeah.
01:09:58
Speaker
I don't know. Maybe. ah Just because I don't know. And i suspect that you know the more time I spend with the engine, the more time I learn what that grain is.
01:10:10
Speaker
Those things will stop being confusing or puzzling or whatever. But um you know right now they are. So I don't know. um But I think even transitioning from 4.3 to 4.4, I think there were a few things that were sticking points on an electronic instance that were way better on Spook Express. Like I remember in the last 20th instance, making changes while the game, while the editor was open. Oh yeah. It was like really unreal. So I just have to get into the habit of like, okay, I'm going to close Goto, then I'm going to pull changes, yeah then I'm going to reopen Goto. And that's not an issue anymore. So like, I think, I think they're getting there.
01:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, Good job, company. Good job, foundation. Thank you, open source developers. Yeah, I that's the other thing too like it's open source software like come on like they're not you're not having to pay for it right like uh show some gratitude i'm saying that to me really i'm not saying it to anybody else on the team just i'm just saying it to me yeah i was gonna say um i'm sure we'll send an email next time we uh pay the license fee hey i'm drag next sponsor scoto
01:11:23
Speaker
Hey, good job. Thumbed here as sponsorship. I will say that every time I look at what the other engine companies are doing, yeah just like, let's let's let's be nice and say, as corporate citizens of the world, sure I look at Godot and I think, yeah!
01:11:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, Godot, open source software. yeah Like this. But yeah, and now we're... working on spooky express which is gonna wrap up development in an indeterminate public to the public amount of time uh but it is you know there there is an end date when this podcast comes out we will have announced the release date oh that's true so that's october 21st uh yes when when is this episode coming out
01:12:18
Speaker
In like six weeks. Oh, wow. Okay, yeah. Then we can talk about all all kinds of future stuff. yeah Okay, yeah. You got any predictions? ah but I've got some grim ones, but I i don't... Let's not do let's not do those.
01:12:33
Speaker
ah I think... I'm just trying to think about game stuff. Oh, well, actually, if it's in six weeks, yeah. the I mean, the Existential Treads demo is definitely out.
01:12:45
Speaker
I don't know how much crossover with the audience of a drag neck podcast. And there is with like existential treads, but if you want to play a goofy action game, go check it out. It's on, it'll be on steam and yeah there you go.
01:13:00
Speaker
What, yeah. What are your ah predictions go? What's your craziest prediction for the world? Six weeks. Um, I know you're going to like places that you don't want to like speak it. Yeah. its Yeah. I don't, I'm trying to think of like a neutral to positive one.
01:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, sure. um Also, i'm like there's a couple things that I know will be announced by then, but like... I'm not supposed to know now. so it's like i can't You can't publicly say like, yeah ah wait you you could claim like, oh yeah, i'm good like just I'm about to edit something in from the same week of this podcast. Hang hang The spirits are speaking through me. The spirits are speaking through me.
01:13:44
Speaker
Hey, that Nintendo Direct sure was interesting, huh? Oh man, oh there was a lot of good stuff there. yeah ah Yeah, that Nintendo Direct that came out on on which which date did it, if it was going to come out on? Oh, it came out on... and it featured... and I can't believe they shadow dropped...
01:14:08
Speaker
you know. Yeah. yeah I mean, all that stuff. It really... You heard you're hearing it here first. like What an age we live in. Yes. um Anyways. can't believe they gave Mario a gun. Again?
01:14:24
Speaker
Oh, man. um i will Speaking of Mario with God, I will say those Mario and Rabbids games that Ubisoft put out. Yeah. Underappreciated tactical strategy. ah they're good They're great.
01:14:34
Speaker
Like as far as like examples of a genre, they're so, so good. Yeah. It's like, why are the Rabbids, which are the minions but didn't get big? Yeah. ah Why are they in an XCOM game with Mario? who Yeah.
01:14:49
Speaker
They are. And it's really good. It is a really weird... I mean, I'm sure they've talked about how that mashup happened. Yeah. ah They wanted to work with Mario, and so they invited Nintendo to see a prototype, and Miyamoto was in the room, and he asked, ah where did you like what game did you rip the Mario model from? And they said, we made this.
01:15:12
Speaker
And they said, oh my gosh, you have attention to detail. Sure. can trust you with the IP. And then they gave Mario a gun. That is so funny. Is that really like the short version of it? Oh, wow. That's actually the story is they were sold because they made a Mario character model from scratch that looked official and convinced Miyamoto that they had ripped it from a data mining Nintendo game.
01:15:38
Speaker
Oh, wow. what ah What a funny individual, Miyamoto. Yes. ah Anyways, yeah, if you want Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Yoshi holding freaking guns.
01:15:51
Speaker
Yeah. ah Yeah, no, those are those are good games. um I do not believe those are in the Thinky Games database, but they are they are they are surprisingly good strategy games.
01:16:03
Speaker
Yeah. All right, I think we're all over the place. Do you have any last things that you want to plug? Anything else that you want to chat about? No, I mean, you know, um yeah, existential treads.
01:16:16
Speaker
You were so nervous about this, ah like, having enough to discuss in this episode. I was not, I was not nervous. No, not you, Adam. I, I just wanted to make sure you like, listen, I made a mistake early on.
01:16:30
Speaker
I wanted to, I was trying to avoid making the mistake of telling the story and then losing the thread. And then I did that. But now that that's happened, I found myself embracing it. Yeah. I think that's, right answer's that's a lesson for life.
01:16:42
Speaker
This is a conversation between three people who have worked together on and off for five years, yeah five, five and a half years. Yeah.
Musical Background and Experiences
01:16:50
Speaker
ah just chatting about Godot and musical instruments.
01:16:58
Speaker
Oh, yeah, And Warrior and Rabbits. Oh, yeah, we have to do another 10-minute digression on musical instruments. I know, I know, I know. i'll' ah of it Two minutes. Two minutes. Yeah, go for it.
01:17:09
Speaker
ah Seren, when did you... What instrument would you say is, like, your main instrument? Do you have... ah For real violin that I'll tell you what violin is, ah if I ever worked on a game that was just like an obscene hit and I didn't have to worry about money for like at least a few years.
01:17:28
Speaker
Yeah. I would take time off to just like learn how to play violin. It's really good. Violin or cello, maybe. Yeah. um I will say if you have ah big if you have bigger hands, cello is definitely easier. Yeah, yeah. I had... but Violin is the... ah i so I picked up violin when I was in third grade and i wanted i wanted wanted to do cello and then i wanted to do double bass but i rode the bus home and my parents wanted me to practice at home and so they said no you're gonna you're gonna pick a violin uh i was also playing piano at the time and like a cup and a couple of other instruments and they all used uh either the treble clef or the bass clef so viola was a non-option because that uses its own messed up uh cleft the alto cleft where um um middle c is or c5 however you want to write the note yeah is uh the middle line of the staff oh weird yeah it's bizarre um i had no idea that's crazy so so and my parents were convinced was going to mess me up on other instruments if i learned a third clef at this at in elementary school so they shoved me into violin so yeah i did violin and then my fingers grew larger and then i was like well this gets harder over time huh
01:18:38
Speaker
are ah Oh, yeah. Wow, that's crazy. hadn't considered that. Are your parents both musicians? That sounds like they're both musicians. My dad was never a musician, but on my mom's side, I come from come a musical family where basically everyone has...
01:18:55
Speaker
Through a certain – you can trace one straight line through genealogy of like, yep, you you directed a marching band. Yep, you played instrument in a band for like that for like decades. Yep, you did. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Wow. like Basically, yes, for when I was a very young child, piano, some or like some early wooded like wind instruments, violin, um leads into viola, cello, and bass.
01:19:20
Speaker
very easily, did handbells, did other there did learn the full percussion suite, and then eventually in ah high school, I ended up Having an empty period at one point between – I would – this school bused me to the university to go take college classes on the high school's dime.
01:19:41
Speaker
and Which – great gig if you could s swing it. Yeah, sure. Honestly, just not having to pay for college courses. com Like just go go learn from professors.
01:19:51
Speaker
Great stuff. ah But there was like an in-between period where it's like some days the bus would need an extra hour. And so i' the band and the band director was not teaching anything during that time.
01:20:05
Speaker
And so basically they said, well, whatever. Time to teach you every instrument in the band. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. So um no, I i can – I'm very rusty at a lot of instruments right now, but like give give me a week and I can get up and running again on that. Yeah, that's awesome.
01:20:24
Speaker
Wow. Great. um Every time ah ever do I say this out loud on like a game team, ah this will be funny if because we're going to record with ah Priscilla pretty soon, also about spooky.
01:20:34
Speaker
um i don't think that Priscilla knows any of this because – uh like whenever i would tell someone on ah on a team and the composers and the composers like i had to go secure all of these live instruments and i never thought to ask if anyone on the team knew all of the instruments yeah and i'm like no one asks me if i can play a musical history you're like one of the first in years that's asked we're like we're we're obviously past the end of the podcast but like that is immediately like i've got a i don't know a handful of follow-up questions about uh
01:21:08
Speaker
you know, ah your experience and other stories and stuff like that. But hey, we can save it. We can save it for the next time we work. I will just say this. I've professionally turned Europe. Oh, okay. Well, I did not know any of this either.
01:21:20
Speaker
i i've
Maintaining Privacy Online
01:21:21
Speaker
I've had another. I've i've been a teacher. i've been i mean based ah music I've been a music teacher and I've been a professional music like musician, basically. Well, this is like, this is perfect.
01:21:31
Speaker
Bring this up. ah bring this up to Priscilla, who's like, A, also just super fun to chat to. Yes. Like, that that is going to be just like a really good topic of conversation. Oh, yeah. No, that's going to for all of you, think.
01:21:43
Speaker
Yeah. ah Anyways, this will, yeah, now this is on the record. Yes. So people, people will, people have the chance to actually know this about me now. um I tend, yeah, because as online of a person as I am, like, if you if you scroll through all my social media,
01:21:59
Speaker
You'll find out my political takes and what I work on, but you will not find out information about my public, my personal life, really. So yeah, yeah that that's just kind of the the arbitrary line that I've drawn.
01:22:12
Speaker
Well, I'm happy that this is out now because that is like such a fun detail to know. Yeah, I've I've I've done a lot in my life. um I have I have lived a complicated happy life.
01:22:29
Speaker
And you also made all of those incredibly accurate predictions too. Exactly. and And the future can come through me. Yeah. it's All right. ah Thank you again. Where can people find you online?
01:22:40
Speaker
ah I'm Adam DeGranis on Blue Sky. i am. Oh, geez. I guess that's it now. Yeah. Welcome. That's the only social media people use. Yeah. Chickadeegames.com is my professional site.
01:22:55
Speaker
um But
Podcast Conclusion
01:22:56
Speaker
then... ah Ask, where am I online? Just ask Seren and Alan, and they'll... right oh are I'll direct everyone to your popping off Snapchat account, or...
01:23:11
Speaker
but but I'm trying to think of social media platforms that technically are still running, but feel defucked. Best place to hit me is probably MySpace. i Yeah. saw yeah Well, I think that was actually gone, but yes.
01:23:25
Speaker
No, I actually... i ah i understand like i do think it's actually still around. Yes! It was like a year ago, at least. Yes, I love that. Tom, Tom's always in my top nine. All right.
01:23:38
Speaker
All right. ah Thank you again for joining. This has been lovely conversation. And thank you for listening to the Draconeck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com.
01:23:51
Speaker
Wouldn't you believe it? Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melody Zawaniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.