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Episode 26: Luke Spierewka (Pup Champs)
231 Plays21 days ago
In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Luke Spierewka, the developer behind Pup Champs and Railbound. Topics include the development of Afterburn's games, developing games in shorter turnarounds, and lessons learned across multiple successive puzzle games.
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Guest
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Drakknack 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 Drakknack and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Drakknack at Drakknack and Friends.
00:00:36
Speaker
I am. Today, we're joined by Luke from Afterburn, who you may know from his work on games like Railbound and the upcoming or recently released, depending on when you listen to this, Pup Champs.
00:00:47
Speaker
How are you doing today? Hello, nice to be here.
Luke's Entry into Gaming Industry
00:00:51
Speaker
Can you give yourself a little bit more of an introduction with like your path into the industry and some other games that you worked on?
00:01:01
Speaker
Where to start, honestly, because I've been doing this for more than 10 years now. But I guess like my start into the industry was when I've had the chance to work on the prototype of a game called Superhot.
00:01:13
Speaker
That was 10 years ago. And that was sort of a lucky break into the industry because it allowed me to sort of start from a really good position because that was a very sort of recognized prototype and that gave me some like contacts and friends that then helped me out later.
Experience with Gwent and Mentorship
00:01:31
Speaker
But I worked on that for a year and then I decided to finish my university studies. So I went back, did my bachelor's and then worked then worked at CD Projekt for two years.
00:01:42
Speaker
I was working on the Gwent Witcher card game. so not unlike the most prestigious project, but that actually turned out to be really nice because when I was joining the company, I thought they're going to put me on Cyberpunk because everybody was working on Cyberpunk back then.
00:01:57
Speaker
But sort of working on the, let's call it like B project in the company made it less like intense, but I still had access to really good mentors and people that taught me a lot. And I feel like The pace that we can have with our games that we're making, sort of that I started making after at working at CD Projekt was only possible because I worked with these really great like programmers and designers and everybody else.
00:02:23
Speaker
So it was really
Founding of Afterburn
00:02:24
Speaker
nice. And after two years, I decided that I'm actually like kind of done with card games. So I left City Projects and it was a bunch of things coalescing at the same time, like my partner, well, then partner, now wife, who's co-running the studio with me, sort of wanted to focus on their medical studies.
00:02:41
Speaker
We wanted to change cities. Living war so was was a bit expensive. We had some money saved up. And also we've heard about some like cheap office spaces that we could rent if we go back to the city where I finished my studies.
00:02:53
Speaker
which is how Afterburn got started, sort of as a myriad of these different things coalescing at the
Development of Golf Peaks
00:02:59
Speaker
same time. So in March 2018, we started sort of working on our own projects, sort of bumbling for three months with different prototypes. Like, it wasn't like, oh, let's make puzzle games from the get-go.
00:03:11
Speaker
kind of... Like we kind of arrived at by accident because initially we started working on like a binding of Isaac type roguelike, but it turned out that I'm really bad at like numerical design. So that one didn't go anywhere and some other stuff that we tried out.
00:03:25
Speaker
And then one day i basically ah like i was browsing some stuff and I was thinking about what could be prototype. And I had this idea for golf peaks that kind of just came together as a full design in my head in like,
00:03:39
Speaker
within minutes. It's really weird to think about it because like I even have like a photo of the design that I drew on the blackboard that shows sort of the how the game's gonna be laid out and the camera perspective and everything.
00:03:53
Speaker
And the game kind of turned out like this, just way prettier than what I drew on the blackboard. And the sort of the main idea behind Golf Beaks was let's try and do something that's really, like really, really tiny. Like let's put all of ourselves into a project that we can finish in three months. Of course, it wasn't three months. It was six months.
00:04:12
Speaker
But let's do something that's kind of like our calling card, like a small game that we can show to people and say, like, this is the quality we can reach. And sort of that mentality, um,
00:04:23
Speaker
From that mentality, a lot of the later design decisions and and project development decisions even springed
Learning Publishing and Game Design
00:04:30
Speaker
forward from. So one of the reasons why the game is on mobile was because we felt it's like it's a small game, so it's going to be a better fit for mobile compared to Steam, for example.
00:04:40
Speaker
the game is premium on mobile because we knew that within three months, turned out to be six months, but still we wouldn't have time to implement in-app purchases and ads and whatever. So we just went premium because that was the easiest to do. And sort of a lot of the other decisions ah regarding the the price point and the features and the content and everything just kind of sprang from that initial point and through some like a combination of luck because people were even back then were telling us like don't do premium it's not going to do well it doesn't sell on mobile in 2018 and through bunch of other stuff it turned out to actually work out for us and that kind of gave us the starting point of being able to sustain ourselves doing self-published games and we've been doing it for seven years now surprisingly
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's a journey. What do you think from Gulf Peaks, other than like the experience of being able to ship a small game in a smaller time window, what would you say that like working on that game taught you the most?
00:05:43
Speaker
Oh, a lot. I would say... like ah So the main thing was with Golf Peaks, we also wanted to like try out all of the different paths. We actually released like one free game that is still available on iOS, which was a game-gen game. And that kind of was our first pick at App Store in trying out how does the publishing process for a game actually look like?
00:06:05
Speaker
How do you upload the builds? How do you set up the screenshots? How do you set up the descriptions? So we tried it out first there ah just to be able to... like go through that process once before we actually start charging people for the game.
00:06:19
Speaker
And Goldface was kind of like an evolution of that. uh, it allowed us to like test out the steam backend and test out the app store backend. And it taught us a lot in terms of like, how do you actually get from ah build on your computer to a game that people can play on all these different platforms?
Design Philosophy and Player Feedback
00:06:35
Speaker
Uh, so that was definitely like one thing, but also like, I feel like within the process of making that game and making those decisions and testing it on people and everything, we kind of found the bedrock for how the company is going to operate and our design ethos and everything. So one of the most crucial things we've done was sort of we spent the first month on a prototype.
00:06:59
Speaker
It was ugly as hell. But the main thing about it was When we had that, we went to a game, like a laid back game developer event that we have in Poland. um It's basically like a weekend of drinking and having like casual chats with people. I mean, like most gaming events, but still.
00:07:16
Speaker
um And we've shown the game to people over there. It was actually like a really wild time. Like we bought a secondhand MacBook, like three days before the event and had it shipped from like Polish, a Polish version of eBay.
00:07:29
Speaker
And as we were driving to the events, we were figuring out how to build the game to iOS for the first time because we had iPhones, but we didn't have Mac books. Uh, so we couldn't like show the game to people unless we figured it out. So it was a wild time.
00:07:43
Speaker
And when we went to the events, we showed the game around to people in its early stage. And the game, like the reception that we've had there sort of this informed our approach to puzzle design and difficulty progression ever since. Because the the first prototype of golf peaks that people actually saw was sort of an antithesis of how we design them now.
00:08:07
Speaker
It was closer to Steven's sausage roll in a way, but worse because it was like, every single level would introduce you to multiple new mechanics and also introduce them via text boxes. So to us, it didn't feel bad at the time, but to everybody that sort of laid their hands on the phone, like we could immediately see them like just skipping through all the text boxes and our faces would like turn pale as we saw like they they they were just not getting it.
00:08:33
Speaker
And that sort of taught us the importance of uh sort of going hard the other way around and trying to first like design the mechanics in a way that's approachable and that you can learn from the layout of the level and from the tools that you give to the player but also like not introducing too many concepts simultaneously at the same time so usually in afterbone games like we try very hard to sort of distill our games into like if you have a mechanic so for example let's let's take golf picks as an example like playing a card and golf picks, so moving moving the ball around the on the grid, theoretically is one mechanic, but it's actually composed of multiple mechanics because there's card selection that comes into play, there's the direction selection that comes into play.
00:09:18
Speaker
so can So for most mechanics that we initially considered to be like one single mechanic, we've realized that you can actually split them further. so ah split them further further into interactions and then try and design puzzles around teaching those interactions. So making sure that we can like, tea and and making sure that we prioritize them. So for example, like if you have a multi-stage mechanic that's like has one interaction and has a second interaction, there's there's like a twist of the mechanic.
00:09:44
Speaker
Like you don't need to introduce all of them in a single puzzle. Instead, let's like focus on them. And if we feel that even like just introducing it is a bit too difficult, then we usually like also try to reinforce it with like a small puzzle, like not a tutorial puzzle, but like a small puzzle that plays on that concept concept again so that we can see as designers that as the player, you've realized the point of this mechanic and how it interacts with everything else.
00:10:11
Speaker
So I would say that's sort of the core learning that we got from Gulf Peaks that we have been sort of crafting and our games ever since.
Early Playtesting and Complexity Challenges
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a real through line there. like You can see that...
00:10:23
Speaker
focus on approachability in all of your games, I think. And you you you first picked up on that from watching people play Gulf Peaks. At what point in Gulf Peaks development was that? Like you said, it was a six month development. Like what point did you have that realization?
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, I would say like it was a month in development. So it was a very early version of the game, like it didn't look great. um We had like 10 puzzles total in the prototype and we felt like, to us, like playing internally, it felt good. But as as soon as we saw people actually putting their hands on it, we realized like those 10 puzzles needs to be stretched, at least in ah in the game that we wanted to make, needed to be stretched into like 20 or 30 puzzles to allow breathing space for ah people to enjoy those mechanics and learn them and internalize how they work.
00:11:14
Speaker
Yeah. And who were you testing on? like Because i I also feel like there's a certain level of like the playtest data you get is somewhat dependent on the players and the expectations of the players and the... Oh, absolutely. absolutely and that was like, and that was the even more horrifying thing because we tested it on game developers.
00:11:32
Speaker
So we like, our assumption was like, if these people have trouble with this game, then we're in a really bad place. and we need to sort of try and climb out of it. so So our assumption was like, if professional designers are not, like they don't want to read these text boxes and they don't want to internalize these levels and get bored after like level four and they kind of just play it out of being nice to us, then if a real player engages with the game, they're goingnna get butre going to try and drop it even faster. So we need to it's not about dumping down the game, it's about figuring out why are they having trouble interacting with the game and what can we do to make it more pleasant to them.
00:12:11
Speaker
And how did that lead you into Invento? ah So Inventor was a really weird one because, so for Golf Peaks, it was always intended to be our sort of loss leader. As I said, it was it was supposed to be a calling card for the company. And our goal was to make zero money from this game.
00:12:30
Speaker
It was there to, like our plan as we were sunday starting the company was let's produce a really small but polished game so we can show what we're capable of. and do it quickly in like three to six months and then let's spend a year and a half making the actual game that we want to make.
00:12:46
Speaker
But as it turned out, Gulf Peaks did make money and part of that was because we were scrappy and we're like we're based in Poland and the budget for the game was kind of laughable, honestly, at least like even to compared to our current budgets.
00:13:02
Speaker
But it made the money back so we figured we figured like Let's see if this wasn't an accident. Like, let's see if this is reproducible. And if we can, within the same parameters, make a similar game, not a similar game, but like, not not like a clone or a sequel or something like that. A similar scoped game.
00:13:22
Speaker
Yes, exactly. A similarly scoped game, which is going to allow us to see if this is reproducible, but also how much we've grown within the process. Because now we had some codes. Now we knew how the stores worked, so we also wanted to see like if we give ourselves another six months, can we make something that's even better? And that's how Inventor got born.
00:13:41
Speaker
About
Invento and Replicating Success
00:13:42
Speaker
a month after we shipped the DLC for Golf Beaks, because after we released Golf Beaks, we also did some like free DLCs with some extra levels, just to like make the game have more content, because we felt like we needed that.
00:13:54
Speaker
we went to a game jam and we came out with a prototype that was completely not about cooking. was actually about textile design. ah But the core mechanic was the same. We've actually like changed the theme of the game during development as we realized like textiles are probably not going to be super interesting to people.
00:14:10
Speaker
So let's try and figure out something that's more exciting. And we were really into cooking at that point. And that's kind of how it went. So that's that's how Inventa got started. um But also like during development, we've we've decided like, let's try and up ourselves in terms of golf peaks didn't have any characters and didn't have any story.
00:14:32
Speaker
So let's see if we can try and like still give ourselves six months and make a similar scoped game, but let's up it a little bit by adding the story and also One of the reasons behind that was also because golf picks didn't have any characters, like mascot characters. It was really hard to market the game because, i mean, there's only so many times you can like show the golf layouts, like the grid layouts with a golf ball on it to create compelling promotional artwork.
00:14:59
Speaker
So this time around, we decided, like people love cats. We love cats. ah Let's do cats. And that's been also like the fruit line for all of our later games. always have mascot character. we always have like a masterd character because it helps us to entice people to play the game by this like cute cat or dog or whatever.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, and how early do you try and put that in in testing? Like when you're showing people, like other developers, people that you're trying to get early like design feedback for, are you making sure to have like the cute aesthetic ah mascot in those builds? Or is it first really just trying to lock down the core game loop and core game mechanic and make sure that's good, and then figuring out what makes sense for that?
00:15:47
Speaker
um So there's like a bunch of things I could unpack here. So one of them is like the mascot is always like, is always not like a core thing. It's very helpful and we try to like figure out something that's nice and that sort of makes sense within the context of the game.
00:16:05
Speaker
But I would say they usually come in late and that's something we always start like worrying about more as we start showing the game to actual players, like people who who will purchase the game.
00:16:18
Speaker
ah In those early builds, we don't focus on the mascots that much because the story also comes in late. We know it's... like We're happy with what' how it comes out, usually, but it's not like a core focus for us. like We don't have a narrative designer, for example. It's mostly like our group that's currently developing the game is sort of trying to figure out the story and how it should be, but it's not...
00:16:40
Speaker
Like, we always focus on the puzzles first and the rest is a nice bonus for everybody else. So that's one thing. The other thing is we test our games on peers and players and everybody else way too late in the process.
00:16:55
Speaker
Like, every single time we develop, we try and, like, make a new game, I always want to start doing it earlier, but I also, like... hold myself back because i I always feel like, oh, this is not good enough. Like we need to have this and this and this, and then we can start showing it to people.
00:17:10
Speaker
Whereas we should probably be like showing it as it's like really, really ugly and really underdeveloped. I feel like Golf Peaks was actually the, Golf Peaks and Invento were the ones where we shown it earliest.
00:17:22
Speaker
For Railbound, it was actually like a prototype, like a university prototype. So it got iterated on before we started for production on it. ah But for Pop Champs, I wish we would have showed it earlier, but that one also like required the most design overhauls.
00:17:38
Speaker
like we We showed it to people a little bit, but... Not to the extent I wanted to but I guess so it could also add here that the thing that we are internally looking for the most in our games is sort of is something very very elusive. It's hard for me to describe but I know an afterburn game where I see when I see one it's like we go for some prototypes and we go from some like design ideas and everything and it's not like It's not a science. It's more like if I play a prototype or I see like a design idea for a game, then I can determine if it's going to make a good game in the types of games we are making. And we're always trying to sort of push it a little bit. we're like
00:18:20
Speaker
As I've said, like we're not producing sequels or... or like copies of our own games, but they tend to have like a similar flavor. So whenever I'm like thinking about the core design and the mechanics and everything else, I'm trying to determine like, can we make a full fledged game out of it is one of my criteria.
00:18:38
Speaker
Like, is this just a game jam game? Like, is this a game that we can make 10 puzzles for and that's going to be it? And that's solid and it's fun, but it's not going to make a worthwhile commercial release versus this is a game where we can actually try and expand the mechanics and create like a full campaign out of.
00:18:54
Speaker
It's one of like the um core things that I look out for, for example. And how early in the process do usually like get a sense of like, yes, this is this is after Bunny enough or no, let's change change direction?
00:19:12
Speaker
I feel like for most of our titles, sort of the North Star has been, if we can't get a prototype of this done within less than a month, like I would, love i would love to keep it like under a week, but like, let's say less than a month, then we have no chances of making it within like nine months, I would say.
00:19:33
Speaker
So that's, that's been like one criteria is like the scope of the prototype sort of determines the scope of the full production, like in an ideal world, we'll probably be able to push out a prototype of a game within a week and know it's going to take us about like less than a year, like a year or max to make it.
00:19:51
Speaker
So if you're spending less time or you're you're taking longer than you'd expect to show people the project, how are you how do you approach difficulty balance and onboarding and things like making sure that your games have approachable difficulty curves?
00:20:11
Speaker
So one of the things was that we've sort of gotten a sense for it as we were developing our past games. So right now we are obviously like relying on the knowledge we've accumulated.
00:20:24
Speaker
But it's not a perfect one. like Every time we show a new game to people, we're surprised that we thought like we nailed it this time and we don't need do-over.
Balancing Game Difficulty
00:20:33
Speaker
But it's never like this. it's always like It's always too difficult and then we need to scale it back.
00:20:39
Speaker
ah but But of course, like we still accumulate this experience. So when we were making golf picks, we were heavily reliant on sharing it to people, sharing it especially to like new players, like somebody who isn't a gamer or somebody who isn't playing a lot or somebody who's some somebody's kid.
00:20:56
Speaker
or going to a trade show and then showing it there because you get a random random selection of people. like That was very important for us. And also like doing beta tests online for people who have never seen the game before.
00:21:08
Speaker
That taught us a lot in terms of like getting a sense for what's okay and what's not. But even then, like as you're developing a game and you're stewing in your own designs and your own ideas for several months, you kind of like you know that a mechanic works like this because you've programmed it yourself. like Our team is about very small, so you've programmed yourself or you've seen it a hundred times.
00:21:31
Speaker
And so like the internal difficulty ah always rises. And then we need like this, this like validation, like this sanity check from other people to help us bring it down and realize like, okay, no people get stuck for too long on this.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah. But I always wish we, we show it to people earlier, but yeah, it's always a tough balance of um you wanted to show it to people when it's in the best quality, but you also need need to show it when it's kind of like not done yet because you need that validation.
00:22:01
Speaker
And this is maybe a good transition to start talking about Railbound because there was actually quite a big gap between in Invento and Railbound. So like, yeah, how much of that time were you spending working on Railbound? How much of that time was on different projects that didn't come together?
00:22:19
Speaker
so this is really funny because Invento came out in September, 2019, and then we finished the DLC in January, 2020.
00:22:30
Speaker
And we were very eager to start a new project after that. We moved offices to a new space. We finished renovating an apartment and then stuff happened. And we kind of like COVID happens and were were having a really tough time transitioning into remote work. Like we just finished like moving everything and we were happy to start working on prototyping a new project. And we suddenly had to find ourselves in this reality where like my wife was newly like with a child. So that was like ah a bunch of stress. And then the pandemic was stress and then trying to figure out how to work with people under under those conditions was a lot of stress.
00:23:13
Speaker
So we were trying to figure out what to do first. And then we got like a government grant, like a pandemic grant for culture related stuff to do a prototype of something we've been thinking about, which was a tactics inspired, like a Fire Emblem inspired tiny game.
00:23:32
Speaker
um So that kind of took us, took our minds off the pandemic a little bit. um And we finished that. It was a lot of work on the, like, once you finish a government grant and you need to like write, um s like you need to first submit for it. So that took some time.
00:23:48
Speaker
And then once we got it, we needed to like finish the grants by like making all of these descriptions like, oh, we spend the money on this and this. And we feel like the thing we've made is so has cultural value because all these things. so So that was most of our 2020 was like scrambling around this and trying to figure out what to do about it.
00:24:07
Speaker
And then we had our kids, like our kid was born in November and that kind of took the wind of our sails a lot because it was like, it was a lot.
00:24:19
Speaker
And so that was most of the gap. Like it was basically like June, 2021 before we felt like we could return to like semi-normal development cycles.
00:24:30
Speaker
The rest of the time was kind of, I mean, we weren't doing like nothing. We, ah for example, like we put some bento on Steam. We did some like maintenance work. So it was like, it was like mostly in the back.
00:24:42
Speaker
And in June 2021, I went to this local student competition. like We have a thing where our technical university, the one that I graduated from, has a games track where within two so like the two last semesters, you spent on making two separate projects. One in Unity or an engine of your choice, and the other one more tech-focused in a C++ plus plus engine that you make yourselves.
00:25:08
Speaker
in student groups. And at the end of the year, those two projects get graded in like a student competition. It's a whole thing. like They invite people from like local and ah regional game development studios, and you have people coming in and grading the projects. There's like prizes and stuff.
00:25:25
Speaker
um but It's also like a really good opportunity to showcase yourself to different companies. And so I participated in that as a student and then I came back as a judge to sort of check out these projects and one of the games in there I played and I was like this could be an Afterburn game and of course the prototype for that was Railbound. It was called Train Connector back then so and initially like immediately we knew like we needed to change the name to something more catchy but it was basically Railbound.
00:25:56
Speaker
but It differed in ways where we felt like we could tighten it up. for example, the prototype for Railbound was more sandboxy. ah You had a lot more like leftover rails on each level. It was like more freeform.
00:26:11
Speaker
So we felt like we could kind it tighten it up and make the puzzles more engaging and also like introduce some new mechanics. And especially like since it was a a student project, like on the art side, we felt like we could do a lot of work making the game prettier, making the difficulty curve better.
00:26:28
Speaker
And so we started talking to the students if they want to A, have us as a publisher and just give them money and come back with a game at some point, or B, just like have us sort of absorb absorb the IP and absorb the project and release it as our game. And after some consideration, they they decided to go with option B because they felt like we'll probably have a better chance of success at but with that. so And that's how we spent the next nine months working on Railbound.
Adapting Railbound from Student Project
00:26:59
Speaker
So the initial prototype took about two years, but it was like a like student two years, so a lot of downtime in between. But the prototype like went went through a bunch of stages during that time, and then it was full production when we started development in November 2021. And yeah, i'm I'd i would love to know, like how did you feel working on this game that it's like simultaneously yours and not yours?
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, that was that was tricky at first because, I mean, it felt like it it didn't spring from my head, but I didn't have a lot of trouble about it. But I sort of needed to make the game mine or like the game ours because it's like ah From the beginning, we knew like we were going to rewrite it from scratch because the code base was like a student project, I mean, it wasn't the best. So we designed it from scratch. Like, for example, one of the things in the prototype was that it wasn't deterministic.
00:27:56
Speaker
So like everything was kind of like spread. The logic of the game was spread between a bunch of things. And then you have a total of- Oh, so like the order that game components were added to the scene would affect what happened?
00:28:08
Speaker
It was more like all of the different objects sort managed their own logic. and it was all like time-based and then you had a toggle for like increasing game time um to like speed up the game.
00:28:22
Speaker
And if you would toggle that, the result would not always be the same. So like when we saw it, like that was a clear red flag. was like, okay, we need to redo this and we need to redo it, right? So the the actual final game has like an action system where things are like very tightly controlled and you always get the same results. you can And that was actually like a big help because At the end, we created like a testing solution for the game where you could like run a bunch of levels in like a test suite and speed it up like a thousand times to get the results in 10 seconds and see like are these mechanics still interacting correctly, has nothing broken, and the system can withstand that regardless of the speed.
00:29:02
Speaker
So, and then for, you mentioned at the top of the ah episode, so going a ways back, ah that you, for Gulf Peaks, you went with a premium app,
00:29:22
Speaker
because you didn't have the bandwidth to implement ah in-app purchases or ads at that time. Yep. What's your view on that now? And like, how has your, how has the last few years of the mobile marketplace successes or but like underperformances colored that?
00:29:45
Speaker
So what's initially started as a pragmatic decision, like you've said, like making golf picks as a premium game was a pragmatic decision, a calculated one instead of like, what would bring us the most money?
00:29:56
Speaker
But we also like don't care about money that much. Like we're not in this business to extract the maximum value from our digital digital portfolio. It's more about creating the kinds of games we would want to play ourselves. And I'm not really playing like free-to-play puzzle games.
00:30:14
Speaker
ah That's not what I'm there for. So for the rest of our titles, we decided to stay premium and also like at every step, like evaluating. like release We released this as premium and if it works out, then it's good and we continue doing that. If it doesn't work out, then we try to figure out what to do with the next game.
00:30:32
Speaker
um But of course, like there's like as when we started Afterburn, I really wanted to be able to release one game a year. like Once we got the ball rolling, I really wanted to keep that. But then the pandemic and life and everybody else and just getting old and having less time to work compared to what we have now...
00:30:53
Speaker
compared to what we have have back then. But also, just as our portfolio is getting bigger, it also needs more time. Like, Gulf Peaks and Invento and Railbound are not existing in a vacuum. Like, you still need to, like, take care of them once in a while, and that just eats into the time that you have.
00:31:11
Speaker
That's made the releases longer, like times but between the releases are longer for us. And also like during those years, we saw the market change. So this is why we decided to go with a try before you buy model for PopChamps because we've been talking to developers.
00:31:30
Speaker
you you for example, ah and some other people and also people from the platforms. And we decided that we want to give it a try in the sense that it is still kind of like a premium model, but with extra steps.
00:31:45
Speaker
there's like The downside is like we had more... like more work implementing the in-app purchase that you can use to unlock the full version. But the upside for the player is you get to try out the game before actually committing money to the game.
00:32:00
Speaker
And on one hand, like I feel like premium is still the nicest model in the sense that it's the most straightforward transaction. You give us the money, we give you the game and there's no other strings attached and and we never do like you pay extra for these like levels and stuff like that or you like watch this premium ads to unlock a skin for the game ah because I'm not a fan of these these solutions but I'm very curious to see how PopChamps does sort of as we've sort of smashed through the barrier of you don't need to pay us up front to try out this game because I also feel like Pup Chumps is compared to, for example, a Railbound.
00:32:40
Speaker
It's a tougher ask initially to convince people to try out this game, but once somebody plays it, they're usually so positively surprised. So that was one of the decision one of the decisions we've made And also, like the market has also changed with the subscriptions. You have the Apple Arcade.
00:32:58
Speaker
You have the Google Play Pass. We've also been... Well, we've been in Google Play Pass. We haven't been in Apple Arcade, but it's changed a lot since we started releasing our games. And we're also curious to see where it goes from now.
00:33:11
Speaker
ah So, talking about PUBG, where did the mechanics come from?
Evolution of PopChamps
00:33:19
Speaker
So Pop Chumps is a really funny case because this was actually supposed to be our third game.
00:33:25
Speaker
So we started working on Pop Chumps right after Invento. I kind of left a little gap there, but right after after we finished Invento and the DLCs and before COVID hit, we started working on this game because we were like thinking about...
00:33:39
Speaker
So we had a bunch of ideas bouncing around in our minds at the same time. One of them was, we really like Fire Emblem, so maybe let's try and do something tactical because we're like we're making grid-based games, so jumping from that to a more tactical game with units should not be that difficult.
00:33:57
Speaker
And also something that was in our mind also at the time was, What if we do a sequel to Golf Beaks? But as we started to look into like indie sequels, it quickly turned out that you basically don't do an indie game sequel unless you're like Hades or i don't know, The Binding of Isaac or something like that. like Or Cosmic Express.
00:34:17
Speaker
Or a Cosmic Express that was just announced and you should wishlist on scene right now. Yeah, no. But like for most indies, it only makes sense to do a sequel if you're like mega successful or if you have a really good case for it. And not even like and even then, it's always a tough proposition. like If you stray from the original too much,
00:34:39
Speaker
then sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. It's really hard to say. So we were thinking about, like what if we do a SQL to Golf Peaks, but that's not actually a SQL to Golf Peaks? So let's keep the sports theme, but instead of... like Because we were thinking, like if we do a SQL to Golf Peaks, there's two main problems that we would need to overcome.
00:34:56
Speaker
One of them is, you need to have a mechanic or a set of mechanics that are... exciting enough to be able to show this game to people and say like, look, it's this thing you like, but different, and you should buy it again.
00:35:09
Speaker
Because if it's too similar, like if a golf, let's okay. So as we were thinking about it, golf picks two would only make sense if we would make it a game that's taking place on like a cube or something.
00:35:20
Speaker
So like you're bouncing the ball on the walls and you're changing the like perspective because then you can kind of make the same game again but just with a ah big mechanical twist that would be like super exciting to people because the thing that I was fearing was if it's too similar to the original game how do you do the tutorial?
00:35:40
Speaker
And maybe like I think the case for Spooky Express shows me that maybe it's not Like it's not such a big problem if enough time has lapsed between one game to the other. But the thing that I've always been afraid of is how do you do the tutorial for the game that's very similar mechanically to the original game?
00:35:58
Speaker
And do you just do the same levels? Or maybe you've learned enough that you can do it and again. I don't know. So we started working on a sequel to Golf Beaks that would not be a sequel to Golf Beaks, where the ball, like you have one ball, but instead of using cards to move it around, you would have units.
00:36:15
Speaker
which well in the original design they had cards that you would arrange on a timeline of sorts like you would have these like uh move two two steps to the right and move one step upwards and what else but you would use multiple units and you would arrange them on a timeline to have them pass the ball between each other and score a goal using that mechanic and that was interesting but then we stopped doing that because of all the things that happened in 2020 And we only unearthed the project pretty
Refining Mechanics and UX Simplification
00:36:44
Speaker
much after Railbound was finished as we were sort of looking at our suite of prototypes and deciding what would be the best fit for our next game.
00:36:53
Speaker
We actually also, like right after Railbound, we started working on another prototype that you've also played, but we haven't talked about it very publicly except for like two screenshots we've shown on Twitter and in our newsletter or something.
00:37:07
Speaker
about construction, but that one we've had some mechanical problems with, so we didn't pursue it further. And then we found this like forgotten football prototype ah and started thinking about, like, okay, so how can we actually make this?
00:37:23
Speaker
And since then, it went through a lot of iterations. Like, initially, the game was played in portrait modes, and the goal was on the top of the screen. In the final game, it's on the sides, and the game's landscape, because that allowed us to present the game better on different devices.
00:37:39
Speaker
We've ditched the timeline idea, because that was a UI nightmare. And we've just made it so that units have stamina and you have freedom over moving them. But then we've created some like mechanical wrinkles on how interacting with the ball and passing the ball changes the orientation of the players. And then added a bunch of mechanics that we felt would interact with it in interesting ways.
00:38:02
Speaker
So from the prototype, the game turned out to be very, very different. ah But we still feel like it brought us and into interesting places, but also that's why it took, it's our longest development, because we sort of needed to find the game in the initial design and change it a bunch of times along the way to get to the gameplay that we wanted.
00:38:24
Speaker
Yeah, do you like you you mentioned there that that like um a lot of gameplay is in those really subtle things about like what direction a character is facing is like very deeply meaningful. um Is that something that you found along the way rather than being like designed in from the start?
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah, so for this game, that's definitely something that we found along the way and felt it could create interesting mechanics if we presented to players in a way that would get it. And in a way that has been like the biggest challenge making this game was making sure the mechanics are...
00:39:03
Speaker
understandable and approachable in a UX sense. Whereas for other games, like for Invento, we've had the core mechanic from the start and it never changed until the end. But we've played around with the supplementary mechanics. So the like splicing the pieces into two or like copying them and everything else, that came later.
00:39:22
Speaker
But the core mechanic of you have these tiles and you place them in the box and they cover each other up, that was there from the start. And for Golf Peaks, we've also had like the cards were there from the start. the tiles were there from the start and the golf inspired mechanics, like the water and and sand tiles, all of that was in like from day one. And even the mechanical, like if you use too much strength, the ball rolls over the hole that was in like basically from the get go.
00:39:47
Speaker
ah But for PopChamps, we needed to explore the possibility space a little bit. And so like the timeline was the initial idea, like of a mechanical wrinkle where you would need to synchronize the movements of your units and pass the ball between them.
00:40:03
Speaker
But in our testing, it turned out like A, it was a UI nightmare to present it to people in an approachable way. And also planning the whole sequence of events. Like, for example, let's say like 10 moves ahead for three units was just way too much for most.
00:40:19
Speaker
Like you needed a really good grasp of the mechanics to be able to like visualize in your mind styles. Like, oh, if I do this and this and this and this, then the unit is going be here and it's going to intercept the ball and pass it to somebody else.
00:40:32
Speaker
And once you added also enemies, which was something we knew we wanted there from the start, like you can't, like it's really hard to have a soccer game without an opposing team. ah Then you would need to track like six units on the field in your head somehow.
00:40:48
Speaker
And we just decided that was way too much work. So that's when we ditched the timeline as does your sort of main wrinkle slash obstacle slash interesting mechanic.
00:40:59
Speaker
in favor of just moving units tile by tile. And then that's where we started exploring the direction instead as a sort of supplement to the mechanic of moving around and passing the ball.
00:41:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'm personally a really big fan of... Designing the game such that you're simplifying the UI, like being OK, saying like, oh, this is an interesting mechanic, but we can't make the UI for it intuitive and approachable.
00:41:27
Speaker
So we're just going to like cut that off. We're going to go, like no, even though it's tempting, we're just not going to explore that for the purpose of making the core interaction method simpler.
00:41:39
Speaker
um I think it's a hard decision to make often, but I think a lot of the time it's the right one. Yep. Yeah. For us, like for, um for the longest time, the timeline felt like the most interesting thing in the game.
00:41:54
Speaker
And now, like if we show somebody screenshots of like the timeline versus no timeline, like Nobody's like, why did you want to do this in the first place? like Everybody's like, oh this is like the new interaction system is the natural one, the the obvious one. But for like months, we were like, no, this needs to be like this because this is the interesting thing about the game.
00:42:15
Speaker
But yeah, thankfully, like our team figured out that we can cut the timeline and we can replace it with other interesting stuff. Yeah. And yeah, with with relation to the um the mechanics relating to like which which direction somebody is facing, I kind of want to coin a term, but I don't know exactly what term it would be. Like maybe like nitpicky mechanics or something.
00:42:40
Speaker
um I feel like there was some of this in Bonfire Peaks too, where it's like, oh to solve this puzzle, you need to like really understand some of the consequences of mechanics that...
00:42:54
Speaker
um some players might want to just hand wave or theyre like, oh no, I get the gist. um But then there's some types of puzzles, some types of mechanic where like you you can't hand wave it. You need to know like the difference between like, oh, this this is what happens in this situation and that is what happens in this situation is the difference between solving this puzzle and this puzzle being impossible.
00:43:17
Speaker
And I think it's a really interesting like mechanical design space that's also... I think in some ways it's a bit at odds with your overall games of like overall goals of being super, super approachable.
00:43:35
Speaker
Yeah. ah And it's been something we've been like very conscious of ever since we started implementing it. And it's been the most difficult thing for us to like convey to people as they're playing the game. So in an early prototype, for example,
00:43:51
Speaker
ah like all of the players well were always facing left or right because that was cheap to make. You could draw draw one sprite and you could just flip it on the x-axis and they would be facing left or right.
00:44:03
Speaker
But once we added the direction mechanic, that created problems because... then we needed a way to convey like, oh, you're facing the left as a sprite, but you're actually pointing upwards in the code.
00:44:16
Speaker
So for a long time, like we tried to play around with it, like to do like ah like an arrow next to your player that would indicate the actual direction and just add like UI signage to say like, oh, if you interce like if you intercept this ball, it's going to set you, like set your rotation like this with like a big arrow that would fly from from the bottom of the...
00:44:38
Speaker
the units to indicate the direction has been changed or something. And it took us a while. And then at some point we just said like, okay, like, yeah, we can't do it the easy way around. We just need to like, for all units and all animations, it needs to be like facing in four directions to like show clearly like, like the unit is facing this way and make like really clear shooting lines and passing lines to make sure that we convey this information because it's crucial.
00:45:06
Speaker
And I feel like, If we wanted to spend like extra like two months on it, we could probably still like make an even better implementation of this system, like UX wise and code wise and animation wise.
00:45:20
Speaker
But also at some point you need to say like, okay, this is probably going to be good enough Because we don't want to be making this game for like eight years. Yeah, for sure. ah That's really interesting. Did you try a version where players could literally only be facing left or right, which would, I guess, be like a towards the goal or away from the goal?
00:45:41
Speaker
And so they could only shoot left or right? I'm pretty sure that we've tested it in the in the form of levels, like levels that would block you and would wouldn't allow you to do it the other way around. i I think that some might even be in the game itself where you're still passing left or right, but at some point it became clear that you want to like you want to utilize this space because it just creates more interesting stuff.
00:46:08
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, I'm always really interested in this kind of... like design decisions about like what the core mechanics are and like how just a small change can have like really interesting long-term ramifications yep i've said at the beginning that i'm like i don't consider myself to be great at numerical numerical design so pop champs uses like very simple values like the shooting ranges are usually like within one to four tiles uh but i still feel like we could probably still play around with these values and create like create very different games. so for example, like one of the units shoots a long pass that's like four tiles away, but if he was shooting three instead of four, that would create like a very different experience already, even with such a small change.
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah, totally. um As we wrap up, do you have any questions for us? um So something that's been on my mind as your sort of a very recognizable mainstay in the puzzle game space Something that's been on my mind lately was we've seen the puzzle game genre sort of open up in different new ways over the years. Like it felt like there's these waves that come in, like match freeze are really hot right now, or like hidden object games are really hot right now or something. And now it seems like detective games and and deduction type games are really like,
00:47:36
Speaker
doing really well these days? Like, where do you think the the puzzle game space, and I know it's a really broad space, but where do you feel that it's going to go in the future in terms of like all these genres, like subgenres happening and like old classics coming back, but in new forms?
00:47:56
Speaker
Nothing but Sokaban until the end of time. Yeah, Alan Nostradamus, ah tell... if If we knew, we would be making business decisions based on ah the the roadmap. I was hoping for these hot scoops.
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah, everyone is. We've talked about it. I mean, like, in relation to the kind of games we make, ah like, I know how to design a certain type of game. And if I tried to design detective game, doesn't matter if, like, that's a hot genre. I don't have the brain. Like, like let that that doesn't fit with my experience.
00:48:33
Speaker
um So if i if I was looking at the trends and going, like, oh, we should do one of them... we could try, but it would probably be bad. um i don't, I don't think it would be bad. i think that you could make a decent detective game. I don't think that you could make a detective game that is great in the realm of detective games in the same way that a lot of other direct net games are great in their specific ah spaces, if that makes sense. Right.
00:49:02
Speaker
I think that... But if we ever become a two game studio, then we could just get Mari churning out detective games and huh Yeah. um Becoming a two-game studio was our dream for a long time, or at least my dream. like I really wanted to have like two projects happening simultaneously, but like not shipping simultaneously just kind staggered. Yeah. yes we We didn't pull that off.
00:49:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's not it's not an easy thing, especially with a very small team. um I think that detective game is a very is a very identifiable ah trend right now.
00:49:36
Speaker
I think that over the last five or six years, the actual trend is game that... rewards player by making them feel smart, no matter what the actual difficulty is, without turning off a lot of players. I think that, like, really, it's been a lot of approachable games and specific... I feel like you're throwing some shade at me right now. honestly... but Your games are super approachable. i've i've just I'm throwing shade at some of our games. so
00:50:10
Speaker
um I honestly think that, like... a lot of the current detective game lineage go basically goes over Din, Golden Idol, and then splinters off into like 20 different directions.
00:50:24
Speaker
And i think that one of the biggest successes of ah Case of the Golden Idol is the way that it The UI?
00:50:37
Speaker
The UI, yes. But like specifically the way that the UI very delicately balances, you're like making sure that the player feels like they're in full control, but also makes them feel like they're a genius for solving it, even on tutorial puzzles, right?
00:50:56
Speaker
And it's not making the player feel... Stumped. Stumped, frustrated, ah feel like so like what Alan was saying earlier about like, well, you didn't you didn't understand this edge case. So you're literally not going to be able to solve this puzzle unless you understand this like this edge case of how this mechanic worked. And like Bonfire Peaks is a great example of a game that has a lot of those. And I think that there's a there is definitely a place for those, but like not as much in the mainstream.
00:51:27
Speaker
I think that like when you look at a lot of the mainstream games, it is games that make people feel like they are putting everything together on their own and are very approachable in doing so.
00:51:42
Speaker
I think Blueprints is another recent good example of that. i love this game so much. Yes. this is This is the thing. This is part of why everyone loves it. um I think that...
00:51:55
Speaker
like Outer Wilds is a great example, it especially with the one more run nature of both blueprints and Outer Wilds. Like it is like minimizing frustration at the oh at at the time it's taking you to solve the overall mystery or like you get to the bottom of a puzzle solution by putting up and an artificial sort of roguelite style barrier in front of you to say like, no, no, no, it's okay.
00:52:24
Speaker
This is this the way the game is going to work. We're going to pull you out of this and then we're going to have you approach it again. then we're going to have you approach it again. then we're going to have you approach it again. And in doing that, it's actually like, I don't It's a really smart way of analyzing this kind of thing.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah, no, I feel like you're onto something with even like the recent successes, like, well, not so recent now, but I mean, like Patrick's Parabox is a game that I consider to be like exceptionally well laid out in terms of difficulty progression.
00:52:54
Speaker
And it, showcases you a mechanic that's interesting but could be potentially like you could make steven sausage roll version of patrick's power box where every single level just like breaks you but that's not what that's offered what's offered is a 300 puzzle like super smooth playthrough that's really nice and that's harder to make than the steven sausage roll version potentially it's easier to make something that's hard that's true that's that's how i am pretty much about all of this True. That's a very good point.
00:53:27
Speaker
Any other closing thoughts on that, Alan? No, I think that was bang on. Awesome. Do you have any closing thoughts, Luke, before we wrap up for the episode?
00:53:39
Speaker
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. It was really was really nice chatting with you. Of course. Yeah, great to chat to you and good luck with the launch. Thank you. hope it does well. You can get the game on Steam or wherever it's most comfortable to you.
00:53:54
Speaker
Yes, you're very busy, May. It'll be Steam, iOS, Android. Yes, on launch, definitely Steam and Windows and Mac versions on both on Steam.
00:54:05
Speaker
And App Store and Google Play. We love itch.io, so we'll probably be on that, but maybe not at launch because we have, like, our our hands are full at this point. ah But yeah, those are the main platforms. And we'll definitely come to Nintendo Switch as soon as we figure out how to do the dead ports.
00:54:23
Speaker
Yeah. Because it's going to be the first time we do it in-house, so that's going to be fun. Oh, nice. um Good luck with that. Thank you. yeah ah Awesome. And thank you for listening to the Draconeck and Friends official podcast.
00:54:38
Speaker
Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at googlenoise.bandcamp.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawadniak.
00:54:48
Speaker
Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
00:55:14
Speaker
you