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Episode 48: Levi Pinkert (Loophole)
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In this week's podcast, we talk to Levi Pinkert, creator of Loophole, about what ideas make it from drawing board to actual development, how to make the judgement call on ambition Vs. realism, and the terrible crime of not featuring pushable blocks in a grid-based puzzle game.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Drakknick and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Alan, the head Drakknick at Drakknick Friends, and today I'm joined by Levi Pinkert, you may know from their work on Loophole.
00:00:36
Speaker
How are you doing today? I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm good. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, lovely to have you. I think this was one of the surprise hits of 2025 for me, um although I didn't actually get around to playing it until the holiday period.
00:00:54
Speaker
I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah, I guess let's start
Levi's Journey into Game Development
00:00:58
Speaker
at the start. like How did you get into game dev? I started a bunch of years ago just by doing game jams.
00:01:06
Speaker
I've just done a lot of game jams. I love the GMTK game jam. I love Ludum Dare. all that stuff. Nice. Yeah, I ah i also started with Lundi. ah yeah, you're doing a lot of online jams?
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, all online. i don't think I've ever done an in-person jam. And then ah when it was time for me to go to university, i went to USC, which has a game development program. And so I went there and I met a bunch of game designers and I'd made a lot of games there. And now I'm here. That's pretty much it.
00:01:39
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, and but you'd you'd already been making games for like a few years before going to USC? That's right, yeah, mostly game jams. I hadn't done many big projects until in USC.
00:01:51
Speaker
When I was there, we made me and a bunch of friends made this game called The Wear Cleaner, um which is kind of a stealth comedy. It's very wacky game, and I was the game designer on that game.
00:02:05
Speaker
um And so that was my first like big game. That game did pretty well. And then I went off and kind of did a solo project, which was Loophole.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah. how long How long did Loophole take you to make? So it took exactly one year. um It was kind of a limitation I put on myself when I was starting it, is that I had a year left in college and I wanted to finish a game in that time.
00:02:31
Speaker
So I kind of came up with the whole thing around that. At first, I wanted it to take only nine months, I had to put an extra month on the end because you know, but you know how it is. Sometimes there's a little more stuff than you thought there was.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah. i mean, it's a really impressive for just one year. i think a lot of people for a project this size and polished, they they could take a longer. and you And you said you're also doing, making it alongside your final year at school.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. um Yeah, I mean, that's that's also pretty impressive. So yeah, I was taking fewer classes because I was pretty much done. um i spent way more time on loophole than I spent on actual school, for sure.
00:03:13
Speaker
but But yeah, I was still a student. And so it was ah it was a busy year. Yeah.
Challenges in Developing Loophole
00:03:18
Speaker
And um did you also do, um like, who worked on the the graphics and the music for the game? Was that you two? Yeah.
00:03:27
Speaker
that for the first six months of development, the game did not have graphics or music. And I kind of just punted that as far as I could, which I think ended up being a mistake or at least creating a lot of chaos towards the end of development. Cause at some point I realized like, okay, this thing needs to look a little bit better.
00:03:44
Speaker
Um, and so then I brought in a lot of my USC friends to help finish it. Uh, so I had a friend who did all the audio and music, Henry. i had, Another friend who did lots of concept art, Tian.
00:03:56
Speaker
I had a friend, Moose, who did a lot of the 3D modeling. um And then I did some outsourcing for some animations and some other modeling. Part of the concept from the beginning was to make a game that was going to be really minimal on art and on other work outside of the game design and the programming.
00:04:12
Speaker
And so you can you can tell that when you play the game, that it's it's a pretty focused experience. Yeah, but that that helps ah both in needing less art, but also for helping the overall thing be more finishable. So I think that's a ah very good constraint to have.
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. It was helpful. Even when it hurt, it was like probably hurting for good reason. Sure. ah you You said it was a bit chaotic leaving the art of music until the last minute. Was that just because of how much you tried to cram into a short space of time? Or was it also like, oh, decisions that I made early, like make making this specific asset more complicated for some kind of reason?
00:04:57
Speaker
I think it's actually the other way. I had a really hard time making good decisions about what the art and the music would be like. And I think that's because um when when you think about that stuff early, it becomes part of the identity of the game.
00:05:11
Speaker
um And so you you have a good intuition for what this game looks like, and what this game feels like. um With Loophole, I spent so long not having art and not having music that...
00:05:23
Speaker
when it was time to make those decisions, I was kind of petrified. i didn't know what direction to take it. And so I had to just, you know, put a lot of trust in my partners who had interesting ideas there and also just, uh, kind sent it on something that I liked. And yeah.
00:05:43
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I think it ended up pretty cohesive. So, uh, I think the approach, the approach worked, who but yeah, next, next time I would start, with a bigger team and start with more of a kind of holistic approach.
00:06:00
Speaker
Because I think there's more to do with the story and the world and bringing that all together. Yeah. I'm i'm curious, um how closely did the original idea um map to what you've ended up with?
Design Evolution of Loophole
00:06:16
Speaker
Well, it depends what you think of as the original idea. This game went through a bunch of changes in my head before it was ever prototyped. The original idea was actually more of like a screenplay or a TV show or something.
00:06:31
Speaker
I just had all these ideas for from really watching time travel movies and media. And I was kind of opinionated. i was I kept thinking, here's how time travel should really work.
00:06:42
Speaker
And so I had a ah notebook full of ideas for that, but I don't have much experience, you know, writing screenplays. And so I adapted it into a puzzle game. um And at first in my head, it was more like Portal. It was a first-person game. But just thinking through all the implications of that, there was a huge benefit to discretizing everything, to making it played on a grid with discrete time steps.
00:07:07
Speaker
um because I was imagining there these puzzles where you'd have to put states back exactly how they had been or replicate things you had seen before. And that that works a lot better in a gridded world.
00:07:21
Speaker
And so that's how the game became kind of a Sokoban game. And then from there, that's the first prototype I made. Things still changed a lot. I can go through all those.
00:07:32
Speaker
But yeah, there's a couple of pretty different feeling prototypes that happened for this game. Yeah, I can definitely picture how a portal, like a first person version of this game could work, but with the specific mechanics you've got, it's probably more playable as a soccer band game than as a first person game.
00:07:52
Speaker
Totally. But it's also just like the Sokoban version is much easier to make. In the Portal version of the game, the player would just look at the floor to solve all the puzzles because the game relies a lot on what you can see. Oh, of course. Right. And so so when you put it in the Sokoban perspective, um the idea of what you can see is kind of taken away from the player.
00:08:14
Speaker
and And so that makes the puzzles a lot easier to to design. Yeah, definitely. And like the the way you do vision with just like, oh you can see everything in the current room and not really caring too much about actual line of sight. I think that's also a very neat abstraction.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, that was something we prototyped early on, was the very first version of the game actually did um per cell vision. So we would like use some algorithm to do a raycast and figure out what cells you should be able to see.
00:08:47
Speaker
And that was cool because it it enabled some puzzles, right? You could have a puzzle where there's a pillar in the middle of the room. You kind of have to shimmy around the pillar to decide what on the other side you could or couldn't see.
00:09:00
Speaker
You could also imagine it was really finicky because it's not obvious how to resolve some of these diagonal lines. And so, yeah, at some point I just decided to make it a flood fill algorithm for what you could see.
00:09:12
Speaker
And that it simplified the possibilities a lot, which made the puzzles easier to design and easier to think about as a player. Yeah. And before this game, had you made other jam-sized grid-based games or had you heard you played a lot?
00:09:30
Speaker
I had made one other many years ago. i'd played a couple. i was a big fan of Baba Is You, which was a huge inspiration for this, but I'm by no means an expert in this genre.
00:09:42
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, i mean, I think the puzzle quality in the game is, is pretty high. Like how, how was the process of like getting to grips with like, okay, I've got this mechanic and I'm designing puzzles for it.
00:09:55
Speaker
Uh, was it like, oh, this is like, um, did you, did you get the hang of it pretty quickly or did it take you a while to figure out, oh, this is what a good loophole puzzle looks like.
Puzzle Design and Playtesting
00:10:03
Speaker
It was a kind of a mixed process. There's days where it was really hard and then days where it felt really easy.
00:10:09
Speaker
But I don't think much of that had to do with me. It was mostly just like I would write down all these affordances of these mechanics. And the goal of each level is just to make the simplest thing that allows the player to have this realization about the mechanics.
00:10:27
Speaker
And so when I'm designing a puzzle, that's all I'm trying to do is put that down in the simplest way. And sometimes that just happened. There was just an obvious thing. that that worked, but sometimes it didn't.
00:10:40
Speaker
And the the puzzle was really contrived. And for those contrived puzzles, sometimes I would come back to it later. And again, I would see the simple thing, but sometimes I wouldn't. So some of those puzzles were cut or some of them made it into the game, but they're they're later in the game so that the player can handle the contrivance a little better.
00:10:56
Speaker
But yeah, it just took some practice and time and it was sometimes frustrating. um And yeah, did you did you have basically for each level like a sentence like, oh, this level is about this thing?
00:11:07
Speaker
is i have a ah really awesome like digital board where I have all the levels mapped out. And for every level, there's kind of a description of what the player has to realize.
00:11:18
Speaker
And also for many of the levels, there's like kind of key takeaways that they can use in future levels. Nice. Yeah, I think that's often a really good way of doing positive design.
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah. and how much um how much playtesting did you do and how much did ah that reveal? Like, oh, I need to like have way more levels here to teach stuff or...
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly what it was. um I did a lot ah lot of playtesting, mostly just with friends of mine. And it didn't reveal any like really fundamental flaws with the game, which is good. I was happy with that.
00:11:55
Speaker
But it absolutely revealed failures in the level design and in the sequencing of levels. and And so when that happened, I just went back and i i usually added more levels in those places where people get were getting stuck because...
00:12:10
Speaker
Again, the idea the game is this kind of learning experience. And if a player is getting stuck in one place, it doesn't necessarily mean that puzzle is too hard to be in the game at all.
00:12:20
Speaker
It probably just means they need more help working up to it. But it it is always surprising to see what players find hard to figure out and what they intuit really quickly. Yeah, for sure.
00:12:31
Speaker
And one one thing that often find changes surprisingly much from playtesting is like figuring out which order to introduce ah mechanics in. um I think for this game, a lot of that is kind of set in stone because they they depend on each other.
00:12:48
Speaker
he But... Yeah, i'm I'm curious, like, how long did it come up with to come to to figure out all of the mechanical variations on the concept that you introduce over the course of the game?
00:13:01
Speaker
um It was one of the easier things about the game is coming up with the mechanics. um I basically, from the beginning of the game, I knew what I wanted the ending to be. And so to execute that ending, you already need like, two thirds or three quarters of the mechanics.
00:13:19
Speaker
Right. I added one more mechanic, the blue mushroom, just as like a teaching tool, because I think going straight to the green mushroom would have been impossible for players to understand.
00:13:31
Speaker
But yeah, other than that, everything was kind of necessary to get to the ending. And so that's how I came up with that. And then the order, I could think of a few places to change the order, but I think it's, I never really had to change it. It kind of worked in the way that was obvious to
Project Completion and Future Aspirations
00:13:47
Speaker
me.
00:13:47
Speaker
Nice. Does it, like when you when you got to the release line, you set yourself this like goal to like finish it in nine months, release it in a year. um When you're getting to that point, could you feel that like you were getting diminishing returns or were you like, oh, this is still, i this is still so but far like past what I what do i want, but I i said I'd release it, so I'll release it. Like how were you feeling when you came to that finish line?
00:14:16
Speaker
great question. actually don't think I was at Diminishing Returns. I think every day in in those last sprints, the game got like a whole step better.
00:14:27
Speaker
And who knows, maybe it could have gotten even better from there. But I was feeling kind of done with the project at that point. And I don't know, I was really happy to stick with that timeline I'd set for myself just to prove that I could do it.
00:14:42
Speaker
could stick to that, but there's definitely a world where this game has more levels and I've gone over them more um, That's part of what I was doing. We recently released a level editor.
00:14:54
Speaker
i think this game has a lot more puzzles to be made with its mechanics, and that's part of what the level editor is about is i'm hoping that some people can go and figure that out. Yeah, i briefly looked at the Steam Workshop and saw that yeah people few people are making making levels. um how much How much work was that to to make? Like you've got a a a web-based tool for authoring and then a way of uploading that to Steam Workshop. Is that right?
00:15:21
Speaker
Yeah. The reason we did it that way is because it saved us a lot of work. Yeah, definitely. Like, just if you want to put a good... editor into the game, you need all these menus for like saving your levels, restoring levels, ah editing everything about them, not to mention the screen where you actually construct the level.
00:15:42
Speaker
And so my idea was if we just make a level a JSON file that the player can do anything with on their on their own file system, we kind of save everyone a lot of work.
00:15:54
Speaker
And then I also have a friend who worked with me on the game and helped finish it up, Abby. She's a really talented web developer, and she offered to make the entire ah the web editor experience.
00:16:05
Speaker
And so all I had to do was make a pretty small change to the game that just let it load a JSON file level and run it. So it was pretty easy overall.
00:16:17
Speaker
Nice. And I assume that that web-based level editor is not what you were using during development? No, I made this game in Unity and in Unity have kind of a customized window that lets me do level editing.
00:16:33
Speaker
It's pretty funny, it's still a 2D game in the editor window using all my old temp 2D graphics um from before the game was three d But because that's also integrated with the Unity editor runtime, we couldn't release that to players.
00:16:50
Speaker
But I also wouldn't want to, it's pretty ugly. Yeah, like dev editors are often pretty awkward to use in a way that ah you, while you're creating the game, they just can just get used to that. But if you were to like force other people to have to use that, it's like, ah!
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, but I am jealous of ah having the level editor now. It's funny that we could have reversed the order on that and saved me a little bit of pain. Yeah, I mean, it seems like authoring stuff in that editor, the the new one might be like slightly nicer.
00:17:26
Speaker
But I would imagine that there's like a turnaround time on like how fast you can make a change and hit play and see that change that would be like still better in the Unity editor.
00:17:38
Speaker
That's possible. The new editor can be pretty easy. And yeah, we could make better tooling for it to make it even faster. But that's a fair point. Yeah, I guess it would probably be possible to take the the new editor and like hook it into Unity so that it was more integrated. Yeah, we talked about doing that even.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, that turnaround time but just being able to like press a button and see your level in edit it's in in the game like immediately is like really important in my experience. So yeah, I wouldn't regret not having it too much. That's fair.
00:18:14
Speaker
now Now it's done, like how do you how do you feel about puzzle games? Do you think you want to make more or is it just like, oh, you'll have an idea and that idea might be a puzzle game or it might be something else?
00:18:26
Speaker
I love puzzle games because think they're kind of... i think most games are trying to be puzzle games, whether they know it or not.
00:18:38
Speaker
All games are trying to be this... kind of exchange of information between the game system and the player. And it's about the player building up some mental model, building up some skills, and doing that in conversation with the game mechanics.
00:18:55
Speaker
And so the puzzle game is like the clearest distillation of that. But I think all games are doing it in one way or another. And so i still don't know what I'm making next.
00:19:06
Speaker
I have ideas for puzzle games. And the one of the reasons I like that is because those games have such a clarity to them in that way. But I also am drawn to non-puzzle games because i think non-puzzle games can do that same thing. They can be that conversation, that exchange of ideas.
00:19:25
Speaker
And when you take it out of a puzzle context, you do get... a few extra tools to tie into there. You can do more with not just developing the player's mental model, but developing their skills.
00:19:39
Speaker
And I'm also interested in social experiences and things that multiplayer games can bring into the equation. And so to answer your question, i don't know if it will be called by the world a puzzle game, but I think whatever I make will have some of the spirit of a puzzle game in it.
00:19:57
Speaker
Nice. Can you, can you think of any non puzzle game examples that like exemplify that, uh, that sense of conversation between the designer and the player?
00:20:09
Speaker
Sure. Um, one of my favorite games ever is rocket league, you know, rocket league. So rocket league is a game where it's not a puzzle game. It's a competitive multiplayer game and you have a car that can jump and flip and boost.
00:20:26
Speaker
And, A beginner player might enter the game and, you know, they're not very good. And over time, they realize they want to reach a ball that's high in the sky so they can hit it before their opponent.
00:20:41
Speaker
And what they can put together is that if they jump and lean backwards and boost in the right kind of exact sequence of inputs, you can fly into the air and hit the ball before anyone else. And so that to me is the same thing that happens in a puzzle game, which is the player sees some problem in front of them and they combine the mechanics in some way to to solve that problem.
00:21:07
Speaker
Now, the thing that happens in Rocket League is a little better than a puzzle game in some ways, and it's a little worse than a puzzle game. The way it's worse is that some players may never have that realization, and when they do, it might not be so clear and so orchestrated.
00:21:24
Speaker
but But the way that it's better is it's it can be a much more organic and even insightful experience than a puzzle game because um the player is in this sandbox where they could do anything. And so when they have these discoveries, it trues it truly feels more organic than a puzzle game.
00:21:44
Speaker
and And that's something I admire a lot about that game. Yeah, and with a multiplayer game, there's also an element of like the meta. It's fine if you're like playing on one level, but then if some like if you're playing with the same people and suddenly one person learns a trick, that like incentivizes everybody else you're playing with to like also go, like oh, they did something.
00:22:05
Speaker
that worth me learning how to do? Right. That's exactly right. well And there's more to it than that even because... um In an ordinary game system, you have all these mechanics that are working together to create complexity, but none of them on their own is truly complex.
00:22:24
Speaker
Versus in a multiplayer game, I think of it as the other players in the game are now these kind of infinitely complex mechanics that you've put in um with infinite possibility to them.
00:22:36
Speaker
And so a that just expands the possibility space enormously. What was your favorite part of working on a Loophole?
Core Mechanics and Game Design Decisions
00:22:46
Speaker
I think my favorite part was discovering the mechanics and um putting them together for the first time and making little tweaks to make them work.
00:22:59
Speaker
i already talked about creating the flood-filled vision, but around the same time as then, i was making other changes. For instance, in the game, the world is constantly blowing up.
00:23:12
Speaker
which forces the player to move quickly. and the reason that was added was actually not for the obvious reason, which is that puzzles need time limits for them to be fun in this game.
00:23:25
Speaker
The real reason I added that mechanic was... because players and playtesters didn't fully understand the time mechanic, it's easy for it to look like a cloning mechanic.
00:23:36
Speaker
And the thing I realized is that the world, the difference between cloning and time travel is that if the world has state, then in one of those cases, the world state doesn't reset.
00:23:48
Speaker
And in the other one, the world state does reset. And so we needed to put more state into the world um to show that you're not cloning yourself. You're traveling back in time to when the world was in a past state.
00:24:00
Speaker
And so the explosions were an expression of the state of the world, the current time of the world. And they, of course, were also an elegant way to add a time limit into the level.
00:24:12
Speaker
so So to answer your question of what the favorite part of development was, it was coming up with the core systems at that very early stage of prototyping and seeing them kind of come together to make elegant puzzles.
00:24:25
Speaker
And I'm pretty happy with how that turned out. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any other things that like changed over the course of development, like from that original version that would be interesting to dig into?
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, here's an interesting one. um At first, the game had pushable boxes, which is ah thing in most games in the Sokoban genre. And I liked pushable boxes because but it brought this game into that genre in ah in a clear way.
00:24:56
Speaker
And it also added this kind of inherent complexity. um You could make a whole game just about pushing boxes. Many people have. um And it's an interesting game. There's a lot to say about that.
00:25:10
Speaker
But the thing I found is when I started designing levels, the the first levels of the game weren't really about time travel. They were about boxes and trying to get players up to speed on like, what do you need to know about sticking a box on a wall and can't now you can't get it off, things like that.
00:25:30
Speaker
And it it gave me a really hard time because I wanted the player to start the game and within the first five or ten minutes, think about time travel. And so then I came up with this idea of like, what if the boxes were not something you pushed? There's something you can enter the same square as and then pick it up and move it around freely.
00:25:50
Speaker
And I struggled with this for a while because it's a big change. But one of the cool affordances I found is once you can pick up a box, you can now take it with you through a time machine, yeah ah which you couldn't do otherwise.
00:26:04
Speaker
And so once I got there and started designing puzzles or about taking boxes through time machines, I was i was pretty convinced. And and um I'm curious what you would think about it, but I think the game's a lot better for not having the push-roll boxes just because it it clarifies what the game's about in a really good way.
00:26:23
Speaker
ah um Yeah, I guess I hadn't really even noticed their absence, which is, I think, a very good sign. Like, yeah, as you say, like picking things up feels feels very natural for the mechanics you've got.
00:26:36
Speaker
I think... Now that you've designed the game you've designed, you probably could add to them back in and it would like, it would allow for some interesting puzzles, but they'd be like interesting puzzles that are not like core to the game.
00:26:55
Speaker
Yeah, the biggest puzzles that would actually be really good is the fact that a box could block your vision. And so you could build little like hiding holes for yourself out of boxes.
00:27:08
Speaker
And those were the puzzles I was most sad to cut. Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't considered that that would be how the room vision would work, but that's a very reasonable way it could work. And yeah, that's certainly mechanically deep puzzle.
00:27:23
Speaker
I think you're right that the game overall is better for not having that. It's the kind of thing that like, oh, if it was still working, like, oh, just add it to the level editor and ah see see what what's possible there. But yeah, and it's it's interesting because like in some ways, I don't know if it is a problem of like onboarding um because you said like, oh, well you need to teach block pushing before you introduce the... ah um the, the, uh, time loop stuff, but like the game right now does introduce time loop stuff well before it introduces the things you can pick up and drop off on, um, on buttons. Like that's, it's one of the first things it introduces, but there are puzzles that you've got to introduce the loop stuff without that being added. so that's true you could imagine a version of this world that like, even like introduces the pick up a ball boxes and then later introduces pushable boxes.
00:28:17
Speaker
Right. Um, But I think it's it's good to pay attention to like the pacing of a game. And I think it's good to keep up the momentum of how often you're introducing new mechanics, which I think this game does a really good job of.
00:28:32
Speaker
And yeah, if you've if you've got something that is not allowing you to do anything new with the core time travel mechanics, then yeah, in some ways, maybe it doesn't need to be there. Yeah, I think I agree.
00:28:45
Speaker
Was there anything else that you cut from the scope of the project? The other big change I made was figuring out the structure of the world.
00:28:56
Speaker
the The way the game is now, it's very simple. There's these teleporters you enter, they bring you to a map screen. And so the game is technically continuous. Um,
00:29:08
Speaker
Like you can kind of peek from one level to another and some of the levels you do move between continuously, but it's mostly to a player is going to feel like just a bunch of disconnected rooms. In an earlier version of this game, it was much more interconnected and it was really hard to make work because just the way the game mechanic works. Once you go into a room, you can almost never go into that room again. Yeah.
00:29:34
Speaker
Barring some mechanics. And I had ideas for how to solve this, like create pocket dimension rooms that you can have multiple people in at once. But I just decided if I want to finish this thing, I'm going to keep it simple structurally.
00:29:49
Speaker
And so that was kind of a big rabbit hole that I ended up just completely cutting off. Yeah, I think having more of a sense of like, oh, this is a continuous space could have been cool, but probably not so cool that it's worth the large amounts of development hassle it would have been. And you you get to do a little bit of that at the end.
00:30:12
Speaker
Right. And maybe it feels like a little bit more special at the end for not having been there at all earlier. It's possible. I think...
00:30:23
Speaker
The way that a more interconnected world would enhance the ending is that we could let the players discover the ending on their own a little bit more. um so So right now, it's a fairly linear game. And so at the end, you're just...
00:30:39
Speaker
forced into discovering that ending for yourself or no the opposite you're forced into walking into that ending you don't really discover it it just happens right you're like oh i'm going through a linear set of levels like oh here's the last linear level okay i'm here right and this is something that i don't have any of the details of in my head but i i feel like there's some way with a more open world where you could let the player come to that decision to go back to the starting levels on their own and come to some realization about what to do with those levels.
00:31:13
Speaker
And that could make that ending more special. Yeah, I can see that. I think the the signposting for that, for players who like could otherwise get like, oh, well, i'm I'm ready to be done with this game, but I like, wait, what what what do I do now?
00:31:31
Speaker
like, oh, I've got all these hard puzzles. Do I need to solve all these hard puzzles to beat the game? um i think that's a tricky signposting challenge. It's not impossible, but... ah I think its it it has the potential to be a really thorny design problem.
00:31:48
Speaker
i think so, yeah. And it's part of the reason I went with the very simple route I went is um simplicity is just such your friend as a game designer. especially because I i've thought of this game as being somewhat accessible.
00:32:03
Speaker
It's not an easy game, but it's also not a particularly hard puzzle game compared to most of the stuff in the genre. And so, yeah, I had a lot of fear about adding more mechanics just to enable this kind of open, this more explorable space.
00:32:27
Speaker
And then all that would do is confuse players more about where to go and what to do. and so in the end, keeping it simple was a really useful thing for me to do.
00:32:38
Speaker
yeah for sure. um And i I kind of feel like as you think about your your next game, i'd probably encourage you to like keep the same kind of constraints that you put on yourself for this game. ah for that fun like i think a lot of people try to... like okay Oh, well, I've made this thing. Now I need to do something more ambitious and then something more ambitious after that.
00:33:00
Speaker
But I think shipping is like so much more important. And like I think you've you've managed to scope this game really, really well. um So I think you should ah remember that as like, oh, yeah, this this game was sensibly scoped, not like, oh, well, I had to make a bunch of compromises.
00:33:21
Speaker
Well, it's both, right? It's hard to keep both those things in balance in your head. And I'm really interested to hear you say that because, yes, a lot of my thoughts for the next game are, what if I made something bigger?
00:33:33
Speaker
What if I made something crazier? The reason being that I do feel all the compromises I made. i'm I'm really proud of Loophole, but think there's even more to do.
00:33:45
Speaker
and And so it's an interesting conflict, right, to... to find that balance between, um, what can I finish and what will I be happy working on versus what can I really do?
00:34:00
Speaker
um if I put everything into it. Yeah. And I, I think a lot of it comes down to figuring out, where being ambitious will be impactful versus where it won't. Okay. And I think in the early stages of the of making a game, it can be hard to tell what the eventual impact of that stuff is. But I think...
00:34:23
Speaker
It's almost always a good choice to like be a bit more conservative early on and go like, well, this thing has a large potential for scope creep. So I'm not going to do that because you can always go back and revisit that decision, but it's really hard to make the ambitious decision and then roll that back.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. But to play devil's advocate here, you are someone who has made successively bigger and more sophisticated games. Was that a conscious choice on your part? Or was it truly just you you thought you were making something simple and over time you discovered it had to be bigger and bigger?
00:35:04
Speaker
Well, I ah like that trend exists through to Monsters Expedition, but everything I've done since Monsters Expedition has been smaller than that. So I think Monsters Expedition with me learning that like, oh yeah, there's ah there's a level level of ambition that like, if you can execute it, the results will be extremely good, but it's extremely painful to do. Like that project took me three and a half years and um it was stressful and like,
00:35:34
Speaker
the process of making it like caused a lot of interpersonal conflict within the team. and like it, i I didn't come out the other, I came up the other side of it, extremely proud of the game, but not proud of the process.
00:35:47
Speaker
Sure.
Balancing Ambition and Enjoyment in Game Development
00:35:49
Speaker
And I think having done a game of that size now, i could do another game of that size more efficiently, making fewer mistakes, um,
00:35:58
Speaker
And I don't know if I'd never made that game, like i whether I would be, i I wouldn't be equally capable of making games that are good in that way. um But I think I could have probably ramped up to that scope of game more slowly and still ended up with something that was as good, but the process of would have been less painful.
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, that I'm glad you mentioned process because that's really what it's all about, isn't it? like I think about the prospect of making a bigger project like that. and And the thing that really needs to be right there is the process. Because if you're enjoying making the game, to some extent, it doesn't matter as much how long it takes or um whether there are hard parts.
00:36:49
Speaker
And so that's what I aspire to, is to to be working on something where... where I'm less affected by the outcome and and more just affected by how the process is going. Yeah, i think I think that attitude is really important um because there's a level of ambition that can kind of blind you to the fact that you're not having fun on a project.
00:37:12
Speaker
m And I think there's a there's a way of approaching it from the other side, which is like, oh yeah, I'm i'm having a really good time making the thing. And like, yeah, I'm i'm having fun. And i like, like it's the game is getting better and better. And it's also getting more ambitious, but like at the core is like,
00:37:28
Speaker
oh yeah, I'm doing this because I'm i'm enjoying this and because it's ah satisfying to make this game rather than being enjoying the moment rather than having this dream in your head of like, well, I got to got to get there. I'm not there yet. I got to get there.
00:37:45
Speaker
Of course, because the dream is never quite as important as you think it will be. it's it's It's only most important in the context of making the process interesting.
00:37:55
Speaker
Right. And i I kind of feel like whatever your initial idea is, there's almost always something about that that's compelling enough to be a released project. There's like...
00:38:11
Speaker
a good game and that people will enjoy. it might be like a different it might take a different length of time to make one version of a game versus another. But I think there's very few ideas that are so bad that ah you you start making it of like, well, this is completely unsalvageable. There's there's nothing interesting here.
00:38:32
Speaker
But to some degree, like when you're making something, i I've found that the process of making something that wants to be a game with 100 puzzles is very different to making something that wants to be 20 puzzles.
00:38:45
Speaker
And I yeah often don't know what size it is until I make it. Well, that's something that's very admirable about you is that you've made not only many big games, but many, many small games.
00:38:57
Speaker
And so that's something I need to do more of. Yeah, and to some degree, I think I could have only made my big games by having first made a bunch of small games. Like, I used my small games to, like, train myself up on puzzle design.
00:39:10
Speaker
you Not consciously, but like I think that's the effect that it had. And I think if I had only been making big games, those games would have been less strong.
00:39:22
Speaker
I actually want to get back to making more small games. like um Adam Saltzman, I had him on the podcast recently, and like he's very inspirational to me because as well as making these big projects at Finji, he's been making for the last year a bunch of games in Pico 8. And lots of them are like really, really tight, interesting games that I think he made in like a couple of weeks.
00:39:45
Speaker
And it's like, oh, I i could be doing that. I used to do that. I could still do that. Why am I not doing that? Yeah. And it it's something that's really exciting about where I'm at now when I'm coming up with new ideas is I can just make prototypes that are essentially just a small game.
00:40:02
Speaker
And it's a lot of fun.
Post-Loophole Prototyping and Writing
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah, like you said before going to school, you were doing lots of jam games. have you Have you continued to make jam games? I guess while making Loophole, you were probably prioritizing that over small games.
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah, I've done one game jam since. um But otherwise I've more been spending my time um just writing. I filled like three notebooks with just written thoughts on games.
00:40:33
Speaker
I have a couple of prototypes in in Unity projects. um I think it's pretty standard stuff for game designers to do just to come up with come up with new ideas and test them a little bit.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah. I'm curious. um I mentioned before that many of my ideas are not strictly puzzle games, but you're someone who's stuck very much with not just puzzle games, but mostly very similar puzzle games with kind of a shared set of mechanics.
00:41:04
Speaker
um Is there a real rationale for that? Or is it just like those are the kinds of things you're inclined to make and you're just following your heart?
00:41:15
Speaker
um I think it is very much a thing where i like for a long while I was using PuzzleScript to prototype ideas and to make jam-sized games.
00:41:28
Speaker
And that tool is so tuned to grid-based puzzle games that it's hard to make anything else in it. But because that was my primary prototyping tool, that would like shape the ideas I would have.
00:41:42
Speaker
And then the more I would use that tool, the more that would be the only type of idea I would have. And so that would be the type of thing I'd make. And then that would be the type of thing I'd have more ideas for. So that was kind of a self-perpetuating thing like the tools shaping the designs I was interested in pursuing. But also, i feel like I wouldn't be very good at making something outside that space.
00:42:07
Speaker
And when when I have this like choice between, like oh i i could I could make anything. Well, I could i could make a good base puzzle game, and I'm like extremely confident I could make a good one of those, versus I could make something else, and I'd be pretty confident that the first thing I'd try would be bad.
00:42:24
Speaker
So do I want to make a good game or a bad game? I really like making good games. Yeah. And so there's this this pressure to like keep keep doing that. And like I'm i'm happy in that space. i's I think if i wasn't happy making them, then I'd probably have more incentive to push myself out of my comfort zone.
00:42:44
Speaker
Um, and I mean, I guess there are, there was business constraints that like possibly should push me outside that comfort zone where like grid based puzzle games that like don't sell as well as other types of game, even other, even other types of, of puzzle game.
00:43:00
Speaker
But, uh, I think I, I don't want to make, let myself make creative decisions based on business stuff like that when I, it doesn't feel like I have to. And so, um, um Yeah, i'm i I think there's still plenty of space to explore in this space and other people I think are better at exploring things outside that space. And because we like we we publish games and we develop games, I can kind of like mentor other people who are already exploring that kind of space and doing it better than I would. And I can like publish other people's games or I can like chat to them as peers.
00:43:35
Speaker
And that I can get the satisfaction of like thinking about other types of portable games without having to make them myself. Yeah. It's interesting. the thing you say about, you know, you're good at making this game, but you're not sure you would be good at making other games. um It's so true that each time,
00:43:57
Speaker
I sit down or anyone sits down to design a game. There's such a learning process. I think that's a lot of what playtesting is about is it's not just testing the game, but it's testing your own mental model of what kinds of things are hard or what kinds of things work.
00:44:14
Speaker
And so you probably have a much better mental model about these games than I do. But ah at the same time, it's so tempting to just the possibility space of games is so enormous.
00:44:25
Speaker
And so I'm drawn to so many different things. And it's hard for me to imagine you being so ah so happy and comfortable in this in this one corner of it all. But I admire that, I think.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think I'm just happy making... ah I mean, i i guess it it doesn't feel like I've ever like been making the same game over again. It seems like i'm I'm using the same design space, but every game turns out so differently. like Even Spooky Express, which is like the closest thing to a sequel that I've ever done, think the feeling of that game feels so different to what Cosmic Express feels like.
00:45:06
Speaker
that even though it was like kind of coming from a space of like, oh well, let's do that that game, but a bit different. It didn't feel um like, oh, well, here we go. I'm just ah sort making another train draw track drawing game.
00:45:22
Speaker
So i I think as long as the core mechanics of each game feel exciting as a design space, the fact that it's like, oh, well, you control a character and they're moving around on a grid is kind of inconsequential. Like that's not that's not what excites me about grid-based puzzle games.
00:45:42
Speaker
um What excites me is the consequences of what you do with the specific mechanic you're you're exploring. That's a great point. It makes me think of something you said earlier, which is um to to keep your ambition to the places that really matter.
00:45:59
Speaker
um And as you as you said, ah grid-based puzzle games are easier to make than many other games. um And the things that really matter is the mechanics, the things that the players are thinking about.
00:46:11
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think i think that's a really wise approach. Yeah, hopefully. um Before we wrap up, um was there anything you wanted to ask me or pick my brain about? i know you you kind of just did.
00:46:25
Speaker
Was there anything else? I think, yeah, that was the thing I was most curious about is just the process of choosing what genre to be in and thinking about different games. but Maybe another question I have is um something that's difficult for me is kind of deciding to make a game because I'm sure everyone has this process of prototyping and thinking about things.
00:46:47
Speaker
But then there does have to be a moment where you build a team and try putting all your time towards something. And so i'm curious how you think about that moment and and what kinds of things you're thinking about and how you make that decision.
00:47:02
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a really interesting one. um i think the sensible way to do it is to like make a bunch of prototypes, um very small scope, very low stakes, um make make like five to ten of them, and then go, like well, does does it feel like any of these have this special source?
00:47:22
Speaker
If not, okay, I'll make more. So, okay, well, like, does this does this really meet this, like, extremely high threshold for starting a big project? and In theory, I think that's the approach I should have. And in practice, it's not really been like that.
00:47:37
Speaker
In practice, I've just gone like, well, I want to make something. um I'm going to put together a team and we're going talk a bit about what your ideas excites us. um But then we're very quickly going to go like, OK, well, we're making a game and we'll figure out what we're making as we go.
00:47:53
Speaker
and I think that has it's mostly been very good, but it's a bit different when I was doing that 10 years ago when i was just like collaborating with people ah and like none of us had any money. was just like, hey, you're cool. want to Want to make a small game together? um Versus now when it's a very specific, like, well, I have, I have a ah company and I have, uh, savings from previous games. And so once I start making a new game, I'm going to start paying people and those people are going to have a burn rate. And so, uh, like the, the longer this game takes, uh, the more it's going to cost and, uh,
00:48:40
Speaker
ah The longer it takes, the better it has to sell in order to justify that time making it. um i think I was a lot happier when I was doing it, just making games with people making games with with low stakes, low expectations, and we just kind of see how it went.
00:48:59
Speaker
Whereas now I kind of have to like both figure out like, oh well, what am I interested in doing? And like, also, is that a sensible thing for my company to spend X amount of time doing?
00:49:12
Speaker
i mean And yeah, I'm still figuring that perspective out. This is something I really struggle with because I find there are some ideas I just have a lot of energy for. Those are the ideas I want to work on.
00:49:26
Speaker
And once you have something like that, it's so hard to put it down and go and prototype something else just because, you know, as you said, that's probably the right thing to do is to explore more broadly before you commit.
00:49:39
Speaker
But also your own energy to work on something really does matter. And and maybe that speaks to some power that the idea has. i don't know Yeah, I think um with my jam-sized projects, I think it helps a lot that i like my vision for something like that is extremely um unpolished.
00:50:03
Speaker
um Like if I'm making something puzzle script, there's an upper limit to how much it can be polished. um And so the ah the version of that idea that feels like self-contained and like, oh yeah, this is a a finished project I can move on to and maybe I can revisit and like do a better version of it. But like this feels like i'm I'm happy with this enough to move on to something else. It's like fairly constrained and fairly doable in in a week to a month where I feel like in in a tool like Unity, it's harder to get to that point where you feel like, okay, this is a good stopping point for this prototype.
00:50:42
Speaker
Yeah, totally. it' It's such a good point that upper limits are are really, really useful. And i think that that applies to the finished game. True. Yeah, absolutely. um I think I've never really done prototypes. i've always I've always done small games and occasionally a small game has been something I've looked at and go like, okay, I think this could be a bigger game.
00:51:05
Speaker
But if I'm prototyping something, that generally means that I've got at least some team together and we're making something and we're just figuring out like what what we're making.
00:51:17
Speaker
i find it... Yeah, hard to to scope. um like I find it easy to scope, here's a small game. And I find it hard to figure out, like okay, what what would be a prototype?
00:51:30
Speaker
Because a prototype, just like I can just keep making it and keep keep throwing ideas in there. And there's there's always more you can prototype. Yeah. And it's also a really good point, I think, just about how playtesters engage with the game.
00:51:45
Speaker
it If you show someone... here's a prototype, but you have to imagine all the stuff that isn't finished yet. um it's It's hard to know what result you're going to get.
00:52:00
Speaker
But if you can show someone a a game, or even if it's very limited in some ways, you just want them to engage with it like a game, I think there's a lot more to learn there. um And so...
00:52:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of value to just making prototypes that are playable games um and that have good limits on them. For sure. Well, yeah, this was great chatting to you. um Before we wrap up, where can people find you on the internet?
00:52:29
Speaker
ah You can find Loophol on Steam and that's about it. Great. Well, thank you for listening to the Dragon Conference official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoisemusic.com.
00:52:41
Speaker
Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandes. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawodniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
00:53:00
Speaker
you