Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Drakkneck and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Seren from Drakkneck and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Drakkneck at Drakkneck and Friends.
Speaker: Hello. Today, we're joined by Dom Kamis, who you may know from his work on games like The Golem and also the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Nice to be on the podcast.
Speaker: Absolutely. So can you introduce yourself a bit with your background and what people might know you for other than what I just listed? Gosh, well, ah this being a puzzle game sort of context, I guess I should mention i've been making puzzle games since very roughly 1993. That was when my first commercial game came out.
Speaker: But unlike a lot of people in the industry, I'm by no means a full-timer. Games has been mostly a hobby for me. And I've spent the largest part of my career being a freelance programmer, you know, in all sorts of contexts, not necessarily games.
Speaker: And it's only really more recently that I've been doing increasingly large amounts of games work. So that's how I ended up here. So how did you start?
Speaker: Oh, gosh, how far back are we going here? So in computing, like more generally, or games like video games, when I was about eight years old or so, the first microcomputers had just started appearing.
Speaker: And I somehow ended up with the old BBC Model B. if anyone's old enough to know that thing. It was an 8-bit machine, revolutionary at the time. it had a massive 32K of onboard memory, which you could do incredible things with. And obviously, if you're if you're an 8-year-old and you've you've literally never seen a computer before, it's it's like magic. And my dad had bought one back from work, and it was you know plugged into the TV in the lounge.
Speaker: And i I just spent as much time as I could possibly get away with are on that and then i guess some years later the first puzzle game i ever seriously played came out on that machine which was a thing called repton which was basically ah sort of like boulder dash so it's a gravity it's game with gravity it's grid based and there were lots of rocks everywhere like really lots of rocks and you're digging around through soil and when When rocks are insufficiently supported, then they roll and then fall. And so the puzzles involve attempting to collect lots of diamonds which are scattered around the place without either walling yourself in with rocks or being hit on the head.
Speaker: ah Yeah, it was it was you know ah endlessly diverting. And then it spawned two sequels. And the second sequel had a level editor in it, which was... you know again, revolutionary at the time. It's like, wait, you're saying i can just I can just make levels for this game and my friends can play them? That's extraordinary.
Speaker: um So yeah, I instantly fell in love with that. And that's, ah like, there's been various games in in this area, and some of them are more puzzly, and some of them are more action-y. A lot of them have, like, moving enemies that can lead to a lot of time pressure. Like, how, on on the, like, action-to-puzzle spectrum, how puzzly was Reptum?
Speaker: Right, that's a really good question. So, I guess the first thing to say about that is that back then... people were much less conscious of these kinds of decisions. Absolutely. There was a kind of feeling that if you didn't like a feature in a video game, that was on you, you know, the game was what it was. The game is perfect. And you should get good. um So yeah, there was, there was real time stuff in there. Um,
Speaker: I guess i I also was a player of real-time things. I was and still am. So it it didn't bother me personally. And I was not at all conscious of it. But yeah, there were there were real-time elements. And there were also things like Repton 2 had an area where there were meteorites falling from the sky and you had to dodge them.
Speaker: It wasn't puzzly at all. If one hit you'd just die. you know, we it's the kind of design decision which these days, nobody would give that a pass, right? It would be considered ridiculous. But it was the opposite back then. It was like it was so ah so reasonable that nobody would have questioned it in the slightest. So that was very funny.
Speaker: It's fun hearing about these games because the games that I hear as an American from the 1980s British microcomputing scene are, I guess, what would be considered like the biggest hits. So Dizzy and games by the Oliver Twins and games by ah Ultimate who would go on to become Rare.
Speaker: Ah, yes, yes, yes. Like, those are those are the types of ah entries from that era. Because, again, like... i don I don't mean this in in a negative way at all. The knight...
Speaker: Late 1970s I would say about 1990, the British games industry is very Gallupagosian in that like it it was very insulated and it had its own industry evolution that was like separate from the rest of the world for a long time.
Speaker: Oh yeah, for sure. That's right. And I mean, of course, I guess the thing that's that's easy to forget is that, you know, in these days of downloadable games, ah back then actually shipping games around was hard, right? So one of the reasons why ah Western exploration of, for example, Japanese game culture didn't really take off until much later is because Japan is a long way away.
Speaker: and and that Yeah. That actually mattered back then. you know Yes. And, you know, you would get American subsidiaries that would bring the games across the Pacific, but then they would stop at America.
Speaker: yu But also, like, we didn't have the we we didn't rely on microcomputers for this in the same way. ah We were really focused on ah television games, ah which, you know, Atari.
Speaker: Yeah, Atari and then ah the n NES. And so it's very funny ah because there is this industry like, quote unquote, industry wide term of like the 1983 video game crash.
Speaker: But that was just America. That was just the United States specifically. That was not Japan. That was not Britain. That was not Europe. That was not even really Canada. It was just the United States. But um America has decided that we are the only country that matters online. And so like we're going to create the Internet monoculture. And so therefore the entire video game industry crashed in 1983.
Speaker: if Right. Yeah, i didn't I didn't hear about that until the last 10 years. Yes. um genuine Genuinely ah very funny. But no, so yeah, that's this whole era is like so just super interesting to me as someone who my only avenue of exploring it was like when Ocean would bring over a game, or Codemasters would bring over a game from the UK, port it to the n NES, and then release that n NES version in the United States. Oh, interesting. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah. these And would always sound like a British microcomputer, like the audio. Like they didn't really do anything with the audio. So it just sounded completely different than anything else on the US. And you knew instant, on the NES, we knew instantaneously, ah, this is a British one.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a British game. You could hear it. Of course, back then all these machines, you know, they used to have like custom sound chips that could make hardly any sounds, right? Yes. Now we're so used to the idea that, oh yeah, you can just have any audio you like. It's normal. Yeah. Yeah, no. But you'd have like 15 different types of computer or video game console and they would all have like completely different graphics capabilities, different audio capabilities, different number of buttons on the controller.
Speaker: it Yeah, no. And then um legitimately, i I think it's, ah if I recall, ah weird Like I said, weird warning. I believe it's the Sharp X1 that had the exact same microprocessor as the and NES.
Speaker: oh Just by pure coincidence. And that's what allowed these ports to happen. I'd never heard that. That's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, in 8802. Look, we I could get really in the in the damn weeds about 1980s microcomputing, so we should probably move on at some point. But like, yeah, that's where you got your start.
Speaker: I will move on. So, yeah, the other thing which is, um you know, when when people say, oh, yeah, tell us about what you've done, is that I'm one of these people who does a little bit of everything. So, or sometimes a lot of everything. Yeah.
Speaker: So also at about the same time was the time when role-playing games were just taking off in the UK. And again, you know, I was like eight years old. So obviously this stuff was was incredible. And I spent all my waking hours stuffing in as much role-playing as I could manage.
Speaker: And the like games. So at that time, the UK did not at all have a strong board games culture. Board games was, you know, really unplayable rubbish like Monopoly and Cluedo and things like that.
Speaker: And so the idea that there were that there were fun things you could do around a table was kind of quite revolutionary, at least to me. like Maybe I was living in some kind of bubble, but yeah very exciting stuff. And then the other thing which grew out of that is that role-playing games were imported to the UK from the US by this little company called Games Workshop.
Speaker: um And, of course, as you is you've doubtless heard, ah they went on to become quite a big deal because they were also interested in miniatures-based gaming. In fact, in the early days of role-playing, people used to use miniatures for role-playing like quite routinely.
Speaker: And so they bought up this this company called Citadel, who they'd been using to make the miniatures. And then they got very interested in, ah rather than just being an importer, into designing and releasing their own games, which they turned out to be very good at.
Speaker: And so I was also like super into that scene, went very, very deep into there. And in fact, my first my first ever like published game design credit was actually on one of their games. Because ah there was a guy called Richard Halliwell, who worked there at that time,
Speaker: ah Very, very good game designer. Sadly died relatively young. But he designed a game called Space Hulk, which is actually, like, it's it's very well regarded. But actually, even within that context, it's ah it's a way better game than most people realize. It is so, so good. and This guy was just an incredible designer.
Speaker: I got very into Space Hulk and played loads of it. And so when they were designing the sequel, I got involved in playtesting it. And they sent me a copy and spent ages and ages kind of ironing all the kinks out of that.
Speaker: And it's quite weird to look back at now. Because at the time, i was like, yeah, this totally makes sense. Like, I'm really good at this game. And they're trying to make the best game they possibly can. And now I'm like...
Speaker: I was a 15-year-old school kid, and I wrote them a letter saying, can I do stuff for you? And they said, yes? It's like, what? what's What the hell's a labor law?
Speaker: Well, I mean, so by the time Deathwing came out, I wasn't 15 anymore. But, you know, it's like what you come to realize after a while is like now there are really good mechanisms for doing all these things. But back before they existed, they still happened. They just happened in really strange ways. And it's why if you look into the history of like almost any field of creative endeavor,
Speaker: you you find all these weird connections between people. It's like, oh, look, this person knew this other person. These two people shared a flat, and that's so bizarre. um But it's not coincidence at all. It's because prior to the internet, that was the way you made connections with people. And so, you know, it's like if you if you want a playtester and there's no internet, where do you find one?
Speaker: Well, you might as well write to that kid who's been pestering you for the last three years, you know? So yeah, um so there was all that stuff. And then this game that I wrote in 1993, it's a collaboration with a couple of friends of mine.
Speaker: um One of them was my flatmate at university, also a very good programmer. and um I'd written this game on a machine called the Acorn Archimedes, which history almost forgotten. talked about the Acorn Archimedes on this podcast before. I had one as a kid.
Speaker: I hope so, because it was absolutely excellent. It's like one of the things, ah going back quite a long way, one of the things that used to infuriate me was the way that the IBM PC had become the standard on which modern computing was based, really. Yeah.
Speaker: um It was everywhere. And like the design, everything everything about the design of the PC was so bad compared to the Archimedes, which was beautifully put together. um But yeah, that's just the nature of. ah Yeah, I'm looking at this ah machine right now and it's this looks beautiful, especially at the time.
Speaker: Yeah, so the thing ah the thing that that I really liked about it was that it had but had two languages built into it. So I guess like the modern equivalent of a hard drive, except it didn't have all that stuff going on.
Speaker: And ah one of them was thing called BBC Basic, which was just essentially it's essentially just a very nice dialect of basic.
Speaker: um very, very easy to write, very stable, um not very performant, but you know that's basic for you. And then the other one, was this thing called ArmAssembler.
Speaker: ah So Arm is the the name of the chip that was in this thing. But this was such a nice assembly language. like Most assembly languages are really, really hostile and difficult to write.
Speaker: um So this puzzle game was just written in Assembler. And that wasn't some kind of weird flex. That was actually just the easiest way to do it, um which you know you wouldn't you wouldn't ever contemplate doing that now.
Speaker: um But then for for sales purposes, this wasn't very good because the these computers were fairly expensive and not that many people had them. So um ah John, my flatmate, just ported it to the Amiga and we released it on the Amiga.
Speaker: And then like when we were just about to publish it, like we were all still undergraduates at the time. We had no idea how you go about publishing a game because nobody knew then. so um So we wrote to Amiga Format, which was just the the kind of then preeminent magazine, and said, hey, you know, ah' we're publishing this game. Can we put a demo on your cover disc?
Speaker: And the editor wrote back and said, yeah, yeah, that would be great. Come and see us, though. It's like, all right. And so this was, you know, they were based down in Bath, which, from our point of view, was quite a long way. So we all, you know, jumped to the train. Where were you living at the time?
Speaker: Well, I was in Oxford. I was studying. And the other two, one of them was Oxford, one of them was in Cambridge. But yeah, so we jumped on train and went down there. And it was it was just the strangest experience at the time. Because...
Speaker: It was just a bunch of guys. Like literally, it was like a it was like a small office. And other than the game's paraphernalia absolutely everywhere, it's just like four random blokes, you know, and they were really, really informal. So like, oh, hi, you know, thanks for coming to see us. Tell us about your game. They were taking you seriously.
Speaker: ah let Like completely seriously, to the extent that they didn't even acknowledge the fact that, you know, we were so young. um And then at lunchtime, like we just all went to the pub next door. There was literally a pub next door to their office. And, you know, they weren't talking about the industry or being all serious and all this kind of thing. They were just playing pinball.
Speaker: They said, oh, yeah, we always play pinball at lunch. Do you like pinball? And like, yeah, I love pinball. Let's play pinball. So, you know, we we did that for a while. This guy was um Marcus Dyson, was the then editor. Yeah.
Speaker: Just a really nice guy, really nice bunch of people. And what we didn't realize was that um this wasn't going to help our game really at all. so So they did put it on the cover disc, but they put nothing about it in the actual magazine.
Speaker: And because we'd sent them all the all the details, we're like, you know, this is where people can get the game, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, none of that appeared. And we hadn't thought to put in the demo how you order the main game.
Speaker: So, you know, you sent this thing out to everybody's. Now, there was, fortunately, a file ah included with the demo, which had our contact details in. But obviously, only a relatively small subset of players actually found it.
Speaker: So it was a remarkably exclusive game in the end. We sold, I guess, about 120 copies, something like that. It's hilarious. Hey, that would be pretty good in 2026. Yeah, up to point.
Speaker: yeah up to a point But some yeah, it was very it was very influential on me. like the The way they approached the whole thing like made a real impression on me. And ah when they'd when they'd finished playing pinball at lunchtime, Marcus Dyson got a 10p out of his pocket, which was how much it cost to play then, and put it on the edge of the machine and walked out.
Speaker: I said, oh, why did you do that? And he said, well, it's nice, isn't it? So the next person who arrives there can play pinball without having to find money. It stuck with me for years afterwards.
Speaker: But yeah, and then the you know the next thing I did was I went and got a day job because that's what you do after you graduate. and it's like I did consider going into games, but I'm particularly back then, but I think probably still now the the on-ramp into games is is horrific. horrific that You can't just walk into the games industry and say, yeah, you know I'm going to do games production or whatever. I'm going i'm going to write games. Yeah.
Speaker: what they What they do is they have like a big pyramid, and the people who actually make the games are right at the top. And then you have to kind of work your way up. And it's like, I'm not spending 20 years before I can write my first game. It's like, I refuse to do that. So, you know, it just it remained a hobby for me.
Speaker: And I guess it might have stayed there, if not for some strange strange circumstances later on. Yeah. Yeah, i went and I went and made operating systems for like eight years. Which operating systems?
Speaker: Well, so it's not something you would have heard of, but um there was a guy, games programmer called Chris Hensley, who made some games for the Spectrum. ah Quite successful.
Speaker: And he got really tired of porting his games to other platforms. So one day he decided he was going to make a porting framework. And thereafter, he would write his games for this framework. And having done so, he would then just automatically have like free ports to all the the popular platforms at the time.
Speaker: And in the process of writing this porting framework, he discovered that the aspects of it were very hard to do well. And so, you know, he started a proper company to do this and got like, um you know, administrators on board and many other programmers and experts in particular fields, and they tried to do it properly and they did really well.
Speaker: um But in the process of making this porting framework, ah they discovered that what they were really doing was making an operating system. like That's what a porting framework is, right? It's an operating system.
Speaker: And then ah some years into this process, ah suddenly software on mobile phones started to become a thing. And ah because of the nature of games and what games care about, they realized that they had one of the very few real-time operating systems that was compact enough to run on phones. And so they were effectively like way ahead of the market.
Speaker: And so... you know i wouldn't It would be unfair to say the business pivoted, but they stopped really talking about games. like It wasn't about games anymore. And they made like ah a clean room implementation of the the Java profile that was popular at that time, a thing called MidP. And you know they were selling like millions of units of this stuff to like mobile phone manufacturers in the East and so on.
Speaker: So it was potentially quite interesting business. And it ran into trouble for really odd reasons. So like at the time, I knew nothing about business, and I i arguably still don't.
Speaker: But they approached you know a couple of the really big manufacturers and said, you know do you want to buy our technology? And they said, no, we want to buy you. We'll buy your company. They said, oh, no, you can't do that. We're not for sale.
Speaker: I said, yeah, but the thing is, we can't buy your technology because you're too small. but we We agreed that it's great, right? But that we cannot balance our $2 billion dollar company on top of your...
Speaker: $2 million dollar company. That's ridiculous. Like it creates this totally unacceptable risk. So we either have to buy you or we can't use you at all. And so, it's you know, they obviously the the management like found ways around this problem in limit to a limited extent, but it was such a strange thing.
Speaker: And one of the people they were working with actually had the had a phone that was was more or less essentially the iPhone, like two years ahead of Apple. um And it it never actually came out. It collapsed before they got to market. so a lot of these things are very interesting to see from the inside.
Speaker: yeah, and then the way I got back into games was completely unrelated to anything to do with work. It was 2001. My partner and i you know had decided we were going to have a kid as many young couples do.
Speaker: um And somewhat to our surprise, it turned out to be twins. So we're like, oh, OK, well, I guess this is going to be twice as much work then. But OK, fair enough.
Speaker: And then some years into this, ah it became apparent that my son was having difficulty learning language. There some kind of speech delay going on. And we didn't discover until many years later that he was autistic, but we were sort of learning about this as we went along.
Speaker: And it then eventually turned out that um it's impossible to get childminders under these circumstances, that they need special qualifications, which then makes it so expensive that if you're just, you know, unless you're enormously wealthy, you can't you can't do it So I was like, okay, I have to be at home then. So, you know, I quit my job and it's like, right, well, it's fine because I'm a programmer and this is a computer so I can work from home. and say ah So, you know, i i I kind of became a freelancer without ever really deciding to, but it just made the most sense for us.
Speaker: And like so many of life's decisions, it actually worked out brilliantly. And, you know, I love freelancing. It's let me work on loads of cool things. um And then over time, as as I was saying earlier, I just gradually drifted towards games and doing more and more games work.
Speaker: And was that easy to just be like, oh, I'm going to do freelance programming and eventually get freelance programming on game projects? or So was that easy? No. No, it's definitely not. um And ah i mean, I guess there's kind of two questions there. So like freelancing, no, it's very hard. you you have to...
Speaker: You have to go via kind of work contacts and social contacts and just everything, like every opportunity that you can find. I was i was briefly a freelance programmer. A friend of the family gave me one gig and then i never i never and have got around to finding more work after that.
Speaker: I was not good that. Is it freelance if you take one gig? and or is that Or is that like paid Lance? like what like I feel like free means like... I was free to take on other work. Okay, I mean, yes.
Speaker: ah ah Arguably even freer, right? Aspirationally free Lance. Yeah, but no, it is like, so the thing about freelancing is it it covers a multitude of different ah lives that people do lead. ah You know, some people, it's it's effectively solo consultancy, right? And ah you hear about people getting enormous wages and, you know, consulting for like like like top firms and doing incredible work. That was definitely not what I was doing.
Speaker: um Like certainly for the first few years, it was very much, I was mostly doing things related to the twins. And then, ah you know, in the gaps, I was doing bits of programming. And ah fortunately for me, we were able to live mainly on my partner's salary. So, you know, I think if I'd had to like pay rent in those first few years and that I was just on my own, that would have been very tough, very tough. um Speaking of which, actually, i i gather that Gwen Frey ah in fact has twins. and They must be, what, about one now? Something like that? Very young anyway.
Speaker: don't even want to try and guess the age because that's just going to make me... Whatever it is, it's going to be wrong. Whatever it is, it's going to be wrong. but and Let's say under three. I can very confidently say under three. But I was listening to an earlier episode of your podcast. I forget exactly when.
Speaker: um And this was ah this was Gwen talking about ah the the fact that she was expecting twins. and She said, you know, this next year is going to be chaotic. But then when I come back and I'm like, oh, no, so sorry to break this to you. You are not coming back in a year. It's like five maybe at the inside.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very disruptive. And a shout out to Gwen if she's listening. But it's it's very disruptive and you know you really don't get a lot of sleep. It's it's absolutely exhausting. and And fortunately, i love childcare. Like my um my my little sister was seven years younger than me. And so I got a little bit of this like early in life and already had a taste for it. But I think kids are amazing and had a very good time, you know, when they were small doing all the all the parent stuff. But um yeah, it's it's not compatible with the career. It really isn't. so
Speaker: ah So a lot of these these freelance jobs were were done under not ideal circumstances. um And then the second half of your question, Alan, like, you know, picking up game stuff, it's really a lot of it's just people that you've crossed paths with for whatever reason. So in fact, you probably remember this. ah One of my early freelance ah games gigs was on Sokobond.
Speaker: ah This would be about 2013, something like that. and Yeah, you yeah look we we didn't like include that in ah the list of ah stuff that you have worked on because it was like yeah not a no you weren't like a primary creative force on it, but you were very helpful. No, I didn't write i didn't write the game by any stretch to the imagination. It was not even a programming thing. It was ah like ah testing of levels and triage to some extent. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, you you were you were kind of like telling us, like, I think you were ranking like each level on like one to five for like, how good is this level? Yeah, two things. How good is it and how hard is it? Which I i still tend to do that with things. It's like have a two axis system.
Speaker: If you've played any of my games, ah you will recognize that I have a much bigger problem with easy levels than with hard ones. It's sir yeah do you Do you have a spreadsheet for the Golem of like, here's all the levels, here's how ah good they are, here's how hard they are?
Speaker: So I don't, and here's why. Because I find it impossible to rate anything I've made. ah sure. so ah So levels i think ah but that I think are bad in my own games just go straight out. They don't even make the shortlist. It's like, I don't like this. It's gone.
Speaker: um Levels that I think are good, I'm often wrong. LAUGHTER
Speaker: ah So that's why I'm so keen on playtesters is um i'm I'm a big advocate of playtesting. And I kind of feel like until you've properly playtested things, you really don't know much about them at all, both in terms of how good they are and how broken they are.
Speaker: So the Golem was carried quite hard by the two playtesters that I hired, who were Joel Fox and CHZ, whose real name to this day I don't know.
Speaker: But they they were superb. like I was very lucky with them. They were really, really good playtesters. And the playtesting process for that game was long. Like... you know When we shipped, some of the levels were quite rough, but that's nothing to how rough they were before before we'd gone through that iteration, polishing them up.
Speaker: And how how long were you working on the Golem? Because like in in my head, it was like... kind of like not maybe contemporaneous with Sockermont but like closer to that the Monster Expedition and then I went to look at when it released oh this released like 2020. Yeah so your recollection is not your recollection is not quite right but it's complicated so the reason why it's complicated is because um initially it was just like a little web thing
Speaker: um the the levels were huge. Like it was like screen sized levels. So kind of, you know, a hundred cells across or whatever it is. In fact, I think it's scrolled even.
Speaker: um And there were many, many puzzles on each level and you were kind of wandering around solving things. and And I released that to like to the Thinky Puzzle Discord.
Speaker: um And it was only when people started playing this that I realized, actually, this is this is a horrible format. it's It's really the worst way to present this stuff, right? Because every time that you do one puzzle, you have this kind of anxiety about, am I taking the right pieces forward to the next puzzle?
Speaker: Or could I have extracted more material? And in fact, I've already failed everything because I haven't gotten enough out of the earlier puzzle. you know it's ah And so it's the it's the opposite of what you want. like The game's already quite hard. What you want is reassurance that what you've just done is correct. And so so the next thing I did was I released a whole series of levels for it, like really a lot of material, where I was releasing...
Speaker: like one level a day for the whole of January that year. this what i think it might have been 2020 or maybe 2019. I can't quite remember now.
Speaker: But yeah, i was just I was just publishing them. And in fact, um this was just ah at the point at which the Showcase channel had launched in the Discord. And so for about the first month of Showcase's existence, it was just me spamming up the channel, which I couldn't possibly do now. But at the time, it actually weirdly worked out as quite a positive thing because it meant that everybody was visiting it like once a day to play that day's level.
Speaker: And then after that process was over, I was like, okay, I now have enough feedback that I'm actually convinced that this game is good. And oh, look, there's a pandemic on. So now no one is giving me any work like at all. It's just freelancing is over. It's gone.
Speaker: So I might as well work on this game because I'm not getting any income anyway. So that yeah that's how it that's how it ended up getting made, really, is that companies all went into this weird kind of defensive crouch and and you know they wouldn't talk about anything.
Speaker: And there certainly wasn't any work. so And then the you know the other thing which surprised me, I guess, is that after the ah the kind of paid version of the Gollum came out, it was it was way more popular than I was expecting it to be.
Speaker: ah Not necessarily in terms of numbers of sales, but in terms of people saying really nice things about it and like being very enthusiastic. So that was a good experience. I like that.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's like very much a niche game, but within the Thinky Puzzle community, it's definitely got a reputation. That's a but yeah perfect summary. Yeah, it's it's exactly what it is. It's like, um you know, it's it's one of those things where it's like the person who made your favorite puzzle game probably likes the Golem.
Speaker: But you wouldn't like it. and Yeah, i was I was replaying some of it earlier today before this podcast and It's something we've talked about before, but like it's it's a very contraction-based game, which is like a flavor of puzzle design that like I think is still quite striking. And like not not a lot of games like have quite comparable puzzle sensibilities, I think. like yeah Do you think that's like something that ah you're particularly interested in? Did it just happen coming from the mechanics of that game?
Speaker: So i I, yeah, so that's that's certainly, ah firstly, that's a very good summary. I think that is very true. it It is something that I'm interested in, but I did not, in the case of the Golem, make it intentionally.
Speaker: So the thing which which really shaped the Golem is I came up with a new approach to designing puzzles, which I wanted to try out. And basically what the approach was, was that I'd noticed that a lot of design, not not on my games, but on everybody's games, a lot of design was very shaped by the level editor.
Speaker: And so what I wanted to do was design all the puzzles for the game without opening the level editor. And basically the idea was that... Each puzzle would be one sentence of natural language, so English in my case.
Speaker: And if I couldn't summarize the core idea of the puzzle in about a sentence, it probably wasn't a good puzzle. And that way it stopped me doing all those things which you constantly see where puzzles are just kind of geometric or they're based on some little bit of micro or something like that. And so what it meant was each puzzle had to have a really clear, like solid idea behind it.
Speaker: And it turns out that when you build those things, many of them turn out to be contraptions, which was not part of the idea going in. It was kind of a discovery. It's like, oh, yeah, OK, fair enough.
Speaker: And then reading the Steam reviews for the game, quite a lot of people pick up on this and say, oh one of the things I like about this game is that you build these cool things. It was very much stumbled upon rather than intentional.
Speaker: And how how do you feel about the game um now, like six years on? like is Is there anything you look at and go, oh, i wish I'd done that differently? Or like, oh, I think this could have been um i like, like if particularly I feel like with a lot of people thinking about hints these days, like the Golem is a game that does not have a hint system. Like, do you to feel like it could have had a hint system if you're making it now?
Speaker: Oh gosh, so this is really two questions. I'll answer the the first one first, which is, yes, there are definitely things I would do differently. And in fact, with the passage of time, they accumulate and become more intense. So ah in particular, i i think that there is there is a mistake that I made repeatedly in the Golem, which became worse and worse towards the end of the game, which is if you have...
Speaker: ah If you have a level where something is hard to do, then the harder that thing is, the more you want to strip out everything around it except the hard thing.
Speaker: um So the worst offender for this is a level really, really late in the game. in fact, it's arguably the second from the last level. It's thing called telekinesis. And... and I think it's probably still broken in its current form in the sense that there's at least one way to complete it, which is not the intended way.
Speaker: And this is actually ah what got the level into this state. So it was broken repeatedly by the playtesters. And every time they broke something, I would put in like a little sticking plaster, which prevented the thing that they'd done. And so the level now consists of the core idea, plus about 12 of these sticking plasters. And it's enormous and very cluttered. And like, it's... the The more you patch the unintended solutions, the less focused the level becomes on the core idea.
Speaker: Right, exactly. And so the the core idea of this level I still love. I think it's a brilliant core idea, but it's now so badly obscured that I think even a player who successfully solved the level...
Speaker: um like their their experience of the solution path wouldn't be at all what i would want it to be it would be a kind of a long slog through deep chaos probably about a day's work to complete this one level so yeah uh that's you know these kinds of things i would definitely do very differently but also my design sensibilities have changed you know the um something that i I always say to anyone who listens to me about puzzles for five minutes is that we're actually right now in a golden age of puzzles like there's so many really really good puzzles coming out all the time and
Speaker: you know, it's ah as flattering as it is that some of these people say, oh yes, the Golem was an influence on my design. It remains the case that I'm looking at their games and going, wow, this is so much better. And so i'm I'm very influenced by the design going on around me. And I want to like absorb a lot of these really good ideas and, you know, make something that that both embodies them and kind of carries forward some of the things I've been thinking about. they yeah, constant progress.
Speaker: The second half of the question is what you asked about hints. So I have a very complicated relationship with hint systems. Because if you go back 20 years, I was that person whose whose pride would not allow them to press hint under any circumstances. of this' like It's a failure if you press hint. And I've kind of grown out of that because ah puzzles are like mathematics in that ah you pass your peak very young.
Speaker: And so i'm i'm I'm hopeless at puzzles now compared to how good I used to be. But I still have a kind of slight antagonistic relationship towards hints when I'm a player. So i don't like the fact that a lot of the time pressing hint will spoiler me. like Usually the thing that I want to know about the level is not what it tells me.
Speaker: And then switching to having my designer hat on, I find hint systems hard to design because i I can't bring myself to incorporate a hint system which does something that I would hate as a player.
Speaker: um And hint systems are hard. like that Some very good work has been done on them, but you know it's an intensely difficult problem. Because what you want to do is you want to allow the player to be the one who still experiences the moment of discovery. There's some cool idea in the level. You want them to find that. You don't want to just tell them what it is.
Speaker: but you don't know what they're stuck on. Like, they're stuck, but you don't know why. So the ideal hint would be something that tells them everything except the big revelation, so it unblocks them perfectly to find it for themselves.
Speaker: That's really hard. Have you been experimenting with the with thoughts on hint systems on whatever you're working on next?
Speaker: So ah not very much yet. So the... um I'm working on another large puzzle game and have been for about seven years now, but like not full time.
Speaker: And increasingly, like the way that I look at puzzle design is the hardest problem is finding like the right core mechanics. And so this game has been pulled apart and reworked several times, like changing the core mechanics.
Speaker: A hint system, when I get that far, will be something that goes in after pretty much all the puzzles. So I'll get to maybe 90% completion before I start seriously thinking about what I want to do for hints.
Speaker: I think this time i probably will have one. um But whether I have one that I'm genuinely happy with, or whether it's one of these things where it's a concession to the expectations of the player base, is another matter.
Speaker: Gotcha. Gotcha. ah So yeah, what how would you describe your career after the release of The Golem?
Speaker: So ah i actually, um like weirdly, I went into full-time employment for a while um because I applied for something ah that I was looking around like freelancing boards.
Speaker: And ah there was this this particular company called Volta XR. And ah what they do is they are a special effects company and they make ah real-time special effects. So not like you would see on a movie or something. They're for use by musicians primarily or other people doing interactive experiences. And the idea is that, you know, suppose your band performing somewhere that has one of these huge video screens, as many places do now, what are you going to put on the screen?
Speaker: So you know it could you could like prepare video contents and so on, but then you have to sync everything that you do up with your music. The other alternative is you could have a piece of software that's monitoring what you're playing and adapting the visuals and like creating visuals as you play, which is essentially what what the their software at that time was doing.
Speaker: And then during the time that I was there, they got very interested in interactivity. so that was about the time I came on board. And essentially what what the idea was, was if this stuff is being generated in real time, then the audience can play a part in generating these these visuals, right? So um potentially a very exciting possibility for any performer, the idea that you've got an audience of thousands of people and they're all in some sense involved in what you're doing or you know can influence it in various ways.
Speaker: um And yeah, ah it remains a really interesting a really interesting field. So Volta is still going. um I don't know exactly what their current direction is, but it's I've seen them doing things. And like I think they were at the Super Bowl and they did a display in Times Square and these kinds of things.
Speaker: ah And it's really it's really all about that kind of... exploration of the idea of interaction for for these big video displays.
Speaker: And yeah, that there was a lot of interaction. So like in terms of its relevance to games, um we were actually using Unity for this. It's quite good for special effects. And so you know I picked up a lot of skills doing that that so that were then relevant to games. And then not very long after that, I was involved with with Astra, who you may know.
Speaker: um they Unfortunately, they recently shut down, as I understand it. um that was Megan Carragher was giving a talk at ThinkyCon, which some of this was discussed.
Speaker: But um yeah, they became they went from being, ah I guess, like almost a charity, a kind of support system for young developers, ah to being a publisher. They became astrological.
Speaker: and put out some good games. But yeah, so I was never employed by Astra, but I was working as a kind of mentor on their Discord. ah And there I met ah Kate Killick, who went on to found Glowfrog Games.
Speaker: And so I worked for them for a bit, putting out their debut title. um Due to ah ah circumstances beyond their control, they lost their their lead programmer ah halfway through the project. And so I was in the um unusual position of freelancing as a lead developer, which you don't get to do very often.
Speaker: ah But it was fun, like fantastic team. And yeah, like that that game was incredibly ambitious, but ah but came out really well. So it'll be interesting to see what Glowfrog do in the future.
Speaker: In fact, I think that yeah they um ah Ellie, their artist, won an award for that work. So that was that was nice. Yeah, and then coming off the back of Glowfrog, I've been still...
Speaker: still mainly looking for games freelancing and I'm still doing that now. Yeah. And you're currently working on our next project, which it's secret it' is very secret. so we're not going to say much about it. But yeah, it's been great having you on that. i Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah. um Before we wrap up, I got to ask you, how did you end up running the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam? Yeah. Well, actually, in in a very low-key way. So um ah I have always ah spent a lot of my time online.
Speaker: um i've been I've been online but since before the web existed, so I'm very used to it by now. And um one of the conversations which kept happening on that Discord is people were saying, oh, we should do a game jam.
Speaker: And then, you know, six months past, we should do a game jam. And eventually i got fed up and I got like, right, that's enough. We're doing a game jam. And of course the thing about something like that is that then a year passes and somebody goes, are we doing that game jam again?
Speaker: And so it's just become, you know, it's become a thing now that I do every year because why not? No, but joking joking apart, I actually love it. Like it's one of my favorite things every year.
Speaker: um because well there's two reasons. Firstly, that community is actually lovely. like It's just a big a big bunch of really nice people. ah which may yeah That makes the process of running a jam actually a pleasure, because like instead of having people shouting at you about how cross and upset they are, it's just lots of people asking very you know very reasonable questions and being generally nice and supporting each other, which I love to see.
Speaker: um And the other thing is we get some shockingly good games out of that jam every year. Like, I think it's true to say that every year the jam has run, there's been at least a few games in it which have been better than some of the things I've paid money for in the same year.
Speaker: Just really, really good. um And that's because there's a lot of good designers hanging out there. so you know, it's I guess it's not rocket science. ah how do you come up with the themes for the Jam? Because i feel like they're generally pretty good at like being like nicely evocative, not too constraining, not too vague.
Speaker: Oh, thank you. um Yeah, so ah so it's kind of a two-stage process. So one of the things I do is I have a text file, which I just keep on my machine throughout the year.
Speaker: And every time an idea occurs to me that I think might make a good Jam theme, then it goes completely untriaged into this text file. um And then ah when um when i get to the end of, like when when we're sort of a month or two away from the game jam and I have to make the announcements,
Speaker: i so I strip off like my three favorites from the list, the ones that have sort of stood the test of time a little bit. And then i have ah I have a secret advisor ah who I consult with and say, you know what are the pros and cons of these three? Which ones do you like best?
Speaker: It's Joe, by the way. and um and yeah And then you know through that process, one is picked, but usually the top three are all pretty reasonable. um there's there's quite a lot of pitfalls actually in in picking themes like there's various things that you have to avoid um primarily to do with locking people out of the jam so like on a couple of occasions we've had things in the shortlist which we've both been very excited about but then we realized oh wait a minute there's a whole category of developers who might not want to touch this at all and so then it's like so that's not a good theme because you know we we really want everybody to be able to join in who wants to
Speaker: So we won't be seeing ah the AI blockchain jammed in anytime soon Oh my goodness. Yeah. So actually that's, uh, that is, I guess the world.
Speaker: That is the one aspect of of running it this last year, which was very different, is that, of course, AI has become this huge thing. And you know when I was doing, i did a research degree back when I was at university and like very closely adjacent to the what was then the field of AI.
Speaker: um And so I have all kinds of opinions about this stuff. But you know it did it did cause ah did cause some distress this year with people saying, you know why did you not ban AI submissions?
Speaker: And it's a good question, very valid. And so there was a big ah big discussion which did get slightly heated, which is unusual for that community, um but was also quite productive. And so as an experiment, ah this coming year, I am actually going to ban AI.
Speaker: ah even though ah there are some arguments for not doing so. um And just see how it plays out because it's difficult to predict, right? Yeah, I mean, the main reason to not have a rule against it this year was, well, we didn't need a rule before.
Speaker: Yeah, so this year we actually did get one AI submission, um which was very, very open about the fact that it had been made that way. And controversially, I think it was a good game.
Speaker: But... it was still like many of the other drawbacks of AI would, could still be leveled against it as a valid criticism. And, you know, because, because I'm the organizer, I feel like I have a very strong duty to actually not weigh in,
Speaker: With ah ah you know my personal views, i they're not exactly secret, but I try and set them to one side ah and you know try and arbitrate the thing fairly.
Speaker: But the reality is there was there was such an asymmetry in the feelings of the community. That's the main reason why I want to try banning it for a year, because it was something like 20 or 30 against for every one for.
Speaker: It really was overwhelming. And at the end of the day, the jam belongs to the community. It's not mine. like it's I'm um its current custodian, but it's i I don't feel any sense of ownership. you know it's And it's just one year. like you know if we If we do this for one year and it works, maybe we'll just stick with it because it's the simplest thing.
Speaker: ah if there do seem to be actual drawbacks, if I get lots of mail from people saying, I'd love to participate, but I wanted to use AI for this one little thing, then maybe we'll have a more nuanced rule in future, which says, you know, don't submit slop, but if you want to use AI for these particular things, it's permissible, you should flag it or whatever. I don't know what the what the best answer will turn out to be.
Speaker: want people to make games.
Speaker: Oh, what a... What an ever-evolving quandary in this industry. Alas, we can't dodge it. Yes, before before we head out, ah is there anything specific that you would want to plug?
Speaker: I don't think I want to plug in a anything, no, except um you know the Thinky Puzzle Discord, I would say. like If there's anybody listening to this and you were not involved there, it's a great community. Come and check it out if you haven't already.
Speaker: Worth your time. Co-signed. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online? ah These days, are mainly blue sky, which ah I like as a community. It's peaceful place.
Speaker: It's relatively calm there. I like that it's calm. I like this too. All right. Well, thank you very much again. and thank you for listening to the Dracneck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoisemusic.com.
Speaker: Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melody Zawadniak. Please write and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
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