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Episode 17: RBOR Games (Bean and Nothingness)
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In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Nic Ford, Jordan Watkins, and Michael Von Korff, the developers behind Bean and Nothingness. Topics include the development of the game, designing complex interactions while balancing the game, and designing puzzle games for hardcore puzzle fans.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the Dracneck and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Seren, the producer at Dracneck and Friends, so and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Dracneck at Dracneck and Friends.
00:00:35
Speaker
Heyo. Today, we're joined by the team behind Bean and Nothingness. How are you all doing today? Having great day. Awesome. Can the three of you sort of introduce yourself, name, pronouns? What have you done on the project?
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, I'll start. um I'm Nick Ford. I did a few different things in the project. I was half the team writing the code. I designed many of the puzzles, but not as many as Jordan.
00:01:02
Speaker
And um to the extent that there was a team lead, I guess it was me, but maybe we can talk about how that worked later on. I am Jordan. I did also quite a few of the puzzles, including sort of putting the entire structure of the game together was sort of wound up falling to me of like managing the like actual, this is what the final set of puzzles is going to look like.
00:01:26
Speaker
I did sort of the other half-ish of the code and I did some music and sound design. um Nick forgot to mention that he wrote this story. that is true.
00:01:37
Speaker
ah Michael? Yeah, I'm Michael Von Korp, he am, and I did sort of initial game design, which we all sort of collaborated on together, sort of concepting the game, and a bunch of puzzle design, although I think ah by the end of the game, probably a lot of my sort of early designs wound up more as inspiration for many of the puzzles that exist in the game than than the actual final puzzles. And then I did a lot of playtesting at the end.
00:02:04
Speaker
ah Mary Wooters sadly couldn't make it. um And she did a lot of the art and character design for the game.
Overview of Bean and Nothingness Game
00:02:10
Speaker
Awesome. So before we get into the details of it, can one of you describe the game for somebody who might not be familiar with it?
00:02:19
Speaker
Certainly. So Beanie Nothingness is a like a challenging, turn-based, 2D, top-down, tile-based puzzle game. So it's divided up into puzzles.
00:02:29
Speaker
It's a little open-ended which puzzle you go to solve. It's the thing we like. The goal of an individual puzzle is to get to a specific win tile, but there'll be some sort of obstacles in your way. And the core mechanic is that there are beans on every level, um which you can pick up, and some specific combinations of beans, which we call recipes, which are unique to each level, will turn into various monsters when shot. And the monsters can do things for you. They can get rid of these obstacles, but they're also sort of threatening, and they can get in your way. And so the interplay between those two things is a lot of the source of the puzzle design in the game.
Development Journey and Challenges
00:03:03
Speaker
And as I understand it, it was a fairly long development. When did you start it and what was going on with yourself? ah Yeah, so we started in sometime in 2012. I don't remember the exact month.
00:03:16
Speaker
um We were all in graduate school together in ah in a math PhD program at the University of Michigan. And um actually, originally, the plan was that this game would be our quick initial game that we would just like put together really fast to see how we work together as a team and if we wanted to do something bigger. And then um it actually ended up taking around nine years from beginning to end. We we released in December of 2021.
00:03:43
Speaker
That's not to say it was actually nine years of work. I think there were big chunks in the middle there, especially after we started graduating and we weren't all living in the same place anymore, where basically nothing happened on the project at all.
00:03:56
Speaker
You know, this was never a full-time job for any of us. So it basically had to just happen when we were at places in our lives where we were able to devote the time to it, and you know the stars aligned to make sure that we could actually work together.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, in that sense, the game sort of benefited at the end from the pandemic. i think I mean, we we'd certainly were working on the game off and on throughout those years, but I think I fell off for the most part after the first year and until the pandemic.
00:04:28
Speaker
And we definitely sort of came together at the end and were able to push it through, which we would not have been able to do if we had lives at the time. How many times did the overall direction or like major decisions change throughout development? Because with a protracted development that long, I have to imagine that you would simply realize, like okay, maybe this isn't working, maybe this isn't working. like What are some of the biggest pivots that happened?
00:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's there's definitely a ah single sort of canonical answer to that question. For maybe two-thirds or so of the game's development time, it was going to be a real-time game.
00:05:09
Speaker
So it was it was always grid-based. So it was a little bit like, you know, the the old Game Boy Pokemon games or something where you would press a direction that would still move you an entire tile, but like stuff would be happening in real-time all around you.
00:05:23
Speaker
um I think for... quite a bit of the time that the game was real time, we were all kind of in agreement that like, in an ideal world, this would have been a turn-based game, but it sort of seemed like too much work to make that change. And at one point, you know, just a couple years before the game actually got released,
00:05:42
Speaker
I decided to just sort of see what would happen if i tried to rewrite the game engine to make it turn-based. And actually, almost none of the code that I wrote for that experiment ended up in the final product. But I think it was so pretty immediately clear, i think, to me and Jordan, that this was obviously a good idea and that we should put in whatever effort we need to make it work.
00:06:02
Speaker
To add a bit to that, there was a problem that we kept seeing in playtesting for the first... So this was actually in 2020, I think, when Nick made that change, if I remember correctly, right after the pandemic started.
00:06:15
Speaker
um And there was a problem we kept seeing in the like eight years before that of playtesting, which was people would try to do something in a level which wasn't the correct solution. It wasn't something that would work.
00:06:27
Speaker
And they would be pressing all the inputs sort of perfectly. It was a pretty easy game to manage, but they wouldn't believe that they were pressing it perfectly. And so they would continue to try the same solution over and over, feeling like, oh, they just need to do it faster. They just need to execute better. And that was obviously a really bad experience for players that...
00:06:47
Speaker
was a big thing that we were trying to manage in our puzzle design over and over, and we just couldn't kind of get it to work. And the shift to turn-based was, it it just immediately solved this problem, which was very exciting.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense because there's there's definitely a lot of puzzles which are like one turn off from working. And like in a turn-based game, you can like reason it through and go like, well, no, there's literally no possible way that I could be any more efficient. But yeah, when you have that execution component, it's just not going to be as obvious.
00:07:21
Speaker
how How much work was it in the end to make that transition? um It was many, many hours of coding, but some things actually got easier in the new version of the game, just sort of logically, right? I think it was simpler to have pretty well-defined strict game logic if you know the question you're answering is, what's the sequence of things that has to happen within a turn rather than what's the sequence of things that has to happen within a frame of animation?
00:07:50
Speaker
um it was a lot easier for us to think logically and holistically about that question. um But the actual work of making the transition happen was was pretty hard.
00:08:01
Speaker
Were there any edge case behaviors that you changed at that point? You're like, oh, well, it kind of had to work this way with a real-time system. But now that we've got a new paradigm where everything's going to be turn by turn, you could make different decisions about how things would behave.
00:08:19
Speaker
There were some some changes. I mean, there more than edge cases. Like, i originally, the vine monster pulled things sort of slower than the player moved, which made the monster feel different, made puzzles work differently.
00:08:38
Speaker
um But you can't have a monster, you know, that acts sort of... anything other than on multiples of turns, you know, in a turn-based game. So I think that was a pretty substantial change.
00:08:50
Speaker
It was probably the starkest monster behavior change, yeah. There was also ah an issue that it might be a little harder to notice where the the roller monster, the first one you encounter in the game, ah used to move, I think, like four-thirds the speed of the player or something, and that obviously was going to have to change.
00:09:06
Speaker
two um But I think actually ah there were a lot of questions about, you know, various various things can happen in a turn that like maybe change which beans are on on the play field or um things like that. You know, like when when you shoot a bean and something else is trying to grab the bean, like who wins?
00:09:26
Speaker
And I think questions like that, um we basically just re-answered all of those questions from scratch and in ah in a way that I think was was much better than what was there before. Awesome.
00:09:37
Speaker
So as you're, you know, as we're talking about needing to re-answer a lot of those questions and with the protracted development, how did you stay engaged in the project through all of that time?
00:09:54
Speaker
Like, obviously the game was developed in phases like over many years, like you said, but like, When you did come back to it, was it usually like an aha, I've solved the problem now and I have free time right now. I'm going to jump in and I'm going to change it. Or like, how did that actually end up working in practice?
Team's Motivation and Design Approach
00:10:15
Speaker
ah So one answer to how we stayed engaged was that a lot of the time we didn't. um I think... After I finished grad school in 2014 and um moved to to take on a job, I think starting around that time, basically no work was happening on the game for maybe around two years. Maybe if if ah Jordan or Michael remembers differently, they can correct me. but um the The things that made us re-engage with the game where' were basically like, like you said, one of us or several of us having sort of the time and mental bandwidth to take it on. And especially after the development had been going for so long, I at least just sort of felt like, oh, this is like a big creative project that's been a part of my life for a really long time and it would just be really satisfying to play.
00:11:03
Speaker
get something out the door. And I think that feeling was actually, even as simple as it is, ah big part of the motivation for for trying to push to get the last mile. done There were a couple of times where we scheduled, like I came out to visit Nick and you know then we were together. And so it was a little easier to work on the game, you know being in the same physical location.
00:11:25
Speaker
Probably there was nothing as motivating as the switch to turn-based, which I think it solves so many problems and made us feel like, oh, this is it. This is, we really have the game. And for me, at least that was a huge motivator. It's suddenly so much easier to just work 50, 60% of the time on the on the game.
00:11:42
Speaker
And was this a all of your first game or had you you made like jam-sized projects before this? ah It was our first game of any decent size, yeah. i was very excited when I was in high school about making like little little tiny games, you know, of of the sort that you can make while you're in high school. But yeah.
00:12:06
Speaker
So I guess I had some knowledge of like roughly how to code a game loop starting out. But ah for the most part, I think basically, yeah, it was our, it was our first project. And um I, and I think Jordan feels the same way. I imagine learned so much just from working on this project. You know, I'm,
00:12:26
Speaker
kind of ashamed of a lot of the code from the very beginning of it. And um in in addition to to technical stuff, I feel like I learned a lot just about how to manage a large project and get something out the door.
00:12:38
Speaker
In practice, we rewrote the code base two or three times. Like our very first attempt at the code, I think almost nothing lives from that. um So there is a sense in which we made this game, but a smaller version of it, and it wasn't very good, and then we made it again.
00:12:55
Speaker
I do think that when it comes to sort of puzzle game design, there are some experiences that we probably drew from that that weren't designing puzzle games or or video games at all.
00:13:10
Speaker
i had a lot of experience at this point designing puzzle hunts, like, you know, thinky puzzles on paper. And I know that that informed a lot of my sensibilities and and thinking around, you know, initial designs of the game.
00:13:26
Speaker
Design-wise, I had some experience, just a little bit of experience making custom levels for Droid, which was also a big inspiration for the game, for me.
00:13:38
Speaker
Awesome. Over the time when you were, you know, let's let's say the parts where you were less focused, the parts where maybe you were coming back to the game after a longer stretch of time, were you ever tempted to cut down on the amount of mechanics so that you could, like, rein in the scope of the game and get it shipped sooner?
00:14:00
Speaker
Or did you always want this to be this massive, super long, super deep game? We did definitely cut some mechanics, um mostly ones that we designed relatively late that just sort of didn't seem like they supported enough puzzles to be worth the extra complication. But um speaking for myself, the sort of maximalism of the design of Bean and Nothingness is actually one of the things I like about it.
00:14:26
Speaker
um I like that there are a whole bunch of different mechanics and a lot of interactions to have to pay attention to. i think it makes for a very different experience for the player than a more streamlined puzzle game, which can be great, of course, in its own right. But um the bigness of the game, at least for me, I think is a big part of the artistic vision of the project, if you want to put it that way.
00:14:47
Speaker
And I guess the the flip side of that question is, um what was the scope of the game as you originally envisaged it? did we Did we really envision a scope of the game early on? to Well, I mean, i guess I guess another way to frame the question is like, what did you start with? How many monster types did you have on day one that you were like, oh, we should try this and we should try that?
00:15:12
Speaker
I mean, day one was, you know, what should our little toy game be? and I think one of the very early designs was some someone, I mean, it wasn't even a design. It was like, it would be kind of cool if you had a game where robots built other robots, ah which is why we are robots building other robots games.
00:15:31
Speaker
um and And then there was some idea about lasers. So like within, i don't know, 36 hours, like, like I don't actually remember how long it took. we We ran through a bunch of ah brainstorms and I think probably came up with the initial idea for the game, but still thought at that time that this was going to be a toy.
00:15:52
Speaker
So there was no real ambitious concept. It was more like, could I make this work? Could we make this work? And probably we only had like two or three monsters because we were we were just toying around with this bean idea. Okay.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think after maybe six months or so, we had designs in place for, i'd say about half of the mechanics that ended ended it up in the final project.
00:16:17
Speaker
There was a huge difference between each monster and in terms of when it entered the game. But the the ones that we invented that first year, I think with one exception, all ended up in the final product.
00:16:31
Speaker
What was the one you cut? There was an idea at one point for a bird monster. And the idea was that it was going to have a nest on one tile.
00:16:43
Speaker
And then if it ever saw a bean in like a radius of, I don't remember exactly how, something like three, it would like really aggressively move to try to grab it and like bring it back to its nest so it could sit on it.
00:16:56
Speaker
um And the idea was that if you were carrying a bean, it would you know just like run into you and and kill you in order to get the bean that you're holding. The design just kind of felt really bad. it was basically just an obstacle. It was really hard to make it do anything that actually would help you solve a puzzle.
00:17:14
Speaker
um Also, like the pathfinding that it would use to get to the particular tile where the bean was was very hard for the player to predict. um So for many of those reasons, I think we dropped that idea relatively quickly. um the The germ of the idea that like something that wouldn't let you go by if you were holding a bean did end up becoming the cloud monster, which I think was a much better design.
00:17:38
Speaker
And so how soon did you have the idea of varying recipes per level? That was very early, I think. um They weren't always going to be beans. I think um Mary drew some really great pictures early on of examples where like the monster would be built out of components that were somehow related to what kind of thing it was. There was like a like a bird bath bird that she drew that I remember really liking that was like a bird that was also in the shape of a bird bath and you would make it out of like a stone and a feather or something.
00:18:11
Speaker
I think actually the beans were originally a placeholder for that. Like I just wanted to get some code written that would do the thing. And so just like, okay, well, until Mary draws her beautiful bird feather, I'm just gonna stick colored beans in there.
00:18:26
Speaker
um And then pretty quickly we realized that doing it with the beans instead of with components that were sort of semantically related to the monster, we would have the flexibility to exactly as you said, to have recipes that,
00:18:38
Speaker
change per level, which is actually one of the mechanics in the game that I think is the most central to the final design. How do you balance having multiple like multiple mechanics from multiple designers in this game with like that can feel like they have different styles of puzzle?
00:18:58
Speaker
That's an interesting question. So a thing that I really liked about the game Droid was exactly this thing that you have said about having multiple styles of puzzles. So for me, this was always like a feeling of a strength. Like I i liked having different puzzles from different designers, which had different feelings.
00:19:16
Speaker
I don't know that I ever thought about like... like the The feeling of balancing them was, oh, I want a lot of these different feelings if I can get them. I want a puzzle that you know there's a small puzzle with an elegant answer or a big puzzle with lots of stuff going on where most of it's you know kind of little work. um I don't know.
00:19:36
Speaker
I will say a lot of the monster designs um with maybe one or two exceptions were very collaborative efforts to put together. You know, it was the kind of thing where we were all just kind of in the same room with a, with a chalkboard because we were in a math department and just throwing out ideas and like, Oh, but what if the vine did this instead of the thing that you just said, it was, it was the kind of thing where um it was really hard to attribute the final design to any one person because it just sort of arose from ah a big conversation.
00:20:08
Speaker
I'd say a lot of the designs that we ended up with have some things in common. Like a lot of the monsters care about straight lines, for example. That was something that I think brought a lot of the designs together and meant that when we were coming up with new designs, it gave us sort of a direction to look in.
00:20:27
Speaker
But i actually don't think that it was the monster designs necessarily that would have presented the biggest challenge for harmonizing. It was more, like Jordan said, it like entire puzzles that were designed by different people. But um again, I actually think that's ah that's a strength of the final product.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think with the maximalism lens and focus of the game, it kind of makes it more attainable to to make something of this scope. If you're not too worried about like, oh well, all the puzzles need to feel like kind of that like they're the same vibe as each other.
00:21:02
Speaker
Like if you have that as like an additional constraint ah over everything, it just makes it even more work to finish. Yeah, it's interesting. Like we were chatting to Joe of Joe plays puzzle games yesterday. And he mentioned that feeling of having lots of different styles of puzzle from different designers as like a really interesting thing that he liked a lot about the game.
00:21:23
Speaker
um Yeah, and i'm I'm glad that came through. um I'll also say Jordan put a lot of work in the last year or two, sort of harmonizing the puzzles, making sure they literally all had the intended solution, but also just putting in a lot of the final work, arranging everything, editing the puzzles, and bringing them together. And I think um that effort was also important for the game to feel good in the end Yeah, how long did it take to playtest and find all the unintended solutions? Because like with with mechanics this complex, there's always going to be some very hard to find broken solutions to puzzles.
00:22:02
Speaker
And im like I'm sure that even after release, you would have been finding them. But yeah, like how how is that process like? Yeah, I mean, for sure there are still unintended solutions in the game.
00:22:15
Speaker
ah There are some puzzles, I mean, this speaks to the difference in puzzle design philosophy. There are some puzzles that don't really have intended solutions. the Puzzles where we just kind of give you a lot of stuff and a problem, and we know there's a number of ways to go about it, and we hope that's interesting.
00:22:30
Speaker
And then other puzzles where there really is a trick that we want the player to figure out, and it's sad when we see someone you know getting it in a different way, especially when it uses a trick that was already showcased in a different puzzle.
00:22:44
Speaker
A lot of finding those is, at least for me, has just been you know watching as many playtesters as I can, watching people play the game. um And I really do like watching because...
00:22:57
Speaker
for every unintended solution that someone finds, I will notice an unintended solution that they don't find just by watching. um so So that has been the most valuable kind of playtesting is when I sort of get to be over the shoulder of someone.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah. I'll also say that we really were not able to get the a number of playtesters before release that I think we would have ideally had. um you know we We are not a professional studio of any kind, and we couldn't really put any money behind finding playtesters. So as a result, we basically just had to make do with a dozen or so people we were able to find through just our personal relationships to play through the game.
00:23:42
Speaker
um And also, you know the game is very, very long. And so especially if someone is just playtesting for free out of the goodness of their heart, they might not get all the way through to the end. And that was definitely, we we we definitely had playtesters who got all the way through to the end, but um that was also a challenge before the game was released.
00:23:59
Speaker
I mean, that's a problem with gave puzzle games of any scope, let alone as large as being
Game Features and Player Interaction
00:24:05
Speaker
a nothingness. So, not terribly surprised. Was the level editor always in the plans to release to the public because of the ah sort of drawed influence and everything like that? Or did that decision get made later in development?
00:24:24
Speaker
That was basically always the plan. um The level editor that shipped with the game is almost identical to the level editor that we actually used internally to design all of the puzzles in the game. um We internally, we also have a ah different ah UI for arranging the puzzles within an island, and and we didn't end up shipping that um basically just because it it would have been a ton of work to get it into sort of presentable form and and for probably not enough benefit.
00:24:56
Speaker
But the idea of of having custom levels as part of the game was was part of the plan from very early on. There was actually way early on a plan to allow players to create custom monsters.
00:25:07
Speaker
which looking back was very ambitious. But the idea was ah for a while that all of the monster behavior would be controlled by by Lua code, which is a programming language that's very easy to sort of integrate into ah into a game like this.
00:25:24
Speaker
And we actually originally implemented all of the monsters in exactly the same way that we were planning to expose to players to design their own monsters. But um the system ended up just being too inflexible to actually be useful or fun for anyone, including us as developers, frankly, to interact with. So um eventually, we just ripped all of the Lua out of the game and and hard-coded the monster behavior, which I think was probably for the best.
00:25:51
Speaker
When you included Steam Workshop support because of the level editor, did it surprise you that the most popular items are not levels, but they're alternate localizations?
00:26:02
Speaker
I don't know that i thought about whether levels or localizations would be more popular. um Certainly, you wanted to include the... Given that we weren't going to do the work ourselves to do localizations, it was a thing that we wanted to provide workshop support for localizations.
00:26:23
Speaker
So we did expect... Well, we hoped that localizations would appear on the workshop. Yeah, we were actually contacted by some fans. i don't remember if it was people in China or Japan first, but um those those were two of the earlier localizations. And um i think a lot of the impetus for us to include that feature, Jordan, you can correct me if I'm wrong, was because people actually just reached out and said, like, can we please translate your game into Japanese?
00:26:50
Speaker
Yes, I agree. You earlier mentioned that some levels are kind of a bit open and some have like a particular trick that you need to figure out to solve it.
00:27:02
Speaker
I'm curious, do you do you feel like the levels make it obvious which type of level it it is Or do you think that there's sometimes a bit of an ambiguity about whether you need to like just apply the tools you've already got or whether you need to find something that's completely outside the scope of what you're thinking about?
00:27:22
Speaker
I think that the levels do not do a particularly good job of communicating this information. And this is probably one of the things I see as a weakness of being nothingness, that the experience of playing it, you can go into a puzzle and it just feels like you're hitting a brick wall, that there's sort of, I'm not sure what to think about, I'm not quite sure what to do. And it seems like the how often people have that experience seems to differ from player to player, which is interesting and I don't have a good explanation for it, like differ a lot from player to player.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah. And I would say one, there's a ah finer distinction I might draw on on like one side of that, the dilemma that Alan mentioned, which is you could go to a puzzle and maybe you decide correctly that this is not an open-ended puzzle and it's one with a, you know, a particular linchpin to the solution.
00:28:10
Speaker
But there's always a question like, is this a puzzle that I can solve using the mechanical rules that I already understand? Or is this a puzzle where I'm supposed to be learning a new interaction that I've never seen before?
00:28:22
Speaker
And i think in a couple cases um where the the answer is the second one that you're supposed to be learning a new interaction, it can be kind of a feel bad for the player to enter that situation with the assumption that they're going to be able to figure it out.
00:28:39
Speaker
using the things they already understand. And they like they can't tell the difference between a situation where there's something new to learn or they're just not being clever enough. um And yeah, I agree with Jordan that that's that that's not always ideal.
00:28:50
Speaker
And I think the reverse can be true as well. that I think we put a lot of work ah during playtesting refining the game into trying to make clearer when there's a new mechanic, like really simplifying a puzzle, for example, ah down to its ah or base components to make it clear that, oh, there's really nothing familiar to you that you can do to solve this puzzle. There's probably something new here.
00:29:17
Speaker
But still in in those puzzles where there isn't anything new, it can be confusing for players or challenging for them to realize that they have the tools they need,
00:29:30
Speaker
right Because you maybe maybe in fact a player identifies the general solution approach to a puzzle, ah but they've sort of messed up the order of a couple of the steps in a in a relatively uninteresting way.
00:29:45
Speaker
And just because of the complexity of the mechanics and their interactions in this game, you can sometimes you know think, oh, I've hit a brick wall. I am totally stuck. you know There's some aha that I'm missing. And then at some point you realize, oh, no, all I have to do is X. It's basically the thing I've been doing all along with a slight twist, and and now I've solved it.
00:30:03
Speaker
And that's not, I think, the ideal solving experience. um It's maybe the price we pay for having a such... a wide variety of interactions that are you know a little bit complex but you know i think there's a tremendous benefit um in terms of the you know all the beautiful and interesting puzzles you wind up with uh all the emergent complexity how hard did you intend for the did you want the game to be
00:30:31
Speaker
ah Very. um That was actually an explicit design goal from pretty early on, um especially from the vantage point of 2012 when we started. you know a lot of the games that I think would become inspirations to us sort of halfway through the development process ah hadn't been released yet.
00:30:51
Speaker
And we sort of felt like there were not all that many examples of a puzzle game of this general type out there that were at the level of difficulty that we ended up with with being in nothingness. So right from the start, this was like an intentionally difficult puzzle game for people who really like spending a lot of time with puzzles.
00:31:12
Speaker
um And you know I think by one hazard of having a nine year development cycle is that a lot of other examples of that came out in between that conception and and release.
00:31:26
Speaker
But that was, yeah, that was definitely part of the plan from the very beginning. I do wonder if that meant that when we did release the game, there were more potential players who'd be interested in playing such a game, right? Like, maybe the ah market for an indie game of this ah challenge level was was smaller.
00:31:46
Speaker
Like, a you know we We were never going to be sort of mainstream, everyone wants to play this game, even if they're into puzzle games. um So now we get to benefit from you know players who have played a lot of these other games and are hungry for more and maybe something even a little more challenging.
00:32:02
Speaker
I'm curious what some of your reference points are for other puzzle games that you think are like you you were using as reference points for so the game. um Yeah, so Jordan mentioned Drodd. I believe Jordan is actually the only member of the team who's played Drodd any appreciable degree.
00:32:19
Speaker
I've spent maybe half an hour in it, and you know I see where he's coming from and treating it as an inspiration. Other games that I think came out sort of in the middle of our development process, but were sort of retroactive ah inspirations for for us in puzzle design, Stephen's sausage roll, I think, was a big ah had a big effect on me. Snakebird also,
00:32:40
Speaker
And, um you know, it was a little bit later on, but ah Baba is You, I think, shares something of that sort of maximalism philosophy that I was mentioning before.
00:32:51
Speaker
And, you know, we already had a lot of the design of the game in place by that point, but it it did something to sort of, don't know, it was sort of a proof of concept that a puzzle game with that many mechanics could be really good.
00:33:02
Speaker
And I found it very satisfying to to play through it for that reason. Like, oh, we're we're trying to do something that can work. Snakebird and Steven's sausage roll in particular, I think really cemented for me the difficulty feel that we were talking about before, that having such a positive experience with the difficulty level of both of those games.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think it's very interesting that all of those games, um they're not just hard to 100%. They are hard to just get to an ending.
00:33:34
Speaker
And like that that's not necessarily the same thing. You can have a game which contains incredibly hard puzzles, but that have a kind of critical path that like takes you and like shows you some of the concepts and gives you a good, pleasant time.
00:33:53
Speaker
And like, then you you can get to an end and go like, oh yeah, I've i've had a and ah a good time with this. And it it was like, a bit hard, but like very solvable at every stage.
00:34:05
Speaker
But now there's just a lot more hard puzzles and like doing, doing that is like the real, real hard charge, but that's a lot harder to do It's a lot harder to make a game that has that moderately difficult critical path.
00:34:19
Speaker
um It's like kind of training wheels for the really, really hard puzzles that are optional. And it's less, it's much less daunting to make something that's just like consistently very, very hard.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think I agree with that. um I will say I think A Monster's Expedition is a very nice example of the thing that you just said. um i had basically exactly that experience with it. I think like we we did we did have to reduce the difficulty curve of the game in response to playtesters. But I think we we kind of didn't want to make a game that had a a sort of breezy critical path like that.
00:34:54
Speaker
um i mean, yeah i'm I'm sure it would have made the game a lot more commercially successful if that were part of the design. But um at least for me, I think that would have felt to me like it would have clashed with this other design goal of of having most of the puzzles be very
Commercial Success and Passion for Creation
00:35:11
Speaker
challenging. um You know, the there was a certain, i don't know, mentality of puzzle solver that we wanted to attract.
00:35:19
Speaker
And I sort of like about the game that that we are relatively clear early on about what type of puzzle you're going to find in Do you have any questions for us as a team, just about anything?
00:35:36
Speaker
I've actually been curious about something for a little bit. So, Ellen, I guess you've been running a puzzle game studio for a while, and um I guess I am curious about sort of how you've made that work commercially. My impression is that, you know from Steam statistics, that puzzle games are one of the less popular categories. So I assume you're you're in that category because you like puzzle games.
00:36:02
Speaker
um how How were you able to sort of make that work? And basically the answer is ah that I made three games that released on Steam and on mobile early enough in in those ecosystems that you could do okay just by virtue of having a good game.
00:36:24
Speaker
And like those those games did not make me rich by any means, but I could make something with ah basically no budget and release it and it would earn enough that I could live very frugally on the income from it.
00:36:39
Speaker
in a way that doesn't really feel true today. Like if we were to to make something the scope and price levels of Sokoband or A Good Snowman or Cosmic Express and we released it today...
00:36:56
Speaker
without having the ah studio reputation that we have today, um like those those games would make a very small fraction of what they they earned um just by the fact that they were releasing like five to ten years ago.
00:37:13
Speaker
But yeah, so so that those games released and like they I was really not at that point running a puzzle studio. I was making puzzle games, but I was treating it as a full time hobby that happened to make enough to keep living rather than running as competent business.
00:37:32
Speaker
um And then a Month to the Expedition is really the project where that shifted. um like we We started that with kind of a similar mindset and then we worked on it long enough and it got big enough in scope and we were able to polish it up enough that we were able to pitch it and get funding to do it justice.
00:37:56
Speaker
um And that funding was sufficient that we we had suddenly a ah runway. And so then after release, the game sold much, much better as well, um partly because of the production values and the amount of work we could put into it because we had a budget, like this kind of self-perpetuated thing.
00:38:16
Speaker
And basically everything we've done since then has been possible because Monsters the Expedition made enough money that we have money in the bank and like we can spend money on something and it can be a bit risky and it's not going to bankrupt the company because we're not spending 100% of the money that Monsters Expedition has earned to date. Or like, yeah, there's that.
00:38:38
Speaker
There's a big safety net that comes from having a game that's as successful as that. This is making me think about as we were releasing this game, are like 2021, whenever it was, and really not being sure like how much success we were shooting for or like how to make it successful as successful as possible.
00:39:00
Speaker
And like I'm just thinking back to we were trying to get interviews with media, right? And sort of no nobody wound up returning our calls, as it were. like we you know We wanted the game to get coverage and you know articles about being a nothingness in some...
00:39:13
Speaker
online publication, some blog somewhere, and it didn't really happen right away. and I imagine that if we were, you know, if Arbor released ah game two, that we'd get a little something and sort of, I can see how that builds on itself. But but it was very hard with this game ah to kind of get anything rolling.
00:39:35
Speaker
Oh, I mean, it's a bad environment out there for anyone entering the industry, making anything in the industry, trying to get funding in the industry, breathing in the industry.
00:39:49
Speaker
i wish that it were better out here. Yeah, there's something nice for us about yeah being able... I mean we're obviously very lucky to have been able to make a game like this, put tons of time into it, and not have to depend on it being successful financially.
00:40:07
Speaker
I really think that that is the way to go. if you want to make something creatively interesting is to not expect that you'll make any money from it. like And to to only work on something if you're okay with that, if you if you just want it to exist properly.
00:40:24
Speaker
um Because the moment you you go in with like a business plan, ah like, oh, well, I'm going to work on this game for five years and, well, need it to earn me this much money. Otherwise, that will be a waste of time. That's just a recipe for burnout and depression. Yeah, I think if this game had been thought of as a commercial project from the beginning, there's basically no chance it would have been finished.
00:40:49
Speaker
um There was actually a period... at some point where we were considering, I'm not sure it was ever very seriously considered, ah releasing the game for free.
00:41:01
Speaker
And the primary reason that we didn't do that is basically like, we thought the game was worth more than $0 and we wanted to communicate that to the people who were gonna play it. You know, a free game, I think comes with certain ah assumptions attached to it. And we didn't think that our game matched those assumptions.
00:41:17
Speaker
But yeah, we the the the plan was never for this to be a huge and significant source of income for any of us.
Conclusion and Credits
00:41:23
Speaker
Thank you so much. ah Where can people find you online? And do you have anything other than being a nothingness that you want to plug?
00:41:31
Speaker
I think the best place to find us is on the Discord for the game, um which is is linked on the on the menu screen for the game, um as well as ah linked on our no longer at all active Twitter um If you want to find us, that's that's by far the best way to do it.
00:41:49
Speaker
And we don't have anything else in the works. Totally fair. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a blast. Thank you. This was really fun.
00:42:00
Speaker
Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you. And thank you for listening to the Dracneck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis.
00:42:12
Speaker
Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawadniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice, and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
00:42:40
Speaker
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