Steven Mummery aka ThePrinceOfMars is a video game designer known for the light gun shooter 'Pixel Crisis' and currently working on 'Quartermain and the Cult of Cthulhu', a retro first person shooter being published in March of 2025.
Wishlist Quartermain and the Cult of Cthulhu
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- Tyler
Chapters
1:06 Project Origins
2:10 Game Development Journey
2:37 Business Model Insights
2:59 Exploring Easy FPS Editor
5:09 Chronic Fatigue and Game Making
7:05 Early Experiences with Game Design
10:01 Pixel Crisis and Fan Engagement
10:10 House of the Bread Development
11:14 Game Creation Challenges
12:49 The Evolution of Game Tools
15:36 AI in Game Development
16:45 Discussing Game Design Philosophies
19:00 Balancing Gameplay and Story
20:10 Enemy Design and Mechanics
24:22 Weapon Mechanics and Feedback
28:09 Limitations of the Game Engine
30:18 Future Game Concepts
37:22 Integration of Tabletop Elements
39:33 Gameplay Feedback and Player Experience
43:18 Storytelling in FPS Games
48:13 Marketing and Value Perception
51:02 Theatrical Storytelling in Games
56:03 Insomnia and Creative Process
1:43:18 General Advice for Aspiring Game Developers
1:56:02 Creating Unique Games Over Following Trends
Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:27] Is a two-year project it was going to be a two-month project but i seem to be medically incapable of doing small projects um the idea was originally okay so basically opera at kovic when kovic first happened i started doing online tabletop gaming at first advantage and dragons then i'd done call a kufulu and then eventually we moved on to a more action-orientated version called pop kufulu and this is a few group of close friends and when i came to chance to do it like to put tons of it into these and i would photoshop the characters together because i told all my friends pick a famous movie if you can't think of
[1:04] a character for our games pick a famous movie actor.
[1:07] In a movie you like and that would be your character so i would photoshop all these characters together in posters and that would be i'd have lots of fun with that and we'd enjoy it and we've done this for like a year and then eventually i'm like i gotta make a game so why don't i uh basically make a video game based on these characters and that was basically what uh quarter main and the carter cabula became was my attempt to do a pulpy indiana jones like adventure based on the tabletop gaming characters my friends created and my original goal was to make something that all my friends could enjoy it didn't work i barely talked to them anymore but i made a cool game at least i think i did yeah man i've been playing uh you know the early build uh how what are you looking at releasing it now what's kind of the time frame uh march basically i've got uh february to just sort out the uh cut scenes and then it's just polish polish polish polish yeah it's good.
[2:10] Six weeks time to kind of do that qa and marketing push you know put the put the final shine on it and everything but anyway so but for the sake of folks listening i have played a build that is six weeks roughly early um and it's there's still some things so if i if i cite any issues they're probably resolved by the time the audience is hearing this but yeah it's it's really really interesting um,
[2:33] Just kind of the whole business model of working with the easy FPS engine. It's not something that I had ever considered. I mean, I've obviously made quite a dent in the GZ Doom boom. The boomer shooter boom, so to speak. But, you know, then Sam had contacted me saying like, Hey man, you know, like we have this cool kind of Cthulhu game coming out with DOS Man that you might be interested in.
[2:57] I didn't even know Sam had a fucking video game company. So I was like, sure, why not? and then you know you i ended up getting connected with you and everything but the game is is neat it's it's very simple obviously for folks uh who are fans of like kind of the we'll call it boomer shooters for the sake of doing so for the the retro fps crowd this is everything that comes out of like the easy fps engine is going to be very rudimentary it's it's essentially you know like 2d sprites all the way around uh very similar to wolfenstein in its functionality it does have room over room stuff from what i can tell so that's neat it does it.
[3:32] But there are other limitations um okay so maybe a bit of clarity would be in order for the audience because they may not know all this stuff uh first of all i just want to clarify you've not spoken to any other easy fps editor uh devs at all you are the first person that i have known to have made a game in this engine unless of course someone else had done it and then passed off a game not telling me that there are many i just assumed that they had one of the other devs talk to you at some point okay no worries um so for the audience uh basically what is easy fps editor it is basically think rpg maker but for fps games uh it's an ability to create a specific genre as easy as possible to the point where you don't really have to do tutorials so you open it up and you're like okay this makes sense here is a grid which is the map.
[4:25] Here is where i draw in the enemies here is where i tell them what to do simple stuff it does get a little complex when you go right into the little details of it but to just pick up it is one of the easiest game creation tools i've ever known um yeah so that's what easy fps editor is rpg maker for old wolkenstein efps games right and folks can get a hold of this like through what itch die io is kind of where i started finding at least branches of it but um so it seems like there's been a lot of forks um do you use a particular one or do you recommend i use uh clive edition i think because that's the name of the guy who done the spinoff yeah um it's okay i would love to go into some detail on the pluses and minuses.
[5:10] Again maybe you know take a second just to fill the audience in i have mentioned uh before uh that i've been on this podcast is the fact that i've been suffering for the last few years from a form with chronic fatigue i've been very very tired so i wanted to make games but i stopped programming because i suffer from brain fog i get these moments where i can't think clearly and i had to give up anything involved programming so i wanted to still make something i wanted to be as easy as possible now you're mentioning like jay-z doom i don't know how complex it is to use that would you describe that as a hard thing to pick up and learn or was it quite easy for you i just want to first acknowledge the fact that as i'm american and i said gz doom and then you as a brit would say ggz doom and that is hilarious no no it's funny it's funny uh and it's true it's right both ways so yeah yeah ggz doom is basically a more modern updated you know community version of.
[6:06] The more i was playing doom than yeah for the folks listening you know like i have to always keep that in mind like if if someone's tuning in that has no clue what we're talking about i have to have to give them some you know some leeway and some understanding of like what what does this even mean what are they they're saying all these acronyms i don't know it's like being in the military again you know uh but yeah with the doom engine there's been so many games over the past several years that have used it right like the like hellforge studios is a big big one where they have you know they're my question was was it hard to learn i didn't learn it i guess i guess that's what i'm trying to say to you is that i am in the business of it i've been on the i took that as being a depth is what i thought no no no i i don't look man i don't draw shit i don't i don't code i i can write narratives but i'm i've been primarily my entire.
[7:06] Existence in the games industry has been totally on the business side and the like project management side so when it comes to doing the nitty-gritty stuff level design i'm an imbecile you teach me everything you know i'm gonna give it a little bit of a look or done for my yeah for sure for sure okay so basically like i've always wanted to make games but i have one crucial flaw i'm an idiot i i can't come me too um yeah yeah i i've always been having dyslexic i at school had learning different abilities i was always in a special needs class i had trouble with that but i always thought i can make games i know i can i can fucking draw for starters i feel that i can do level design if i just got through that barrier so when i got on the pc when i was in my early 20s i was like i played a little rpg maker the first thing i ever used was rpg made from the ps2 right and that taught me the basics but you couldn't really do anything with it because you couldn't give the games to anyone right so i got on the internet and i could i didn't want to make rpgs because i know my disabilities i can't write i'm not an author but i thought i could do game design and i was like why the fuck are they not programs like rpg maker but but other genres and i found originally a program called fps creating which was made by a british dev company called the game creators and this was back in 2002 2002, 2003, something like that.
[8:33] Um and it was fucking terrible it would let you make fps games but all the fps games had very bad enemy ai and it had uh bad terrible slowdown issues it was badly coded so whatever games you made if you had rooms that were too large the frame rate would fall through the fucking floor but i made like six games with that uh one was called the principality of mars which was like a steampunk fps game and this is before bioshock uh and there was another one i made called the Tales of Cthulhu which was a Call of Cthulhu inspired I'd never played Call of Cthulhu I just played the video games which I actually hated but I liked the idea of it um you know Dark Corners of the Earth on the original Xbox anyway so I made these games with that and I gave up on game making because I tried to learn game maker and I couldn't do it I couldn't get my head around code and then a couple of years after that I discovered Construct 2 and Construct 2 didn't use traditional code it used a um its own proprietary uh tick and i can't remember the words they use their own proprietary system for making games that was like coding but not simpler i found it okay still kind of hard still very buggy i made a couple of demos and people really liked them i made um on-rail light gun shooters pixel crisis it was a homage to time crisis i put like three months into it and it really took off it's
[9:58] really fun yeah thousands of.
[10:01] People play it and i get fan mail to continue it every.
[10:04] Single fucking day but every time i respond to them can't too
[10:07] tight can't too tight right i then try to.
[10:10] Get back into it my code was such a mess in pixel crisis i only started over and i made a christmas fiend game called house of the bread which is a pun based on house of the dead yep um and house of the bread is i need to in a second i'm sorry i'm skip the whole backstory right um house of the bread was uh a version of like house of the dead but it was gingerbread men and elves and that was also hugely popular but after like two months i was down and out and i was tired i didn't want to work on it anymore and i thought to myself why the isn't there something like rpg maker for an fps game i want to make an fps game and that's when i found easy fps editor and it is the but when i first got into it. It was buggy. It was shit. It did not work. It crashed all the time. It would corrupt its program files and fans come in and they've patched it and they've made it usable. It's not great. But if anyone listening to this wants to make games, but they can't code for whatever reason, be it that they're tired or be it because
[11:08] they're a bit dum-dums like me, whatever, this is a great way to make an FPS game. Because if you can draw, you draw your sprites, you put them in the game and you can make a fucking game okay there you go you can talk now it's okay uh so actually let's rewind a bit for a couple of different questions here with this chronic fatigue that you're like suffering from it's interesting um.
[11:32] That you know you get tired of one thing but you can kind of like find it in yourself to work on something else but not the thing that you were working on right so like you my pose is so bad i would leave notes and i would go back to it after several months i wouldn't know what the fuck i'd done i only god knows how that thing works now i think that's why most programmers, would you know that's why documentation is so important right from the from the project lead side of things i i've definitely dealt with situations i i am not any better look i took two coding classes and what i learned in both of them was that i am don't want to do this that's what i learned not how to code but that i don't enjoy it and don't have any it's for me it's not even like i'm not even fucking tired i'm just bored i'm like dude and then i mean give you an idea of how bad pixel crisis was it was one single event sheet right it wasn't on multiple event sheets it was on a single event sheet because i didn't finish the course learning how to do it i started the course got like two hours into it and then went i can do this and then so yeah the availability of tools you know like efpsce or however you want to easy fps editor, it's so hard it's a fucking episode.
[12:50] Instead of that you have lots of different tools for people who want to make games that don't want to code I mean there's even something as simple as like Roblox or whatever I mean that you could go crazy you know Minecraft provides a lot of these things of course a lot of people have used Unity in this way because there are so many different plugins that you can use I mean the entire game Cultic my friend Jason who's been on the show a couple of times. He doesn't know how to code at all essentially, but made one of the best games in Unity. Very, very well-selling game. So I'm for these tools in existence. What's that? Coltip was made with the Junknookum engine, wasn't it? The Build Edge? No, no, no. That's in Unity.
[13:32] Really yeah you should uh you reach out to jason and you know maybe he could like give you some some idea of what tools it is that he's exactly using but yeah he doesn't know how to code that guy's a he's a gun nut he knows a lot about guns he doesn't know shit about, computer coding but a very i'm far too british to know a damn thing about guns but i yeah um But my point here is that, you know, folks all over are making games that don't know and don't have any interest in coding. But what I think is ideal, even if you do have a tool like this, is for, you know, a guy like you who's got the creative side of it, you know, the artistic side or the storytelling side or whatever, a guy like me as well. You just need somebody who's good at coding who, you know, wants to help.
[14:21] So ideally like the way that we've structured it in the keep is like you know i'm i'm primarily going to be like writing scripts and things like that stellar valkyrie for instance i've written you know along with my writing partner chris uh what this is what the game is we put the design document together or whatever and then you know like we need to we just need to find a good coder who knows doom really well and then that's you know we have someone like uber who comes in and does that um so i think that some of the conversations you and i have had leading up to this where we were talking about like oh we know maybe this audio issue or whatever it could be fixed and i understand that in your case it's like the engine is closed source so maybe it's not as easy to jump in and make edits to but if you had a good programmer who could like open up that one of the issues that we had pointed out was like uh there's no in your in your engine there's no proximal or distance-based change in the audio so if someone's standing 200 yards away from you with a shotgun it makes the exact same sound in my ear as if they're point blank shooting me in the face it is it is a big problem it is a big problem and i think it's actually open source the only reason why i said i couldn't do anything about it was because like like i said i can't code but no you're 100 it'd be hired in a program yeah it probably could get that fixed um.
[15:36] But yeah it's that truth be told there is a once this project is done in march it'll be my first completed game since my fps creator games and the it's the world's my oyster there's a lot of different things i could do now because like you're just catching this conversation mentioned that cultic was done without coding and suddenly i played for cultic i know it and my eyebrow was raised and oh is that so you know that is certainly something i would like to do for a sequel which i'm already formulating in my mind um we're already at the early stages of people being basically you know being able to open up something like uh like clawed ai or chat gpt or whatever and basically tell them like make a game like this you know and then just tweak from there it's already happening with film television stuff so i i i feel like i've been an unnecessary curmudgeon with ai since i draw as soon as my friends say oh look at this ai image or i know that i'm like oh no blasphemy no no no you know um so i've just sort of completely ignored ai.
[16:45] I just yeah i we don't have to get into like the political argument because there really isn't one on my end to me it's just like it's a new tool it's going to be used and as an analyst of what goes on in the games industry it is just simply going to be a part of what happens, like it or not people are going to use it and there will be games that you know that utilize this technology but forget about you know how you feel about any particular company or ai system whatever the fact is that most of your tools like most coders today most of the people who are doing you know c sharp c plus plus whatever are not actually writing code the way that they did you know 20 years ago what they're doing is typing into an editor that is then ai generating you know all these based on what they're doing like do you mean this, You know, if you're using a search engine, you are using a rudimentary form of AI that's like, do you mean this? Or, you know, it's auto-correcting based on different things or giving suggestions based on what it's analyzed you're looking at. So that is just a part of game design at this point. There's really no getting around it unless you are, you know, binary coding or something along those lines. I'm sure some programmer out there is going to be a smartass and be like, actually, you know, according to my calculations, sir. But you get just what I'm saying.
[17:57] Uh yeah even in your case like if you're comfortable using a program right that has you know there here's an engine that you just plug in everything you want essentially that's what ai is going to do in a lot of these cases is it's like okay here's a thing uh we're going to make inferences based on what it is that you want to do what is it you know linguistically what are you telling us you want us to do you put input your own you know sprites images maybe even people are just saying like i would like a thing that looks similar to this and they draw stick figures and it creates something you know analogous to that how they source you know the creation of that art is up for debate you always get that question where it's like how much is something yours so like if you see with this game i didn't code the game but i did edit the state files which control how the enemies behave and i did draw the sprites which means i would say this game i've spent two years on i'm very proud of yeah it's not 85 percent mine i think if i'm putting a number up my ass that's what i would say there is a point though where it's like.
[19:00] How much if you're using ai and other these tools a good example a good example um back in the day you could use rpg maker on the ps2 to make an rpg game but you couldn't change any of the sprites you just had to use the 3d models it provided but you could do all the writing but at the end of the how much of that is yours because the code isn't yours and the models aren't yours but anyway I'm sure I had a point there somewhere.
[19:29] I mean how different really is, Quartermain from Satan from you know space aliens in space from you know Flash of the Blade, Reverend, Reaper now we can talk to something I can actually have a conversation because I've got to be family I can't really add I think it's very different I was specifically trying to recreate a certain type of game.
[19:56] Specifically Brutal Doom-esque, sort of like very quick reflex-based FPS games, while something like Reverend or Satan seemed to be a lot more slower. They seemed to be a lot more...
[20:10] Just slower basically um and i i i don't know i've got playthrough saying do the enemies behave differently because i went to great lengths to try and make the enemies behave as different as possible so i gotta point out i started this conversation off saying i didn't even know sam had started a game company so yours is actually the first of you did i should have registered that uh yours is the first of the dos man games that i have played but given that they're all made using the same engine i'm curious like you know what i would say my game is very okay i'm saying my game is three digit i have like i would i'm trying to get this over to the audience right if it seems like this i at no point even though i have been tired i might have been doing it in little bits every single day i have put my heart and soul into this game and i've gone into great efforts to make this as fun as possible when you're playing another game and if you find it repetitive if you find you go into another room and there's another bunch of nazis and you go oh yawn there's a bunch of nazis do not know that i did try and design each area of each level to be as fun and variety as build field as possible like i a lot of thought went into my level layout my enemy behaviors i tried very hard to make the enemies behave uh with as much variety as possible to make them behave.
[21:36] Okay, so basically I played Doom. I played a lot of Doom. And I was like, okay, in Doom, there's a variety of enemies, and you look at them and you immediately think, I know what this guy's going to do. And then you look at everyone else in the room in seconds and you go, I know how these guys are going to react in conjunction with everyone else. So you see, if you go into a room in Doom, you see a pair of pinkies and you see a reverend. You go, okay, I circle strafe, I avoid the missile, and i if i only have my fists i sort of dart in and out on the pinkies and your brain makes these sports within seconds and that's the gameplay of doom and i wanted to recreate that so i have enemies that look very distinct from each other and try and behave very very differently to each other so you have the cultists who are my imps you have the dark youngs which are the things with tentacles and cooves and they're my pinkies you have the dimensional shamblers they're my reverence They're like a mix between a reverend, not a reverend, Archvile. Archvile is the world I'm looking for. They're my archviles, and they're skeletons. The skeletons with the rocket launchers. Yeah, it's reverence. It's like a mix between an archvile and a reverent. The point I'm trying to make is I tried very hard to get distinction between my enemies, which leads to gameplay and variety.
[22:58] I've actually, very analogous in the design Bible, of uh in the keeps stellar valkyrie uh we we were basically looking at like okay we're not gonna we're definitely not gonna copy the doom you know doom's enemies by any stretch of the imagination but to sort of like fill in like it's a really good doom is a very good uh archetype for you know you should have enemies that sort of fill certain spaces even down to like having at least one aerial enemy you know sort of like a cacodemon that controls that part of the screen um it's just interesting i was just gonna say interestingly how you you deal with these enemies is sort of sort of designed based around in in the original doom that you you can't aim you know along the y axis you're only you know side to side so again with go on carry on i'll let you bit i'll actually let you finish a sentence sorry i keep thinking of ways to come in i should that was pretty much the end of the thought right just saying that it's interesting that you have this tradition in fps to sort of fill up different parts of the space or fill up the different parts of a level with enemies that behave or occupy a certain part of that screen even though the original game, doesn't allow you to aim vertically that was pretty much the whole thought so go ahead yeah.
[24:23] There are very few games that i think have like perfect balancing but the only two that come to mind for like perfect weapon and enemy balance is the original halo and doom right um for like like they have an enemy and a weapon for each specific area and all the later halos added too many weapons too many enemies it lost this perfect balance but in the original halo you saw an enemy and you're like okay i need this specific weapon right and it was the same in doom in my opinion in like the perfect balance and to a lesser extent, I thought they had very good work and balance in, um, it's kind of in blood, but I, I don't want to monoliths blood. I've seen you played that right.
[25:06] I don't like the actual campaign that comes with Blood. I think the campaign is broken hard, but if you play Death Wish, the expansion comes more. There's also, I think, my friend Damien made this one called Mero that's quite popular. I think Mero 2 is coming out at some point. But yeah, a lot of the extended stuff for Blood, or even fan-made stuff, is really, really good. I think that the gameplay is solid, but the original campaign has some difficulty. 100%. I think I'll find Blood. I used to play that game, right? And then I tried Deathwish after I saw a video of it on YouTube, and I discovered that, oh, wow, the balancing really fucking works. It was just the bad level design.
[25:49] There is, like, that situation where, like, okay, there's a perfect weapon for each thing. You use the flare gun at a distance, you know? But anyway, my original point was so few FPS games have that balance, and for all of my games, flaws, if it has any, I have tried very hard to try and achieve that sort of a balance. My machine gun is great at medium range. My Colt gun, my Colt Navy, the main pistol you use all the way through it, is your sniper rifle. You use that to hit things from a distance, and you can fan it when you're close to an enemy to deal a lot of damage quickly. My heavy machine gun is fucking dreadful at great distance, but it eats enemy paths at close range. And my fire... The magic ring. It's like one of my later weapons. It's like a ring that fires. I was lucky enough to get the secret, which I'm not going to tell people how to get, but yeah.
[26:43] Yeah so if you get the magic ring that's that is my plasma gun from doom it kills everything the magic ring just tears through everything um i've tried my game doesn't have perfect balancing i think my shotgun is i tried to copy the exact damage of the shotgun from doom but it doesn't feel right i don't know what it is my shotgun still feels a little weak it's gonna get additional balancing before the game comes out but it still feels a little weak at the moment but i've tried so with the doom shotgun let's just this is one of those things that every every fps designer faces at some point like the shotgun is like the kind of the quintessential weapon in a in a retro fps so in the in doom particularly the the single barrel shotgun is basically a fucking rifle i mean you can shoot an enemy straight across the map like it's a railgun more or less and you do the same amount of damage and then then in doom 2 they introduced the double barrel shotgun which is you know much better at close range but does a a huge amount of damage and then also like the feel of it you know you there's a difference between shooting a you know a 410 and a double barrel 12 gauge it feels different so you kind of have that player feedback that's also very important and i think it's a an interesting limitation of the engine you're working in is having the ability to make the sound feedback, match the damage that you're doing on screen.
[28:10] That's going to be an interesting thing for you to overcome.
[28:13] There are problems with the engine. The sad truth is, if I had been able to sit down and study, as opposed to wanting something which I could do without studying, I'd probably have made a better game than another engine. And I polished and polished and polished and tried as much as I could to make this game as good as possible.
[28:31] But I probably could have made a better game in Doom. There's no denying it. The engine is flawed. One of the limitations was I could only make eight weapons, and you'll be amazed how fucking quickly those weapon slots get filled up. Right away, one of them has to be your melee attack, because you're always going to run out of ammo. The next one's going to be your pistol, which I always have because you want to have a weapon which you're always going to have some ammo for, so you never really reduce the do's to punch. You have to punch in case you need it, but you have the pistol there as you fall back. You've got your shotgun, because you have to have a shotgun. Then you have your machine gun. Then you've got your heavy machine gun. Then you've got your fire ring thing, right?
[29:12] And that's only six. What the fuck? There's eight weapon slots. What the fuck have my other one's gone to? One second.
[29:18] I'm opening up the game to look at my weapons section, give me a second, let my weapons go punch colt, there we go, colt, pistol shotgun, machine gun ah, my shoulder bazooka, I have a bazooka that's what it is, which I hardly ever use um, my enemy machine gun and my ring, if they'd given me more weapon slots, I would have done a double barrel, um if they'd given me more weapon slots, I would have had a snagged rifle but, you know, it's something that you don't see in a lot of uh you know what we would traditionally call like a retro fps or like 90s first person games versus what you do later see kind of in the playstation xbox era of shooters is weapons that only apply to a certain area at a certain time so like you know being able to like in a section oh well there's this mounted machine gun that you use from like a helicopter or whatever but it only you know you can't kick it with you once you leave the helicopter, that sort of thing,
[30:15] can really add a lot to the dynamic of gameplay. Even with a bazooka, if it's not one of the weapons that you add to your repertoire that you carry around, but for a section it's really useful and fun, that can also be a good storytelling trope. It's all down to like personal preference i always liked having like a selection of like eight or nine or ten weapons which you really get to know but you really get to like.
[30:45] It's it's down to personal preference i mean might i ask you a quick question what's your favorite fps scan of all time ever yeah that's a loaded question that's a very and why is it doom yeah um i guess it's a really it's a really open-ended question so i guess if i had like to be stranded on a desert island with no other game to play ever but i had an interconnection internet connection and doom 2 you know the iwad i mean that would be the obvious choice because then i can never run out of content but ah geez like best state like stock out of the box as-it-stands FPS game ever may not be Doom. Genuinely.
[31:33] Because there's so much that takes... Saying Doom is like saying that your favorite rock band of all time is the Beatles. It's like the stock answer. There's a lot of other bands that take what the Beatles did and then do it arguably better or in a different way. There's a difference between Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix innovated the guitar. Stevie Ray Vaughan perfected what Jimi Hendrix did with the guitar. So I have to say that there's... Go ahead. Don't you? I was going to say, during game development, during game development, you get new appreciation. If you start doing game design yourself and you start trying to make your own game, you suddenly get much more appreciation for the people who came before you. Right. You don't realize how hard it is to make something that's actually fun until you have to do it.
[32:21] It's really difficult. I mean, if I had to say my favorite FPS game of all time, does it have to be a single player game? I just pulled this idea out of my arse. You can say whatever you like. I mean, Quake 3, man. Come on. That was the first one that I really loved. And I would say that the weapon balancing for multiplayer is super fun. There are great things to say about the original Quake and Doom, but then when you get into the multiplayer side of things, like you were saying perfectly balanced, and they are for single player, but for multiplayer, they're not. And there's all these tweaks and things that happen. Unless it was co-op, it always did kind of suck, I kind of thought. Yeah then you know then you have like unreal tournament i mean you have so many options.
[33:04] I'm literally scrolling through like my steam just all the plethora of fps games that i have trying to think is there is there any game that's just like more perfect than doom in a single player campaign i would even say doom 2 is better than doom 1 for you know for a lot of reasons in terms especially in terms of weapons and enemy balancing uh level design yeah yeah i get that too yeah i mean when i was a kid i didn't have the pc doom i didn't know what an arch while was uh i had the playstation version ah you one of those guys yeah yeah i like doom 64, yeah i had the 64 version as well it was an amazing both of them um but yeah it's it wasn't two years later when i discovered like doom modding and that that was like oh this is how I'm going to spend like 90% of my life. And it's a real shame that it was never on Steam in the modded capacity that I played it. Because I'd love to know exactly how many hours I put into it. Because it must be just an insane number. It must just be years of time I've spent playing Doom. Just a shockingly large amount.
[34:19] Um golly i mean there's dusk is a really great kind of like more more recent example of like a similar type of game that i think takes a lot of influence from games like doom and quake but then arguably does it in some ways better um and then there's like golly there's so much more than just the shooting and the level design there's like movement there's there's you know setting there's music there's everything that goes into making a video game i think yeah like the whole thing if we're talking about soundtrack then it's got to be like perfect dark for me or golden eye one of those two yeah oh christ almighty i mean you brought up uh the the playstation and and uh nintendo 64 ports of doom i've had aubrey hodges the composer of that on the show quite a long time ago but shut the front door my god he's an amazing guy like people people know him from like doom and in in you know quake 64 and that kind of stuff but he you know he went on to do like nfl's madden's theme song that he's a pretty accomplished kind of guy um and i am you know you know what you've had me on here to talk about the game we just oh we can talk about whatever the fuck we want dude it's okay we're gonna sell your game i promise listen to the soundtrack of doom from the cd itself if i'm if i'm remembering correctly because i remember i would grab a lot of the games and then just put them in my portable cd player and then just listen to them i'm pretty sure doom was one of the ones.
[35:45] That had red book audio i think is the way they describe it but you could listen.
[35:49] To it like a cd i may be wrong because i may have just been reminiscing of just.
[35:54] Listening to it on youtube later doesn't matter right.
[35:59] Talking about the game okay so if anyone's listening to this they want to know why they should buy the game well for one it's very cheap uh number two a lot of time and a lot of soul into this uh like the game's gonna i was just gonna say it it it makes up for its limitations engine wise with your storytelling and world world building and that that's something i really wanted to drive home here there's something i wanted to add i'm thinking okay this is going sound totally cringe you know how like hacks always include themselves in their work like chris chan would include himself in the sonichu comic um okay another example like david lynch would appear in all of his stuff rest in peace rest in peace i know terrible tragedy it's about all of them immediately i'm thinking at the beginning of my game i should have me as like a dungeon master like standing there saying like if you've got your character sheet ready camera pans down as a character sheet and then i tell the story and then that leads to the and then like every now and then you cut out into a hub area which is done like a mansion or something and if you've found so many secrets you can like unlock doors and get something i don't know what maybe like audio commentary maybe concept art haven't figured it out yet i've got like two months to add this but i'm thinking of you know trying because i've got to do something to
[37:21] stand I've got to do something to look different.
[37:22] And I'm like, why don't we lean into the tabletop gaming aspect, since this is based on a tabletop gaming campaign? So yeah.
[37:34] I think that's a really interesting trope because that's where the concepts of a lot of the early id software stuff came from, is them sitting around a table playing D&D.
[37:48] Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, and at the core, this is an argument I've gotten into. So many people who really love Doom Eternal, and I've had to defend my position. That i i don't hate the game but i don't like it the same way that i like the entire rest of the this the franchise because you can tell that that sort of rpg element is gone from the you know basically the underlying structure of how the game works i won't get into that whole argument but essentially you know it makes no sense that i would shoot an enemy, 400 times with a shotgun and it not die but then as soon as i do what the game wants me to do suddenly i'm making progress like that and then as opposed to the original game where it's like you have a lot more leeway in the way that you play that i was actually thinking about that while i was playing quarter main earlier that you know you you give the player the option to kind of like approach different things different ways in the level design and also the the weapon choice and there are right you know better ways to kill an enemy than to shoot a shotgun across the room but if it's the only ammo you have you can still actually progress whereas in a lot of cases you know like the more modern stuff won't allow you to do that so that's a it's a good i don't know if it was a choice or just kind of like a happenstance but it works it's basically going back to old game design or newer game design newer game design they want that more progression they want unlockables older game design you have a series of tools and you can approach them.
[39:15] Combat area in that way. If you think about a Doom level as a puzzle, you have just enough ammunition, just enough health on the map. Each room has to be approached. Like I said earlier, you look in there, you scan, you look, okay, this has this enemies, this enemies, this enemies. What can I do?
[39:34] And that's the fun of the game. And that's how you have to approach my game, because you know how these enemies respond, and you have to react in a very specific way.
[39:48] Yeah. What do you think of some of the other games and the choices that they make? Similar stuff. You and I were talking about the way that enemies give feedback for being shot at, right? And some of your enemies, I don't know what they're all called yet, but like the guys that are sort of flying uh vampiric looking monsters or gargoyle looking things they give very good feedback if i shoot them i can see them flash what are they called, night gaunts they're not based on enemies right um yeah if you're a big fan of like lovecraft and lovecraft's writing you're probably gonna hate my game because i didn't i i looked for the call of cthulhu uh enemy part of the manual okay so call of cthulhu for those who do not know is a tabletop role-playing horror game right where you're meant to encounter these monsters and you're probably meant to die the rules are designed in such a way the players are very squishy they can't take much damage and the monsters are meant to be horrendous and atrocious and take tons of damage and not die and i looked for the rule book i took the basic concept of the enemy and i turned them into fps bad guys which means they do die quite easily so we're not being entirely accurate to lovecraft lore here but yeah the creatures with the horns that fly.
[41:05] They're called night gourds um yeah they so they the way that they give you their feedback from you know like they're stalling or they're taking damage and that sort of thing so doom was always quite good at showing pain states as opposed to like half-life right we think we had talked a bit about that whereas you know the difficulty scaling in half-life basically just makes enemies stronger, it's just they just have more health and then they don't give you any real feedback than when you're hurting them so it's it's the first time that you boot up half-life and just put it on hard it could be very very frustrating you're just sitting there like pounding an enemy with ammo and it's like am i even doing anything is this doing anything at all and it's most most frustrating in games where this problem occurs and it's a boss and you really genuinely don't know when it's going to die. Kingpin Life of Crime probably has one of the worst all-time final boss fights for that reason. I don't know if you've ever played it. I've never played Kingpin, but I've gone back to Half-Life.
[42:15] Gameplay is, to my mind, the most important thing. Plot and story are great, and they're hugely important. But there's a reason why I've gone back to Half-Life three times in my life, and I play Doom once a month. At least every year, I play it. I play it a lot. I'm getting tongue-tied. The reason why I play Doom a lot, I don't play Half-Life a lot, because all that cinematography, all that story is great, but it doesn't match really good game design. And like with my enemies showing damage and hurt, it's the little things, but it pays off. In my game, if I'm going to blow my own trumpet, I did work quite a bit on the noises enemies make when you kill them. If you kill these big robots, they say like shutting down in German, and you get a noise, right? And that rewards the player. There's another robot that has two miniguns. And if you can kill him before he fires, the miniguns carry on twirling with a twirling noise and he falls down dead. It's these little things that are feedback to the player.
[43:19] So yeah, that is hugely important.
[43:25] You kind of said how gameplay is primary and then storytelling is secondary, but you put quite a lot of effort into the storytelling of this game. I would say more than a lot of retro FPS games would or have. Yes and no um okay i had to put the story in because it was a love letter to the time i spent with my friends right so i had to put that effort in but at the same time the premise for my game was basically written on a napkin the way my game design worked was i'm like okay i can't believe it's taken us this long in a podcast to get to this point uh i'm tired and distracted and i'm running around all over the place on tangents after talking about the game design when i made the game i basically said what are the places you go to in old fps games you got your tech base so i drew a bunch of tech base sprites and i broke on that for like a couple of weeks and i'm like what's another place a mansion i draw a bunch of mansion wall tiles and i do that for a bit i'm like what's another cool place to have a fight a train so i've done that for a bit and then a graveyard and i'm like okay what the fuck is the actual plot though and i already came up with the name quarter main versus the cult of cthulhu and i'm thinking okay we need some sort of reason for him to go to all these different places and i just sat down one day and i thought okay there he goes we can do the graveyard first and then.
[44:46] We can put the train and the train goes through the town because the town is near the castle and that's how i put it all together and then post hoc i came up with justifications and reason for all of that so um it is important in the fact that it's my way of saying i love these guys and i made this game is my way of saying that i've had fun with these guys and you know it's a an homage to my friendship and the time i spent with them but at the same time the plot's a little thin on the ground sometimes but i did put the effort in on the presentation i put lots of npcs and every time you talk to an npc their artwork appears on screen that looks nice yeah.
[45:28] It's fun, man. I personally really love narrative-driven games. Especially in the FPS space, there's a lot of folks that are like, you know, they cling to that old John Carmack quote about how the story in a game is as important as the story in a porno. It's a great quote. It's a great quote, but it's not necessarily true. It's just a genre difference. Like, okay.
[45:53] Something I would try to... Sorry, go on. I was just going to say, i've played games that were like heavy on the story not so heavy on the gameplay and i still enjoy it because of the story like the gameplay is just a sort sort of a necessary element for the sake of telling the story and that's okay too oh one thousand percent one thousand percent um it really games are an art form and they have a thousand different flavors but for a boomer shooter i thought have the plot but have it be optional and i've been really careful about tangenting compartmentalizing the plot so what i do is as you've probably seen when you played the game the plot happens in like separate segments so when you get on the train you get that little tiny cut scene area where you can talk to people and learn the law but you could just go ahead and skip it you walk forward you shoot the nazi you go straight into the action again yeah that one you don't really get the plot during the level because if you die like 50 times at a level it's so stressful hearing the plot again like if you're on a section where like you're doing a fight and then you die and then you re-hear the dialogue again that would always piss me the fuck off looking at you looking at you yeah I would always compartmentalize it you would have to go through that section again right.
[47:11] Yeah it's it's a classic sort of take and you and I were discussing like you know your your treasures that you pick up i'm assuming that's a wolfenstein 3d homage in a lot of ways actually no it was a tomb raider i was playing a lot of tomb raider i was making this um yeah and that was what yeah yeah you get it in wolfenstein in wolfenstein but in tomb raider you get free specifically per level and then you get rewarded for finding free and i like that because it's uh i was thinking the reward should be an audio commentary because i'd be kind of quick to make. So what I would do is say that if you revisit the level after you've found a free, I can load in me as an NPC, and you can talk to me, and I'll just talk about the level, or talk about the tabletop gaming that led to the level, or talk about the stories of my friends, and other games that I liked. And, you know.
[48:05] Like a director's commentary sort of feature. Which is interesting in games. Yeah, it's very interesting when it happens in games. Especially if you're not expecting it.
[48:13] Wait what but it's cool i i like the treasure i like anything that sort of creates a scavenger hunt in a level because that adds a whole new dynamic of gameplay um that that you don't get otherwise and it makes for a lot of added value to the customer right like if maybe if they played through the game once and that's it and it's like all right well i beat that game and that's it you know i got my three dollars worth in in this case by the way guys all dos man games are going for like three bucks like they're totally worth picking up for the folks listening yeah um like i said it's a passion project for all its flaws if it has any i know i put my heart and soul into it um but that's what's interesting though is that for someone to when you when you're choosing on the marketing side of like what what price point do i put on this game and there's always this discussion amongst you know between a publisher and uh you know designer how do we add value to this? How do we add replay value to this? And that can come in so many different forms like from adding Steam Achievement type stuff or like Scavenger Hunt type stuff. It could be multiplayer modes, co-op modes, level editors, etc. But that's always going to be a thing. And then when you pay $3 for a game in a lot of cases you'll have the idea like oh well it's going to be shitty, it's going to be cheap, whatever the fuck. But then there's always that the difference between a $3 game that sells like 12 copies and gets a few good reviews and one that.
[49:41] Sells three million copies and makes you you know a lot of money is oh my god i can't believe how much value i got for my three dollars and that's what you want to show up in your reviews that's what i design basis so what i've tried to do in all my games and you play pixel crisis you've seen it it's so fucking crazy like yeah at the beginning of pixel crisis it starts with the player falling from a parachute to a castle through a window then you fight through the castle then a helicopter comes through the other side and starts shooting through the window at you right yeah that is all dying pixel art and that's within like 30 seconds go hard and go fast like you've not played that far yet but in my game i'm just going to give spoilers just because it's going to advertise to people this will hopefully entice people in my game you have a train you get attacked by a gyrocopter on the train you destroy the gyrocopter it collides in a cutscene with artwork with the train causing it to crash you then later on in the game you end up in an airship the airship explodes you fall onto a castle you fight on the castle roof go hard right you've got their attention go crazy with it you know you should have been an action movie director instead of a.
[51:03] Just have to go to camera school or whatever you know that kind of stuff yeah.
[51:07] No it's it's a good philosophy it really does work especially for the shot night it works, yeah you you got to go over the top it's because you want people to remember you hopefully if i have any regrets about making this game apart from using the engine as opposed to learning jay-z doing it's doing the world war ii whole p uh genre it's it's very done in fps games and thus i'm afraid that it may sort of like blend in with the crowd of other ones um my other concept was the principality of mars a remake um which was the steampunk game i made back in 2002 i wish i made that because that's a really cool concept and if i do go on to make other games after this i'm planning to work on on rail shooters because it's a market which has almost no games in it and it's a it's a genre that i love yeah we're going to talk about that off camera too that's going to be a thing that we yeah i love that whole concept of douglas yeah but um that's happening but that's happening but i kind of wish i'd make the principality of mars because it's a fucking cool concept i thought like it probably would have sold slightly better because it's a different type of game the concept for the principality of mars was it's not until years later i realized i may have just been copying killzone without realizing it whereas the idea that mars was a colony.
[52:37] Uh and on the colony a dictator rose up and he declared himself king because he was crazy because he was getting high on like sort of mushroom drug in mars we came up with some sort of barge and fungus that he was getting high on and then he was assassinated by his son who then blamed the assassination on the british and then invaded britain and throughout my three terrible fps games that i made in fps grader you start in london then you go to mars and then you finally confront the prince on his orbital space uh castle right and these games were terrible they they had terrible frame rate issues terrible ai but the concept was cool as and looking back there i kind of wish i'd made that but anyway i probably will do at some point i probably might do the unity thing um yeah the principality of mars is a cool idea and it's mine no one better steal it you you've done such a good job with like building the atmosphere and environmental.
[53:37] Storytelling even something i i kept commenting about like the skybox in your game and it's it's something that you know a lot of people don't put too much effort into it's just like oh yeah there's just got to be a sky but like how you come out in front of the train and you can see the the castle in the background and it's it's simple and it's elegant but it's also like foreshadowing what you're ultimately going towards even if you don't pay attention to any of the dialogue that is telling you like this is what you're doing this okay yeah you'll see the ship arrive you'll see the airship we're getting docking you'll see the uh sun slowly start to eclipse you know as you go through that it's a little detail but i love doing stuff like that i fucking love foreshadowing yeah it's it's good storytelling and it's it's good world building overall i think that probably comes from a lot of your you know dnd oriented you know gameplay that kind of thing Tired Adventure. Did you ever play that game? No, I don't think so.
[54:34] Okay. Rocket Adventure is a game that Americans don't know anything about because it was released in America on the Mega... It was released on the Sega Mega Drive or Genesis, as you guys know it. And when they released it in America, they made it too hard. It was a thing Konami in America was doing at the time where they were trying to make sure the games weren't too easy because they thought the Americans liked hard games and because of rental markets. They thought if it was too easy they would return they wouldn't rent it again and again and again, because they'd made it too damned hard in the american version it never really took off rockinite adventure was kanami's attempt to do a platforming game platform mascot game and the main character is a possum who is a knight with a jetpack it's one of my favorite games of all time at the very beginning of the game the first thing you see is a castle with an airship docking You then go to the castle, get on the airship and then fight the bad guys on the airship. I basically kind of copied this idea for my FPS game. Um, um, It's a small tangent. Broken Night Adventure on Sega Mega Drive. Play the PAL version. It's fucking amazing. Anyway, sorry. You're very theatrical. It's in your name, too. You were born to be a storyteller, in a way. A lot of this is insomnia. A lot of this is only sleeping four hours. I get this manic energy. I can feel it in my voice.
[56:00] I'm afraid I'm going to say something stupid because of it, but I'm fighting it. I haven't said anything stupid yet. i don't know you're doing pretty good so far and i can relate to that uh we were talking a little bit before we got on to onto the recording but you know like shift work permanently changes you as a person like if you work night shift overnight shifts for a significant amount of time it permanently changes your brain this is like scientific fact it's it's on now for a second part of my law done i okay so basically i was a perfectly healthy person and then uh my co-worker said, there's this job going is the cushiest job imaginable. And my, we were both working in the supermarket and he said, you want this job, my friend done it for a bit and you don't have to fucking do anything. You come early in the morning and you, this is like three in the morning, right? So it's very early in the morning. And then you just basically move this stuff about, and then you sort out the newspapers coming in and no one bothers you. It's like two hours working like an eight hour shift. It's fine. Oh, wow. I can do that. How hard could that be?
[56:59] And it, at first I was fine, but then I stopped sleeping. Like at all, I just completely stopped sleeping for like a week. I was going fucking insane. Um, but I, I kept with it a bit and I finally started to get my sleep back a little bit. But even when I was sleeping, I was tired all the fucking time.
[57:17] And I have had blood tests. I've had cameras with a sundown sign. I thought I convinced myself I had cancer for a bit.
[57:24] I, I, I have done everything. I finally quit that job got a new daytime job but still it's been almost a decade and i'm still i only sleep four hours most nights and i'm tired all the fucking time and i don't know if it's related to the not sleeping properly and i know you're thinking if you're only sleeping four hours a night that's got to be the reason why you're tired i don't fucking know because i'm really fucking tired but it's it's hard when you're tired and you can't sleep more than four hours like um yeah precisely because people say what does that mean tired and sleeping are different fucking things motherfucker i know it sounds crazy but they are different things it is so tired is the inability yeah tired is the inability to focus the inability to think straight uh sleepy is the urge to fall asleep and with me falling asleep isn't the problem it's waking up after four hours and not being able to get back like i can fall asleep every night it's just after four where i was like we'll wake up um you you start to go crazy too you start to hear shit and see shit and like fucking do you think you're dreaming and then you realize you were awake the whole time it's very much like the movie fight club that opening dialogue where he's explaining what it's like to have insomnia is from i'm sure chuck palanick has very real personal experience having written that uh like everything is just a copy of a copy of.
[58:50] A copy yeah yeah yeah you're like a fly horse whenever i talk to you about the.
[58:55] Dart i'm like yeah i know we just, it's so true i uh i definitely had like like i said my own mom struggles with that because i there was several years in a row where i did not see sunlight for more than two-thirds of the year at all and like it when you when you work from like 8 p.m to 8 a.m and then you go home and like you're driving through the sun you know the sun is coming up and you're ending your day and you're walking into a gas station and buying like a fucking 30 rack of beer or whatever and you're like and everyone else is getting coffee it you're on a different wavelength you're functioning on a different frequency than the rest of the world and it is weird and i'm sure everyone listening to this who you know has had a job like that you know can totally relate it's every subtle variation yeah being tired i've known irritability i've known zoning out i've known like like hallucinations i've uh yeah it's social anxiety not being able to look someone in the eye for someone you've known your entire fucking life and you're still like darting your eyes around because you can't stand to look at them because you suddenly become incredibly anxious for no reason, yeah don't do night shift is the general just ever like ever even if it seems really easy and cheap there's a reason they give you a job that doesn't require any work because no one else wants it unless you're willing to sacrifice some of your sanity for creativity.
[1:00:21] Yeah I don't recommend it it's not worth it but if you have to, this all of this if all of this is just to do with a broken circadian rhythm which it quite possibly is if you count up the hours i've lost it's decades like it's it's hundreds of hours i've spent just scrolling on my phone or just staring at the fucking ceiling just countless hours lost no you'd be better off picking up like a drug habit than you would not sleeping like the the health effects that it has for me long but you'd be better off smoking cigarettes then you would be not sleeping it's bad very very very detrimental to your long-term health and you know like you said your lifestyle just not being able to work on the things that you do want desperately to be able to work on like because you're you know mentally exhausted all the time forget about physical exhaustion um now i get it man but despite that you're overcoming the odds you're still making games so at least there's that oh yeah no this is never stopping i'm gonna Once I finish this, I'm going to focus on my other new hobby. I'm going to oil paint for... I've taken up oil painting. It's the best fucking hobby in the world. I love it. I'm going to do that for about a month, and I'm going to go...
[1:01:29] Okay straight back to it let's focus let's pick a subject for a light gun game and let's make it however we do it um you were saying like you hire a coder that's a great idea it's a good idea but okay you know i'm talking tangent again tangent time you know i was talking earlier about the uh importance of game engines which don't require coding another one that any listeners are listening to that i highly recommend it's a fantastic tool is shmup creator which lets you create shmups which are games in the audience if you don't know this game so you're the little ship and there's enemies and they fire a billion bullets it's a fantastic tool on steam it's only like 50 pounds i think or 70 dollars something like that and the tool lets you push objects on screen and then give them pathways and then you can create a shmup i politely asked the dev If I said, hi, I'm too tired to make light gun games. I would like to make a light gun game with your engine. Would you add that for me?
[1:02:33] He said yes. And after like a year of stalling, he's finally done it. In the latest update, if you go into the actual code of the engine itself, there's a little, you open up the level in a text document, go through these different options and you turn on use mouse control. You can make a light gun game using Schmuck Creator, which is really cool. And if you don't do any coding, I think I could theoretically make a whole light gun game in maybe five months.
[1:03:01] Just drawing all the sprites, putting it in there and telling them what to do. Now, there are downsides. He hasn't included any ammo. He says he will do. There's no ammo variant. Not variant. Variable. There's no ammo variable. So anything you would do would have unlimited ammo. So I'm thinking maybe like the machine gun light gun game, like Operation War. Have you ever played Operation War?
[1:03:26] Operation Warp was an arcade game from 1985, I think. It was one of the first light gun games that ever existed. It worked because they didn't actually have light gun technology. The way it worked was when you moved the machine gun around, it was basically a joystick. So when you're moving the gun around, it was moving like a joystick, which would then tell the computer where you're... For some context, I was born in 1995. So, I mean, there's going to be some shit that I missed. I think I'd actually be 40 now. I've lost track of time. I think I'm actually 40. Yeah, shit. Fuck. Yeah. If it's not in the history books, it's likely I didn't. If it's before I was born and not in the history books, it's likely I haven't seen it. But still. Yeah, it's an old arcade game. Have you ever played... LA Machine Gunners sounds really familiar. Is that... Yeah, it was a Sega arcade game from 1997 maybe. I think it had a Wii port. I might make something like that, basically. A game where you have unlimited an IMO machine gun and you just at everything. I'm looking up images of this to see if I can jog my memory. The gun handle on this arcade machine looks extremely familiar, so I'm wondering if I have messed with it in an arcade.
[1:04:45] My all-time favorite light gun game is Terminator Salvation by far. I've put more quarters into that machine than I probably had quarters otherwise in my life. So... Again, as good as I'm old, I'm always going to say my favorite stuff is the older stuff. My favorite liking game called Time Crisis is everything. It's like saying you like the Beatles, you know what I mean?
[1:05:12] I only like the first three. I feel like there's a real sense of cam to Time Crisis. There's a real sense of over-the-top silliness that kind of got lost from four onwards. Those first three really toned that down. Some Japanese silliness that I liked. It felt like a dance, right? You were shooting the bad guys, and they would fly all over the place, and they all wore brightly colored uniforms to indicate how well they could shoot. I love that game so much. What do you think of the idea that genre and storytelling comes in basically 30-year intervals?
[1:05:49] To illustrate what I mean is, if you watch films from the 80s, And you have these sort of tropes that are like, you know, kind of absentee parents, latchkey kids that live in these big suburban homes and stuff where they're, you know, they're kind of free to roam and do whatever they want. It's like not actually an accurate picture of what it was like in America in the 80s. It's actually 30 year olds who grew up in the 50s and 60s make finally able to make stories about what it was like when they were growing up. And then that sort of happens iteratively over time. So in the 2010s, you have this resurgence of things that were popular in the 80s. So you have games that are influenced by people who would have been watching movies in the 80s. Yeah. Yeah. 1,000%. 1,500%. Yeah, totally. Here we are in the 2020s, and we're talking about 90s first-person shooters, right? Like –.
[1:06:43] What i can't say example of this is when i was a kid video games were never right in media what i mean by that is you would watch something and they would have the video game and it would be wrong like it wouldn't look like any real video game it would be like what they'd usually do is they get a cgi company to come up with a very silly cgi thing and then characters would be holding the wrong type of joystick and just and then in modern media you would watch a cartoon and it would do a parody of a video game and it would be pitch perfect. It would be a perfect 100% parody of it. Is it Smiling Friends? Happy Friends? What's that new cartoon? Happy Tree Friends?
[1:07:24] No, no, no, no. There's one called Smiling Friends, I think it's called. And they've done, the whole premise of the show is they're like counselors and they had to cancel a character who was a PS1 character. The character was basically Crash Bandicoot. and they when they had this character on screen he would be a low polygon model and whenever he would talk his voice would be incredibly distorted because it was like tiny audio files on a play station disc um it was a perfect parody you see my point is yes you're entirely correct people who make the media will be able to perfectly reference media from was it whenever they were kid you know whatever the interval that is but yeah so like you know the people making stranger things right in the 2010s are remembering their childhood in the 80s so it's like this, modern 80s nostalgia but if you go back and watch shit from the 80s they're referencing shit from 20 to 30 years before that because that's when they were kids you know so they were watching, i don't know easy rider or stanley cubrick films or you know stuff that would be would have been popular when they were young and then they're replicating that when they're finally old enough and have the money and the space and time to do that and i think that's a very important thing in media to remember especially when you're looking back historically.
[1:08:47] I don't know if this is true but i remember hearing something on a podcast the other day where someone was saying that um in recent years he feels like like the latest few decades there hasn't been the massive changes in culture there was like the previous decades in media like if you look at like 80s media to 90 media 90s media completely different you look from 90 to 2000s completely different but for the last few from like 2010s to 2020s so much.
[1:09:17] Um do you think there's any merit to that i think it's uh there's this great book that i recommend folks get a hold of called uh within context of no context and it's sort of an exploration of kind of growing up in the 20th century and especially the later 20th century in the post-atomic age and that sort of thing and even i would say that the big watermark you know that divides today from the past i won't even say today i'll go like the the later 20th century from all time before it would have been world war one that permanently changed the world and then the next big thing after that appears to be sort of the the widespread use of the internet, and so i i agree with what you're saying uh in the way that it's reflected in media but i would also say that it's like there's nothing to compare now to so like if you talk to a 23 year old like my wife is 23 and the world that she grew up in is not i'm not even like she hates when i even use the word generation difference because it's only six years difference but it's still it's like.
[1:10:28] I i remember what it was like when you know people just didn't have the internet when people had to like if you got in an argument with your buddy you two just fucking argued about it and And then if you were born in 2001, you've never seen a world where you don't just solve that problem by Googling it immediately. And then I think that in media, that's also reflected. But the people that are currently making popular media. Are mostly going to be 30 to 40 years old. I mean, people who have experience, worked their way up to the point where they have enough money to make something. So they're either trying to appeal to that younger audience or they're appealing to their own audience, which is going to be people my two-year age, you know, that 25 to 30 kind of demographic.
[1:11:13] Sorry, 39. I'm so glad. I'm so very glad I didn't have the internet as a child. I was raised, I didn't have the internet until I was 20, like like maybe 22 23 uh and i'm grateful for it because if i didn't i would probably be known as a lol cow i'd probably have um i probably have like a wikipedia page on me somewhere about uh the incredibly cringy early youtube career of prince of mars um yeah i i dread to think um there's advantages to both but i'm certainly happy that i know both sides of that coin.
[1:11:52] And i grew up in alabama too so i always like someone's like well what generation are you and i mean like technically i'm a millennial but i'm like but i grew up in sort i won't say underdeveloped because that sounds like i'm shitting on it but you know we didn't we got things a lot later than the rest of the first world in a lot of cases so there's just shit that i'd you know maybe someone else that was born the same year as me that grew up with high-speed internet you know all around them would have had that i just didn't i mean i was more or less in the woods or on the farm you know kicking a soccer ball around or some shit like that with my with my brothers then i was consuming media on the internet or like you i didn't even see youtube until like 2005 and i thought because i'd never seen high-speed internet until i was visiting a friend's house who had high-speed internet and youtube and i thought it was just a website where you watched dragon ball z i was like oh there's a thing where you can watch dragon ball z on the internet. It was so confusing to me.
[1:12:50] And then, just for a little lore dump on my side, I didn't really, until I was, 20 years old and in the military i didn't really like have a computer that i regularly used you know i didn't play computer games i played console stuff but i didn't have like a pc you know and like i didn't have a steam account or any of that stuff until i was an adult, and i think that that developmentally affects the way that you think about a lot of this stuff if you grow up with it yeah yeah i i i had a point but in the middle of that conversation that you're having it seems to escape my mind i think we're originally talking about sending to an audience because nostalgia and the circle of nostalgia but that's not the reason why i want to do it i want to make a light gun games because they were my favorite child because i had a g-con 45 and a peter's two and the crt tv which i still own which i think still works i haven't turned it on for a year i've been using my do you know what a cindon light gun is.
[1:13:52] Um a cindon light gun is a light gun that you can get from modern pc's where you plug it in the usb socket and the way it works is it looks at the tv with a camera on the inside of the gun and it then does within milliseconds calculations of where the cursor should be to then uh let you shoot the tv screen like a normal light gun it's not perfect it's not great you uh you fuck around with vr headsets at all.
[1:14:22] No no i have not um basically because i didn't have enough room in my house i heard you need a lot of room for that and british house so here's an interesting thing about them uh i have a quest too and i've got pretty limited experience with this stuff but it's so let's say you wanted to do an fps in uh in vr and you don't have a lot of room right and most people don't like that they take this into account when they're designing these things in the in the games around them It's like, you know, you're not really going to like run around your house like Doomguy and, you know, you're not going to have that layout of E1M1 in your home. That's ridiculous.
[1:14:59] But the way that they do a lot of the FPS games is that they sort of make it like a three-dimensional light gun game where you're basically standing stationary in an area, you blast everything in that area, and then the game moves you to another area, and then you do it again, and so forth. So it's like almost a new iteration on that that old trope so instead of a 2d gallery where you're shooting into basically a theater window you're you're doing that in three-dimensional space but you're not moving in three-dimensional space does that make sense yeah yeah no 100 but i would have to play that to know if i'd like it because i feel that when you play a light gun game your vision is held within that one area that one square of the screen so you know the enemies are going to turn up there you have a split second to figure out where they are if you're in a full three-dimensional area it would be harder to get the player's attention in time to get that knee-jerk reaction gameplay so i would feel the way that you get around that is level design though you don't necessarily have to turn the player around all the way in the you're not standing in the center of ruin imagine you're standing in like a canyon with walls on either side and the enemies are in front of you you know so you're you're not really looking all the way around you you might be mostly looking within you know a 90 to 120 degree fov in terms of like where the action is taking place.
[1:16:24] I would be lying if i said i wasn't tempted but i would have to experience it first i've never had one on my head so i would i would be tempted i would be i'm i'm tempted i mean i've not even looked into i didn't know how expensive vr headsets are 100 probably pounds i'm not sure how it translates to dollars, but I would imagine for something decent, a couple of hundred pounds. It's certainly something worth considering. But yeah, I was thinking like Quartermain Arcade. Have you ever played an arcade game called CryptoKiller? I have. Yes. Yes. Yes. It wasn't amazing, but the general concept, it was made at best, but the general concept of like shooting mummies and skeletons, that but Quartermain, the arcade game? Come on. I'm pretty sure I played that in a movie theater. Like it was like one of the lobby in the movie theater games that we had. And that's also how I played House of the Dead. um same way, yeah yeah yeah yeah in fact that was right next to that was right next to house of the dead in the in the movie theater i'm talking about yeah oh my god it was so good holy fuck oh that was the main inspiration perhaps the bridge which is my other light gun game um was oh yeah that was oh god i fucking love kind of people so much holy shit.
[1:17:43] I remember finding a youtube video a year later years later where the devs were talking about making it uh it was just it was just that day and listening to them show seeing them show up all their notes and all their ideas um back to uh that was great back to quarter main or at least tangentially i wanted to talk a little bit more about lovecraft i mean you you said that you were primarily inspired by the the tabletop game are you a are you a fan you've already you made that other game about lovecraft too the other uh well yeah okay i'm gonna get uh and you're gonna get a lot of people gonna not try the game after i finish this next sentence but really no i'm so sorry look i'm sorry guys i tried i really did i put on the audio books but i've literally listen i've listened to the collective works of shakespeare and i found shakespeare easy to understand it is a particular type of english that i would imagine okay, Yeah, that turn of the century, you know, early 20th century Rhode Island, transatlantic English is different. I'll be frank with you. I like Call of Cthulhu. Yeah, yeah. I like Call of Cthulhu, not necessarily Lovecraft.
[1:18:53] I had hundreds of albums playing the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu, not so much listening to the works of Lovecraft. I made it through the actual story, The Court of Cthulhu and The Mountains of Madness and the ones everyone listens to, like the big hitters, you know, Shadow of Winsmouth, right? But I've not listened to much more after that because I've listened to Edgar Allan Poe, same problem. It's just really hard to understand and not just understand, it's not something I try to understand. It's more it's just a really dry and kind of dull and people are gonna hate me and they're not gonna want to buy the games out i shouldn't just lie i should just lie to you and said i loved it the actual truth is that there's probably more people who feel the way you do than don't and.
[1:19:41] That's a and so one of the one of the ways to kind of like put that into context is like i bet a lot of the people that are really into i love lovecraft stuff i'm not really into you know like all these different you know games and tabletop stuff and you know whatever are actually more into the derivative works of people who were inspired by lovecraft than lovecraft himself so like in the same way that there's a shitload of people who love you know uh fan fantasy like medieval fantasy stuff like have you actually read the lord of the rings or did you watch the movies and play all the games and you know like extended universe stuff you know that and that's a big difference so i mean i i find it hard to read tolkien i i have but it's it's not it's not exactly modern english it's like reading the king james bible or something it's with books yeah.
[1:20:34] With books and with actually with painting and art look as well there is so much slippery like like when i first tried to get into painting i had the mistake of going on to oil painting reddit and um like you say what tools do you need and they're like oh you can't get these paints you perhaps you must get these ones because they're the they're the expensive artist ones you only need these brushes and and to be frank i got on just fine with the cheaper shit and there's a lot of snobbery in books as well it because like you if you say like i listen to like black library novels people are like oh you're listening to crap but space means go shoot shoot i had fun i was enjoying myself that's the importance right that's that's the important thing as I thought I was enjoying myself. I listen to a Stephen King. If I want to listen to horror, I'll probably just listen to King. Did you enjoy Alan Wake? By chance, that series?
[1:21:29] I loved Alan Wake. I thought it was a great game. I only played it once, though. It's one of those things where... It's interesting how many games there are, oriented around Tolkien and Lovecraft and that sort of thing. I feel like Stephen King is such a prolific... He's translated into film so well. But there's not a lot... Other than Alan Wake, there's not a lot of video games that are like Stephen King the video game. It is not. It is really odd. Now, the thing is, I, would do that apart from the fact that like i said at the very beginning i don't trust my ability to write i i genuinely don't i i feel that i would just be insulting stephen king if i attempt to make a stephen king inspired game um but yeah it is weird there isn't more well why is it they're like you know why is it they're like the green mile the game or you know that kind of thing or you know the state like the these things just don't they're not there uh is it does he.
[1:22:23] It's like stephen king himself like turning down video does he have a problem with the art form that he's not licensing things like that forget about derivative works why aren't they licensed why is it why does it that exist and yeah here's what i say about stephen king right i know what that man has and hasn't done because he hasn't or has or hasn't included in his books anything that man has ever done in his life he's included it in one of his novels and in none of his novels none of his characters that's true they've all done a lot of coke and drank a lot of alcohol he has never played a lot of coke right yeah uh and he's by a lot of cars had a lot of existential crises you know spiritual visions no video games there you're right yeah, yeah exactly you like stephen king every main character he's ever written is a self-insert every single fucking one of them um and like i feel like i know the man even though i've never actually met him because i've listened to a lot of his stuff and yeah no i i know he's never played dnd and he's here's a fucking video game and that's sad because i feel that he would break dnd and i feel that if he got into video let's go let's go into this together i will try to get in contact with stephen king's people and it's gonna be hard but i'll and then you can come up with the gameplay design but i think that like misery would be a great like telltale style like point and click adventure game like if you could just adapt something like misery into a game it would work really well.
[1:23:53] Yeah you shouldn't no no no no what if you don't adapt you don't adapt because the books are already their own thing and they were written as a book you need to sketch in king to play a bunch of games and that sounds crazy but then have him create something that matches the medium because if you try to adapt it would be like doing like gone with the wings the fps game just wouldn't guilt him into it be like well you know harlan ellison did it and he'll be oh well you know harlan fuck that guy i don't know i'm better than him um i don't know that's a good point though man i've just genuinely like i don't know why that doesn't exist uh more the alan wake is the the single one and only if someone else knows of any please like comment or whatever in the in the notes here because i i don't no there isn't i swear to god there is nothing else that's inspired by stephen king and i i feel that everyone's kind of copying everyone else it's one of the reasons why I kind of regret doing a Lovecraft game, because when I first made my first Lovecraft game, which is the Tales of the Cthulhu, Tales of Cthulhu, which I made in FPS creator back in 2002 or something, there were no Lovecraft games. There was Call of Cthulhu, the Dark Corners of the Earth, and the original Xbox. I fucking hate that game. And people are going to hate me for saying that. That game was broken hard.
[1:25:08] And there was my games, and that was pretty much it. And then over the years, I saw Call of Cthulhu really take off. and there were so many Lovecraft games. So many out there. And yeah, people just copy each other. It became a trend to do Call of Cthulhu-inspired Lovecraftian games. I was just thinking, it's a really inspiring game. I was just listening to, earlier this morning, Metal Gear Solid. I was doing a no-commentary playthrough in the background while I was working on the game. And I really admire the original Metal Gear Solid because Minio Kojima just included everything he liked in one game. He wanted to talk about nuclear weapons, so he just started talking about that. He liked Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, so he made that his main character. He thought mechs were cool, so he included a mech. I admire that. I wish I could think of an idea where I could just take everything I like and shove it into one giant vat and put on Blend. Metal Gear Solid is so interesting because...
[1:26:12] Like it has that escape from new york inspired part of it and i'm a huge fan of escape from new and escape from la and basically everything john carpenter ever made but you're absolutely right it's just like hideo kojima just shoving everything all of his interest into one thing is is for for better or worse in many cases um and the whole the whole series a lot you know has has that sort of thing but i do like the uh the boldness to just basically like scrape snake plissken right out of escape from new york and put him into his own world i was working on a game called uh combustion when i was at 3d realms and it should come out i think sometime in the next year or so but it it has uh this main character that's actually a.
[1:27:07] Cat his name's calico but has some sort of you know some some subtle snake fliskin uh influence as well into that character uh but you know yeah there's there's derivative and then there's just like down to the name stealing a character and putting an eye patch on him and everything you know that's that's a whole new level of uh derivative art in a way it's not yeah you know i mean actually he did try go try and go to john carpin and say do you want to sue him that you can find this tweet that's posted on twitter and john carpenter's like no i didn't want to sue hideo kojima i met him at convention he seems like a nice guy yeah he made me shit loads of money from all these nerds going back and watching my movies probably yeah um you know what i is i i would like to at some point in the future like yeah i'm making like in games but i would like just make a list of everything i enjoy put down the piece of paper and say how can i combine all of these things how can i take all this stuff that i like you know and just sort of blend it together and make something note i got a feeling that in like five years whenever you make this thing you're gonna we're gonna look back at this podcast and be like that's that's where it happened that's that's when they had that their million dollar idea right there um.
[1:28:21] I realized a long time ago that there's nothing is truly original. Like I would always look at games made in niche to IO and then you see what's popular. And I always go, Oh, why didn't I think of that? It's a brilliant idea. A game where you're a robot paparazzi and you're chasing someone or a game where you're like trying to date frogs or whatever ridiculous fucking idea they have. And I'm like, that's creative. Why didn't I think of that? But I realized that creativity for creativity sake isn't necessarily amazing. You just have to take what you like, recreate it, and do it well. As long as you have passion there, as long as you believe in what you're doing, other people will enjoy it too. Okay.
[1:29:08] Right. What else about Quarterman would you like to discuss? I guess my next... We've already gone on the Lovecraft tangent, which wasn't what I thought it would be, but that's okay. I'm not saying you disappointed me it is interesting though that you you you do you have made now two lovecraft games and don't love lovecraft that that is so wild um but it's again i was trying to think of something no one else was doing and i'm like and the first time i done it was like oh this iconography is really fucking cool with his tentacles and stuff ancient demons i'll do that and with the second one i wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for the fact that i was basing it on my friend's characters um you know otherwise i just never would have done it yeah i find it so strange that.
[1:29:56] It's not really strange it's something that you see a lot where things are derivative and we got on onto that a little bit earlier but just to you know like the the vision that people have when they think of an angel right and they think of like this this cherubic even the word cherub they think of like a a youthful thing with like a diaper and wings and like a halo and all that stuff is in no way whatsoever what it says in the source material it's actually inspired that their vision is something that happens you know over a thousand years later in the renaissance and enlightenment period but if you're talking about like a biblically accurate angel it's something much more you know terrific and in like strange and imagination it's got like four faces and wheels and there are all these different uh descriptions you get and then you know but then there's all this stuff that is based on something that was inspired by that but changed something fundamental about it and then that happens so much just with everything, all derivative works, all video games all that stuff, It sounds just like, oh, you're a Lovecraft fan. No, I'm a Call of Cthulhu fan.
[1:31:09] It's easy for you to fall in love with different things, different aspects, different variations. How many fans are there of the original Ian Fleming Bond novels as opposed to fans of the movie? And that are Mission Impossible fans or Austin Powers fans that don't know anything about 007. Or Jurassic Park, you know? but you know it's um so so do you feel that there are other similar topics that you would make a game about like you've explored like the action movie stuff and you've even done a christmas game you've done lovecraft now.
[1:31:46] There are there are subject matters that i've never figured out a way to make a really good game out of and i don't think anyone ever has is i kind of like mecha anime but specifically even i say that i mean like gundam uh which is a specific uh series but i like the uh aesthetics of it i like anime characters yelling as mechs fight in space and i've never found any of the video games made about gundam to be good um so i've always liked for how could i take this idea of like screaming anime protagonists and make it into a preferably like an arcade game because i like arcade games and make it kind of good ish i was thinking maybe something along the lines of starfox but then then you end up with like basically what is just like um space harrier uh but i i don't know i would love i can't picture it in my head just yet i would like to make something sort of like mecha anime um as for other concepts for games i don't know uh i like starfox Maybe I can combine that and have like Mecha Gundam Star Fox with little furry animals inside mechsuits. I don't know. I definitely know I'm going to make a lot of light gun games. As for ideas, I've got like five or six different ideas. I'd like to make a Robocop-like game. I would like to make... I've never played a game called Wild Guns on the SNES. No.
[1:33:10] Okay it's available on steam but i wouldn't recommend buying it on steam it's almost identical to the snes version it's it's really good wild guns is a science fiction western so you're in the future and it's anime-esque so the bad guys are riding on robotic horses and there's like rope uh cyborgs and there's like drones and but you're a cowboy and you're firing cowboy gun something in a sci-fi western like i'm getting pretty fucking cool uh you can call it intergalactic outlaw and you go from planet to planet and then in one town you've got to shoot all these aliens that are also cowboys it you know it's it's silly and campy and over the top the important thing with doing light gun games you've got to be campy you've got to be ridiculous you've got to be over the top another cool idea what about castlevania the light gun game right right maybe like maybe evil dead you travel through time you're killing medieval zombies and stuff with a shotgun but like make it off-brand evil yeah that reminds me a lot of uh duke nukem's time to kill where you know duke is like what's that playstation one i believe yeah.
[1:34:26] Yeah i think i played that one it was it's quite like tomb raider it has it's a you know the 3d or so what do you call this it over the shoulder no that's not it uh i feel like such an idiot being a game designer and not coming up with this term immediately but yeah it's third person and you're platforming a lot and everything but the the plot is basically it's the most not woke plot of all time it's the yeah yeah i've been traveling through time to say the the big cops turn duke's bar his strip club into a gay strip club and he wants to go back in time to make it not a gig it's the most not you couldn't do it today but yeah that was but you go to what you know the first level after the first city you know like you go back to like the wild west and then you're in you know the the roman coliseum and all these different you know you're in future world all that kind of stuff but yeah and you're you're kind of carrying that same arsenal of weapons with you and duke just keeps changing costumes to fit in that would be a good idea for a I was thinking doing it in sort of like ghouls and ghosts that is a throwback but yes.
[1:35:40] Okay pixel art cartoony cheapy style ghouls and ghosts style medieval village the medieval people being attacked by the ghouls and ghosts like monsters you've got like your giant suit of armor wearing demons you've got like all these sort of classic ghouls and ghosts like monsters time vortex open legally distinct ash williams falls through with his gun right there's your game right you find through you go through to the castle and then on the final level dimensional vortex open and they attack modern day new york city and the final level is you on the back of a car shooting the demons flying through new york city all pixel art that'd be a pretty cool idea for you know and i think i might make what i find interesting about all of these ideas that you have is when it comes to light gun games i don't think most people playing them really know what the story is at all they're like they're too immersed in the immediacy of shooting all the stuff to think about like what am i actually doing here and what am i progressing towards and your style of thinking about it is very cool and i think that if you emphasize that even with your you know whatever idea you go with like a light gun game that genuinely has like a story that you're immersed in is cool it's it's not about story it's a theme it's a setup it's uh um like you're like you know lethal enforcers you're a cop they're the bad guys go shoot them time crisis you're an agent they're the bad guys go shoot them you know carnival it's an evil circus, they're evil clowns.
[1:37:06] Go shoot them. But it's a theme and it's got to be bright, it's got to be colourful and it's got to grab it. And you have to progress. You can't go back.
[1:37:14] The thing is that most people that have played, every game that you just named, right? Most of the people that have ever played these things, they come up, they throw in two or three, you know, whatever the quarter or token amount is. They play a little bit of it, you know, they have some fun, and that they don't really take in what the progression of that is, right? And then there's a few people that blew all their quarters and won't play through the whole thing. And even then, they may not really know what the progression of that story was. They just, you know, I beat it, aha! I got the high score, that kind of thing. um but when you're playing this stuff on you know on a console or pc or whatever and not on an arcade machine you have a lot more leeway with you know as you said story but like not necessarily story but just progressing through settings and and really fleshing out the full idea of what those those themes are i i wouldn't i wouldn't put a story in my luck on games not really i i to my mind they should be like pure and simple what you want to do is you want to have like rememberable and catchy lines so i don't know if you've ever played the original time crisis like the very first one i think it's one of the most quotable fucking games ever made like there is like six or seven lines i can just off the top of my head just think of your father will pay the price for destroying the imperial rule you know uh never mind my men will gun him down you know be my guest and let me entertain you like if anyone's ever played the original time crisis you know all of those fucking lines and who said them.
[1:38:39] You want to be catchy, you don't want to bother having an actual plot, you want to have just like a series of really quotable, catchy moments, and that's what I want to aim for in my future games, I want all my games to be cheap, two or three pounds I want most of the light gun games to be finished in like half a fucking hour and I want them to be really rememberable, and that's what I'm going to aim for and that's what I'm going to dedicate the rest of my game making life to and the occasional PS game.
[1:39:08] I don't know. It's so cool how all these different genres, whether it be FPS or RPG maker type stuff or light gun or whatever, you can just slap a theme on it and, you know, go wild with it. It's sort of like, even with like theme parks or like just roller coasters, you could have the same roller coaster. Disney's done this a million times, like the same, basically the same thing, different setting, different theme. Um and you kind of stick to the same archetype as you said you know this is the theme here's the bad guys shoot them or whatever yeah um it's weird how games condition you to sort of know what it is expected of you without saying so right so like it postal for example uh postal 2 you know hall you know it's infamously one of the i'm actually going to be in an upcoming documentary about it. I'm interviewing the people that are making the documentary very soon.
[1:40:03] But, yeah, quick plug to Tad and Jason and all those guys and to Mike Jarrett. Fuck you, Mike Jarrett. The design of the game is such that you start off in this shooter game, and it gives you a gun, and everybody's mean to you and shit, and then you just start shooting people because you know that that's what you're supposed to do. But you actually don't have to do that, and if you don't pull the trigger.
[1:40:27] No one will attack you it's on you the player it's like a trick that they play on the player to get you into doing it but it's just like how much does it take you know just very subtly to get someone to like in a video game walk up pick up a gun and just start shooting civilians, nothing it's like very little prompt actually needs to take place it's just be annoying, you know i think it's better but like what sort of person's gonna play postal like you you got into that knowing what you were gonna do the game's called right it's yeah it's a series of elimination like my mom wouldn't have played postal and she wouldn't have shot anyone if she was playing postal but uh the person who would buy postal or play postal is the sort of person who would shoot up a virtual school um i was uh credited in postal brain damage for i basically was like part of releasing the the original trailer for it when it was going to come out and everything and i i showed this to my whole family i'm like oh look at this isn't this really cool and my grandma was like this looks terrible this is awful and i was like oh yeah i guess that's true this is pretty awful but um as you said this it takes nothing and you sort of know what you're getting yourself into but then again it's like uh what does that say about people, you just pick up a gun to start shooting.
[1:41:51] In a video game. Now, it's good. And like I said, it's a serious elimination. You wouldn't be there in the first place if you weren't going to do that. But I've always been a firm believer that you can do whatever the hell you want in media. You know, I've done terrible things in the world of video gaming, and I would be a multiple war criminal if it was real. It's easy in Quartermain because the bad guys are cultists and zombies and monsters and fucking Nazis. Is it's yeah kill a colon let god sort him out, i was gonna say were you the one that got pushed out the train because you didn't shoot the ss yeah who confronts you i assume that that is you you made the assumption i would shoot him, i he doesn't aggress me he doesn't do anything to me so i'm like i just assume everyone would shoot him he's an ss officer he deserves to die um maybe he's like the what was the rudolph hess character maybe he was just about to you know he's maybe he's taking this train to get to scotland to tell everybody hitler's plan before the end of the war you know maybe he's, maybe this is the feminine part of me he's like maybe i can tame him you know.
[1:43:09] The Beauty and the Beast kind of trope. Yeah.
[1:43:19] Do you have any... I don't know, just like... General advice that you would give to somebody... Who dreams of making video games... And hasn't done it yet?
[1:43:30] Yeah, okay. So, I have two different bits of advice. One, if you... If you don't think you can code... Easy FPS Editor is a great way to make an FPS game. If you want to make an arcade shooter, use Schmuck Creator. If you want to make anything story-based and you don't want to learn to code, the easiest way is probably RPG Maker. But I don't entirely recommend that because there's 20 million RPG Maker games and no one's going to play them. If you want to learn something a bit more complex, go to Ciro Construct 2 or GDevelop. Or construct free if you're willing to pay a subscription anything beyond that is going to be more complex and you're gonna have to put a lot more time effort study into it um any other bits of advice back up constantly whenever you're doing back up everything um because you never know when something's gonna crash and then you're gonna lose progress it happens to everyone all the time and make friends oh my god i've made it this far and we haven't even talked about it jesus fucking christ um yeah make friends with other people in the community i have been utterly blessed and i cannot fucking believe i've gone this far without mentioning it and he's gonna listen to this he's gonna hate me for not mentioning up to now i have a music german his name is a german he is not an ss officer just german.
[1:44:55] He does all the music and he does it for free and it's really fucking good music make friends with people because you never know if you're going to find an incredibly talented person doesn't value their own work so you can abuse them um that's so important i have offered him money he hasn't taken it for some reason um yeah make friends talk to people help people help other people who don't know how to make games because you never know when you can use them, um that sounds far more abusive than i meant to but it is actually really useful advice and it can be beneficial to both, parties, that's another yeah, it's beneficial to both I have, I can't write for everyone, but I was helping someone called Tim, and he was like, I will go over your script, and he fixed the script up for me, done it for because I helped him learn the game, socializing with other game developers is incredibly important, yeah, and I know you're kind of wrapping up the podcast and we've been going on for a long time and we've talked about everything but the game and that's my fault mostly.
[1:45:59] You've got to admit that soundtrack you've been hearing so far i love the soundtrack as one of the first notes that i took was like who made this soundtrack it's really really uh it he's doing it for free so yeah just um talk to people you can't have mine uh but talk to other people um and see if you can use other people and um yeah he's he's so good he's so good uh yeah i i need to give him some money i do i i think when whenever i make so much money in the game i'm just going to take a big wad and we can just add it to him because that's a fucking great soundtrack yeah man i think uh i think that's like really really the best advice you could give anyone who want i know i've known so many game developers well i'm not gonna say wannabe that's so mean uh would-be game developers who try to do it in a vacuum and i'm like just don't be afraid to ask people for help you will be blown away by how nice people are and we're willing to just like help you figure out how to do stuff because chances are they were in the same boat at some point and you will be better and your product will be better for having exchanged ideas with other people that is so true.
[1:47:14] And that said i will give a small bit of contradictory advice if there is something you had your heart set on and your game is coming towards completion don't be afraid to splurge out on something if you need to i really wanted german voice acting for the enemy i loved the yelling and screaming of the germans in the wolfenstein remix i i love the angry german noises when you're like an alarm goes off and you hear like a load of what to me is incomprehensible gibberish but screaming over the alarm i love your willhelm you use the willhelm scream in the game too yeah yeah yeah exactly i use the little home screen because that's copyright free but uh in the newer versions we need to really patterns that audio so you can hear it clearer but all the germans are screaming actual german and i went to fiverr and then i paid out to get an actual german voice actor another bit of advice if you're going to do that expect to haggle they will have one price listed on the front and they will try and get you to pay five times as much haggle them down okay because those fuckers are not going to ask for the price they're listed on the front page I have another counter piece of advice to that.
[1:48:23] If you want German and voice actors, take the train to Germany, go to a bar, any bar, on a Friday around 2 p.m. And start talking to people. Have a voice recorder with you. Mention that you need some Nazis in your game or whatever it is. You need this or that. People are just willing to help.
[1:48:45] It's amazing how much people just want to be part of stuff. Like we have a one of our games call of seragnar uh features a lot of like renaissance fair goers like people who would typically be you know hanging out at these sorts of things and they're dressed up in like these medieval costumes and everything and you know you'd be surprised even for like a really small prices and stuff like hey would you be willing to pose for some photos you know and be in a video game and like people are like that sounds amazing we'd love that you know like don't don't be afraid to just like literally you know people will people go out of their way to do stuff like that it's really really fun and it's beneficial to everyone all you have to do is credit them and say like hey you know if you're looking for people who can do costume stuff or convention work and that kind of thing like you know contact this number or this website, um you just never know man you never know i.
[1:49:34] I don't know if you have a time limit to wrap this up. I don't, but I have another tangent for more advice. If I can do that, keep going, man. We'll get all that. Oh, okay. More advice. Um, yeah, it doesn't matter if you can't draw learning how to draw is the most useful skill in the entire fucking world for game development. Cause if you want to do something, you can just do it and drawing when you can't draw. I couldn't draw that well for the longest time is admittedly fucking hard. You have to study in practice.
[1:49:59] It's not easy. I'll admit that, but don't be afraid to trace, right? A lot of my npcs i did kind of just google like german beer hall guy and i would find a photograph and i kind of traced it probably shouldn't say that but if you're doing pixel art you know no one's gonna fucking know except the fact that i just told you um but also a lot of my weapons like the big falconstorm which is uh actually it's a reference to michael the music guy's game he's making his own schmuck with falconstorm it's looking fucking amazing but um it's my heavy machine gun it's actually uh the it's the machine gun from doom uh the doom eternal maybe maybe it's the doom remake it's that.
[1:50:43] Machine gun but i drew over it changed it enough to make it a different thing but i needed that basic sprite to get the idea of where the gun would go on an image what wet stretch is pointing in don't be afraid to trace if you need to and another bit of advice if you're not a pixel artist uh and you want wall textures go everywhere with a camera and start taking photos of walls because i've done that in my earlier games and it doesn't actually look that bad um just using your own photos for that's really good advice i've got a few friends that are like texture artists and level designers and such and they will like you know we're traveling around and just they'd have a camera with them or their phone or whatever and just like see an interesting building you know walking through like wherever denmark amsterdam but i just oh i really like the brick layout here and they just start snapping pictures of it like how i'm going to use this. I'm like, that's super cool.
[1:51:34] Um that's that's really good advice just using using things around you uh architecture around you whatever you know that's all all stuff that could just go into the into the you know the soup and the perpetual soup of your your idea for a game or whatever it may be.
[1:51:53] Okay more advice uh set deadlines for god's sake um my games like i have a blog with tennessee the world on games forever and they never ever finish and i know and then i get friends who want to see the game finish and they stop being my friends to stop messaging me because they get fed up of asking me how the game's going and i go i'm working on something else now working on something else now working on something else now set deadlines for god's sake in fact um if you can get a publisher i hate to say it because i kind of wish i'd sort of publish not because you know sam's amazing but dulceman games are great but i wanted to prove to myself that i could self-publish and I wasn't able to do it because I was too fucking tired. But I did kind of need the publisher because the publisher sets deadlines and for God's sake, set yourself a deadline. They also set you up with media and do lots of things. Yes, exactly.
[1:52:47] Yeah, it's, trying to get a publisher. Another bit of advice because yeah, they do do all the boring stuff like setting things up. Um, Yeah, yeah. I have a bit of advice. Don't judge yourself to other people. Have you ever heard of two-pack theory? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, holy fuck, someone's made two cakes, as opposed to, like, oh, this cake is better than mine. The theory is that don't compare your cake to someone else, because to someone else it means there's now suddenly two cakes. I looked at Satan that came out, and I went, oh, it looks better than mine. Oh, no, it's terrible, terrible. And Steve, shut the fuck up. Your game is very different. You're not exactly the same. You made the same engine, but you're going for a completely different feel. They don't look the same. They don't play the same. It's fine. It's fine stop comparing to cake theory you know.
[1:53:47] Yeah try not to hate everything you do which is a problem for me because I hate everything I do I look at my own mark and I see all my flaws always.
[1:53:57] I always on that note don't be afraid to just put something out there I've known.
[1:54:06] Tremendous amounts of game developers who are, that sort of perpetual perfectionist like what you were talking about earlier like i've started a lot of things and never finished anything sort of thing or whatever and it's just like it's okay to just like publish like not the best game in the world and do that like 10 times i've probably said this so many times on the podcast but it's some of the best you know advice i could ever give period is you know people ask john romero something like you know what what about your early work like wolfenstein and doom and and you know commander keen and quake and then he would say something like those you know wolfenstein 3d was my 87th game and it's true like that's 100 fact just make stuff just put it out there you know you know even if it's like not the best thing in the world you could be making money that's going towards you then making your masterpiece later it's not like the statue of david was michelangelo's you know first thing he did i don't know with this i've got one other more controversial bit of advice i don't know if this is correct per se but sometimes it's okay to quit on a project, like sometimes it is okay if you feel like it's not coming together to just stop signing into the sunk cost factory job, you know like if you like there's a game I made called Omega Wing it is a shmup made in shmup creator and no one cared and I made four or five levels in it and I cannot stress the fact that no one gave a fuck.
[1:55:35] And I don't necessarily But after I made my fourth level And no one downloaded it I was like, I'm just going to stop Clearly no one cares about this game I'm just going to Stop doing that, Sometimes it is Finishing a game is good If there's still a fuck ton left to do And no one cares Sometimes it is best to stop.
[1:56:02] Yeah Yeah, Don't follow trends. Don't try and make things that are popular. Just make the same as everything else. Find what you like and try and do exactly the game that you want.
[1:56:19] Yeah. And I think that is my last bit of advice. Don't follow trends. Don't try and delay everyone else. Do your thing, and other people will like it, hopefully. It may not sell a billion copies, but some of that will. Also, just because you're not initially successful, you'd never know when somebody might pick it up later. And find that it's their favorite thing ever i know i know we're contradicting my previous advice about not giving i'm giving up on games but the american thing wasn't really a passion project i was just sort of like kind of doing that because i wanted to make something in schmuck greater um or even you know giving up on it is one thing but just agreeing that now is not the time and then you may find you may be 10 years later where you're like man i had a great idea for that thing and I never really fleshed it out now, it could be I've seen it happen where it's I now have the inspiration or I've learned a new skill or the technology has just now occurred and been made available that allows something like this you know, even if something is like I really want to make an FPS game but I don't know how to code and then later on someone makes an easy FPS maker and now that's available to you changes the whole dynamic as opposed to you know back in the day when you had to write everything from scratch yourself.
[1:57:35] Um or you might just meet the right collaborator like who you know some somebody might contact you after this podcast i don't know but and say hey i'm a whippersnapper programmer and i'm looking to you know help somebody make this kind of stuff maybe i could fix that audio issue for you i don't know but you know what i mean like ever since you're a.
[1:57:56] Ever since I've gone to EZF, I've had so many people just message me out of the blue. It happens all the fucking time. It's got a great little community. That said, the Discord could be a rough effect because there's no moderation. So if you ask too many questions, I'm going to turn the fuck off and read the manual. But I have had a lot of close friends that I've made. And shout out to a meal because he's going to be listening to this. Shout out to – I'm going to just list up a bunch of names. you know uh luggage michael you know uh if we plum dog he picks a wolf you know everyone who's from the community shout out yeah and if you didn't get mentioned i don't care about you i'm uh i'm gonna be getting keys for i think uh all the other dos man games too so i'll probably you know get get quite a few different you know familiarities and connections within this community That's going to be interesting, too. And I want to have Sam on. So, Sam, peer pressure. You have to be on the show. Yeah, I can tell you what. Play Reverend and get my dear friend Emil on. Because he's tried to do his own version of Blood. It's a damn fine little game. And Emil is one of the nicest men I've ever met. Yep, make that connection, man. Just make us a little group chat or have him get me on Discord, email address or whatever, and I'll make it happen.
[1:59:21] Ben? Fucking-tastic. Good, good, good. Was there anything else you wanted to cover today? No, no. I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. If anyone out there hasn't tried tabletop gaming, it's really fucking fun. Try my game. It's a passion project that's Quartermain and the Cult of Cthulhu. Wishlist it in. Wishlist it right now. It will be out in March. Yeah.
[1:59:48] Yeah. Yeah, basically. Yeah. So it's basically, it's kind of like a Doom sort of thing. It's got that whole kind of inspired by tabletop gaming angle. The voice acting, fair warning, is going to be a little bit amateur, but there's a reason for that. It's voice acted by the players from the game itself. They're all just a bunch of guys I knew and played the game with. Okay? So that's why the voice acting for the main character and his two compatriots you talk throughout the game is going to be a week. But keep in mind, these are tabletop gamers, not voice actors. Um yeah uh other bits of random life advice take up painting it's a fun hobby and very relaxing, uh watch some bob ross he's fucking amazing um yeah that's that's pretty much it, oh never ever ever ever do night shift ever under any circumstances ever uh yeah it's been really good spending some time getting to know you and talking about the game, testing it. I'm still going to be playing it. I'll probably have beat it long before it hits the rest of the world. And I'm hoping to get that final build whenever you're ready, Tom. So if there's anything I can do to help, let me know. I sincerely hope whenever I complete my next project, whatever it is, you'll have me on again to talk about it.
[2:01:10] I would very much like that. I'm hoping it's something arcadey that we can talk about together. And yeah, up excellent peace out i guess.
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[2:01:33] Know what you're thinking i thought you said you were done with boomer shooters well i mean come on uh yeah just thank you very much to steven for coming on the show man it's really cool and thanks to uh sam marshall for putting us together uh make sure you go and wish list quarter main and the cult of cthulhu it's coming out in march uh but the steam page is already up make sure you show some love and and go ahead and grab i mean it's only a few bucks like literally like three for most of their stuff. So DOS Man Games on Steam. If you're following the Steam page to Quarterman, you'll see it right there under the publisher tab. And just grab everything they have. Why not? Good stuff. Thank you to all of our wonderful supporters on Patreon. Big ups to Shannon, Ant, Michael, Fred, and Brad. And of course, as always, the theme song to this show is by John of the Shred. So check out everything he does over at Scythe Dev Team. I love you. God love you. Stay.
[2:02:34] Music.
