Thomas Vestergaard & Oliver Cohen Chime make up Woodhound, the Danish game studio behind Desecrators - a 6 degrees-of-freedom shooter set in the distant future of 4096. Our conversation ranges through unconventional storytelling, player agency, co-op gameplay, the many games from the line of Interplay's Descent, the Danish indie game development scene, futurism in art, and what's next for their studio after the game's release.
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Books Mentioned
Chapters
00:00 Start
4:13 The Dichotomy of Good and Evil in Games
8:49 The Search for Forgotten Games
13:13 Multiplayer and Community Engagement
14:46 The Challenges of Procedural Generation
20:25 The Danish Gaming Scene
32:25 The Transition from Education to Industry
38:08 The Future of Game Development in Denmark
47:58 The Competitive Nature of Game Development
54:17 Roadmap for Future Development
1:00:59 The Advantages of Working with Established Engines
1:14:39 Inspirations and Sci-Fi Influences
1:25:10 Player Feedback and Feature Requests
1:46:22 The Boomer Shooter Renaissance
1:57:18 Ideas for Future Game Development
Transcript
Tyler:
[0:00] Modern means of communication, the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless, and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic and technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion, have opened up a new world of political processes.
Tyler:
[0:19] Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal and can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local, and sectional misunderstanding.
Tyler:
[0:41] This quote is from H.G. Wells in the New York Times, quoted by Edward Bernays in his 1928 Propaganda.
Music:
[0:49] Music
Oliver:
[0:59] The original idea also, at least on my side, grew out of the frustration with the fact that no one else was making these games at that time. And still, that's like one of two games since then, right? Since we started, that's four years ago, I think.
Thomas:
[1:14] It's less than one game per year on Steam.
Oliver:
[1:18] Yeah, it's depressing. So, I mean, I really wanted to play those games again. And so I think that was the spark, at least for me, to start on this idea.
Tyler:
[1:28] Yeah. And you had told me that you were born to make such a game, right? A spaceship style, whatever it is, as long as you're flying spaceships around in zero gravity, you're happy. But I kind of want to know, why is it? Yeah. Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:43] I really like, for some reason, any game about sci-fi vehicles. There's a fascination with that concept since I've been, yeah, I don't know, since I can't remember anything. So when I saw nobody was making these games and I was looking for a game to make, it seemed like it was my duty to make it, yeah.
Tyler:
[2:05] When was the first time we remember maybe drawing or designing a spaceship? Were you one of those kids that had the rockets with different chemical rockets in the backyard and whatnot? I don't know how legal that is in Denmark.
Oliver:
[2:21] No, rockets are legal all year round, but it came another way around, actually, because, of course, I drew spaceships when I was a child. Everybody drew spaceships, sure. But I think what really started it was my dad was working in software back then. He had a big computer at home and he would bring these disks he got from work, which were like disks filled with pirated games. I don't know where he got them from, because it was not like the popular titles, it was all these weird Eastern European games usually. So at a young age, I didn't actually play things like Doom or Quake or anything like that because they weren't on those discs and that's all I had. But they had all these weird Eastern European sci-fi titles, and most of those, they were like, it was some sort of aircraft, a tank, and there was really a bad story, but they had pretty good gameplay and atmosphere. I feel like Eastern European games are still kind of in that vein. Like they don't have the budget to really do the big narratives. They said to have all that atmosphere and interesting concepts. And I think just playing those games for years and years, that developed, you know, my taste for how games should be.
Oliver:
[3:37] So I always really wanted to make games like that. These weird games that are not the traditional narrative where you are some.
Tyler:
[3:46] If you look at the US,
Oliver:
[3:48] The US makes most of the games that are popular. You're usually some kind of person running around with a gun. If we're talking about action games and you're fighting something that's definitely evil, like demons or aliens invading, things like that. But these weird games I played, it was never that simple. It was always some strange concept and it wasn't really clear who was who or what you were fighting. But yeah, I liked it a lot.
Tyler:
[4:14] I think um what's what's really interesting about what you were saying is like the the kind of clear division between good guys and bad guys sort of like stems almost from like tolkien fantasy where you know it's very clear you know good guys bad guys and then you have that like actually leading into even the american west where you know if you watch like an old western movie or even like wrestling from you know way back you would have like the good guy always wears white boots and the black guy always wears black boots and like the it was just so spoon-fed to the audience that you're you're not really left to have any sort of nuance then later that that sort of changed with the kind of concept of the anti-hero and there are classic literary examples of that too but yeah in your game it's you don't i don't even think it really ever tells you if you're good or bad at all i mean it's just you're you this is what you're doing you're kind of plundering around for stuff and uh i mean in the description given in steam it kind of gives you some backstory which i also thought was a really cool kind of throwback to the way games used to give you story you just kind of find out iteratively while you play instead of it being cut scenes and you know you don't have like a star wars roller at the jump of the game that tells you this is the situation you just kind of figure it out make it up for yourself even to some degree until you get later in it's cool
Oliver:
[5:37] Yeah, I think that describes it well, that part about making it up a little bit as you go. It's not that we don't have... Of course, we have a picture in our head what's going on in the game, but I also like when games, they just expose you to the world, the mechanics, and if those things are well designed, they should actually just tell you the story. You should understand what's going on.
Tyler:
[5:58] Right.
Oliver:
[5:58] And you shouldn't need text or voiceovers and so on to really explain these things. Of course, if you want characters and a traditional linear narrative, you probably need that. But when we're talking about a procedural game that's really about the moment-to-moment gameplay and making that feel good, I don't think you... I mean, if we had a limited budget, we would do it. But with the resources we have, we just didn't think that was that important.
Tyler:
[6:26] It's such a... Almost, you know, in the terms of video games, like an ancient concept, having a spaceship that you know you kind of fly around you get little upgrades and you shoot around in multiple directions of course this is three-dimensional and that's been done for a long time but i mean going all the way back to games like asteroids other clones of the similar like on classic computers i personally like when i was a kid my grandma would sit me at the computer and put on asteroids and tell me you know just leave me alone and it was awesome and as you said there's no like it doesn't give you a story it's just like Does this mechanic capture you? Does it create an addictive game loop so that you're just having fun and progressing? Even things like Ski Free. Forget about spaceships. That was kind of the hallmark of a good video game. Pong doesn't have a story. Does the mechanics on the screen capture you? Play it. Do you like it? What were some of those games for you guys?
Oliver:
[7:22] Games that captured me. I mean, of course, Descent. You can tell from the game we made that captured me a lot, um, but I didn't, I've spent a lot of time in Descent, but I'm trying to remember some of these Eastern European games. The problem was back when I played them, I couldn't really read, especially not English. So it's really hard for me to remember what they were called.
Tyler:
[7:44] Gotcha. Yeah.
Oliver:
[7:48] Like, you know, the predecessor to Stalker, it's made by the same company, I believe. It's called, it has kind of a similar concept, except it takes place in the U.S. Or Mexico or something, and you're these soldiers moving into this area that's contaminated with something.
Tyler:
[8:04] Do you know what I'm talking about?
Oliver:
[8:06] It's not that popular.
Tyler:
[8:08] I'm trying to do a little Google food search on that. Let's see, Stalker, developer, let's see. I didn't even ever think about what they might have made before Stalker, which is a kind of a shitty thing to do as a journalist.
Oliver:
[8:22] Yeah, but it was a really clunky game, but it was, back then I didn't know there were games that weren't like this. I just remember that had a big, yeah, made a bit of an impression because it was kind of scary and realistic for the time. And it had this, yeah, concept with these aliens in the middle of the US, in this area.
Tyler:
[8:40] Any chance it's Heroes of Annihilated Empires?
Oliver:
[8:45] I'm afraid not. It's quite bad. I can't remember what it's called.
Tyler:
[8:50] American Conquest. Fightback. No, that's not it. That's like Revolutionary War Times. They've made a lot of games before Stalker, actually. What are they called? Somebody's getting angry at us in the show notes right now. Angry comments are getting tight. GSC World Publishing. So I'm looking at the wrong thing here. We want the developers.
Oliver:
[9:10] Odename Outbreak. That's the one.
Tyler:
[9:13] Odename Outbreak.
Oliver:
[9:14] Excellent yeah I think outside Eastern Europe it's pretty much I'm not sure was it even sold in stores I don't know I just got it on this disc and I thought it was pretty pretty cool I.
Tyler:
[9:28] Don't even see what you're talking about is not even listed on their Wikipedia page so like yeah it's a deep cut, man.
Oliver:
[9:34] Maybe they're embarrassed.
Tyler:
[9:37] It could be.
Thomas:
[9:40] One game that had a build that affected me, I think you have heard about it, Limbo. There's not a lot of direct speech or text on that, but it still tells the story very strongly.
Tyler:
[9:56] There was sort of a time period. How old are we all? I'm 29. 39 39 okay so i mean whatever roughly 10 15 years ago there was sort of this slew of really cool very story-driven solo dev games that are side-scrolling on you know built-in unity and they were coming out on say playstation for you know part of the past there was just so many of these limbo being one of them that i played uh uh fez another one that i remember like getting on the playstation pass that kind of stuff but just such a good slew of those types of games and story driven very very deep you know into the you know emergent story, nevertheless, because you're kind of, you're first introducing the mechanic and then you continue to learn as you go. But yeah, Limbo was such a good title. I'm really glad you brought that back to me. I might replay that now. There was, I think around the same time that I first played Binding of Isaac, I probably played Limbo shortly thereafter.
Thomas:
[11:00] Yeah, it's the same for me. I also played Binding of Isaac a lot.
Tyler:
[11:04] Yeah, man. See, it's not technically, I guess, roguelike, but you do have a lot of that sort of like tell your choose your own path as you as you go in desecrators you know your different different levels pop up and i i found out the hard way like after i die i'm like oh god okay gotta do that again but then i was like quickly like oh at least it's not exactly the same thing that's fun so what were the what was the inspiration for that mechanic oh just rather
Thomas:
[11:31] Than an inspiration it was more oliver his core focus was making a space game and mine was wanted to play around with procedurally generated maps. That was what I wanted to play around with when I came into this game. And space sounds like a lot of fun because you have freedom in more direction and can go crazy with it. And rather than, you know, let's say when we started,
Tyler:
[11:58] When we did some tests,
Thomas:
[12:00] That's where we played around with it. We didn't desecrate as far as our second concept. We also did something before where it didn't work out. And once we found something we liked to play ourselves, we started putting more and more time into it. And eventually, it became something that looked like it had a commercial potential.
Tyler:
[12:24] There was a little more consideration than that, because what we talked
Oliver:
[12:29] About was that we didn't just want to do Descent again in Unity, because that's kind of pointless.
Tyler:
[12:37] Maybe you could do that,
Oliver:
[12:38] But we really wanted to do something that maybe not evolved the genre, but did something a little bit different. So that's why we decided we wanted to do procedural, because that hadn't really been done in a good way before in 6.0. And also it's way more fun to work on a procedural game if you're going to spend five years playing the same thing. And that's also when we decided it had to have multiplayer because all of these other six stuff games, they're fun when you play them in co-op. But the co-op implementations have always been kind of crappy. So we wanted to do it where it was a part of the co-design.
Tyler:
[13:13] I think it's obligatory that I ask if there's going to be deathmatch, like two spaceships against each other in this game at any point.
Oliver:
[13:21] Yeah, people have been asking for that, and we do want to do it with the player base we've had. It just didn't feel like it would make much sense with all the other things we had to do as well. But I think it will be there after release, within a year, something like that, because we have all the pieces to do it. We just haven't made it a priority.
Tyler:
[13:44] No, that's really cool either way. I mean, personally, my actual advice would be like, don't worry about it. But then I know that there's going to be so many people that ask for it. And it's going to be really neat to see how that mechanic plays out. The co-op aspect over there, that's really cool. And as you said, it hasn't been done a whole lot, at least in this space. I need to actually, I haven't had the opportunity, obviously, playing the early copy. But whenever it's available to more people, or if I get more keys, I will definitely try to do it with some friends. Or maybe even you guys could invite me one day to try it out.
Oliver:
[14:23] Yeah, why not? That'd be great. That was kind of hell to implement the multiplayer. You can tell why something with this combination of features hasn't been done that many times before.
Tyler:
[14:37] Yeah.
Oliver:
[14:38] Because these self-hosted servers where everything is procedural, so each client has to generate the exact same copy of the world.
Oliver:
[14:47] Then you have hundreds of enemies doing stuff all the time you have to simulate it was yeah it was tough but i'm really happy that we did it i feel like the game could never really be that interesting if it didn't have this feature yeah.
Tyler:
[15:00] I also think that
Thomas:
[15:01] Even if we add player versus player co-op the co-op experience will stay the core of the game
Oliver:
[15:09] Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Tyler:
[15:12] It's just always a challenge, you know, because people, it's become sort of an expectation that multiplayer has to be there. One of the games that we're working on right now, Stellar Valkyrie, like it's been something that we promised from the very beginning was like, yeah, we're totally going to do multiplayer. And the problem is that the game is in the GZ Doom engine. So it's like technically hasn't been done before for a commercial release.
Tyler:
[15:34] And there's a reason for that. We've been testing it lately and it's like, yeah this is really coming along then there's like licensing issues and stuff that you're probably in this game your game is made in unity if i'm correct yeah yeah yeah way way safer at least in that regard license wise uh it's software if i have this recurring dream where i'm in texas in a suit and i'm standing in like a almost like an appeal to a a mass of senators or judges and I'm just explaining why id Software ought to license people old engines instead of just continually pushing their new thing on people, which is fine. I like all of their stuff. I don't think id Software has ever published anything that I hated. But the sheer number of people who are able to make games in old Doom and Quake engines and forks of them and stuff, legally, that's cool. But without Steam integration, without things like co-op and stuff like that, it's actually kind of a pain in the ass.
Tyler:
[16:34] Um descent was originally published by uh interplay studios i actually got a chance to work with those guys so they're sort of in a tie-around kind of way between interplay id software and me i got to work with them on uh kingpin reloaded when we were at uh 3d realms and slipgate and so like christopher taylor and uh rusty boucher were kind of the the producers on Interplay's side. They came from Fallout and Star Trek and all that stuff. Really, really seasoned, old-school game developers.
Tyler:
[17:08] And that sort of endured, but I got to actually pick Rusty's brain a lot about the development of Descent and everything.
Tyler:
[17:15] And it was kind of weighing on my mind. There hasn't been nothing like that. I think Sam knows I'm always looking for stuff like that, which is probably exactly why he pointed me to your game. He's like, hey, dude, I really think you'd like this. I'm like, yeah, that's awesome, man. The soundtrack is actually pretty cool, too. That was another thing that they did back in the day that you don't see as much lately, is these sort of collaborations with genuinely popular music artists. Descent had, I believe, the gentleman from Typo Negative doing a lot of the tracks and stuff. Really cool.
Oliver:
[17:48] Yeah, it still sounds really good, the soundtrack. You can tell it's from an actual band and not just made for... Of course, game composers can make great stuff as well, but to me, it just has time to sound even though I didn't even have the soundtrack when I played it.
Tyler:
[18:04] Yeah, man.
Oliver:
[18:05] Cool.
Tyler:
[18:07] You want to talk about... I just want to say,
Oliver:
[18:09] Interplay's still around. I'm surprised to hear that. What do they do nowadays?
Tyler:
[18:15] At one point, and this is years and years ago, so well before I got in any way in touch with them, I believe that they sort of sold the company to a gentleman named Hervé, and then sort of the mission slowly became to, all right, let's look at what IP we retain, which is quite a lot, actually. They have a lot of IP. Kind of alright let's see what we can you know revisit remaster generate some income I mean far be it for me to know what goes on in the background there so you have you have basically a couple of producers if I understand correctly that are just sort of overseeing those projects as they get there and then Kingpin Reloaded was not the biggest success by any stretch of the imagination but let me do a little digging here they have they obviously sold fallout a long time ago to bethesda um i feel like a chump because i'm not pulling up their website very quickly i will cut out the long pause so we don't sound awkward yeah yeah earthworm gem that was brought back to and then obviously balder's gate is a big deal right now they had worked on that so i feel like they're probably getting a lot of sales on their older titles because of the IPs that they worked on before that are still popular.
Tyler:
[19:40] And then if we were to look more recently, I would say... You guys are very patient. Very Danish. I like that. Satrix Entertainment, I believe, just is defunct. I don't know of anything that they've done recently at all. But yeah, they're making a lot of money off the back catalog at Interplay. Just a quick search on Steam all the Baldur's Gate stuff is selling like hotcakes because of the new game then you have Is it interplayed?
Thomas:
[20:12] Do they have it directly or do they have a studio dedicated to the remasters and sending a full titles like Atari and Night Knife? As far as I know it, they're outsourcing stuff.
Tyler:
[20:26] They're basically, like I said with Kingpin they just licensed it to slip gate in 3d realms and they were like yeah you guys make it you know we'll manage the publishing into things and see where it goes there's only like according to their website only four people currently even employed there you know there's a ceo business affairs head of gaming and and then like film tv dev and that's interesting too because i haven't heard them announce anything about film tv but i wonder if they're thinking about making like earthworm gym you know cartoon children cartoons that kind of stuff because they have a whole animation division apparently so maybe that's where the money's going but it's interesting and it's cool to see a lot of these older companies that are getting revived if they're bought by you know someone who's a fan of the original stuff 3dr was an example of that um coming from you know the its original apogee days and then after duke it was purchased by you know fred schreiber and uh who was it mike mike nielsen a couple of great wonderful dane danish investors that took it and did what they did with it all that kind of stuff but they're out of all you guys ever spend any time over there a little
Thomas:
[21:39] Bit I've spent mostly for vacation or you know
Tyler:
[21:43] Oh yeah I spent a lot I mean I lived in all born but I spent a lot of time in our house and Rondos like that kind of area not just all over Jotlin beautiful runners yeah it you know it gets a bad rap but it's actually a beautiful nice little town that people people shit all over on us and it's it's gorgeous like the canal going through the city and everyone's nice and sure they're drunk but they're not hurting anybody but compared to america if that's the roughest city you got bring it on you know what i'm saying yeah
Oliver:
[22:15] Yeah i'm just kidding around actually because my family's from honor so i've been there many times it's yeah it's not bad actually no.
Tyler:
[22:22] It's one of the best places to go fishing too i had i had a lot of really a lot of fun runners in just surrounding areas it's there's a a full uh what do you call replica of elvis presley's graceland in randas denmark for what for whatever fucking reason what a strange place then you have the the the rainforest zoo kind of place i mean and then and if you i was getting on the train in albor to go south and someone says oh don't go there it is a rough place i'm like what do you mean rough
Oliver:
[23:02] I don't know how it got that reputation, actually. I didn't know about it until, I don't know, five years ago, and I've been there so many times. It doesn't seem rough at all to me.
Tyler:
[23:12] No, no. It's just this stereotype. There's a Mokai. Everybody calls Mokai Ranners Kool-Aid or whatever it is. It's hilarious.
Oliver:
[23:23] Nothing wrong with Mokai.
Tyler:
[23:25] I got involved with Body Slam Wrestling, which is you know kind of the premier danish pro wrestling uh company and i went all over the country with them and there's a tag team called randas panya which you know i that's the word is like champagne render champagne or whatever but it's just these two guys that you know they come out doing like tiktok dancing and like all kinds of stuff and then the first thing they do before they wrestle is they bust open a couple of bottles of mokai and just smother their faces in it swallow it all down and then throw it out into the crowd and go crazy it's really fun really fun guys uh yeah it's it's a cool it's a cool country man you guys have a lot of great culture and i would say more than anything denmark's design culture is incredible like the education system centered around designing things to be the country in the world that is if if known for nothing else known for legos and making really comfy chairs speaks a lot about who you are as a people and i love that you know if like by god if i'm gonna if i'm gonna sit in a chair all day it's gonna be the best chair in the world awesome love that well
Thomas:
[24:41] The chair being comfy is a bit of a new thing earlier it was very pretty but very uncomfortable chairs that was the Danish design.
Tyler:
[24:49] Like the, there's all these famous pictures of, you know, world leaders sitting in Danish chairs. But is the idea that it's uncomfortable so that they'll get up off their ass and work?
Thomas:
[25:01] Oh, I'm thinking if some of the designs that are 50 years old are Beyond the chairs, also the textile stuff, whatever you grab around it is also part of it to make them comfy. But since you're from Olbo, are you above or below the fjord? Because I know there's locally some battles about which are the right place to be from.
Tyler:
[25:27] New Zambi is across the fjord there. Honestly, that's kind of like the cheaper spot to live. I lived sort of like south of there along the main highway. So I was much more central in town. How did you
Oliver:
[25:44] End up going to Albo to work for 3D Realms, as I understand it?
Tyler:
[25:49] Yeah, yeah. I took a job there for a couple of years after I got out of the
Tyler:
[25:54] military as a producer and then later as a marketer. I was really good friends with Fred Schreiber. and he kind of like took me under his wing for a while, let me learn the games industry in and out with them and then I came back to America last year.
Thomas:
[26:11] You were in the American military where you were drafted or how did you go get to the military?
Tyler:
[26:17] Oh, I guess I'm the one being interviewed now. It's okay. I enlisted in the Air Force when I was 20 years old just because I really needed a good job and it was better than going to college you know in america you can kind of go into debt going to college and otherwise i was you know not really making a lot of money as an electrician so i decided you know i'll just go do the military for a while and then you get a lot of benefits from it you get paid fairly decently um there's a lot of upward mobility and that was kind of my i don't know it was just kind of my way of getting out of alabama and into the world so to speak to get to travel to get to learn a lot of new skills and while i was in the service is when i started in the keep as just a podcast and then and
Tyler:
[27:08] Do you guys remember the realms deep showcase yeah so i was sort of the one of the main planners and coordinators of that and i was actually you know in in a lot of the the forward facing stuff where like i was getting beat up by the running with scissors people or whatever just kind of the jokey stuff in that showcase too um oh yeah and because i was help so helpful with that with my studio and we showed it off a couple of our games too yeah that's kind of what what got me on the radar to you know maybe go go take a job and actually move to denmark so i had uh i had actually flown over there for a week to shoot all the all the stuff for realms deep 2021 so i spent that you know a week that summer and uh in albor and then a couple of years later i just moved there it just made sense to me fun adventure too so
Thomas:
[28:00] Cool yeah i really like the the show because it didn't just uh show the you know the trailers
Tyler:
[28:08] I
Thomas:
[28:09] Broke up the sections very nicely with the events and stunts you did you know it flowed really very well
Tyler:
[28:15] Yeah man it it's a shame that it you know it is where it is now i'm kind of hoping to you know be able to get something like that again you know a good summer summer showcase for indies that's not just so many so many of these events are just trailers you know it's just game trailer after game trailer after game trailer and i always wanted it to be as you said you know a variety like something that was actually fun to watch and that was really inspired by devolver digital with their e3 showcases that they used to do i always thought that was really epic like yeah this is like like a little movie you know and then the games are sort of planted in there and people aren't just watching to see what the next game they're going to release is. It's like, oh, this is a fun thing. I wish more stuff like that existed and I'm hoping that over time it does.
Oliver:
[29:03] Were you the guy that rejected Desecratus from the Home Steep Show case?
Tyler:
[29:09] Probably not. I could probably tell you exactly what the name is but I'm not going to because that would be mean. but it was what year was it that you entered it in 23 and
Thomas:
[29:21] You entered both 23 and 24 but for 24 i think there's a very good reason it didn't yeah didn't appear
Tyler:
[29:30] Um i mean to be completely honest with you about it it's it's largely because after they sold the company to saber and and then all the stuff that was going on with embracer group it was just like this kind of constant fight between the corporate side of things, what's best for business versus the spirit of Robles Deep, which was all about hey, we're going to show all our own stuff too in some of these bigger games, but this is about giving back to the indie community. Because the truth, from my perspective, it's like By doing this for indies, not only do we have a space for our own stuff, which is sort of in that realm too, but also we're going to have the first look at so many games that might be good to publish, you know what I mean? There were so many games that were completely 100% indie, show off in Realms Deep, and they get a publishing deal, whether that be from us or from, I don't know, at the time, Fulcrum was picking up a lot of games. Early on there was Apogee as well New Blood Interactive Night Dive Studios there were just so many great smaller publishers that were involved in that that were totally scouting what's the next thing I'm going to publish based on this crowd of people I apologize that Desecrators didn't make it in I kind of wish it had but then again maybe it wasn't meant to be because the show didn't even happen last year
Oliver:
[30:52] We just didn't make good enough game.
Tyler:
[30:54] No no there is a there's a lot of really cool you know just indie game space in general going around um in all bore and and then across denmark there's a gentleman that i worked with named uh brian nielsen who was the head of all caps and then i believe he's now involved in the government so to speak you know promoting games around the country like kind of handling government subsidies that go into indie games and stuff you have all these conferences that pop up amongst the universities there would be like almost monthly game jams at all board university and so many great students coming out of just like media graphics in in general you know they're they're really really geared up to work in you know such an industry or advertising or things that are adjacent to the games industry too um what was your guest experience with you know school And how did that transfer into a career in video games?
Thomas:
[31:51] I guess I can go first. I got an education as a software engineer and started working right after university at some enterprise software, so it's a completely different direction. But, you know, during university, I did some consulting work for some various games and then slowly got a taste for actually working with games. And I don't know, eventually I met Oliver and a common friend said we should make a game together. So we tried it out.
Tyler:
[32:25] Yeah.
Oliver:
[32:27] No, sorry. Keep going.
Thomas:
[32:29] I was just saying that's my story.
Oliver:
[32:31] Okay. How do I start? Maybe actually, Tata, you know this place. I was in Grano studying at Game IT, the division over there.
Tyler:
[32:44] Yeah.
Oliver:
[32:46] At that time, when I started that, I had done some modding for games and did levels and so on. I never did any coding. And then I started doing the course over there, which is this free game development course. That's also at the same time a normal gymnasium high school education. And we were doing these game projects in certain classes. And I was always very frustrated because I was very driven and I made lots of concert art and models and all of this, but the guys in my groups, they were not as motivated, especially the guys who were coding. That really drove me crazy because it doesn't matter how much art you make if nobody's implementing the game. So at some point, I just realized I have to start coding and.
Tyler:
[33:36] I was never really
Oliver:
[33:37] Interested in coding. I was never good at math. I just thought I had to do it.
Tyler:
[33:41] Right.
Oliver:
[33:43] Yeah. But then luckily, once I started doing it, it was actually pretty great because then you have to feedback loop of you put in some code and then your game does something different, and suddenly it's actually really fun to code. Pivoted completely from doing art to then just programming, because that's how you can actually create the product and you're not dependent on others for implementing your vision. And then after that, after I finished that three year course, I did various things, but I ended up doing software development as my day job because I got good at coding. And at the same time, it's really difficult in Denmark, especially Copenhagen, to really work in games. Like you can't just go out in the street and get a job at an indie company. They're like in the community area there are maybe one or two companies I would consider interesting for this kind of game. So it was always in the cards that I had to make the game myself or the startup of someone else. And that's, yeah. Then I met Thomas and I had this idea and we just went for it.
Tyler:
[34:47] Yeah, I think that's the way is to just find someone else that you have complimentary styles with and sort of, you know, start your own company. Fuck all this trying to get a job somewhere, especially in the landscape of the industry over the last several years. It's really undependable to depend on subcorporation to kind of fund and back everything because eventually they're going to want their money back.
Tyler:
[35:09] And then, you know, being beholden to timelines and stuff. I mean, working with a publisher is a lot, you know, that aspect still exists, but it's not the same as, you know, working for a corporation where someone, you know, they don't even know your name, so to speak.
Oliver:
[35:25] Oh, and to be honest, if you have to go inside a meeting with a straight face and tell some investor you're going to make a sick stuff procedural game and it's going to make them loads of money, I could never sell that because of course I believe in our game and it's for our standards it's doing well, but I wouldn't say it's a good investment opportunity for someone who's not personally invested in this kind of project.
Tyler:
[35:50] It's a tough sell with any titles because you really don't know. And you have to find somebody who's really willing to take a risk on that and say, hey, I believe in this. We're sticking with you through hell or high water. No matter how it goes, we're going to have you back because we believe in it. I think that's just kind of the nature of the beast. I've had my own struggles with it. Even working in publishing for a significant company, I was like, it's still hard to find people who believe in stuff. And it's, it's hard to even, you know, from the other perspective to believe in, like, is this, you know, I can find myself blinded by like, I really like this game. I really think this is cool. And then kind of do the numbers and like, it's probably not likely to make money. Um, but it can't all be about, it can't all just be about dollars and cents, I guess. That's the hard part.
Thomas:
[36:41] I mean, if it was, then I would probably still be in the business type of software. Yeah, the value proposition was like, either you can pay us to fix your system or in 18 months break the law. What do you choose? That's a bit stronger in terms of value.
Tyler:
[37:02] What's the dev cycle been? You said you've been working on desecrators for five years now?
Thomas:
[37:08] Yeah, I think. At the start, we started by meeting up one day per month. So, and then I don't know after how long we started doing it more once per week and slowly did it more and more. So we got more and more invested in it. The company actually happened because of the co-op, the multiplayer. Yet this working, we are both behind something called a carrier-grade net that blocks it so neither of us can host in the peer-to-peer. So Steam was like... If we use Steam, we didn't have to worry about firewall punching and all the other technical details. It did it for us. And once we had to do business with an American company, or just a general company, it's a good idea to have your own limited liability company, simply just for protection. That's the main reason why we made a company at the start.
Tyler:
[38:08] Yeah, Denmark has a really great track record for indie startups becoming really successful. You have Tunnel Vision games. I know Philip Newman, when they did Lightmiter, that was a pretty big success. Then, of course, there are the sort of legendary things like IO Entertainment. I remember playing, was it Hitman Blood Money? was one of the best freaking games I ever played. So I think you have a lot of support, I think, to start companies. If you want to start a company, you can get a lot of government grants and stuff to kind of back you through the early phases of doing it.
Thomas:
[38:50] Yes, that is true. We didn't do that.
Tyler:
[38:53] Really?
Thomas:
[38:54] No, because, well, we noticed, but it was two months too late after the deadline once we started looking into it.
Tyler:
[39:02] Gotcha.
Thomas:
[39:03] Well, that's mainly because we started, you know, when you only work once per month, time passes quickly.
Tyler:
[39:11] Right.
Thomas:
[39:13] But yeah, actually, so they have these general funds for companies, for startups, that are quite well. And then, until recently, they didn't really have that much for games. If you have wanted to it was the movie funds
Tyler:
[39:31] You know film
Thomas:
[39:32] Production games were pushed under that
Tyler:
[39:37] Obligatory. Mads Mikkelsen has to be in your movie for it to make money, right? Yes. You should get him in the game. That would be fucking epic. It would.
Thomas:
[39:49] But I guess they looked at Sweden and was like, hmm, maybe we also
Tyler:
[39:54] Want a big
Thomas:
[39:55] Industry here, earning money. So just recently, a dedicated gaming institute was formed and have their own dedicated funding pool.
Tyler:
[40:06] Seems to be happening actually quite a lot across europe right now i believe that there there's going to be a new school i think in copenhagen that they're opening up but they just opened one up in bradoslaw where it's just completely centered around uh game development and ai and they're just taking students basically out of gymnasium straight into you know college level courses for working on that and it makes sense because i mean as a nation as a as a continent we you would want to be ahead of the curve in those places. It's really interesting that you're doing this completely independently. I feel like there's got to be paths other than that. Working with Perks, how has that been for you?
Oliver:
[40:52] I would like to add some, before I answer that, at least from my perspective, some context. And that is, I've felt for a long time, until the past year or so, that we didn't really need funding that much. It was more a question of time, because.
Tyler:
[41:09] It's really like
Oliver:
[41:10] The limiting resource. Even if we had a lot of money, it's not clear what we would do with it, because you need a lot of funding to hire people. And if you're hiring people, you're paying salaries. And if you're paying salaries, you have completely different expectations for sales. And once you have that, you will have complete different expectations for the product.
Tyler:
[41:30] I thought for what we were making,
Oliver:
[41:32] We didn't really want to.
Thomas:
[41:33] Change it radically
Oliver:
[41:34] Just because so we could hire people. It was always clear to me that this game would have to grow slowly over time. And then once.
Tyler:
[41:41] The concept is mature,
Oliver:
[41:44] Once we have explored the space, maybe you can make it bigger and sell it to a lot of people. But if we start now going big, I think we just lose the vision and make something else.
Tyler:
[41:54] I actually think that's really clever. I think that's the right way to start a company like personally i actually just did a whole podcast talking about basically that where it just makes more sense to accept that you're going to have to start small and grow slowly over the course of several years than it is to uh you know take a bunch of loans and investments and then try to scale with that and then give yourself the risk of just going bankrupt and not even getting out you know the game that you meant to do um in a large part that is what happens to i would argue most startup companies in the especially in the indie game space where it's like you you have that brief maybe two-year period of getting a lot of money from your investors and then you know then they want their return when they start auditing and everything they start you know looking at the numbers they're like hey we're not making money back yet and then they pull your funds and now your company's defunct and all of your employees are unemployed and now you have a pr problem and uh and then you have promises that you've made to your customers you know you have games that you've said are going to come out and then they're actually not going to come out because you bet on the investor and the investor didn't bet on you
Tyler:
[43:02] Um unfortunately that's a it's a sad truth that i think a lot of people have to learn the hard way but i 100 back you know what you're saying is the correct way and ultimately your game is you know right around the corner from coming out more or less exactly how you like it so even if it doesn't make a shitload of money you did successfully do it and you didn't go bankrupt doing it and you're not going to have a bunch of angry employees, so. No.
Oliver:
[43:27] And we also, at least for me, it's more important than the money that we have. We have players who've been playing the games for years, giving us feedback. We changed the game a lot based on what these people are saying. And it's really, for me, way more important to watch these people enjoy the game and make the game better for their sake, listen to the feedback. Like, even though we're making a retro game and we want it in some fashion to be true to the classics, I also think it's really interesting to take the feedback and then try to evolve the concepts a bit because those games were not perfect, not at all.
Oliver:
[44:02] And I find it just really fun to, in a way, work with your fans to just make it better. That's really what drives me. And if you make money doing that, that's great, but that's not the point.
Tyler:
[44:16] I, again, just to reiterate, I do think that is the correct way to do it. You will, in the long run, you will have a game that represents your company very well. Whether or not it makes money is actually kind of irrelevant when you're talking about, you know, what's the next project. The question will be from the funders, you know, what have you done that's come out? You know, have you shipped a game before is usually the number one question. You guys make any games before this? I think you sent me a link to one spaceship game. Was it as a studio or just individual or?
Oliver:
[44:46] Yeah, that was the Pylon. That's the game. That was my first game, and that was a really big risk, you could say, because I hadn't made a game before that, and then I just dedicated three years of my life to making that game. And I mean, you learn so much, and it was so fucking difficult, but I'm very happy that I did it, and I think all things considered, it turned out way better than it should, considering before that I'd only made prototypes in Unity, and there's so many things with, when you have to do all the sound, the graphics, the coding all of this yourself, it's just you learn so much, it was it was an interesting experience, I'm very happy I did it, but it also was all I did for three years, right? And I ate like baked beans and eggs for three and a half years because I had no money Yo.
Tyler:
[45:40] My god I know that I know that struggle.
Oliver:
[45:44] Yes, sir. Yeah.
Tyler:
[45:46] What was the beer budget? Did you have just water out of the tap?
Oliver:
[45:52] Oh, I did save some money for beers because if you've ever been to Copenhagen, they have a lot of good beer bars. So I had to take that seriously.
Tyler:
[45:59] And yeah, not only is it an abundant, but it's like cheaper than water in most restaurants.
Oliver:
[46:08] Yeah, yeah.
Tyler:
[46:08] It's pretty good.
Oliver:
[46:11] It saves the game, you could say.
Tyler:
[46:14] Hey, whatever gets the sausage made, we need to look inside of the mechanics of how that happens, I say.
Oliver:
[46:21] No, no, but also it kind of transitioned into Desecraters because those games have a lot of similarities and a lot of the design and systems I built in Pyre and they're kind of carried over and evolved because if you look outside and you look at Pyre and you see a game with some spaceships and you think that's pretty simple. It's just some spaceships using lasers. But you also work with games, and you know when you're actually making them, there are so many systems and details, there are so many ways to do these things.
Tyler:
[46:51] And at the start,
Oliver:
[46:52] You do everything wrong and your game just feels like shit. And then you iterate, you iterate, you iterate, you turn all these knobs again and again, again, and then at some point the game comes together and it actually feels good. And it's so good starting Densecrators from the point where I've seen the whole machine work and know how it kind of feels. Because if you're starting from the bottom, you have to build the technology, the design. You have to develop your taste to know how the game should feel. And if you have to do all of that at the same time, it's just really difficult to make a game that's... Unless you're copying an existing game, then it becomes difficult to make something that actually is good.
Tyler:
[47:29] Do you have a community of other game devs around that you hang out with and talk to and bounce ideas off of, or are you guys more or less in a vacuum?
Thomas:
[47:41] I guess you can say we hired a consultant to look over our systems a couple of times and break down the vacuum beyond what we get from the Steam community.
Thomas:
[47:57] That answers your question?
Tyler:
[47:58] I mean, that is the answer to the question. I find it interesting. People have different ways of approaching this. Me personally, I like a hybrid where I like to have my own space where when we're developing, it's totally just private where we're focused in on what we're doing and not sharing every idea that we have with other people. Not from the sake of secrecy, like where it's like, I don't want anybody to steal our ideas. That's not really the motivation, but just more like to focus. But i do like to just have a broad you know view of what other people in similar spaces are doing
Tyler:
[48:36] Because when you do share ideas it may not even be that you take exactly what their idea was or that they take what your idea was but you're sort of maybe it's the american in me but you know breeding competition you know what i mean like it's it makes you it forces you to want to step it up and you know oh well we were going to do this but then they did that and that now i just need to make something that's better just to one up it that kind of thing um and also just in general like pulling up marketing resources you know like if you got a lot of friends who are also game devs you you know you're all reaching your own individual audiences and then you have the opportunity to kind of like cross-pollinate be like hey if you like this my friend's making that and you'll probably like that too i don't think it's necessarily a competition for customers so to speak i'm reading this really interesting book right now by a guy named edward bernays who is actually sigmund freud's i think nephew but the book is called propaganda and it's like this kind of view into the late 20s you know late 1920s of america so 100 years ago of american marketing and you know just the the evolution of propaganda through you know the first world war leading into the second world war and then kind of
Tyler:
[49:51] Understanding how PR would handle all these different situations when it comes to reaching new groups of people. But then you're not just marketing to... Say you're selling a video game. You're not necessarily just talking to people about video games. You're talking to people who are in adjacent industries. So if you have a friend who makes movies, or you have a friend who makes cartoons or writes books, or is in the t-shirt industry. There are ways in which all of you stand to you know help each other out but you're also you could make the argument that you're sort of competing for people's attention so it's not just necessary uh it's not necessarily just play my game not that game it's like play my game instead of going to the movies tonight you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah i'm trying to think in those terms more and more lately but a propaganda is kind of a dirty word i don't i don't think that he meant it in the in the way that we think of it now at the time, but still a cool, cool book. Anybody out there who's interested in like PR marketing, I actually highly recommend it. Let's see.
Oliver:
[51:00] I just want to comment because from that perspective, I don't really talk that much for other developers, but I do look a lot at other games and how they solve the problems we have and I'm like naturally competitive. So anytime I see another product, I think I need to beat that. But we need to do it better.
Tyler:
[51:20] Yeah.
Oliver:
[51:21] And the second part is anytime somebody plays our game on a stream or YouTube or anything, I will watch whatever they upload. I'll watch it five times looking for like exactly the moments where something in the game doesn't flow right or where they don't know what to do or things like that. And that's like, that also brings the competitive feeling out of me. Like the game should really be better than that. That's unacceptable. You're letting down your customer.
Tyler:
[51:46] Yeah. the only thing critical i had to say i think in my in my notes about desecrators was just that it is fucking really depressing when you get pretty far along and then you die and uh i would say that the first time that i like had an actual you know like lose all my lives moment and had to start again i didn't really know what it was that killed me and that kind of hurt but otherwise very very cool game.
Oliver:
[52:14] Yeah, that's fair. We always have wanted to do like some kind of meta progression. So when you die, it's not the worst thing ever. But it's just been really difficult to come up with something that integrates with the rest of the game. Right. Like, you know, many games, they do undogs or upgrades, something that persists between each time, each playthrough. Right. We've just... The way the game works, it has kind of this sandbox feel where you have a lot of tools to feed very difficult enemies. And it's like if you take some of those tools away just to lock them away and give them.
Tyler:
[52:52] To the player later when they progress,
Oliver:
[52:55] It just feels like the game becomes boring. You're making the game worse just to make it better. And I know in some way that is what progression is when you unlock things, but it never felt right to me in Desecratus. Yeah, but I know what you, I know the feeling you're describing. We just don't have the angle yet, I feel.
Tyler:
[53:17] How much longer do we have until release? You have, I think, yeah, I was about to say that.
Thomas:
[53:23] I think actually we just announced the release date. Yes. So next week, Friday, the 28th of February, that's when we will release.
Oliver:
[53:38] Perfect.
Tyler:
[53:38] So I'll put this out on Tuesday so that it's like right before the launch. Yeah, that'll be great. Yes. That's really, really cool. Actually, I guess you're going to plan on doing like periodic updates to the game after you get player feedback and everything. It's not early access.
Thomas:
[53:57] Yes, we actually plan to do something atypical. We will release a roadmap not during early access, but afterwards.
Tyler:
[54:04] Okay. That's cool.
Thomas:
[54:06] And I guess we have plans for like one to two years for work after, probably more two years after release. So we're not done with the game yet.
Tyler:
[54:18] Understood. Game does terribly terribly bad
Oliver:
[54:23] Then yeah at least a year probably two years more the.
Tyler:
[54:29] Good news is once it's out
Thomas:
[54:30] You know whether it
Tyler:
[54:31] Does good or bad the in fact if it does bad that they'll just be incentivized to like well we want to get a return on it so you'll have plenty of time to work on getting that return no matter what yeah
Oliver:
[54:42] And actually also if it really is if we get a lot negative feedback you can just look at it as you have a lot of they're giving you a lot of advice on what to work on that's also not that bad.
Tyler:
[54:52] Right
Oliver:
[54:53] But but i have a good feeling about the game like it's it's a week away but this release feels much better than the release for pyre which was just crunch for weeks.
Tyler:
[55:02] Yeah how did you go about structuring your sort of like development roadmap i mean it's just the two of you right so it's not that it's not that much management i assume You can kind of communicate pretty clearly amongst yourselves, but just making sure you didn't end up in a situation like that.
Oliver:
[55:20] In terms of this... Yeah, go ahead, Thomas.
Thomas:
[55:23] Yeah, we didn't really have a roadmap like that. We have some different, you know, ideas we wanted to play around with, try out. And sometimes we scrapped it or waited with it in terms of others. So in terms of direct roadmap, we didn't really have a normal one. We just... In a way that felt like we progressed forward and tested some ideas out. And then I think it was only really after we signed with Perp that we had to give a date that we
Tyler:
[55:55] Had to think a little
Thomas:
[55:55] More clearly about what we wanted in the release.
Tyler:
[56:01] I think that's pretty common with indie games. When you do take a publishing deal, you have to stop. It's so freeing to be able to just be like, yeah we'll just kind of go at our own pace and then you know they do want a milestone plan of some kind or whatever um so you gotta you gotta make those concessions but it's not that bad i i find you know in hindsight having done the you know just well we'll just figure it out as we go indie thing can be fun until you get you know until you get to release date and then you find yourself constantly crunching it's like oh my gosh like we if we had just planned if we had planning and that's also probably from like just project management experience in general across multiple different games like yeah it's it pays off in the long run to have a plan i would
Thomas:
[56:51] Say i think it was not that as important for us because i mean it is it was a decided in early access since i think three years ago and about every two to three weeks i think we released an update. And since we kept updating and having a build that was working most of the updates, I think 99% of the updates were working, it really wasn't that risky to say, okay, worst case happen, we take an already existing working update and call it version 1. So having a solid backup reduced the pressure.
Oliver:
[57:30] Tyler, I saw that on your in the keep page you have two games in development Yep. So you are, as I understood it, you are some kind of producer there. Who's developing those games? Do you have, like, your own studio, or how does that work?
Tyler:
[57:48] Yeah, and The Keep itself is its own studio. So Stellar Valkyrie is in-house. Like, it's me as the project manager and the writer of the game. And then we have several other people, like, you know, my whole team of arts and artists, We have, I think, three artists on Stellar Valkyrie, two programmers, you know, 3D modeler, the whole shebang. And then Call of Seregnar is more, my good friend Damian is the sort of like lead designer, artist, and programmer on that. And we're just supporting him as we go. And as, you know, on the business end, I'm trying to help him get a, you know, either a publishing deal or like help fund the game. So in Valkyrie, whatever it was,
Oliver:
[58:40] Stella Valkyrie, you're doing that in G-Set Doom, right?
Tyler:
[58:44] Yes, sir.
Oliver:
[58:45] How is it to work with, yeah, it's not the original Doom engine, but an engine like that compared to Unity? Is it like, of course, it's completely different technology, but like the rate of development, how does that compare?
Tyler:
[59:02] Well, the good side of it, and I'll start with the good side of it, is that you have so many people who have been working as a hobby in the Doom engine for, you know, as much as 30 years. So there's quite a lot of, you know, knowledge in terms of like, this is how this works. And you have people who have been making levels for a very, very long time, know every in and out of the engine, you know, down to the core, what they want to change. But there's also like limitations of it. Like I said earlier, There's no Steam integration, unless you have a wrapper that you create or a launcher of some kind that puts a layer between it and Steam, just due to licensing stuff with the edtech engines and whatnot. There's actually been quite a few games over the last several years that have come out in GZ Doom because it used to be you had to have a Doom iWOD to run it. And then I'd say it was about four or five years ago, maybe at this point,
Tyler:
[1:00:07] They finally came out with a version that did not require you to have the Doom.WOD to run it. So with that, you started to see a lot of commercial games in GZ Doom. Some of the bigger ones being like Heaton. Recently there was Sulaco was actually quite a big success. Multiplayer can be pretty complicated in it as well, but. Main thing that pisses me off from a production standpoint is that you have to design your levels with textures. You can't just block out a level and then go back and texture it later. You kind of have to have textures as you go. So that's a huge pain in the ass. There's also some limitations in terms of room over room. You have to be really slick with your teleporter placement and stuff to make the illusion that there's room over room even though it's not really there.
Tyler:
[1:01:00] Uh yeah yeah just i guess the the concise answer to the question is like i probably won't do it again yeah i'll in the in the future we'll probably just use uh you know unity or something else for for pretty much everything but at the time that we started this project it made sense just because it was like you know it's a good time to capitalize on this engine not a lot of people are doing it and then i think that we got really ambitious with it whereas you know a lot of other people went ahead and just, you know, released stuff like, hey, I can just pump out a bunch of like really simple shooters in the Doom engine and make my money back, you know, really, really quickly.
Oliver:
[1:01:38] Um, I just imagine that, um, one big advantage of having an engine like this is that like the feel of the game is good from the start, I would imagine. And by that, I mean, like the movement, the physics, how enemies move around, all this stuff is like proven to be good because it's used in Doom and so on. But if you start with Unity, you just have bolts and rigid button physics and all that. It feels terrible if you're making FPS, right? So you have to implement all that stuff yourself. But if you're starting with DZ Doom, you have like, what could say, not a template, but you have the game feel from the start. You just have to fill it with assets. Oh, is that it? Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:02:22] That's 100% true. you start kind of with like if you if you already like doom's physics this is probably going to work out for you and even if you want to tweak them and change them it's like you have the parameters there and like i said earlier the the experience of people who know how to do that is vast you know there's lots of them so that was honestly my original idea when we started development on this game was like i'm just going to grab like an artist that i really like you know who works in the Doom Engine and a guy who does levels encoding in the Doom Engine and put them together and I'll write a script and we'll all work together until it's done. It evolved a lot since then, but yeah, you're 100% right. That is one of the big selling points. It's predefined and all of the settings that you could ever want have been done by the modding community at some point.
Oliver:
[1:03:16] I developed the opposite of that when I developed Pyon, because I don't know if you've seen the game, but it's this top-down vehicle shooter.
Tyler:
[1:03:25] I did look at your Steam page and footage of it, but I haven't actually played it.
Oliver:
[1:03:29] Yeah, and okay, but it's kind of, it's a top-down shooter, and in that sense, it's not that experimental, but the actual thing you control is like a physically simulated ship, so it has like velocity and angular momentum and the stuff, but you're still controlling it with your keyboard and mouse, So it's very different from most of these top-down shooters. And I just feel like the moment you start just changing something fundamental like that, you have a different control physics scheme, and you have no reference because no other game is doing this, then suddenly you're just like in the middle of nowhere design-wise. You don't know if this can ever feel good. And you just have to try out so, so many different like physics values and control types and all of this, and then hope it will feel good at some point. But then if you're starting with something like GZDoom, I imagine it's just the exact opposite. That's just you open the engine and from the start, you have all of this. You just have nice controls.
Oliver:
[1:04:27] And then in Desecraters, it was also, I think, I spent a month or something every night just coding the physics for the ship controls. Because when you have a game like this, and again, you're controlling a ship, you're doing that all the time. It has to feel good. so the way it moves or the way it collides when it hits something like okay it collides but what does it do? Does it stop? Does it slide? Does it bounce off? All of this you have to figure out and that just took so long to get right yeah
Oliver:
[1:04:58] but I feel like we actually did it quite well. I was just thinking maybe the next game I should use an actual engine so I don't have to do this again.
Tyler:
[1:05:06] Yeah I mean well there's also going to be even in Unity just like people who have made projects or or you know they've made other games like that you know they have similar physics that you may just grab you know grab the project and and work from there um as opposed to just you know opening up unity and just going you know from scratch you know to your destination it's it is interesting your point totally stands there like having to come up with every little thing individually on its own is is tough especially if you're limited on time and resources He says,
Tyler:
[1:05:44] So I guess that's the benefit of just having a big community of games, you know, to other developers who are doing similar things to pull from. Like, how did you do this? there were a lot of uh like when when we first started seeing like the sort of indie boomer shooter thing pop off i would say dusk being probably the biggest one to start uh there were just so many games in in unity that struggled with uh trying to kind of replicate the the quake and and doom physics you know in the in the oh duke nukem sort of like movement and shooting style and everything you had to you had to be clever about making sure that was implemented because the default unity you know just if you just use what they have from the jump for shooters it sucks it's like this is lame but it's not necessarily built with that in mind but
Oliver:
[1:06:37] If you're making something like dusk which i also really like um i imagine that i mean you you can look at the Quake source code and you can see exactly how those physics work, right?
Tyler:
[1:06:49] Yes. Yeah, that's true.
Oliver:
[1:06:50] If you're somewhat decent at coding, you could replicate that in Unity.
Tyler:
[1:06:53] Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:06:54] Maybe that's what the developer did. That's what I would do, at least.
Tyler:
[1:06:59] Yeah. And there are several things. Like, you know, Sam is really big on that EFPSC engine where you don't need to learn how to code, really. You just, you know, learn some scripting language that I guess is for that particular little engine.
Tyler:
[1:07:15] And go crazy um but then it's frustrating on the every single time i play a dos man game i'm like oh we haven't fixed this issue yet can you guys just like hire a programmer fix it i even went so far as like i'll i will pay a guy to make you a very similar you know program just using unity so that you can do all the same things tweak it when you want to and and have you know perks like i don't like steam integration localization like these are all very important um from the marketing standpoint anyway and being able to port it to console too which i think desecrators would be a great candidate for but yeah you'll you'll never see reaper you know in uh on the nintendo switch or at least not in its current form so it's a little bit of a downside to port to consoles,
Oliver:
[1:08:07] But we don't have a concrete plan yet. I imagine that it's... I expect there's a lot of work and it will probably be twice that amount of work. Have you ever been through that process?
Tyler:
[1:08:19] Yeah, I mean, we had a whole... Slipgate had a porting studio. In fact, that's a lot of how it made its money early on before the seller to Saber and had all the corporate backing. It was just doing a lot of ports. So a lot of my really close friends there were, you know, the porting team.
Tyler:
[1:08:36] I actually know a guy who worked there and has now just started his own company in Canada who would probably be willing to talk to you about doing it if you, you know, have a limited budget or whatever, just to open it up and see what it's like and give you a quote.
Oliver:
[1:08:52] Yeah, that would be interesting because...
Tyler:
[1:08:54] Yeah, shout out to Fireplant Games. Do a little free commercial for them on the podcast, I guess.
Oliver:
[1:09:01] Yeah, send us a link. That could be interesting.
Tyler:
[1:09:04] Yeah for sure yeah i'll uh i'll link you up as soon as we're done here i guess we can also talk with perp
Thomas:
[1:09:11] I don't know what they have in mind in terms of porting
Tyler:
[1:09:13] Um well i don't i don't know how perp does business but i i would imagine they have i mean most of their games are on consoles right so they probably have to have people who know how to do that um the question is focus
Thomas:
[1:09:27] On ps2 or the ps uh what's called psvr2 but the playstation i think that's their
Tyler:
[1:09:34] Focus yeah yeah well that i mean the two desecrators in vr would be fucking crazy yeah talk about like never leaving the couch man i would i'd be glued in yeah i mean i recommend having a bucket nearby okay your
Thomas:
[1:09:51] Lunch leaves decides to leave
Tyler:
[1:09:53] You yeah man um i wanted to just kind of like talk more about your your sci-fi influences and stuff like i i noticed like little clever things like you know you have deep space mine in is one of the levels in the game and stuff like that so what are your what are your obsessions with with sci-fi and you know that inspired this game okay
Oliver:
[1:10:15] Um it's a lot of different influences from i would say the 80s it must be um it may be I don't know how clear it is in the game, but a lot of it is from movies like the first Alien. When making the game, like deciding how the lighting should look in the UI and so on, I just spend a lot of time just watching Alien in the dark and power-posing it and looking at the frames and how the effects and so on. So that was a big influence. Also other movies from that time. For some reason, I don't recall right now which one they were. But Alien is the big one.
Tyler:
[1:10:56] Dark Star.
Oliver:
[1:10:58] I wish it was Dark Star, but I didn't know it at that time. But also not movies.
Tyler:
[1:11:05] But certain sci-fi artists like,
Oliver:
[1:11:08] I don't know if you're familiar with them, but Suneet, you probably know.
Tyler:
[1:11:13] How do I spell that? artist.
Oliver:
[1:11:15] S-Y-D and then M-E-A-D. They're very famous. He did the signs for aliens and Blade Runner stuff.
Tyler:
[1:11:25] Yes. I didn't know this guy's name, but I have seen a lot of this stuff that he's credited for. Yeah, I've sci-fi cars and stuff. Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:11:35] I bought some of his books just for the game. And he's, for some reason, his books are fucking expensive. But he has the most beautiful like pencil and not ink but pencil and what's it called whatever really really beautiful renderings of the science and he has a really really good ability of like just sketching things that make sense to your brain but also they don't look like things you've seen before.
Tyler:
[1:12:01] He's probably my favorite artist he died recently it's very sad yeah
Oliver:
[1:12:05] Um but then also chris foss and Peter Elson, if you've heard of those.
Tyler:
[1:12:12] Yep.
Oliver:
[1:12:12] Yeah. And of course, the game doesn't really look like the paintings also need stuff, but it's more like the idea behind the designs, which is like more imaginary sci-fi designs. It's not so much, you know, iPhone-looking stuff. It's more come up with some big vehicle that looks really... It looks like it does a lot of things, but it's not so clear how it works. Maybe that's a bad way to explain it, but, you know, back in the 70s, they had a lot of psychedelic art, and this also influenced science fiction, where you had all these weird vehicles which didn't really make sense, but also they weren't explained, so you didn't know whether they were supposed to work or what it was, but it just looked cool. And it's kind of the same starting point I had for a lot of the things in the game. Just wanted interesting, weird shapes, and I didn't care too much about how they should work, and they shouldn't look too much like jet fighters or NASA space rockets. It should look more strange. I always thought that was more interesting. Like you're in a dark future, and it's not clear if it's even humans who build the stuff.
Tyler:
[1:13:22] Right. Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:13:24] I don't know. That just appealed to me.
Tyler:
[1:13:27] Always been a big fan of the you know the classic you know isaac asimov and you know hg wells sort of the the speculations of what would the future be like and and then in your case it's like not only what would the future look like but like it's sort of a trope that they explore quite a lot in star trek but just you know imagine you're in the year for you know 40 40 0 0 whatever and you're looking back and like there's 2000 years of development between modern era and there for you to look at the history of you know so it's not just what is it what do we have now but also like i'm going into this you know ancient freighter you know by ancient you mean a thousand years old which is a thousand years from now what would that look like too such an interesting game to play with your mind and kind of just you know like i said speculate on dig into it yeah yeah Yeah, actually, right on.
Oliver:
[1:14:21] That is the kind of thinking I had.
Tyler:
[1:14:25] Did you... I had some specific shit I was going to point out, but did you have any inspirations for the types of weapons that you thought would be interesting for the game, or was that more just kind of what serves the purpose?
Oliver:
[1:14:39] The games were... Not the games, the weapons. Some of them were inspired by the.
Tyler:
[1:14:45] Sin and Forsaken,
Oliver:
[1:14:46] Like the basic weaponry, because you know... Certain weapons you just... Of course, you can try to come up with your own concepts, but probably you need like the equivalent of a pistol, machine gun and shotgun, right? But in sixth of terms, you kind of need weapons people understand and you also know the concepts work. And those were mostly taken from Descent Forsaken and there's a third game, I don't remember. But after that, once we had like the basic weapons down, we just started experimenting, just trying ideas out because we wanted to have like a big arsenal of weapons that would feel cool, but not be too familiar. They had to be a little bit different. And we also wanted to play with like strange sci-fi concepts. And like some of the weapons have names that only really make sense if you think about like, find the future physics and so on. So, like, for instance, we have this weapon called Foam Phase, which was the idea comes from a book. I don't remember the book right now, but it's essentially a real gun, how it works in the game. But it's called the Foam Phase because it's around this idea that you have a projectile that's filled with gas that's under very high pressure, and then it turns into a foam stage, and that makes it really explosive upon impact because then all that pressure is released.
Oliver:
[1:16:13] I think I played with that idea with some of the other women's as well, that they should have some kind of, yeah, wild sci-fi idea behind them and not just be a railgun or be a minigun and all the stuff you've seen before. Right.
Tyler:
[1:16:26] Yeah, it's one of the fun things about sci-fi is like trying not to be too derivative of someone else's sci-fi, like kind of coming up with something that's all your own. It's tough. But then I guess there's always like just good old-fashioned taking different things for different elements and mashing them together and seeing where you land.
Oliver:
[1:16:46] Yeah, there is that, of course. You're throwing concepts at the wall to see what works. But at the same time, I also always at the back of my mind had this picture that when the game is really at its peak moments when you have lots of enemies and you have all the weapons, there should be like, it should visually, it should look really flashy. It should not just be, you know, it's like yellow tracers from guns and red missiles. It should look way more exotic and visually interesting. Like there should be big exotic explosions, flares from lasers and all this stuff. And there should also be like a lot of small moments because the weapons have, mechanics that create moments like we have the weapon that has the stupid name Megamind. You probably saw it if you played. But it's this weapon where you drop a bomb and then when it's triggered, it creates like this big expanding blue flare and then flare, it shuts off and there's a huge explosion. And I really love things like that where you have this little like visual, almost cinematic moment. But at the same time, it's also a really effective weapon with like a clear mechanic. It's like, if I think the weapon should look great if it wasn't like an 80s space battle. That's how I would describe it. You should imagine that the Enterprise could shoot this thing. Then it's probably a good idea.
Tyler:
[1:18:12] Yeah i like the i like the way that the game sort of gives you all these different options for kind of how to approach combat where you you do have the mods i actually like the sentry mine a lot i don't know why but i fucking love that thing and then you you have the you know rockets you know sort of your secondary weapon and then your primary weapon and you can sort of approach all these different situations i i find myself a lot like the first thing i do when i get into a level is like you know i find the first intersection and then i just assume whichever way i turn i'm going to get attacked from behind so i'll just sit there and kind of door peek for a really long time until i think i've lured out all the enemies then you also have like a lot of good you know they're not really monster closets but a lot of good moments where you've completed a new task and all of a sudden there's a new swarm of enemies coming you know coming at you and you got to fight your way out of that room and then there's also the situations uh more often than not where you have to choose is it really worth fighting these people or should i just try to zip past them and survive and that's also uh yeah a gamble you have to make as the player because every single mission not only do you have to get in and achieve the objectives but you have to go back it's almost like frodo you know at the end of the lord of the rings where it's like and then there was the journey home which is sometimes worse than the journey to mount and tomb in a lot of cases yeah
Oliver:
[1:19:34] I love that you described that because that's something that those situations you described, a lot of that evolved from, you know, at the start, we just had enemies that sat in a room, and then when you went to field of vision, they would turn to shoot at you. And you can make a game around that. That's like a classic shooter. That's fine. But I really like when games have good AI. So I spend a lot of time building up the AI in the game so that they have, you know, So this really simulated deeply how they perceive sound, how they spot you, how they communicate, and how they move around the combat arenas and so on. And once you give the AI the freedom to sense all of this stuff and react to it, then suddenly you can't just go in a room and just shoot at them. They're just going to dodge it and kill you, right? And then the game just kind of evolves into this space where, at the time, like you described, you don't really want to fight enemies directly, or you have to assume they're waiting for you. So a lot of times you're trying to kill the enemies without even seeing them. You're like shooting weapons around the corner or like suppressing them or dropping mines because you know they're going to chase you.
Tyler:
[1:20:43] And I think
Oliver:
[1:20:43] That's when the game became really interesting because it wasn't just go in the room and shoot things. Sometimes it felt more like you were in this big deathmatch arena and you just constantly have to be thinking about what the enemies are going to do around you. I think that's what really sets it apart from something like Descent where the enemies are pretty stationary.
Tyler:
[1:21:02] Yeah. Yeah, it's really fun to... I think about how often in my case, it's like, I need to tell an artist what I have in my mind and have them make that a reality. And I don't, I don't think I spent enough time thinking about like both the artist and the storyteller having an idea in their mind and then the programmer having to figure out how to make that work. I think there should be, I don't have enough appreciation for that sometimes as I should. But what, what has that been like, you know, which is some of the, the, you know, ideas and requests that you might have versus the reality of what you can make happen.
Oliver:
[1:21:39] So you're thinking about requests we get from our players?
Tyler:
[1:21:43] Well, sure. I mean, requests from the players, but also just maybe even amongst yourselves. Like, I have this cool idea for a thing that could happen in the game. And then what are the possibilities of how to make that happen versus sometimes like the reality of it can't be done or it has to be done in this way. So you sort of get these situations where you have an idea and then by the time it actually comes to fruition it's like, well, this is actually different than I had in mind, but it is the reality of how it works and it's cool. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Thomas:
[1:22:13] I guess I mean, we just we try it out and sometimes, I mean, if it's different, as long as it's cool and improves the game and stick to the vision, that's not a problem. But we also have a lot of features that we scrapped because they didn't work out how we intended. As for communicating between us, it hasn't really been that problematic. I mean, I think it's, you know, been fine. And sometimes we misunderstand each other in a way that we get something better, better ideas. So luckily there hasn't been much issues in terms of what you're talking about.
Oliver:
[1:22:52] Also, there's the aspect that since we're both doing the coding and we both know pretty much exactly how the game works, And then when we have these ideas, we can discuss them and we can usually pretty quickly agree whether this is easy to do or it's very difficult. Have an idea and the question is, well, should we do it or is it a good idea? Can you do it? Usually we just try to do it and then we decide because both of us can pretty much implement anything we can think of, because usually the ideas are not we're turning it into an RTS. Usually it is, what about this enemy or this weapon? Or what about this thing for how we generate the levels? And then if we both think the idea is good, then one of us would just say, okay, I'm going to do it next weekend. That's pretty much the process. Which is very difficult, I imagine, from how you decide what features to implement, right? Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:23:46] I mean, it goes in all different directions. It can often be that you have a mechanic that you want to implement, and then you realize that it's not fun, right? It's not just that it doesn't work or whatever. It could be totally fine, and then that you in in the reality of the gameplay it's like the players are like this sucks or this doesn't work for me so kind of rewinding back to your you know your first sort of reply there the stuff that you know like a player might might want you know in the game when they say like hey could you do this or i think it would be really cool if he did that i think i even threw in a Also the reality, there's so many realities on your side of like budget, time, feasibility, and then what it overall contributes to the game. So it's just a lot to think about. You're so close now to the end, or at least I guess the new beginning of putting that new roadmap in. I imagine once the game is launched, you're going to have a shitload of requests. You're going to have so many people commenting and saying, could you do this? Can you do that? I wish it did this. and then you'll have to decide from your own perspective which of these is actually worth doing. And from what you said earlier, you got about two years to make those decisions. Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:25:10] There will be a lot of things, but I feel like most of the feedback falls into one of two buckets. And the one is the easy one. They suggest some small change and you just immediately know, okay, that's better. That will make the game better. And then you just, Maybe it takes 10 minutes to implement, you just do it. Like, those are just three ways to improve your game. And the other bug is when there's something they don't like, and it's not just like a simple one line code change, then usually, nine out of ten times, you shouldn't just try to do what they suggest. You should try to understand, like, why are they feeling this way? What are they actually complaining about? Because usually it's not the thing they think it is. Which is weird, but it's rare people actually complain about what the actual problem is. So you have to read multiple comments and then try to think, okay, these three guys, they're talking about three different things, but actually it's because we're spawning the wrong enemies in the early levels. Yeah, those are the difficult ones.
Tyler:
[1:26:11] Yeah. And there's also
Thomas:
[1:26:14] Somewhere it's like they want to pull the game in a different direction. And I mean that's fair enough but then if we perceive that's what we do then we stick to iteration and don't follow those advice
Tyler:
[1:26:26] Right when
Oliver:
[1:26:29] You develop games do you do early access or do you do a big release I've.
Tyler:
[1:26:34] I think it really just depends on the nature of the game in question like from a I have not published anything that I have developed personally into early access not that I wouldn't would be totally off you know off put by it but I feel like it from from the indie perspective and from a lot of publishers perspectives they they make the decision to go early access because it's like it's the thing to do or because they're kind of desperate for money to be coming in and then they oftentimes miss whether or not that's right for this title and then also if you don't have a like a delivery roadmap for what that early access is going to look like before you do it, it can be really disappointing to players if they, you know, are like, when is this going to be done? When is this going to be done? And you're just like never meeting a deadline.
Tyler:
[1:27:28] Just a good example would be like Wrath, Aeon of Ruin, and Graven, when we were working on those with 3D Realms and Slipgate, and then they were published by Fulcrum.
Tyler:
[1:27:39] So none of this is to criticize any of the decisions anyone made, it's just the reality of the situation. They decided to go early access with both of those titles, and then it was another three years or so before they came out. And then by the time they came out it was sort of like just rushing to get them out the door so that it would be done so that they could move on to other things whereas if they had just not gone early access in the first place and not announced things before they knew that they were actually going to be ready uh the public perception what might have been okay yay it's finally coming out instead of like oh my god you've been promising this for so long so i'm kind of a fan of not setting yourself up for you know to disappoint people so to speak you know not giving uh any opportunity for that to be the case however um there are plenty of ways that early access can work where if you do you do have a product mode roadmap and you just kind of like release almost episodically like if your game is structured in a way that it can be like okay well think like old school shareware model where it's like here's 10 levels and then in 6 months there will be 10 more levels and then a year later the complete game will come out and we will do updates along the way
Tyler:
[1:29:03] So you could say not only are you bringing in money from the early access release you're releasing at least a complete product even if it's not the whole game it's like they're getting 10 levels of the game. Whatever that happens to look like. And they're you're kind of constantly every time you do that first of all you can you can change the price if you want to or you can reward people for you know getting in early by giving them the rest for free say but you you're in a situation now where you get a new marketing push every time you do an update right so it's not people like oh my gosh when is the game going to be done but it's like okay it's been six months now it's time for the new update with the new levels or episode two or however you want to structure that and now you have another opportunity to make a trailer get a lot of eyeballs on your product make a bunch of new sales all the while you've been collecting on people buying the early access that in that situation i think it makes sense um so i think it's just it really has a lot to do with the kind of game you're making and the delivery pipeline that you have hope that answered your question yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah no
Oliver:
[1:30:17] You need to have We had some sort of plan there. Our plan was actually not to... We didn't do a roadmap because, like you said, we didn't want to give people expectations we're not going to meet because we wanted to have the freedom to try out features, and if they didn't work, just throw them in the trash. But if you have a roadmap that's saying you're going to do these five things and then you have to implement them, and then you have the choice of either doing things that's not good for the game or having people getting angry at you because you didn't do them.
Tyler:
[1:30:46] Yep yeah i don't i don't ever want to be in that situation if i don't have to be it's a it's a real pain just never never say a release date until you actually know the release date that's that's a big one for me like don't even announce a game until you're sure you're actually going to make the game that's one of the worst things that i think you could ever do to yourself is like have a really cool idea for a game and some concept for it put a teaser out and then just never do anything because it didn't work out or whatever. Makes you look like a giant asshole.
Thomas:
[1:31:18] I, you know, I like the focus on the players with these early access.
Tyler:
[1:31:24] Yeah.
Thomas:
[1:31:26] Say, oh, it's just to get some money early and get the two peer pushes. I think if the primary force is on the players and then later for yourself, then you're probably less likely to
Oliver:
[1:31:38] Mess things up.
Tyler:
[1:31:40] Yeah. Like I said, oftentimes the decision to go early access is just strictly based on like we cannot continue to do this if we don't have income because we're not making money otherwise. Us it's almost the strength of having a publisher is that ideally they have other sources of income while they wait for you to perfect what you're doing um as opposed to if you're a small indie studio and you're doing it all by yourself and you're you don't have day jobs you're doing this full-time and then you can find yourself in a situation where it was like we literally cannot afford to continue doing this you know unless we find a way to make money but then i would argue Instead of going early access,
Tyler:
[1:32:18] Maybe just do another small game, maybe even set in the same universe and release it as a prequel or something like that. And then that will just generate more hype. You just have to be smart about what you're trying to do. Oftentimes uh especially like younger indie developers i think get caught up on trying to make their one dream game and they don't ever make other things so that they can learn from that process and they are not willing to take time away from their one big dream game and then they end up in these situations where they've you know oftentimes gotten into really bad publishing deals or you know made maybe some poor financial decisions you know even if you have funding you know they spend it all in in a month and then they're waiting they're sitting there waiting for that next milestone delivery so like just financial management in general is a big part of it I don't know I think it's it's really really hard to kind of make that jump from
Tyler:
[1:33:26] A solo dev or you know even in your case like two developers to thinking about the long term impacts of like what does the financing of a game look like so I just really hate to see like a 20 year old game developer with a shitty deal you know and they're locked into it and it often times compromises their game or compromises their life while they're trying to make their game like you know you become the starving artist who has to go work at I don't know, a part-time job somewhere or whatever and then you're further delaying yourself to release the game that you've already committed to releasing just to make ends meet. And that sucks. It's probably illegal in Denmark. But in America this happens like every day.
Oliver:
[1:34:13] Yeah. And you've... Well, we haven't been in that situation, but, I know some of my friends that work in bigger companies and some of these companies, they want to create their own games or commission other companies to make games for them. And of course, they have all the money to do this, and they can definitely finance things, but I'm always thinking like the kind of people who manage these projects at big companies, I think I would go crazy if I had some guy like that that had to manage something like this, Aqualus, right? Having to... Because he controls the money, of course, that makes sense. You have to, I mean, in a way he owns the product, depending on the deal, but I'm just thinking some guy in a suit and I have to explain to him why it's important we spend a month making this mind explosion feel good. And that's just not going to happen. Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:35:06] Well, they have to really know and understand and appreciate games and, you know, the sad truth. Yeah. Publishers out there did not don't get me wrong on that but when you're talking about like a giant investment group you know or you know investors that kind of thing and they don't they're not really connected to the product at all they're just looking for the bottom line that's hard um always you know have that same yeah like look at riot games and how long it took them to turn a product on or turn a profit on uh dota or not dota is it legal legends yeah yeah just like how long it took to invest millions and millions and millions and then finally get a return on their investment was a, you know, imagine trying to explain that to some guy in a suit who just wants his money back and they, and you give them the power to make that decision for you in many cases, because all they have to do is pull the plug and then you're done. And hopefully you didn't sell them your IP. That's, that's another big no, no that a lot of folks make that mistake where they sign a deal site unseen. And then you realized that, Your intellectual property is now owned by this other entity or person who doesn't have your best interests in mind or the best interests of your players or your game in mind. And you can't even make a fucking sequel if you want to or, you know, whatever. That sucks.
Oliver:
[1:36:24] Yeah, yeah. We specifically avoided that when looking for a publisher.
Tyler:
[1:36:28] Yeah. And as everyone should. You should never. There are very few circumstances where I would recommend selling your IP. You know, like bad juju. you if you're if you're interplay and you've made two successful fallout games you don't plan on making any more and you can sell it to bethesda and make millions of dollars forever uh and it perpetuates the sales of your original games maybe then you sell your ip yeah and what's also disturbing if you look at certain deals it's like it's not just that you make these decisions where you sell your your ip or whatever away it's the amount of money that you actually make that decision for that scares the shit out of me it's like you sold it for what like you know nothing basically you're crazy you know you lost so much potential future income by that one decision that you made today for fifty thousand dollars or whatever seems like a lot of money today but it it could be a lot more later dollars doesn't get you another game yeah it might get you through a year maybe fuck if you live in albor it won't get you very far at all no
Oliver:
[1:37:35] And cook maiden it will be.
Tyler:
[1:37:37] For it yeah but sometimes people do you know they make those those decisions you know that uh that youtube channel channel 5 it used to be all gas no brakes yeah yeah like his story where he he signed a deal you know in his early 20s with the production company who owned the title of the show and the deal was that they're going to give him an rv you know and 40 000 a year and he could
Tyler:
[1:38:05] Do whatever he wanted and then it's like when you're 20 40 000 a year in an rv sounds like a fucking steal but when you're 25 30 it's like what have i done and then he had to get out of that deal you know break his contract and then completely rebrand himself under a new banner that he owned himself because otherwise they were just they were literally taking most of his money and they had the right to do so because he signed the deal so i just yeah yeah wild but it happens every day in the music industry too i mean god the sheer amount of pop stars who've signed ridiculously stupid deals when they're very very young and then it like you know you end up in a situation where the production company or the the record label owns all of your music exclusively they have the license to everything you're not even allowed to like tour around and play it live under your own name because they own that too poor Britney Spears you know everything was owned by her dad or uh I think of Macaulay Culkin the actor you know Home Alone that kid he got royally screwed over by his his agents and his family um as a child too it's that's ridiculous it's crazy so i would just keep all of these things in mind as as a game developer period when you're walking into you know make a deal it if it sounds too good to be true it probably is not true yeah
Oliver:
[1:39:32] Yeah i mean and then you have to read the contract.
Tyler:
[1:39:34] Closely closely and then have several people look it over to like a lawyer some friends your parents i uh you know even from a publishing side of things like if i'm working with somebody really like young even if they're legally an adult. I'm like, I would very much feel more comfortable signing this deal. If I could talk to your mom or something, just so I know that you, you know, have people backing you up on this decision because I mean, as a, as a military veteran, I know what it's like to sign a contract. You don't fully understand when you're 20. And then six years later, it'd be like, what have I done? Um, for all the, all the good things I could say about it is like, man, I really didn't think about how long six years is when I signed that contract, did I? The stuff that it takes out of you too. Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:40:24] Of life it's not something you can't recover from you can always come back from a bad deal but it's just better if you don't make a bad deal in the first place how
Oliver:
[1:40:32] Did you make the jump from military to games.
Tyler:
[1:40:34] Um basically through the podcast so i the the very first iteration of in the keep podcast was that i was super interested in quake specifically like esports you know playing online
Tyler:
[1:40:50] Quake with other people so i started the discord server which is now the actually the public in the cube discord server which was at the time primarily centered around just finding other people of a similar skill you know whatever your elo score whatever it was just who were cool playing quake with each other and actually teaching each other instead of just joining a lobby getting smashed haha noob and then goodbye so it was almost like a little indie training ground for that reason just to find people you know like-minded people to play games with um and there was a a podcast at the time called the state of quake that was ran by a couple of uh really cool guys named slipping unkind and it was their podcast was more like uh like it just you know what's the literally called the state of quake it's like what are the updates what's the news on quake champions at the time was the big one um you know what are the tournaments to look out for that kind of thing just like a like almost like a news like a sports news show and i really really liked that um but they were like struggling to put out episodes regularly because they lived in two different cities and everything different time zones so then i i had got really involved in a lot of their tournaments and helping them out with that stuff and then i i had podcasted before a long time before so
Tyler:
[1:42:13] I offered like, hey, you know, what if we started doing interviews with like pro players and people who are, you know, good at this, you know, and added that to your repertoire. And then I think I did like, I don't know, six episodes of In the Keep as like a fill in for the off weeks for that show. And then after a while, they kind of defunct. So I just took it and made it its own podcast, got its own RSS feed, learned how to edit everything myself.
Tyler:
[1:42:41] And it grew from there. So it went from, you know, Quake was really kind of my obsession, but then there were more and more arena shooters that I was like interested in. You know, I talked to folks who were playing online Doom and some of the offshoots like Open Arena. There was a game called Master Arena at the time that was kind of like had some steam behind it.
Tyler:
[1:43:02] Then Diabotical was kind of like the other, maybe it's going to be what brings that Unreal Tournament kind of vibe back to arena shooters. But then the dust came out basically dust came out and then it was boomer shooters were the thing like these single player games that are inspired by quake and doom and duke nukem and that kind of stuff uh so the podcast just kind of grew from there as i i just i just by a miracle caught that wave you know where i had uh the dust developers and uh you know like i i got connected to fred when they were originally publishing ion fury and all of that stuff kind of cascaded into one big thing and after i think it was after the first realms deep i i had just gotten to know so many great indie developers who were making shooters that that's when i kind of made the decision to i think i want to you know do what what became stellar valkyrie that's when i decided like i'm going to get into this business so that was i don't know 2020 2021 roughly sometime during the summer uh that i first like sat down and said like all right we're gonna make a we're gonna make a company i'm gonna get some people together that i know that are really good and start working on a game and then that was three years before I got out of the Air Force so by the time I had got out of
Tyler:
[1:44:31] The Air Force I had become you know I had I had my own company my own studio
Tyler:
[1:44:35] That was still making a game and then I got involved with Call us to Ragnar
Tyler:
[1:44:38] 2 which is a separate side tangent but I Yeah, it just made sense to go, like I said earlier, to Denmark and do that.
Tyler:
[1:44:47] I had the choice. Do I want to go to uni and take a game development course for two to four years and waste my time, basically? I actually did enroll for a game development degree and then I decided very quickly like this feels like a waste of time you know this feels like I'm just literally like paying someone else to allow me to teach myself how to do what I could be just doing on my own and making money while I'm doing it so the decision you know was like go work for a real company work my way up in that and then I'll just learn how this industry works from the inside so I got to start off as a project manager and then I maybe like a year later I was like okay I think I got this down I want to go do marketing and then you know they kept giving me cool opportunities like that so I started off as like marketing assistant when I made that transfer and then ended up as brand manager before I decided you know like it's this is ran its course and it's time for me to go double down on my own business and go home plus there were so many layoffs around that time that It was like, I didn't want to, I didn't want to get sucked into like being truly corporate. I thought that I would be miserable doing that. And I didn't really want to, I honestly, I didn't want to stay in Denmark. Not that I don't think Denmark is awesome and everything, but it was like, I missed America and I had a girlfriend that I wanted to get married to. So here I am.
Oliver:
[1:46:14] It's pretty cool it started with the whole Quake thing. I love ProQuake, by the way.
Tyler:
[1:46:21] Hell yeah.
Oliver:
[1:46:22] It's very fortunate for both of us, I guess, that this whole boomer shooter renaissance happened because it's still kind of wild to me that it's going because before that, there wasn't anything like that. People didn't really talk about these games. No. I mean, they existed, but there was no community around the idea of old shooters as I remember it.
Tyler:
[1:46:41] In a weird way even though it's not the best game in the world quake champions brought back so much interest in the you know why why is it that these old school shooters are so good and nothing like it exists today um there were a few games that actually did uh actually try it before dusk but dusk was the one that kind of caught lightning in a bottle it was like the right game at the right time yeah with the right marketing uh dave dave oshry i take my hat off to that guy every time i hear his name like he's a fucking genius um i gotta get david samansky the developer of dusk back on the show because he's making like a harry potter clone right now he's making this doing it's like like the if you like if you remember the original harry potter and the philosopher's stone video game like an indie version of that and it just looks awesome and i'm glad to see you know the the people who kind of cut their teeth on uh indie shooters starting to explore and, you know, move into other genres and stuff too. And it's like, they made enough money off Dusk that, I mean, I think David Szymanski can afford to do whatever the fuck he wants for the rest of his life. So really, really cool.
Oliver:
[1:47:51] It's really cool. He's doing these smaller projects where he's exploring different genres and so on.
Tyler:
[1:47:58] Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:47:59] He's not just doing Dusk too, at least from what I'm seeing. I played this, what's it called? He made this game with a submarine and blood.
Tyler:
[1:48:09] What's
Oliver:
[1:48:10] It called but it's completely different from dusk and it's short and really well made and pretty disturbing actually and i just thought that was such a cool experience.
Tyler:
[1:48:18] He uh yeah he was involved in the in dread xp when they were doing their collections too so they did that uh dread x collection the hunt which was like the fourth iteration that was all first person shooter games uh but still like very grounded in horror and in his particular case it's like he had been a starving artist basically just making like walking simulator horror games for a long time before dusk and then dusk just hit the right way at the right time made a made a bunch of money and then what's beautiful and this is like a really good thing for any indie developer to think about is like once dusk became a hit now all of his games that he'd made before that were not financially successful were of interest to people because they wanted to you know every person who played dusk they're like well what else is this guy made i want to play all that too
Tyler:
[1:49:11] And you know that's how i ended up playing uh of the bone collector you know that kind of stuff i don't think it's called is it called the bone collector finger bones something like that but yeah like all all of his stuff the music machine the what was it called something about the wolf or whatever it does yeah just so cool and then he'd made a bunch of stuff after that that is you know like you said the the submarine game or the well what's the one where you're in like a factory and there are all these like unicorns that shoot laser beams out of their heads but they're all mutated and shit you you're shooting them with like a like an industrial nail gun super cool man just a really creative guy and the sweetest person in the world to such horrible okay it's like horrific awful demonic stuff in his in his art and then in real life he's like a just a dad like a just big fuzzy furball nice guy you know father of a few children
Tyler:
[1:50:07] Lives with his wife in pennsylvania they go to church every sunday kind of shit yeah man um there's something about that um but other you know you say you said you're into Quake and stuff like that but like what are outside of space stuff like games that you really enjoy just personally like maybe as a kid or like now just stuff that's coming out that captures your interests or do you even have time to play games when you're making one because I find that's a struggle too
Oliver:
[1:50:36] Yeah as I mean I can start with the short one.
Tyler:
[1:50:39] And that is right
Oliver:
[1:50:40] Now since we started working on Desecrators it's very limited what I've been playing because between Dayjob and Desecrators there really isn't time and You don't really want to sit at the computer when you have the time, to be honest. Before that was the case, like one game that I played a lot when I was younger was Serious Sam, because that's a really great game and it was on one of those discs because, again, it was not really a mainstream title, so of course it was there. And the first and second encounter, I played those so much when I was younger. I really, really like those games. I think they have this really cool feel where it's... I guess Quake also has this, but it's stronger in Serious Sam where, of course, it looks like a dumb shooter, but it still feels more like when you play it at the high difficulties. It's more like playing really fast chess, because all the enemies have these very deterministic, predictable behaviors, and all the weapons are very good at one thing. So it's almost like there are only so many valid moves you can make each game. There's only really one or two weapons that are the right ones, and there's only one or two enemies you should shoot at. So I think it just had this really nice clockwork chess feel, where if you know, if you're in the rhythm and you know the rules, you can just play it perfectly. And that feels great. Yeah, I guess Serious Sam would be my big one. What about you, Thomas?
Thomas:
[1:52:10] For me, it has been Team Fortress 2, because movement is so fun in that. Especially with Demoman and Solja, and also played a lot with a friend, especially during COVID. And other than that, it's, I think, Proteus and Ultracill. A couple of years ago, I played them a lot.
Oliver:
[1:52:33] Actually, another... No, sorry, Thomas, continue. No. Okay. I was just thinking, actually, another game that's a big influence. That's Free Space 2. I don't know, Tyler, if you even know what that is.
Tyler:
[1:52:47] I'm not sure.
Oliver:
[1:52:49] It's like a space sim from... It was published by Interplay, I think, and developed by some of the guys who made the Ascent games.
Tyler:
[1:52:58] What was the name of it one more time?
Oliver:
[1:53:02] FreeSpace 2. Like, it's the sequel.
Tyler:
[1:53:06] FreeSpace.
Oliver:
[1:53:07] Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:53:11] Free Space and Free Space 2. I've definitely seen this before on Interplay's website, but I didn't know what it was.
Oliver:
[1:53:19] I don't know how they would hold up now, but at the time, they had a really good atmosphere and story. It was like a space shooting game, but it was fucking horrifying.
Tyler:
[1:53:32] Yeah, it's very Star Wars-y in the X-Wing derivative? Did you ever play that? X-Wing? Yeah, yeah.
Oliver:
[1:53:42] It's kind of like that, but then the atmosphere is much darker and the story is pretty much that humanity is just getting exterminated by these mysterious aliens. And as a young boy, that was just so intense and interesting and horrifying to play. I think it's one of those games that give me this appreciation for dark, weird games where you're facing some unknown threats and it's not so clear. It's not a black and white story. It's more like either it's a fight for survival or it's more great. I guess is how you would say it.
Tyler:
[1:54:18] Man, I wonder if they would be interested in bringing this IP back.
Oliver:
[1:54:23] They should. They really should.
Tyler:
[1:54:26] Because this looks really cool. I can't believe I've never actually looked into this before. But it looks awesome. it's still uh still available on steam and everything from 2014 to did on Steam, for Free Space 2 on Steam.
Oliver:
[1:54:40] Okay, it's been a while. I remember that the game was really, really good, but it didn't sell that well, unfortunately, so that's why they stopped making them.
Tyler:
[1:54:48] Yeah.
Oliver:
[1:54:49] Because space sims were dying off at that time.
Tyler:
[1:54:52] I think people were getting more into the online stuff, you know, like there was a, oh, what's that MMO in space that everybody keeps stealing each other's money in? EVE? Yeah. Yeah i played star trek online too for a little while it wasn't the best game in the world but it was just fun to live in that universe for a while but yeah a lot of the space sim stuff and also mass effect uh was humongous too so i wonder if that if that those like all kind of like coincidentally contributed to people kind of moving away from this or at least buying something else that wasn't this?
Oliver:
[1:55:32] I think it was mostly like first-person shooters, because stuff like Quake, I just imagine, would sell better than some Dark's X-Wing space sim game. I think a lot of those space games existed because of the limitations of computers at the time. Like rendering a space game is very cheap. You just have some 3D models floating in nothing. But once you can render worlds and physics and so on, then I think for a lot of people, that just appeals more to them than being a spaceship, unfortunately.
Tyler:
[1:56:04] Yeah, I mean, who needs textures when you can have a 360-degree skybox and just shit floating around in it? It's perfect. Yeah. I actually, I do like in Desecrators how, you know, even though it is in space, you're never actually really in space. You're inside of stuff. So you have like this kind of contained thing. maybe that's from the alien influence too. Everything takes place inside of the vessel or the ship or whatever you're in. It's really, really cool.
Oliver:
[1:56:33] Yeah. It's also from more of a gameplay perspective that I tried to make some space games, but in my opinion, the gameplay is kind of boring because when you're in space, you just float around and do circle strafing and fly fast. But the gameplay, to me, it's not interesting for that long. Either you have to have RPG elements in a narrative, something like that. But if you're just focusing on the gameplay moment to moment, shooting things, then I think space games are really hard to work that way.
Tyler:
[1:57:03] Yeah. Somebody who's not me... Go ahead.
Thomas:
[1:57:07] I think Descent 3 also had some open areas and it was the same that we've both
Thomas:
[1:57:13] felt the worst part of Descent 3 was the open areas where you are outside in the space.
Tyler:
[1:57:19] Do you uh do you have plans for the sequel to Desecrators already hmm Yes.
Oliver:
[1:57:30] I don't think I've told Thomas about it, but I at least have two ideas, two directions you could go for a sequel.
Tyler:
[1:57:36] Okay.
Thomas:
[1:57:37] Well, then I don't know what ideas we have. Sounds exciting.
Oliver:
[1:57:43] I would just say that if we're looking at making like a straight sequel to the game, if I was making a Desecratus 2 from the bottom now, I would do some things fundamentally differently, because after making this game for four years, you realize what the good and the bad parts are. And I would just design certain things completely different. And for instance, I would focus more on the horror aspect. I think that's a really fun part of the game that's hard. I mean, it kind of works now, but it's also, it should be more in focus, I think, that could make it really unique. And no, I could talk forever but yes, you could make a Desecrators 2. Let's just leave it at that.
Tyler:
[1:58:27] What about if not Desecrators in particular but just like other game ideas you guys have as a studio? Or maybe just genres you'd like to explore?
Oliver:
[1:58:39] Okay, I have an idea.
Tyler:
[1:58:41] And that is I would like to make
Oliver:
[1:58:44] A game that's how could you describe it? Kind of like a battlefield in the sense that you have a large urban area and you have a lot of vehicles. And then the player can control either like tanks or aircraft or other vehicles. But then simulate the game very much like a realistic military game. Like have a lot of things with sensors, decoys, flares, intelligent enemies hiding behind terrain but still keep it very dark and very sci-fi and then like have this very hard sci-fi battlefield simulator with lots of vehicles i think that could be interesting to make hell.
Tyler:
[1:59:28] Yeah yeah that sounds fun
Oliver:
[1:59:31] I would love that like have electronic warfare like all these modern combat concepts and then actually make them fun i think that could be so cool as you know you're in the Air Force, you know, that Modern Warfare, to me, is kind of, it can be very scary in the sense that you can just, from one second to the next, you can just disintegrate if you're at the wrong place. And I think if you aesthetically work that into a game, you could have this really tense experience. Yeah, just flying around the battlefield knowing at any moment you could be annihilated. Yeah.
Tyler:
[2:00:05] It's it's interesting now because like the the technology of air combat has changed so much since the days of like a lot of your games like i mean ace combat two and four some of the some of like early seeds of why i ended up in the air force perhaps but like those are those are sort of like almost like dated mission ideas the idea of like air to ground combat or just like a bombing mission and stuff like that whereas nowadays you have a f-35 and it's like a flying sniper rifle like you never even see the plane come into your airspace before you get hit uh could do a lot of really interesting stuff with that i don't know if there's anyone who's even tried to make a like a a truly modern warfare style thing even in uh because it doesn't necessarily make for the most interesting story you know what i mean like it's what's effective in war does not necessarily mean fun story to talk about later uh like top gun maverick like the mission in that movie was sort of they had to figure out a way to make it make sense in the very particular context of the mission uh where they have to like between the mountain ravines and then you know like hit the targets and then pull out really quickly and all that stuff and they're trying to put old school jets in it and everything. But in the reality of the world, you wouldn't make decisions like that. But in a video game, you can do whatever the fuck you want, as long as it's fun. So that'd be cool.
Tyler:
[2:01:28] And then like targeting technology, like where you shoot a missile and then heat seeks or uses UV or infrared to try to get in there. See things. You have a lot of things to play with there. Even for like i think it would be cool to do it like from a mission control standpoint like not not necessarily even in the in the seat of the pilot but you know all of the other things that go into doing stuff like this i i was a you know weather forecaster when i was in the air force and i always thought like nobody has really made a genuinely good game around uh you know there's a hurricane coming and you have a base to look over and like there's a you know what are the chances of a tornado happening and you have to play with radar and satellite imagery and all that kind of stuff and make a decision almost like a management game you know what i mean where you oh fucked up and now there's two billion dollars worth of government assets were destroyed congratulations you're fired like and you're going to jail
Oliver:
[2:02:36] Yeah i do think that um like this idea with you said with census and so on yeah i think that like one of the main ideas i have when i think it doesn't even matter whether you're controlling the plane or it's more like you are in mission control i think it's more the concept of when you have like a, let's say, ground to air missile that has a range of several hundred kilometers. I think if you present that in the right way, that can be fucking horrifying because then you have this, you know, you're being tracked by this thing that's going to hunt you down and it's going to destroy you and you don't even know where it's coming from. And it's moving really fast and it's never going to stop. Like if you present that in a cool way, then I think you can make a very interesting experience. I think if you make it go the realistic route, you just lose a lot of players because then what you have is you're flying in the middle of the day that looks kind of nice and then you hear your log on indicator beeping and then at some point you just die which is not exciting it has to be like jaws you have to feel like you are being hunted down by a machine that's going to rip you to pieces now.
Tyler:
[2:03:42] That's a great idea that you we should probably cut this out of the podcast and talk business afterwards but yeah like
Oliver:
[2:03:47] Yeah yeah.
Tyler:
[2:03:50] Yeah yeah I'm picturing it in the setting of Desecrators and you're in the ship and you know that you're almost alien isolation in a spaceship or in a jet or something like that you absolutely cannot get out of this there's no way, all you can do is avoid you're defenseless and you're just trying to get through it, it would be very very interesting yeah,
Oliver:
[2:04:14] Exactly maybe that's the game we should make Thomas that sounds kind of great Yeah, you were meant to make.
Tyler:
[2:04:20] A horror game. That's what you got to be doing. I mean, I might be up for it. It sounds like there's a lot of
Oliver:
[2:04:27] Fun technical challenges in it. You can generate terrain for years, Thomas. It'll be the dream.
Tyler:
[2:04:34] Yeah.
Thomas:
[2:04:34] It doesn't have to be that, but yeah. Oh, yeah.
Tyler:
[2:04:37] So what I'm burning for is the technical problems.
Thomas:
[2:04:43] And, you know, the game is also fun, but most fun for me is coding and fixing problems. So that's, that's what I'm really planning for.
Tyler:
[2:04:52] Well, here's a technical problem for you. Um, historically in, uh, games where you're, you know, airplane flying over ground, like the air to ground mission, or even just, you know, you have the ground below you and you're dog fighting in the air. It doesn't matter. The textures on the ground are almost always not realistically sized. They're sort of made so that they suggest the ground, but you actually hit the ground along, you know, Like, make sense physically to do so um as opposed to like something like starfox where you're kind of like close to the ground and you're bobbing and weaving through things like like you would in an a10 or something like that um so like being able to fly above the airspace and actually like have like realistic physics in terms of like what's on the ground and how it interacts with you would be a pretty interesting technical challenge so if you're playing like ace combat you know you're you're looking down and there's like the suggestion of all the things that are there but it's not realistic and if you're within a certain certain amount of airspace and you're like below 10 000 feet you could do it all for real but if you're flying something that would be you know 40 000 feet in the air and you have to go all the way down just rendering shit would be a huge challenge to you like making it actually like populate quickly i bet i bet that would burn up some graphics card.
Thomas:
[2:06:15] Burn up the UI network interface.
Tyler:
[2:06:21] I think that's the
Thomas:
[2:06:22] Microsoft Flight Simulator route. Something like they recommend, what was it, 50 megabit per second or something. Yeah.
Tyler:
[2:06:30] But yeah, I mean,
Thomas:
[2:06:31] First of all, I think you're right that realistically, rather, it isn't more about giving the perception of what is there. I guess placing wise I mean if you fall to your death doesn't it take a really really long time in the real world like the feeling of it?
Tyler:
[2:06:52] Yeah you usually pass out before you ever hit the ground like you're not even conscious but Ejecting out of a jet at, you know, 20,000 feet, you're probably not, yeah. You're probably burning up,
Thomas:
[2:07:06] You know. Yeah. But I guess maybe it doesn't really matter that much. You can just make it, you know, generate stuff that make it appear like it could be realistic. And then make something big that just flies near you. Ah, you're saved. But then you hit the ground.
Tyler:
[2:07:24] Sure. Yeah. There's so much interesting shit to play with then. Yeah we'll have to you know after after desecrators is out and you guys have racked up all your money we'll have to all sit down and powwow on this again so like fun stuff man we need
Oliver:
[2:07:38] An air force consultant.
Tyler:
[2:07:39] Uh it's funny in stellar valkyrie there's a a level that's like a volcano you know like classic kind of lava level sort of thing and i was trying to come up with a name for the the planet or the moon that it takes place on and i ended up actually calling back to my old squadron i got uh this this tech sergeant on the phone and i was like hey i needed a good name for a volcano and he gave me one that was like a real volcano somewhere in columbia or something where they you know they monitor the volcanic ash so that it doesn't you know knock a plane out of the sky it's like one of the worst things that could ever happen to an airplane is to suck up volcanic ash and then I was like credited in the game as volcano expert or consultant or something like that that's pretty good yeah fun stuff man well I really appreciate this man we've used up a lot of your time I apologize for being late earlier man I totally screwed up with the scheduling software I have but it still worked out I'm really looking forward to seeing how you guys do once the game is out assuming this comes out on Tuesday that'll be a couple of days so good luck thank you yeah man and uh definitely just make sure you guys keep me posted if you have anything that I can do for you or whatever just I'm a message away no worries
Oliver:
[2:09:01] Okay yeah wait it comes out on Friday right don't scare me like that.
Tyler:
[2:09:05] It better this
Thomas:
[2:09:07] Equipment is coming out on Friday
Oliver:
[2:09:09] Oh good Tyler you got me there.
Tyler:
[2:09:12] Did I say something
Thomas:
[2:09:13] Wrong you said Tuesday
Oliver:
[2:09:15] I was like oh god.
Tyler:
[2:09:16] Podcast is coming out
Oliver:
[2:09:17] On Tuesday oh okay okay that's better.
Tyler:
[2:09:19] Oh my goodness everybody listening go right now and buy the game or wishlist it if you're listening to this before Friday and uh enjoy it and write great reviews and tell everybody how much you
Music:
[2:09:35] Music
Tyler:
[2:09:58] Thank you to Oliver and Thomas for coming on the show. It's really, really cool to catch up with some fellow Danes, in a way. I do miss the lovely, flat, green, calm, quiet of Denmark sometimes. And it's always good to catch up with some friends from there, man. I really want you guys to grab this game. It comes out on Friday. Desecrators. If you like Descent, if you like spaceships, if you like shooting stuff and upgrading things, there's no way you won't like it. It's freaking really good. It's a lot of fun, and I'm hoping that many, many people will enjoy it. Also, make sure you're following them on X, Desecrators, and everything, and wherever else you follow stuff. Whatever that means.
Tyler:
[2:10:49] Thank you to all of our Patreon supporters. I love you so much. You are wonderful if you are interested in supporting the show you ought to head on over to end the cube.com forward slash support and there are many ways to do that you can of course become a patreon supporter yourself you can even just be on the free tier i do drop stuff to that rank at times uh when i can but you'll even still get updates you know you'll know what's coming up on the show uh what else oh yeah i set up a new thing where you can like buy me a book i made an Amazon wishlist of books that I want to read and since I'm always talking about books on here I thought that would be a nice way so if you do that just let me know make sure it has your name in the gift and I will make sure you were properly thanked for it you're amazing I love you all also transcripts in the articles now I don't know if y'all noticed that stay in the keep
