We are joined by the great Wouter van Oortmerssen, founder of VoxRay Games, who is currently working on Voxile, an open world RPG which features survival and FPS elements along with a robust creator system. Aside from the game, we discuss Wouter's career working on games such as FarCry, Borderlands 2, SimCity; designing and programming game engines; the lessons of world travel; and the many challenges of starting your own game studio.
| Voxile Kickstarter | VoxRay Discord |
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Chapters
00:00 Start
3:00 Gameplay Mechanics Explained
9:06 The Minecraft Influence
12:08 Crafting Gameplay Experiences
13:44 The Early Access Approach
20:35 Navigating the Indie Landscape
32:24 Traveling and Learning
37:39 Game Design Philosophies
53:50 Lessons from AAA Games
1:07:58 Agency in Game Design
1:11:58 Hierarchy vs. Innovation
1:14:56 Balancing Vision and Feedback
1:21:25 Marketing Strategies
1:43:21 Hiring for a Remote Team
1:48:41 Supporting Employee Well-being
2:02:07 Understanding Game Engines
2:15:42 The Philosophy of Programming
Transcript
Music:
[0:00] Music
Wouter:
[0:34] I first made the engine for it. I've been working on that for years. And then at some point, decided to start a company around it to actually build a game on top of it. I've been searching for a new way to do rendering that bypasses all the AAA complexity, basically, for a long time. And I had lots of experiments, and at some point, I made this voxel renderer with ray tracing, and it was surprisingly fast. It was like, I can actually make a game out of this. This is going to be awesome. And um yeah and then managed to get a team together to to work on it and we've been working on that for like the last three years um i guess summary for people that don't know what it is it's gameplay wise it's a blend of first person shooter rpg survival gameplay styles uh it's a very kind of creative game in the sense that everything is buildable destructible that kind of thing it has a unique look it's a fully ray traced game which is kind of unique even the primary view of the game is ray traced which most games that say they are ray traced don't even do so it has a very unique look with very unique kind of lighting and lots of detail, lots of voxel that looks very pretty
Wouter:
[1:56] And yeah we're bringing that to early access very soon, hopefully maybe in a month from now at the earliest.
Wouter:
[2:06] And yeah, take it from there. I guess another thing to mention is like a big thing we have is because everything is so dynamic and so buildable, we have a super nice in-game editor that allows people to build their own worlds.
Wouter:
[2:20] Our gameplay is also such that it's very easy to kind of bend the gameplay to your will. So if you're the kind of person who just wants to make an outright first-person shooter world, or you want to make a story-driven RPG world or more of a kind of survival experience. Like, all these things are possible kind of within our game. So it's almost like, I wouldn't say you can design your own game. That would be taking things too far. But, you know, you can definitely, you know, make your own kind of gameplay experience.
Tyler:
[2:48] Yeah, you can relate to your own stories within it. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I noticed pretty quickly was that, like, all of the different levels that you're currently offering in the demo that I played, Thank you.
Tyler:
[3:00] Uh they have genres on them it literally says like this is a detective story you know etc and i thought that was nice because i will i'm imagining in the future when people are making their own content and uploading it and sharing it with people to some degree.
Wouter:
[3:13] Yeah that
Tyler:
[3:15] Will be useful for search engine.
Wouter:
[3:16] Optimization yeah we want people to to go it's like i want to play a certain kind of world i want a certain kind of experience i mean i'll find those exactly how i would do that will remains to be seen but what you're seeing is cool because basically we have a couple of in-house designers and i mostly just told them to go wild and and the results are what you're seeing in the sense that like each of them took that kind of in their own way in terms of like what they wanted to create and so yeah the downside is that we still need the world on making these work on making these worlds a little bit more coherent in terms of like storyline and whatnot that. But the upside is that you can really see that you can have very different experiences in our game.
Tyler:
[3:56] So are you the primary storyteller of the kind of the overarching branching between these different stories?
Wouter:
[4:03] I wouldn't say so. I'm certainly, I mean, I'm the original designer of this game, if you will.
Wouter:
[4:11] But nowadays we have a lead designer on board that has lots of narrative experience that i don't have so i try to i try to let people that know better do their thing when it comes to story and the designers individually like are these the ones that design the quests and then pcs and what they're saying and whatnot so with that they're shaping the story quite quite intensely as well i'm not dictating them that they should do that in a particular in any particular way mostly so yeah it's uh
Tyler:
[4:44] It's really interesting like i i had written you the other day like hey did you did you like fez or whatever but i i like that sort of meta storytelling that goes on with uh spoilers for folks who haven't played the game yet but, so you are in this world that you're you know, The theme of the game is that you're able to create your own stories and create your own world and such. And there's a part where you are confronted by this mysterious character who kind of has a moment where I would describe it as similar to the red pill versus blue pill in the Matrix. And I really liked that. I thought that was a really nice touch. And it takes you kind of like, it's not out of the story. It's like, this is the story. the story is that you are a creator maybe you're going into another dimension that you didn't really fully understand if you were just one of the other NPCs in this world and I thought that was so interesting and so cool, not necessarily the most original thing in the world but awesome nonetheless.
Wouter:
[5:44] I'm glad that's working, it's a little bit like he called it like a fourth wall breaking and that's also a little bit dangerous because some people want to just stay kind of in the atmosphere of the game So, yeah, we'll see how that develops. I'm glad you liked it. Yeah.
Tyler:
[6:00] So, I mean, what were your sort of the influences that you had for making such a game I've noticed, especially in the last several years that survivor games are getting pretty, pretty big.
Wouter:
[6:09] Uh yeah i've
Tyler:
[6:10] Seen a couple that seem to be just trying to make a survival game because they're popular and therefore you know sort of lose the ability to make a good game it's just like checking all the boxes this didn't appear to come about in that.
Wouter:
[6:22] Way oh yeah if anything i must admit like you know survival being one of the three gameplay pillars that we have but the current game as it stands is not particularly survivally we're still kind of working on that aspect if anything um and it's also partially kind of the direction that designers have taken it like they've they've made it quite question story driven which is really cool but it makes for a very particular game um at the moment and i i do think there's a lot to survival i think it blends well with the other two in the sense of like survival almost feels like an extension of an rpg in an rpg you're you're you're building up to be very very powerful uh so also survival is similar, except you're struggling like a lot more. It's both about kind of building yourself up in a particular world, using whatever resources you can get your hands on.
Wouter:
[7:15] So we want to do that. In terms of influences, so it's interesting, you know, if you go look online where people talk about our game, a lot of people go like, it's Minecraft with guns. Or lately, thanks to Notch, you know, they're going, it's Minecraft 2 or something like that. And while I am very proud of that comparison, and I think it's all awesome, it's certainly currently not a very good comparison, because we are not really like Minecraft at the moment in terms of gameplay. You know, that kind of open-ended, procedurally generated world, we don't have that. Our worlds are currently, they are all made by designers, so they're much more specific. As a consequence, they're probably also more beautiful, but they're not as open-ended as Minecraft is. that said personally I've
Wouter:
[8:01] Played thousands of hours of minecraft at this point and i love the game and the one of the things i appreciate most about minecraft is just the feeling that you're in a world where absolutely every block is modifiable like when you're playing minecraft you don't feel like you're in some kind of static scenery or whatever you know you look at any any mountain or whatever it's like i can dig right through that if i want to i can make my base right in the middle of that mountain if i i desire there's nothing going to stop me and that kind of level of agency and creativity and you know i'm in control of this world i can do with this world whatever i want to i think i think is super important and i think that's where a lot of other games fall flat you play like a triple a game nowadays and it's like yeah it highlights one thing you can interact with and the rest of the world is all completely static you can't touch you can't even move things it feels so disappointing after having played games like Minecraft, I feel people that have spent a lot of time with Minecraft to have different expectations of how interactable a game is.
Wouter:
[9:06] And that's probably the most important aspect that we're trying to inherit from Minecraft, if you will.
Wouter:
[9:14] In our game still, you'll need certain tools to be able to break certain things down and whatnot, so there's limitations. But in theory, any world you're in, if you get the right tools, you can break the entire world down. You can delete it all and just end up with like nothing um so and i think i think that kind of feeling even if you're not going to act on it that level of power is something that really appeals to certain certain group of gamers it certainly appeals to me a lot and of course you know most game designers they they built the game they want to play so and there you go so yeah a lot of influence from from minecraft um what i really do not enjoy in minecraft is the combat i think it's very clunky and yeah not that fun and i've played a lot of first person shooters in my life i think they're very fun so our game has you know has guns and you know they're a lot they're satisfying to use on like you know hitting skeletons with a sword in minecraft so i'm trying to do do better there and mix in uh aspects of other games and i think the other aspect, I guess, is a little bit more goal-driven. Minecraft does not have too much in terms of quests in the vanilla game. We're trying at least for those players that want to have a reason why they're in that world and why they're doing things to have interesting NPCs with interesting stories.
Wouter:
[10:37] So yeah, that's how we're different. I guess very influential games for me are, of course, the Bethesda games when it comes to the RPG side of things. Also have a big history like in shooters playing games like doom and quake since forever so um yeah i'm trying to mix that all in a wonderful cocktail of gameplay
Tyler:
[11:00] Yeah it's very uh it has the rpg elements and it's very simple though like where you basically when you level up you just pick one of three upgrades and so on and so forth uh as opposed to you know doing something similar to fallout say or built you know uh going full full-blown rpg mode with like the old school dungeons and dragons character you know building style um i thought this was a nice way to you know make it i would say easier but also sort of kid friendly like kids a kid could jump in and just like really easily understand and into this and even an old person who doesn't really play video games could do the same thing uh or me who's lazy uh just doesn't want to think too much but i i really like the the progression that you get as you you start off in the first kind of like, island where you get to go out and like okay you meet a person they give you a quest and then you just sort of have this log of like okay these are all the different things you can do on the island but there is an overarching goal as you stated earlier where you basically your point is to gather up all of these orbs and get the heck out of here but you don't know that from the jump you sort of, uh,
Tyler:
[12:06] iteratively discover what you're supposed to do as you go. And if you want to, you can just run around shooting zombies. I mean, that's fun too.
Wouter:
[12:13] Or slimes or what have you. That's actually what we see that people do is like when I watch people, videos of people playing it, it's very interesting that a lot of them, they start discovering, you know, that the, the world is very modifiable kind of thing. And they completely stray off the quest and they just start whacking everything with their, with their sword or with a gun, whatever. And they just spend a whole bunch of time doing that. Which I think is kind of as intended. So, And yeah, the leveling up system, I would say that is still to be developed further. One thing that you notice definitely that you just get to pick from three, that's also very intentional. What I'm trying to do here is make every playthrough a little bit more interesting by not like there's certain players going like, oh, I figured out that I'm going to put all my points in the damage because that's the way I like to play. And I get the most powerful character, the most quickly, but that does result in kind of like this min-maxing style of gameplay where everything always feels the same kind of thing. And by making this picking, it's like sometimes you have to make do and it's like, okay, this time I'm a character that doesn't have as much damage because I didn't get to pick those things, but I'm much tankier or I can run faster or whatever and therefore your play style will differ every time. And that's kind of a direction we're trying to go with this to ask players to kind of experiment with that.
Tyler:
[13:41] Yeah, Vampire Survivors, I think, really had a huge influence on making it. It's in vogue now to kind of force the player, like here you have three options, that's it.
Wouter:
[13:50] Okay.
Tyler:
[13:51] Sort of a random sort of thing, but you know, you level up, you get three, you choose between three traits, and then that's what you level up again, and then you can choose again, and so on and so forth. But it does make every new playthrough interesting. it's you can't you or you can't just be like i i want to be uh 100 damage focused i don't care about how much health i have i don't care about this or whatever that happens to be um but overall like it it makes a lot of sense i think to do it that way um even even from just the designs designer standpoint it it gives you the ability to sort of like introduce a bit of randomization, uh without it being you know over so i wanted to ask is it random or is it based on the number of uh levels that you've made that you get certain choices the.
Wouter:
[14:42] Which which of the three it currently picks to offer you is completely utterly random yes there's no logic behind that in any kind of way yeah
Tyler:
[14:50] Yeah that's a cool choice or you can.
Wouter:
[14:53] Be lucky unlucky and it's like oh well you only get the well there's three choices right so there's usually something good in in between them but you know you can be unlucky and it's like hey you get the upgrade you're carrying capacity your swimming ability and maybe some something else that you didn't link and it's like okay well deal with it
Tyler:
[15:10] Thus far swimming has not really come into the game for me very much other than just skirting around the sides of the island or whatever but i can imagine you might end up in a situation where oh i really wish i had upgraded that skill and if you had been forced to do so ahead of time you'll be like oh thank god i got introduced that choice and i.
Wouter:
[15:31] Did yeah it's actually if you do go swimming you'll find that swimming is actually somewhat dangerous um like if you stay in the water long it depletes your stamina and if you're in the water with no stamina you can start taking damage and sinking away so that's not a thing unlike the initial islands that we have but on the larger bodies of water it's it's you know some some places you might want to go might be a little bit more challenging because of that feature and that's kind of i guess a survival ish aspect of the game I was kind of inspired by Valheim on that mechanic where you know you're really looking at the world and there's certain crossings and you're like I'm not going to be able to make that and I thought that was very interesting that you can't just you have to create a boat you can't just say I'm going to swim all the way across the sea like you could do in you know survival light games like Minecraft you can swim forever it doesn't matter so So I thought that was interesting in terms of a way that a designer can limit where you can go in the world or, you know, make that a more interesting choice, basically.
Tyler:
[16:41] You were talking about wanting the combat to be, you know, more fun than it is, like Minecraft, say, and everything. We actually, I don't know if you were in there, but we were connected at least by people in the Warfork Discord. So folks that were, it was just like a fork of Warsaw, which is a fork of other things, all that kind of thing. But essentially, first-person shooters that are very much like old-school Quake, CPMA, you know, heavy combat-oriented games. So apparently, at least you have fans in there who are looking at this game from that perspective.
Wouter:
[17:19] Well, I have a lot of history there, right? I still play the game Quake World to this day regularly. And you'll also find that Vox Isle, some people even sometimes complain about that. It's if you will it's on the fast side like the default walking speed is higher than than than most games you're very agile in terms of how you can jump from place to place you can make big jumps um and and yeah the the gunplay depending on the kind of gun you get there's definitely crappy guns in in some of the worlds but it is is pretty powerful so um and that is intentional it's again is kind of my background so it's what i like uh but yeah warsaw it's all that's all very very quake adjacent i would say so and i also used to work on a open source game and engine first but like it's called cube which like there's also a lot of people in that community who've been following what i'm doing with voxel kind of thing so there's there's lots of connection there
Tyler:
[18:20] Yeah i love quick world i actually went to qh land a couple of years ago.
Wouter:
[18:24] And oh really i
Tyler:
[18:25] Feel like loctar is an old friend.
Wouter:
[18:27] And oh really thanks yeah also
Tyler:
[18:30] Yeah we worked together a lot.
Wouter:
[18:31] At least i know of all those people and i'm personally but i always you know always watch their watch their matches so pretty amazing people yeah off the charts really
Tyler:
[18:43] Really loved actually being there in person to watch the the tournament because yeah i mean seeing it online is one thing and then seeing them all at their desks like and there's there's like no bad blood like everybody's super.
Wouter:
[18:54] Cool oh yeah just
Tyler:
[18:56] Girlfriend like competition but.
Wouter:
[18:57] Because the community is so old by now is like you know everyone knows everyone it doesn't make any sense to yeah to try to be a shitty player and it's not worked very well well
Tyler:
[19:07] You know it's mostly like dads at this point it's like the same group of people that were you know at each other's throats maybe 20 years ago like man we've been at each other's throats for 20 years and we all have kids now it's beautiful.
Wouter:
[19:18] Yeah yeah it's amazing
Tyler:
[19:20] So when did you start playing Quake.
Wouter:
[19:23] I did start right at the start uh in 96 um and i was lucky to be studying for my phd at the time so i was a university and we had like a nice a nice internet connection there so i would had a big advantage of role the modem players sorry for him players um so yeah played played since then kept at some point quick two quick three can ride i just kept playing took a couple of breaks along the way but you know a couple years ago i started playing again and i've been playing ever since actually um and there's a good there's a good good group of people in north america that that play the game so it's small but still big enough that you can get get your games going yeah
Tyler:
[20:06] It was a struggle it's probably like several years ago now but there was the u.s quake and doom community that was ran by a couple of dudes named Nationwide Moose and Messiah. And I had a lot of involvement in some of the tournaments that got planned there. But it was really a struggle, not necessarily to find people in North America who want to play Quake, but do so competitively, specifically in Quake World.
Tyler:
[20:32] We hosted a couple of pretty good, solid tournament turnouts. And then I think one year I had a charity event where I got, oh my goodness, I got a couple of like top level Quake world players to just kind of show up and do like a exhibition, you know, three or four maps. And that was really, really fun. But yeah generating interest amongst like young people and arena fps incredibly hard it's yeah they're they're used to something like minecraft where they they're a god and they can do anything they want i'm like well this game not only does it have a really high skill ceiling but also doesn't teach you how to do it you got to just know the right people and get introduced all the different techniques and uh be able to open up your games files and modify things all kinds of stuff it's.
Wouter:
[21:17] I'm actually not disappointed like the amount of like new players that are still flowing in in in the north american quake world community is is pretty good we still even occasionally have tournaments like there's currently we're still in the finishing stages of a a dual tournament that was north america and also people from australia joined in um and that's still ongoing, and it has some amazing players in there. Um, really, really, really good games. So on par with the best of Europe, really. Uh, but yeah, Europe has the advantage of it, such larger community, they can actually have, you know, four and four leagues and stuff like that, which in North America wouldn't work so well anymore.
Tyler:
[22:01] Well, it's Scandinavia, I think by far is the dominant force in the in quick world but it's because they you know it's the same five or six people that have been playing this since a game came out together on high-speed internet or at land parties and such.
Wouter:
[22:15] So yeah um they just keep going
Tyler:
[22:18] Yeah like i i think at the tournament we had one we were all very proud there's like we have one american who made it into the finals but otherwise it's finland norway sweden etc yeah.
Wouter:
[22:31] Lost qh land we had a couple of americans go down there and and someone pretty good so one day we'll win
Tyler:
[22:39] Yeah one day i.
Wouter:
[22:41] Can only hope
Tyler:
[22:42] It's funny that you you're like cheering for the american side now but how long
Tyler:
[22:47] have you been in the states yeah.
Wouter:
[22:48] That's funny because i'm actually from holland um i actually spent most of my quake world early quake world career in the uk that's where i was studying but yeah i've been in i've been in the united states since 2004 so 20 years now um and some of that in texas and most of that in california um so yeah very much
Tyler:
[23:17] So you said you were in like San Francisco. I lived in Monterey, if you know where that is for.
Wouter:
[23:22] About a year. Oh yeah, of course. Been there plenty of times. Beautiful.
Tyler:
[23:25] Yeah, it's beautiful. Especially when you go down to Carmel by the sea and all that stuff.
Wouter:
[23:29] Oh yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I love Carmel.
Tyler:
[23:34] Whereabouts in Holland, like Amsterdam area?
Wouter:
[23:38] Oh yeah, I was born in Utrecht and I studied in Amsterdam. I lived a little bit low over the place, but yeah.
Tyler:
[23:45] Yeah i have a friends all over the country i don't i don't know why but i was just like a i i attract dutch people for some reason but i.
Wouter:
[23:55] Really a very a very rude personality that that would be the way to attract dutch people
Tyler:
[23:59] Forward yeah being just assertive.
Wouter:
[24:03] Very direct uh thing yeah
Tyler:
[24:05] No i really loved uh just going all over the country um so like specifically like my one of my best friends lives in Hendrik-Gito-Ambacht, which is near Rotterdam. Oh, okay.
Wouter:
[24:15] Yeah. I've heard of that. Never been there, but yeah.
Tyler:
[24:18] It's a weird place to like, I go to, I tell people like, well, I'm going to Holland. They're like, where are you going to go? I'm like, oh, Friesland and like this other town you never heard of. And like most people just go straight to the red light district of Amsterdam, say that they've seen Holland and that's it. I went all over. But it's a beautiful place. And yeah, like you said, lots of rude people, but I get along with rude people, I think. I had this experience where I was getting off a train in a small town in the middle of the night, and I just had a backpack on. This dude just walked right up to me. He's like, hey, you're not from here. And I'm like, I'm not. He's like, oh, well... Um where are you going i'm like i don't know i'm gonna go find a hotel meeting my friend in like three days and he said okay you will come with me and i'm like all right yes sir and took me yeah literally took me to his house introduced me to his family gave me a beer called the hotel that was like in the next town over booked me a room and drove me there because it was he was just so assertive about you're not just gonna wander around on the streets okay and it was a really it was nice but it was also very direct as opposed to scandinavia where no one will ever do that you'll never have a stranger just walk up and talk to you for no reason right.
Wouter:
[25:34] Yeah yeah they're willing to know you before they start talking yeah
Tyler:
[25:38] For sure for sure um so you studied in the uk and then you came to did you go to texas first or.
Wouter:
[25:46] No i actually spent some time in germany first so I worked for Crytek there on the original Far Cry game and after that is when I moved to the United States so I went first to Texas that was working at a university actually we had a master's program for game development and I somehow put it in my head that I'd be a good programming teacher for game development of that sort that was actually a lot of fun I had so many students and so many projects it was really cool And while I worked there, I also worked with the local Texas game companies, and particularly with Gearbox on Borderlands and whatnot. But yeah, at some point I decided that California was going to be for me, and moved over here, and did some more work for game companies. I also worked for EA Maxis. But at some point I decided to join Google, because Google was going to start up a game team, and I wanted to be part of it. And did that for a while.
Wouter:
[26:52] And yeah, after a while being there, I was like, I need to be doing what I need to be doing, which was, you know, working on this kind of game project that I'm doing right now. So I set it in motion and luckily it all kind of worked out so far.
Tyler:
[27:06] Yeah, it seems to be going well enough for you, man. I mean, like I said, dude, just watching the Kickstarter kind of grow day by day. And like, so is this your primary work right now as Vox Isle or do you have other things going on as well? Oh yeah.
Wouter:
[27:21] Cause I'm a hundred percent on this.
Tyler:
[27:23] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I admire that a lot. Just being able to take those risks and, and go all in on your own idea. Um, as opposed to, yeah. Yeah. Working for.
Wouter:
[27:35] At some point you just got to ask yourself, like, what do I really want to do in life and then try to accomplish it. And, and yeah.
Tyler:
[27:43] So you the willingness to get up and uproot your life and go to another place for work or otherwise is very admirable because most folks don't do that even though you know it's in some circles it's like everyone has done that obviously or we wouldn't be here but just to the general person they never leave home uh do you feel like you were always an adventurous person or you know just not tied to any particular place.
Wouter:
[28:07] I'm not sure it always was like that but i guess the more you do it the more you notice it's not a big deal and then you keep doing it i think that's that's probably it you know it seems scary to go live in another country but then you do it and it's a lot of fun and then you're always like where am i going to go next and suddenly you're just kind of open to opportunities from different places like i ended up in texas because i was working with people in germany that were from texas and they knew that they were starting up this program at the university there and it's like i was like oh i bet that'd be cool and then it's like are you sure because i'm going to hook you up with the the dean of the program and sure and i fly down there i had really good experience with these people and before you know it i'm living in texas you know so um but yeah that was already after having lived in a couple of countries in europe so i was and i generally like the idea of going to live in the united states i've been there a bunch of times and And I just generally like the culture here, which is a strange thing to say for a European, but I do.
Wouter:
[29:13] And yeah, all worked out. I'm probably not going to go anywhere for a while.
Tyler:
[29:18] No, I think that's great, man. Just in general, like Bay Area kind of stuff, did you adopt a love for football? Or have you...
Wouter:
[29:28] I haven't gone quite that far. I guess I must say, even when I was in Europe, I was never that much into sports. Because it was like Nougar or Formula One or whatever. So, yeah, all the sports that go here in the United States, I have no idea. I had this lady pick something up the other day and I brought it brought up to my front door and she was all like yeah oh I'll take it quickly because I'm sure you're watching the Super Bowl I didn't mean to interrupt and I'm going like what oh that's going on today you know I had no idea so my idea of watching sports is is watching you know QH LAN replays so I
Tyler:
[30:06] Understand both sides but it's really it's really interesting like as you said like I don't think most Europeans would say that they fully like I just feel at home in in American culture. I didn't feel at home in European culture for the most part. I would say I liked the Netherlands probably more than any other country I've been to that's not America, but it is interesting. Just finding yourself as a stranger in a strange land, I think, is one of the most important things that anybody, any young person could do just to really figure out what is it that I really like and don't like. Because you get thrown into another culture and you very quickly realize the difference experiences and then you choose what you do and don't assimilate
Tyler:
[30:48] to you as opposed to just kind of like this is who i am from the beginning um so.
Wouter:
[30:54] Like i would say so yeah i would i've talked with this about this with people many times and i would absolutely recommend everyone to try this at least once like it will change your life having lived in another country and you will never be the same yeah in for what i see in a good way so to everyone listening come on let's go figure out where you want to be do it
Tyler:
[31:19] My wife jokes with me a lot that there's very few places in the world where we could go and i wouldn't be able to find a couch to sleep on between the games industry and the military like i just have people all over the world like like you know hey you know want to fly to cairo for a couple weeks or whatever like i know a guy we could sleep on his couch probably so it'll just cost us a plane ticket and whatever we you know spend while we're there that's awesome yeah i.
Wouter:
[31:46] Think had the same at some point i did like a trip around the world and i just stayed at people i knew throughout the throughout the world it
Tyler:
[31:53] Was pretty out surfing very fun where are some of the more interesting places you've been um.
Wouter:
[32:00] On that trip i went to japan korea china australia india Singapore, Dubai, Turkey, a bunch more places. And yeah, most of those places I hadn't been to. So that was super cool. I still need to do more, but a good start.
Tyler:
[32:25] What did you take away from that trip, though?
Wouter:
[32:30] I think it's similar to what you were saying before, is that actually a lot of these places, like in terms of what they do like this there's so much similarities like the biggest difference is actually the language you come to places like you're in china whatever and it's like yeah okay my chinese not that great so that's definitely a big hurdle but everything else that's going on is like it's not that different from from other places and certainly nowadays of course but you know technology invading everything so it's it's not that crazy if you can overcome the language hurdle. Even that's not so hard. I remember just struggling with a couple of Chinese words and just throwing some English in there, and I was able to do absolutely everything.
Tyler:
[33:12] Yeah i've found that oftentimes and privileged as an american as i am you know basically you need to know how to ask someone that they speak english like and then i mean for for me i also found that like just just expressing polite like gratitude is probably the most important thing like learning how to say thank you yeah it goes a long way in whatever like country you happen to be in um maybe me and depending on your goals maybe like um you know if i'm in a spanish-speaking country i need to know how to say two more beers please etc yes um maybe maybe know how to say i love you if you if you're into that sort of thing oh yeah.
Wouter:
[33:54] And come in handy
Tyler:
[33:55] For sure it's not it's not that hard and i'm.
Wouter:
[33:58] Gonna miss those opportunities
Tyler:
[33:59] I find it to be like as i said being sort of privileged to be from an english-speaking country because if you go to other places i feel like the struggle is that you know you you learn your your native language and then you must learn English in order to be able to participate in the world um and to a large degree you know if I talk to someone from Pakistan or you know pretty much anywhere that's what underdeveloped countries, the first thing they're going to do is learn English if they want to be able to participate in like I want to go to university I want to go study science I want to be any of the any of this stuff English.
Wouter:
[34:33] Um yeah so in in a lot of countries certainly where i'm from that's almost like kind of a guarantee because we get so much english media and yeah we learn at school so not even not even much of a struggle in fact i would say that you native english speakers are at a disadvantage because you know a lot of you only really speak english i'm not sure about you but whereas you know i i was young and was able to speak English, French, and German pretty okay.
Tyler:
[35:04] So yeah, I wouldn't say that I'm fluent in any other language, but I've just been blessed that I studied languages. So I had French in school and then I studied Arabic while I was in the military. Oh, wow. And then I got to go live in Denmark and, you know,
Tyler:
[35:18] Danish is one of the more annoying languages I've had to actually have.
Wouter:
[35:21] Oh my gosh. Yeah. Whenever I hear Danish, I'm like, I, the funny thing is people mistake it for Dutch or mistake the country, even for Holland sometimes. And I'm like, it's, it's completely incomprehensible to me more so than say Swedish, Swedish, I can kind of, it seems easy to learn Danish. Oh my God. It sounds, it sounds crazy.
Tyler:
[35:44] The, the, the three key Scandinavian languages that are so similar in terms of like the written language. So if I'm reading any of those three, I'm pretty good and solid, but understanding a danish person speaking is like the joke is you know it's a if you get a nor nor someone from norway drunk they start speaking danish because they're slurring all their words yeah that's.
Wouter:
[36:10] Funny you say that i have the same impression like when i hear danish i feel like that's it sounds to me like a drunk farmer
Tyler:
[36:15] Yeah i mean that is very most of the country, yeah.
Wouter:
[36:20] Sorry danish people you're all wonderful
Tyler:
[36:23] I'm actually going to have a couple of danish game developers on soon so we'll talk shit about holland all.
Wouter:
[36:28] Right please please do
Tyler:
[36:29] Yeah and i just think that it was lucky for me to get exposed to all that stuff because i grew up in you know alabama and i there was just no the most i was going to learn is maybe spanish you know like i said working on farms and stuff like that you're you're going to pick up a little bit of spanish but yeah.
Wouter:
[36:48] That's pretty awesome man yeah very cool
Tyler:
[36:50] I i grew to appreciate the fact that uh this is not the only country in the world and this is not the only language that gets spoken and all that yeah but um but as opposed to my uncle lives in switzerland and just years of learning french and german and german swiss and all that all that stuff is very oh wow.
Wouter:
[37:12] German swiss there's another crazy language
Tyler:
[37:14] Yeah or swiss german however you're supposed to say yeah even you know even if you're like really good at german switch your lines like okay whole new ball game here congratulations yeah do you do you feel like learning about all these different cultures and seeing all these different places has influenced your game design principles or just
Tyler:
[37:36] some of the ideas that you had for making a game that.
Wouter:
[37:39] Would probably be a stretch to claim that And it does feel quite separate, you know, how my game design has been influenced. Definitely because the games I played, and I do think I would have played, it's likely that I would have played those games, even though I had stuck in Holland for the rest of my life. So I don't think so.
Wouter:
[38:04] Do you feel... Certainly, I mean, what has influenced me, I mean, and indirectly is making a game like this and starting a company that's definitely influenced by me living in the United States I think if I was stuck in Holland for the rest of my life I would have not been so quote unquote adventurous near live in San Francisco and the idea is like you know go make a startup it's like around every corner kind of thing and at some point you go and it's like maybe I should make a start do a startup kind of thing or you know it's it's it's very infectious over here i've not been very commercially minded person for most of my life like one of my first big game projects the the cube engine you know that was entirely open source and free and only later it's like huh maybe could have charged money for this i don't know but i was not even on my mind when i was living in europe because we're doing other things it's like um but yeah living here it's like huh maybe the world needs this I'm just gonna build this and it's gonna be awesome so yeah that since I've been influenced very much by the United States I will say
Tyler:
[39:15] It's in general much easier to start a business in the States.
Wouter:
[39:20] Oh, for sure.
Tyler:
[39:21] Society rewards me for doing that as opposed to like Germany is, you know, there's more laws in Germany than there are like in any other, all the other countries in the world combined basically. But, you know, you start a business, I want to make a video game company. Cool. I also want to sell merchandise, new business, get a license for that. Like, great. Okay. And then, well, we want to do the new thing. And more fees and it can be very compounding. I have a really close friend who lives in Holland as a matter of fact who we were going to go into business together and we still are but the decision came down to basically are you going to start the business there or I'm going to start the business here and then even after he started the business there it became so difficult that we were like you know what, let's just have an LLC I'll run it here and then it'll be much easier for you to just do work as a contractor than it will be for us to Go through all the hoops and jumps to actually get this thing off the ground on that side of the world. Which is, I think there's a big shift in general where in the States right now, we almost got to a point where we were starting to think like, man, it's getting hard to run a business again. Like we're getting more and more like the European model. And I think a lot of people don't want that. And there's pros and cons to both. You definitely want some sort of regulation because you can't have people just doing whatever they want.
Tyler:
[40:42] Unchecked capitalism has its faults. we certainly found that out in the states the hard way um but what's been your experience i feel like there's such a strong culture of that especially in uh in san francisco i mean there's so many companies especially tech companies.
Wouter:
[40:56] It's quite a contrast um i never had an officially a company in europe but i was part of crytek for a while and i could see just like at some point there was this thing that you had to have like crytek was growing and you had to have this internal group of employees or some kind of employee board or whatever that would help decide on things and i decided i was going to be part of that and as part of that i looked at some german laws around like how you can fire someone or not or whatever it's like oh my god this stuff is so crazy complex in that case it wasn't our advantage because we could we could help people from not getting fired basically um that was definitely very difficult um Yeah, the funny thing is that I moved to the, I moved to San Francisco, not because I wanted to make a startup, but because I just really liked the place. And so that was kind of like coincidence. But yeah, now that I'm doing a startup and it's like a lot of people that are doing startup, like they're all right here. I meet anyone and look on our LinkedIn or whatever. And it says like, hey, San Francisco, you want to go grab coffee? And that definitely is a super unfair advantage that I'm not noticing. So I don't mind. Yeah. Um, there's definitely the one hard part about running a business in the United States that I'm noticing is that every time I hire someone in a different state,
Wouter:
[42:17] that state has different, different laws that I have to follow. And, uh, that is definitely a bit of work.
Tyler:
[42:24] Are you, are you employing people across state boundaries or are you contacting them? Yeah. Okay. I have both.
Wouter:
[42:30] Employees and contractors depending on, you know, what, how much they're doing for the company.
Tyler:
[42:36] Yeah.
Wouter:
[42:37] But nowadays there are, you know, there's a solution for everything. So there's startups that help you, you know, do payroll and other conforming stuff for your startup in different states. So when you use that, but they're not all that great necessarily.
Tyler:
[42:53] Just in general, dealing with the taxes, the different state taxes across the borders and then you as the employer having to deal with that. This is actually pretty interesting to me, but this in the keep itself is a business and we generally just have contractors because we're basically trying to avoid that becoming a problem.
Tyler:
[43:15] And the system sort of, you know, it kind of rewards both sides of the coin. In one hand, it's like if you're an employer, you're paying basically half of the employee's taxes and certain benefits are expected and all that. And that's great. But then there's the other option to just pay people more and allow them to choose for themselves how to best deal with that. So if you're a 1099 contractor working for a company in California, but you live in New Mexico, you just ask for the money you need in order to cover those expenses yourself instead of the company doing it. And I think that sometimes that could be taking advantage of people, you know, and I've definitely been on the wrong side of that deal. Don't get me wrong, but if you're a good employer, you'll, you'll kind of like, no, you know, I need to, I need to pay this person, you know, equitably such that they can take into consideration their health insurance, that kind of thing.
Wouter:
[44:10] Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that. In fact, I've had situations with people where, like, for example, abroad, for the longest time, I could only get people on contract. And then I had the opportunity to be able to employ people there through an intermediary. And I asked the people there, it's like, hey, do you want to be, you know, have a fixed salary or you want to continue on contract? And some of them actually, they chose, like, I want to continue on contract because I already am able to do, you know, my own health insurance and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it's just better money for me. Right. And so that's cool. But the problem is, of course, that like, again, depending on the state, if you employ someone for a certain amount of hours on contract or whatever,
Wouter:
[44:50] then potentially you're liable for misclassifying them and stuff like that. So you have to be super careful with that.
Tyler:
[44:56] For sure. It's where a good CPA comes in. Like you really got to.
Wouter:
[45:01] Well, yeah, that's the thing though. If you have a small company like mine, then initially you just end up doing absolutely everything yourself. Right. So I've learned a lot about payroll and state rules and all these things that I never wanted to know. But, you know, at least initially, it's kind of interesting, you know, being a person that has mostly spent my entire life doing programming and, of course, game design and adjacent and even level design and other things. But all these kind of business tasks of, you know, you know, HR, payroll, marketing, business development, and all these kind of facets of running a business, you know, I'm kind of new to all that stuff, but it's after having programmed for I guess four years at this point or something, you know, it's kind of nice to have some new problems to, to be, to be busy with. And certainly, you know, the general problem, how do you hire and keep and maintain a good team of people, man, that's definitely, you know, that's definitely a job in and of itself is definitely both very interesting and a lot of hard work.
Tyler:
[46:06] I actually admire your willingness to do the absolutely everything route because I, I, I I kind of purposefully structured myself such that I would not be in that position, which involves basically taking things a lot slower than I think a lot of startups would. And there's pros and cons to everything. I was in a situation where it was like, first of all, I was in the air force for six years and then immediately like walking into the world of like, Oh, I need to like be a regular person who doesn't have someone to tell me every little detail of everything all the time. So that was a transition on its own. And then having the business in place, I was then going to uproot my life and go to Europe for a few years and leave and still run an American business remotely. So I had to have like, there's no chance I'm doing everything. I got to have a CPA, you know, a registered agent and all that kind of stuff. So I, you know, I basically put the, put the business, you know, at the registered agent so that I could, you know, so it could legally still be there without me being a resident of the state that it was in. And that was, I guess, you know, I learned a lot.
Wouter:
[47:17] Yeah.
Tyler:
[47:18] Yeah.
Wouter:
[47:19] Yeah. I looked at that, but, you know, so far at least, you know, they're very expensive and I need to tell them a lot of stuff just to get them to do the thing that I want to be saving time on. And then it's like, it's almost sometimes like, okay, I'm just going to quickly do it myself.
Tyler:
[47:36] And delegation and project management is a skill all in its own.
Wouter:
[47:40] I know I still need to be better at that. But I think, you know, once and if the company grows, then they maybe have a space for like a dedicated business person or whatever. That would be great. But we're not at that size yet. Yeah.
Tyler:
[47:54] Now you can always outsource it too. You know, you can contract a solid project manager, you know, marketing, that kind of stuff. It all comes into play. You seem to be doing well enough, you know, as it is. And I think that's awesome. And hopefully the game generates enough revenue where, you know, I can hire whatever I need.
Wouter:
[48:12] That is the plan.
Tyler:
[48:15] Do you have kind of expectations such that maybe year one what Fox Isle should sell to meet your goals?
Wouter:
[48:27] That's a good question. I mean, to be honest, the market generally is so crazy right now that it's really hard to have general expectations. There's so many games. There's so much stuff going on. And as you know, the market is in an interesting turmoil that affects things. It's weird because I have a game that I have a confidence in that at least if we keep pushing it in the right direction, that this is a lot of potential to be fairly big in all sorts of ways. I have no doubt this can be a large, successful game. How long does it take us to get it to exactly that kind of polish level and at content level before gamers will agree that indeed that they should all be. That's also hard, right? We're at the current state of the game where we're confident we can go into early access. We have a lot of content. Sorry, it's a lot of fun to play, but there's definitely like lots more that we want to do. What does that translate to in terms of commercial success?
Wouter:
[49:35] Again, I feel like this could be very successful. Then again there are so many stories of you know games releasing on steam and for whatever reason you know they're not quite there yet and they have like abysmal sales or whatever so those are kind of like the extreme points it's i don't exclude you know that it can go one way or the other
Wouter:
[49:58] Um i do feel that like now that we're kind of doing a bunch of marketing activities for the run up to early access. I'm just noticing how hard that aspect is. It's just really, it seems that like whenever we do reach gamers, they're very quick to go, ooh, what's that? And then be very interested and wishlist it. We've noticed that from the percentage of people that we reach and then it then
Wouter:
[50:26] goes out and wishlists it is very, very high compared to other games. So that would be great, right? it sounds like okay you got a game that's attractive and people people want it but just getting to the point where you reach those people that is not a given um you know something like you can wait until the game goes viral or whatever or some huge streamer picks it up and and then suddenly the floodgates are are open you know that would be great but then you're just waiting for that if you just want to push that forward yourself you actually don't have it's it's not that easy to to push that i mean yeah we're posting stuff on on socials and we're doing all the things and um
Wouter:
[51:08] Yeah, that marketing aspect is how do you reach the gamers so that they can see is like, huh, is this something I'm interested in? Do I want to wish list this and potentially buy it in the future? That is actually the hard part. And depending on how well we do with that in the near future, we're going to get, you know, part of that range of possible outcomes. And that's quite a widespread of possible outcomes, all the way from, you know, being the next PAL world to, you know, some game that sits in a corner of Steam and no one sees it. In that spectrum, that's all within the realm of possibilities. I hope it's not very interesting. I'm not expecting a PAL world success necessarily, or at least not straight away. But you just really don't know. So, and yeah, there's a certain number of sales per month that I have in mind that if we get that, we can, we can support the current team, basically. So that would be a very nice place to get to, right? Because that means we're, we're, we're long-term steady. And then depending on how, like how does sales develop, you can either grow the team or keep the team steady or whatever. The worst thing would be to have to shrink the team if, you know, sales are, are keeping lackluster for like a long time or something like that. So that's what I'm looking at, but really it's. at this point i i will not be able to say much of anything like after early access when we got the initial bump of sales from that we will know much more in terms of what trajectory we're on
Tyler:
[52:34] I think that's great and the early access model is is solid because you know you can have revenue coming in and continue to build out and you'll have people playing it they will also like organically share it with other people and that's a huge factor in the in the world of social media and all that is that you know you'll have content creators saying like this is what i think of it so far you know etc and all that kind of thing that's yeah in general i find with a any development i mean obviously you have like real triple a experience having worked on far cry and i think i even saw you were credited in uh borderlands 2 yeah.
Wouter:
[53:09] Well or like one and two yeah
Tyler:
[53:11] Very cool yeah and.
Wouter:
[53:13] Sim city i even worked on so i love the latest sim city which wasn't that great of a game but i worked on it
Tyler:
[53:18] All right but you've you've seen the machine you know in its full-fledged form so to speak yeah.
Wouter:
[53:24] Oh yeah i definitely know what it looks like to have a large triple a machine going and there's a lot of things that i've learned that i don't want to be doing with my company so that's cool
Tyler:
[53:33] That's exactly my experience was getting close to that and being like i don't think i like that but the experience of seeing how it works and taking the parts that you do like, deciding parts you don't like i don't want my employees to be treated this way
Tyler:
[53:48] i don't want my company to be represented this way etc yeah.
Wouter:
[53:51] It's definitely this there's so much stuff that we're we're doing different uh certainly what you're saying with early excess i think we have the kind of game that is very suited for early excess because you know a lot of people a lot of game companies go into early cities like yeah we want feedback from the players and that's usually bullshit in our case that is actually the thing because we're actively developing this thing we want people to be doing crazy stuff like building their own worlds and whatnot so we need to be super interacting with the people that are actually playing our game and it's also for the team it's like we've been working so long like almost three years now you know in private mostly and it's like getting some feedback on what um players actually like and what they're craving more of is going to be highly motivating for us to push those aspects further. So I'm very much looking forward to it. The downside is, I think, given the current wisdom of when you're supposed to go in early access, it's kind of like, oh, you're supposed to only go in early access when essentially your game is finished. And that's what a lot of game companies are doing right now. We're not necessarily doing that. We're going to early access a little bit earlier, exactly because we do want to, you know, work with our customers, basically. but hopefully our customers will appreciate that um and see how that goes
Tyler:
[55:15] So i i find with indies that don't have say the the experience of having worked in the games industry as a whole they struggle with making decisions like you were talking about just going into early access for no apparent reason you know it's or not for the reason that they say they are And it's more often than not, I have seen people that kind of just do what seems to be the trend without thinking about what it really means to do that. So if you, if you, and also just like, you got to be transparent, I think with your audience. Like if you say we're going into early access, this is what the game is going to be. And the reason why we're going into early access is because we need funding and we don't want to work with the publisher. That's fine. As long as everybody understands that's what the deal is. But for a game like this, where in which you are going to have people testing out the editors, they're going to be giving feedback on like, you know, I like this mechanic. I don't like that mechanic. And I wish you could do this or that is going to make your game a better game. Because that's the nature of the game is that it is a, the community is going to be largely the people who are making content at a certain point. And I think that's really, really smart.
Wouter:
[56:20] We have a we have a game also that is that is that is more open-ended right there's lots of different kind of gameplay possible it would be different if you had like a super story driven game and it's like you know the game designer is the all-knowing person and they are there they have this vision it needs to be executed exactly to a t and then the gamer showing up and it's like yeah we'd like it to be like a little bit more this or that it's like that wouldn't work but But in our case, you know, I already know from early, like I said, like our designers have taken our game like very much in a like very questy kind of direction kind of thing. And some early testers are going like, I like this game, but I want more that kind of open-ended sandboxy survival, do whatever the hell you want kind of experience, particularly in cold mode where you're playing with your friends. Um, and I'm like, okay, point taken. We're, we're likely going to be a big focus point, you know, post EA. To enable more of those kind of gameplay styles. Because not only were we planning it, but it's clear that people are wanting that from our game, as an example.
Tyler:
[57:28] One of the best pieces of business advice I've ever been given was that more companies die of indigestion than they do of starvation. And we were talking earlier about how, you know, like I went the go very, very slow route. Basically because I was like, I need to attain this skill or breach this goal
Tyler:
[57:46] before I even start talking about that next thing. Whereas the tendency, especially in Silicon Valley, it's just start a company, try to do everything all at once, and then get to a point where you, you actually have paying customers and you can't meet the needs of their service. And I think in games, early access is a good way of like, you'll kind of know what people's expectations are before you fully launch the game. Like you'll know what they want, what they, what they see is like, this would be the completed version of it. Of course you have that compared to your own vision as well it's going to be really cool but, um going back to like mistakes that i see indies make mistakes whatever just common maybe you call it like just the leveling up system of figuring out how it works but you ever heard of the smart goals model like the smart.
Wouter:
[58:34] Goals model yeah no that does not ring a bell
Tyler:
[58:37] It's a good old-fashioned acronym but it's like making your goals specific measurable attainable relevant and time-based So that's S-M-A-R-T. But I find that some people will get into making games and not have that laid out already. Like you basically need to have each of those boxes checked off before you can set an effective goal. Because otherwise you don't know what to measure yourself up against. Right. You need to be able to specifically say this is what the goal is. This is when we're going to attain it or when we plan to attain it at least does it actually, benefit my overall product and all the you know all of those factors come into play so i like to think in that in that regard whereas i didn't when i first started doing video game development i really just kind of had this open-ended idea like we're gonna make an fps in the doom engine, and it'll have i don't know some levels and all that kind of stuff see what you can come up with and leading a team very quickly I found out that the hardest part of leading a team is getting them to know what their goal is what's my motivation like an actor on stage.
Wouter:
[59:51] That's certainly super important if you know you actually want to have business success as opposed to just having a fun project that you're that you're working on we're certainly doing pretty okay along most of those since we have strong goals we know how to get there we know why we want them and what we want to achieve with them and to some extent i have numbers that i know i want to achieve that said i would say one aspect of our company that kind of goes against that grain is that we are very, very incremental company, I would like to call it. Which means that like most AAA companies, you know, once you get out of like their early prototypes, it's like you get big ass spreadsheets of, you know, all the art essence is going to be produced and all the enemies that we're going to have with all their hit points and everything like that. It's like, we just totally, utterly do not work like that. Like all our content, our art, our monsters, weapons, worlds,
Wouter:
[1:00:45] Gameplay features, they'll just kind of come online whenever however you know as the programming team is really working on just like hey what is the what's the best thing that we can now do to make the game better and we just do that and then we look at the next thing so it's very much or you know having a milestone it's like we got to have exactly this list of features done in three months from now that's cool but it's just it's not going to work out that way so in that sense that's that's one part we're doing doing very differently but a huge advantage of that is is that our game is always in a playable state it's always in a good state pretty much always whereas these triple a games i've worked on triple a i'm thinking of for example of of of when we're working on far cry and right up until months before the game was supposed to launch
Wouter:
[1:01:39] Pretty much every world was like in a state of disarray where it wasn't it wasn't really playable or really fun that really came together at the end uh luckily pretty rapidly like the game ended up being very good um but it took an enormous amount of doing and sleepless nights by certain certain people to kind of bring it all together at the end and until that moment like the first two years of its development it was just like random code features and assets were being built but they didn't form a coherent hole in any kind of way. And I remember working on that and testing, and it was just like everything felt broken and unfinished kind of thing for pretty much my entire time there until right at the end. Whereas our game has, you know, even two years ago, you could run around and shoot things and have some fun. And it's a lot better now, but it's not substantially changed in the sense that there's always a game there, basically. And, you know, every build we make, there's a whole bunch of new cool, cool stuff in there, but it's constantly improving. Um, but you know, the downside of that is that like, you know, I, I would not be able to tell you right now exactly what, what in three months, in a six months or whatever, how the game will look different. I don't have a clear picture of that.
Wouter:
[1:02:58] But working so far for us, so, you know, and that's part of the fun of doing something different, just kind of experimenting.
Wouter:
[1:03:06] Does this style of working work? Certainly as a programmer, I've always worked very incrementally, but that's potentially different. Like, can I have this working style? Does it work for my content people as well?
Wouter:
[1:03:19] And yeah, so far it does. I think we've even structured the editor such that it's very easy to kind of just kind of refactor your world, like what you do in code. You know, here you want to just restructure things, move some stuff around and have a slightly world play a little bit differently rather than feeling that you have to kind of rebuild the world or whatever um you know famously if you look back at the old editors from like doom and doom and quake days certainly doom if you wanted to shift like a bunch of rooms to like a different positional level that depending on the editor you were using that was not so easy and those kind of actions are definitely very very easy in our game because i want designers to just be able to decide any moment like okay players said that that area is too hard i need to move some stuff around to make it better and and that kind of work to be relatively easy to do so that's kind of what a lot of our company's processes are structured around i would say yeah did
Tyler:
[1:04:18] They do mention specifically like not having a real room over room you have to be very smart really play basically placing teleporters such that the player gets the experience of that or maybe even being really smart and like if you're clever, creating the visual that that exists even though it doesn't yeah.
Tyler:
[1:04:38] So we kind of like brushed over this but there's sort of a, a theoretical order of operations for for designing a game that where it makes sense all the way through iteratively like you said as opposed to having a bunch of shit and then having to make it all work at the very end um that that definitely tends to happen i've seen with like teams that are not the most experienced making a really big project for the first time so i've seen situations where you're trying to make an immersive sim, and you will be years into the development and there's really no game to play. Like, well, what have you done? Like, well, we've made a bunch of art. We've made some basic mechanics. Here's a whole world worth of levels, but there's no game here. And that is super frustrating. So when it comes to dealing with investors or in your case with players who are in a way also your investors because they're funding it to a degree. You sort of want to be, as you said, always in a state where it can be playable because that's how you communicate. This is the progress we've made. This is what we've done this month. This is what we've done this quarter, this year, whatever. Because I have seen games get straight up axed not because they weren't going to be a great game but because there was nothing there to test. There's no way to evaluate what.
Wouter:
[1:06:03] Has been delivered. and that's a very important point because unless you've done this before you might underestimate that getting from a point where you have a game that seems playable but it's not fun and there's clearly stuff missing but make that jump to a game which is now fun is so much more impossible than people think it is it's like
Wouter:
[1:06:26] Like the big problem is that the space of possible kind of gameplay designs is like gigantic. It's super multidimensional. It's gigantic. And most of the time where you're in a particular point, your game is a particular point, it's like you're in the fog. It's like you don't know how to get from one point of gameplay style to another because there's so many variables that you'd have to change. So you are with a game where it's playable. Maybe there's something there, but it's really clearly not fun. Fun enough kind of thing and then you don't know how to how to get the fun and you're you're basically screwed and that's what happens to a lot of games um and yeah for our game you know i think the cool thing is like you can play it and then there's a certain level of fun fun there and you can have kind of the conflict like it's it's going to be at least this fun that you're seeing right now and there's clearly lots of avenues to make it you know even better so you're on a good trajectory that does not have these impossible jumps uh in it and yeah we've been kind of on a trajectory for for for a while now and um the fun is only growing so but yeah it's it's it's super hard if you don't have a if you don't have a plan for that and you haven't tested that then good luck order
Tyler:
[1:07:49] Of operations aside what are some of the other things like habits of working
Tyler:
[1:07:54] in AAA versus working in D with your own company? Like, what are some of the takeaways? Like, do this, don't do that, etc.?
Wouter:
[1:08:02] Yeah, that's a good question. So certainly, you know, this amount of planning that we just talked about. I think the other big thing is like how you deal with your, how these companies deal with their employees. Most AAA companies are extremely regimented and you feel, if you're just a programmer or just a level designer or something like that. In most AAA companies, I don't feel a lot of agency to make the game go anywhere. And that is incredibly frustrating because I've myself been part of games on occasion where you feel the ship is going in the wrong direction or the ship is even sinking. And you're just there and it's like, well, clearly everyone is stressed out and frustrated that the game is not going the right direction, but no one feels like they can fix it. And the people at the top, they, they, they're constantly saying that they're fixing it, but then they're not fixing it. And it's just such a crazy situation. Um,
Wouter:
[1:09:02] To give you a random example, I remember Crytek, we had this producer, and he was doing something with how the guns function, like very super fundamental stuff about a game, like how the gun feels and whatnot. And I'm just a programmer, but I play a lot of first-person shooters, and I know what I like about gunplay. And I, I, I sent an email out to a bunch of people like, Hey, maybe we should do this. This will work better. And I got slapped down hard for not being a game designer. And it's like, what do you think you little programmer that, you know how the guns are supposed to work? And I'm like, what the hell? Anyone can have a good idea of how the guns are supposed to work.
Wouter:
[1:09:42] So that's a big difference. I think big AAA companies, um, I, a while ago, I thought it was like, I'm only ever going to go back into AAA if I'm the guy at the top, because I will not be able to deal with. You know being just executing stuff that's not that doesn't appear to be working and so you know my company not saying everything is ideal but i certainly i'm trying to hire people and then also set them on the way where basically like once they're inside the company is like okay you are your own unit kind of thing like i said the designers is like you are you are designing this world both visually story-wise and also to some extent gameplay right it's like i've made the gameplay that they can, they can give their own twist on it. Um, and it's like, that is also like, they, they may be able to discover like a balance in our gameplay. That's even better is what I had in mind. And same with the programmers, like, you know, one of, one of the main programmers I worked with, which was a guy I used to work with at Google and he's absolutely amazing programmer. And it's just so awesome that.
Wouter:
[1:10:46] You know i don't need to tell him anything he he works on stuff he makes decisions on what to what to work on because he's a total pro uh what's what's the most effective to work on when he implements it i usually don't check his scope when i do look at his going like yep that's exactly how i would have implemented it and when there's any kind of design associated with it he does a does a good job and you know and that's totally a game changer like having someone like that on your team is like, I, you know, I don't have, necessarily have time to, if he was more junior,
Wouter:
[1:11:19] I would not be able to manage him like all the time kind of thing. So, and I have basically having a team where, where everyone just does good stuff and, and they push things forward themselves. I'm not sure that can work with like, you know, with 200 people team where everyone just kind of does their own thing. I mean, valve is famously a company that kind of tries that approach. Um, We'll have to see if we grow, if that's maintainable. We have some structure now. We actually have a lead designer, another person who's very good at pushing things forward that kind of manages our design team.
Wouter:
[1:11:55] So we have some hierarchy in the company already kind of thing. And presumably, if you grow, you need more of that. But I think the challenge is to not let that hierarchy become something where the people at the bottom of the hierarchy feel like you know they don't have any effect on where the ship is going and the ship is going the wrong direction that their their voices are being ignored um because the person in the top thinks they're so smart um and i think that's that's a huge difference but you know i have easy talking because i have not led a 200 people company yet so um maybe i'll i'll fail just as hard as these other people will we'll see if we get there business
Tyler:
[1:12:36] Structure is a huge thing and it the size of the company absolutely makes a huge difference like valve having the, famously flat structure of like everyone sitting around a table and everyone gets an equal say and we all you know every there's no matter that's too small to be discussed and all that makes sense, If you have like 12 people, you know, a manageable group of people. And I find that as you grow and you get bigger, I've had this experience very directly. I mean, you've got to necessarily like a manager should have, you know, a manageable amount of people that work with them such that it's a more or less representative democracy. Because the last thing you want is to have a stand-up meeting with 60 people you know 40 of them don't need to be there it doesn't even apply to them the if.
Tyler:
[1:13:29] It's a three-hour long meeting only five minutes of them talking and they just otherwise are muted and yeah i don't i don't this doesn't matter to me etc and all that stuff but if you can kind of like structure it so that your managers of each team they know what everyone's interests are they can represent that well communicate that up the chain um in a hierarchy sense that's really great also i mean the the culture of the leader themselves like or the you know maybe it's oligarchical but the group of people at the top if they're a receptive person you know who's open to ideas and then you also have to have that balance of what to say no to not necessarily because it's a shitty idea but just because we have to ship a product and we if we keep you know feature creep is the term everyone uses. If we keep adding more new ideas for every little thing, if everything has to be discussed, we'll never get to the goal.
Tyler:
[1:14:23] I think coming from the military culture into the game design culture was an enormous shock for me. I mean, I went completely 180 degrees from 100% structure, and if you're at the bottom, shut the fuck up and don't ask about it, to every single person feels that they have a say, and then sort of like I said like finding that middle ground where it you know it works for everyone because the last thing you want to do is discourage someone to the point where they no longer want to work on the project especially if they're a good hand um yeah.
Wouter:
[1:14:56] That's a super super hard balance because yeah you don't have the meeting with the 40 people but those 40 people need to have a path that they feel they're doing meaningful work and their their voices their voices being heard and yeah you can't always do everything and certainly you know as the people working with me will will will tell you is like i'm you know this whole project has a strong amount of my vision in there not just game
Wouter:
[1:15:21] Design but also like you know world structure world building and also even on the technical side and you know like to throw in at this point that you know our engine is built on a custom programming language of mind making so that you kind of know just just exactly how insane i am so there's definitely a lot of strong strong vision um but you you know you've got to just be aware of like when when something is you know when someone has there's a better idea and i think egos get in the way of these larger companies i've seen so many examples of these people at the top that feel they have to push things through their their way just because otherwise what's their value and yeah then you're just being i i definitely just want to make a game that a lot of players really really really enjoy and if all my players are saying like this sucks then you know like what are you doing by just holding strong to it um but there are limits for example we've sometimes had to discuss you just give you a random example um I do have strong ideas about the kind of game like like my game design bias is towards
Wouter:
[1:16:27] Games I would call it with a lot of agency so where the player feels kind of very much in control they feel they can do a lot of things um as opposed to say games where the gameplay systems force the player to you know you can't go out of the bounds of the current area which very famous you know invisible walls and all that um you know you don't gain as much power from from from killing enemies or whatever there's bounds on like how much you can upgrade your character and all these things that are meant to keep the player like in a particular spot so it becomes easier to balance like my philosophy is more like
Wouter:
[1:17:06] Let players go wild uh one discussion for example we very often have in our design team is that some of the designers going like um i'm having a hard time because you know the player is supposed to go through like these things and unlock a door there and then do this quest and then you know finally get to that room where they get the reward but you know i'm having a hard time because if player really wants to they can use the jackhammer which is our destroyer tool kind of thing and they could just dig around that locked door and get in the room that way and again it's like how do we avoid that and they essentially are saying it's like i want you to stop it being possible from the players to destroy the world and i'm going like no what why are we doing that if a player wants to feel clever that they've circumvented a part of like the quest requirements by by digging around something that's not a broken game that's a game where players can be creative and choose their own paths and the quests are only there really to give the players some kind of structure if they want it they're not like in some kind of holy requirement that every part of the quest has to be fulfilled exactly in the way that the designer envisioned it right so as an example of like you know my general design philosophy so if if people in a company come around is like you know the games i play i really like it if the world was not destroyable and you know if the the the
Wouter:
[1:18:29] Player could not attain strong weapons by their own motivation that well or some kind of way to then i would say it's like okay sorry that's that's nice but really this goes against the grain of it and that's where i have to say no but that's the thing there's plenty of other examples where where you know it's not strong that's strongly part of the of the vision and you just make the game better um and you know a very simple example of that is that like originally I had designed all the items in the world to have a weight so that your inventory had like weight limits and that's how you do things. And it turned out to be very opaque. It turned out to be very hard to manage for players
Wouter:
[1:19:12] In terms of like figuring out like when they were overcumbered and they needed to drop items. And that was just not a really fun gameplay mechanic. And then our lead designer made a strong case for switching it to like a slot-based approach. So, you know, you can't carry more when your slots are full. But you don't particularly care, like, about the weight of the things that are in the slots. Right. And that made the game just so much more fun because you just very visually, clearly can see exactly, you know, what your limitations are.
Wouter:
[1:19:40] Turned out to be a better design, even though personally, I kind of liked the weight design more, but I had to admit, it's like, yeah, okay, we're going to make the game better for most players by switching this up and we switched it up and now the game's better, you know? So.
Tyler:
[1:19:55] There's this sort of age-old rule amongst game developers. When you're doing your marketing, don't talk about inventory management, which I think is dumb. For instance, I think when you're making something and the intention is for it to be fun, ideally, if you're dealing with something like inventory management, make that fun. As you said, it's not really fun to think about the weight of the object, but it may be fun to just think about, okay, well, this is the number of slots I have. A great great example was uh resident evil 4 and or resident evil in general and also uh there's another game that's sort of like doing a nice take on that that's coming out hopefully soon called gloomwood but the idea that you have a briefcase that's this size and the the number of slots in that briefcase that your object takes place you're sort of playing this little tetris game of getting stuff in there so like maybe this rifle will fit in the case but you know you have to turn everything sideways or whatever to fit it in there and that sort of gamifies and also makes it realistic what you could carry um and it you know make making one of these challenges a game in and of itself that's cool i like that sort of way of thinking about it um your way of doing it is perfectly valid too and also just being able to like you know iteratively like you pick up a backpack, you got a bag or a set, you know, the RPG, you know, sack of holding, uh,
Tyler:
[1:21:23] way of doing things, the Barry Poppins bag.
Wouter:
[1:21:25] You definitely have a way to expand your slots in many, many different ways. So, yeah.
Tyler:
[1:26:19] If you don't mind. So I'm, I'm, I am curious what your, what your marketing goals have been. I know, I know you said you're doing, I mean, obviously right now you're making podcast appearance, at least on this one. Do you have other shows that you're going to be part of?
Wouter:
[1:26:35] I haven't got that much lined up. I recently did do a kind of an interview with someone who has a Minecraft-related channel. And it's very cool. He reviews games, but then he also has interviews with developers interspersed in it. And I thought that was a really cool format. I'm definitely looking to do more of those, um, you know, and get my team involved, but they, they tend to be more shy than I am. I have no shame. Um,
Wouter:
[1:27:08] Did you say marketing goals, I guess? I mean, in the end, we have goals to take early access and build that up to, you know, a level of success for the game where we can support the team is the overarching goal, of course, of anything in most game companies. So how to best achieve that is to make early access into a success. That still is a thing that, you know, for most people, it's all about the wish lists, right? So, because the wishlists all get to hear that the game launches, and that really helps push it forward. And also, you know, the Steam algorithm is such that the more those people come in, they seem like, oh, this is a popular game, and it shows it to everyone else as well. So, you really depend on those wishlists, or like even Steam gamers that have not wishlisted it yet, for those to be able to see it and potentially get interested and buy it, or then wishlist and buy it later. That's cool, too. um so yeah most of the marketing is really is is geared towards that to get people to see the steam page to see what kind of game we are and then hopefully be interested in and then wish list it um that is that's the big thing i think for us the other big thing is just to get people into the community um again with the editor i think if we get early on a lot of people are building worlds
Wouter:
[1:28:30] Super cool because that attracts, again, other people, and it's kind of like a thing where players and people that create stuff in the game get some kind of symbiotic relationship, if you will. That's another big thing that we want to build up through marketing and socials and whatnot.
Tyler:
[1:28:51] I think the incentive of someone who has created something to then say, hey, look at this level that I created in this game. Good point. It's a huge deal too.
Wouter:
[1:29:01] Yeah. They will, they will want exposure for their world as well. So they become kind of people that, that help with that, you know, for sure. Yeah. But I'm definitely realizing how new I am to marketing, so we'll have to see how that all works.
Tyler:
[1:29:18] I've found that a lot of people sort of bank everything on the Steam algorithm. And I try to encourage folks to, of course that's important, but also reaching people regardless of the Steam algorithm. Like, don't just depend on, like, them seeing it on their store page and magically deciding that of all the other 10,000 games they're going to be exposed to today, this is the one. Like, making those personal connections go into the conventions, handing out, you know, flyers or business cards with your QR code that goes directly to your game site or your game store page, even better, on there. Um it just like stuff like this like you and i are having a conversation we may not reach that many people but the people who do hear it are kind of like hopefully have like a kind of yeah connection they're like oh i like this guy i want to see what he makes as opposed to just does the game stand all on its own um which is good too a lot a lot especially programmers tend to sort of think that it should stand on its own it should be i just put it out there like you know I've built the statue of David and people should just flock around it. And I'm like, I mean, there's no harm in saying like, Hey, did you hear there's
Tyler:
[1:30:31] a statue over there? Maybe you should go look at it.
Wouter:
[1:30:34] You know, it seems not scalable to personally be, you know, talk to the gamers or whatever, but you know, these, these people that become your kind of your super fans, if you will, and these people have so much more value than, you know, random, random person playing it that doesn't care so much because like you say it's like yeah they'll be they'll be making stuff they'll be talking to their friends and then there's a whole bunch of good stuff um that said you know you just realize just how crazy big steam is the reason people go for this wish list stuff is just when you see other games and they have like some kind of a success like that 90 of their sales and their traffic came all from inside steam it you know they had big streamers play their game or whatever and that was a huge thing for them but that's almost more like a seed of of the success of these games like once once they take off it's entirely inside steam which is just kind of crazy so you want to have a want to have a go at like that kind of level of success you gotta you gotta treat steam seriously i'm afraid but there's no reason why you can't do both i mean we will uh we're very small still at this moment so we have all the bandwidth in the world to engage with with the smaller community directly and we will continue to do so um while you're also trying to you know optimize for steam
Tyler:
[1:32:02] I would posit that the uh all of the traffic coming from steam is a chicken and the egg scenario because a lot of the games if you're really really paying close attention on the marketing side that do have that kind of traffic the reason why they have that kind of traffic is because they built a strong community that right everyone wishlisted lots of people are buying it and then the algorithm oh this is a profitable product let's put it that in front of more people And then you start to get those people that are like, oh, this is on the state, on the page, on the page. And they're seeing it all the time. There's the old marketing rule of sevens, you know, plus or minus two. How many times have you seen this before you actually pay attention to the fact that it exists or even notice it? And, of course, exposure is huge. Just getting your logo, your brand, an image of your game in front of people in different contexts. It takes a lot of time before most folks that aren't initially gravitated towards it notice it. Door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, right? If he knocked on my door seven times, I might be just so tired of him asking that I'm like, yeah, you know what, come in and do the demo.
Wouter:
[1:33:09] Your vacuum must be really special that you're wanting to come seven times. Now I want to see just how well it sucks.
Tyler:
[1:33:16] And not even just an advertisement, but just seven different people told you about it. I heard of Vox Isle, you know, okay, cool, whatever, I've got a lot of games on my radar the next week. Man i'm playing box i'm like fuck i think i heard of that before yeah you know the third third week 10 people i know are in a discord server playing box aisle, the fourth week somebody's like oh i made a level for box style and i'm like all right i gotta start paying attention it seems like a lot of people are you know that i trust are engaged in this and you know oh now there's a youtube video one of my favorite reviewers is doing that um i go on twitch there's several people and it just kind of iteratively oh yeah It comes to the point where you've strangled the person like a boa constrictor into paying attention to you.
Wouter:
[1:34:04] We'll be doing all those things. It just turns out doing all those things is not easy or being able to get on those things. So, you know, we'll just keep hammering away at it and we'll get there.
Tyler:
[1:34:17] It's a, it's something that happens a lot. I've noticed in the podcast industry where like, say someone's on a book tour and, you know, they'll be on, I don't know, the Joe Rogan experience. And then I'm like, oh, okay, whatever. And then you'll notice like, oh, they're doing every major podcast all at once. So it's like the next week another like oh he's on lex friedman oh he's on eric weinstein oh he's on you know and then it's just you know before long you're like it creates the illusion that like everyone's paying attention to this but in fact it's the marketing side of things is saying you need to reach all of these audiences and where they cross over because people are going to start recognizing your name because the first time that you see that in your feed it's just another name and then you keep seeing the same name over and over and over again you're like oh a lot of people are interested in this but in fact it's that they're smart about how they're playing their cards yeah.
Wouter:
[1:35:12] We have not been that structured or smart about it so far um but yeah i'm totally going to be emailing lex after this because i want to totally want to be on this podcast and i think it would be very helpful for vox out to be on on lex friedman so i would maybe we'll have to look
Tyler:
[1:35:30] Like so his episode with john carmack was inspiring i was like this is yeah if.
Wouter:
[1:35:37] John carmack can be on there then you know why not me i mean let's let's be honest come on
Tyler:
[1:35:43] I mean, if you could pull it off, let me know, because I'd also very much like to talk to Wes Crumman.
Wouter:
[1:35:49] That'd be kind of an achievement. Wow.
Tyler:
[1:35:51] I will go on his website and write out, like, hey, I think you should have this guy. Like, I've done that to greater or lesser successes in different ways. I find it, for instance, John Carmack, very approachable guy. Like, you would think it's impossible to get in touch with the great and powerful legendary John Carmack. But his Twitter, at least, you know, when I did this, why open DMs?
Wouter:
[1:36:15] Oh, yeah.
Tyler:
[1:36:16] Yeah. And he responds, you know, like, hey, you know, thanks for the offer. In my case, he was like, I'm not doing a lot of podcasts right now. After the Joe Rogan one, I promised Lex I would do it. So I'm not taking any more offers until after I've done that. And then I think three years passed and then he did Lex. So I'm thinking, you know, I've got a window of time here before, you know, maybe he'll just.
Wouter:
[1:36:40] Build that up.
Tyler:
[1:36:41] Yeah.
Wouter:
[1:36:42] It's funny. I had that with, um, with Tim Sweeney, like a long time ago, more than 20 years ago now, he was posting that he was working on some programming language feature for Unreal Script or whatever. And I have a good amount of background in programming languages. And he was asking about something or was struggling with something. So I just emailed him and was like, Hey, if you tried this, maybe look at that. And immediately like half an hour later got a reply back huge wall of text about what he was all doing and stuff like that and and then you know we've exchanged like a ton of emails ever since mostly about programming language stuff and that was just really just kind of funny like even back then he was already he was already fairly famous i guess only gotten worse since um but yeah he didn't care it's like here's someone who wants to talk to me about that and you just went for it. And that was super, super awesome.
Tyler:
[1:37:34] Um, all the folks that I've run across from like epic games, just really cool dudes. So Cliff was his game. Very cool dude. You know, doesn't live too far from here. Actually, I'll probably just go knock on his door.
Wouter:
[1:37:46] Oh yeah. Just north of you. Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:37:49] Yeah. But he's just very like personable and like pretty down to earth considering he's like a multi millionaire. And, and I think that's awesome. That's, that's the kind of multimillionaire I'd like to be. Yep.
Wouter:
[1:38:01] It tells an enormous amount about someone. Character if you've achieved something and you don't want to talk to regular people anymore because you're above that now or something like that that that tells you you'd check as and vice versa for
Tyler:
[1:38:16] Sure for sure.
Wouter:
[1:38:17] Good on them so
Tyler:
[1:38:20] As voxile hits the market you know in early access do you do you have like a maybe a list of outlets or content creators or whatever that you intend to reach
Tyler:
[1:38:33] out to or is it going to be primarily.
Wouter:
[1:38:35] Um not personally so are working with a with a marketing slash socials person that is that is working all those kind of things out and we uh we use a small pr agency for like just regular you know news outlets like for example our coverage on ign was through that um um but yeah not not really i personally like it's it's pretty difficult because there's For example, a lot of streamers that do like Minecraft content and they're kind of naturally attracted to what we're doing. But, you know, their audience really needs to know that our game really is not a Minecraft clone. So that kind of thing. And it's kind of like our game is very in between a lot of things. It has the look as if it's a Minecraft clone, which it isn't. You know, and it has this blend of gameplay styles. There's a lot of shooter games out there, but it tend to be very serious and realistic shooters. Whereas, of course, we're much more cartoony in some kind of way. There's a lot of like you know more cutie adventure games out there but it tend to not have guns and monsters whose parts will fly off and expose skeletons underneath so it's almost like we're this weird blend where we don't really fit that easily in a very clear
Wouter:
[1:39:52] Then again potentially we can we can interest all those markets but it's not that easy to find like a streamer that's like oh this is exactly the kind of streamer that That but yeah we're looking at that if you have ideas um please send them my way
Tyler:
[1:40:09] I would be very thankful so certainly down to hell um it is my profession after all so i'm always like especially with people who are like i'm already interested i'm like yeah this is what i would do maybe these people i would talk to i'll even go so far as just like go to a search engine and be like you know tell me all the people who played these types of games and i just give it like a list and then like this person has a community blah blah you know that kind of thing they have 400 000 youtube subscribers that are all interested in this particular topic and okay and now i'll make a spreadsheet and then i'll go and email a key to every single one of them be like hey i think you might like this and that a large part of that is is how it works behind the scenes um i think, there's a fine line when communicating to an audience what your game is and also deciding what to make, where in which it needs to be.
Tyler:
[1:41:06] Comparable to something that they're already familiar with enough that they understand what you're describing, and also different enough that they, actually want what you're selling that they are not having their needs met by the thing that you're comparing it to so like if you were going to make a i don't know a game about shooting and building things that's an online massive multiplayer game where you know there's a circle and it gets smaller and you're forcing combat to happen there's probably another game that already, offers that service for free so why am i gonna how am i gonna talk you into spending money on something that's probably not doing it the same thing exactly as well as that one is um and it turns out that when you're when you're coming out with a new idea this is the first time anyone's ever seen this the way to present that typically has to do with spending a fuck ton of money, um and there there are genres uh.
Wouter:
[1:42:04] Might be a problem
Tyler:
[1:42:05] Yeah there are genres where it's like i think investors struggle with like they all see the trend and then they want to invest in that genre and they don't realize i'll just use uh like moba as an example if you want to make a successful moba game or really esport of any kind uh you can't just say here's a budget you know you have this amount of time to develop it put it out and then stop supporting it if you don't get a return on investment turns out the way to make that happen is to continue to double down and double down like so riot games took forever to make a profit once they did make a profit it was extremely profitable but it took a lot longer than i think most investors are used to you know their fiscal quarter that is.
Wouter:
[1:42:54] Definitely that is definitely something and that's not something that will be interesting for us like i said before it's like i have that confidence we can get there question is like how long does it take us to to get there and you know will we survive all of that
Tyler:
[1:43:08] Yeah i.
Wouter:
[1:43:10] Am certainly going to try but uh yeah that is definitely interesting
Tyler:
[1:43:16] I found that like a great example was quake champions, exactly but bethesda is like we should do a well first of all we'll do a quake game but we're going to make it more like a like other esports where it's they started off with a paid model and then they switched to like a season pass sort of thing with loot boxes and such which was following a trend not that the game is in any way bad i've played a lot of probably have more hours in quake champions than any other game that's not a oh wow okay rpg then after a while they're like this isn't making us any money and i'm like because you you basically what you need to do especially with esports is invest a shitload of money in advertising and prize pools like you need to have tournaments or else people aren't going to be interested um a big part of the bringing.
Tyler:
[1:44:04] Back quake um quake world in north america was me explaining to people like the reason why no one's playing in your tournaments is because there's no money at the end of the line but if you could raise a enough money that it's worth someone who wouldn't otherwise do this time to stop playing what they're making money playing and play this they'll come play this so you you want your your your prize fighters so to speak to to show up um we don't we even did experiments on purpose we would see like we would iteratively increase prize pools this was more quake champion side than with um quick world but like we want to see how much money it the prize needs to be for pros to like if we get pros to show up you know so like rafa being one of the greatest players in all quake history right he joined one of the tournaments that we put on.
Tyler:
[1:45:00] And then we knew that's how much money it's worth that's how much it needs to be before where these people, this group of folks take interest. In your case, that's not really applicable, but I mean, theoretically, I guess someone could make a PVP campaign or level or something like that and hit Vox Isle, but.
Wouter:
[1:45:20] That's the hard part if you're like a smaller company like us, is like any kind of money available, we can port it into marketing, go big that way, but that same money can also be poured into, you know, supporting the team for longer, actually making the game better. So you know which which of those is gonna you know gonna give better better results in the long term certainly i think the latter um so it's it's but it's a careful balance you got to do some level of marketing for sure and of course organic can be cheap but it sometimes doesn't reach people quite as much so it's it's yeah trying to figure that out um hope that we'd get at some point in the position where we can have big ass competitions that would be very very nice yeah i mean suitable for our game so like
Tyler:
[1:46:07] Competitions to for people to make campaigns or levels that are like.
Wouter:
[1:46:11] Yeah you
Tyler:
[1:46:12] Know and if.
Wouter:
[1:46:13] We're running when they're running one yeah yeah we're doing one at the moment but it's you know for fairly small moderate amounts of prize money but um we're experimenting with it already because i think that will work wonderfully for our game it's kind of natural natural thing for us to be doing so
Tyler:
[1:46:31] Yeah um i believe in fact the the designer of quake champions won a level design uh competition during the quake live time frame.
Wouter:
[1:46:42] Oh wow okay ended up working for
Tyler:
[1:46:46] It's you know software and such and that's how i got into it so shout out to adam pile love that guy.
Wouter:
[1:46:52] Nice i was very active in the quake level design community way back when and uh i've seen a lot of friends from that era that are now you know elite designers and lots of game companies and things like that it is very awesome to see from the from the early beginnings where it's like some new guy that's like hey i made this little level it's like ah this guy's got some some skills in terms of making aesthetically looking quick levels and that's
Tyler:
[1:47:19] How uh tim whatlets ended up at his software was making oh yeah.
Wouter:
[1:47:22] Yeah yeah he made a very strong ascent that way yeah so
Tyler:
[1:47:28] When you're uh when you're hiring folks sort of what are the qualities that you look for in employees.
Wouter:
[1:47:32] So yeah that's interesting i mean um kind of by necessity we're a fully remote company and that's not because i got some kind of philosophy that remote is better than office or something like that but we don't even have the the money nor the ability to have everyone in an office so that that's kind of uh kind of by necessity but it does bring the ability to hire like across the world and you know we we have people united states with people in europe uh we've even at some point had someone in japan we have someone in new zealand so we're like kind of all over the place um and that's cool because we have very kind of specific kind of skills that we're looking for for example you know we work exclusively with voxel artists like people that haven't created voxel art before as opposed to someone that's a good polygon artist, but, you know, has never done anything with voxels. It is really kind of like a very high, at least specialized skill.
Wouter:
[1:48:30] And you know some of the best people for those like we have one guy um in in germany he actually he worked also worked on teardown for example and you know he's just amazing and uh yeah you got to go there so we're very much indexing on you should find the best talent wherever it is as opposed to just trying to get everyone in california or something like that the other thing is like related to something i mentioned earlier is that we really need the people that are kind of self-driven and drive things forward by themselves and that is because again we work in remote i'm not sitting next to this person's desk and being able to easily tell him what to work on next kind of thing so that is just kind of essential and also be this small company and also from the philosophy that i i told you before i think the game will turn out better if these people just take their own initiative and say like i want to build this i've told my artists like Because we don't have this clear list of what assets need to be made next.
Wouter:
[1:49:28] Very often, it's just like the artists in our company, they'll be in a chat with the level designer, the level designer going, I'm building this new house, and I need a new style of set of pieces to be able to build this house in a particular kind of style, and then go make that. That's one way to do it. But I've always said to the artists, I'm like, look, as a voxel game, I'm like, if you're a level designer, you're always kind of browsing our voxel assets. Like, hey, what's a cool thing I can use for this particular thing? We just need more of that. So why don't you go think, like, whatever you think is the coolest style for a particular kind of object and make a cool art set for that. And it's like, I'm totally cool of you...
Wouter:
[1:50:09] Essentially being like a tiny art director in that sense and you making your own choices of what the game needs or go into an existing world look around and see like what visually here is the weakest then go make it better and you know so that requires a whole bunch of like but not all people that you find you will tell them that they can do that but they end up then not doing it because they just like are a little bit too shy in taking initiative and and they just want like you know a very clear description of the asset that they need to be working on and that's how they're used to work or something like that so that's that's the big challenge for me like i'm really looking for those people who can just come into the game is like i'm going to make all this stuff better from what i'm good at it's like that's that's really one that's going to result in the best game overall in the end also because you know i don't have time to go through every game world and analyze like what needs fixing you know i'm not even an artist so i mean you know um
Wouter:
[1:51:16] So those are those are those are the big things and then of course yeah those other things like you know communication skills very important if you're working remote um being able to organize your own stuff so but the yeah the big ones are definitely like someone who knows how to drive the game forward themselves and make it better and just generally getting someone with really good skills from wherever in the world um yeah i
Tyler:
[1:51:45] Like to think about is like there's a a triad of you know qualities that make a good uh forget employee i mean just colleague in general like because team culture is huge it's like you put a team together like getting them to go through the storming norming performing part is you know that's very important and they have to personalities to mesh and all that but there's like this i think it was neil neil gammon had this philosophy of like you need to you need to have two out of three at least qualities of like are you on time are you pleasant to work with and are you skilled at your job and you can be, uh pleasant work with and then skilled at your job and late all the time and most people will still tolerate you you know or any any combination of the three but you need to it's very rare you get someone who's like so good that they're late and shitty as to be around and you'll still want to have them there um i think but i.
Wouter:
[1:52:42] Think i've been lucky that i i can honestly say if all the people are currently working and that we've had working in the past that no one really qualifies as shitty in any kind of way they've all been pretty nice to work with so yeah all friendly people so that's
Tyler:
[1:52:57] In a small unit that's pretty attainable yeah you know like same thing with us where i think everybody gets along super well you know nobody has any issues and we have the freedom as a small company to be you know like somebody's like hey you know i don't have bandwidth for this or whatever i've burnt out or i'm gonna go on vacation or whatever i was like that's cool i'm Because every single person here is going to do that at some point. Like, oh, you know, got to go to the hospital. Fine. Yeah. I don't ever think that anyone should be like neglecting their, for say, their children for their work if they don't, you know. Oh, no. Yeah. But there are companies that absolutely will. And coming from the military, absolutely don't give a shit.
Wouter:
[1:53:37] Oh, in that respect? Yeah. Yeah. Are you treating your employees?
Wouter:
[1:53:40] Well, that's the funny thing. Like first of all if you're working remote with people it's like i have no idea how these people are working anyway i'm mostly looking at like what their output is not like what hours they're working um but yeah i've never i've never so far have asked anyone to do any kind of overtime or that kind of stuff or they can always just kind of organize their own life around around the job let's hope we can keep it that way i
Tyler:
[1:54:08] Think in my experience working with people who are highly motivated and genuinely care about their work and the overall product and everything. More often than not, I'm having to tell people like, hey, take a break. You don't have to work on Saturday. Please go to a movie or something. It's more often than saying, I need you to keep up. That almost never happens. In general, it's like, hey, if you get to a point where it's like someone's got too much, I, as the manager, as the project manager, I need to, figure out a way that this works for you it's my job not to ask you to get more maybe you need a second pair of hands um pride can come into that as well you know where you'll have someone who wants to do everything and then having to be like look i need you to learn to delegate this like i, you know i don't need you to do every single little task yourself i would rather hire two more people and have you delegate and give feedback so that you're not working yourself to death trying to make this happen like i mean i have to respect your autonomy that that's your choice but also like the last thing that i need is for my best artists to burn themselves out and you know have to go on a vision quest in the desert for 40 days while we're trying to meet a deadline like we don't want that either it makes more money for me to spend on more people than it does for me to lose you yeah.
Wouter:
[1:55:34] Absolutely have definitely seen those patterns
Tyler:
[1:55:36] Yeah yeah and uh just just personality meshing all the way around like we you've got to have someone who can both see the the the micro level of like what they're doing and also like how does this fit into the overall vision and with a small team that's pretty you know this is what you did today we're implementing it into the build right now now we're all going to test it together let's all say what we think about it i i prefer this way much more than i did working with like gigantic teams, because you i was i've been in situations where i've like walked up to someone who was clearly having a terrible day and i'm like hey uh what's wrong they're like well you know blah blah blah is going on at home and i'm like why don't you just go home and deal with that and they're like well i can't i have all this work to do i'm like have you talked to your manager they're like i don't know who my manager is, I'm like, that's inexcusable. That's not okay. I'm telling you to go home. And if your manager has a problem with it, they can argue with me about it. Just give them my name or something.
Wouter:
[1:56:39] Yeah, I really cannot picture that. These kind of job situations where you feel like there's no way out. Because otherwise your manager is going to fire you if you don't keep on working or something.
Tyler:
[1:56:51] Especially if you don't know who that person is. It's like Borderline 1984 type of thing.
Wouter:
[1:56:59] Yeah yeah that all doesn't sound great
Tyler:
[1:57:01] Um we touched earlier on like the the cultural dutch thing of being rude but i like to use the word assertive and i would say a lot of people simply are not assertive where it's like you could know who your manager was but you you're so not through your own fault but you're paralyzed by the fear of like if i do anything if i ask for more for more money if i say i need a day off something will happen that i don't understand And I'm like, honestly, in a lot of situations, if you just walk up to somebody and be like, hey, I'm dealing with this, goodbye, they're not going to even, they never had any intention of punishing you for that at all. They just don't know that you're suffering.
Wouter:
[1:57:39] But that too, it really depends on the company culture that there are some companies where people just have fear for asking something and for good reason, because it's just that kind of company where, you know, if you stick your head out, then it's going to get cut kind of thing. But typically yes you you should be you should be asking and you should hopefully work in a company where that's cool
Tyler:
[1:58:00] Yeah i i've i've maybe not on purpose but i tend to reward people who are just like hey i have an issue and i want to fucking raise it up to the top absolutely yes yes thank god please you know everyone look this person's saying something they're giving feedback constructive feedback is good let's argue about it like even if you hate me for like if you're coming at me like angrily like i want to hear it please give it all and then we can figure it out together and it but i totally get why like if you have an organization of 500 people you can't you can't have those conversations and there's a lot of tendency for i hate an absentee ceo more than anything like if you don't have that open door policy and you're approachable and stuff or if you're just like leaving things and be like i'm just gonna go do this and uh i'll check in because what you have is that person comes back and then sees that things have gone in a direction that they're not comfortable with and then they make a bunch of changes after work has already been done can't stand it like don't make people do the same thing twice unless it's absolutely necessary um and that's that's.
Wouter:
[1:59:08] Go ahead i was going to say it's like that's one of the good things i picked up at a company like google is like they're very big on like one-on-ones where you have like regularly scheduled meetings with your your manager and they don't have any agenda whatsoever because the whole point is your manager's ass is like how are you doing how are you feeling and and that's because a lot of people they might feel bad or things are not going well or they're kind of struggling in their work or they don't know where to go next. But I don't feel the strength to bring it up to someone because it somehow feels weak or whatever. So when you have this open-ended... And I noticed in these kind of meetings that people will bring stuff up and I'm doing it in my own company as well. And you have these meetings and people bring stuff up. It's like, oh, wow, this is important. We need to address this. We need to fix it and make this better for you.
Wouter:
[1:59:58] But until you have that meeting, they will not bring it up kind of thing. They will not set a meeting for you on like a different time i've always said like if there's anything just just come ping me and we'll talk about it like right the minute that you're experiencing it but people tend to not do that there's too much of a threshold of saying i have something i don't feel 100 good about so you need to almost force it on people it's like you need to be asking people all the time it's like hey is there something that you that's not working for you right now and if you ask that explicitly then usually they feel okay to say like actually you know this is just this could be better and then you go fix it i uh
Tyler:
[2:00:42] I think I've said a lot of negative things about the military, but it's not all negative. One of the things that the Air Force in particular is quite good at is exactly what you just described. It also comes down to the individual leader themselves. When I was a staff sergeant, anyone who was under my leadership, I would do exactly that. I'm like, we're going to have regular check-in.
Tyler:
[2:01:03] What are your goals? Are you okay? What's going on in your personal life? Because all I really care about is the mission gets done here. And then what's more important than that is you're you know are you being served by your service so like if i have a one guy who's like i want to make you know i want to go to you know officer training school and i want to be a lieutenant and then i want to learn how to fly an airplane and all that stuff and i'm like okay how can we make this work for you like what's the best case scenario where we take what you know in my case it was a meteorology department i'm like okay let's work on your degree you know let's get you into the right program so that you can apply for those things we will you make sure you have a good evaluation package or whatever so that we can do that and then you have someone like me when i'm talking to my supervisor like what are your goals you know in the air force i'm like to get out uh in a couple years and go start a company because i really want to be in the video game business and and then i i was lucky to have people who are like yeah okay so how do we support that
Tyler:
[2:02:00] like we still have to do your job while you're here but we.
Tyler:
[2:02:04] Can make this work for you so instead of you there's this thing where you know you're you're kind of expected to do a certain amount of like volunteer hours per year it's you know that kind of thing uh or whatever like well maybe instead of uh doing volunteer work by going and you know working at the animal shelter or whatever on your weekends uh come up with a way that you can do so a lot of uh charity tournaments that i had put on in the past was like okay i'm gonna put quake and charity together we're gonna have a tournament we're gonna give all the proceeds to charity everyone wins you know raise a bunch of money and all that kind of thing and then at the end of the year like what did you do volunteer was like well i organized an entire thing.
Tyler:
[2:02:45] Where you know tons of gamers ended up raising you know a couple thousand dollars or whatever and giving that to the florence night and yell foundation and then when you read that to you know the promotions people they're not saying like oh you didn't do anything they're saying like wow this guy has real leadership qualities nice and communicating that and even in the company culture, you know, say it's Google, you may have one person who's like, all I want to do is just like do my job and go home. You know, I want to come in here. I want to, you know, crank out UI assets and then I want to go spend time with my kids. That's great. Let's put you in a situation where that, that lifestyle works for you. And the same thing with, you have someone who says, well, I really want, I'm looking for promotions. I want to move up in the business. I want to learn how this whole business works. And then I want to go start a competitor company. Great. How do we get you to that point?
Tyler:
[2:03:30] Absolutely and uh and not crush your dreams by saying like no you're gonna work for google i had a boss that said that to me he's like you're gonna work for me for the rest of your life i'm like okay his business is no longer uh it no longer exists i don't know i don't know but i'll never be that way and i learned that lesson from having someone tell me that so i'm glad i have a few people not like i'm gonna go you know have them on a hit list but like who said really negative things to me that hurt at the time. And then like, I look back and I'm like, I'm really glad Mr. Crabtree in high school told me that I would just be a flunky if I didn't go straight to college, you know, because now I can look back and say, you motivated me to show you, you were wrong.
Wouter:
[2:04:18] Awesome. Yeah. I love that. Love that.
Tyler:
[2:04:21] Uh, I guess the last little bit here, I wanted to talk, touch on like your, your teaching side of things. So you worked in the university system and stuff like that.
Wouter:
[2:04:29] Yeah. Yeah, I did. I taught at the Guildhall SMU in Texas for some eight years or something like that. So it was a good amount of time. I helped build that school up. And it was really cool because it was like kind of the first time we were doing like a game development school and working with local game developers. Yeah, that was really, really fun and helping. Of course, in my case, it was the programming curriculum that I was busy with. Yeah, they had a really good time there. And, you know, I taught some couple of hundred students there. And pretty much all of them went into the games industry in various places and still in contact with a lot of them. So it's been, it was a really awesome time.
Tyler:
[2:05:15] Were you primarily teaching like programming game design principles or?
Wouter:
[2:05:20] Not any game design. I was just definitely only on the programming side and particularly teaching them how to build various components of an engine. So, you know, graphics, programming, character animation. Of course, me being a programming language fanatic, I would throw in a course on how to build your own scripting language for a game engine kind of thing. Um and yeah just various topics related to game engines and that was a lot of fun
Tyler:
[2:05:49] What were some of the more interesting things that you would teach like let's just say it's, i'm showing up today it's it's a design engine 101 how do you inspire me to think about this in a different way say i'm a student who's just taking this class for no real reason and you want to and you want to suck me in be like
Tyler:
[2:06:06] this is what's cool about it.
Wouter:
[2:06:07] Yeah that's a good question um the interesting thing is like i wasn't particularly pushy on like you need to structure your engine this way because these were students that there was a master's program so students would come in with already like a bachelor's in computer science or whatever so they they they think they already know programming kind of thing so in terms of like the structuring of the engine i would kind of let them do their own thing but then as they were doing their own thing i would review their code with them and then kind of um and then kind of ask them questions seeing like whether that was ideal and kind of steer them in other in other ways a cool thing about that program was that um it was very hands-on so i would do like a lecture for maybe like up to an hour or something like that on like whatever topic we're doing and that would be you know just something practical it's like how we're gonna do you know normal mapping in in or we're gonna implement like a bsp tree or you know or we can do character animation engine or something like that um but then the rest of the class would be like several hours of like hands-on time where i'm basically working directly with the students on their particular engine and their their engines grow out to be like you know very very different from each other and that's kind of where the the
Wouter:
[2:07:23] A lot of the interesting work is um just kind of help them and shape that and of course they're going to compare amongst each other like how they're approaching things and um kind of my favorite parts would be the things that would eventually like turn out to be more about software engineering you know how do you how you how do you make this stuff maintainable uh you know it keeps growing and growing and certain things are harder and harder to change like how do you how do you deal with that um so that would give me opportunity to teach like all sorts of other like unrelated things to like just building an engine like as as part of that you have interesting classes just purely on like you know refactoring those kind of topics so yeah it was pretty varied it was a lot of fun
Tyler:
[2:08:10] What is an engine?
Wouter:
[2:08:13] Ah, well, people define that differently, I guess. And that's an interesting question, because, for example, the engine that I'm building right now has a completely utterly different structure from most game engines. And certainly the engines these guys were building, I mean, nowadays an engine, you look at Unity and Unreal, it's like they're just these behemoths. It's just gigantic. And of course, what they were building was much smaller. but yeah uh you know in the end anything and even something small can be an engine just branding some bunch of things on screen um i think the big thing is that you're that you're working directly on the on the the graphic subtraction layers rather than just adopting those from from somewhere else that's when you're building an engine i suppose i don't know i don't have really a clear definition of like what's an engine what's not an engine
Tyler:
[2:09:10] Yeah i find i find it fascinating it's almost a philosophical topic at a certain point like it i think i think about it like it's it's a machine that does work for you to a certain degree where it's like you you know even even in the sense of a physical like an internal combustion engine is like it does more work with less input than you alone would do a bicycle pedal is an engine like because in the physical sense you are doing work, but it's less than the input you put into it. Or, sorry, it's the work that is output is more than what you personally are doing. So you're moving faster than you would be moving your feet at the same rate, you know, without the bicycle.
Wouter:
[2:09:54] In a very abstract sense, that's what an engine is, yeah. And surely, yeah, it does a whole bunch of the heavy lifting of you implementing a game. I think an important thing about an engine is, of course, that it must be able to implement different kinds of game. If something can only implement one kind of game, it's like, then it's really more like a game than an engine but yeah an interesting thing for example about our engine is that we're flipping things completely upside down like most engines are this block of complex C++ and then maybe it'll call out to like Lua or whatever as being a scripting language just to update some objects we're doing the opposite way around like we have a scripting language or a programming language that the entire engine is written in and then only some heavy lifting happens in some c++ libraries but um so it's almost like you take the roles of like the normally in an engine the c++ is what's in control and what's driving the overall structure of like how everything connects in the engine in our case that's completely not the case the scripting language is the one that's in control and the c++ is just like library functions if you will And also, our engine is more tightly integrated with the kind of game that we're making than something like Unreal or Unity is, of course. Which is cool because it affords a lot of simplicity. If you try to make an engine that can do actually every genre on every platform, like, yeah, you just signed yourself up for an enormous amount of complexity.
Tyler:
[2:11:21] I had a friend attempt to do that. And it consumed him. Like a legitimate legitimately like ruined his career that he was so really fixated on trying to make this work in every conceivable purpose that you know you never that happens with any sort of project where it's like if you if you try to do too much you know every scientist will say like my theory i have to figure out the end of this before i die and it was the same sort of thing where it's like it in in this particular scenario the guy was like making a game and he was trying to make this work for this game and he was also at the same time trying to make this and if any other potential thing came along you would be able to use the same you know engine and that you know the game never got got finished and it was basically the system yeah.
Wouter:
[2:12:13] That is such a stereotypical story i'm sorry to say like the amount of programmers that are attracted to this idea that the underlying and they want to keep this completely general just in case they might needed in the future it's the biggest downfall of programmers everywhere this kind of like planning for the future and then building lots of complex infrastructure and abstractions for for the future and then never getting used is the number one mistake of programmers i would call it there's no there's no bigger error that programmers make in general um and but it's attractive because as programmers you know we just love we love structuring things that's all we do we create structure you just like of course building an engine an engine has to work for everything that's enormous amount of structure it's like an endless sandbox of you being able to invent new pieces structures and new abstractions and new things and how should we put this all together and like what tools can we build for this it's just endless amount of fun but yeah it will also kill you
Tyler:
[2:13:16] Well i think about you know isaac newton and he's trying to discover the philosopher stone you know doing alchemy and adding together all the numbers in the bible to try to figure out when jesus is coming back and things like that and and it takes another guy like edmund halley to be like hey um we have this problem like a real finite problem of figuring out when this comet is going to fly through you think you could do that and then newton is like oh i did that years ago I just didn't think it was important but I lost it I'll go write it down again for you real quick and then I'm going to get back to the philosopher's stone thing, because that's what's important to me but there's such a tendency to kind of, try to have your theory of everything and it's like you know you're you're always in between like do you see the forest for the trees or you don't see the trees for the forest and yeah it's it's very interesting i am not a programmer i took enough programming classes to know it's not my path in life but i do find it fascinating well.
Wouter:
[2:14:17] In some sense i am the epitome of that kind of programmer in some kind of way because i'm always building new programming language to build my next project on top of so you know i can definitely be accused of of making that mistake myself um but you know so far i've i've managed to not go too wild on on spending time on the programming language so i guess it's working out
Tyler:
[2:14:40] Do you find that working in custom things makes it more difficult to hire people who can then easily translate what they're doing into what you're doing?
Wouter:
[2:14:51] Um, yes and no. I definitely thought about that, that it would be, you know, that definitely was the question, like when we started, when we turned, like, what was at the time, like my hobby slash research project into like, this is going to become a company and a game product, that definitely thought came to my mind is like, this would be a moment, like, do I rewrite everything that I've built here in? You know pure c plus plus or rust or whatever or something that's a little bit more palatable to the average programmer um i decided not to for for many reasons um so there's certainly there will be certain programmers that like a lot of programmers they have like certain languages they want to work in and if that's not what you're offering they're they're off the table and that's fine uh there's also programmers to which this kind of stuff is attractive and certainly like Like, you know, my good friend, Ben, that's one of the programmers I've been working with the longest. You know, he had already been interested in working with the language that I made before he even got hired. And it was just totally not an issue for him. Like, oh, that's cool. That'd probably be fun to work with. And he's also into compilers and stuff like that. So there's a certain kind of programmer for which he's like almost like a bonus.
Wouter:
[2:16:02] But yeah, I've definitely, you know, recently hired a graphics programmer. And I did get some candidates, particularly like the more experienced ones that like, you know, I'm used to working on Unreal. And I work in C++ and Unreal with these kind of shader languages. That's what I do. And that's what I know. And, you know, these people, they looked at my engine and like, what the hell is going on here kind of thing. And I could tell that that wasn't attracting them. But that's also good. it's like i want to um though not long ago i actually did a talk for a graphics and engine um online conference react it's called it's again sometime soon
Wouter:
[2:16:44] And i did a talk for that particularly explaining like our engine structure and how that relates to us having that custom programming language or whatever and i got so many of the of the engine people in there in the discord and going it's like oh my god this is just like you know this it sounds like a dream to work for kind of thing or this piece like refreshing and it is such a completely uh grounds up overall of like what it means to be an engine and throwing away lots of the amount of crafts that you normally get if you use unreal
Wouter:
[2:17:15] Or similar so in the end it kind of bifurcates the people uh in terms of and you know there's plenty of people around that i can always find the people in the latter half for whom it said whom is a bonus but it's it's a good point that you mentioned this because it's definitely when i do look for these people just kind of gauging whether this is this is for them it's a bonus or it's it's a detriment that is definitely an important part of the hiring process because yeah otherwise there's no point i don't want to have people that are doing stuff against their will at some point work with someone and they they they clearly didn't like it and they were gone like where's the debugger it's like this thing doesn't have a debugger how am i supposed to work with this and of course my reaction was i immediately implemented debugger it's like okay here's debugger but that didn't initially made made that person that happy as a as a consequence so if someone has like a very strong feeling that they want to be working with certain language you're just not going to fix that
Tyler:
[2:18:17] That's true even outside of languages like just you know if someone sort of like has a lane and there's nothing wrong with it but i mean like this is the lane that i want to be in and i don't want i'm not open to you know changing my workflow or to doing things in a different way and i in from an employability standpoint i'm always going to encourage people like learn to be elastic like i'm not necessarily saying get a don't do what you want to be doing but what i am saying is that like if you are if you are going to be working for other people and not the head of your own project then the more versatility you have the more hireable you are, like if you if you're a unity person you're like i only work in unity that's the only thing i intend to learn how to do and then one day you know the games industry pivots away from like it just doesn't work anymore it's not the industry standard same thing with a you know a video editor you only know Adobe Premiere and then, an alternative like DaVinci comes along and you have you know a company and they're like well we use DaVinci tools because we're not willing to pay for the Adobe suite and you have to relearn everything that you already know, makes you not a good candidate for that particular thing so I totally get that.
Wouter:
[2:19:31] I think what a lot of people are underestimating, they think that if I spend the entire 10 years of my career so far in one technology, I'll therefore be
Wouter:
[2:19:40] the best at it and therefore will be the strongest for that kind of thing. What they're underestimating, particularly an example of programming languages, is that using different programming languages changes how you think about programming and makes you a better programmer overall. So you can spend time in multiple programming languages and you'll actually be a better programmer in one of those languages that you have learned compared to someone who spent only that time in one language and they really don't have the picture of what it all, what does it all really mean, this structure code and what's all possible kind of thing. It's almost related to the topic we had earlier about living in different languages and, sorry, in different languages in different countries and um and only then figuring out what your own culture is like and how it's different and what you want to adopt and what you want to what you want to throw away um same with programming languages or graphics apis or a whole bunch of other things um and and yeah and you can only know that once you actually do it so it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem there right
Tyler:
[2:20:48] Specifically from the point of view of just language in general it's like the more languages you know the closer you're getting to the source which is not like what does this particular word mean in english or in german or in you know greek whatever it happens to be it's like if you understand the etymology of the word you're using it has a much deeper richer meaning and so from a coding standpoint it's like yeah i'm not saying yeah you need you need to know everything in binary necessarily but what it's like if you understand what this actually is doing behind the scenes you know like what you're leveling up you you're you're initiating yourself into like the, point where you have a real understanding of the topic you know the difference between a first year bachelor student and uh in a doctorate where it's like you you fund you understand this in a philosophical level where you can really break it down and think about it in a very broad, you know way so like my fascination with learning you know languages in general has always been that it's like i i got to a point where i'm like okay if i really want to understand this i need to learn latin or i need to go get a book on ancient greek or hebrew and like figure this out from that standpoint because this word is more than meets the eye so to speak you know the letter here is more than meets the eye. It has deeper meaning than that, that is intrinsic in what is being communicated, but just not on the surface level.
Wouter:
[2:22:16] Your brain basically starts clustering like all those different languages and it becomes like a more general concept in your brain and that's really worked with programming languages also you your your speed of learning those new things just comes higher and higher because of because you see those general concepts i for example sometimes find that like the best programmers are the ones that can understand everything in terms of memory it's like okay you're programming java what does mean to allocate an object? What does it do with that? Where does it put it? How does the garbage collect it? And, you know, for someone who's worked in other languages, you can actually kind of see through the language as if the language is transparent and see what the language is doing, how it's implemented. And that means you just understand everything about the language. Not only do you understand how fast things are or how to work with it, but every new language just becomes like a different mapping to these kind of general concepts. And you can just learn a new language in no time it's like
Tyler:
[2:23:13] Yeah and.
Wouter:
[2:23:15] It's in it's extremely powerful and it just makes you write way better code in any of those languages
Tyler:
[2:23:20] I find that it is less so when you're dealing with young people like really really young people if you're teaching them any new skill at all you know they kind of learn the same way that they learn their native language so to speak you know like by just doing it um but there's a point where you know if you're teaching someone to for in my case it was like you're going to learn arabic the first thing we're going to do is spend like a while teaching you your own language in terms of structure and not just in the way that you understand it when you think so what is a cognate what is an article what is a you know an antonym and a synonym and what are what is a metaphor and then once you understand that it's like okay now when i present this to you in a new language even though it's not going to translate word for word uh you'll understand the broader idea of what is being done here so for it there is no word for is or to be in arabic or most semitic languages there is no like this is that it's like this that and it's implied or you know what is a vowel versus a consonant can be very challenging when you start talking about semitic languages because it's like most of the vowels are implied and some things that we think of in english or just in you know western latin-based languages in general as a vowel.
Tyler:
[2:24:39] What if you use it as a continent? So the Ayn in Arabic sounds like a vowel to us, but they use it as a consonant at the beginning of a word that is going to continue from there.
Tyler:
[2:24:52] I can only imagine how that translates into coding language, but I think I understand your metaphor, so to speak.
Wouter:
[2:24:59] It's definitely i did some part study linguistics so i'm a little familiar with with these kind of concepts yeah
Tyler:
[2:25:06] I uh i really want to thank you for coming on the show man this has been very enlightening and like just cool to see what you're doing uh immediately i i don't have a lot of experience with uh this specific genre of games i mean i do with on the first person shooter side obviously rpg elements i get uh survivor games like the only ones that i've really dived into who are like Raft. And then I was talking with a friend about the forest and stuff like that later, you know, so the crafting element for me has been the biggest challenge. I've certainly run into situations where I'm like, I should have destroyed that item and got the blueprint for it before I continued this level. But it's all, it's all end of learning how something new works.
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Wouter:
[2:25:48] Yeah. Well, thank you. Super interesting.
Tyler:
[2:26:00] Thank you very much to voucher for coming on the show i really really enjoyed that conversation man it's uh it's rare that we get to deep dive into kind of the business side of things um in that way so i'm hoping that that helps a lot of people out there who are dreaming of starting their own game studio or something similar or even just any small business at all uh that's that's kind of like one of my passions if you didn't notice so yeah i also want to thank our patreon supporters so thank you to brad fred michael aunt and shannon y'all rule be sure and look in the show notes and uh if you're interested back that kickstarter for vox isle it's going to be a really cool game i have enjoyed every moment of playing the demo thus far and uh, that's it i love you god love you stay in the keep, InTheKeep.com InTheKeep.com.
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