Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we have a returning special guest for the first time in more than a year. It’s Jay Baylis. Hey, how we doing? Very good, thank you. How are you doing? Not too bad. Do I get like a medal or something, or like a little pin badge? Like a third time returning guest. Well, it’s nice for you to come on an episode that isn’t fundamentally cursed to its core for once. I don’t know about a medal, we’ll think about that. I don’t know, that’s kind of where I excel. Yeah, 40 quid, we can give you that. That’s kind of a medal in a way. So yeah, Jay, you have launched your second game as part of your independent studio, Bitten. It is Bitten, right? Yeah, I think that’s the canonical phrasing at this point. Awesome. So yeah, Bitten Studio launched its first game, sorry, its first game, Lennar’s Inception, back in 2020, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it’s going very messily so far. No, no, no, we’re all tired men. Yes. So your second game Cassette Beasts has just launched on PC, and you can play it through Game Pass as well as playing it on Steam. Congratulations. That’s awesome. It’s also coming to- Switch Xbox and Xbox Game Pass, yes. Awesome. Fantastic. On May 25th. So yeah, people will be able to check it out on more formats very soon. It’s got fantastic reviews. Last time I checked, there was an 86 Metacritic, which is fantastic, a really, really good launch. I saw it described as it feels like a Pokemon game or Pokemon-like game that’s aged with its audience in a way that Pokemon has not, which I thought was a brilliant way to describe what I’ve played of it. And yeah, so fantastic work, Jay, to you and Tom Cox and your partner at the studio. So yeah, how’s it been going? How’s your launch week been treating you? It’s been pretty manic. There’s something very stressful about kind of putting something out in the world that you’ve been working on privately. And you guys, I’m sure, have felt the same when it comes to podcasts. It’s a bit of nonsense, you say. We’ve already become nostalgic for the time when we hadn’t put anything out so that there was no pressure and no one was paying attention. Right. But now it’s out there. It gets a bit surreal and you get kind of very divorced from the fact that you made stuff that people are playing. I don’t know, I’ve been watching people playing it on Twitch and I just have this kind of very weird, averse reaction just because it’s like, I don’t know. I’ve kind of forgotten that I made it. I’ve forgotten that I made this thing and I kind of can’t remember having made any of it. Maybe I had some sort of stress-induced amnesia. Yeah, I suppose that might be it. It’s interesting as well because I had a few colleagues who were mentioning it in a sort of team chat this week and that was very surreal to see them talking about this thing that you’ve discussed with me on and off for the whole time you’ve been making it for three years, three plus years basically, three and a half years. So that’s quite surreal because I’m like, oh yeah, I know why it’s set in a place called New Wirral because I know all about Jay and yeah, it’s exciting. I am interested, obviously without saying how it has done because that’s up to you, that’s private or anything. Are there easy ways to kind of gauge its success? Because I think on podcasts, we can sort of see how many downloads we’ve had. When we put out YouTube videos, there’s all this kind of like spread of analytics and it’s like instantaneous. You can see like, this is how something’s performing. You mentioned they’re seeing reviews or seeing people streaming it or whatever, but is there a central source you can return to? And if there is, are you obsessed with checking it? Because that’s definitely what I would be doing. Oh yeah. I mean, on the Steam backend, we’ve got like, this is your sales number and it updates every hour. And I can like obsessively like hit refresh on that one day. I don’t know, it’s kind of hard because I don’t really know what we thought they would get. I think critically is the big thing right now because you know, sales like can go up, they can go down, they can tail off very quick. So I think it’s very early on in terms of gauging how well we’re selling because it could be that we’re like, oh, this is cool to talk about for like one week and then Zelda comes out and then everyone like forgets that we’ve made a game forever and that’s fine. I guess like critically, like we were kind of hoping like, you know, if we get that 75% on Metacritic, we’d be happy because that puts you in the little happy green zone instead of the sad yellow zone. Right. But we’ve been kind of like overwhelmed with the response. I guess we spent a lot of time looking at this stuff, so we’ve been overly critical of it, but then people are coming in and seeing it and they’re seeing it without having any expectation, and when you make something, you have the expectations that you’ve built up for yourself for that thing. So when you make something like this, there’s so many flaws that I see, but then people are just seeing the stuff that I’ve gotten over early on and liking it the first time around, and I always kind of forget that aspect. There’s stuff that I’ve written that I thought was like, oh, that was all right, and then people would really jam with it, and it’s like, oh, that’s kind of cool. But it’s really hard to tell, and I don’t think we can say it’s a success or anything at this point, but critically, this is like, we’ve been over the moon because people really like the game, so that’s been fantastic. Yeah, absolutely, and you still have multiple platform launches to come, so you’re only going to find more people. But yeah, really exciting, and I can’t imagine how surreal it must be to get it out there. It’s also funny seeing people… I see that Eurogamer’s review, which I thought was really good, praised the lefty politics of the game, basically, and I just found that really funny, because again, what I know about you, and then playing the game a bunch more this week being like, oh yeah, this is lefty as fuck, and that’s actually quite rare for a game, really, but it’s also not so overt about it that it’s like reading Twitter. But yeah, is it nice to see people respond to that stuff? Yeah, I didn’t intend it to be as explicit as it was. Again, it’s one of these things where we write stuff, and we’ll say, oh, that’s a funny line, and we’ll put it in the game. I think one of the things people respond well to is, there’s a plot line. This is any minor spoilers. At the start of the game, you encounter these vampires. There’s a quest that says you have to take them down at the vampire stronghold with this character, and then you get there and find out they’re just estate agents, and they’re trying to capitalize on the local property market. That was something that we put in because it was funny first, rather than because we had any overt political agenda, but we’re very happy that people are responding positively to it. I think a lot of the stuff in the game, it was just Tom and I trying to make it to the laugh with weird ideas. There’s a lot of like monster puns, like pun names and stuff, that just came from like, wouldn’t it be funny if we did this? And I wasn’t thinking too hard. I guess it’s quite easy for indie games to kind of go a little bit like too eager on the politics and feel like you’re being preached to. And I really wanted to avoid that because I don’t want people to yell at us on the internet. But people seem to have responded well and that’s been nice. Yeah, I think it’s because superficially it looks like, you know, let’s say you want to play an RPG where you catch monsters. Let’s say like you wanted an alternative to the market leader in that respect. Then this superficially, this is a very beautiful looking version of that type of game. And so you do sort of like when you’re going through like a harbour town at the start of a harbour town. So when you go through that location, you’re just like, oh, this is a beautiful version of an RPG town. And then when you encounter the monsters, you’re like, oh, there’s a really nice, you know, sort of coherent art style to the way these monsters are designed, even as strange as they get. And that stuff is what that’s what your first impression is made of. You have to get like a bit deeper into it until you find that stuff, which I think helps. But I did admittedly encounter a vampire outside of basically a payday loan place. And I was like, oh, yeah, Jay wrote this. But yeah, really cool. So, I mean, you rented in Brighton, you know what it’s like. Yeah, that’s right. No double glazing and like a grand amount for a single room with lots of hair on the floor. Good stuff. Yeah, it was it was it was tough down there, man. So yeah, Jay, so that aside, I will get into the making of the game a whole bunch in this episode. But I did want to ask you what you’ve been playing lately because I know you’re constantly got something on the go. You had a big Genshin Impact run for a while there. You and I variously have played Age of Empires 4 and recently Fortnite and obviously like Darktide and, you know, Halo Infinite for a while. You know, we kind of had that on the go. But what have you been up to lately on the game side? Great question. I’m still kind of chipping away at Fire Emblem Engage. I keep telling my partner like, OK, this is it. I’m about to finish it. And then like something else will happen in the game or they’ll throw like another three missions at me. I was a big Fire Emblem guy. I really, really enjoyed Three Houses. I think I told you, I think this feels kind of like the Starz channel version of Fire Emblem, where it’s like it’s got the production quality to an extent of like the HBO tier, you know, Three Houses. But also the script is not quite there. I’m having a lot of fun with it. I think it looks beautiful. I think the flow of Fire Emblem of having these little guys and you, I think Matthew Do talked about this on the pod. The stories that you kind of invent for yourself with these characters is way more interesting than like the kind of standard fantasy anime fare they give them. You know, you’re attached to this character because they’ve got a long bow and now you’ve given them a horse and now they’ve got the best range in the game. Not because of like the singular character trait. I think that’s very true. I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve been playing it actually. I’m working my way through that. My partner and I actually have been smashing through all of the Resident Evil remakes. So I think when it launched we got two, but we actually got too scared from Mr. X. We actually stopped playing for several years because it was too spooky. You should have just modded him into Thomas the Tank Engine. But then the fourth remake came out and there was this sense of, you’ve got to get this. So we smashed through that and we were like, well, that was great. The third remake was £8 on the PlayStation Store. That seemed like a great price for that game. It becomes a 9 out of 10 at that price. Oh yeah, absolutely. Smashed through that and then last night we finished Resident Evil 2. The kick is now carried on to a game. We just got Resident Evil 6 and that feels like a real step down after playing those three in a quick succession. Resident Evil 6 is wild and weird and brilliant. Yeah, I can see why they kind of stopped and said, like, we’ve gone too far here. It took a bit of a break. It’s the most brilliantly dreadful game ever made. You can see that there’s a sense of, like, the technology hadn’t been there up until that point to kind of throw, like, Michael Bay action set pieces every two minutes. I must have been so liberating to get to do the most ridiculous stuff in the engine. But it doesn’t, like, lend itself well to, like, a horror experience. I think we’ll, like, modestly chip through it and then maybe, like, forget about it and then, like, just never come back to it. I feel like it might be a strong, like, do not finish. Well, yeah, that’s enough. So you’ve done the four remake now as well? Yeah, we did two, three and four. Yeah, I feel like there’s some suggestion that a version of Resi 5 might be next on the cards from that finale to four. But whether it’s the same Resi 5, that’s, I think it’ll be something else. That’s what’s being hinted there, but I guess we’ll see, not to spoil too much of Resi 4 remake. But yeah, okay, interesting. So that’s good. I do like the idea that Fire Emblem Fates is the heels or power book 2 of the Fire Emblem franchise. That’s good. So one other thing I was going to ask was actually, you went to Bath last year. I met you for lunch. Please tell us about it. Obviously, we’re big, we talk about Bath a lot on this podcast and some of your stories about Bath have really made me laugh. So yeah, no pressure, but I just wanted to ask you how that adventure went for you and your partner. I enjoyed Bath. I think this was about my birthday last year. It was kind of a grown-up adult trip to the city. See some sights, enjoy some lovely architecture. I did see the JC’s kitchen tent and then did the Leonardo Pointing GIF to my partner who had no context of why this was funny to me, that there was a crap tent. And then feeling vaguely embarrassed, I didn’t pursue it further. Yeah, and I think that my takeaway anecdote was that my partner is very well read and we really wanted to go to the Jane Austen Museum. So that was kind of the highlight of the trip. And then eventually we got there after having booked ahead and we got there. Crucially, she is not a fan of what I’d kind of describe as like amateur performance, whether that be kind of acting or music. And then they kind of ferry you into a room and then like a young lad comes out in like a full period outfit and he’s like, hello everyone, I am Mr. Wickham from Pride and Prejudice. I just kind of felt my partner’s soul kind of leave her body in the chair next to me. And I kind of enjoyed it through that like kind of silent knowledge that this was suddenly completely turned into not what we expected or perhaps wanted. My takeaway really was that very like moment of that happening. Amazing. Yeah, like I was actually just today describing the ye olde cosplay that goes down at the Jane Austen Centre to describe like what we should do with the royal family here where it’s like one dude in a king outfit and you go and meet him at Buckingham Palace and he gets 32 grand a year. And that’s like that should be the royal family basically, that one guy. You should have to stand outside the palace and kind of ferry people in. They have like a dining room after the Jane Austen. But the best thing about that guy is he makes perfect sense on the doorstep of the Jane Austen Museum. But on his walk to and from work, he looks absolutely preposterous. So if you’re ever crossing over a traffic crossing with him and you can see everyone else being like, what the fuck? Not trying to make eye contact with just a guy who looks like he’s fallen through time. My other big memory was that the train ride there was the moment that the announcement that the Queen had died happened. And then we got off the train and like people were like yelling in the streets like the Queen has died. Very bizarre country. I think this is not going to help sell our country as a very serious one with your international audience. The Queen has died. Bath not taking it well. The Queen has died. You pointing, hey, look, it’s Jaycee’s kitchen. What an experience. Well, it is a tent. Amazing. That’s good. Yeah, I’m really pleased to have that story on the record because it makes me laugh every time I think about it. The soul leaving the body thing. That’s great. So yes, great stuff, Jaycee. So to get into Cassette Beasts then, I’ve basically got two sections of questions here. It’s the most intensive plan I’ve ever made for this podcast because I came up with it at the start of the year, what I wanted to do on this episode. And I guess I’m probably taking advantage of your good nature too much here, but I really did want to understand how a game gets made. You know, when you’re sort of like at your scale of developer, essentially like a two-person team with a bunch of contributors. I suppose like that was something I just really wanted to dig into. So I suppose like to start with, what is Cassette Beasts and where did the idea come from? Great question. Cassette Beasts is a monster collecting RPG. It is a game about transforming into monsters using cassette tapes in cassette players. So the premise is that these characters have cassette players and they have tapes and each one is like a monster tape. And then when you pop that in and you play it, you transform into the monster and then you do turn-based battle. Then it’s kind of like an open world adventure about kind of going around. You’re on this island called New Wirral and you’re attempting to find your way out and you kind of explore around and you meet characters and get to know them and do their stories as you kind of like go on this journey essentially. Yeah, so really cool. And I think that it’s interesting that this kind of game started proliferating more in the last few years. Suddenly it’s kind of caught on as a kind of like, I suppose, indie spin of, you know, something familiar that we’ve seen like many times with, you know, Mario and Zelda and stuff like that. But now we’re seeing it with, you know, with monster collecting, quote unquote. So, yeah, it’s cool. But I was kind of like, I was always just thought yours was in pole position in my head because it felt like the cassette tape idea set it apart a little bit. But there’s also like a lot more to the game, which we’ll get into. But I suppose then, Jay, like obviously your last role, you were at Chucklefish. You worked on Wargroove and Starbound. Wargroove was like, you know, I know you’re a huge part of that project. So I suppose like when in the course of leaving Chucklefish, do you and Tom, your dev partner, know you wanted to make this game? You showed me some early images on your phone in a pub on a wet and windy, brighter night in December 2019, I believe. That sounds about right. Yeah. How far along was it at that point and how long you’d been thinking about it? So we basically went independent that summer of 2019. So we were working on Leonard’s Inception and basically the plan was like, write, wrap this up, put this out. Leonard’s Inception is our first game, but it’s kind of like, I guess game teams have a concept of game one, game two. And Leonard’s Inception is kind of like game zero because it didn’t come from a place of having budget or anything. It was kind of essentially Tom’s hobby project from years back that we’d eventually turned into a semi-commercial project. But it’s kind of like a very kind of scrappy and kind of punky game, which is to say that it’s a little bit jank and only runs on PC. But we were like, we’ve got to put this out and then we can work on like a proper game, you know, and get funding for it. And that was the plan. We didn’t like have an idea of what that was going to be straight away, interestingly. We had like a few ideas. We basically were like, we needed to make, you know, a commercial product, something that we could make well and that we’d be interested in making, but also like something that people would buy. And we didn’t like settle on a monster collecting game straight away. For a time, we kind of played around with this idea of like a rogue like kind of superhero game. It didn’t really pan out. We didn’t have like the kind of we didn’t kind of gel to the idea. We really wanted something where we could be like we could describe it and get excited for it because then we’d have ideas and stuff for it. And I think we kind of kept coming back to the idea of a monster collecting game because we kind of had this financial theory that there’s a huge amount of opportunity in that space because I’m fine saying Pokemon. We can say Pokemon. Pokemon’s huge, which Pokemon’s the biggest media kind of property on the planet. And through kind of some sort of logic, you could argue that as a consequence, like the monster collecting genre is the most popular game genre on the planet. But whilst like COD comes out and like it’s an FPS, it’s pretty big, but then like it doesn’t cause everyone else to say like, oh shit, we can’t make like an FPS game now because, you know, COD’s the big boy. We had this idea that there was actually, at least like obviously a lot of people who were into Pokemon are into Pokemon the IP, not necessarily like as a genre. But if like some percentage of that were people who would just like to play any Pokemon style, you know, collecting monster game, then we could make something that people would have gone to buy. There were a few early indie monster games kind of kicking around that time. Temtem came out pretty early on in development for us. And there was a sense of like, oh, have these guys like beaten us to the punch? But we kind of kept at it. And essentially it came from a place of, we’re big into this kind of game. We think we could make a really good one. And we just have this idea that people like games in this genre beyond this one IP. And it was kind of a hard sell. I think it was a hard sell to kind of publishers and stuff, because in the end they look at Pokemon and they say, well, you’re not going to beat Pokemon. So, you know, what’s the point? And also turn based RPGs are not like a cool genre. I think there’s definitely like a perception that it’s kind of like an old school or a bit niche or a bit old hat. And like that’s not the kind of genre people invest in. So like early on, we kind of knew we’d have a couple of these problems or like challenges, I guess, in terms of getting off the ground. But then like the kind of more we kind of brainstormed ideas around it, we kind of got more and more on board. And then we started like prototyping around like late 2019. Samuel, when we met up in a dreary pub in a dreary month, I think what I’d shown you was like a couple months of work, like max. It was like really like not much there. I think it was just like we had like monster sprites in there and like the bare bones of like I can make a battle run. So yeah, it was like super early on at that point. What’s interesting is to suppose that like I consider that almost like a lifetime ago for me, like a lot’s happened in my life since then. What’s it like for being a game developer when you are locked on one project for that much time and like when you reflect on where you started versus where you are now? Existentially, what does that do to you? What’s your reaction, I guess? I think for me, it feels like not much has happened. The pandemic happened like immediately after, but it was fine because I’d already like gone crazy working from home alone at that point. I was like six months ahead of everyone else. But then, you know, I’ve like I’ve lived in the same place. I’ve been doing basically the same kind of thing for the past three years. So I think like for me, it feels like weirdly like not much has happened. I mean, there’s a lot of like going on in the world and in my life as well. But like it feels like it doesn’t feel like I’ve got my three years worth. I kind of like sacrificed three years of like working time basically to this. And now it’s only really now that I feel like I’m in the kind of like the after period. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess that the next era starts now, essentially. Okay, interesting. So, Jay, you mentioned Lender’s Inception only came to PC, but like it’s a really nice looking 2D Zelda inspired sort of top down game that people might find they own from an itch bundle. So at least one charity bundle, I believe. So I was curious, was there anything you took from that game into this as your kind of first indie project? Oh yeah, totally. So Lender’s Inception, to break it down, is kind of like… I think it started… Tom’s original project was actually to make a procedurally generated remake of Link’s Awakening, and then at some point he kind of pivoted it into his own original thing. But it is ultimately kind of like a Proc Gen Zelda experiment. And we kind of ended up shifting it around and giving it this plot and kind of setting where it’s kind of this creepypasta version of Zelda, where you play as a town NPC in a very apparent Zelda pastiche. And then the game’s equivalent of Link is killed early on because you failed to give him a tutorial in time. So you end up playing the game out in his place as the memory starts corrupting and the game starts breaking down because the rules aren’t being met correctly. And it has this kind of weird energy. Looking back on it now, it’s a very dark feeling game. It’s got this nightmarish vibe to it. I think one of the things we took a lot from that was mix. I think people really gel with the mix of lighthearted and then dark. So there’s some lighthearted moments, there’s a lot of joking in that and fun character bits. But also there’s horrific child boy hero murder on screen and horrendously corrupted monsters and stuff. I think we really got attached to that mix of lighthearted, fun Nintendo vibe and then the creepypasta horror thing. I think people gel with that as well. I think even younger players, that kind of thing is probably bigger with 12-year-olds than it is with us. I think people like getting weirded out and creeped out by games because games have such a massive potential to be uncanny. We definitely took that into Cassette Beasts, for sure. One thing I didn’t actually put in our plan here, but it’s definitely worth asking, which is when you decide which project you’re going to work on, what do your first weeks and months look like? How do you decide, okay, here’s what I’m doing for the next two months, here’s what Tom’s doing for the next two months. What does that look like at the very start of development? We spend a lot of time meeting up in cafes and stuff with sketchbooks and notepads and just being like, what is this? We start out with a bare bones idea of, okay, monster collecting RPG. You transform into monsters, great. What does the rest of it look like? What does the tone of that imply? There’s a lot of meeting up in Brighton loading bar and hashing out, okay, how does fusion work? What does that mean? What’s the structure of this game? What are you doing? So we had to figure out what the totality of assets would be in the game and then over time we schedule, right, okay, it takes X amount of time to make a monster, how many monsters can we make? Or it takes X amount of time to make a dungeon, how many dungeons can we put in the game? And hash out the full schedule for the whole game. So pretty early on, after the first couple of months of doing that, we had a full schedule of like, right, this is what every day of the next three years is going to look like. And this is what we’re doing for it. And one thing that does help is that it kind of helps prevent that kind of indie, you know, forever working on a project and perfecting it instead of just kind of getting it out. We really wanted to kind of hit our deadlines and stuff, especially as like a first time funded project on the studio. So it’s kind of like, what is the best version of all this stuff we can make in the time we’ve now allotted for ourselves, essentially? I’ve never produced, I would say, a creative project because I’m very lazy, but I’m always starting things in my head. And you have that initial burst of excitement. It’s the raw creativity. You’re probably making the biggest leaps in terms of like ideas. Do you find that with this, you know, like, is there a part of the process which is just more exciting and fun? And is it the beginning? I actually don’t think it’s the beginning, because like, like it took a while for us to start getting into the really fun stuff of like kind of creating like boss encounters and stuff or like writing quest lines. So like even though early on we had the hash, we’d like hashed out like, OK, there’s this many partner characters in the game and they have quest lines. We didn’t like know what they were at that point. So there’s a lot of like, OK, what’s this person’s quest line and brainstorming ideas and then being like, OK, zombie estate agents, that’s really funny. Or like, what does this boss look like? And it’s like, oh, it’s a big skeleton monster. And that’s like fun. It’s like fun kind of doing the kind of in the weeds, having to come up with a creative solution, like on the schedule day. And then like kind of writing this game, the kind of full game script out and stuff like that. There’s a lot of fun because you got to kind of like flesh out the characters. So those are the characters that would like kind of be archetypes or like vague descriptions on paper and then kind of getting to kind of figure out what their voice is. And then like, you know, putting that into script form and then seeing that in a game is very kind of rewarding as you go. I feel like the middle was probably the most chill of the project because you’re kind of like doing a lot of like creative stuff. Or like I was like churning out monster designs and stuff. It’s kind of fun. Obviously, like the end of a game is like a lot of like wrapping up and like book fixing and nitty gritty. But I feel like that middle stage is actually a lot of fun as well. Okay. So you say you made that schedule of what you’d be doing for the next three years. How much do you stick to that and how much you deviate from it? I say we. This is all Tom. Crucially, he’s like the kind of smart numbers guy. And I just like talk a lot and turn up on podcasts. I think we did. I think we were pretty good on the schedule. I think we also gave ourselves a lot of like allowance. We’re like, okay, okay, here’s like a week at the end of every month where we haven’t got everything scheduled because there’s no chance we’ll have done everything we wanted on the previous sections of the game in that time. So like stuff will run over or like stuff will be like more of a drag than we think or certain things will actually take like a lot less time. I think what happens to the schedule is Tom will ask me how long it takes for me to make something. I’ll give him like a confident answer and then he’ll privately like double that on his schedule and then not tell me and then he was correct. That’s amazing. This is basically how that producer Yoshida saved Final Fantasy XIV. He just had a big spreadsheet and was like, every sale is like one person’s day of time, essentially. I like the idea that your Tom was doing that just for you. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, okay, that’s interesting. So the art style of the game, Jay, you are an amazingly talented artist. I suppose how does Cassette Beasts look different from Wargroove in your mind’s eye? How do you come up with an art style for a game like this? Thank you. So, I mean, I’m a pixel artist. I think I’m always going to be doing something primarily pixel art based because, you know, that’s where I excel. I think early on we were like, what does our game look like? Is it 3D? Is it like kind of 2D? I don’t like kind of high-res 2D. I think it was a case of, well, I can either make a crap 3D looking game or like a good pixel art looking game, so we’ll stick to pixel art. I think, so like early on we did like a lot of art tests of figuring out like what does the next game like look like. And I was like super keen on the, I guess like Octopath, like HD 2D, although I believe HD 2D is like a legal trademark. Who is it? Yeah, I think it’s actually like a brand term now for Square Enix, which is great. I really like the idea of mixing kind of 3D and 2D pixel art. And part of that was actually a cynical business decision in that I was kind of starting to see, like I started making, like working on like commercial indie games in like 2012. And like this is like before, like you could just put anything on Steam. And like seeing the tides turn in terms of like what you need to do to get noticed on an indie game. There were indie games that were coming out like in the Xbox Live Arcade era that would not sell like 10,000 copies now, I think, that were doing huge back then. Just because like the bar has risen so high. So I really wanted to move away from like just a 2D game, partially because I felt like audiences like look at 2D games and be like, oh, that’s a cheap pixel art game, that was cheap, there were diamond dozen. So I had to kind of learn 3D. I mean, I touched on 3D a little bit when I was at university, but I kind of had to teach myself like Blender from scratch. And I was really interested in melding kind of like 2D pixel art textures in 3D space. The actual like 3D kind of architecture of the game is done with a program called Cubicle, which essentially like a voxel like editor where you can create like blocky 3D pixel art models and export it, which is great because I kind of got to kind of circumvent a lot of the 3D stuff I didn’t really know early on. But it kind of came out of like a necessity ultimately, like, right, I have pixel art skills. I think this game needs to be pixel art plus 3D. This is the game that I can make with that time. The actual kind of art style of the game in a lot of ways is like very, we kind of strip back on, if you think of Octopath Traveler and the Live Alive remake, they have a very textured, pixely look and it’s very high detail. And these games have big art teams on the environments. I did all the environment on myself, so I didn’t have the time to do it. So it was kind of a case of what can I do that is feasible in that time. And what we ended up with was kind of, I kind of call it HD GBA. So it’s a very small color palette across the whole game. Rather than overly textured grass and ground texture, there’s a lot of block colors with little details to break it up. And it kind of gives the game a bright, simple look to it, I think. I think it helps with readability as well, because sometimes there’s a lot going on. But ultimately it was kind of a collaboration between needing to make something commercial, but also needing to make something that I can make. And it was essentially like, this is the best look I can make for a game that I can make a full game of in time. Hmm. HD GBA, grab it now before Square Enix does. I feel like GBA might be trademarked. Does it rankle at all when you read reviews and people are like, it looks just like Pokemon Red Blue, and you’re like, no, I was very specifically going for the GBA entries. I mean, we’ve had a few comparisons. I mean, the DS Pokemon games had that kind of combination, but they didn’t go for the extreme kind of 3D perspectives and stuff. I think it was more novel just because the hardware was 3D capable. We’ve had some compliments in the year. I think press have kind of picked up on the idea that it’s quite simple in a lot of ways, but also it kind of helps readability in things. I think things like having a very limited color palette, like there’s one grass shade that gets used for all the regular grass in the game and stuff like that, or there’s one shade of red that gets used everywhere, kind of helps kind of unify a lot of the art assets and also saves a lot of time. And I think that stuff sells it a bit as kind of like a cohesive art style. But this is the first time I’ve designed a world, like kind of the environment assets of a world, like entirely from scratch. So it’s been really cool to see people gel with it because I don’t think environment art is particularly my kind of forte, but I tried my best. Oh, it’s great, man. It looks really nice. The variety of quote unquote biomes in the game. Really impressive. The Harbour Towns is a great RPG location, and I think that you deserve the praise you’re getting for that side of things for sure. I do actually want to ask a bit about monster design. So I think monsters are really, really good. I think like not to compare too much to Pokemon, but when Pokemon is like it’s a shoe with a face or whatever, and I’m like I’m not entirely digging the whole deal, especially as like the kind of roster expands and expands, it becomes some of the designs seem quite abstract to me. Some of them are still absolutely beautiful, but I’m really curious, like how did you approach that side of things? Where do you get ideas for these monsters from, and how do you make sure they all kind of like fit in the same universe, conceptually or logically? This is obviously the core of kind of the cell of the game is like, hey, there’s monsters to collect and you like monsters, right? It was kind of like, for one, like to be a bit self-indulgent, like it’s kind of a dream come true to get to make this stuff, because I think as we’ve said before, like on our Cursed Pokemon episode, like I had my brain kind of like irreversibly rewired from playing Pokemon at the age of like six, and I basically spent my whole life like doodling like monsters and stuff, and I knew like early on like, okay, if you got to work on this, it would be a lot of fun to get to do that, I think it’s a great idea to get to make your own monster game roster. There was a sense of, even if this completely flops, and we don’t break 5,000 copies, it would have been fun to have done. And that was part of it, because you never know how things are going to shake out with a startup. So there’s a few rules early on that I settled on when it comes to designing the monsters. One of them was, okay, I don’t want to do what I call the elemental animal rule. Pokemon is the best at this, they excel at this greatly. This is like a fox plus fire, or this is like a cat plus grass. Animal plus element is a very Pokemon rule. And again, Pokemon is like a pet sim as much as it is an RPG. So it makes a lot of sense, given the kind of thematic nature of the kind of experience in Pokemon. And I feel like a lot of games, there’s a lot of like cool, like indie monster collecting games, but a lot of their monsters also lean into that kind of approach to like, this is how we theme the monsters. It’s like, you know, Poison Bird or whatever. And I wanted to kind of get away from that. And I wanted to make it so, kind of like taking a step back. We wanted Cassette Beasts to be something that is like, this isn’t a quote unquote Pokemon clone. This is just like a game in this genre as much as Digimon is, as much as Persona is, Yokai Watch, there’s a ton of them really. So we kind of needed to kind of settle on our own identity. And the transforming into monsters kind of helps a lot with that. And one of the things we have to kind of overcome was like, how do we set apart the identity of the monsters of Cassette Beasts? So one rule again was no elemental monsters. So kind of part of the lore of the games, there’s a lot of inspiration, a lot of kind of themes of the game involve kind of like the concept of ideas and like where ideas come from and how they influence us and kind of art and creation. And then we kind of wanted to tie a lot into that. So we take a lot from kind of like kind of cryptozoology, you know, like things like, you know, chupacabras and stuff, you know, like monsters that like rumored to exist is a big influence or like kind of like mythology as well. We have like a lot of like mythological things. We also like merging kind of like like human iconography with creatures. So like our like most popular one is like traffic crab because it’s kind of got a cone on its back for a shell and stuff like that, kind of incorporating like like a human junk into the monster designs to kind of give them a sense like kind of a weird inorganic kind of look. And then also one thing that helps again with kind of unifying all of the designs is that we have like a really limited color palette of like 14 sets of colors. So like there’s one white shade across everything. There’s one red shade. There’s one orange shade. And it kind of feels a little bit like how like in Lego, there’s like a limited kind of pool of plastic colors. So everything in those colors kind of fits together. I think that helps a lot in kind of unifying the set. Another rule was, you know, in the internal logic of the game, you’re transforming into monsters so you can fight better. So none of the monsters could be things that like it would feel like a step down from just like decking something yourself. There were some monsters I’d sketch and I’d be like, I’d feel worse in a fight if I turned into that. So back to the drawing board. It has to be a bit cooler. And I think a lot of monsters tend to be a kind of bipedal, a bit meaner looking or have weaponry and things. Not kind of overboard, but Digimon where they’ve got like three Gatling guns on them. We do have one Gatling gun monster actually. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge. I think one thing we want to do is basically kind of sell the idea almost that this is like a set of like action figures that you could imagine buying. They’re all kind of weird. They’ve got this merge, like this kind of like common plastic colour to them. There’s kind of like a shiny inorganicness to them. And it kind of lends itself well to the kind of like weirdly kind of dreamlike atmosphere of the game. That there’s these kind of weird like toys come to life kind of vibe to these monsters. If you could turn one monster into an amiibo, which one would it be? Hmm, the Heart Pick is probably one of the starter monsters. Traffic Crab is probably the popular one. We have like a monster called Pom-Bom, which is kind of like a Pomeranian. Probably like a bomb theme. That’s like, that’s the obvious like this is getting turned into a plush, if anything is. Right. Over a mascot cell. Maybe that’s a bit too easy. I feel like Traffic Crab is going to become real British wildlife in the post-Brexit times. Oh yeah, here’s Hoping. I will see those all over like the South Coast, I think. I’m curious like when, so when you, you know, you started making the game, you have this schedule. Like what, do you make a basic prototype? Like what do you need next to kind of secure funding basically? So for us, we had a kind of a weird approach where we essentially made, our prototype didn’t have anything that’s really like in the game as you play it. We essentially had like a test map that has like the physics and all the physics and some of the abilities you get in the world were there. And it was kind of like a, here’s a little obstacle course where you do some battles as you go and like, hey, this is what the game could feel like if you funded it. It was kind of a hard sell because we didn’t have like the time to kind of create the start of the game. We didn’t have the time to kind of create like the opening maps and things. We really wanted to get kind of a publisher on board as soon as possible because we were kind of very nervous and stressed out about kind of running out of money. So we essentially had like an engine preview of like, this is our monster collecting engine. This is like, you can see some of the traffic craps walking around early on. You have a partner following you and there’s like dialogues in the world. And it was, I don’t know if it was the right approach. I don’t know what the best approach would be for a game like this. I guess like a lot of publishers want to see something kind of very defined early on. It gives you a great indication as to what the final experience would be like, but also that can take a lot of time and money, especially for a game that requires so much of it to exist before that start can happen. So you might think like the demo that we put out early on, that was kind of like what our pitch was, but we didn’t have like any of that stuff in essentially. So we had this like early build that was like, hey, here’s what Cassette Beasts could feel like, take our word for it. And we didn’t really get much attention and we kind of were stressing out around like the start of 2020. Again, maybe we were kind of too eager to get something early on, like kind of funded and stuff. But what we had really was very, very early. And we weren’t really getting anyone kind of interested. So we kind of stressed out and came up with this plan where we were like, instead of kind of doing this on the private side of like, you know, shipping around publishers, we kind of said like, what if we put this out there ourselves, announce it? And if we get any press from that, then maybe people will get interested because, you know, indie publishers love to see games that can get pressed kind of organically on their own. So essentially from in the first like quarter of 2020, we started kind of shifting gears into like, okay, how would we promote, like announce this and putting together like an announcement trailer. So we kind of started making like a lot of like scenes early on that were like, okay, there’s one, a very, very first trailer, there’s like a shot of someone running down like a snowy field, and that doesn’t exist in the game. That was like a snow map that I put together, so I could record that shot for a trailer. But we have those assets, so there’s a eventually we, there’s a snow area in the game, but just that particular one doesn’t exist. Or like, I made a bunch of monsters, but the animation, basically all the assets that were in that very, very early like announcement trailer were what we had, and we had nothing beyond that. And it was essentially like a, hey, I think we can cut together a cool trailer using what we have that maybe we can get some press. And in kind of a stars aligning moment, the pandemic happened and there was no game news for a while. And I think it was going to be, Jeff Keighley had announced like the kind of Summer of Games Fest in May 2020. And I think it was the week before that, so there was nothing going on in games press. And I think we just like emailed it around like everyone. And then like, you know, Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun ran with like, hey, this is this cool lo-fi Pokemon game with tapes. And I don’t have proof, but I think getting that press, like that much press early on because we happened to hit in like a snow news day, is what got publishers like to kind of get back to us and kind of like be like, okay, now there’s interest in this clearly. So it was a bit of a star’s line in a moment and like a, you know, terrible worldwide pandemic that kind of set us up, I think, to get publishing. I mean, I think we would have stuck with it regardless and it could have been that it would have worked out regardless, but I think getting our publisher, Raw Fury, on board at that point, I think came from us making this kind of leap to kind of go public with the game very early on. One of the downsides of that, of course, being is that you then lose an announcement trailer opportunity. Samuel, I want to show you, you are very familiar with like, you know, how valuable things like that can be when it comes to games press. So we kind of started off with already having announced and being years and years out. So we are kind of like marketing campaign had to be kind of structured around that out of necessity. But I think that is what got us. I like to believe that’s kind of what happened causes to get published. I don’t think there is necessarily a playbook for how games find publishers. But I know that when people go to GDC, for example, they’re often going there to try and find a publishing deal for, you know, a prototype they’ve worked on or a project they’re pitching or, you know, I think there are like varying degrees of this. People get publishing deals from like basically a PowerPoint and some people get it from an existing demo or they can even get it like deep into development when there’s like a year to go and they just need to run a marketing campaign and get some QA or something. So how unusual do you think your experience was there? I think it was pretty unusual. I mean, to an extent, a lot of indies also get picked up by like putting a cool thing out on social media and then like say, hey, let’s talk, this looks cool. I mean, and this game’s out have been published because they did a GIF that did like 1000, you know, likes on Twitter and, you know, GIFs. I think visuals sell, you know, a cool looking game and a GIF that’s an indie game, you know, that sells. Publishers are interested in things that like look really cool from just a glance. So I think getting seen because you’ve got a little bit of press attention is probably not super uncommon. But I think our game again crucially isn’t one where we designed it to be like the most detailed, beautiful pick slot that you can possibly do because that’s, I mean, I think I can make like a nice screenshot for a game like that, but I don’t know if I could like drag that out to a full game. So I think our game situation is fairly unusual, but it’s not super off mark at the same time. Okay, that makes sense. So how many publishers did you have get in touch off the back of that? Was it just Raw Fury? Did you have multiple conversations or was it like, okay, this is the one right away, let’s go with it? We had quite a bunch of conversations with folks. Raw Fury was someone we were really keen on working with early on, so we were kind of super chuffed to actually get to work with them as our publisher. So we were in talks with quite a few. Ultimately, it was a case of like, who do we think is like the right fit for this, to kind of get the vibe, and we definitely felt like from Raw Fury, like early on, they like got it. I think that’s like super key because I think it’s very possible to work with a publisher who like knows that your game has potential, but doesn’t like, no one there like understands why people like it. And if your publisher aren’t like championing you themselves, then I think you’re going to kind of fight an uphill battle, I think. So yeah, we had a few get in touch with us. I think also Raw Fury’s terms don’t, I think one thing that was very crucial to us is that we wanted to keep rights to our IP, which Raw Fury allows as part of their contract, which I can say because it’s public. But there were a few publishers that needed a buyout of the IP, and that’s fine, but that just kind of wasn’t what we want. I think it’s very important to us that we own this, we own Cassette Beasts, no matter what happens going forward, this is something we own as an IP. And if you’ve always got something that you own, then that’s hugely important, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I’ve skipped ahead a little bit here, but there’s one other thing I was going to ask you, which I was really curious about, because you use an open source engine called Godot for Cassette Beasts. And I think it’s interesting, because one of the Eurogamer comments said, oh, is this the highest profile game using Godot yet? And then someone said, well, actually, Sonic Colors Ultimate is rumored to have used it as well. But I was curious, what goes into picking an engine? Because I think it’s maybe the thing that people understand the least in terms of how people talk about this stuff on the internet. So what is that discussion like? And how does it affect the way you make the game? Yeah, we actually jumped through a ton. So I mean, this is really down to Tom, because he’s the sole programmer on the project. And what he is able to make makes or breaks the whole thing. So we kind of trialed out, essentially. We had a bunch of assets. And we trialed out, OK, what’s the pipeline of getting stuff into this engine? And how does it look when we do it? So we even trialed out Unreal Engine and put some of the basic assets of the game in that. And it was like, wow, this lighting looks fantastic. But the pixel art support in Unreal Engine is non-existent. And Unity and things. Godot was very up and coming at the time. And I had never heard of it. Tom was super keen on it. One of the things about it that’s really good is that it’s open source, which means that, say you have an issue with Unity, that’s like a Unity bug, you have to kind of like tell the Unity developers and hopefully they fix it or you create a workaround. But Tom is able to just kind of like, okay, there’s an engine bug. Okay, I fixed Godot. Now there’s no engine bug. And also one thing about it is it’s very lightweight. So something like Unreal Engine, if you’re making a first person horror experience, it’s like plug in and play. It’s like designed to make that kind of thing. And it will look very good very early on. And it would function very well as well. You know, you can drop in like a first person, like character porn into Unreal Engine and get like a first person engine running in like 10 minutes max. But trying to use that engine to make a game like Cassette Beasts is kind of like fighting against all that stuff that’s there for that. But because Godot was kind of lightweight, it’s not really designed to make any particular kind of game, which means that you can kind of tailor it for what you want to make very easily. So, you know, Tom worked on some tooling and stuff for like importing assets. And I think one thing that ultimately we ended up with and was really important was like, okay, how long does it take for me to have this animated monster to getting it like running in the game? And in another engine that might take a bunch of button clicks and it might be a pain in the ass. But in Godot, it’s like, okay, we’ve created like a sprite importer. We’ve created a tool for previewing monsters. And it takes like, there’s like nothing, there’s like no time at all between like, you know, finishing drawing something and getting it running in the game. So the pipeline of getting everything, you know, from paper to running in the game is like extremely fast. And I think that allows us to make like, what is like quite a big game for, you know, two full time developers. I think without that kind of like quick pipeline, if you’re like doing a lot of like messing around with like, you know, the minutiae of configuration and stuff and like importing sprite sheets and like making sure the sprite sheets are imported on the right sizes and stuff, all that stuff like takes a lot of time and it really builds up when you’ve only got a small team. So I think Godot is like, it’s allowed us to have this kind of fast pipeline essentially. Right, right. Is there another factor where, because it’s open source, you don’t have to pay licensing fees for the engine. Oh yeah, that’s nice too for sure. That’s not me being cynical, but I was just like, I was thinking that is something I know that developers have to weigh up when they choose technology. So, yeah, okay, interesting. That is really interesting to hear because I think it really is the thing that people misunderstand the most with how games are made and people kind of like hear that like, oh, Frostbite is hard to develop in and stuff like that, or this game looks like that because of this engine. And I don’t know, it’s interesting to hear it from a practical standpoint. Okay, interesting. So, I suppose go back to the publishing side of things. It sounds really basic, but what does a publisher do and why does it actually matter? I think the publisher essentially exists to do, in our case, everything that we don’t have the time and resources to do. And that’s stuff that would still exist even if we were to self-publish. So, okay, Tom and I are working on the game, but then who’s submitting the builds to, you know, Microsoft backend and stuff like that? Who’s running localization, coordination and stuff for getting it translated into languages? And who’s, like, tracking those people down? Who’s doing all the marketing? Who’s getting you interviews with press so people hear about your game? It’s basically like the rest of the iceberg. We get to do the stuff above water, which is just, like, make the game. But there’s, like, a ton of things that, like, need to be done. You know, in promotion, in QA, you know, it’s really useful to have people that can just, like, test the game constantly and kind of report bugs or kind of gameplay issues. Because, you know, when you’re making games in bubbles like ours, like, we have no real concept of how easy or hard the game is because we’re very good at it. So it’s really useful to kind of have people to kind of say, this has been an issue, even if it’s something that we didn’t know about. And also just kind of like, keep up with production and kind of keep up with like, hey, how are you guys doing? So like, having… Role Fury being a part of the project is kind of invaluable. As much as it is like a two development team project, like a two man team project, it’s like a project that has like, I don’t know, maybe like a hundred people ends up touching the game or kind of influencing its ability to exist in some way. And it’s really… We really wouldn’t be able to do all this stuff without them. Yeah, I mean, it really is like everything else in terms of the game production that they kind of sort out. If you’ve seen our game, that’s probably because of them, because we don’t have the time to be doing it. Yeah, of course. I ask, not because I don’t know what a publisher does, but I work for one, just to be clear. But yeah, I’m just really curious to hear it from the dev’s perspective. You know, I just… I know obviously some games do launch without a publisher, or like they’re self-published. And yeah, like the localization thing is a massive, massive chunk of work that he’s doing, as is QA, when you’re launching on multiple platforms. So yeah, I’m always curious to hear what like the, you know, what the upside is for having a publisher versus just getting the game out yourself. Did you localize Lennox Inception? Oh, no, no. Lennox Inception basically just released in English on its like little Java engine on PC. Right, right. Yeah, it had like a budget of zero. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, huge difference in scale of what you’re making here. Okay, so how do yours and Tom’s skill set divide up? I feel like I’ve always, you know, you’ve kind of alluded to it there, but I’ve always roughly just assumed that this is the art side for you and then, you know, technical brains for Tom. I’m assuming that’s kind of roughly how it divides up. But like, how do you decide, I guess, like how do you divide up the work and how do you decide what needs to be outsourced basically or paid for? So I think it helps with Tom and I because, you know, we have very different skill sets. But also, like, there are some things where we kind of like have a Venn diagram kind of closes. So, for example, like the art and the main kind of story writing and stuff that I handle, then a lot of the actual kind of design and structure of the game and also crucially like the whole battle system is like all Tom’s work. And then we’ll do a lot of collaboration with like kind of, okay, here’s what we want the broad story to be, here’s what we want these beats to be, and like ideas on like, you know, certain moves and stuff like that will definitely brainstorm together. But we are really able to kind of like compartmentalize the kind of project where I’m doing a lot of the kind of visual stuff and he’s doing a lot of the kind of like behind the scenes numerical and code stuff. I think it helps, we have like a lot of different priorities between us, but also at the same time we have a very similar vision for what the game should be. So there’s a lot of stuff early on that I had proposed for the game that he wouldn’t be sure on, but I’d be like, trust me, let’s just go with it and this is the approach. And there’s definitely a lot of stuff where he proposed it early on for the game and I wasn’t super sure, but he was like, let’s just, we should definitely go with this. And then I trusted him on that and it kind of worked out for the better. It’s an interesting question because there’s like a lot of crossover in terms of like, okay, this needs to feel like this, this needs to feel like this, the vibe should be like this in a lot of ways, but also there’s a lot of like, right, I trust him to just kind of like come up with all the moves, for example. And he trusts me in turn to like design a bunch of the monsters. But at the same time, there’ll be like a cross back and forth. So like I’ll propose some moves for the characters and then he’ll come up with some ideas for monsters. One of our monsters is called Gin and Tonic, which is like a gin, gin bar cocktail waiter. And it’s a pun that people keep highlighting. And that was one way I like he came up with a monster pun name first. And I like designed a monster around that. So we do a lot of it’s not fair to say that I like design all the monsters because, you know, there’s definitely like a lot of creative back and forth on that. And again, when it comes down to quest lines and stuff, a lot of it comes from just like us riffing ideas. There’s one character quest line that like we just kind of like joked into being and then stuck with. I won’t spoil because it’s like it’s quite like a fun reveal. But we were like laughing out loud when we kind of like came up with the idea for it. So I think having like a creative partner who is like not stepping on your toes in terms of what your day to day is, but at the same time is like able to kind of contribute is like hugely important. Yeah, plus I guess someone you can spend loads and loads of time with, right? Because that’s the other thing is that you just have each other in a lot of ways. Yeah, it helps that we’re good mates as well. You know, we can like chat about the stuff and like not get each other’s nerves too much, hopefully. Yeah, I think you just have to have like a part, a creative partner who’s like able to kind of bounce back and forth with you and also you just get along with, you know. Just like us, Matthew. Yeah. I was going to ask, by the time of release, are you kind of like fundamentally agreed on everything or are there things in the game where, you know, you’re waiting to see, you know, either of you are not sure about the other person’s thing and then there’s like a I told you so or waiting for the kind of review reaction. I think there’s a lot of stuff where, like, I think we kind of knew that certain things worked out, like, by the time they were in the game. So, like, one of the things early on was, like, Thomas really keen on this, like, there’s a feature called the Ranger Captains, which is this quest line where you go around and you, like, you meet kind of like the leaders of, like, the local community kind of protection guild in town and they kind of act as, like, foe, like, gym leaders. Not too many comparisons, but they’re kind of like harder opponents that kind of have particular characters and stuff. And that was something I remember I wasn’t, like, super certain on because I felt like, I don’t know, I couldn’t, like, envision how that fit into the world. But then in practice, I actually think it adds a huge lot of, like, a lot of kind of characters to the game. It adds, like, a lot of reason to kind of explore the world, kind of like a secondary main quest line. And that’s something that, like, by the time that was in the game and functioning and, like, I got to start, like… So, like, one of the things there was that, you know, he devised these strategies for these characters and then kind of give them names based on their strategies. So, like, he’d come up with a character and be like, okay, this is Buffy because she buffs herself in battle. And, like, that was the extent of her character. And then I had to go in and, like, devise what Buffy looked like, what her voice sounded like, and, like, what her personality was. And that was quite fun because it’s kind of like working from prompts. And there’s a lot of stuff like that. I’m sure there’s a bunch of decisions that I made early on that he wasn’t super certain on that, like, have since, like, played out pretty well. It’s kind of hard to, like, to remember in retrospect, like, how any of this, like, happened. So it’s really hard to, like, recall how anything got made. There’s nothing in the final game where you were really like, I’m really interested to see how that lands. There’s some stuff, I think the whole game was a lot of, like, I’m interested to see how that lands. But now it’s landed. I’m like, OK, I’m glad that it did land as well as it did. I think as well, there’s a lot of stuff. I think we can be overly critical about ourselves. I have high bar for writing in games, I think. And a lot of games, I feel like I don’t gel with the writing very much. So there’s a lot of writing in the game where I’m like, is this too cloying? Is this a bit fake? You know, this is stuff that I’ve written. And then he’ll reassure me is good. And then the press will come out and I’ll be like, oh, that was good. Or decisions that he’ll have made and he wasn’t super certain people would like. But I have to be like, no, trust me, I think this is a really great shout. People like it, ultimately. Okay, that’s interesting. So here’s a question. So you obviously yourself and Tom, you have to account for and how you budget a game. But like, I’m curious about the outsourcing stuff. So is it, I think your brother did the music for this one. Yes, that’s right. That’s good. A bit of nepotism going on there. Nice. But really great music. Are you from a family of just incredibly talented people? Is that like the whole thing with the Baylis clan? Because yeah, really impressive. So you have a composer to think about, but you also have some quite prominent voice actors in there. So how much is that part of the kickoff discussions with Roar of Fury about, okay, this is what we’re going to pay for alongside us, essentially? I mean, so a lot of that was kind of like we come up with a number and we run them by it. We run it by them, essentially, and say, this is what we need to do. And I think rather than the monetary budget for this stuff, the real bottleneck is time. So for example, the voice acting is stuff that I entirely solo sorted out. And that was a case of, right, I’ve done this on Wargroove. I know how much time it takes to do simple, I call, limited voice acting, where you’ve got like, hey, what? And all these little sound bites. And I was like, right, we have enough time to do the game with all these voices. We don’t have enough time for me to chop up and like direct actual voice, like fully voice cutscenes. We just don’t have like the kind of team bandwidth. And that was a decision where it was a case of, we could have afforded it. It really was like a time thing. So it was a case of, right, I can do that and we’ll just kind of go with that for now. And there’s a lot of stuff, you know, my brother Joel, he was working part time throughout the whole like development. So there was a lot of like, cool, like he’d have a bunch of cool ideas and we’d like, there’s a bunch of like cool music ideas we’d have. But then I would just be like, right, we just don’t have the time for that. So let’s do like the best version of this that I think we feasibly have time for. And it kind of like, everything takes longer in game development as well. So it kind of shakes out as like, you can go further with a lot of stuff, but like this is the number we have to like settle on early on as like what we can achieve in the time we have. And then obviously, I’m not the solo artist in this project. So like Michael, who is an animator that we contracted, is a good friend of ours. He did basically handled all of the regular monster animation in the game. So like all the attack animations and stuff. And like the amount of monsters that we could get done in that time really came down to like, this is how long it takes an animator to animate one monster. Okay, how many monsters can we animate in that time really? And we ended up in a number of like 120 monsters because that was in the ballpark of like feasibility. So yeah, like a lot of it really comes down to like less like monetary costs. Because again, we’re working on such a small project that even like even bumping the number of like monster animations up and stuff wouldn’t like break the bank. But it really comes down to how much time we have with the resources we have, I think. Interesting. So that is super granular. But I’ve just always been curious about this stuff, is it how much of it is from the start versus, you know, how much of it is something you discuss halfway through? Okay, so this is my last question for this section, Jay. They’ll ask you some more game specific questions. But how do you decide what to pay yourself to work on your own game? Sounds bizarre, but like you read about like the Shovel Knight devs living out of their savings or whatever. And, you know, these kind of like gamedeveloper.com articles where people talk about we were running out of money, but we did X, Y and Z to get over the line. Obviously, when you have a publishing deal, I wonder if it’s a slightly different sort of situation. So how do you figure out like what you’re worth to yourself? Really, it’s a case of like. So this kind of comes down to the pitch for the game, because the pitch of the game is how much money you have to recoup in order to, you know, start making profit. And it’s kind of like, OK, say if you gave yourselves less salary, then you’d be starting profiting earlier on, right? Just mathematically. And the main cost of the development of the game is paying ourselves salaries. So it really comes down to a balance of like, how much do we need to like not be struggling? Because again, like if we’re doing this for like the next X amount of years, you don’t want to be like, you know, scraping by. But also at the same time, how much is enough to kind of like, you want to go under the limit where you’re bumping your own budget up too high. So it’s kind of a balancing act between like, like life costs and also like, how much you think you can sell, you know? Maybe if we were making like, I don’t know, like a survival crafting, you know, multiplayer MMO, we could give ourselves massive salaries because we’d be pretty confident that we’d make it all back. Yeah, it’s kind of a tricky question, isn’t it? I think it really comes down to your budget, essentially, and how confident you are that you can make a certain kind of amount of money. But at the same time, you know, we had a publisher backing us. We don’t have to pretend that we were like struggling the whole time to get by because they were, you know, helping us out, like financing us essentially for the project, which is great. You know, I hope it’s not like crass to ask, like, would this not have happened without that publisher backing when it happened? Yeah, I mean, like we had backup plans where, like, if no one published us, we’d, like, have our budget and then do a second round potentially and, like, see if anyone else wants to give ourselves money, at which point we would have had to, like, you know, decimate our salaries. So yeah, it really comes down to, like, how much we think we can get someone to invest versus how much is, like, wise to ask someone to invest. But there’s that initial bit of runway. It must be quite scary because nothing’s confirmed and it’s costing you money. Oh yeah, like, before we had any publisher, there was, like, a lot of period of time where you’re, like, just running by on salaries. And I don’t recall it, like, super well, I think because I was stressed, but I think that’s a good indication of, like, what I was feeling at the time. Okay, Jay, I did have one more question to this. I’ve not been the plan, so don’t feel like you have to answer it. What is a milestone with a publisher? Like, what’s that whole situation like? Well, what’s super cool actually here is that Raw Fury, like, don’t operate on milestones. So I think one thing that’s quite challenging about milestones is that, like, they’re quite arbitrary. You know what I mean? Like, if a publisher says, like, okay, you need to have finished, like, level one. Well, what is level one? Like, level one is like what you say it is. So there’s challenges of, like, are you both in agreement on, like, what one level counts as in order for you to have, like, hit your contractual milestones? It can be really abstract because you’re using games terms that you’ve defined in order to get your money, which is very real, from your publisher. Again, like, Royal Fury don’t operate on milestones, so we were pretty, we got to kind of, like, make the game at our pace and not have to kind of structure our month on month based around certain aspects of the game. Like, for example, like, a lot of the script and story stuff came in much later. So if the milestone was like, you need to have finished, like, one quest, then you start asking questions of like, okay, do we just put a placeholder quest in here so we can, like, hit our milestone? But then, like, that’s eating up development time and content that isn’t real. You start to get into some weird territory there. So I’m really glad that we’ve just been able to kind of develop the game at the pace that we think, you know, we’ve been able to, we’re able to kind of keep up. And again, it’s really helped us make what is, like, not like to be able to, but I think in terms of the scale and the time, we’ve made something pretty big. Yeah. I think that, again, not having to hit like arbitrary milestones and stuff has really helped us out there. Okay, fantastic. Well, I appreciate your honesty to all my fucking ridiculous questions there, Jay. That’s good. Very different to me asking you, how do you feel about the fucking, what’s it called, KO minigame in Sonic Adventure 2? Very different vibes. Okay, let’s take a quick break, then. We’ll come back with some more game-specific questions about Cassette Beasts. Cool. Welcome back to the podcast. So, Jay is going to have a sore throat at the end of this podcast because I’m making him talk so much, but it has resulted in some pretty amazing insights so far. And Matthew’s kicked back with some Renny, I assume, and just a Diet Coke, just having a nice Sunday morning, so it’s… I broke my tooth just before we recorded this podcast. That’s unpleasant. The same tooth? Oh, no, what, like a bread roll again? Cocoa Pop. Fuck, okay, I mean, that’s tough. Like, have you got an emergency dental treatment plan, man? Oh, I’ve got, I had one booked in for Wednesday anyway, but I don’t want to eat into Jay’s precious time with this bullshit. Yeah, eat into, too soon, man. I mean, that’s tough. Okay, so, yes, got a bunch of more questions about Cassette Beasts here, more specifically about the game, having a probe development quite a lot there. So, Jay, at one point you said to me, maybe about six months to a year ago, I think we’ve made a weird game, and that’s stuck in my memory. Do you remember why you thought that at the time? There’s probably a bunch of reasons. I think the whole game concept is weird. I think the transforming into Cassette Tape, like into monsters with Cassette Tapes is kind of like innately weird. But part of me likes to think that people like weird games, and maybe making a game idea that has got a little bit of weirdness to it, instead of something broad is maybe what people want. There’s some weird games that do really well. Undertale is a very weird game, but people like it because it has a lot of personality. I don’t know exactly why I said that. Maybe it’s because I was sleep deprived. I don’t know. But I do think we’ve made an odd game, but I think it’s odd in a way that people have figured out. At least reading some of the reviews, people have gelled into what it was we were going with, and that’s really nice. There’s one lad in the dock in Harbour Town who says, it doesn’t really make sense that we can record these monsters onto cassette tapes, but don’t think about it too much. He says something like that and I’m like, that’s good. That’s Jay telling me, don’t overthink the concept of this game too much. Yeah, I very much enjoyed that. I was curious, what are the non-Pokémon influences on the game? Because I think it’s really obvious to just ask questions about that side of things. I know you are a rampant media consumer, and you can feel that there’s more going on in the DNA of this game than just Pokémon. So what else kind of influenced it? It’s a good question. So I actually think, maybe just for listeners, for context, the actual structure of the game is not really much like Pokémon. It’s a game about collecting monsters in turn-based battles, but then beyond that, I think we diverge a lot from what you might associate with Pokémon. For one, the actual world exploration is very much inspired by Zelda. There’s a bit of Breath of the Wild in there. I think our reference point was actually linked to the past in terms of the scale of the world and also the density of stuff in it. We didn’t have time to make a massive open running across fields with a horse world map. So we went for this compact one where every quadrant has lots of puzzles and stuff to do or little quests and things to see. One of our influences was Digimon World, which is a PlayStation 1 Pet Sim RPG. I don’t know if either of you have played this. No, I always coveted it when I was too old to be watching Digimon at 12 and then thought, oh, Digimon is on PlayStation where Pokemon is on Nintendo platforms. It was like an isometric looking thing. Yeah. What’s weird about this is it’s not based on Digimon. Basically, Digimon is a property that started out as like, this is Tamagotchi for boys and it was like a virtual pet sim. Then Pokemon came out and then I think Bandai were like, we’re retooling our entire franchise to look like Pokemon. But this is actually a pre-Digimon anime game, which is based on the branding of the virtual pet. So it’s a very weird vibe game where you’re like a kid who gets sent to this magical island, where there’s all these talking Digimon and you raise a Digimon. But what I always connect to with this game as a kid is that you’re kind of like plonked into this island, and there’s kind of a case of like go nuts, like there’s encounters that will be too hard for you, so you have to train up in the early areas or there’s areas that will open up. And the whole game has this kind of like weird uncanny vibe to it. And the gameplay is incredibly obtuse and a lot of the puzzles are incredibly obtuse, but it has this kind of weird like Y2K dream scape feel. And I really love the idea of like just kind of putting you in this world and asking people to like go nuts a bit and kind of run around and kind of figure out what to do and kind of find fun at their own pace. So that’s something that I kind of use as a reference point. A lot of the kind of social aspects I definitely pulled from Persona 5. It was very fun because Tom hadn’t actually played Persona until we’d finished the game. I was a bit stressed that he would play through and be like, oh shit, he just copied all these ideas. For example, you actually live in an apartment above a cafe, which I didn’t realize was literally the premise of Persona 5 until I’d made it. And it was too late to change. So yeah, I think a lot of the social aspect, I kind of got inspired by Persona. I think the Persona really excels at that vibe of hanging out with your friends, hanging out with these dumb friends that you’ve made in this RPG world. And I really wanted to kind of capture that element. Going back to the Pokemon thing, one thing that the Pokemon, like the anime, would always have that the games never had was this aspect of like, you’re going on an adventure, but you’re doing it with friends, you know, like the Brock and Misty type characters. So early on, we really liked the idea of like, okay, you’re traveling with an NPC at all times, and they’re able to comment on what’s happening and like have conversations about the story so far and stuff. And we also kind of figured that, you know, if a lot of people who are playing this have played Pokemon, which is very, very light on characterization, then it might like pleasantly surprise them a bit to like see that kind of reactivity from the characters. In terms of narrative stuff, I think we took a lot of inspiration from like kind of a… There’s a lot of Grant Morrison in here. There’s a lot of kind of Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison’s Multiversity. Grant Morrison, the comic book writer, is really good at stories that kind of explore the nature of stories. And there’s a lot of that kind of like DNA in the game. And also the sense of like you can do weird stuff and people will go along with it if the kind of human core is there. And also the kind of melding of like, you know, Multiversity kind of comic book abstract kind of concepts with like occultism. There’s a little bit of that in there as well. And also kind of the like subversive kind of left wing side of it as well. I suppose you have like all of these people are from different, are they from different versions of reality? Yeah, they’re from like parallel universes essentially. Yeah. Yeah, in all kind of in this in-between place. Kind of stranded there. That’s, yeah, I suppose I hadn’t really thought of Morrison as an influence on that kind of side of things. Oh, yeah. I know Tom has like a lot of inspirations. There’s a lot like sci-fi novels and stuff that he got inspired by. Yeah, again, I think we tried not to make it too gamey. We tried to like turn back on the kind of game references and stuff as well, and kind of turn it into like a broader kind of, you know, identity of its own as well. And I also like a lot of inspiration from like my own life. I definitely put a lot of myself into like the kind of the partner characters or like aspects of like things that I feel about things definitely come up. I think people draw a lot from their own lives when they write, you know, anything. So there’s definitely a lot of like myself in there not to be too indulgent. So I suppose how much did Cassette Beasts change from what you originally conceived of up until release? Because I feel like you and Tom are pretty responsible devs. It seems like you’ve been on task the whole time with knowing we’re going to do this and the end product is largely what you conceived of. But that’s on the outside looking in. Is this the game you planned to make three and a half years ago? Yeah, I really think we actually kind of stuck with it very early on. I think once you could see trailers and stuff of the game very early on, I think we had a really strong idea of what it was. I mean, when we were first talking about what the game setting would be, there was a lot of discussion of… I think I proposed something a lot more urban dystopia, for example. And Tom was like, no, we need this to be a chill vibes game. We want people to want to hang around this world. And that was the right choice. We definitely experimented a lot early on in what the setting and tone would be. And I wasn’t super sure on how what we ended up with would be responded to. Very early on, at least. It was hard to tell if this was the right vibe. But I think as it fleshed out, we felt more confident that, okay, this is the nice vibe, this is the nice tone emotionally for the game. So I think once we properly started working on it, we had quite a clear vision for it. And it basically stayed on track from that point onwards. But early on, we definitely had the cassette idea and we didn’t really have much else. And we definitely had to build a lot of that up. Yeah. So in the game, you fuse monster forms to create new ones. And I know that was something you planned from the start, because I think that was some of the first art you showed me was here’s what happens if you combine two monster designs. What challenges does that create logistically and how do you account for that as the game’s main writer and artist? So we haven’t even talked much about the fusion system, but this is essentially like our headline feature. When we were first talking about a game, we were like, right, this needs like USP, right? This needs like something that no other game is going to do. And it couldn’t be open world. We were like pretty early on, we were like, we can’t do open world because like Pokemon will do open world like very soon. And that was pretty right. We were pretty correct on that. But we were like, okay, relationships and like fusion. So we worked a lot on kind of procedural systems, you know, with Lennox Inception. I’d worked in doing like procedural monster art in Starbound. So we had this sense of like, okay, fusion is something we could do. We just have to figure out like what that means in the game. And then when we had this, you know, concept of transforming into monsters with cassette tapes, we were like, okay, so then if you’re with a partner character who’s following you around, because as we said before, you know, you want that experience of hanging out with a friend. Does that mean like fusion is like you and your partner transforming into a single monster together? And like, like that’s, that’s maybe that, maybe that’s what the weird thing was that I was talking to you about early on, because that’s like a weird concept. It’s kind of a strange thing to do. It’s very, it’s like kind of pseudo intimate. And once that kind of came together, like conceptually, we were like super on board. What the actual logistics of the Fusion system would be is something we kind of had to figure out. It went for a couple of iterations, but essentially how the system works in game is, it’s kind of like a, like a super meter, you know, you build up this meter, this Fusion meter, and then when it’s full, you can trigger it in battle and you can combine your monsters into, your monster forms into one big form, and you kind of combine all your moves, and stats, so you get this kind of super form buff that you can like blitz boss fights and stuff with. And how that works on the art side is, so every monster is essentially drawn twice. So if you imagine every monster exists as like a sprite sheet with like a bespoke animation, and then it also exists as like a modular action figure, is a way of describing it, where, you know, I’ve drawn the head and the legs and the arms and the bits of the face and stuff, like separately, but also always in the same scale. So if you were to kind of mix and match the parts, they’d all fit together. So I think a modular action figure, or like a Lego version of them, is a good way of describing it. And because we can animate those pieces separately, you essentially get a whole animated character that can have attack animations and stuff, because, you know, if I draw like, okay, we have like a moth creature, so it has wings that the fusion form can use. And then if it uses those wings, they have like an animation where they flap. So the final fused monster, you know, has an animation where it like stamps its feet and flaps its wings, because all those parts are like animating together. And that’s essentially the breakdown of how the system works. And the practical side of this was just drawing a shitload of things. It was just drawing like a lot of like wings and a lot of legs and a lot of tails. So there’s a huge amount of like, every monster has like at least several bespoke parts. There’s some like reuse, you know, we can get away with like multiple like lizard legs, for example. We don’t need to draw those twice. But yeah, there’s a lot of like bespoke art on that side of things. And it’s all kind of drawn in like these animations that are all timed to fit together. And then this essentially could be our like headline feature, you know. People are really into like monster fusions. People are really into Pokemon fusions where they draw like fine art of like two monsters fused together. But it’s also something we knew that like Pokemon would never do or like Digimon would never do. Because I don’t think necessarily just the technical side of it, but also the fact that there’s like 1000 Pokemon now kind of makes it hard to do. But also at the same time, like Pikachu is like Pikachu. You can’t like dilute the brand of Pikachu by making it like now it has wings or whatever or like has like a robot head or something. So you can’t like dilute your like trademarks in that sense. I think they’re very keen on the branding of Pokemon. So we were safe that we had this safe idea of like they will never do this. They like technically and like artistically cannot pull this off. It’s also a lot easier to do in Pixlar as well. So yeah, that’s kind of how that all came together. It was the kind of like logical end point of like a lot of distant decisions and a lot of the project revolves around that. I am actually interested in that, you know, because you identify it as this USP earlier on and there’s so much heavy lifting has to be done to actually execute it. Reading a lot of the reviews, I am struck by like it comes up a lot and people are talking about it. But not every review necessarily identifies it as like this is the thing, because there are loads of other ideas in it as well. And I am kind of interested in the balance of was there ever any fear of like drowning out with all the other cool stuff you’re doing? You know, like how do you kind of like surface that and make sure, you know, was it hard to find the balance of how readily available is the skill? How often do you do it? You know, was there ever a version of this where you fuse, you only ever fuse as it were, rather than having the individual monsters too, because by all accounts, you guys have done loads of interesting stuff with the individual monster battling too. Yeah, I’m actually quite pleased that reviews don’t go into it too much. I kind of hoped early on that it would be like, come for the fusion and stay for everything else. I think the fusion is cool, but I do think it’s a USP, very specifically in terms of it’s a selling point, but not necessarily the best point of the game. And I was really hoping, I think it was like, I think this is why Pokemon always has a new gimmick every game, that isn’t actually that crucial to the game. You know, the Gigantamax for example, that’s a fun thing, but it’s not worth writing that much about, because it’s a small part of it. And we kind of saw fusion as that to an extent. This is something that will get people excited, but it’s not the stuff that we were excited about when making the game. The stuff that we were excited about was the characters, was the open world, was the weird bosses and stuff. We think it’s super cool, and people are like, we have a Discord and people are posting all their crazy fusion combinations and stuff. But I actually was hoping it wouldn’t be the only thing worth writing about with the game, and I’m kind of glad that it is worth a sentence or two in reviews. Oh, that’s cool. Catherine was reviewing it for RPS, and the thing she talked most about, and I think this ties into something else Sam was going to ask next, was the advanced kind of elemental kind of interaction. So like one of the, you know, you have your kind of elemental types, but they also kind of almost, there’s almost like an alchemy between them, where it can create positive or negative effects based on which elemental types clash, which that really caught my imagination when she was talking about that, and it clearly caught her imagination too. I could talk about that for sure. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, when we were talking about, okay, we were early on, we want this thing that, you know, people who like Pokemon and games like that can get into, but also we want something a bit more like… I guess adult isn’t the right word. Some of our reviews are saying this is Pokemon for adults, and then like there are people commenting saying like, oh, does it have like drugs and blood in it? That’s so shit. And it’s like, that’s not… I don’t think that’s what we mean by adult. Like, that’s not the vibe. It’s more like gameplay and emotionally potentially. I don’t know. But yeah, we really wanted to kind of do something with the elements that wasn’t just… I mean, Pokemon is a game for kids. I think I said this a lot last time. It has to be simple. And like the strategy in Pokemon is like very like one step. It’s like, okay, if they are water, use electric. It’s like one step decision, really. Which is like great because it’s like a strategy game that’s like easy enough for you to get into as a kid, like a six-year-old, but also like there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes with the optimization when it comes to like the older fans. We wanted to do something different than just having these like multipliers, just because we felt like it would make the gameplay like, you know, that one step gameplay. And like Tom Spear had a lot of this stuff with the design of the battle system. And we kind of had this system where essentially you have like, you know, like weaknesses and resistances and like special, you know, damage bonuses. It’s more like attack bonuses, but more in terms of like, okay, so a lightning attack on a water type monster and Cassette Beasts gives them a conductive status effect, which means they take damage every time a lightning attack hits anyone. So it’s more about these kind of like, kind of like reactions and kind of things that you can add up. If you do a fire type attack on a water type, it doesn’t do less damage, but it gives them a healing steam kind of buff that gives them health every turn. So it’s kind of more about like playing with status effects and like inducing them on yourself and like inflicting bad ones on your opponents and kind of like who gets to kind of control the field in terms of like status effects and like the state of monsters. So like one of the things we have is, okay, if you hit a plastic type with a fire attack, then they turn into poison type because they melt. But then if you hit them again… I love it though. There’s like a real wit to that. I think it’s really like next level. Yeah, we have these little like text boxes that pop up and kind of try and explain the logic to them because it’s otherwise like a bit too much to kind of keep track of. I do think it still is quite complicated, but I think you can kind of get through the game without like keeping it all in your head. You can kind of broadly just like, you know, because when you select a monster and select a target, it tells you are you going to do a good status effect or a bad status effect. So you kind of get an indication as to what’s going on. So you kind of have to, you can kind of like learn the broad strokes of it and not learn the minutiae of it and like get through the game. And I think that’s key. Yeah, really impressive stuff, Jay. And it is drawing praise more generally for how it builds on the formula established by this quote unquote genre. I don’t want to keep saying Pokemon. But yeah, it is interesting. It’s like having that outside of perspective allows you to solve some problems that were not problems, but I guess figure out new ways to do things that a series that’s quite set in its ways cannot do in its nature, right? That’s one of the advantages of making your own version of this type of game. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, again, we started with like the genre and the kind of concept of collecting monsters. And then we didn’t like, I think it’d be very easy to be like, OK, let’s start with a wholesale Pokemon game. And then what do we change? And I think there are indie games that do that. And like, they’re really cool. And they’re like definitely know what they’re going for. But we wanted something that kind of like, it starts from that point. But then like, we didn’t do like, OK, you have to go around and collect gym badges and do the Elite Four. We didn’t like have any of that because we didn’t like keep any of that design from it. So we essentially took the basics of the like genre. And then we’re like, OK, what’s cool stuff can we do with this? That would be kind of more interesting to us. We played around with a lot of the moves as well. One of the cool things we have is like, so our moves work on like a sticker system where like every move is almost like a materia slot. You know, every tape has like these slots for moves and you can kind of interchange them as you please as long as they’re kind of compatible with that tape. And that kind of also applies to like passive effects as well. So you can like, you know, you can get a monster where you just give it like 10 passive attacks and like one regular attack and you can only do one thing, but it’s like really broken in like one other aspect and stuff like that. We have like a, I saw someone on Discord like last night, they had a tape that was, we have like a self-destruct attack that when you die or your monster tape like breaks, it, you know, does a splash damage to everyone else in the field. But I didn’t realize, it makes a lot of sense, that actually stacks. So they have one attack that they do on themselves and then they just have like 10 self-destruct stickers and it triggers like 10 times. And they just have like a bomb Pokemon or like monster essentially that essentially like takes itself out and like kills everything else. There’s a lot of like broken strategies you can do and we think that’s really funny and we think people actually don’t mind it being broken because they feel like, when you’ve like learned a game system enough that you’re able to like completely bust it, I think that’s actually fun. That’s like rewarding instead of like a bummer. Yeah, player creativity being rewarded, like you say. A bomb Voltorb they basically made there. There is a slight horror element to the game, Jay, which feels very you. I think this tonally sets the game apart because it means the game is not wholly wholesome. And I think that combined with the adult characters you meet means that that’s why I can see why people in their 30s or their 20s, why this is resonating with them. Can you talk a bit about that side of things and how you, the elements that you would recognize as adult and how they tonally affect the game? Yeah, for context, there’s these boss encounters we call Archangels. One thing that always disappointed me in Pokemon is that you never fight anything that’s too great that you can’t catch it, right? Even when you’re fighting God. God is something that is balanced for PvP. So the scale of the set piece can only be so far. I really wanted early on to have boss fights that were beyond what you can mimic. So I have these boss fights called the Archangels. All of them are drawn or designed in a horror style where they’ve all got a reality-warping, incorrect art style that doesn’t really match the rest of the game to sell them as these eldritch beings. I just thought that would be a lot of fun. It was just something that early on I was like, this will be a really cool thing to see in a game like this. And again, we think people really like the horror when it’s contrasted with the cute side of things. So I was super keen on it. And artistically as well it was really fun to get to do because I got to… So one of them was a stop-motion aesthetic to them. One of them is designed to look like something out of Yellow Submarine. It allowed me to go nuts with art assets and artistic inspiration that doesn’t line up with the rest of the game at all. So yeah, it came out of a place that would be fun. We definitely wanted to make something that wasn’t adult exclusively. It’s ultimately like… This is a game you could show to a 12-year-old and it’s completely fine. There’s nothing too mature in there. But I think thematically, there’s a lot of like… I think I wrote a lot of this game to be kind of like a send-off to my 20s, you know? I finished writing the script and then I turned 30 last year. I think I put a lot of myself and my feelings about being an adult into the game. And there’s a lot of characters kind of disgusted with themselves and their own personal quests and their own personal arcs kind of reflect that. And I just kind of hoped that people would gel with that because it was kind of like special to me to get to write that kind of thing. Yeah, I just kind of wanted to write a game that kind of felt like, you know, this is this genre, but if you’re in your 20s, these are games that are even like Persona, which is like much more adult is like you’re playing as like 15 year olds. I wanted to make one of these games for like people in the like 20s and 30s essentially, but also in a way where like it’s not off putting this still kind of cute cool characters. So like you could be younger and play it and it would not be like a problem at all. I think. Okay, two really quite like I guess dull questions like comparison, not artistic questions. But did you decide to put the game on Game Pass? Or is that a publisher decision when something like that happens? Oh, I wonder what I can say here. Now it was it was like a it was like a decision that both of us really wanted. I mean, like both sides really wanted. We were super keen on it. It’s really good for Indies. Oh, what can I say? No, yeah, we were super keen on Game Pass. I think one thing as well is, you know, we’re like a small studio. We’re just starting out. And Game Pass is really good at getting a lot of people seeing your game and playing your game. And, you know, like early on, suddenly having an audience that because I think that’s like 25 million Game Pass subscribers. So having 25 million people who could see your game and play it is like huge. You know, I mean, it means that stuff you have going forward has like X amount more fans than it would have otherwise. So we were like super, super keen on getting Game Pass. And a lot of Indies are very pleased that we got it. We’re on PC Game Pass right now. And, yeah, we’ll be hitting the Xbox Game Pass when we release at the end of May. Awesome. So, all right, my last question, your game is also coming to Switch. Say you’re a developer and you want to put your PC game on Switch. How do you go about doing that? I’m not the technically minded person. I think it really depends on the engine. So, like Godot, we used a Godot 3.5, which is not necessarily made to port to consoles. So we’ve been working with an external team to help porting and stuff. It’s been really challenging and there’s kind of a trailblazer sense of it. I think it really comes down to, so A, having a publisher that has connections to these platforms really helps out. I think it’s probably a lot harder to self-publish on like consoles like Switch. Again, the caveat that I haven’t done any of this stuff myself. But I think also like, you know, porting, I think it depends on your engine, you know, Unity and Unreal are typically more reliable for porting. But there’s also like, you know, Game Maker games and stuff on Switch. I think it really depends on like your experience with working with these platforms and if they know you and having connections and stuff. And that’s stuff where, you know, having the publisher connections can really come in handy. But otherwise, yeah, I think our engine has been tough. I think going forward, Godot 4 just recently came out, which is kind of the next step of the Godot engine. And that’s kind of where a lot of developers will be jumping on board and supposedly have a lot more support out the box for platforms like Switch. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. That’s good to hear about how that sort of stuff works a little bit. So, Jay, just to kind of wrap up, is there anything else you wanted to say about the game or working on the game as we end the podcast here? Any final thoughts? I guess I’ve been saying a lot about Tom and I working on the game. I think it’s really easy to kind of sell into the kind of small, like, you know, two or one man team myths, but it really hasn’t been like a two man project. You know, I’ve already mentioned, like, we’ve had artists, like, for example, the artist Sammy, who worked on all our portraits, kind of, that, like, is half the identity of the game already right there. And, like, Joel on the music, for example, I think all the reviews that we’ve had have highlighted how cool his music is, and it is. I think this has been like a really collaborative kind of project, as much as it has been something I’ve talked about as just the two of us working on. Yeah, I guess, if any of this sounds cool, you should buy the game. Yeah, absolutely. I can sales pitch at the last second. Yeah, like, it’s out now on Steam and available on PC, Game Pass, and yes, on Switch and Xbox on May 25th. I can vouch this game running on Steam Deck. By the way, it runs very nicely on Steam Deck, so, yep, a firm recommendation from me. Jay, I really appreciate your honesty in talking about this game with us. No worries, thanks for having me on. Yeah, of course, and you should come on again and talk about Metroid at some point, that’d be good. Oh, I’d love to do that, yeah, yeah, yeah. All the best to the console launch, and congrats on making something so cool. Thanks. Thanks a bunch. Awesome. In which case then, Matthew, we wrap up the podcast. If you like this podcast, you want to support us financially, patreon.com/backpagepod. It was, by the way, really funny to hear Matthew try and remember how to do this stuff last week and then just give up. That was really funny for me, listening backwards. We’re twitter.com/backpagepod if you want to follow us on there. I’m going to try and get the podcast on Blue Sky. That seems to be the app people are going to now. The non-curse. What the fuck is that? It’s like the new, basically Jack Dorsey’s new Twitter. But they don’t surface right-wing and crypto lads with the blue ticks, which is so fucking shit on Twitter at the moment. I was about to pivot the podcast into right-wing crypto. Yeah, it would be a good year three for us, I think. Okay, Matthew, where can people find you on social media? At MrBuzzleUnderscorePeste. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. You can follow Jay. Jay, where can people follow you? Follow our studio. We’ve got BittenStudio, twitter.com/bittenstudio. I like to pitch the studio instead because my personal handle is so embarrassing to read out. So yeah, follow our game instead. That’s good. I do recommend. I want to say where to find Jay then, but if you can track him down, he’s a good follow. Your Bionicle tweets, the aforementioned HBO and Starz, Fire Emblem memes. There’s some great stuff out there.