Transcription
If you're anything like me, you've laid awake at night dreaming of having that viral indie game. Right now, I've released some commercial successes, but I've not had that massive viral indie title. I mean, can you imagine hundreds of thousands of copies of your game sold, millions of dollars in the bank? It's almost inevitable for you to just feel like you're a genius, right? How could you not? The sky is the limit. You've made it.
And even better, let's say a major publisher, they sign you on for your next game. So for your next game, you pour your heart and your soul into this game and then suddenly without warning, that publisher pulls the plug. You're devastated, but you believe in the project, right? You have some courage. So, you take a huge gamble and you buy this game back from the publisher. You're all in now, right? And when you feel like the game is ready for early access launch, you kind of feel this sense of vindication. It's time to show everybody that they were wrong about your game, right? So, you hit launch and you wait for that praise to pour in. And one by one the reviews pour in and they are well negative. Suddenly you're sitting on mixed reviews. This story was supposed to be different.
And this is the story of Thomas Malor. He's the mind behind Aie and also his new game No Rest for the Wicked. No Rest for the Wicked is that game, right? It lost its funding from a major publisher. Thomas Maller had to buy it back in this ballsy gamble and then he struggled when it launched on Steam's early access. And the game frankly got ripped apart by reviewers in early access. And that's the reason why we're chatting here because well last week something crazy happened. It's a really inspiring conversation and honestly in my opinion and I've talked about this in previous videos, Thomas Maler is one of the most inspiring game developers I've ever talked to. Um, he has a backbone and willpower. He's got kind of the whole package for what an indie game developer needs in my humble opinion. So, let's jump into the conversation and hear about Thomas Mer's crazy comeback story.
You're successful as a game developer because you feel like you just you put in the hours. >> Um, and you're willing to you're willing to kind of suffer and and it's not suffering obviously because you're having a good time, but you're working your butt, >> right? >> So, why do you laugh about that? >> It's it's suffering to some degree, right? But I I laugh because of the whole um because I'm having a good time, right? Because I literally do like I work >> a lot of times now to ship No Rest for the Wicked together. There were still so many things uh and then we did the beta, right? There was still so many things to fix and then we did the beta and some players were unhappy, right? Like we introduced some systems there that they didn't quite enjoy, right? And I was literally up every day till like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning was just working away on the stuff making sure that no rest of the wicket together lands. >> Yeah. >> And I still loved it, right? Like it's still so great to just see >> all the improvements coming in constantly, right? And all the little things and tweaks and so on and like even some bigger stuff, right? Whether you're like, "Oh my god, like I don't like how can we ship with this issue and so on and then you figure it out." But it is a blast, right? It it must be like a music guy who just sits in his recording studio, right? And does stuff and it's just you don't even notice that it's 4 a.m. or something, right? It's just >> but we're making this hit song. It sounds amazing, you know. >> I know. And you are, dude, you're making you are making a hit song. I mean, it's you're you're giving Triple A run for their money.
And so, I kind of want to shift gears here and and talk about AAA a little bit. I'm not really into like the whole Blizzard world now currently. Um, I grew up playing Blizzard games specifically. I would just watch my brother. >> Yeah. Right. And I would I would watch well everybody did if you're our age, right? So like if you're I don't know how old you are, but I'm 35. >> I don't know if people get that anymore like how huge Blizzard was, right? Like literally I remember when when whenever they made a new cinematic, right? It was like >> the skies part and you know the light comes down and so on, right? It was like almost, oh my god, this should be a national holiday, right?
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In the early 2000s, right, Blizzard was literally that kind of company where everything they touch turned to gold, right? Um it was like Spielberg for a while, right? Where it's like literally when a Blizzard game came out, they built up that kind of trust where you wouldn't question it. You would just buy it because you knew these crazy probably work their ass off to make sure that this next thing is going to be amazing, right? And I mean, it's already been like 10 years since Blizzard has been kind of altering, right? Like there's a lot of I I left Blizzard in like 2009 or something, I think. >> Mhm. >> And it just became more corporate, right? And I think you actually really see that in their products. I'm not trying to [ __ ] on them, right? I'm just like it is what it is, right? It has become really really corporate and they failed a couple of times now and some of their games don't quite aren't quite what what players expect anymore.
What does corporate mean? >> It mean to me it means Blizzard used to be very much like Moon Studios is right now, right? Where it was literally just here's a bunch of crazy people that just trying to make amazing stuff, right? And then it becomes more and more, oh, but we need to do X because, you know, here's a whole shareholders thing, right? We need to be ready at this point. We need to release our games at this point, even if they're not ready, right? Like, they just need to be ready because that's what shareholders expect and so on. And it changes and there's producers everywhere suddenly, right? And it changes from here's a small group where everybody is just amazingly talented and they're trying to really create magic, right? To >> oh, there's other reasons of making games other than, oh, we want to just make the next huge thing, right? That could be so >> awesome, right? Like it's it very much changes from passion to well, basically just being a business, right? And yeah, >> I mean we all running businesses, right? But >> I think once it get gets down to, oh, we need to maximize profits and you know like every single decision has to go through people who you know like the sales team and so on, right? It's just it it it ruins the thing, right? Like you couldn't you couldn't write a great song if it's literally okay well that section in the song is kind of you know like that needs to sound more like Justin Bieber right like that that you know it needs to be >> it needs to be fully in the control of the creatives right and then obviously you need to align with you know folks to make sure that you know the game properly gets marketed and so on I think that's what we're seeing and I mean it's not really a secret right I'm not trying do on AAA and all of this stuff, but we have seen AAA faltering >> in a way bigger way than we ever have before simply because the kind of like games that are getting produced like that. It's similar to Hollywood, right? Where in the '90s, even early 2000s still and so on, there are still movies getting made that are really that really had heart still, right? And I recently like heard uh Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and so on talk about this, right? Once it became all everything became risk averse, it starts to create these kind of like slop >> products, right? Where it's just >> this is not this doesn't come from passion anymore and out of human ingenuity and so on. This is just something that we're trying to sell and that just creates that doesn't connect with the humanity anymore. Right.
Well, I think we're in a I think we're in a time when being purposefully on the edge, whether it's, you know, on the political edge, on the cultural edge, making a game that looks like it was an oil painting. Your game looks that way, by the way. Making making a game that is edgy or like crossing a line, I think, is is is the way forward for the industry. Because AI in particular is it is and Ben Ben Affleck talked about this. It is like the distillation of all genres or all all pieces of artwork and it distills down into this boring average. Right. >> It is literally designed to create generic stuff. >> That's right. That's right.
So my my thinking with I I've I've thought a lot about our podcast we had together, man, and you've inspired me a ton. You mentioned in the previous podcast, and I didn't fully understand it when you mentioned it, but I've been thinking about it a lot. You mentioned that you want to take a genre and push it forward, right? Take it like take it and expand it. >> And I didn't fully understand the implications of that until I read your tweet. you tweeted about you said that oftentimes basically the the >> the idea of your post was oftentimes your play testers will tell you >> hey don't do this and don't do that and don't add this mechanic and don't add crafting and all this stuff because it doesn't fit well maybe it doesn't fit the genre right >> and so often times developers will be safe and I'll do this as well you'll you'll listen to your feedback you'll listen to your play testers because you're supposed to right well that's what people say I've even said that listen to your play testers The problem with that is you just basically you're just reskinning a game. >> Mhm. >> You're reskinning Diablo. And so tell me about that tweet and tell me about your thought process and I guess the courage involved in in expanding it.
>> Yes. And it is courage, right? Because you're literally risking your livelihood. You're risking everything at that point, right? Because you're making a game that you don't have any clue if anybody would want to play it, right? But you're making it because your heart tells you I would want to play this. I think there are probably lots of players like me out there. So what I was basically trying to say is I think every now and then you have to be okay with change, right? And I gave the example of if Miyamoto would have been stubborn and would have just stuck with like he was on a huge high in the early '90s, right? Just making Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, right? Then even Yoshi's Island like he even improved stuff on top of that, right? He could have kept making 2D platformers for an eternity and he would have had a you know really steady business there and so on right um and that probably could have worked right but it wouldn't have pushed the industry forward and we went through probably a good three decades now where it was your responsibility as a developer to not just be okay with the status quo right because it was generally accepted that if you just stick with the status quo other people will come in and eat our lunch right And so Miyamoto, for example, in the early '90s, right? It must have taken a huge amount of guts to say, "Look, here's all this stuff that we know how to do, right? Like we know how to do 2D sidescrollers. We have probably amazing tools that allow us to crank them out super fast, right? And every single time we make them, we sell four, five, six million copies." But then they went and saw, well, the whole 3D thing is approaching, right? And we really should throw basically all of that in the trash and we should make Mario 64 because that is where everything is heading. Um, and we don't want to get stuck. And I can't fathom how much courage it must have taken for Nintendo to just say, "Yeah, that crazy Miiamoto guy just bank the entire company on his decisions." Right. Like cuz if Mario 64 would have been a failure, I'm pretty sure Nintendo wouldn't be around today. >> Yeah. >> Cuz no way, right? Like they completely changed the industry with that game. And again, like we are old farts now, right? Like I don't know how you are older, Thomas, right? But I'm 42 now. >> Yeah. So you're >> I'm getting there. I'm getting there. >> Yeah, you're getting there. But I'm 42 now. I I live through all that stuff, right? So it must have taken a tremendous amount of courage to basically throw all of that in the trash, right? And just say, "Well, we'll make a 3D platformer." And by the way, nobody knew what a 3D platformer was, right? Cuz it didn't exist. like and and you just they just had the courage to say but I trust that we are good designers right and the sales team trusted the designers to think that oh they will probably come up with something great because they've done really great things before right and what I have seen um in generally in the last 10 years or so right probably even 15 years or so is that that got thrown into the trash right because we saw things like hey like Call of Duty for example Who who would go and really change the Call of Duty formula at this point? Nobody, right? Because it's it's revenue that always comes in every year, right? And you can't really change it, risk it, do anything with it, right? You can maybe change the bells and whistles like add some bells and whistles on top, right? Or modify things here and there, but every now and then I think we need bigger changes, right? And when it comes to ARPGs, well, one of the main reasons or the main reason why No Rest to the Wicked exists and why we've worked on it is because I got really frustrated by why has this genre moved into that direction and why has it become so stale. When I played Diablo II in the early 2000s, I was like, Jesus Christ, look at this game, right? Imagine what we'd be playing 10 years from now, right? If they already have all of this, it should be so simple to just add cooler things on top, change the genre a little bit, improve the combat system and so on, right? And then Diablo II came out and was basically, hey, we made Diablo I but on steroids. We didn't change the combat system. We just upped everything to 11, right? We didn't look at recent trends. We didn't look at what we could do with 3D and so on. It's basically Diablo II, but everything is faster. And then funnily enough that kind of like became the norm for ARPGs, right? Like if you talk to people today and you ask them what is an ARPG, they will tell you, "Oh, it's basically a click spam game, right? Like it's one of those button mashy like a Diablo II or a Diablo I or a Path of Exile 1 and 2, right? And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, right? Like these games are fun >> and similar to 2D platformers, right? These games are fun. They will always be fun. There should always be developers that make that stuff, right? But I think at Moon, I think we always kind of like had the like we started with AI where the whole idea was, well, we don't know why the nobody's making Metroidvanias anymore, right? >> And then the idea was well, let's look at Super Metroid. Let's look at Castlevania Symphony of the Night and where can we improve? And my go my decision was I think these games are some of my favorite favorite games ever make >> ever made. But they're not great platformers. So maybe we can improve the platforming component, right? That's literally how it started. Like why why doesn't like why don't these games control as well as a Mario game does? And we kind of like slipped into this whole thing of like with every game that we touch now, we try to advance the genre, right? And it's probably really stupid. like from a business decision. It's unbelievably stupid, right? Because I remember being in the calls with Microsoft back then with Orient the Will of the Wisps as well. We decided let's rip up this whole thing, right? Like we could have easily made like an expansion pack kind of thing where it's just here's AI 2 and it's kind of like what Ori was, but just with more levels and this and that and it would have totally worked. But I wanted to really push that forward. I wanted to completely change the combat system to completely like try to do to really look at everything to do to blind forest what Super Mario Bros 3 was to Super Mario Bros one, right? That was the idea with Will of the Wisp. Let's really push the genre forward and let's really kind of like elevate everything that we had. And I I remember for example the first calls that I had with Microsoft regarding blind forest like when we when I first pitched a storyboard. I was working with Johannes Felhuber. Um he was an amazing artist from Austria. I wrote the story and we did the first storyboards, right? And I showed it to Microsoft and they went on me, right? They were like insensed about why in the world would you want to do storytelling in a 2D platformer? It's never been done before. It's so stupid. Not even Miiamoto does it. Look at what they're doing with Mario. Right? The story never met us. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Right? And I was I I made the argument that guys trust us, right? Like we'll try it. Maybe you will warm up to it, right? Give us a chance. And over time, at some point, they were probably so annoyed that they just went, "Let's let that idiot do whatever you want, right? Cuz who cares?" Like, it's not going to break the game, right? Like worst case, people skip through the cut scenes, right? And the funny thing that happened was that Blind Forest came out and that story stuff became the huge marketing beat for Orient the Blind Forest, right? Because you literally had people playing the game for 10 minutes and starting to cry because they were already invested into the characters and so on, right? And then the the the thing was the the funny thing was then we did Orient the World of the Wisps, right? And I remember being in the room with Mark Coat, our producer back then. Um, and he was the one who ultimately convinced me that we should do orient the will of the whisp because I already wanted to push ahead and do no rest for the wicked at that point. Um, but he was really kind of like the guy who convinced me by appealing to me being a perfectionist, right? He literally sat in the thing and was like, "Thomas, you could literally take Blind Forest and just perfect it and make your Super Mario Bros. 3. Why would you not want to do that?" Right? That was like me, he's right, you know? Like, of course he is. Um so so we decided to do that and then all then the immediate thing from Microsoft was hey you guys need more story right because story was amazing in blind forest right and we're like that's such a different tone from when we pitched the first story was to you right where it was all no let's be risk averse let's not do story because it hasn't been done before in 2D platformers and it isn't important in 2D platforms and but we made it important right and then even from the people who were so critical about it Right. It was like, "Yeah, okay. Do more of that." Cuz it actually worked, >> man.
So, this this attitude of of wanting to just make games you want to play has I it's put you in an interesting position with No Rest for the Wicked because from the outside looking in, this has been a wild journey of making this game, right? >> Tell me about it. Can you tell me can you tell me um well I'll I'll give a little anecdote here because I reached out to you I reached out to you like three months ago and I just said I was just basically complaining about funding because you know I had budget cuts for the for my game and I was expecting you to say yeah it's hard you know you can do it here's some advice but you basically said I don't even know if you remember this but you basically said bro this is the way it is you know like you you said something about your studio had funding cuts and had some issues with funding and you were just like >> basically just like toughen up and I'm curious where has is that attitude new for you this sort of thick skinned attitude or is this something you've learned through No Rest for the Wicked or is that make does that question make sense?
>> I think it's the like I trust myself as an artist to be able to figure it out. I trust myself and our team enough, right, that we're smart enough dudes to figure it out. Um, John Lennon had this quote, right, where he said, "I'm an artist. You give me a tuber and I'll get you something out of it." Right? I I see it that way. Like, for example, with Blind Forest, we were totally ready for Microsoft to basically come in and tell us, "Guys, these cutscenes, cut them, right?" And we already had prepared for doing the Mario Galaxy thing, right? Where oh the story there's still story but it's told through little story book panels right and you would literally just see a page >> and a little painting and like and story and or went on to do this and that d right and we even had that fully prepared but luckily enough that didn't happen but I mean you just got to fish where the fish are biting right and every now and then like this will happen to you this happens everywhere right it doesn't matter how successful a developer you are a lot of times it's even me doing that to people right where I tell people guys cool ideas but we can't make it work right we don't have the resources to do this I ask you to do the best thing you can do within the resources within the budget limits that you have right >> and a lot of times what I have found is that those limitations often times are actually a good thing I'll give you an example um at Blizzard what I heard because I wasn't there during the Warcraft 3 days and so on right but what I heard is that Warcraft 3 all the cinematics and so on were a miracle that they came together, right? Like one of the first things that I did when I joined Blizzard because I was such a huge fan of Warcraft 3 and the way they told the story and so on was to open up these cinematic models and to look at them and see well how how how the did they make this stuff, right? And they were god awful. Like these models were just you couldn't do so many things. You couldn't deform them properly and so on, right? Cuz they would break all the time like the rigs and so on. You have to imagine that was the early 2000s, right? That was none of the tools that we have today existed. So it was all garbage, right? So they they they did things like when Arthus kills his father, right? If you have all the tools available to you, you would just show that, right? Like you would just put the camera on Arthurs and show his father and like really cool see the stabby move. But because that breaks, right? Like you can't actually do the full body animation and all of that stuff. They did this really clever thing where they when he walks up to his father to kill him, they pan the camera over to the wall where the shadow is, the silhouette is of Arthur's actually stabbing his father, right? And it hides all the garbage from the rig and the animation, all of that stuff. But it's epic, right? Like it's just you see him actually killing his father, but you don't actually see it, right? You see the you see it in the shadow, right? And it's a brilliant move. It like literally probably costs like hundred times less than what it would have cost to actually fix that shot and fix it in post and all of that stuff, right? >> Yeah. >> Um and a lot of times it it works out like that, right? So you kind of like have to trust yourself that guys even if you don't have the budget to do X or Y, right, do the best thing within the budget that you have and you might just hit gold there.
>> Yeah. It it it kind of makes me think about AAA because it's like you wonder if you wonder if it's just there was just there's just too many resources in these studios, you know, the budgets are way too big. And it's funny cuz I've had I hit some kind of stride this year because I've been kind of basically making games solo for the last year. And I've just realized I can make games so fast. Like the tools available >> your videos, by the way. Like it's crazy. >> Have you seen them? Thanks, man. >> Yes. Yes. >> Thank you. Yeah, it's like really quick. I'll do it in like three hours. >> I appreciate that. I I'll do it in three hours. And I mean, it looks like an indie game, but it's like the resources available to us as game developers these days is bananas. And then I think about AAA and I'm like I don't even know if they know that like indies and indie studios is is so hard to define because you're independent but your game is going to be 60 bucks, right? Um so it's kind of a AAA game, but I don't I just those labels >> independent in the same way that Larian is independent, right? Where it's just yes, we're an indie studio technically, but we're not three guys in a bedroom anymore. So, I see AAA like moving at a pace of this and then I see indies or like just small studios that nobody knows about moving at a pace like this. >> Yeah. >> And because they're they're scrappy, you know. It reminds me I I I watched the Revolutionary War document, the American Revolution documentary from Ken Burns. It's amazing. It's it's an incredible new documentary. It took him like 10 years to make. What's really fascinating about the American Revolution is how scrappy uh the colonies were, the American colonies were. And they weren't scrappy in the sense that they did it themselves. They were scrappy in the sense that they could manipulate France to help them. Like they had all these weird like back alley um negotiations and ways to win the war. Like losing the war wasn't an option, so they just did everything they could. and it created this almost poetry and this mythos about the founders um that would not have been there had it been some generic hey just funnel in money and win the war. And so it makes me think about your studio makes me think about independent studios where this strange bizarre like scrappy way of making games creates these really interesting projects. Um, and then you look at AAA, it it almost looks like an AI prompt, you know? It's it's just so so flat. Everything feels flat. And I can't even put a finger on it why it looks flat and why it looks a certain way. >> Um, but you know, >> it's because of that. It's because these decisions I I think it's because of that. It's because these decisions like that should be made in a creative scrappy way, right? Where the magic of creation should come through are being influenced and colored by outside factors, right? By like, oh, we that that thing that you did looks really cool, but we can't actually put that as loot in the game because that needs to be MTX, right? Because all of that garbage, right? >> Um, and every every year, by the way, I I send out a message, a summary basically of the year, right? And I sent that to our Moon Studios team. And usually I ended up with something like never doubt the small group of people can change the world because it's the only thing that ever has. Right. That's this old saying that has. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's it's this old saying and there is something very true about this. Right. It's never been a huge group, a mass of people that has really influenced change, right? It has always been a small group of passionate people that wanted to move something forward, right? Because there is something that happens. There's also this rule of 150 or something, right? That when a company gets to 150 plus people, that's where things start to fall apart. That's where the management overhead becomes so great that you're actually hurting all the people that are geniuses in your team, right? >> Because now they're not doing the thing anymore that they're good at, but they're managing. And I I I think that's very very true. It's just money being spent in really silly ways, right? And I'm I'm still kind of scrappy. I want Moon Studios to still always keep that kind of like startup culture, right, of like we're just a bunch of crazy dudes, right? That just make games and let's not be stupid with the way we spend money even if our games become successful and so on, right? I'm sure we'll need that war chest at some point. Let's not go let let's let's stay with our feet on the ground, right? Because who knows what will happen in the future.
Well, speaking of money, let's um elephant in the room is that you sold 50,000 copies in a day >> for No. >> 74,000. >> 74,000 copies. >> That was last week, right? Um >> that was like it kept going like that, by the way. Like we were >> Yeah, it's crazy. Like, so no rest for the Wicked is a really like I think this will probably be studied, right? Because it's such a fun example of how developers can screw up and then actually correct the ship and so on. Um like write the write the ship and so on. Um so here's what happened to us, right? We released No Rest for the Wicked in early access. We were our publisher was Private Division. >> Um so Private Division was basically this like this label from Take Two, right? Take two basically saw, hey, it's not smart to put all X on in one basket, right? Then folks like Michael Borish came along and kind of like pitched to them, hey, we should really have a label that focuses on smaller games, right? Which I thought, perfect. That's exactly what you should do. You shouldn't just make 200, 300, 400, 500 million games, right? You should also like invest money into genius creators because who knows who makes the next Minecraft, right? Yeah. >> And so they did that and that's what they basically pitched to me and I was like, "Yeah, I want to sign up with that label because that sounds great, right?" Like that that that really is something that I can ch with. So we went through orient the will of the wisps we shipped that right then we fully focused on the rest for the wicket and um we delayed the release internally a few times right because we weren't quite ready and then at some point private division was like guys you got to ship right like we got to get it out there and we were like >> let's get it out there in early access because this game is so complex there's no way this is like the final version right like we'll need to ship it into early access same as what like we had this whole argument with them, right? Like Blizzard does it all the time with like uh public like private public releases, right? And that's they use that feedback to improve the game and so on. And we we were able to convince them that early access is a good thing and we should do that. So we released it. Game was really successful at the start, right? Made a ton of money and so on, but a lot of that obviously went into the publishers pockets, right? Like as you probably are well aware, right? Like the deals that you sign are very much in favor of the publishers. So at some point we got the call from private division that um or from take two rather that well they're shutting down private division right because the money doesn't make any sense anymore. We'll make billions of dollars with GTA 6 anyway, right? Who cares, right? And so we were like, "Oh, what does that mean?" Like, and like so we just like basically scrambled, right? And like looked at, oh, how much money do we have in the bank? And by the way, war chest, right? Like this is where this came >> in really importantly, right? Like this is where they suddenly paid dues. And we were just telling them guys, okay, so if that happens, right, we obviously don't want to see our game getting cancelled or getting shoveled off to some other entity that we don't know, right? So how about we actually discuss buying the rights back, the publishing rights back completely, right? >> And we had to pay a tremendous amount of money, like just you can imagine, right? Like just we had to pay a tremendous amount of money to pay the publishing rights back, right? It was really scary cuz No Rest for the Wicked was out there and obviously like our uh burn rate is quite high at this point, right? And we just had to shoulder it all ourselves now.
>> Well, also were the reviews were the reviews good for early >> reviews at the start were good and then we did the Crucible update and the reviews were still good, right? And then we had all been working on the bridge which basically doubled the content and all of that, right? And um I got so focused on just putting more and more content in because that was the one thing that people constantly complained about that it's very good but there's just not enough content, right? So I went >> heads down content content content content, right? And then Breach came out and because I was so focused on content, right, there was no way for me to pull back and just properly play test the game. >> Yeah. Um in the in the late stages. I played, you know, like until like 3 4 months before release, right? But in the last 3 months, we made some really critical changes still, right? And I had to finish that content otherwise we wouldn't have been able to ship, right? Um but there were some changes made that really didn't shell well with players, right? And we got as swift, right, when we released, we had to release and we got our ass handed to us to to us, right? Because it was just really difficult, right? And the level up curve was not properly balanced and so on, right? So, I I went into kind of like crazy mode, right? And >> can I ask you? Yeah. Go ahead. >> I'm so sorry. I just want to clarify. Was this before or after you spent a ton of money buying it back? >> That was after. >> Oh, man. >> Super scary. Yeah, that was after. >> Okay. Jeez. >> So, Breach came out, right? And we got just bombed by negative reviews, right? And like people were like, "Oh, this is so unbalanced and super difficult and da da da da," right? So, but within a couple of days we had the situation fixed, right? And then players got happy and so on. But the problem is once you fall into negative reviews, right? Once you fall into a negative, it's unbelievably hard to get the to get the response on Steam and so on, right? To get to positive again and then to very positive, right? So, I announced on Steam back then like and made a funny face, right? It was like like look, we are mostly negative right now or something, right? Like, oh gosh, >> I'm I'm going to prove you all wrong, right? We're going to turn the ship around. >> Yeah. >> And so we did, right? And it was just the same thing again. Like a lot of times as a developer, you get beaten down even by your own player base, right? And they were right, right? Like that's the thing. They were absolutely right with their criticism and so on, right? Um and we made those changes. Then they were happy again. But it took some time, right? Then we did breach refined. We basically did this other update patch, right? That fixed everything where we felt like this is in a pretty good spot now, right? And very slowly the reception turned around, right? >> And then right after breach refined, we started working on no rest for the wicked together, right? Which had the last batch of changes like we looked at more and more of the community feedback and so on. And we did all of that and we did a whole bunch of other things, right? We just tuned and polished and everything, right? Then we released No Rest to the Wicket together and things went ape, right? Like it went crazy.
>> This was last week, right? >> This was last week. So there there was like our marketing um lady or Puva um basically came up with this whole thing of like guys, I think we have a perception uh an an attention issue, not a quality issue because the game is actually really good and when people play it, they love it. But just not enough people know about it, right? So, she came up with this whole plan of like it hurts, but we're going to do a minus 40% sale, right? >> Yeah. So, it's heavy and we're going to do a free weekend, right? So that everybody gets to play it. By the way, I love the free weekend. Like that really like did its thing like that like is now something where I would really say, "Oh my god, lots more developers should look at this because it was basically a demo, right?" Because the game like No Wicked is a game that you couldn't possibly finish on a weekend. It allowed people to just dive in at a really like no cost of entry to just dive in and we got like an insane conversion rate, right? Like compared to what you see in the industry, it was like three, four times higher, right? Where it's like so many people who just got to play the free weekend immediately went and buy it, right? So all of that kind of like resulted in oh my god we were number one game on Steam for a good time there and just the game sold you know like at first 30,000 copies a day then 40 then 50 then 74,000 copies a day then you know it went to 60,000 copies a day 50,000 copies a day it just went absolutely bonkers right so >> was the multiplayer was is multiplayer that steroids that your game needed Is that what it was or was it the discount or maybe >> I think it's there's this cool Malcolm Gladwell book called the tipping point, right? And I think that's just what we reached, right? Like we had work been working on the game for such a long time that all the polish came in and the multiplayer came in. So it became really enticing um and really good products, right? And I think the free weekend was the the thing that pushed it over the edge, right? Where there was no >> no big fee anymore to spend, right? You can just try it, right? And once you try it, you love it, right? So, I think that's what they did. I think we hit that tipping point in terms of like the quality of the game and we made it easy for people to play it. And that I think was the rocket fuel.
>> I'm I'm studying the art style of No Rest for the Wicked right now. And please, I I want my I I want to break down what the brand identity is um and why it is so cohesive. You use a lot of saturated colors. That's that's the first thing. It's very saturated. I'm looking at some screenshots here. But there's also some very low saturated parts of the shot. So like I'm looking at Let me share my screen really quick because I I'm I want to I want to try and figure it out because I'm I'm fascinated by the art style. I've never really seen a game with this art style before. Um, so like super vibrant greens, right? Just insane levels of green. >> Yeah. You know who we are ripping off with that? >> Who? >> Caravaggio. It's the bright dark that he coined. >> Can I Google that? How do I spell that? >> Yeah. Caravaggio. C A R A B. You will get it anyway. C A R. >> There he is. Caravaggio. >> Caravaggio. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Yeah. Let's Let's take a look here. And now open up for example the taking of Christ by Caravaggio, right? Let's take a look at that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So obviously I did go to art school, right? Cuz I had to study this for years. Um so take a let's take a look at this real quick >> or like just >> like I mean this is brilliant, right? Um >> yeah there's certain saturated there's certain colors that are hyper saturated. >> Yes. So obviously like it's very saturated, right? But what he always did was also he played with the colors in a way where um where the light and dark kind of like um explains his message, right? So for example, Christ here is depicted in and by the way, I'm not religious at all, right? But I find it fascinating what the old masters did. Christ here is uh depicted in like full light, right? And so on. And then it's not a mistake that the people who take him have like black armor, right, with like really strong contrasts and so on, right? Cuz he basically wants to say like these guys were, right? And so on. Um and you see this all the time in these paintings. Let me just um find something. >> Um can you open up or can you find the incredul Thomas? >> Yeah. >> Like this is such a great thing, right? Where it's like hey here you have um all the like basically this is one where it's where basically tried to depict the story of like you know Christ is coming back and so on right and then you had all the apostles kind of look at it right and he >> did this really nice thing where it's almost grotesque right that they're not believing him right and you even have like Thomas sticking his finger in there right because he doesn't believe that you know he wants to know for sure right and so on but the way he always played with colors and so on right um is very very interesting, right? Like, and the way he played with darkness, like most of his paintings, like 70% of most of his paintings are just black, right? Just straight up black. And now you look at No Rest for the Wicked, right? And it's just >> all the stuff that isn't really all that important right now, right? >> It's just dark, right? It's just black. We're using basically the same old principles um >> that that have been used before, right? And I mean, that's where I think this is really important, right? Like if obviously it's easy these days to just open up Unreal Engine, slap a bunch of assets in there and like throw a light in there, right? And it'll look good. But then the question is, but that doesn't make you an artist, right? An artist's work is so much more, right? Like you actually need to look at the composition. You need to understand what you want to say with things, right? You need to um you know, and all of that stuff has to influence influence it, right? Like where do you actually put your lights? What are you actually giving focus, right? Right? Because you also lights work in a way where you direct the eyes with that. Right? Like if you look at for example this image here, right? Where where is your eye directed?
to? Right. It's towards the brightest spot. It's towards the oven, for example, right? That's right.
>> And all the like your eye wouldn't immediately go to the table in the background or something, right?
Um, that kind of thing. So there's just a lot of these considerations that that are taking place. And I think the reason why people are infatuated with the art style of No Rest for the Wicked is because of that. Because you look at like, every now and then, you get these vistas that are like, "Oh my god, look at this." Right? And it's not just, yeah, technically it looks cool, right? Like, "Oh my god, it has global illumination or something, right?" But just, "Oh my god, this looks like a painting, right? This looks like some something an artist would do because an artist did do it."
>> That's a great quote, by the way. It looks like art because an artist did it. I love that.
Oh, man. Dude, this looks, it's, it, I don't know. Is there any game that looks like this?
>> Don't ask me, right? Like that's for people to decide.
>> I, I've never seen. There's something really oily about this. It, it feels like.
>> By the way, I mean, we're doing that everywhere, right? Like our all our textures are hand-painted, right? Where you actually see the brush strokes still, right? And I want that. I want to see Mikuel's art in there where you actually see how scrappy sometimes like textures are and so on, right?
Um, you can absolutely see that. Yeah, it's almost like seeing the fingerprint, right, by somebody, right?
>> I freaking love that. Okay, let's take a look at the engine. Whoa, this isn't Unity.
>> This is Unity. Yeah, I mean, this is not really Unity. Like our whole renderer and everything is our own thing, right? So.
>> Wait. So, okay, hold on. It's Unity, but you've, you've basically changed it so much with editor tools and inspectors that it, it looks completely different.
>> Yeah. So, we've kept the UI.
>> Got it.
>> But everything else, basically, and how it all works, right, is, is basically proprietary.
>> That's crazy, man.
>> Yeah. So, we can take a look at this. So, for example, I have, I have uh, these two scenes open right now, right? This is literally where you start, right? And there's like, this is where you start the game. You wake up on uh, in the shallows here, right? And then this is where you all explore, right? Da da da, right? And if you work on this, like, if the ed, the designers work on this, like here's basically like, you turn on the gizmos, right? And like, literally they just place things and make sure that, you know, all this stuff is where it should be, that the enemies are placed where they should be, the destructibles, the pickups, blah, blah, blah. Right.
>> Right.
>> One of the cool things that I learned on AI, right? Ary was a Metroidvania. And do you remember like the Metroidvanias you always see, here's the Castle Vania Symphony of the Night map, right? Or that kind of thing. And so in AI, we already did this thing where in editor, we actually took screenshots of every single level that we had, right? And we allowed you to kind of like just move an entire scene around, right? By just grabbing that screenshot, like, and then moving it, right? So we had, we had, we had in AI a tool where.
>> Um, you could work on the entire world, right? You would see the entire world just represented through screenshots, right? Because you couldn't load every single scene in the game all at in the editor all at once, right? Cuz your computer would explode.
>> Um, and then we were, we were able to kind of like just move things around, right? So you would see kind of like that Symphony of the Night, but it was the actual world. It was the game, right? Which allowed us to properly, you know, design the entire world. Like, oh my god, this scene connects to that, and then, oh, if I drop down here, like it connects to this and so on. Right.
I would love to see, by the way, how, how Team Cherry did it, right? Like what the difference is, I'm guessing.
>> So, it's kind of like an LOD.
>> Yes.
>> It's like an LOD of your entire game.
>> Yes. And the reason why I'm bringing it up.
>> The reason why I'm bringing it up is that we did the same thing in the rest of the wicket, right? Like one of the reasons why the level design is good is because A, we spend a crazy amount of time leveling, like designing all the all the areas, right? But then also the entire world has to come together. So if I like, right-click, we have these marking menus that we implemented, right? And if I toggle on the world preview, you can see. And by the way, I have to be a little bit careful because there are areas in here that are not even yet in the game, right?
>> That's fine. And you get the final edit, by the way. So you'll, you'll be able to look and see like, make sure my editor is.
>> Probably fine, right? Like I showed some of this stuff before. So I, but, um, but the idea is that you can totally see, right? Like, like I have these two scenes opened right now for me to work on them, right? But then if I toggle the world preview on, we show the collision mesh of everything, right? So if I want to see the entire world, well, this is how it all fits together, right?
>> Is that a collision mesh or a nav mesh? I'm trying to figure out how you.
>> This is just a, yeah, this is just a b collision mesh, right?
>> Okay. And you do that manually or it's automatically occurring?
>> Uh, you, the designers and artists who work on stuff, right? There's one process where if you worked on the scene, you just bake, and then it bakes it, everything out for you.
>> That's incredible. I love it so much.
>> So jealous. If you, if you basically work on the world, right? Like there's like, you can immediately see how, oh, here's Marinus Keep, right? And how it actually connects to Orb and Glades, right? And so on, and how all of these things are interconnected and so on, right?
>> Yeah.
>> So, um, that really kind of like gives you that whole thing of like, okay, well, we can work on the entire world and, um, you know, like see everything and see how everything connects, how everything works, etc. There's places here that.
>> This is the entire 1.0 and even beyond 1.0 launch, right? So, for example, what players have right now is the shallows, the Marinus Keep, um, Orban Glades, the Lowland Meadows, Marin Woods, Sacrament, obviously, uh, Nameless Pass, and then the Black Trench is a dungeon, so it's in a separate scene over here, right? So, you kind of like enter from down here.
>> Um, and then you explore it, right?
>> Um,
>> But then there's also places that players haven't even gotten to see yet, right? Like, so we have, um, here the frozen peaks, or Tier Tier will be a town that is pretty cool, like it's a snowy foresty, like snowy wintry town that has an elevator run all the way through it, right? With like all the rich people living at the top and so on, right? Um, and we built a lot of the stuff already, right? We just have to kind of like get it finished, right? And that's always the.
>> The, the difficult thing. But this is, this is pretty cool, um, in terms of like how we fit things together. By the way, one thing that I wish would be in Unity, I don't know if you have that yourself, is we have smart selection. I don't know why this is not a thing in Unity, right? I, I hate in Unity that when I want to select something, like you see this little bush here.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. It doesn't highlight it. Right. Like there's this little bush here, right? Now, let's take Unity selection. Right. I'm like, good luck selecting this. Right.
>> You have to click like three layers through to get it.
>> Exact, like I will try to select it now. Right. I click this and, ah, selected something else. Right. I click it again. Ah, selected something, something else. Right. But if I toggle on smart selection, it will literally highlight the thing before I do it. Right. So if I want to select the bush, boom, you just select the bush.
>> Yes. Okay. So that leads me to a question. Okay. There's something in in me as a developer that I cringe and wince when I think about how many game objects are in my scene. Yeah. And I'm starting to realize, you know, 15 years after starting making games, that that's just the way it is. Like I'm assuming that all those little things you can select.
>> You, everything is a tiny little object, right?
>> And it's all static.
>> Yes.
>> I mean, it does, like we do our best to bake it all together, right? So we don't have that many draw calls.
>> But ultimately, yes, that's how it works, right? Like every single thing here is an object. You show me that bridge, for example, like how many objects is that bridge?
>> That little, that little. Yeah. Like, uh, look at that. Holy crap.
>> Oops.
>> So that's not that's not one big, you know, blend model or whatever Maya or whatever. It's all these little pieces. What?
>> Yeah. It's all just made out of little pieces here. Right. So it's like it's all this.
>> Crap.
>> I don't have my, like, I'm working in my office right now where I don't have my tools set up yet.
>> That's okay. But you can just select the entire bridge, right? And kind of like move it about and so on.
>> And are you, I mean, are we using real-time lighting here or is this a light map?
>> Yeah. No, this is real-time lighting with. Yeah.
>> Holy crap. How many point lights do you have?
>> A lot. I, yes.
>> I assume you have a light culling system though.
>> Uh, yes. So there's generally a lot of kind of like optimization systems. Like if you look at Marinus Keep here, right? Like, and I turn on the borders, like it's all getting split up into.
>> That's so cool.
>> Into multiple borders, right? So you don't load everything and so on, right? So you only load the things that people actually can see or see in the distance and that kind of thing.
>> Dude, you know, this is so encouraging to me because it makes me feel like AI is never going to be able to make games.
>> Like, obviously you'll.
>> Yeah. You. Well, obviously there's AI tools and I, I use some and they're, they're very not art tools, but like Copilot and stuff. And.
>> Claude is very helpful for diagnosing bugs.
>> But I, like, I look at this and I'm like, that's not even the game. That's the editor, and you had to go in there and create this editor in a very human way because there human needs.
>> Also in a fun way. Let me show you some more stuff, right? So, for example, Unity has this whole project panel, right? Where it's just literally showing you uh, all the objects, all the assets that exist in the in the.
>> Yeah, it's, it's like if you try to make an ARPG, it would kill you, right?
>> Um, so I created this item manager.
>> Um,
>> What?
>> And this is where we basically, like, here's how we organize all of this, right? So this is literally showing you all the kind of like items in the game. And I always try to kind of like make our editors look nice. I would guess that we probably always have made the most crazy Unity projects, right? Because of like, yeah, I don't think there's any other ARPG or something that uses Unity in the way that we do with the amount of complexity.
>> This, when I see this, sorry to keep talking, but like, when I see this, I, it, what it tells me about the way you think about things is you think in terms of long term. So you're like, I need.
>> I need a.
>> A toolkit that's going to be useful for a decade. Is that kind of the way your brain works?
>> Yes. So I project.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Exactly. And I want like the tools and so on, uh, to be fun to interactive, right? And B to be immediately intuitive, meaning even if you haven't worked with this tool before, it should kind of explain itself, kind of like how it works, right? And it should give all the information to you in smart ways. Right? So, for example, at the top here, right? Like I'm, I'm just looking at our weapons right now. Right? At the top here, it all does all the summaries for me, right? It tells me, oh, there's 356 weapons that we have. By the way, this is more than what we have in the game right now because you are seeing some stuff here that only comes with tiers four to six that will only ship at 1.0. Um, and it does everything. Like it, it already kind of like explains to you how many of these you have and how many strength weapons do we have, how many decks, how many face, blah, blah. It does all of that for you. Right? If an object isn't properly set up yet or something, right? There's all these kind of like systems in there that explain to you why. Right? Here it says, item improperly configured, rule breaker, item cannot be dropped, it's not sold at a vendor, and it's not a special reward. Well, that's because I didn't toggle this here. It's not part of any loot tables, right? Um, but if anything is set up in a wrong way, right, it will actually tell you that. Like here, for example, if I click this rune, it, it shows it in red and tells me, rule breaker, utility rune assigned to weapon, right? Because we're currently making this push of like, hey, we don't want utility runes in weapons anymore. Um, so it's just this thing where it's just this shouldn't, like, you couldn't really realistically just work in the project panel and have, oh, here's an asset, and I have to click it in order to see in the inspector what its values are and all of this stuff, right?
>> I want to immediately see what is the item, what is its attribute distribution, what class is it for,
>> What's the drop level, what's the item level, um, what rune is assigned to it. Let me open the prefab. What are the grafting ingredients? What's the, um, what's the actual value, um, when you, when you sell it? Even the telemetry is in there, right? So, we see, well, how many players on currently have been using the woven reps? Well, it's 1.51% of the player base, right, have actually used this weapon.
>> Okay. So, it's pulling data from the server or something.
>> Yes. It's pulling data from the telemetry so that we know like, hey, if a weapon is really underused, right? Like.
>> We will show you that, right?
>> That is genius.
>> There's one tool by the way, um, that I released recently because I thought, um, people would get a kick out of it. Uh, let me open it real quick. It's this one, um, the quick select tool. So this is a little bit messy right now, but all this tool is, is basically a clipboard, right? Because the thing that annoyed me in Unity was always, hey, there's the project panel and there's the hierarchy panel, right? And I was always like, I'm mostly working with these four, five files. And every single time I look for this file, right, I have to type in the name here, right? And then I have to click on it and then it opens up the inspector, right? And with the quick select, this is on GitHub by the way, like people can just download this now. Um, you can just literally take any, like, let's go to tutorials here, right? And if I want to click any asset, like I'm working a lot with this one right now, right? You can literally just drag this in here and then it'll throw it in here. Oh, this one already.
>> And then you can just click this, right? And if we look at the inspector, well, that's, that's what it will show you, right?
>> I've kind of found, Thomas, that, um, the more the bigger my game gets, the more irrelevant the project window becomes in terms of like where all of my assets are. And frankly, even what my assets are named because it's like.
>> I've, I've found it's more effective to select stuff from the scene view than it is from the project view. Like I'll literally open up another scene.
>> And go find the box that I want.
>> As opposed to scrubbing through the project.
>> So you can just copy and paste it and so on, right?
>> Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> That's right. So, let me show you some other. Let me show you some other stuff because I think that stuff is interesting for people that make ARPGs and so on. Right. So, for example, we have the balance master.
>> This is where we basically balance.
>> Yeah.
>> This is basically where we balance the entire game, right? So, this is just again, like we can just set, hey, what is the player's max health, right? Or what are actually their base stats and so on. What's the level up curve, right? And it goes to what is the XP? It shows you on a curve here, right? To reach level two, you need 50 XP. To reach level three, you need 100, right? Then we also have this curve generator in here where it's, I can set what is the max level, what are the phases, right? Like early game, um, starts at level two, lasts till about level 15, should take about 5 hours, and based on that, you can adjust the curve, etc. Then we also have the calculator, right? Where it's like, hey, what's the target level that we want to reach? What's the amount of time it takes to kill an enemy? Um, how much does it cost to make to get a trade, right? And it calculates all of that for you, right? So, if you're looking at 1.0, by the way, right now, the curve generator will tell us you will have to play the game for 172 hours and 26 minutes to actually to actually complete.
>> Your character progression.
>> Hey, is this industry standard for, for ARPGs to do stuff like this?
>> I don't think so. I mean, I, I think a lot of times, um, especially the tooling is a bit of a pain in the ass, right? Like, and you have more of the project panel and all of this kind of stuff, um, where it's just, oh, separate assets that fly around somewhere and you have to actually know what the name of these assets are and so on, right?
>> And we try to make this really simple, right? Like, so, for example, we have this whole manager tool thing, right? Um, where it shows you all the, like, we, we, I, I pushed recently to kind of like have managers for everything, right? So I just opened up the NPC manager, for example, and again, we try to make this look a little bit nice, right? So if I want to manage NPCs.
>> Like Filmore, Filmore is the Smitty in the game, right? I can just look at his, you know, like if I want to look at the vendor stock, right? I can just look at, oh, Filmore is the guy early on that I find. What does he actually sell there? I can look at the loot sources. Oh, he has weapon, shields, tools, armors, weapon morale, blah, blah. If I want to go in there, I can make changes, right? I can just set, you know, whatever I want. And how many of these things does he drop, right? Um, and so on. And if I want to go, I don't know, like if the story folks want to add more dialogue or something, right? They can literally just do that here, like, hey, what are eaves drops, right? Um, and if you open this up, I can also listen to the audio. If he does this, you know, if I want to know exactly like what is he saying and what are the things and like we make it easy to.
>> Add more, right? So that literally every monkey can go in and see, hey, um, our story folks aren't very tech, um, tech heavy, right? But like everybody can open an NPC thing, right?
>> And say, "Hey, I want a new line for an intro, right?" And then just click a button, add intro, right? And then just, okay. And now modify this, right? Like, now just like throw the stuff in there, etc.
>> It's interesting. I think about, um, there's two ways to sell a game. You could sell a game to an audience, and then you can sell a game to a business. So I'm not saying you would sell No Rest for the Wicked to like Blizzard or something, but like, this is how you do it, right? You, you build them an engine, and it has documentation, and it has a system so that it makes the, the IP more pro, more valuable to a potential studio. Would you say that's true?
>> Um, yes, but I'm obviously building it for myself, right? So I just want to make sure in terms of if you had to sell this, you could.
>> Yes, obviously we could. I mean, we, we had to be responsible here, right? And we had to build the game in a way where, I mean, I already said we're going to walk on the west for the wicked for probably another 10 years or so, right? I don't want that 10 years to be horrible, right? I want that 10 years to be really enjoyable, right? And if somebody has an issue or something, right? I can very quickly just jump in and like, really quickly make changes and commit that and.
>> And there you go, right?
>> Um, and there was some of this, right? Like when the whole Private Division thing came up, right? Um, we were thinking in all kinds of directions, right? Like, yes, we could potentially sell No Rest for the Wicked and so on, right? And, um, it is at a point where, you know, like the tooling and so on, everything is kind of like quite mature by now. It's really just like, we just building it for us, right? To make sure that we can make changes rapidly, we can iterate really quickly. We can throw stuff together super, super fast, and it should be enjoyable, right? And I think that's part of the things that like the tooling a lot of times is just really crappy in games, right? And.
>> Um, I think especially with the AI stuff, that's where it helps, right? Like, for example, our, one of our art directors, Daniel Vanuven, um, he used AI to kind of like just man create a little management tool for his team, right? So they see how much work is left, and it creates little screenshots, right? Where it's like, okay, here's the map of our game. Here's where the bugs are, right? Like, oh, there's a bug in Lowland Meadows here, right? At this spot, right? And you can click on that and see exactly what the bug is, and then quickly go in and fix it and so on. And that doesn't necessarily need our core team to look at it and go crazy, right? We're currently in this whole thing of like, okay, like AI code is pretty crappy a lot of times, right? So they, our guys do not want it anywhere near quantum or any gameplay code or something, right? Which is understandable, or the multiplayer code, or any of the stuff, right? Any, any of the stuff that AI would not understand. But especially for tooling, it's very good, right? Like, it's, it helps.
>> It's phenomenal for tooling. I, I think I have like 20 different tools that I've been using that will do stuff in batch, you know? So you'll say like, "Hey, you know, I need you to olude every scene. Do occlusion culling for every scene." And you just click it and it occlusion calls every scene.
>> Or light mapping. You can light map every scene, or you can generate GUIDs for for all of the g for all of the enemies.
>> I, I think that's why people are kind of like a little bit silly right now, right? I completely understand the whole AI slob thing, right? Like if you use it for art, it's so, if you use it for story, it's so. Right? But if you actually, if you actually use it for like code, it's the same as autocomplete and so on, right? Like it will literally just take code that is kind of messy and clean it up and add comments, right? So that the next person who works on it doesn't have to do all the work again of like, I, what, like, what did that person think when he wrote that line of code? What does this even do? Right? The three things I found it's very helpful for in particular, Claude, um, is to, uh, tooling. It's great for tooling. Um, you could get, you could get an editor tool that can save you hundreds of hours just because you no longer have to manually select everything and do, like, for example, occlusion coloring. You can just do it all for every scene and get it done in like 30 seconds. And that, that the tooling takes 10 seconds, 30 seconds for Claude to write, and it works, right?
>> The second, the second one is, um, documentation. Uh, it's really good. What I mean by documentation is, and I'm not saying this for you because I know you know all this. I'm saying it for my audience. But, um, documentation, what I mean by that is it knows the interconnectedness of all of your scripts and it knows it better than you do, or or a team member. Like, let's say a team member doesn't quite know what happened last year because they're new. You can get Claude. You say, how, how does the enemy work? Or how does the enemy interact with the loot boxes? Or how, like, all these interconnected things. It'll just tell you it's, it's these scripts, this script, and this script, and here's how it works. And then you go, boom, got it.
>> Oftentimes for me, you know, even though I've written the majority, the bulk of the code in my game, um, I had a team member named AJ who also did some of the code. He probably did 40% of it. Often times for me, I won't even remember why I wrote a certain line of code, and it was me. John Carmack actually said that in one of the Joe Rogan podcasts, right? Where it's where he basically said this whole thing that until Quake 3, I think it was,
>> He was authoring every single line of code in the studio, right? But then Quake 3 and forward, I mean, the code bases have become so complex that it's ludicrous, right? Like one person could not understand an entire code base and like literally every single thing that is going on, right? And I think that's where it really helps, right? Like to have this little assistant where it's just, dude, just scrap, scrape through the codebase quickly for me, right? I don't know where this thing is set, right? And obviously, like that, that doesn't, that doesn't, um, mean that you shouldn't learn how to know how to code anymore, right?
>> Right.
>> It just means, well, because you still need to know what you're doing, right? But it just means, well, if I have to look for something like that, search is really helpful, right? So I know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I look at this thing like Sven Winkke recently came in under a lot of heat, right? With like, oh, we use AI for concept art. I don't know how you would do that, because like concept art, like in terms of art, what we found is that it's utter garbage, right? Like it creates super generic.
>> Um,
>> Um,
>> And but I want people to not kind of like throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? For code and things like that. Like a computer should make the mundane [ __ ] easier, right? But yes, it should not take away the creative stuff, right? Like it should not take away the ingenuity of like what some programmers come up with, right? Or it should not take up.
>> What artists can do, right? Or if you like right now, I, I did try my best to do to have AI even write a little side quest a couple months ago, right? And so at it.
>> Like the story of it.
>> Yeah, the story, like just, I already had like a picture of.
>> Yeah.
>> It's just, it's built to to create the most generic, right? Which doesn't help, right? Like I already had like, here's a story pitch that I wrote myself for a side quest, right? Can you write the dialogues for it? Right? And it's just.
>> Dude, this is so goddamn awful. I would never put this into my game. Like, just that.
>> All right, man. Thank you so much. Um, and congratulations on just the wild success and enjoy your vacation. I think you're going on a vacation in a couple days, right?
>> Yes. My wife is forcing me to.
>> You good. You should. All right, buddy. Take it easy.
>> Thank you, Thomas. Was super fun again.
>> Yep. Cheers. You may also be wondering how to turn that $100,000 or million dollar game idea into actual money. And some of you might want to do it before you even finish your game. For that, I have a gift below for you. It's totally free.