Games That Push Back with Bennett Foddy

26:58So, it's really, yeah, it's about what people want out of the game and it's about what they expect to get and it's about how much effort they expect to have to put in. And then, you know, I think there are situations where games expect a huge amount of work where they don't get called difficult, right? Like if you sit down to play Europa Universalis. It's just this mind-boggling complexity you can't possibly hope to overcome without watching YouTube videos or having a friend to guide you through or something like that. But that game's not known as difficult, right? For some reason, we would only talk about the difficulty of that game in terms of how the AI plays against you and what the resource constraints are and all of that stuff.

27:40It's a difficult grand strategy if the AI is really fierce and is constantly kind of attacking you. But there's just as much friction in that game or way, way more than there is in a lot of my games, right? I think the same thing goes for accessibility, right? So, there's a lot of talk about accessibility. Usually, accessibility features for a game are ones that enable you to see the ending, to see all the content regardless of like how good your reflexes are or how good your vision is or whatever, you know, like whatever other sorts of abilities your body has. But we don't often talk about accessibility in terms of like how easily and quickly does the game get you to the kind of core of the experience, right?

28:24Like it's never deemed that a game is inaccessible because you have to do eight hours of tutorial before you're playing the real game. If you're playing like Final Fantasy XII, you're not really playing the real game until you're in about hour 20, 25, 30. And nobody calls that inaccessible because people's expectations and orientations are toward the storyline and the visual content, and we get that really easily. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really have like a kind of unified theory about this, but I would just say that just like with frustration, the kind of concept of difficulty seems a little bit overly broad and blunt and not really kind of fit for the sorts of debates and discussions that we're trying to have with them.

29:08Maybe just a little more language or a little more theoretical constructs are needed to really be able to kind of crack these open yeah it's interesting maybe it's maybe it came across this way just because you know we're talking about your games but like when you the things you listed you know on one side and then the things just in the other you know with the europa universalist example like you know it really does to a certain extent like the way we talk about difficulty does talk a lot about losing progress of some form right which is obviously like something you play with a lot i know you've been heads down on baby steps last five years but i was wondering if you're aware of like the growing trend in games that are resetting progress, like hardcore World of Warcraft, hardcore Minecraft, and like the fact that those are becoming super popular.

29:45And if that hadn't given you any thoughts, because obviously that's like you've been playing with for years now. Yeah. And those modes have been around for a while, but I have noticed they've started to get more popular. The one that I love is RPG maps and Trekmania, especially, I mean, there was one called Bennett 48, my checkpoints, which is, you have to climb up a building. It was like very, very difficult things and you fall back down. There's no checkpoints, right? Amazing. And that one went on to be the, as I understand it, went on to inspire Deep Dip, which is a collaboration between a number of RPG map makers from Trackmania, which is this giant colossal tower that takes hours and hours.

30:22And the whole community was involved in a kind of collaborative effort to see who could be the first to beat this checkpointless tower. and then Deep Dip 2 which was even bigger again. Deep Dip 2 they had like a community pot it was like$30 ,000 for whoever could finish that first on stream so I love that it's I mean I can't really take credit for this except it you know maybe in just a small piece of it because I feel like like this kind of sense of hardcoreness the sense of like really being prepared to send people back a lot is something that started to really pop off around the time that Dark Souls came out Demon's Souls really sort of started that, these FromSoft games, which were like, we're going to, in the clothes of a genre, an action RPG, that had become very kind of progress-oriented, very number-go-up oriented, which is really what we mean when we say RPG systems.

31:15We mean you can't lose progress, that you're always ratcheting up progress, right? They were like, no, that's no fun. Let's go back to feeling some fear because you can lose a lot of your effort. And it was received, I think, a little coldly by journalists and by a lot of players when Demon's Souls came out. But it started to kind of like catch fire. Some people found it had a very kind of passionately positive response to it. And so, I think you can kind of see we're almost at like kind of peak sending you back now. And then we'll get another backlash. We'll have another 20 years of checkpointing and quick saving and all of that stuff.

31:53These things come in waves, they're fashions. and the reason for that is that there are trade-offs, right? Like, I mean, I think what you lose when everything is sort of like safe and checkpointed and quick-saved and so on, you lose a sense of stakes, obviously. If you can't lose progress, then you're never really afraid and you're never really stressed. You can't really go on tilt. You're just kind of like oriented and it orients you more and more to the kind of micro successes and failures you have. Like if I'm playing, for example, Quake 1 with my fingers on F5 and F7 to quick save and quick load, I'm just like trying to optimize every little kind of like one second stretch of the game.

32:33And then I'll save if it was good enough and I won't save if it wasn't good enough. And that's a way to play. And it's like there's a whole aesthetic of that. But what you don't get is any kind of like feeling of like being out on a high wire. Yeah. And by the same token, when you have a game that sends you back a long way, you have a lot of stakes, you have a lot of stressful feelings or whatever it is, excitement and feeling of it mattering how you play, but you never get to kind of really focus down on the micro. So, I think it makes sense that it's something that comes in waves and in fashions.

33:09but yeah i think we're right now probably cresting the peak of of sending you back culture yeah it's really interesting i don't know i always find it interesting because i have very much my game playing friends very much fall hard on either line like there's a group of us who only play games that hurt us and are incapable of playing games that don't and there's a group that just like do not want any of it whatsoever yeah never did it shall cross in any way we can't even come close to the axis and it's just so yeah it's so fascinating changing tact a little bit i think that explanation was a great example of i guess something i've you know not strictly game related but i want to talk about your dual nature as an academic as a game designer because aside from giving us wonderful views and insights into game design and you also have amazing fun with it i think your ign reaction to the getting over at speedrun is art i just think it's it's perfect it's a perfect artifact but i think you've used that to examine some things that are really interesting so you know one that you kind of touched on there when you were talking about track mania you've been incredibly aware of some really interesting gaming subcultures and like really spoken about them interestingly but i think one that i want to chat to you about is well two i want to chat about speed running and streaming because i know obviously i'm a big ludwig fan so the getting over it generation was like a big thing for me how did you know seeing streamers and i know that your journey very much started with like moist critical playing quap and everything as well how has seeing streamers basically have their careers been made by your games like how does that influence your practice at all?

34:31If I'm honest, I didn't really understand. Even having had that experience with Most Critical and QWOP, and I have watched the occasional Let's Play, I mean, I have to just be honest and say, when I'm looking for a YouTube of gameplay, I'm always typing no commentary into the search. I didn't want that experience of seeing somebody reacting for me. I felt like it would kind of spoil things for me. And I definitely once started to see streaming take off. Streaming has lots of different forms. You know, I have a lot of friends who watch League of Legends streams, which are really not reaction videos.

35:06It's more about watching people who are at the top of something that's very competitive play it in a way that they can't and like to kind of learn from it and admire it the way that we admire athletes, you know. The peak of a frustrating experience watching someone grind League of Legends. That is keeping my games to hurt you. It's like no one's done better than that. So, I don't think they're all the same, but the kinds of streaming content that I've been most interfaced with is the stuff that my games have been supporting, right? So, stuff where a so-called rage game, somebody's playing a game because it provides emotion-provoking, relatable situations that they can have an outsized reaction to on stream and that their fans can kind of like enjoy the entertainment value of seeing their favorite streamer react in a certain way.

35:54and when I was making Getting Over It, I think it's clear in the script that I was sort of like oriented against that, right? My orientation was it annoys me that people aren't going to play this game, that they're just going to watch it on stream. And here is this thing where the kind of meaning of it comes from the fact that you're going through an ordeal and you're sort of like in contact with the designer. And I think that game is that for some proportion of the audience, especially people playing it the first time. You know, so I didn't have a deep understanding of what it is that people are doing when they're watching streams or anything like that.

36:32I was kind of against it because I knew it was sort of like stopping people from actually playing the games themselves. As it turned out, Getting Over It came out and I think probably the great majority of people have experienced it in the format of watching people play it. And that certainly hasn't been bad for my sales and it would be churlish to complain about that situation. So, I've tried to have more sympathy for that experience, right? And to kind of understand that it's playing a different role. There's something that I do believe quite deeply, which is that it's something that's natural and that we should hope for as game designers is that the games are used in ways that were not originally intended.

37:09And I think a lot of like the Trackmania RPG maps that I was mentioning before were never envisaged by the designers of Trackmania, you know? that's not a usage that they would have supported or I mean maybe they they love it but it wasn't their intention that's quite clear and I think that oftentimes the kind of most beautiful aspects of games come from the sort of unexpected usages of folk usages of the games and the folk the house rules and the different the mods and the modes and all of the all of this different ways that the kind of player base kind of runs with it in the case of getting over it some proportion of people had this sort of experience as I intended it, and that's great.

37:47But there was this kind of phenomenon that was much bigger of people using it as a platform for rage performance. Now, I don't like watching rage performance. It's not a thing that works for me. It always seems inauthentic to my eye. But I certainly have enjoyed watching reaction content of one type or another in my life. You know, like I think it owes a lot to Japanese variety shows of the 80s and 90s. in terms of format, having the kind of celebrity face in the corner while something interesting happens and you see them react. There's something that's very human about it. There's something that's kind of very basic and deep.

38:26And I'm not against the fact that Getting Over It was a kind of a good platform for that or at least a timely platform for that. And I guess to really answer your question, do I think about it now while we're making games? Yeah. Yeah. Now it kind of feeds in. we try to design everything both from a point of view of how this will work for a spectator and how it will work for the player simultaneously. And one of the nice things about that is it actually means that if you do that, if you focus on both as we tried to do in Baby Steps, it means that games are really nice for kind of hot seat play in the living room with families.

39:01And I've heard from a lot of people who have said that playing Baby Steps, they had a wonderful experience with like five people playing, handing off the controller. It's certainly something we observed when we were playtesting it as well. And I think that comes from a kind of an orientation to understanding that kind of stream spectators will always be there. I mean, it seems good. I'm happy to have a kind of a broader conception of who the audience is. Yeah, I've never gotten a sense of how many of the players it is. So, I had a thing with Obra Dinn. Well, I played Obra Dinn and I was like, that was amazing.

39:33That was incredible. I wish I could have raised my brain and play it again fresh. And I had a similar experience of getting over it. But my reaction to that experience in both cases was like, I now want to see someone else go through this for the first time. And I think that those people in streaming get often, unfortunately, labelled as like the backseaters and like banned and told to go away. But I do, I think that is like getting over it. I think a lot of the joy is like seeing someone encounter the narration for the first time, seeing someone get bodied by it for the first time. And actually quite a few people have played it and that's, they play it and then go seek a stream out to see someone get that bit that's interesting yeah no i didn't think about that but yeah we do that with movies too don't we yeah like if we really love a movie we want to be able to discuss it with people and we want to be able to share the experience so yeah there is a kind of amount of experience sharing like that as well but yeah i guess on the subject of people doing unexpected things again the book is perfect speed running i guess a very similar question you know we've had game developers who like spoken about not intentionally putting in sequence breaks but like as they're designing a level thinking about okay how is speedrun is going to engage with this?

40:31Is that something, you know, that's factoring in at all? I remember what was the current record for getting over it. I think it's disgusting, but how is Baby Steps looking? Baby Steps, I think the glitchless record is something like 45 minutes now, which is crazy. It's really for a game that you just have to actually take steps in if you're playing glitchlessly. Yeah. The glitchy one is something like eight minutes. I think it's gotten down to about that little. The joy of physics-based games. Getting over it glitchless is like, yeah, 45 seconds. Glitchy is faster. I'm not so interested in the glitchy runs.

41:03My preference would be to patch out the glitches. I don't think that you should. I think whatever you've shipped, if it becomes the tech that the speedrunners are using to kind of compete for better times, you kind of have to leave those bugs in because that becomes the little platform of play that they're doing. Unless it's kind of ruining anybody's experience. But you really have to search for the glitch that the eight-minute speedrunners are doing. Yeah. I mean, I think about this stuff a lot. I was aware of it and thinking about it when I was making Getting Over It. I think speedrun culture had already entered the mainstream in 2016, 2017.

41:37Every time I would playtest it at NYU, somebody would say, oh, you know, speedrunners are going to love this. I'd be like, okay, well, you know, I've got to think about that a little bit and try to sort of support that. I don't know exactly what the requirements are. I guess to make a speedrun or be interested, it needs to not be too random of an experience. If they have to kind of reroll all the time. They don't like that too much. It's good if you leave the possibility of skips open. So yeah, I mean, when we made Baby Steps, for example, Baby Steps has no invisible walls, give or take. There's like one or two situations in the dark area where we have to do that to stop you from getting soft locked.

42:11But in the open world, there's no invisible walls. Very, very rare for an open world game. And we just assume, like a network security admin, assuming that every password is automatically compromised. We assume that every cliff is compromised, every difficult area, rock wall, whatever it might be, you have to assume that they're all compromised and you make the game work allowing for that. I think that's how you support speed runners as best you can is to make sure that the game doesn't crash and doesn't fall over if they do something that's not expected or not desired. I think I love that approach as a designer know, just in really in general, I think about one of the things that I found most inspiring was learning about some of the exploits people use in Spelunky.

42:56Spelunky is a game that has certain kind of things that look like they should be invincible. There's an invincible ghost that gets you if you take too long. There are invincible walls, et cetera. But it turns out everything in that game just has health and the invincible things just have a ton of health. That's such a good way to approach design is to never use absolutes, right? Like to just to always kind of leave the door ajar just a tiny bit for people to exploit things. So yeah, speed running, it's a nice way to kind of re-see your work, to see people again, like reconfiguring it or reconceptualizing it in a different way.

43:34Speed running makes a game into a different type of game in a way, for the most part. They're taking different pleasure from it, immediately becomes its own type of thing. It is one of the great beauties of games that they support so many different types of play. Like Ti Nguyen, the philosopher who's been, who has a book out on games, has this idea that what's special about them is that they're unfinished, that they need to be completed by the players. I actually think this is true to some extent of all artwork. It's always the audience that completes things, certainly true of architecture, for example.

44:06But it is particularly true of games, right? And I think it's important to say that it's true because we do and one of the weird things about being a game designer is you're so in control of the world and the rules and all the nouns and verbs that you can get led into a power fantasy of being able to control people's experience and be able like as long as I polish this enough and I control it enough I can make sure everybody's having the intended experience and you can't I think and it's better to proceed with the with that assumption from the jump staying on getting over for a second then I've got another question about paper steps but I'm getting over obviously the full title is getting over at Bennett Foddy and you narrate it and you bait the player a lot and you've done a fantastic GC talk about that decision but I guess in terms of putting your name on a game and directly engaging with the player in that way was the reaction what you expected did it work as intended I think it did I think it did it doesn't for everybody especially the people who are experiencing the game through streams where the audio is muted it's not going to work in that way the idea what I want is to create an experience that feels like the player is in communion with the designer in some sort of way.

45:11Not in a way where I'm controlling their experience, but in a way where they sense me as a human being present in the work. And putting my name as part of that, but then also just have this narration that starts formal and becomes more intimate through the course of play and try to forge that intimacy by finding points of aesthetic or emotional commonality between me and the player. And I do that by gating, right? Like basically, like if you got this far, it means that you must have been enjoying it, right? Like, and if you're enjoying it, let's talk about what that means. And I think that we have the same taste.

45:45I do think that worked. And I get a lot of email from people who felt something with that. And I'm very happy about that. So, we can sometimes get people to feel a certain type of experience. We hear from people who played baby steps, who had some of the kind of intended feelings about that stuff as well. We wanted people to interrogate why and how they play games and why they persevere and what that's really about and to kind of question their own orientation to getting instructions and getting help and all these sort of different things that we could call masculine types of play, both for men and women.

46:22And I've heard from a lot of people playing Baby Steps that it made them reflect on on stuff in that in those sorts of ways so we do at least get some people to have the experience that we want we don't have to give up on intention or completely but we just have to have a kind of a loose grip yeah absolutely yeah so about baby steps i think the post flash styled games like you have an aesthetic that like i've really discussed me of gary's mod maybe i just described too many things as podcasters like gary's mod but like you know it feels like default assets and half naked man in a pot and the baby steps guy really gives me attack on titan guy vibes.

46:57What drives that aesthetic? Where does that come from? I think at first it was a practical consideration. I was getting over it and I was like, well, I have to control the scope of this somehow. I really love pottering around with 3D art and especially effects art. I could just spend forever rat-holing on one visual effect like Lucas Pope does, except that he's much faster and more skilled than me. So, it's maybe not such a problem for him. But even in his case, you can see like the real pleasure for him is in making like a special effect or a shader look just a particular way. But if I do that, then getting over it takes me 25 years to finish.

47:37So, I was like, well, how am I going to do this? And then from that point, I was trying a couple of different things. I had an early prototype that was like, it was all going to be cutouts from historic furniture magazines and jewelry magazines, like trying to get like photographs from like high budget magazine ads, cut them out and then make the world out of that. Didn't really like how it looked, wasn't quite working. But I think from there, I realized that if it's going to be kind of like detritus in this way, that assets would actually like work fine, like 3D, especially free 3D assets, which tend to be a very mixed quality.

48:15And a lot of the ideas in the game, the narration actually flow from how that looked rather than in the other direction, right? Like, so you might think that I picked an art style to kind of match the mountain of trash idea, but actually came the, it was in the other direction. So it started as a scope constraint and it kind of inspired a set of ideas in the kind of theoretical realm. Yeah, it's interesting to me. I just, to me, it's something that is so, like, there are so many games that are made out of assets now. In fact, like if you're playing the Final Fantasy remakes, you see many of the same Megascans plants that are also in the Resident Evil remake that are also in Baby Steps, you know, like there's not that many different repositories of assets out there.

49:01and they are in fact being used not just by cheap or free games on steam or an itch what we call an asset flip but by things with massive budgets now it's just kind of like universal and it has its own set of like cultural significance right like a meaning there's a ways of meaning when you use off-the-shelf parts that it's just kind of visually suggestive of a certain set of things right for getting over it, particularly the fact that all of the assets are from different free repositories and they don't all sit together, right? They don't look like they're from the same reality. It gives a kind of a collage or a kind of bricolage sense of unreality or of surrealism that is flowing out and that I started to like.

49:49And I guess I started to think while I was doing it, well, this could be beautiful actually to buy my own lights. You know, of course, every visual artist thinks their own work is good looking. I don't feel like other people have to feel like that about getting over it. But when I was making it, I was like, I can make this look nice, even though each of the individual assets is kind of horrible looking. And that became very interesting to me. Then we kind of kept doing it in baby steps just because if nothing else, it allows you like one of the nice things about working in 3D is you can just like from thought to reality very, very quickly.

50:23You want to have somebody be like, well, we want a school bus in this game. She didn't actually make the cut, but you can have a school bus, pop it in the game, round trip, you know, two, three minutes. You can see if that's a good idea. Oh, it turns out it's not a good idea. So, we'll cut it, right? It gives you fluidity. So, it does commit you to a certain type of set of aesthetics. You can't do this in a kind of a cartoon aesthetic or a painterly aesthetic or a 2D aesthetic or anything like that. It commits you to kind of like low mid-budget contract studio looking stuff but still possible to make that look nice I think yeah absolutely it's a beautiful game so obviously I mentioned as well your collaboration with Gabe and being a former student I guess I just want to ask straight up like you know how did being a game designer alongside your game you know your practice teaching game designs like how did those two things work out it seems like you've you know you've kicked game designs around with students and obviously students have gone on to be professional collaborators and it's gone very well.

51:19Yeah. I mean, I made a couple of games with AP Thompson. I made one for the iPhone called Stare, Slide the Blocks to Ascent, which I tried to put the tutorial in the title. And we made one called Multibowl. And then, yeah, I helped, I should say, I helped a guy to finish Ape Out. And that went really well. I was really kind of happy with how that was going. So, we went on to make baby steps together. The thing that I miss about universities is that there is a kind of a intellectual and creative community that you kind of get for free. You get very interesting people coming to ask to do an independent study with you because they have some interesting project and they show it to you and you can like just immediately sort of jump into like a fascinating and interesting mutually beneficial situation.

52:04The class that I liked the most was a class where students would make a different game every week for the whole semester and you just get this kind of fire hose of interesting ideas. And it's not like I was stealing the students' ideas. Although I do think there is a statute of limitations on that. And if they haven't used an idea after like five or six years, I feel like I should be able to steal them. But no, I mean, I think that the sense of being part of a kind of live creative community where ideas are bubbling around and there's kind of like an economy of ideas floating around. I really miss that.

52:39So yeah, I think it's tough. I mean, there's not too many, I can say this without sounding too shady, there's not too many games, academics who are actually publishing games at the same time. And of course, there are some very prolific ones, Paolo Pettuccini down from Pittsburgh and CMU. And I think about Eric Zimmerman at NYU and Frank Lance also made Universal paperclips while he was at NYU. There are some exceptions to this rule, but the great majority of people teaching video game design are not publishing a lot of games. And I understand that because obviously teaching takes a lot of effort and games takes a lot of effort.

53:15And it's difficult from a point of view of like breaking your attention. One of the things people generally need to make video games is uninterrupted focus. And it's tough to do that when students are running into your office all the time, or you have to kind of keep on putting things down to go and teach a class. But for me, even given that it was still, I think the kind of balance of how it was working was that it was generative. It was kind of more inspiring and energizing than it was a distracting and draining of time. But having said that, there's only certain types of things you can do. And I can do a game like getting over it in that context, you know, which is small scope.

53:52It took me about a year alongside full-time teaching load. I couldn't do a thing like baby steps like that, right? There's just too, too much work. And I think one of the things people don't understand if they're not game developers is that the difference in the amount of work between those two types of projects is titanic. You know, it's not like a 4x difference. It's like a 20x difference just in the amount of iteration that you have to do, how long it takes to kind of prop up each individual system. All of that stuff is just really kind of titanically different. When people talk about there being Fodian games, I don't even think that the kind of unifying thing is that they're rage games.

54:29I think it's that they are really, really small scoped in a very particular way, right? It's like one level. It's like one system in one level. That's a way that you can keep it very small. So yeah, there's some things you can't do in the academy and that's why I'm not in there anymore. But I do miss that sense of community and I think we will be kind of eternally looking for ways to get it back without being in the academy. Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, Well, not that you can't have it, but the sentiment. But you did mention Multibowl, which funnily enough, Multibowl was the genesis of this episode because I only very recently heard of it and was immediately upset I couldn't play it.

55:04But obviously, you know, I found out the reasons for that, etc. But then also, you know, you seem to have been fairly aware of that in creating it. Like, how was the experience, I guess, of creating this thing that would only ever be like exhibited and performed rather than released? For people who haven't played Multibowl, which is most people, it's a kind of a pastiche of emulated games. I played something like 1500 different two-player arcade computer console games using MAME. MAME is an emulator that now emulates basically every system from history. So, I was really able to kind of go through just a ton of them.

55:39And I winnowed that down to about 300, 310 games where I would capture a moment in that game as a save state. Like somebody's about to score a goal, somebody's about to shoot somebody, somebody's about to win a point. And then with the help of AP Thompson, we wove them together into a kind of like a randomized gauntlet. So, I'm now playing against you. It's going to drop us into an exciting moment in a game and we're going to play like 10 seconds until somebody scores a point and then it's going to drop us into another game. So, it's like the WarioWare of multiplayer games in a way, but it's also like a trip through history in a way that WarioWare isn't.

56:16And I had that idea bouncing around for years. And it wasn't until I had a conversation with AP about it where he seemed to think it wouldn't be that hard to do the technical side, at least for him. He's a very, very gifted engineer. And MAME is actually set up to do this kind of thing because it has like built-in debugging tools and has like automated debugging stuff built in. So, what I need to do then was I needed to play all these games, find these save states, that's the easy part, and then go into the debugger and try to figure out which variables change when you score a goal, like which variables change when you touch the ground, when you shoot somebody, whatever it is.

56:56And I had never done anything like this before. But as I got more and more into it, I went into a sort of like a weird obsessive state that I don't think I've ever been in before when I've been making games. I got like just fixated every day. I'd be like, I'm going to do like five more of these and I would like be like just trying like desperately to kind of sometimes if it's like a Commodore 64 game there's like variables that are hidden in the audio CPU instead like some little pocket of RAM that's not supposed to be used or sometimes with the really old like the Intellivision games it's like the score is not actually stored anywhere it's kind of like encoded in the graphics memory that's used to display the score and there's all these little tricks that you discover and so because it's kind of fascinating detective game itself just kind of like figuring out how to detect when somebody has scored a point in an emulator.

57:47So yeah, we made this experience that you can kind of play as a kind of like a meta multiplayer game. But you can't really release it, of course, because it depends. Even the save states have a lot of like copyrighted code in them and so on. And the ROMs that it depends on, the ROM files are also obviously you can't distribute. So we settled for being able to show it at parties and in other kind of like reasonable fair use situations. And It's one of my favorite things that I've ever worked on, honestly. It's a very unusual experience. And the reason that I love it is that it gets to the heart of what I like as a player, which is the moment when you're trying to figure out, oh, what does this joystick do?

58:25What does this button do? What am I doing right here? How do I play this game? It's that little moment of not being sure how to do it. That's what I love. And in multiball, it's just keeping you in that, going like again and again and again, like, hey, here's a new experience. here's a new experience like you figure out who you are for starters like figure out who you're controlling figure out how the controller works figure out what the rules are yeah and all that i love that scenario head to head as well right like yeah yeah yeah because the other person is trying to do it at the same time and you're trying to just do it a little bit faster than them i love that feeling of being at sea and i think multi-ball kind of produces that feeling better than anything else that i've made yeah it sounds fantastic yeah great great idea as well and also Yeah, absolutely.

59:07We've had quite a few emulator developers or people who have ported to emulators on here. And it's like, you know, what you were just hitting on about the detective games. Like some of the things we've heard is just like as a programmer, you're just like, I don't know how anyone invented that. That's absurd. So I can imagine that being very addicting. Yeah. While we're talking about, I guess, kind of, I don't say low level, but like, you know, different kinds of systems. We did mention Zipper earlier. So Zipper is a game for the Playdate, which is a show favorite here. We've had them on as well.

59:30And Zipper was one of the season one games that I must admit I didn't get very far in because it did completely body me. Yeah, tell us about Zipper before I ask you, I guess, the main question. That's definitely outside of my wheelhouse. So, it started as a Flash game back in 2008 or so. I had made a little prototype in Flash, which is the same art style, same kind of visual aesthetic. But making turn-based games is a totally different skill set than making physics games, and I just didn't have the skills. And so, I kind of shelved that until about 2015. Dean Cable from Panic pitched me making a game for this thing, which he said would be out in a year, which was not the case.

1:00:10But yeah, it seemed like a kind of a fun thing to do as a lark. And it seemed like the perfect time and place to resurrect the little turn-based samurai game that I had come up with. But yeah, I mean, to me, that was interesting mainly as like coming as a novice into what is effectively board game design and grid-based tactics game design. And to try to bring my own sensibility to that, which I did by creating kind of an input scheme that's unobvious and a kind of traversal scheme that's unobvious. In Zipper, you kill enemies by dashing past them or up to them very, very like in the blink of an eye.

1:00:44In a way, I have to confess is inspired by the anime Bleach, which is not a, you know, I can't stand behind Bleach. but I do love the aesthetics of the combat in that. It's like a hyper exaggeration of a Kurosawa movie. And I just was trying to kind of like, in a turn-based format, get this sense of like speed of like blink of an eye movement. And I think it came out okay. I still don't consider myself to be a good designer of tactics games though. Yeah. I mean, I loved it. I thought it was very hard, but yeah, I thought it was really good. And it actually took me many years to realized that you had made it as well which is a problem i have a lot with a lot of playdate games so i think you you know you succeeded in stepping into a different genre as it was but i guess what i wanted to ask you is you know you did flash which obviously likes the script and i believe baby steps and getting over a unity yep how was the experience of developing for the playdate i actually loved it i mean i so the playdate is kind of a minimal api and lure which makes it a lot like making picot8 games which i also love what i love about it is i love not having anything provided.

1:01:54What do I mean by that? Well, there's something that's kind of aesthetically gross when you are making a game that just needs a very, very kind of like minor, let's say I'm making a Pico8 game and I decide I need a particle system. And my particle system, it can really just be a table of XY coordinates. And I can just draw a pixel at those XY coordinates and update. Maybe the table has velocities on them. Maybe the table has lifetimes on them. It's just an array. And the code I need to traverse that array and move the particles around is like three lines long. So if I compare that to working in Unity, where the particle system is like probably a million lines of code, and it does like a zillion things, which I might want to use, but most of the time I don't.

1:02:36There's a sense of just like inelegance to that, or it's kind of gross like bloat that I can't escape because it wanted to be all things to all people. Now, I'm not a good enough programmer to make a Unity-style particle system myself, but if it's 2D games, if it's something like the Playdate or Pico8 or whatever, even Game Maker, of course, it's not very complicated to do something like that. And so, I love the sense of only having what I need. And real programmers hate Lua because it's slow. And to be honest, getting Zipper working at a reasonable speed on the Playdate wasn't easy because there's pathfinding and that, you know, it just doesn't have any CPU.

1:03:15And Lua has a lot of weird gotchas in it, like depending if you traverse an array this way, but not this way, suddenly it's slow. Or now, you know, you use too many globals or not enough globals, or you've got to try to move these globals inside this table and your meta table, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like that's as boring and nerdy and stupid as writing in C. And Maybe I should have just written the whole thing and see. But I love Lua because it's so easy to iterate. And so much of what I consider to be good game design is about having a tight loop on having an idea and having it running.

1:03:52and when I was making my cricket game for the iPhone in 2008 it's a very very early iPhone API and didn't really have anything it's just OpenGL and Objective-C but in Objective-C in particular if I want to add anything I now have to make a separate class and an interface to the class and I have to do all of this like and so like just the smallest idea I'm taking an hour to be able to get it to happen. Whereas in Lua, oh, my particle class doesn't have a field that I want. I'm just going to access it as though it exists, you know, and now it exists. And this is such a messy, bad tech debt generating stuff.

1:04:35But for small games, tech debt is not really a problem. In fact, it's so quick to work on the play date, so quick to work in PicoAid that if you start to feel you've got tech debt, you just start again and re-implement from scratch and the tech debt has all gone away. So yeah, I love Lua. I love JavaScript. I love these high level things. I don't love having to optimize them when it turns out that they're too slow, like that sucks. But if you're working in the kind of turn-based land or in kind of very simple stuff, then generally computers are fast, you know, and don't do anything too silly, then you can really work in a very free flowing way in those systems.

1:05:11And so the play date, yeah, knowing exactly this is the hardware target this is how fast it's going to be this is how much memory you have all of that stuff there's something kind of very freeing about it right like just really takes a lot of the kind of shit work out of game development and i i did enjoy working on that device a lot yeah for sure i really like that yeah pico 8 is another great call up for that really yeah just constraints again constraints are good we like constraints yeah all right i've kept you far too long so my last question and you are free to turn down this question but you have said fairly recently in response to the character design in Baby Steps that working on character design and animation brings you over into liking Big Butts and that you, and I quote, had a lot of evidence for this.

1:05:51Please present your case before the jury. Well, it's hard to do that without visual evidence, but I would invite people to look at, for example, old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Bugs Bunny does a lot of flashing his bottom to the camera. There's a lot of like looking over his shoulder when he doesn't need to be looking over his shoulder. There's a lot of turning around and then as he turns around, his bottom is like pointing at the camera for much longer than it ought to be. And once you notice it in Bugs Bunny, you'll start to notice it in Mickey Mouse. You'll start to notice it in anime. You'll notice it basically everything that you look at, 2D animation, 3D animation.

1:06:33You start to notice that the gaze of the animator is much more on the glutes of the characters than you think it might need to be or that it might be if you were using a camera and kind of live action. I don't know why this is true, but it is kind of true. And I think it's particularly bad for game animators and character designers because we spend so long, we have the character in T pose or an A pose and we sort of rotating around them and adjusting them. And then, you know, like I just think naturally, there's a kind of a natural focus towards their butt. I guess part of it is that it's an affordance of the technology is that their computers, 3D graphics cards are very good at representing bottoms in a way that they're not necessarily for other targets of the sexual gaze.

1:07:28And so, I would just invite anybody who's sceptical about that claim, start looking at other video games, start looking where the camera points in the 3D over the shoulder games that you're playing. Start looking at what is more lovingly animated and where the triangles have been put, all of that sort of stuff. It's definitely not just me, although I didn't restrain myself particularly much. I'm thoroughly convinced. all right thank you so much it's been delightful and yeah thank you for joining us thanks for having me