I Asked the NBA The Run Team Everything!

0:02This is the premier podcast spotlighting people of color. Every week we talk news, what we've been playing, and tell you who's invited to the cookout. Our show is all about talking about gaming through a prism of blackness because we are the culture. Welcome to Prokaka, y 'all. Yo, what's good, everybody? Welcome to the Spawn Me podcast with Kahlief Adams. I'm your host, Kahlief Adams. We have a dope, dope show for you this week. One that I have been looking forward to for a very long time. So I'm super excited to get into all of the goodness. But if you are new to the show, go check us out on Apple Podcasts.

0:41If you want the video versions of the show, go check us out on Spotify. Make sure you're hitting us up so you can check out the latest and greatest from the Spawn of Me podcast, especially because in a couple of weeks, we'll be heading down to LA for Summer Games Fest. So please go make sure you're leaving us some comments in the show notes, leaving us some stuff in the responses when it goes up on social and go check out our stuff over on TikTok, Instagram and all the other places where our show resides. This week is going to be really dope because I am so hyped because we have two of the gents from Play-By-Play Studios who are going to be talking to us about NBA The Run, which is my game that I have been waiting for for a long time.

1:23and I have been chasing these brothers down because I want to talk about NBA The Run to talk about what might possibly be the next version of the NBA Street vibes that we have been looking for in the genre of basketball, non-SIM basketball, which is nice to be able to have some new goodness there. So we just had a really dope conversation with them that I want you to check out and is a really good nugget towards the end And that might be a pretty exclusive conversation that no one else has gotten so far. So we're going to listen to that right about now. Then after that, take a quick break and come back with some more thoughts here on Spawn on Me.

2:04So go check out the interview right about now. What's good, everybody? Ember Cago, this is Khalif here. We have a really dope episode and an interview that I have been waiting for for a second because I am excited. It is the playoff season. The Knicks are going to take the chip. We are going all the way to the championship, and I have some wonderful folks who might know a little bit about ball on the show with us today. Scott Probst and Michael Young from Play-By-Play Studios to talk about NBA The Run. Gentlemen, how are you both doing? How's everything going so far? I'm great. We're at the wire.

2:41Excited for the playoffs. At the wire, no joke. You know, the game is going to be dropping very, very soon. uh you know the buzz around the game has been phenomenal and has been really really cool to see you know i'm a big fan of the work that you have all put in in the industry because i've been following some of that work for a while i want to talk a little bit about you know your origin stories of how you kind of got into the space how play by play came to be um because i think you know a lot of times when you see a new game like this especially one around a sport that all of us love a lot of folks are like well who are these folks to come into the space and and and start to make a new game what's the pedigree behind their work so scott i want to talk to you uh first about you know how did you conceive and think about you know uh joining forces with mike here to to make play-by-play uh be the thing that is right now yeah it all it's a good question it it all started back in like 2021, I think it was.

3:41It was in that weird COVID time where like we were all separated. Everyone's isolated. You know, we couldn't physically be together. And I was previously at EA for about 16 years, and I always worked on the EA game side. So I worked at the Visceral Studio, EALA. I've always been a huge sports fan and a sports nut of every single sport. But I never worked on any sports games. And so when I kind of COVID hit, I was back at home, started reconnecting with friends over games and that was just like the way that the kind of the origin story of play-by-play started i started playing games with some old friends that kicked off some conversations of like hey you know wouldn't it be fun if we got into the space of like bringing back these games that don't exist anymore right like we love going online we love playing against our friends with our friends and we felt like the kind of world had changed and there was a place where it was like these games that we love it's crazy like and be a street balling 23 years ago at this point.

4:35Oh, God. I don't even like saying that. No, don't say that again. These games have gone away. And in a way, it's like the next generation, the future generation, and selfishly our generation, we don't have these games to play anymore. And I think the world has been dominated by sim sports games, which I'm also a fan of. And I think they've got clearly a space in the market, obviously. But these games, the streets and the Def Jams and the SSXs and the Mike Tyson's punch-outs and the Tecmo Bowls, the list goes on. These games went away. So that was really the whole start of Play by Play. Can we bring together people through the love of sport and bring back these games that I think were once so loved and revered and just don't really exist anymore?

5:19So it all started there. I love that. Michael, when you see a project like this come across your purview, And you're like, all right, this seems like something I want to jump in. And especially as a CD, as a creative director, you know, what was your impetus to kind of like jump into the boat with the rest of the team and say this is something that we wanted to see come to the world? Yeah, so Scott and I got connected through a colleague. And I guess he was telling people what the pivot of the company was going to be to make a game like NBA Street. And I just said, you got to talk to Mike Young.

5:51And I was happily somewhere else doing cool stuff. And I talked to Scott. It was more just pick my brain and hear what they're doing. And I wasn't looking for a job. And, you know, I think we really hit it off in that first conversation, us and the CTO, Simon Golding. And it made me think back to the best time of my entire career, working on the Street Series up in Vancouver, especially street two and three and those small teams and how intimate it was and what Scott was pitching wasn't just the game but the culture small teams and it just appealed to me and he offered me the spot and you know they flew down the next week and we kind of said this is the vision of this game and we went at it and it's turned out to be everything I hoped which is you don't get the opportunity to make games like this.

6:50And from being inside EA for 20-plus years, after I left the Street Series, everyone pitched, let's do Street, let's do FIFA Street, let's do Fiat Street. And it just wasn't set up to be. And so you'd see these attempts at arcade-ish experiences, but inside Madden. And the games aren't built to also have this tack on mode. And so I think the way Scott talked about approaching it is what the industry needed, which is a game built from the ground up to play like those games, you know, super responsive and not just tacked on to a simulation sport title, but its own thing. Yeah, what I love about the game is that it does feel like it is not that what you just talked about, right?

7:37It doesn't feel like a tacked on experience. This is a very bespoke and smartly done version of that NBA streetball experience that I think a lot of fans who have been waiting for this got really excited about the initial kind of showcasing of, you know, the gameplay, this amazingly dope painterly kind of graphic style that's been implemented here. The twists on the kind of usual three-on-three gameplay that's in the mix too. And then, of course, you bring in, you know, the goat in Bobbito to come through and be the voiceover, be the play-by-play man. We gotta do it. I mean, when I heard that for the first time, immediately I was like, who's running PR and stuff on this game?

8:28I need to go find out who's doing this. Because that's, again, that's like for me as a New Yorker and grew up in New York and been to Rucker and was there when so many, you know, when the EBC was really at its heyday in the early and mid 90s, that just brought back so many memories that came through in those ways. How important was it for you all to kind of really nail those pieces too? Because I think that we're going to talk a little bit about the gameplay in a second, but I think the cultural layers there that you recall pulling in from the soundtrack that is a banger and all these other pieces that are in there already, how important was it for you to kind of collaborate and think about those pieces alongside just really solid and fun gameplay?

9:10I think that was the magic sauce. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I mean, for me, the magic sauce of NBA Street Volume 2 was, it had the cultural piece. NBA Jam had the gameplay and it was legendary. But mixing in the authenticity of the people that were on the inside, like Bobbito and Just Blaze and Jimmy Smith, who invented Nike freestyle commercials, those were collaborators of the NBA street team. And I thought it brought not only the gameplay was sick, the legends were sick, but it also had this like woven in the soundtrack. Everything spoke to the authenticity of the culture around streetball at the time.

9:54And so I think that is different than an arcade game with big heads and, you know, jumping over backboards and, And, you know, that's not the game Scott wanted to make, and I didn't want to make it either. So we've often talked about, well, what if this was NBA Street 14? What would the game look like? And what would that team have done? And Bobbito had to be part of that. Yeah, yeah. I love the fact you talk about it in that way, Michael, because I think the impetus usually for this genre of game is to go as wacky as possible, which I love to see you all have kind of brought this down into this stylized version of it that is grounded in a space but also is fantastical in another way right Scott I know you were going to chime in on that last question if you had anything to add to that too I'd love to hear yeah yeah I would love to my answer to it was Mike said it's the magic I think your question like my response that it was everything like from how we built this team right it's a small team Everybody knows that.

10:58We're an independent team. Mike being here, right? Like, I mean, that's a very intentional choice to have Mike here. Bobbito being here, very intentional. We had to be very clear about our decisions and what we wanted to build and what kind of game we wanted to build, and we built our team accordingly. You mentioned the look of the game, right? Like, Terry Smith, our art director, is an absolute legend. I mean, this is the guy who designed the San Jose Sharks logo, arguably the best logo in all of sports. You know, but he's also a legend in the world of just basketball and video games. I mean, Terry knows the sport in and out.

11:31He played for Stanford. He's a coach. He's, you know, he's been involved with the NBA for years and years and years. Every single person on this team was kind of hand constructed to say, how do we want to go build this team to deliver this game that we want to create? And I think it started from a place of exactly what you're saying is we knew we didn't want to go too fantastical. We didn't want to go big heads. We didn't want to go kind of a niche style that didn't feel like it was authentic to the world of streetball, which, sorry to get ahead of the question here, but I feel like a lot of pitches on paper, the obvious place to go is double somersaults and rocket boots and we're going to play on the Santa Monica Pier where there's not really a court.

12:10so like for us it was about like look you look back to mba street volume two and of course it's over the top of course it's like you know it's not a sim based game but like there is this level of authenticity to it it's it's true to the culture it's true to the sport um down to the very feel of like the moment-to-moment experience and that's what we want to deliver which i don't think necessarily sounds as great on paper right at the pitch stage at the concept stage but we knew we could get it there in execution and we're so happy about where it is today so i think it's you know it's a combination of being very very focused with every single person we've brought onto this project um has been involved with this project so many people i mean i mentioned terry mike glen chin who was part of the old nba street team he's been involved with the project glen's an absolute legend he was part of the jimmy smith nike campaign um the whole team of play-by-play so i think we've been really intentional about the game we're creating and we hope that you know Players love it when it comes out on the ninth.

13:07And even when I think about the kind of game dev side of that thing, hearing you talk about the size of the team and all those pieces too, that really not going so broad helps with scope, right? It helps with trying to figure out what you can get done and what you can't get done in the space of a couple of years while working on a title this big. what was it like the day when you got the the nba yeah nlbpa kind of sign off on it was that it was that a real big moment for you all in terms of how you were thinking about what the next layer was was going to be and and where you could go it was a dream come true right i mean like mike joined i think it was like april 17th 2023 i literally think we were in florida the next day with mike like doing an offside about like okay the game and at that time it was the run got next right and we had these hopes and ambitions of it one day being an nba game but we knew it needed to get to a stage of real before it could be right like we couldn't just approach the nba out of the gate or so we thought and say like hey here's a pitch on paper so we spent the better part you know the next kind of 12 to 14 months building out the game and that's when we launched the the run got next original announcement which i think was july 23rd 2024 um which is almost two years ago now and they hit us up the very same day i think adrian o 'keefe from the nba reached out to us next day we were on a call with the nba and it was a dream come true i mean we we knew from the moment that adrian reached out like we're gonna do this i went back and actually looked at like our records uh we had that call so she reached out on the 23rd i think we met on the 24th by august 1st we were modeling lebron that's why like seven days we were like this game's nba of the run.

14:53We got to do this. Right. And of course, there's like a six to nine month process to go through, you know, all the logistics and whatnot and agreements and whatnot. But we knew we needed to flip the game and turn it into that. And I think we were already creating a game at its core. That's the game that it is today. So this was about how do we then build this to be NBA and incorporate the stars and everybody that's part of the game today and the moods and the outfits and everything you can do. But it was a dream come true. I couldn't, you know, we couldn't believe when that message came through.

15:20Yeah, I love that. Mike, I want to get into gameplay because I think, you know, we're running short on time. It's a quick run for y 'all today. I want to talk about the kind of foundational pieces of what you're looking for. If you're like, these are the pillars of our game. These are the things that when you as a player are coming in and we have an expectation for your experience for what you're going to get with NBA The Run, And give us the kind of, you know, elevator pitch of what the kind of pillars of this game are and why folks should be really excited for it. We wanted a game that had a lot of tension.

15:56The moment to moment tension was such a big part of Jammin' Street, which is that's why we made defense very powerful. Steals, shoves, blocks. There's a lot of turnovers and the metagame layer of in the zone. So you're taking risk with your team to do fancier, like to really nail street ball. You want to have over the top moves, fancy moves, risk reward, gameplay that, you know, not just scoring the basket, but doing it in the flashiest possible way is encouraged. Beyond that, it was about looking at how modern games are played. So when we looked at my 10 plus years on the Madden franchise, we would always try to get this casual audience when sports fans could come in, join up with their friends and play games and have fun.

16:47We weren't seeing that as much. It was more hardcore competition games and a really large barrier and a lot of money to get into those games to come in and be competitive. So we wanted from day one, you come in, all the characters are powerful. You can jump into games with your friends. You can like, just like Fortnite, you don't have to be the best at sports games to come in and run with your buddies and win some tournaments and feel like you're actually contributing to your team. So that base layer of controls we knew had to be very simple. and then there's a layer of skill and strategy and expertise that gives you depth and has people getting better and better and starting to expose things that we didn't even design you know that's what makes great games um seeing how people play it and turn you know our designs into something even more special because how they chain things together and and discover but you know the short gameplay sessions was also key we feel that you know if you went into a game of 2k or madden they're amazing experiences but sometimes they're 45 minutes and if you're losing that you see so many people just drop out you know so that experience of just being rage quit on isn't fun or sitting there and like taking a beating for 45 minutes an ultimate team isn't fun either whereas in our game you could have these meaningful experiences and we looked at games like Fall Guys and Fortnite where you could go in and lose immediately, finish, you know, bottom 10, and you're right back in.

18:18You get some rewards. You're right back into a meaningful match. And with our game, I feel like you're always on the edge of your seat. You're always in this moment of navigating the strategy. Each match feels different because, oh, it's three points only, basically. You know, three points or three, everything else is one. So now everyone's focused on stopping Steph Curry or Dame or Brunson. And, you know, the next match might be dunk fest. And now they have to play like a different role. Maybe they're the ones racking up assists and getting steals and maybe they're decoys. Or they're taking the risk to go in and dunk.

18:58So, like, back in Street, one of my favorite things was Shaquille had a really high chance of blowing a level three trick. You know, that was a risk for him to do it. But if you were about to dunk on him as the dunker, you knew that's probably a loss. So, all the characters were very skewed. And that was a really big, important thing for me, too, is back in the day when we grew up, Tecmo, Bo Jackson and Tecmo Ball was fun to control. Michael Vick 07 you know we the athletes were superhero versions of themselves but there wasn't just one per game one game breaker so we looked at the whole roster and said like let's make you know 50 or whatever we're shipping like 30-ish guys but 30 Michael Vick level game breakers and I love the videos I'm seeing out there where so many people have posted a video of this guy breaks the game and then i have another person telling me they're trash like you can't win with this character and that's the sort of fun of building a lineup and then there's other choices we made because this is an online game so we don't like ball hog so there's a lot of steals so if you just want to like walk up the court and hold on to the ball and make it all by yourself you're it's designed to make you pass i mean we're always online games are always going to be ball hogs even if you're playing with your buddies but um the game's been designed it can't it couldn't just be nba street or nba gm recreated because this is an online game to meant to be played with your friends and compete all night with your friends going tournament to tournament you know unlocking stuff getting right back in the matches but if we had just made street a lot of those choices wouldn't make sense in a modern game i don't think yeah i i think one of the things that i you know in the couple of sessions that i've had so far that really kind of speak to that is this is the kind of like perfect easy to pick up hard to master kind of game right like even in the ways that you all think and think of and have made some changes throughout the different play tests and early betas of not only uh kind of simplifying some of the control schemes and in some of those in some of those aspects you know continuously listening to to the the audience about like what things are you finding in this space that we can tweak early that we can give you the kind of best experience in there which i do want to talk about in a second but even the the versions of the permutations of the win states for each for each match i love that that kind of roulette style of like all right here's a new version of what we're going to give you so that you have an opportunity to think about how you're going to play with your teammate and how you're going to build your team out in some of those ways like i remember an early match where it was one in which uh it was uh mostly dunks kind of space right so i was like all right yeah so i was literally literally going to go find someone on my team or i was going to be that character who was going to be the the stopper right i'm going to hang out i'm going to basket hang a little bit see if you're going to try to drive to the hoop and then i'm going to try to block you so we can get an easy easy transition basket on the other side of it what was it like also thinking about this from a um a piece where you're constantly in this loop of being in a tournament right which i thought was really brilliant um every time you kind of load in and you start your matches you're in a bracketed tournament right that adds such a different layer of sweatiness to to the game in a good way what was the thought process behind that too because it definitely feels like you're going for something every time you load up which is which is great right scott you want to do that you take that one i could tell you yeah i mean i think the short version is keep you on your toes like we always want you on your toes we always want that like out of seat action right so the whole feel of a tournament the moment you see a bracket as a player you know their stakes right so like we've played this game a ton without bracket structure right and it's like of course it's a lot of fun but like when you add that in there's just this whole other layer and level of tension that gets associated with it where even in our internal play test where we've played for years at this point you know it gets competitive very competitive it gets hot like in zoom calls where people are like no you're not doing no no no no we got dunk fest we don't have the right team you know like all this stuff so yeah i think for us it was like to mike's earlier point we looked at the games that have kind of aspects of like battle royale whether it's fortnite or you know war zone and fall guys and stumble guys and all these different games where there's this like tension associated with the core gameplay and the whole loop and for us, I think it was this kind of let's add tension with the tournaments.

23:41However, we also wanted to keep these kind of these short burst sessions that Mike talks about a lot. We don't want you to have to go into a game and play for 27 minutes and lose and be like, I got through the qualifiers or I lost in the qualifiers and I had to spend a half hour. These are quick three to five minute sessions, five minutes at max really, where if you lose, it feels like let's run it back. We can get right back in and run the tournament again. And then the other thing we coupled it with was the rule sets where I think it comes back to collaboration and coordination as a team. If you go in there with all steps, and I think I saw the team in the earlier footage, and it was like two steps and a process.

24:14Yeah. Yeah. A lot of shooters. Like you get triple threat, you're probably going to win, but like you run into dunk fest or city or one of these other modes where it's like, Oh, we don't have a dunk or we don't have somebody who can, you know, slam on people. Steph, sure. He can still slam in the game. So it runs him. But if Giannis is at the basket, right. Good luck. You know, So I think it was just kind of like a combination of we wanted this tension with the tournaments and then the rule sets adds this other layer of complexity where you never really know what's coming at you, so you have to plan accordingly when you go in.

24:45And what we found is that while it's a ton of fun to go in with three Wembees or three Stephs or three whatevers, you can end up in a place where you feel like you're really strong in one place and maybe not so strong in the other place. And that's what Mike's done from a balancing perspective. It's like the reality of all of these guys in the NBA. they're all 99s like they're all you know what i mean but they play that way then it's you know we have to have these like towering strengths and then weaknesses to kind of add into our game so steph will play is kind of a heroic version of himself but we have to have weaknesses of steph even though steph there really isn't any weakness right i mean like but to have the game play that we want i think is a very key element so i think it's all these things combined it's you know taking that tournament structure for tension adding the level of randomness which we think kind of adds complexity and layers in a whole different kind of element of strategy to it and then each player kind of brings something different at the court and coordination between teams before you go into tournaments i love that answer because i think the the thing that i came away from my game uh sessions were man for the folks who aren't thinking about it in those ways in terms of like building their team out to be pretty diverse in terms of your skill sets they're going to get run through it's going to be it's going to be harder for them unless they They're really trying to find, you know, that one thing that they're going to do.

26:04And, you know, if you're playing with randoms, it's always a little bit hard because, you know, folks, folks, if you're not on mic, if you're not kind of communicating, you have to kind of feel how people are playing. You're like, all right, that dude's a nut. He's never going to pass me the ball. Fine. I'm going to try to go spot up somewhere. I'm going to basket hang or do something to maybe get a to maybe get a score or something so I can be helpful. Or, you know, you take it upon yourself to be that that that specialist during that moment. Right. You were like, well, I know these folks are not going to pass.

26:30I know they're probably on or off. Let me be the rebounder for that game and try to figure out good ways to balance that stuff out. I love that you talked about balance, and I want to dig into that because I think we just came off of two open betas, and we're going to go into a third very, very soon. That's going to be, I believe, on all platforms and consoles next weekend. And there's been a ton of feedback, I'm sure, for the team coming in through the telemetry you're all pulling in and information you're getting from fans in those conversations. There was a great blog post that just came out today as of recording that will be, you know, this will be going out tomorrow or even later today.

27:14Talk to me a little bit about what has been some of the really good findings that you've had there and some surprises that you might have gotten. because when you put the game in the players' hands, it's always going to be different than when you had a chance to kind of forecast what that feedback was going to wind up being. So talk to me a little bit about what that feedback has been and what have been some of the things that have already changed within the game that players will be able to see in the next playtest. Mike, you take that, Mike. I'm going to send it to you, Mike. I will say from a real perspective, or Mike jumps in on the first play test.

27:52Yeah. Like Mike and I, on the very first play test, Mike and I crewed up. We had his son in with us, and we were like, this is going to be a cakewalk. Like we're just going to cruise. And like an hour into it, we were like, damn, we got to lock in. We were locked in for the call. It goes to the whole thing. Easy to learn, hard to master, but people start getting it quick. It's your point until there's thousands of people, and you don't really see how people are going to play the game. So I'll stop there, Mike. Go ahead and bow. I love that. Yeah, so we had a friend and family playtest the weekend before the first public one.

28:26And we started to learn a lot right away from watching people play. And, you know, the biggest thing we had after the first one was we weren't communicating any of the depth of the metagame within the zone. So why do advanced dogs? Why do advanced tricks? So we saw people just kind of play vanilla, go up and down the court, try to get open, take shots. um second play test was exploit city like i'm i'm burying backcourt shots with stuff from full court shots you know um so we really went back to shooting and we do want stuff to feel more powerful than real life you know like when when we pulled up from near logo yeah in the playoff game that's cool we want those highlights it's we want those awesome moments to be like poster dunks and logo threes to be what our game's known for.

29:20But we also don't want cheese of somebody just standing in the backcourt ripping shots. So we went back and designed a whole new system around defenders being close, knocking down their ability to hit the shots. We had some random luck thing built into the game from when it was got next, the run got next, that allowed somebody to have a 6 % chance to hit any perfect shot with no skill involved that got ripped out. So it's those types of things. Going back and tuning guard to make guarding easier and more impactful. So if you're Steph and you're shooting half court and you're not in the zone and you've got two defenders right on you and one of them is in guard, it's not going to be just – it's going to be high skill if you get it.

30:05But that's the type of thing we saw. And then with shoves, seeing how somebody with LeBron or Giannis was just flying around just destroying everybody on inbounds. from behind. You'll see next play test, it was really about looking at those exact situations. It's not fun just to get mowed down every time and have someone do it three times on one possession. It's looking at things like energy drain, different balancing out to where a guy like Maxie could actually do a successful shove sometimes, but having not do it every single time. It's just kind of getting the balance and seeing how people are exploiting things in the first play test we had a ton of goaltends so it was getting goaltends to come back to being a high skill pretty rare thing like once or twice a game but somebody who's really good at timing not a cheese thing where it's just you end up with wambi standing under the hoop ruining everyone's good time so until you go online you don't see these things you expect them but until you see thousands of people playing your game it's really tough but we played in the play test we watch videos of the play test we're in our discord we're reading everything you know sometimes polarizing features are a good thing but not to the point where they ruin the game so the best thing we've heard is the game is fun there is a strategy layer uh the format of the tournaments and the rule sets is going really well um but yeah we're we're super open to feedback and we want it because we want the game to be great and you know it'd be so bad as a developer to just ignore what fans want because there's also we grew up in the street jam era and nba live there's an audience that's for the last 20 years all they know is 2k and so there's different expectations we watch videos and people are saying they're greening it.

32:08Yeah, yeah, yeah. Green. It's just a link. Gamer expectations. So I think one thing we try to do is we take our experience as developers. I got to work on a bunch of EA Sports big games and learn from so many amazingly talented people. Then all my time on Madden as a creative director, learning from that experience and what we were trying to do to bring in a more casual audience. And then looking at my son's generation, who, you know, he plays sports, all his friends play sports, and they would spend all their time on games competing together. And so it's all of it. It's looking at making something more modern, but building on our experiences from all the years.

32:53And sometimes it's really hard to kind of, you know, things have moved into the culture, right? Like the nomenclature of greening something. you know it's a thing that you kind of can't get away from while you're also talking about your own game mechanics that are just like no these players each have their own shot and and you're trying to hit it at the arch of the shot you know the high arc of the shot the it's hard to kind of you know pull that thing through it's when mp3 players all became ipads right ipods you know what i mean so it's that that weird kind of thing that you have to to kind of move yourself through and around but what i do love is the fact that like the conversations that are happening within the company from the wonderful work that that fam uh ray has been doing as well on the community side and and and the team and hearing all those things come in from the from the audience iteration has been really really quick which i think is really fun to see from a team that is as nimble and as small as you all are to see how fast you're kind of getting those things implemented and seeing those changes happen is that a thing that players can kind of expect moving forward because i know there's a hard line there in terms of how how many resources we have to kind of get a thing done how fast are we seeing stuff what's the kind of thing that is you know a real problem versus a perceived problem uh that the players will have how you know is this going to be a thing that when you're thinking about the moving forward that this will be a consistent and constant thing where those changes will be kind of fast once once we do get a good consensus of what are the issues that we want to really tackle in the game i'll start 100 percent you want to you sorry you want me to take it i'll start um i mean one of the biggest negative critiques of the game was animation movement and over the first two play tests that was the big negative and i think what it took our team was okay it's not that we aren't great at animating stuff it's the game didn't evolve animation wise from when we were going to be the run got next and so we we looked at that feedback critically and we took it internally and we focused our entire team on it and redid all those animations and honestly the first ones internally we were like no they're still not when we're hearing the audience once and so the team killed themselves And you might not be able to do that at a more risk-averse company, I would say.

35:21So having like Scott, who just cares about the quality of the game, of course, but was open to a little bit of risk to address that. And then we saw great feedback on those changes. And then in the announcement you mentioned today, you're going to see that although people are having a lot of fun with the game and realize it's not NBA Street, they're missing some of those like and one style tricks. And these things were in our sort of long roadmap, and we had hoped we'd got to them. And quite simply, we just didn't have the time. But we're seeing that the demand is there. And again, team went crazy, and we've added a whole mechanic around N1 style tricks, style moves, that are going to be in the next play test and you're going to get your slip and slides and your hypnotizers.

36:18And we love it. And it's, I would say at this point in most companies, you wouldn't take that risk because what's it going to do? Gameplay balance. But it's us playing the game tens of hours to feel these changes and see if we can actually get them in without breaking the game. And so we're all dedicated to taking the feedback and when we can get stuff in that is safe enough. And then beyond ship, I think we want to continue to build a game with the community. Yeah. Scott, you want to add anything really quickly to that too? Yeah. I mean, I was just going to say that we pride ourselves on listening to the community.

36:55Like it's a very, very important part of who we are as a company and the DNA of the company. So to your question, like 100%, you can expect that to be the path moving forward. I would say that good, bad, and ugly on Discord, Instagram, YouTube, we read and we watch every single thing we can consume. We literally have Slack channels internally where we're sharing gameplay clips, not so awesome gameplay clips. Like all these different things where people are like, what are we going to do about this? I think the amount of changes we've made in the last month or so just based on feedback from the community is insane.

37:28the level of scope to mike's point like we reset all of the animations around run sprint dribble sprint trip like that that was a herculean effort but i think what we've found is everything right i mean the amount of change that we've done the animation team are killing themselves to make this happen but i think it's because we're all motivated and we really care about this game like we truly care about this game hitting in the way that we want it to you know what i mean like we want our fans to be thinking of us as a team that listens to them and gives them what they want so to mike's point we had a stylized version of animation sets that's kind of always been our stylized version but we've heard from our community we don't like that stylized version we could have ignored it and just said well we do um and some of the people on the team by the way they do but also like we said hey let's take feedback to heart and to mike's point we iterated we worked through a few different sets and we got to a place where everybody felt like it was better so whether it's animation sets or this entirely new dribble mechanic like we take all this stuff to heart we do not take it lightly keep the feedback coming because the community is what motivates this team i think we've all worked on these teams where you know you get to the end and everyone's fried and we're fried we probably don't look great right now you look beautiful thank you thank you um but i've been on teams where you get to the end and you're just like put it on the disc like just just make it go you know this is not that team this is not that game this team is working around the clock i mean around the clock to try to get this to be the best version of the game it can possibly be that goes for animation gameplay front end usability every single thing we can do that we read we take it to heart so just a message to the community keep it coming if you don't like something let us know hit us up whether it's in discord instagram wherever we read it all we take it all to heart and we will be a team that addresses feedback up to launch and beyond launch and all times moving forward that's what we want to be known for as a team and a company i mean i can see it in in all the ways you all present online and in in interviews you've been doing uh while you're doing the kind of press run on on these pieces it feels like of of many of the companies that i've seen kind of pull together over the past couple of years, you are absolutely implementing the things that conversations are bubbling themselves around and pulling out those really good nuggets of info.