Is Imagine Dragons making the next big CTF shooter?

0:01Spawn on Me 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 Bracago, y 'all. What's good to everybody in Bracago? This is Kahlief here, and I am very, very excited because we have the team from Night Street Games and my man, my metal, the smooth kind of fellow Eli Harris, the voice of Julius Reeves, to talk about their new game, Last Flag. But before we talk to them about all the cool stuff that they're doing, I want to show you the trailer that got shown at Summer Games Fest because it is super, super dope.

0:43So let's check that out, and then we'll get back to the conversation.

0:52Yeah. Flag time, baby.

1:00Julia 2015

1:30ako!

1:36And... roku! And now... Lastули!

1:49Countdown begins.

1:56Bye. Bye.

2:17Adios.

2:37wishlist now

2:45so i'm very excited about everything i just got a chance to see for multiple reasons that we're going to get into but mac first i want to i want to again thank you for being here and coming to hang out on the show uh as ceo you have the the wonderful task of telling everybody at home what they just got a chance to see oh well thanks for having me out so stoked to be here today with jay um yeah you know this uh the whole kind of concept behind this my brother dan who's a co-founder with me you know we grew up with boy scouts and we used to play capture the flag in the woods at night We had that kind of quintessential childhood experience where you're the thrill of nature, you're a hero, you're sneaking across the battle lines.

3:27And we were thinking about all the Capture the Flag game modes over the years, Unreal Tournament, Quake, Warsong Gold, all these great games. None of them really had hiding and finding. And some of those things that were kind of the core of that real experience is more about like, you know where their base is, I'm going to do Payload Escort, I'm going to bring it back. and so we're like well what does it what does it feel like when you actually get to hide your own flag and it feels like you know the real uh capture the flag experience we had as a kid so that's where we started from and it kind of developed into what today is uh you know yeah it's like a third person shooter but really no it's first capture the flag like everything from the characters to the level design to the you know to the gameplay elements is all around this kind of core experience of the freedom of real hiding and fighting.

4:18I'm even more excited because this is a genre that is near and dear to my heart. It is a thing that I love to play in games where, you know, I'm a first-person shooter fan, third-person shooter fan at heart. And I remember my most favorite sessions when I got a chance to play competitive stuff, because I'm very competitive, probably too much. I'm probably too Virgo to be competitive. But Capture the Flag is the mode that I want more people to play. When I would play Halo, it was my favorite mode. It was the mode that I was like, why is no one else in this game type with me? Because everybody wants to play Big Team Battle or something else.

4:58But now that you're bringing a very dedicated version of Capture the Flag to the space, I am super hyped. Talk to me a little bit about what it was like to kind of start the process of, again, And, you know, you had that memory with you and your brother of growing up in those spaces and having this understanding of, you know, what is that childhood memory that would relate to a game? But most folks don't say, hey, I've done that thing and now I want to go build a studio. What was the impetus for you two to kind of start that process and talk about, like, we have meat on the bones here that is going to be really good and we want to actually make this thing come true.

5:37Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, you know, I mean, like so many other people, Dan and I, we grew up, we got a ton of brothers in our family. There's eight boys and one girl. And we used to all play games together growing up, right? That was just a big part of our childhood. And, you know, when I was young, I started doing 3D modeling and animating. And, you know, Dan kind of got into coding. He still does a ton of work in C Sharp. He's always built little games in Unity and, you know, posting them online anonymously usually and stuff. So we talked about making games for years, done tons of collaborations with Imagine Dragons, with gaming studios.

6:10But this was like a dream kind of on the shelf for quite a long time. I found like a paper recently that my mom brought out this stuff from her garage. It was like third grade, like what do you want to be when you grow up? And it was own a video game studio. Just like very weirdly specific. I was like, okay, like that's kind of weird for a third grader. But, you know, this is like a dream. And to be able to rub shoulders with, you know, folks on our team who just worked on some of our favorite games that we've ever played is just like just magical. And learning to kind of crack the code on Capture the Flag, which was tricky, like there was definitely some obstacles along the way, has just been like an amazing journey.

6:54So we're really stoked. We finally we've been in quiet mode for like years, you know, working on this. And now to finally be able to share it with people is is really exciting. You know, I want to come back to that in a second. But I do want to I want to pull Jay into the conversation because I know one of the things that's really difficult, but also super rewarding is kind of speaking to what Mac was talking to, like being able to work with so many veterans of the gaming space. I know in my own personal time of working at studios, those are the folks who have gotten a chance to really, you know, tap on their shoulders and be like, when you worked in that thing, how was that?

7:28And what did you do here? And what are the conversations you had to work in that space? As a producer, you're having to, again, wrangle a bunch of cats to make a thing happen, to make things work. Oh, but also kind of like making the deadlines to make sure that the game is on track with those things. Talk to me a little bit about your journey into the game dev space and what you what you worked on you know what kind of projects you had a chance to to get in touch with and how has it been to work on on on this one sure um well i actually started out as an english teacher uh working in a brazilian company um i had to help people understand some things that came in english from external qas and from other stuff too um we were having some challenges with organizing the priorities, especially coming from external parties.

8:25So they brought me in and they were like, okay, can you help the team organize here? And I did, and I had a lot of fun doing so. And that's how I ended up working, starting to work as a producer in a gaming company. I found out that helping people understand their priorities and what should come next was actually a producer's job and I found out I also loved doing that. So that's how I started in the gaming industry. I've worked on a couple of projects, Cobra Kai 2, The Walking Dead, Destiny's that came out recently. A couple of projects that haven't been announced yet so I can share. But last year I was very happy to get a message from the team inviting me to join this amazing company and work on something very creative.

9:15My dream was always to work on an original IP. I wanted to be a part of, you know, a dream being built from the start. So when I saw the idea, this 70s vibe and the gameplay, I just fell in love with it. And that's, that's when I joined. yeah i i mean one of the things i've i've always said to folks who ask about the process of making games i say if you ever see a game out in the world go thank a producer uh because those are the folks who make it all happen behind the scenes those are the folks who are you know again making sure that everything is on track and that all those things are kind of getting into the games that they are trying to make so i i feel i feel that in a real way of of seeing people who are making those um making those leaps into into this game especially from a space that is so different than game making in terms of teaching um but i feel like there are there are three points in there that that make a ton of sense um so excited to hear that that's a part of the way you kind of got into the space um eli we got to bring you in especially the voice of ricago uh eli harris coming through also the voice of julius reeves who you heard in the beginning of that dope dope trailer you know we've known each other forever at this point uh you know i'm still trying to get you to adopt me uh into the family because you already got some shorties uh so i'm trying to be i'm trying to be the fourth uh in the fam but what i love about your work is you consist you consistently are in so many different spaces with your expertise and every time i see you connected to a project, it is different.

10:54It is fun. It is interesting. And you consistently bring something new and fresh to everything that you do. What was it like getting the call from, from the night street crew and saying, Hey, we want you to be a part of this project. Well, um, one, I gotta give a shout out to, uh, Gerald Valoria. Um, I've known Gerald for a couple of years and it's interesting. He and I never physically met, but we would communicate, uh, via linkedin and so there were some projects that he had uh been working on before but you know some things didn't work out with those and so then he had hit me up and said hey man i got this original ip that i'm working on that i think you would be perfect for and he said i'm gonna reach out to mac let mac know blah blah i'm like who's mac you know and so then come to find out talking imagine dragons man i'm such a huge fan of this group yeah so gerald told mac if i got the story correct Gerald had told you, Mac, about me, and you had heard some stuff.

11:53And then Gerald made the connection for Mac and I to meet. And the moment that we talked, it just clicked like that, just automatic. For Mac to be at the position that he is, the individual that he is, with the immense amount of success with he and his brother, as well as other things that he do, he's an incredibly humble dude. um easy to talk to um very clear and so you know the moment that that he told me what this game was about like capture the flag see we used to have a variant of capture the flag around my way yes so i'm kind of i'm gonna date myself a little bit on this back in the 80s um kung fu theater was a major thing and we used to watch kung fu theater and then like during the summer usa the usa network would have kung fu june so it'd be like sundays at the church would watch kung fu theater and then there's kung fu june we would actually have ninja wars so it was similar to what capture the flag was but we would build like a fort um in the woods and the the goal was to reach the ninja fortress exact same thing as capture the flag but it would be ninjas so when he told me when i saw that and I saw the character and I saw the name.

13:10I'm like, is this a spinoff off of Bass Reeves? You know, Bass Reeves, the bounty hunter. And Mac was like, you know what? I'm gonna talk to my guy about that because he wouldn't know more about that with Matthew, right? That's who you talked about as Matthew. Our game director. Yeah. Matthew Berger. Nice. Matthew Berger. Yes. And so then it was the whole seventies vibe because I'm a seventies baby. I was born in 76. So it was, it was, it was It's just a beautiful thing to be a part of. It was original, real original. And there's other things I'll speak on as we go into later in the podcast. But that's how I got involved.

13:46You know, the connection to Gerald Valoria, having built such a good relationship with him and him appreciating my work. And then him connecting me with Mac and his Night Street Games team. That's how I got involved. That's dope because one of the things that I always love the origin stories of games is not only just the kind of like, how do you pull in talent that feels like a perfect fit for things? And again, like, you're a perfect fit for pretty much everything that you get cast in. So it's great to see that continue to be the thing here. but what I love to hear is that conversation about the inspiration parts of not only the character but the world and all of those things and Mac I want to talk to you a little bit about you know we talked a little bit about the inspiration for the game itself but what brought me in immediately was the the vibe and the aesthetic that you're that you're leaning into this kind of 70s funk joint is real interesting to have as this space and it feels like it gives you so many ways to kind of uh think about what do you want this world to look like in the world building that you're in talk to me a little bit about why why why this vibe why this kind of era you know what was the impetus for you and the team to kind of to play in this space yeah you know dan and i we we grew up playing a lot of lucas arts games and we talk about that studio a lot right like we loved how you always feel like you're kind of in on the joke it's like smart humor right like We reference Portal a lot too.

15:17Games where it's like tongue kind of firmly in cheek and like you really – you just like immerse yourself in that world. And when we talked about kind of where this game made sense for the very, very beginning for whatever reason, we felt like 70s was like – which can mean a lot of things, right, to people. 70s can be like flower child. It can be whatever. And in different countries it means different things. But for us, it was like the big personalities, like the expressionism of the 70s. That's what got us really excited. That kind of larger than life kind of thing, kind of like a Tarantino 70s, you know, where it's like just got like a little bit of swagger.

15:56And it's funny because, you know, Julius Reeves ended up just kind of being the face of that first trailer for us, not purposefully, but in many ways, like that character just represented that. He's also like an author, and he's very entrepreneurial, and he's a bounty hunter, and he's out there kind of like in some ways like promoting the book. And yeah, there's a lot of layers to the story that I won't get into today, but a lot of mystery to unravel as well. You know, there might even be things hidden in the trailer. Actually, I've never said that before, but this is all I'll say it here first.

16:31But there's a lot of – there's kind of the sinister backstory of this guy, Victor Vex, who creates the television show. Vex TV is his network, but it's Vex Enterprises. And there's some kind of question marks about like, well, why did he make this show? And all these contestants have their own reasons for being on the show. But there's also kind of this underlying mystery that you can dive into and sink your teeth into a little bit as well. But I will say when we talked to Eli, it was so very atypical of voice casting where usually we cast a huge net, talk to a billion people, whatever else. We were on the phone and I think when it really clicked, I said something and Eli laughed and I was like, oh, dude, that's it.

17:16That's it. That's Julius. We're never going to find anybody better than this. Like, it just was so perfect and just so lovely to work with. And it's just been a fun ride together. What's the collaborative kind of work look like across the studio? Like, I think studio heads and usually creative directors kind of have those initial moments where you kind of get the brief, you get the pitch for what the game is going to wind up being. you start to iterate on the minutiae of what that looks like from a design perspective from a gameplay loop perspective from a audio visual perspective you start to get all of those things together what were the kind of initial things that you were like this must be in it like this must be in the game we must have this as a touch point this must be a pillar that will drive the direction for what we're building what were some of the first uh things that you all talked about in the team about around those things yeah it's a it's a great question and it's a journey because you know you start the game the idea is like yours at the beginning yeah but then when you start finding things the game then starts telling you what you need to know and you have to kind of try to honor that and eventually like the players own it right and you got to learn from them so early on we knew we wanted to capture the flag right but we actually we were looking at like isometric gameplay we were looking at fog of war we tried a ton of different things um and uh what we found early on is that that hiding and finding it's it's like the it's like the same feeling you get in gorilla tag where it's like a simple kind of everybody understands it and that's what makes it so special it feels so good to have like hidden the flag somewhere cool and people are just dying trying to find it or vice versa when you're like roaming the map you find it like we knew that was special and different um but it was challenging because there was all these other ideas we had right we had like these this like wendigo beast you could kill the turn of the sky tonight and we had these kind of moba elements that we had to kind of peel away those things as we went through it and say no no no this is this is what's great and how do we how do we honor that and so um we spent like six to eight months you know matthew berger did such an amazing job of helping us really kind of pause everything and say, okay, just game loop.

19:38Like, let's just keep iterating on that and seeing where it gets. And it took us down this road to where we are today, where we found a balance where you had the freedom and chaos of hiding and finding, which we think is imperative, but balanced with some objective decisions you can make. So there are these radar towers across the middle of the map. And if you own a tower, every 30 seconds it eliminates a search area on the enemy's side of where their flag might be and so you're making these decisions as a team like how much am i fighting over these towers just like eliminate search areas and hone down my search versus how much do we roll the dice like and just go out looking for the flag and you can play it the way you want to play if i'm a terrible shooter i am kind of not that great i'm like i'm extremely competitive as jay will tell you i have to be like really careful in all of our, you know, play tests because I get very passionate and me and Matthew have this rivalry.

20:32And anyway, I'm not very great, but I do enjoy it. But I can say, you know, our team's getting outgunned. Like we're just going to skip the towers. We're going to sneak around the back line, or I might be good at hiding and finding and not good at shooting, but I can contribute, or I can be good at sneaking around and killing these cash bots that spawn and earning money from my team. So there's a lot of ways to contribute as different types of players and that was really important to us as well we're very casual competitive like fun first competitive second yeah jay i want to i want to kick it to you really quick because that always sparks a question in my mind once we start to talk about game loop and and and all those things so like you're getting information from from from mac and the team to say here's the vision here's the things we're trying to implement and you as a producer get a chance to kind of execute on some of that stuff one of the things that always comes up when i have discussions with folks who are doing the work you do is the happy surprise right is the thing that you didn't expect to come out of either a gameplay session or a brown bag or a discussion about the technology that you were using to kind of get the game in a good spot were there things that you can talk about that were happy occurrences that kind of either changed the way the game was kind of moving or something that became a feature?

21:54You know, again, give me the super high level so we don't dig into the weeds and share stuff that's not available to be known. But like, were there moments in your work that you were like, oh, this thing that came out of a gameplay session, we really liked that. Maybe we should implement that and put that into the way the game goes. Yeah, actually, we play test the game a lot. So we try to play the game at least twice a week. Because I work with the design team, we play the game basically every day of the week. And we really value feedback, both internal and external, when we can't get external feedback.

22:29So we've had quite some changes based on feedback since I joined. it's funny to think when i joined like a year ago some of the abilities of the characters we see right now were very different they they would do you know things um that are definitely not even similar to what they do now and that took a lot of iteration and it was a surprise right because it's not that they were not it's not that they weren't fun they weren't fun back then but we We saw it could be even better. We had some room for improvement there. So we made some time. We're trying to have some time to iterate on feedback every time we plan for all the surprises we might have.

23:16Something that might not click the way we expected or something, some crazy idea for our next map. We are actually implementing some crazy idea that came out of a play test. like oh what if we could do that and it turned out to be great so you know um we prototyped and it worked and it's it's gonna make it so we we tried to leave some room for all these wonderful surprises we have yeah yeah that's rad just to to build on one thing jay was saying there i mean you know a lot of the best features have come out of pain points you know we struggled for a lot of like Respawn, for example. It was like, Respawn is never fun in a game, sitting around waiting to be born.

24:02And we also had a problem where if you die, you can respawn at a radar tower you own. And it's like, so we had this kind of clunky UI system where it's like, we got to click on the radar tower, and then you spawn there later. Anyway, that problem and some of the feedback we got turned into this whole kind of green room feature that we have, where you start the game now in this green room where you can see the enemy team across this glass wall, and you can go like, dance in front of them, throw stickers on the wall, whatever. But then there's these tubes that are kind of like old 70s bank tellers, you know, where you run into it.

24:33It's like, whoop, like pulls you up. And that tube system now like takes you to whatever the, you could go to like the spawn points you own now. So I own Tower B. There's like a glass tube that like spins around. It's like accessible to the other team or our team. And so it basically, it solved our problem of, you know, how do you make it easy to go to teleport to the places you own. So it helped out with that. But it also made for a much funner experience. When I die and I come back to the green room, I might see an enemy running to their tube C and call out to my team like, oh, they're going to C.

25:09They're probably running the flag past there. There's all these kind of meta moments that kind of come out of that. And I don't think we ever would have thought to create something like that if we weren't like problem solving and listening to feedback when we were playing. oh that has got me really excited because i think one of my favorite parts of games like this is intel like i think having good intel is a thing that is so important for games like this and it becomes a real hard thing when you have especially you know i'll reference halo again like you had those big team battle uh capture the flag moments and everyone kind of is doing their own thing right you have the people who are you know playing overwatch and not not literally playing Overwatch, but being Overwatch and either trying to shoot people who were trying to track the flag down and capture stuff.

25:56You have the runners who were going. You have the defenders. You have those folks. You have so many different versions of that. But with a gameplay loop that is pretty short, it sounds like matches usually around like 15 to 20 minutes or so. 10 to 15 minutes. 10 to 15? Typically never more than 20. That's right. And in that time, you have flag hiding. You have point capture over the radar towers. You have payload escort trying to get that flag back to your home base. You have base assault and defense because at the end of the match, you run it back to your base. You have to defend it for one minute to win, which is the climax of everything, by the way.

26:31I'm like, Kalief, get up on the roof. Call over the coming from Eli block this door. You know, you're like batting down the hatches. You're getting yourself ready for like an assault from the enemy team. So it happens super quick. And it touches a lot of familiar notes in terms of like gameplay, but like there's some real novel things too. And a lot of psychology when you're watching people like you're like, dude, they're fighting so hard over Tower C. There's only a couple of squares left there. I bet that I bet their flag is there. Or are they just trying to throw us off because they know like we're going to look at a otherwise.

27:04So you you're really like constantly trying to outsmart the other team. Oh, I say it was sorry. Yeah. During the LAN party, when I had a chance to play it and really get into it, I got to say it was really intense for me. And when you spoke of the green room, that's one of the things that stood out to me when I got cheated, man. But when someone capped me out, I'm not going to get into it because it was one of Mac's guys on his team that did me really wrong. And I'm not even going to say his name, but he did me wrong. If you got a blast, Eli, if you got a blast, I won't hold it against you. I'm not going to do that to him because he and I, we joked about it afterwards and everything.

27:46I had him too. and somehow he just disappeared into a pipe and I'm like, come on, man, because he had no help. But when I lost my health and I went down to the green room, that actually stood out to me because I'm like, this is pretty freaking interesting because I thought I had to sit around and wait for a respawn. But yeah, you go down to this room and you can just get sucked right up into this pipe and I thought that was really neat. And then the communication aspect of it, Like, you know, it's been a while since I did a LAN party like that, where there's a room full of people and everybody is just talking and communicating.