Discord Game Club Ep. 15

Hi, Brett here from the Dev Game Club. It's our last week off, but we want to wish you a Happy New Year if you're listening to this around when it comes out. We also want to remind you of the Discord community's charity event, Defeating Games for Charity, which is coming January 23rd to 24th. Check out the schedule at DefeatingGames.com.

Since we're out, we are again running a Discord Game Club interview. Biostats and Calamity Nolan interview Discord member Carlos, who is an independent graphic novel creator and publisher, as well as having a background in game development. Thanks to them for giving us something to run in the feed when we're taking an even longish break. See you next week for our 2025 wrap up. Take care.

Welcome to DGC Just Rhetoric, a podcast where Nolan and myself interview developers and content creators. Today, we are excited to have our first artist author, Carlos, who is also a game developer. I'm your host, Ryan, or Biostats on the Discord, and I'll let these gentlemen introduce themselves right now. Hello, I'm Nolan, or Calamity Nolan, in the Discord. And hello, I'm Carlos. I am Carlos in the Discord.

Easy enough. Yeah, typically we ask about the Discord name, but yours is sort of obvious. It is kind of obvious. I would say that at some point I decided to abbreviate it as, I don't know if it's in the Discord like that, like CRLJMB. Because in my head, that's like a perfect simplification of Carlos Zambrina. There you go. It's on the back of the novel, yeah. Yeah, and nobody's showing the... Holding up a book, yeah. ...signature of the comic book.

And then later I realized that it really doesn't make any sense why those letters in particular are chosen. In my head, it makes a lot of sense. It's like a control jam band. Control jam band, yeah. I was going to say Carl Jumbo, but yeah. Jimbo, like the ones in... Banjo-Tooie. Yeah, there you go. But instead I'll ask you about your art collective name. Okay. So the Badlands, but with a slight misspelling. Badlatans.

Yeah, that's a funny one. So I've been doing sort of like art, game dev, religious stuff with a friend, like a creative partnership, if you will. And I don't know, I feel like maybe we're feeling edgy. I can't remember right now. It was just trying to pay homage to the older, mistranslated typo text of NES Super Nintendo games.

So you're like, it's funny if it were Badlands with a DNS. And it just started like that. Which is funny because at some point, I went to GDC. And at that point, we have done maybe very, very small. games in XNA. And I had a business card that I had printed. And it was around the time where there was an iOS game called Bablands that was somewhat popular. You were kind of like a blob moving around, and you had to avoid spikes.

And people were really excited because they thought I was that guy. So I had to very quickly run away. All right. So let's get to the big topic. You recently completed and have printed Homebound.

Which, so one thing about the title is, on the actual graphic novel issues, it's broken up into two words, but everywhere else it's one word? That is a good question. Originally it was a homebound starbound, two words. And then I realized that it was too long, so I made it homebound. So I think it is supposed to be one word. I just think for the visuals of the cover, it made more sense to do it in two words.

Kind of like to showcase that it was like the, you know, like these mats with words that they have for kids that you put, they got letters and you put them out. I thought if it was to line, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't work. better. Also, originally it was going to be printed as one single graphic novel. I had to divide it into blocks because I went to a comic convention and I didn't fully have everything set up yet. I didn't have the final chapter, so I just...

divided into small books so that I could sell it and print it. But the original cover had like the characters interacted with the pieces and kind of like the layout worked out so that the characters were closer to the B than they were to the N. And that was easier with lines. So I guess it is one word, but stylistically it worked out for the cover. Clearly one word disjointed in time. There you go. There you go. Well, I should pay you for that.

yeah and the uh for those of you haven't seen the logo it's um made up of big bubble letters like uh in a kid's room you have these mats that go on the ground and you like slide them together and it's a nod to there's a book about a kid about uh an unlikely parent i guess slash kidnapper yeah and if you look at the logo the color layout of its letter kind of

showcases in purple a word which is completely accidental but like in purple there's like four letters next to each other called oboe which makes no sense but i didn't think about that I was like, oh, here we go. We're getting the deep lore. No, it just makes no sense. Love that. No, no, no, no, no. There's like a secret hidden thing in there, but no. Red herring's all around. Bring your own interpretation.

So yeah, tell us about Homebound. All right. I've always liked the comic book medium. I've been doing it on my own, like small comic books. I never did or managed to do anything longer than 20 pages. At some point, I did a small comic book that was around 18, 20 pages, and I wanted to do the second part. But on my free time, when I had a full-time job, it was just hard to coordinate everything.

But I had some ideas for how I would do it and then one of the ideas was one of the ideas would be homebound and I had like a beginning and an ending and didn't know what to do with the rest but I had it like in the back of my mind.

And then at some point, I was burned out. We made a job. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take some time out to figure out what is it that I want to do. It wasn't quite clear. But then naturally, within a month of having quit my job, I found myself just starting drawing this.

comic book it was intended to be 80 pages and yeah like i think the origin of the idea would be like a bunch of eclectic characters going on a road trip with a baby and then kind of like their relationship with this baby and with each other was kind of like tied by a sort of muckoffing that i kind of found interesting but really i feel like it was a combination of in 2018 my brother had a kid and i visited and it was quite nice and then immediately after that covid happened so i didn't get to

visit them again for like two years so a lot of my interactions with my brother and my family was through video calls so i would have like the kid would like look at the screen a lot and i would do drawings and a lot of the pages in the book are based on that like me drawing numbers and him being like no draw the seven again i think that influenced a lot the story of like being centered around a baby and i kind of i always rabbit it around sci-fi and fantasy

like visually. So that did a lot of that. And yeah, believe it or not, the rest is just me start the drawing and following my guide of what the story would be. So you mentioned your sort of love of comics as your starting point. And you had...

done a smaller version a 20 page had you in the back of your mind for like a number of years wanted to do a graphic novel you guys I think many times there was A long time during COVID, I was thinking of doing a fanfic about Ocarina of Time. Then at some point, I was like, well, I'm not going to do that. So I'm going to do a fanfic about Metal Gear.

And then at some point that didn't work out. So I started using the characters that I designed for those comic books and making them on comic books on my own. But it's always like sort of learning around how I would do a full graphic novel. test that i mentioned that was like 20 pages was supposed to be like a vignette of a graphic novel that i would be making it was always in the back of my mind i was i never had a full idea that naturally turned into like a story with an arc

and ending that I could be like, OK, this is control. I can start piece by piece following it. So Homebound was the first one where, at the very least, I had a clear idea for an intro, like a setup. And then sort of the introduction of a plot kind of direction. And then an idea of how that would end and lead it into an ending. I have no idea what would happen in between.

But like in my mind, I'm like, there has to be like a journey in between for these characters to realize that they're going to do what they're doing at the end. But I have no idea what it is. I just know that it's like a certain amount of time passing. But I also knew that I had had...

hard times doing anything longer than 20 pages in the past. So it was kind of hard to commit to actually be like, let's just do it. In my mind, I was like, let's just try to limit it to 80 pages because I know that I can do that. I clearly fail at that. I think the total page counted like 300. But yeah, I'd probably find it to do a full creative project on my own. When you say you had the start and the end, this is sort of the plot.

points right or did you know initially I wanted it to have a baby be sort of the almost the MacGuffin in the sense that everybody else is shifting around yeah so I had the idea of certain types of characters navigating or doing a road trip with a baby like like almost diary comic or like web comic style and i also had a different idea that i thought i would type to it a character doing a space mission

kind of like finding a stowaway baby and like that sort of intro in my mind was very clear how it would turn out i'm like oh i see that could be like a story in its own and then how are they correlated and i'm like well what if there's like a storm around the planet that could do that

And then within like a week or a month, I'm like, wait, if I follow that thread of that storm, then these characters could be doing these at the end, which I think is pretty cool. So that's sort of what I had. I had very lose-lose. designs for the main characters the baby had like at some point was blonde the main character at some point had black hair but they both had like the same similar vibe and then the two siblings were non-seer were almost designed

like within the week that they were going to turn up on the pages. I have some sketches for them, especially the woman, sir. She, I think I just finalized it very late. Runo was based on a sweater that my nephew would wear that kind of looked like a lizard. And I'm like, that'd be great. So from there, it kind of developed. And I had been sketching him for a while, like.

kind of like oh it'd be nice to have like a a sort of exploration video game where like there's this character camping around and I have drawn him camping around um pretty much like the I don't know I think Nolan you have read the books or you have at least do you have them we've both read them yeah yeah we did i had to disclose something if my son ever hears this He has finished the first and I'm not allowed to read ahead. So I didn't read the rest, but I did read the rest. Wait, yeah.

Now I was going to mention that the pit book has a lot of these sketches that I did way before the idea of the book started, of like these little lizard characters camping around. That's basically what I mean when I had like the plot and ending. Yeah, no, so the fifth one just came out, so it's five different installments, which is what I just held up for the camera, which this is an audio medium, so that's twice now.

showing things off that the audience can't see but yeah it's very cool so the entire collection is now complete and it was great to pick them up and read through them we were talking about different comments on it My favorite was on the back of Volume 3, you have a quote from your mother. I do, yeah. Which is, No me he enterado muy bien de la historia, pero me han encanto los dibus.

uh basically i don't get the story very well but very good i love the cartoons yes they always tease me like that that i'm making a comic book but they cannot read it so i have it in the back of my mind to actually translate it that's a that's a real quote that like i literally copied it from our group set i assumed yeah another one is uh your brother read the whole thing while taking the dump that was offensive to be fair i mean i guess like when you have two kids

Being in the bathroom is like your safe space. Do you know how much I treasure my shower now? Nice. So tell us about the publishing process. So that's something that I didn't have.

figured out how i would do it was always in the back of my mind um this is like 2022 early 2023 when i have like you know made a good dent into the book and i'm like okay this is actually being finished this is exciting And I wasn't sure how it's going to go with it, because you can either do self-publishing in this sort of indie space where you just print it, go to conventions and try to sell it, or go to some local comic shops that have a local author section and try to give it to them.

You can also do some self-publishing on your site, like try to figure out how to get an ISBN and then print it. A lot of that is... the self-publishing with an ISBN, because the idea of going to a library was really appealing, having an official book. It's very hard to do on your own, and Amazon has made it really easy, but I didn't feel super comfortable.

Just partnering with Amazon for that. I didn't like that idea. So it would be, for me, either going fully in the route or somehow finding a publisher that would actually pick up the book and print it. And I hadn't really thought about how that would work. In my mind, once it's done, I'll start working on the marketing so that I can pour all my energy into the creation of this thing. But then randomly a friend...

was interested in applying for a comic book convention in Massachusetts. There's like a big indie comic book convention here called MICE. And I was like, yeah, I'll apply with you. So we applied together. And I got it. And this was like when I was in the middle of writing what is now book four. In my mind, I was like, oh, I'm very close to the end. I didn't know at the time that I had like still like good 100 pages to go.

um because i guess i was just like winging it based like because a lot of this story was like i have the beginning i don't know what happens and then i have an end a lot of that is like well let's follow my gut and see where the characters go. And then when I think I have the right pieces for the ending, I'll just try to land. It was kind of very hard to plan everything in my head. So I just didn't know when it was going to finish. But in my head, I'm like, sure.

But then I got a table at this convention. I'm like, shoot, now I have to finish it this year. And I keep doing the math. And I'm like, well, if I'm trying to be a real project manager about this thing, I cannot guarantee that it's going to be finished. in the next two years based on past experiences. Like if I account for on average how much it takes to write a page, to sketch it out and draw it. Like we're talking about either takes the fastest it could take is three months.

The lowest you can take is five years based on what the longest page has been. So I'm like, this is not a great thing to plan for. So I'm like, okay, let's just do something that I think I can do. I can finish this chapter. And then I'm going to split it into different books. Which I think is actually going to work in my favor because if you're in a convention as a new author, it's easier to sell somebody on like individual 50 page books than like a giant 250 page novel.

So I'm like, the only thing I need to do is finish this book, the number four, figure out the covers. And then after that, figure out how to print and sell it. So like suddenly the idea of how you would publish it.

how I would publish it came with a solution for me. It's like, well, you have to figure it out now. And the only thing to figure it out now is to sell it yourself. So that's why I went in the publishing path, which is actually working out pretty well i really like it um so that's what i did and then i went to the convention and i'm like okay now i have to follow the same format to finish the next book which took like a year and a half i was like way off um what i thought i could do

as always. That's why I always respect project managers a lot, because I'm really bad at that job. So yeah, I finished a few books, and I'm doing again the same indie publishing. And then something that happened during the comic convention is they did like a grant to see which new comics were the best ones or like the most innovative.

And I got, I was part of all of that, of the winners. And part of the grant was that they would engage in conversations with Radiator Comics, which is an indie distributor back in, down in Miami. and they would sell those books for you. So in my head, I was like, I'm going to just sell it in the conventions and then on Etsy. But now I have a door open for an actual online store that could sell the books. So I've been working with them now since.

Anaclysium is a great guy. I don't know if you saw when Tim did the unboxing of the first package. Neil does a really good job at packaging of the books. So, yeah, I did the same thing for when the Facebook was finished. I talked to them again and I'm talking. Sorry. Yes. We did the same thing on the website. And now these.

december i'm going to the same comic convention again with the facebook so that's exciting uh so yeah that's that's been the journey so far in terms of publishing i would like to find

a publisher who actually markets it and handles the printing. Just because that is, A, expensive. Printing is not cheap. I also kind of shot myself in the food because I decided to go for a finish that was... kind of expensive to to do like it's not the cheapest it's also not the most expensive but it was like it's not free I'm really happy with it but it's also like long term it's not really

I have like a thousand books in this home and it's like a whole shelf, like a whole part of my closet, which is not sustainable. And also like even. handling the online sales and everything because it's a manual thing that you have to go to the post office and send it. It's hard to do. The marketing is hard because you have to either talk to stores or keep posting on social media. So I would like...

in the future to somehow find a partnership with a publisher. And that's the next step for me. So if anybody is listening out there. Yeah, one, buy it. Two, if you know a publisher. Yeah. So you did mention the convention in there, and I did notice that you had a MICE grant listed. What did that enable you to do, getting that grant? So like the MICE grant was really nice.

So the basics of Bid was they gave $500 to the first winner, which I wasn't, and then $100 to every one of the rest, which I think are going to be like 10 or 12 other winners. It was supposed to help you with printing. And then they also give you the partnership with Varieta Comics. But the most important thing for me was that they give you like a little stamp, especially on the website of all of the visitors, sorry, not visitors, exhibitors.

And you're also shown a feature on the website as one of the 12 or 10 winners of this grant. And that was really good to be like the number of people that showed up at my temple just because of that was really nice. So I would say mostly it's like a spotlight on you. It's glad that things like that exist for creative people. Yeah, no, my system is really, really good. They've been amazing.

It was really good that the first sale that I had on Etsy when I put this book up was from the first person who came to my table at MICE, like the first Saturday at like 10 a.m. Somebody said, like, yeah. And then... She came over to Etsy as soon as I posted it. I was not expecting anybody that was not my family to know about this, but this is great. Well, congratulations. So I'll give you the...

Yeah, the feedback my nine-year-old for issue one. Oh, yeah, please. Pretty good, sort of funny, funny moments were the three things that I got out of them. Nice. That is glowing praise from a nine-year-old. It is, to be honest with you. And that is, that is pretty good, yeah. That's much better than the praise that I got from a friend who said like, you know, pine trouble is a hard thing to do, you're fine.

I really liked how you handled time travel, which was, you know, we'll get really deep into it at one point and then otherwise don't really care about it. We'll set up the stakes and then... Yeah, thank you. Don't worry about it. It's weird. Pretty much, yeah. So did you have a bunch of graphs out there trying to track all the different timelines? Okay, so I...

Is it book four that has the giant graph? That is a graph that I did. So like one of my, the creative partnership friend that I mentioned was a part of the Badlands.

is sort of like the editor of the book. Like, since the beginning, I've been just sending him, like, all these sketches and, like, the finished pages, and we've been talking about it. At one point, I, like, graphed out. Like, I don't know why I did it. I thought it would be funny. Maybe I had... just seen the xkcd um joke about primer like how the the plot would go and it was like going circles and i'm like oh that'd be funny so i did it for this book and then he was like oh that's great

this is actually super useful. I'm like, well, that's staying in then. I think I should do it. So yeah, that's the one prop that I did for myself that ended up in the book. I would say otherwise I don't think I did one month because it's... i feel like it's it's a tiny bit complicated but like not that much so as somebody who's been like thinking about it for a while it's i don't know it sticks to your brain pretty easily i also think it helps that this is a funny book

uh sort of funny as as bios kid said um right like the first the way it starts uh in the title page it says everything in this book is fictional please don't sue me yes which I think sets you off in a great direction. But being able to use humor to sort of jump past complicated plot points really helps more. accepting of things if there's a joke in it and so i think that that helps with the time travel where uh you know when it's being introduced you have uh

I think Runo in the background being like, oh, you're so screwed. This, you know, uh-oh. Just sort of like... smoothing over all of the weird complicated edges so that people are just like okay whatever this is it this is the yeah thank you it's a very efficient storytelling move to be funny i will say i would get a not so much

time travel but in terms of like the biology of it my brother who is a biologist read it and gave me feedback on like oh you should never call this bacteria bacteria actually don't make sense to be this big like they would be like the size of it all microscopically you should call it this other thing i'm like okay that's

We don't need to. Maybe I'll figure out something else if I ever reprint this thing. But for now, I think Bacteria will do the job. So yeah, let's talk about... the world and the biology and all that, because this is an interesting planet with a lot of anthropomorphic animals. You talk about animals a lot. In fact, there's some penguin facts and some musing in the sketchbook corner that I can bring up. But first off, why so many animals? Do you like animals?

something what's going on i like i like creators i would say i think they're more fun to draw than people but it's also easier to make people gestures or like that's why they're anthropomorphic animals i guess it's easier for me to draw a uniquely a unique looking character if they are an animal that if it's a human so that's why they're like

three humans in the whole book or tattoo whatever you want to look at it so time travel yeah uh yeah no i like some of the in the the sketchbook of the fourth book

which is like a section at the end where you have your sketches you mentioned. It says, did you know the penguins are the only animals naturally able to perform a clean handstand from birth? And then... it's not at all true but wouldn't it be cool yeah i don't know i like brown animals i like i think it's fun and then you also have a question at the end in sketchbook 2 which if you're willing to talk about i have thoughts as well but

Is there any species out there that has no navel but does have nipples? And do both of those qualities rule out lizards? do you know the answer to this i don't uh i have not uh searched it at all i just thought it was funny that i was i kept drawing a lizard but gave giving it like mammal attributes of course yeah bio do you want to throw out your guess

Yeah, duckbill platypus, I think. Obviously, I have bio in the handle, but, like, I do human health bio stuff. So not, like, a real biologist. But that... To me, that was the only mammal that laid eggs that I could think of. These are a horrible idea. Right. So, yeah, let's break it down. The navel, right, is...

from the umbilical cord, right? So that would be in animals that have a live birth and not in animals that don't, that, you know, are laid in eggs or whatever. And nipples, right, are from... uh to produce milk right so animals with mammary glands are mammals so great guess from bio that platypus and also echidnas uh are mammals that lay eggs

However, I looked it up, and while they do have mammary glands, they do not have nipples. Monotremes, that is, yeah, echidnas and platypuses do not have nipples, so they do not count. however i i'm guessing they also would not have unable because the x yeah well but they're young still drink milk So they do produce milk. It's just not via nipple. They have some weird milk pouch. But there is another answer. And that is marsupials.

Like kangaroos and koalas. Okay. They have a weird birthing situation where they give birth very early in the gestation period and then... Their babies live in a pouch, right? Okay. And they then go and drink milk from nipples from their mother. So the answer is marsupials. Do marsupials look like lizards though? Like I would not look at the kangaroo and be like, yeah. That's a salamander right there. They're pretty freaky.

They are pretty freaky in some ways. They're very bird-like in a lot of ways. And then, yeah, do both these qualities rule out lizards? Yes, they do. Because they... Lizards don't have nipples because they aren't mammals. And they don't have a navel because they are laid from eggs. Although there's some discussion online about... there's like still an egg stalk in uh so there will be like some scar tissue around the navel in all animals um but i don't think that that counts as like

a navel as such, something that has to specifically be from an umbilical cord. Yeah, I think so. I will say though, if you look for, uh, Leesert. nipples and google to solve this situation you will find a different area of the internet that you wouldn't generally find Oh, my search is ruined forever from looking this up. Thank you. But I generally find this interesting. Yeah, it was good.

you know happy to do it but i was like oh this is a great question actually uh especially when i found out that i you know i jumped to the same conclusion as bio and was wrong there's also the question of And this sort of comes out at the end of the book, but it's never addressed on purpose. How do eggs come out? Again, that's that humor. You don't want to... Let's just gloss over that. Because all of a sudden, he's got a big egg. that's right he's carting around a big egg yeah yeah

Can you introduce us to the characters? Sure. Let's see. Main characters you have. The sort of main character is Echo, who is a space agent. who cross lands in a planet after some botched rescue operation and meets the other main character, who is Ona, who is... sort of have landed into like 18 month toddler way to describe her. And so those two characters kind of like get brought together.

into this road trip where Ego has to figure out where she lives. There's also two other characters that show up very early into the road trip who are, they call themselves siblings and it's a human, and Runo, who is a lizard with nipples and potentially unable, depending on how you look at it. So the four of them start on a journey.

There's also lots of other side characters, small, a lot of anthropomorphic animals we've talked about. There's also the original team members of Echo when she was working as a space agent who are... Howell. I'm not quite with names, as you can see. A lot of these ones are like, you know what, that's a word that I like. So like, ah. Howl is also a lizard, and Chirp is a frog. And those very quickly disappear out of the introduction and then get brought up later in the story, which is...

It can be confusing if you're reading the books one month at a time, but I figure that's not a problem for me. So yeah, the book is a journey about these four characters that I mentioned. driving around trying to figure out the mysteriousness around this baby. When you're writing these characters, do they have a voice?

They don't have a voice in my head. They do have mannerisms of how they would react. Yeah, I would say... not like an actual sound because I also don't think in words in my mind it's kind of like a peaceful kind of like blobby thing but so I Yeah, I would say like they're all kind of based on different traits that I and other fans have kind of like lumped in together into like a sort of character. So who are you the most? I think I'm all of them.

to a certain extent many people joke when i draw echo just because of like the long face and the one line at the nose it's like that's also how you draw yourself and i'm like it's not wrong maria I feel like because a lot of them have qualities that I enjoy writing, eventually they are also qualities that I enjoy expressing myself. So it kind of like all blends together. Which one's your brother?

I would say Borough the Scientist, the Weird Dragon, which is based on a character when I was like early teens and I had like RPG Maker making a video game and I was like, I'm going to make the next Final Fantasy. There was a sort of dinosaur that was going to be a secondary character in the group, and that was Boro. So, you know, reusing stuff from when I was left. I think one of my...

favorite character interactions is later in the book, you have a pair of birds. Thank you. And just the way they have a yin and yang personality.

It's very funny to me. And the way they play off each other is good too. Yeah, I really like playing with those characters. Also kind of like I was feeling a bit scared because it was around the time where Jess Ant no longer became a valid... creative solution to every problem so like it was not so much about introducing new things into the book but like playing around with the things in the book that i had already set up and they were like but now i'm introducing new characters

is this a good idea like i'm supposed to be landing the ship not making it go in different directions um but yeah i had a lot of fun drawing them yeah no it's extremely inventive and fun to read thank you I love the style that you settled on. We've seen some of your other artwork that isn't exactly in that style. How did you settle on this for?

So I would say a lot of my style in the last like seven years has been like sketches with just like the micron pens. It's like basically a black pen and then a small ink wash. that i do i sort of like landed on that as something that i really liked so i i sort of enjoyed the monochrome black and white and then like one or two shades of gray so when i started deciding that i wanted to make a book

I was like, OK, I need to make it fast. Can I replicate that style easily? And I kind of like could with special brushes, but I'm like, what if I simplified more and land ODS like black?

The background as white and then one shade of one tone of gray for the would represent the ink wash So that's kind of like how I simplified my style for a comic book because the thinking was also like if I'm gonna draw a lot of these pages I should do like the most simplified backgrounds and the most simplified shading, which later kind of worked against me because I started doing like...

What if I have a giant bird that is sort of dark, but also has very coarse shapes? And I'm like, well, how am I going to shade that? Because if I use black, that's too black for what the color of this bird is. But if I don't do it, then it looks flat. So suddenly start hatching, but hatching was not enough. So I'm like hatching lightly, doing dots. And then I was like, well, what if I do an underwater scene? But like water is...

very easy to do if you have a lot of values on Photoshop. But if you only have three, there's like a gradient from when the water hits the surface to the bottom that is really nice. It's also really nice to be able to capture how the light reflects, which is never fully white. The specular on the water is kind of washed out because of how the medium works.

so you never have like fully white or blacks but i had just the only thing i had was like full white and full blacks and then gray in the middle i'm like so i'm gonna do that so i kind of like it worked against me in those scenes where i had

I kind of had to work extra hard to make up for the fact that I didn't have more colors. So like for the water scenes, I did a lot of just dots very slowly to make sure that I had like a steeple pattern that... reflected a very light black like a very light uh gray as it as the water became darker and darker um which i couldn't do easily because the other alternative was just a pure line of black

pen, which would be suddenly breaks the illusion of water. So that started working against me, but I would say that from the beginning it was a simplified version of how I like to sketch on a sketchbook in a physical video. When you're sketching them out.

Do you immediately go to your computer or your pad? Or did you start some of the work with actual paper and pen? I would start with paper and pen. Generally, I would say the sort of micro process of making the book is...

I start off with a script that I'm happy with that is very simplified, but it's like a notepad that has like basic descriptions for the page and the dialogue. And then from there I go and I look at it and I'm like, okay, this could be a page. So I start sketching it in like my sketchbook. on pencil and that usually is like a page in a thumbnail version on the sketchbook is often smaller than a debit card in size if you can imagine that

So this is very rough. If I think that some drawings I want to elaborate more on, I would like to do like a larger version of that. And then depending on how I feel I may ink that or not, I just leave it on pencil. And then from there, I take a photo, put it in Photoshop.

blow it up to the page size and then try to very roughly draw on Photoshop what the shapes and the pages would be and try to put the text from the script there and then kind of like police the drawings a tiny bit more, but it's still in a rough shape so that I can be like very loosely, drag and drop them, be like, oh, actually these cards just need to be more separated, they need to be bigger, they need to be smaller.

And so I do that a lot until I'm happy with the page, sort of. The one thing that those sketches never do is like the full block out of the shapes. I don't tend to do the grays at that stage. So it's kind of just like a silhouette. of characters until I'm happy with the pacing of the dialogue and how the characters move to each other, like from panel to panel.

One thing that happens a lot in those stages is I realize that the dialogue doesn't work fully just because you may want to write something like, oh, why didn't you wake me up? You knew I wanted to have breakfast with me.

with you and the other character being like well I tried to but you were asleep right and then when you try to put it on the page you realize that that works better if you have like a very vertical panel where they're talking to each other but in that vertical panel there's only room for

two paragraphs or two lines of text. And so you were like, OK, well, that's naturally the first character is saying, why didn't you wake me up? You knew I wanted to have breakfast with you. And then you go to the next panel, and the other character replies.

But then suddenly, because of the panel separation, it doesn't look like those characters are talking to each other back and forth. It doesn't feel like it's a dynamic reply, at least how I read comic books. So suddenly I have to go back to the script and be like, OK.

Well, what he says now needs to be like a line so that she can reply with a line on the same page. So I reworked the dialogue a lot to do that. Sometimes I also rewrite the scene a tiny bit just because when I'm writing, I'm like, I have a big idea.

what the scene needs to convey. They need to figure out that they're going north too much and they have to go south. So I write a scene to do that. And then when I actually get to the sketching of the page and I have an understanding of... what the pages before have looked like i look at this page and i'm like does it make sense that they say this like it feels like they should be lying down and being kind of um lazy about this and they seem very active

So I feel like it doesn't look right. And I'm like, okay, well, how should they look like? And I'm like, okay, I'll start going in like that. Like, okay, so this is what the dialog would look like. And then very often... I naturally land on another way of conveying the same idea that I had. Because very often, I have enough pieces. I may have a character that has not said anything in this scene. I'm like, OK, well, it makes sense that that character is very active about going south now.

suddenly put the character in so then the specifics of how a sketch evolves kind of like um change a lot in that process it's never too much um but it's always like

enough of variation that from the original script to the final sketch on photoshop is there's a lot of change and then from there i just go over and pull in the photoshop like i i bring the opacity down of everything to like 20 and i just polish out every single drawing from there. And I'm not a great artist, so I use a lot of reference for that. I go against the wall and I take videos of myself holding different things. I have a whole library of videos of me doing the weird things.

I got into a sleeping bag and trying to run around and falling just so that I could have videos of how that looks like. And so I did a lot of that. And then I also go and go through like... the backgrounds, which I use a lot of reference about. I take photos from camping trips that I've been to or different places. Because it's a road trip, I had in my head the idea that it would make sense if they

have a physical journey. So I started the first trip they do is I reference a lot of photos from Yosemite. And then from there, I'm like, OK, so. If they go back, where would it naturally make sense if they're trying to go there but not quite? It's like, OK, well, Dev Ballet is sort of close. I start referencing all the photos from Dev Ballet. And then I go to Google Maps and try to place a free view and sketching that for the backgrounds.

And then next time I'm going forward, like, okay, it's supposed to have been like two weeks. Where could they be now? Like, okay, Colorado sounds good. And then like, try to find photos of mountains in Colorado and do that. Sometimes I even have like a Microsoft flight simulator, which you can have like a flight cam. and change the daytime and the weather. And I took screenshots and I just used that as reference. But yeah. How would you describe your art style? I would say...

I don't know how I would describe my art style. I would say maybe dynamic, maybe expressive, and then nothing after that. Because I'm not a professional artist, I'm... a programmer by trade, I'm only doing this in my background. I've gotten really experience in doing very fast sketches, so like the pencil and maybe ink washes and ink.

for characters doing several things. So the actual polishing of illustration to full detail. I'm sorry. I haven't really had much experience with it. I'm horrible with colors. I don't do that very often so I stay in black and white if I can help it. So I guess I'm very comfortable with like very dynamic simplified silhouettes.

doing, conveying a certain action is what I would say. What is your background in art? I have been a self-taught artist basically most of my life. I did in college, I did a four week course where it was like one hour every day for four weeks. And that was like sort of like basic of illustration and color theory. But other than that, I have not done much class-taking in terms of art. This is only just doing it on my own. Years ago, I did a 30-hour...

Zebra, of course. It was just like a video of somebody doing a model on Zebra and I just followed that along. I don't know if that counts as arts education, but yeah, that's mostly my background, which is why I'm very unprofessional when it comes to drawing. like for the longest time i've been just drawing based on vibes like if i feel like drawing i will do it if not i will not because it was always my free time so it didn't make sense to force it and these

book required me to be diligent. And if I woke up and I didn't want to draw, well, good luck. You have to draw. So it was always like, at least it was like a smooth transition because there's always work to be done in the writing. and in the sketching, which are areas that I'm very comfortable in. So like the final police illustration always takes the longest time, but if I don't want to do it, there's always work to be done on the writing part. But as the book starts,

getting to the end because the drawing, the final police part takes so long, it reaches a point where you have drawn, sorry, where you have scripted everything and there's nothing to do but actually draw. So the last... year of the book i had to be like suddenly learn to be diligent to be like i woke up and i don't want to do drawings guess what you have to do drawings today you have to do backgrounds well yeah in the last i don't know

10 20 pages are just kind of all extremely detailed drawings thank you it's very impressive and very very moving i think but thank you it definitely is a lot of work And you can feel that. Yeah, I tried. Because a lot of the pages, I could just do a flat gray here. But I feel like I want to do a very detailed cloud. So I spent like...

Again, like a day hatching clouds. Or I haven't figured out really optimal ways to do certain background things that I do a lot. Like, for example, there's a lot of brass in the last eight pages. that are individually drawn blades of grass, because I couldn't figure out a way to do a brush on Photoshop that didn't feel automated. It had to feel somewhat parallel for every single blade of grass, but not enough that it clearly is the art of the same drawing, which meant that

Like 80% of it, I had to draw myself. I did try to copy and paste a lot. But in the end, I had to raise that a lot. It doesn't look good. I did it myself. So there's a lot of details there in the background that took a surprising amount of time. But I'm glad that it conveys the scene well. Yeah, I mean, so I have a little summary of what I would describe the look for the novel.

detailed backgrounds and settings with cute and expressive character. I'll take that, yeah. Nolan didn't put his in, so I don't know if he has a phrase for it. I'll have you know, I'll start. stealing these quotes yeah go for it feel free you may be in the back from another book in the future i yeah i would love that from some random guy who interviewed me

We have a question on here, what motivates you? But I think what you just brought up is really interesting, which is when a hobby becomes a profession and how that changes your perspective on being motivated.

How do you feel about it now that the process is over? Is it something you want to continue to do professionally or would you rather it go back to being a hobby? That's a good question. I feel like a lot of the reason… The reasons that brought me to being burnt out on my job and wanting to quit it is because I've always had an inkling to do something creative that I had control over, like enough control over that I could be like, oh, yeah, I'm proud of everything here.

That's something that we may get to it later maybe but like I I Didn't expect to get out of them game development, but I definitely did not get it because I was like when you're working with like 2 000 people like the final product is of course not a representation of what you want to do creatively and i realized that i wasn't doing that and it was very hard to do it on my own just because there's you have to be very organized with how you spend your time like i said like

This was supposed to be an 80 page project and turns out to 300 pages and three years and a half. So like clearly organization skills are not my forte. So like even when I was doing that in my free time, it never felt fully satisfying because I was not.

get into the places that I wanted to. So that's why I really had a very strong desire to try that, to try a very fully owned creative process and see where that took me. So like at some point in my... early 30s i'm like well i've been incredibly lucky and privileged to have started a career and be somewhat successful by this age so i have savings i also don't have um

college debt because I went to school in a country where education was basically free. Which means that I have savings to be able to quit my job. I don't know when that will happen again because it's a very unique circumstance to be in. So it may be the first time and the last time that I get an opportunity to just quit my job and get to work on a full-time project.

myself full-time so i would say that was the drive the fact that knowing that i was in a very unique position very lucky and trying to make that as much as possible so like I woke up in the morning and in my head, I'm like, you're not going to try to get a full-time job until you're done with this. So I was really cherishing every moment. It was a great experience. And if I can do it for the rest of my life, I would.

I would say I am not that privileged and lucky to continue doing it for the rest of my life. So I'll probably transition to having a steady job with a paycheck for a while. But I wouldn't say no. If this opportunity comes up again, I would not say no. Talk a little bit more about your game dev practice then. OK. Tell us about that. Tell us about making games. Yeah. So I had always wanted to make video games.

like as a kid I really like comic books and I really like video games so in my head I'm like I don't know what this means professionally because in school I'm sort of good at math but I really like straw I could pursue a job in like a degree in arts and kind of do math on the side, which I don't think anybody has done. I don't think math as a hobby is a thing. But I definitely know people who have.

He's done art as a hobby. So I was like, what if I do something more master-related and then do art as a hobby? That seems more, I guess, reasonable long-term for my financial stability. And that's something my parents very much pushed for. But in my head, I was like, wait, what if I really like video games? What if I learn computer science, which is sort of math-related, but also has the potential for me working in video games, which is creative? So I kind of got into computer science for that.

reason. And it's not like I like computers all that much, but it was like a vehicle to do the things that I liked. And then I was very lucky to land on an internship in California right out of college. so i was like that's perfect it's like there's a place that has jobs in the video market that's the u.s so i went to the u.s and then i worked in california for a bit until i had a working visa and then i just started sending out resumes

They didn't have a lot of luck. It's not an industry that likes hiring juniors, and also not an industry that likes hiring juniors that need a visa sponsorship. But I... sort of landed an interview in a company in the East Coast. And I just went for it. And yeah, I would say that was, it was sort of like my 13 year old dream sort of thing.

then was kind of like a hard thing to process because you're there and you're like, okay, now what? And then you have to like process the data. Yeah, I think the real-time programming aspect of it, like problem solving, I think is... very engaging and I like it a lot. Like having to figure out how to solve a problem that is performant, looks good.

working with a team of very knowledgeable people in very different departments. Sorry. It was very rewarding. And then in the end, I was working for a big AAA company. After seven years, it was kind of clear that I had a very strong desire to make something of my own and that there was no avenue to do it within that company just because.

The only way for that to happen is that I miraculously got to be like a creative lead in my company. But at that point, you're going to continue making the game that company is known for. You're not going to make something different. And in my free time, I wasn't having a lot of success doing something creative that would satisfy me. So that's sort of like, I got into like a point where I'm like, I feel like if I continue working for this company, I'm going to be resentful.

and it's not going to be useful for anybody so i think i know i don't know exactly what i need to do but i think i need to create an answer of like how i quit game dev and naturally switch to like the most achievable creative process that i could do solo

see it's a comic book and uh yeah i see you've uh collaborated on a couple of games under the bad ladens yeah talk about those and what your your role on those games was yeah so like uh those were were mostly driven by my friend Rafa. He likes to do experimental and retro-oriented games. So he did a couple of iOS games. So I did help with... several aspects, like the iOS built on one of them, or some technical aspects of other games. I don't know if I particularly excel at one specific accent.

aspect of game dev. I was sort of interested in many fields. So I kind of like tried to be as much of a generalist as I could. In AAA, I technically work on gameplay, AI, and then graphics. But when it came to Badlands, I started to work mostly on what was necessary. Do you want to talk about games in specific? Sure. I mean, I wouldn't...

Sure, let's go for it. Let's see what happens. Yeah, I was only able to play Space Overlords. Nice. Soap Alley was not able to run on my device. Interesting, okay. that was is it you have an android or an ios device android probably android okay yeah it was and getting space overlords to run was a little bit annoying as well yeah

Android and iOS both like to throw up a bunch of scary warnings about, oh, no, this game was made over five years ago. So who knows? iOS straight up takes it off there. Yeah. the market yeah but yeah still runs fine um yeah it's interesting it's it's a a puzzle game um sort of like a pollo pop kind of thing. Yeah, they're the little things like that, yeah. With a, like, space indentured servitude wrapper around it.

Yeah. Very high concept. They were high concepts. Yeah. Uh, Rafa is, he's an interesting creative person. Um, yeah, that was, uh, I think both space overlords and soap alley were done on. acts and i think most of the help the help that i was doing was um butt fixing at this point like he was driving the core development and i was there to be like kind of like backseat designing kind of asking

suggesting ideas, doing QA, fixing small bugs if necessary, but I would say not a lot of bug fixing really. Just mostly QA. For SoulPali, I did a Game Boy inspired manual. along with it. That was kind of fun. That's very cool. Yeah. And then, yeah, I see you keep doing some experiments elsewhere. I do, yes. Looked through your GitHub a little bit, and I saw you just posted something.

for wastelands. And that's a play on Badlands, yeah. Some remarking. Is there any sort of methodology to this or is it just what you're thinking about and want to play around with? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's mostly like...

what my gut feels like programming at the time. I think I do like programming as a hobby and game development, but I very quickly understood that even in a team of people it's very hard to get something going like you have to be very very diligent with your vision even if you're doing it with unity or like i try x and a for a while and some got all

It's hard to get to do things on the side. I'm sure you know this. You have to be very explicit about this code that you want to do and how do you want to do things. And I figured that I'm like... If it's likely that I'm going to end up with something unfinished, just because of how it worked, I might as well do it on something that I enjoy learning. Otherwise, I have...

And I have not finished something and at the end of the day have learned a lot about Unity 5.3.2 specifically, which I may not necessarily enjoy. And I'm like, what if I just do something with an even smaller scope where I... learn about one specific aspect of the game development that I'm curious at the time. And then at the end of the day, I learn something about that specific part of game development that I do find enjoyable and useful.

So that's a lot of the reasons why I do these things. Like, it may be something like, oh, I wonder what, I don't know, platformer shadows work, and then suddenly I end up playing a lot of Mario games. taking GPU characters and see what they do. And I'm like, OK, that's fun. Let's see what I can implement and then try to reconstruct those techniques. So I think that's basically the drive on those things.

Nice. Well, I appreciate formal documentation of a lot of these on your website, which is the.badladins.com, by the way. I'm sure we'll have a link. Wow. It's nice to see sort of an official write-up and documentation of these projects, including a ludography section, which I love, which is sort of like... games maybe that inspired it or intertext for you to play along with it? Why did you start doing this? I think it came specifically from Soap Alley.

because it was very clearly inspired by many other games, and then Space Over Lords, too. So I think that's where that section came about. That's when a lot of these games began to be inspired by others. I think, actually... That may be when the website started and then all the other projects that were before that were added after the fact.

Well, it makes it very easy for us to do research, and I appreciate it. And get a feeling of who you are and what your creative practices are. Tell us more about your life outside of your craft, I guess. What's your relationship to games, first of all? I used to play a lot as a youth. Not so much anymore. Because time became less of a frequent resource, unavailable resource, suddenly when a game stops, respecting your time, it became more like an offense to me.

I think being burnt out from work doesn't help. I really like ARPGs, but suddenly ARPGs became too much. Like, excuse me, sir, if you don't pay me, I have no reasons to do the things that you asked me to do. Yeah, I've always enjoyed video games. I would say I really like the sort of epic journey in a vibrant world that JRPGs would give you. I always enjoyed that a lot.

so much care for the mechanics I think those were more like too tabletop for me specifically and I never cared for them and I think that kind of like adds to after playing 70 hours of each of them for a while. If you don't like the thing that you're doing for 70 hours, you're like, okay, I need to take a break from this. So I kind of like worked against myself in that way. So I don't play as much. That being said, I'm starting Final Fantasy XII.

and it's i'm enjoying it i feel like turns out spending four years doing the things that you like it helps a lot with burnout very true and now you're back to programming you're programming characters I would say it's a win-win situation. And you're not the first programmer we've interviewed that had a time period of burnout. You know, it's almost as if there's something in the industry lingering.

Turns out the only one who works for himself is the only one that we've interviewed that hasn't had it. You know, universal income, the solution for everybody. Post pod Ryan jumping in. After we had finished recording, we were sort of wrapping up, having a conversation. And Carlos let something slip about his past. And we decided to jump back on and let him tell you in his own words.

All right, Carlos, just disclose what you just told us. Yeah, when I was a teen in Spain and just learning about the internet, I was a member of a Final Fantasy Forum, and I run music radio with some friends. um jrpg music mostly final fantasy thing so it was like a podcast before podcast right i guess so but i i will admit i will i did only speak once and i was so uh

that it lasted 10 seconds. It was just dubious. And I'm like, never again. I will just stick to the playlist. Did you have a DJ name? I did not have a, well, at the time I was going for like, a username based on Lufia, the video game. So my username at the time was Lexis. There you go. Nice. But yeah, there was a lot of Final Fantasy variation.

albums like a lot of the what is it called like the Celtic songs or like you know like these versions that they released where it's like it's Chocobo but now it's a samba with people singing it or maybe Skies Above kind of like Black Mage's versions that Uematsu was releasing. It was a lot of that. I was a big fan of the piano collections. Did you preview these and then decide what you're going to put on the show? Oh yeah, of course. I had my own playlist, yeah.

I was a professional. Of course, Bayo. Of course. Yeah. Sometimes I would accidentally mess up the playlist and I was just playing either one song for like two hours. Because I was not always in front of the computer when it happened. But I reminded the five top users that we ever got didn't mind. You come back, there's like four notes. Why is the same song planned? No, you're ahead of your time. These are lo-fi beats to study to.

uh how about a non-video gaming hobby uh let's see i like um rock climbing i like um it's very naturey social and athletic that i enjoy so Kind of like hiking, but upwards. I don't so much like the one that is like hardcore strong, but like just more mellow and going up, up, up on a mountain, kind of like a vertical picnic. That's quite enjoyable. I also like exercising, going for runs. Just socializing with friends. I'd be really lucky to have friends who are like...

very eager to do frequent art hangouts. So if some of them live in Western Mass and I do like a weekly hangout with them on Wednesdays, it's very nice. And I try to organize one in Boston too, every once in a while. Yeah. I like going outside doing watercolors. That's nice. Sometimes kayaking with my partner, and then one person steers, the other person does the watercolor, and then we go back and forth. It's very chaotic, but it's also very rewarding.

I like camping, too, and hiking. I enjoy backpacking that I haven't done to the extent that Tim does. But it's equally enjoyable. I like nature. I don't know if you can. Hypnoties based on the game, but I like nature and animals. Yeah, the more we interview, the more the novel starts to make sense, right? Yeah.

But these rocky sceneries, lots of mountains, lots of road trips, lots of camping, right? Lots of animals. There's like a necessary scene involving a road too. Yeah. And when you did add color in that one section, it did remind me of watercolors a little bit.

Like the pale blue. There's two watercolors in the book that are actual watercolors. Oh, there we go. That's probably why. I would say I'm not good at them, but I enjoy them. Do you have... suggestions for other media that we should check out um well i what's pregnant for you this yesterday the 2000 something movie again it's a great movie that's always a recommendation um

Other media, I haven't thought about this for a while. I just read the second book in the Sweet Bloody Problem series. It is... It's very much in the line of other Asimov books in terms of character building. So every character is kind of like a cardboard. But the sci-fi ideas are very enjoyable. I think they were fine.

Let's see. In terms of comic books, I really like Kate Beaton. She did Harker Background and other web comic styles, but recently she did Ducks, which is really good. Faith Therene Hicks. is also really good. I grew up with Bone by Jeff Smith. Yeah. There's like heavy influences. You can see Bone, yeah, in your work.

yeah also like i tried to but like i didn't get to that level of nausicaa the book by miyosaki it's also beautiful um there's a lot of like the visual narrative style of early Toriyama also heavily influenced like how like he did a lot of like the if you're reading right to left you're probably gonna see the character first doing the kick

then the face of the other character noticing the kick, and then the sound effect of the evasion. So suddenly you're seeing three things within a panel, and I was always obsessed with that, like how well that worked, at least how I read comics. So that also heavily influenced what it is. what support mechanisms do you have in place um ah let's see i've had great life having like a very loving and supporting family and set of friends

who are also very eager to maintain contact overseas. I'm very privileged to be able to maintain contact with friends in San Francisco and all over Europe. So I think that's an important one. And that's one that I didn't realize was so important to me until I started to finish the book and I read it and I was like, ah, like the themes were like accidentally placed around the book.

Yeah, I would say also the friends in the Boston area. I'm really happy with the circle that I have. My partner is amazing exercising. I like being active, being outdoors, camping. Yeah. Here's a question for you. What was it like telling your partner that you wanted to quit your nice AAA job to make a graphic novel?

Well, the interesting part is that the first date happened within two months of me quitting. The first date is like, what is it that you do? And I'm like, well, I'm actually working on a graphic novel.

I just quit my job. So I would say it was great. Well, you know they're not with you for the money then. Yeah, they're definitely not. My family used to joke just because of how I... transition work-wise within like going to work as a mobile web company in california right out of college then transitioning of video games and then quitting my job and like every job decision that i make

i cut my salary by half so like now i'm like after like the game development i think like the only way to go from now is zero salary what a fun joke

Since we're interviewing you for the Discord Game Club, we want to ask you a little bit about how you found Dev Game Club. I don't know how I found it. I want to say it was probably in the...

2018 19 area like i was probably looking for podcasts that were about video games by video game developers i want to say that i probably heard it through them i kind of i really like the final fantasy 9 series probably i was i'm not sure i it's probably everybody's first one yep yeah yeah i really enjoyed i was like

people who are very knowledgeable about the field but also approaching a lot of the games as castle users because they don't spend a lot of time playing most of the games or the style of game that they approach so it's nice to be like

oh, you're starting to work in Final Fantasy 6, but actually everything is very confusing to you, which is very different than the Discord that you normally see on a podcast about Final Fantasy 6. At that point, a lot of people have to guard out everything about the game.

So approaching that from a game development point of view is really nice. And I really like their takes on the industry and their values. I think they're lovely to listen to. Yeah, and then I feel like the Discord... I had heard the podcast for a while, and then I was working at a time, and I was in that period where I had sort of figured out that I was dissatisfied and I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew it was probably not long-term.

what the company that I was working for. And it was around the time that Twinsense was coming up, I think. Because I remember I applied and then I had an interview with Brett, actually. I don't know if he remembers it. And it was during that interview that I realized that I was burnt out. Because there was a very nice way of interviewing where he's very open about questions that you have. And all of my questions were like, so what it feels like.

working in a place that is completely unsatisfactory and after like five years releasing and he was like okay so they they did go with a different candidate but i kind of like the vibes of the conversation i'm like this is I feel like it could be a nice community. And at the time, Discord was really launching, I think. So that's how I landed on the Discord channel, I think. Do you have a game that they should play? A game that they should play? Let's see.

I would go for like very weird Japanese games like you know like the what is the game about the fish from the Dreamcast with a face? Oh, uh, Seaman. Yeah, Seaman would be a good one. Or like these weird JRPGs, like, um, uh, is it Julie the one that you're kissing around people? Hmm, which one? I don't remember. there's like an rpg where like your main action is uh kissing people i don't know if i know that one i can't i'm liking on the name but like weird esoteric games like that could be fun

If you think of it, I'll insert what the name is, if you remember one of those. Carlos did remember that it is Tulip, is the name of the JRPG he was talking about. I can find it, yeah, but I feel like at the end of the day, it's like... They have a process that really works for them, so whatever continues within that process. I'd feel horrible if I tell them you should play Donkey Kong Country 2 when they absolutely do not enjoy it.

Do you have a pillar or a takeaway from their podcast? I really like how a lot of both of their personalities are based around kindness. I think that's very important.

how it manifests towards how they work with other people and also how they relate to the work like you don't never see them being like suspicious or like um hateful uh which is really appealing um curiosity the curiosity that they that they have is also really nice have you learned anything from a podcast that changed the way you you approach games or any of your other practices

I think so. Probably the patience. They clearly have a lot of patience to play some of these games. I don't know how they do it. I don't. But listening stick. to games that they necessarily don't necessarily enjoy and then coming back to it week after week. There's always something within a game that you eventually get out of even if you don't like the main mechanic of it.

And that's something that I've started doing now. Even if I don't fully enjoy a game, just sitting with it, I'm like, you know what, that's fine. It's going to be like 12 hours of not the most perfect experience. And then you discover it's like, oh, wow, the writing team had a lot of fun with this.

It's always nice to find that aspect of it, even if as a whole it may not land, the individual aspects are always something that are worth experiencing. So, yeah, I'd say the patience to stick with these pieces. Nolan once said something. I don't know if he said it when he was streaming or if it was in a Discord chat that there's a lot of reasons to play games and it's not always like fun isn't always the only one that people can shoot for.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think for me, it's like when the game clearly is about fun and you're not having it, it's the one that is like, I think I'm missing the mark. But then if you stick with it, you will probably see something that is enjoyable. Or at least you'll learn something, right? If they are aiming to make fun, right, their ultimate goal, and it's not hitting the mark for you, then I think it's very instructive to look at that.

Yeah, I've been trying for a year and a half now to go through The Last of Us 2, even though it's not a game that kind of fits with my player personality very well. But it's nice to stick with it. And every once in a while, it's like, oh, wow, the way they tackle the sound, the colors, and eventually the cutscene in this area is impeccable. And I'm glad that I stick for that. Do you have any ideas or suggestions to improve the Discord?

improve the discord i don't know i think that it's a very healthy and nice community i like it a lot i think you're doing great it's very nice of you uh yeah i think you know what i do i do have one i do have one great here we go we need a reaction emoji that is just thanks i don't know what to say whenever something is like just say thanks i know yes i know fire heart

Maybe the heart's brain. But they don't wipe from the things. We'll get Mark on it. Yeah, right? Or loss later. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks.

Since recording, LostLake has actually added a thank you emote for the Discord. No, I'm curious about Calamity's thoughts on that exponential approach, but if there's no time, we can do it offline if you want. Oh, I've got time, if you've got time. I have time, yeah. Get into it, Nolan. This is it. This is your chance. Yeah, I read one of your blog posts and had a lot of thoughts about it. Yeah, let's...

Wow. No, I'm interested. You're sending me YouTube videos that I had to watch. Yeah, Bio got the first blast of it. Yeah. You wrote a blog post in 2019. about an exponential approach tool. And just to set up the problem a little bit, this is something that I've been ranting about for about 15 years now. But a lot of game developers... use the lerp function or linear interpolation, which all it does is it has three parameters. You give it a start.

value, an end value, and then a percentage between them. And it'll give you back what that is. So if you give it a start value of zero and a end value of 10. and then a percentage of 50 or 0.5, then it'll give you back a 5. That's halfway between it. If you give it a 0 and a 10 and a 0.25, it'll give you 2.5. So that's what it's for. It's to linearly interpolate between two positions. That is, just give you the percentage between the start and the end. Back.

Unity, in its early years, had documentation that... In like in their official documentation online for the lerp function gave an example code that Every frame it would have you move towards something by using the slurp function. It would say your start position is whatever your current position is, and then your target position, and then a percentage movement there.

And then they also, you know, you could vary it by the amount of time to make it frame rate independent. But that was their basic function. So every frame you'd move a percentage closer to it. This is a terrible approach, in my opinion, because it's literally Zeno's paradox. You're moving a percentage of the amount of distance left towards a target every single frame. You'll never get there.

And it's only through the way floating point numbers work, where it gets infinitely small and you can't represent it anymore, that it ever resolves. So you took a different approach, though. So when you are approaching something, you... uh took that same sort of idea but rewrote the formula for it so that's just a setup do you want to talk about your exponential approach tool um yeah let's see i feel like it is not so much

So the problem that you're explaining, I think, still remains with my formula. I think it's... It does. I was going to get to that. Yeah, yeah. So it's a similar way of thinking of if you always have...

a target point ahead of you and you continue to move the target, you're never going to reach target if you restate with the same equation, which I think is fine because I think at least with the... let's see from the current position yeah so like that problem still arises there the problem is when

Let's assume for a second that we're not in that case, where you're just saying, I'm going to make something go alpha from 0 to 100 from the original position. Let's assume that you're not restating from the source. A lot of people do the, let's make the approach a factor of the difference. So every frame you kind of like get less.

closer to the end so that initially you go really fast and then you kind of like land which is an exponential curve and then the problem with that is if you run that same code instead of 30 frames per second 60 seconds per second then the number of times you're

checking out the difference is different, so you move faster or slower. So that's something that happens often in code. And a way to fix that is to make that instead of making every step related on the difference of the destination and your current position, or the origin, make it so that it's based on a time variable, so that then... When you actually write a different frame rates, it's supposed to work the same way. In practice, if you do it the way you're doing, I think it's probably similar.

been a while since I thought about this. So I think the issue that you're describing should probably be the same. What would be the way to solve what you're thinking? So, right, your approach is it rewrites the formula and um based on basically uh the distance traveled right it recalculates what it should be at i think that your core problem here is that you're using how far you've traveled

as input for the next one, which obviously will create a disjointed function. So the way that I approach this is instead of... uh having it go until it reaches a target position i have it go until it reaches a certain time right i define ahead of time how long it should take on this approach and then

use that index to look up a function and set the position based on that. So I have a continuous function defined. It can be the exponential approach that you want. It can be something else. I really like an S-curve.

you know it kind of starts off slow and then it accelerates and then slows down again at the end it it you get both kind of the ojive um yeah so you guys you sort of have like you sort of have like the origin and the end as inputs all the time, and just the time is the next input for each frame.

Correct. You just look at how much time has elapsed since you started moving. And then you can plot yourself in that continuous function no matter where it is. All right. And then you don't have to rely on...

rounding point errors to actually end, and you know exactly how long it's going to take, right? The other issue that I have with these step-by-step approaches is that you don't have a a fixed end point right it can go longer based on how the calculations go based on what the numbers happen to be right they may be able to continue next step if the floating point numbers can actually represent that right if they have a map for it and oftentimes it goes

a lot longer than developers realize it's going for. If you're like printing what it is every step, you're like, oh, this is actually at the end, really getting down. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that... It was a very interesting approach and a much better one than just using a linear interpolation or a different type of interpolation because it does make it frame rate independent.

Right? That's a huge issue there. Because, again, in the original Unity code, they're just multiplying the difference left by the time elapsed. Yeah, and then you're basically making a speed that is traveling, but the speed is a percentage of the distance left. So that obviously makes no sense. It kind of makes it an exponential approach accidentally at the end.

Yeah, because the way you're describing my code is probably like every frame. It's not this. Sorry, I'm just doing a visual motion. It's not the full curve for the whole version of the frames. Every frame is a minimal version of that curve, right? Yeah. Well, so I liked what your tool did, which you created a little playground so that people could plot out what curve they wanted, right? And then they'd get back the function to do that.

So in theory, in a perfect world, right, where you are integrating along that as like, you know, the distance between your frames approaches zero, then you get a perfect curve. It works. But we live in a world where you have so many frames per second, right? And even if they are, you know, if there are hundreds of them, you still run into this issue. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem. It makes sense.

got this technique from a AAA game that was not gameplay driven. It's more like vibes and peaceful. So it makes sense that the actual lining up of the target didn't match. I'd have to think about it. I think there's like a visual... Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, it's extremely common in the games industry, which is why I've been...

ranting about this for 15 years, right, is because it's an approach that most everyone uses. And then the video I sent bio was from Freya Homer. who is a game dev and mathematician last year, gave like an hour long talk on sort of fixing this approach and came up to a very similar conclusion that you did.

But you had yours, whatever, five years earlier. I actually found many people doing this. After the fact, I found three different versions of these articles going around. I'm like, man, this is... google is not doing great for searching these things but yeah different kind of forms yeah it's been a while since i've thought about it but yeah no that's a fun mental exercise

but no this is this is maybe a me thing but i just like playing around on wolfram alpha and like plotting out different curves and like a lot of the the stuff that i build in my games i I think I actually did this on a stream once when I was doing a dev stream, but I just like go there. I'm like, okay, let me figure out what this function is. Right. And plot it from zero to one and figure out the curve that I want. And then I just re-implement that.

in the game, and then I know that no matter how long on this time scale, right, and I can multiply it, whatever I want at that point. I'll have an index into this function and it'll always be there. Even if I have one frame a second, I'll know it'll be in the exact correct location. Yeah. Because the problem is when the target doesn't move, then you're never going to have the arrow paradox here. That's interesting. Yeah, I don't know. That is a good point. This is assuming a static.

uh position but i also feel like you don't want a situation as a game dev where if something's moving it takes longer to get there right you don't want something yeah i think i would say it's just it's harder to see any changes on Especially with a lot of the different curves of motion, especially, it's very hard to figure out if it's been fast or slow, just because the human brain is so fast, it's like understanding that as the default.

So when you're playing, it's like, this feels wrong. But like every second I play it, it feels different. So when the target is moving, I find that it's harder to figure out what the math is actually doing. there are several layers like seven multiple variables are changing at the same time so it's kind of like hard to isolate what is actually taking longer absolutely and yeah when you were mentioning earlier like

Does anyone do math as a hobby? And I'm like, I kind of do math as a hobby. I don't think it counts. If you're in computer science, you're kind of like out of ideation already. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, I got a math minor when I graduated.

I use math a lot in my game design. Oftentimes to the chagrin of my... collaborators because they'll be like what is this you know i like define my own easing functions and i'm like yeah this is just don't worry about this whatever you know cubic ease in out function that i made up just

i mean you can use it like you would a lerp it's fine yeah and you can write a comment and have them put in a wall from alpha on like graph toy or something that's always super useful yeah 100 but yeah that was my when i saw that blog post i was like oh boy let's get into it yeah Sorry to drag you down into that. And especially in game dev, there's like a lot of the iPhone something that sort of works and then you never look at it again kind of thing. Yeah.

Well, and, you know, these are games. They don't need to be 100% perfect, right? Good enough is, you know, the best way to go for a lot of these things.

the feeling that you want then why would you go back and like optimize it especially because there's no way that that's you know your your limiting problem that is like running a couple of extra If, for example, if you want to move a character so that they play a canned animation and you want the canned animation to start within some degrees, I could see this being an issue because then your character may always be like point something degrees off.

from the animation so like this is something that i could believe it comes up in cases right or if you know in games where you have a million particles that need to do something right this is if you're doing the same calculation over and over again then you want to make sure that that is uh efficient but Again, I don't think that that's going to be your limiting factor in most cases. Yeah, most of the time you're not. It's just a fun...

I think the math of games is something that I kind of like diving into. But yeah, I will check out that video that you suggested. I will send it to you for sure. On a math note, Nolan, I always, he always sends me like coordinates and I'm always like, Oh, I have to flip it. Cause I'm so used to a table being like a matrix, like in math. So one, one to me is the upper left.

Oh my goodness. There we go. That's wrong. No, well, it's also the math, right? Because that's the Cartesian coordinate system is, you know, zero zero is your lower left. So I think you're wrong. Yeah, every time we send map coordinates, I'm always like, let me flip the Y. But then also, right, if you're dealing with image coordinates.

then oftentimes in game development the zero zero is upper left which is depending on where where you're like yeah it depends on the text coordinates of where you're doing open gl direct tags or like eye space from the camera like the y could be up or down but then if it's up or down but your c is in the same orientation that suddenly you have like a right-handed versus left-handed coordinate system which is mostly fine but suddenly the whatever annual computation we were doing

kind of are flipped so suddenly it's like what is my whatever off yeah some of those things that are like a single sign makes such a difference in many ways down the line yeah And like Unity versus Unreal versus Blender have different coordinate systems you have to think in. It's yeah, it's all very silly. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that. Yeah. Well, yeah, a lot of. I'm also someone who I'm very math brained. And so when I see people just go into to like modeling.

software right and it's like start moving things around i'm like no i want this to i want to like move the vertices and like get the coordinate system and like move them myself right like i i'd almost much rather build the mesh myself from vertices than like go into a 3d system and just like throw stuff around so and i often do a lot of just like procedural mesh generation yeah i was just like in the one of the um

projects you were mentioning about programming was like the assigned distance fields and that was a lot of like building shapes out of just math formulas and be like okay but there's a circle here and then you sort of union it like boolean operations with different shapes Or, like, whatever. That was kind of fun in its own way. Yeah. Yeah. I love that stuff. So, yeah, there you go. Math is a hobby. Math is a hobby. We should do it.

yeah but like if you're like if you see a painter who's like yeah in my free time i like to do differential equations like okay that i don't know chances that you are a psychopath that has killed people suddenly maybe this is hollywood media like the way they have painted math as a hobby but i have not met a single person who's like yeah i like to do heavy math well well maybe we should make a math club maybe you should make a mark yeah

Dev Matlab, yeah. Great. All right. Well, that's, yeah, that's what I wanted to rant about a little bit. Thank you for going on that journey with me. And thank you so much for the interview. This was... a lot of fun and very enlightening to to get a peek into your process yeah thank you so much yeah thank you yeah we'll we'll ask you to uh to plug your stuff so where can we find you um

Let's see, I sort of have landed on to just putting everything about me in my website, which is just crljmb.com. And that sort of has a link to my comic book. my whatever code you want to see in some portfolio. But yeah, just CRLJMB.com. If you're interested in just the comic books, you can check Carlos Hambrina with a Spanish J at Radiator Comics.

Nolan, where can people find you? Yeah, if you want to hear more of me, you can see me on Twitch at twitch.tv slash calamitynolan or play my games at upatnight.games. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Discord Game Club, Just Rhetoric. We want to thank Brett and Tim for making the Dev Game Club podcast and for giving us a slot in their release feed. We also want to thank Mark and Artimage for starting the Discord Game Club podcast.

Go listen to those episodes if you haven't already. If you'd like to hear more interviews like these, let us know. You can find us in the Dev Game Club Discord, where Calamity Nolan and Biostats. Goodbye!

So I do want to ask, and maybe what we'll do is we'll stick this at the very end after the outro. A little spoilers for your graphic novel. Okay. Because I think it's sort of related to what we were just talking about.

is even in the graphic novel you have commenting on the novel itself right because you have the piece where he's um essentially in Ona's hand drawing a history of the of what has happened up to this point right so it's one character sort of forcing another character to draw it like in that in that parent helps kid style um and I think that

That goes with what you're just talking about where how you're often commenting on the things that have influenced what you're currently making. I guess that's a good point. Yeah. That section specifically of the book. came about so like like i guess like the macro way of how like the book came together is like i said earlier like i had a beginning very clear narrative intro in my head

sort of like a way of that landing into something else but nothing in between. So from the beginning a lot of the process of me opening the textpad and figuring out what I want to write as a script was like very Yes, and if I had an idea and my gut said that's an entertaining way for these characters to move, I'm like, let's go for it. And then initially it's like, OK, I need to introduce these two characters and somehow join the main characters. How does that work?

they have a robot that tracks them. And then there's a fight with robot. And I kind of work that in. And then naturally, it's like, oh, well, now there's an interaction with these two characters. And then after that, I'm thinking, well, I need these two characters to go on a road trip together. How is that going to work?

How about if this interaction that just happened ended in a way that these characters are homeless and they have to camp together for a while? OK, well, now I have that. And they keep moving.

And now I have to like, how do I convey the passage of time and the road trip? Like, well, let's try to make a webcomic style because that allows me to do vignettes. And then after a while, I'm like... well i should introduce parts of the plot that i need to i know i need to start making and after a while if like there's a natural point or like this is the perfect spot let's do it and then some characters they're supposed to do something interesting they haven't there hasn't been any like

action for a while so I came up with like a weird fight or like chase with a giant crocodile lizard thing and I never liked things that don't have

a lot of consequence, like if the stakes are so low, I don't feel like they're interesting. So I'm like, OK, well, now the group is split. Sorry, this is like small spoilers. But that's sort of how it naturally explores. And then after a while, the plot starts developing in a way that like adding more and more aspects to it no longer start contributing like they kind of like make it grow so like at that point I'm thinking like

then we need to start thinking about the pieces that I have and how it lands. So suddenly the script writing process is no longer about just and and more like maybe.

So there's a lot of alternate scripts that get written. Do I focus on this character? Do I focus on the other group? Do I kind of interlace their storylines? And I write different versions of each, and I kind of wait for a day and read that and think.

How does that want to work out? And then I realized like, okay, so like interlacing the storylines makes sense narratively. Because it naturally means that I have a jumping point for these characters to do something, then wait, and then the next time I come to... to them, it makes sense that they have thought about this thing and then move to the next step. But it also means that the other characters that are doing nothing other than being the other part of the group.

I don't have anything to say about that. So I'm like, okay, what do I do? And then immediately I'm like, what does this silly character who's kind of wacky do with a kid? I'm like, what if I do a children's book?

And then I can do a meta conversation about the book, kind of like summarizing the book, kind of like moving it forward in a certain direction very exclusively. It's fun for me, and it also works with like the... secondary narrative um line that needs breaks so that's how like that idea came about of um let's do a children's book let's color it because that could be fun

And then when it comes later into the next books, the script writing process now takes even longer because now it's like, okay, so I have set my characters into this situation. I kind of want them to... be in this other place plot-wise, and now I have very a finite amount of pages now. So like, how do I do it? And then the script writing process is like, there's several iterations. Like, okay, what if this happens? No, that's not quite.

What if chirp arrives now? It's like, well, that could work, but when does it happen? So I rewrite it and rewrite it. And then when it gets towards the end, the final scenes, where it's like, now the characters need to figure out this and react in this way.

like okay that seems like a reasonable thing for these characters to do but i need to convey that in 20 pages like okay and then at that point i write the script don't like it rewrite it like seven times and then do the sketches of those pages several times don't like it do it again and that process takes like suddenly longer and then by book five which is like finally figuring out what the

arcs that I have laid out almost accidentally without thinking about things. Like kind of like thinking about them, I'm like, okay, these are the pieces that I have narratively. I need them to go to the end in a satisfactory way. So at that point, the writing and sketching pages took a long time. It was like...

almost three, four months of just rewriting sets of 20 pages so many times. It's like page 254B, 254C, rewriting it, adding more pages, being like, at some point near the end, there's like a... summary piece that kind of explains what has been like very quickly happening in the last four books that's also something that happened very late of like no let's rewrite that and let's try it again which is kind of like silly because i because it's a printed book

left and right pages matter. So like if you open the next page, you're kind of like resetting and the thing that you see, it works towards the right page.

So if I add one page explaining like a background thing, suddenly all of the latest pages turn into write pages and then the effects that don't change. So there's a lot of rewriting. But yeah, I would say all of the meta situations of how it writes, how there's like... sketchbook pages on top of the page or like photos or all of those things are things that I found were fun to do that also solved the problem that I had at the time narratively.

It all seems very elegant, right? You're solving multiple problems. And I think what makes it very fun is that it's also... the characters expressing themselves right so i you know the section you're talking about where runo uh all of a sudden starts drawing a kid's book it starts off by him mimicking what echo had been doing with blogs but he he can't quite do it and he misspells it uh and and you know you get to figure out just from like the layout of the page

um a little bit more about these characters that you're spending time with and so i really appreciated all of that work and now hearing you know how thoughtful you were and how much you had to iterate to get there uh it makes a lot of sense how why it was so effective i also love that um you incorporated runo's unreliability in the in the remembrance of of the events right like that's that to me was such a great great little touch thank you it was also hard to get to play with those things but

still make it narratively cohesive. Because sometimes if you push it too hard, it's like, oh, it would be funny if this character does this and this, even though that's completely untrue. But then suddenly, well, that's completely going to ruin the...

perspective of some people reading the book because they suddenly don't know. So finding the balance was hard. So I feel like, yeah, there's definitely a lot of police, even on these small things like, oh, these characters running left, and I need to convey that they suddenly had an idea.

and have been turned right. OK, how do I do it? Like, OK, well, you're going to be reading from right to left to the next page. So you're kind of like maybe adding momentum with your eyes. So like maybe I can just push the panel at any bit to the left. So those ideas of trying to make sure that the movement happens, but also with the narrative side of like...

It's fun for this character to say this, but also it's kind of useful for this story. So what is the best version that satisfies those issues? And I say that that is one of the aspects where being the only person clearly... creatively working on this was really satisfying because i could have like all of these different things that i wanted to solve in front of me and thinking oh i see i have a solution for this or like thinking actually the solution that i have

is not kind of the most reasonable. But I have another solution that is really fun that only solves A, B, and C. And the problem D that I also want D to solve. Maybe I can just nuke it, or maybe I can just make it not a problem or something like that.

like switching the plot point and um the structure based on my specific creative process was really fun i would say it's not great for project management because it turns out that suddenly you're like three more months just doing an underwater scene because you decided that that was fun but it was really rewarding to do all right sorry i'll drop that in the end as a spoiler section but okay

But just the meta-commentary on the programming sort of reminded me of the meta-commentary on the novel. Yeah, that's fun to do. It's hard. I feel like you probably have experienced this. You spend so much time working on a project and then having to spend an additional extra time, almost an equal amount of time to explain it and catalog it, it's work.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very bad at it. So I'm, you know, whenever I see someone do it well, I'm like, oh, let me steal some of that. Make it a little bit easier on myself.