Discord Game Club Ep 8

Hello, Brett here. Tim had some unscheduled travel come up this week, and so we were not able to record our fourth and final Fez episode. In the meantime, I've dug into our Discord Game Club vault for this interview with Michael Betts, one of the developers of Tower Song, by our hosts Biostats and Calamity Nolan. If that's not your thing, please join us next week when we were... I'm really hoping Tim at least gets the 32 cubes. Be well.

Welcome to Discord Game Club's Just Rhetoric, a podcast where Nolan and myself interview content. Today we are excited to have game developer Michael Betts, co-founder and game director of Omega Entertainment. I am your host Ryan, or Biostats on the Discord, and I will let them introduce themselves right now. Hey, everybody. I'm Nolan, Calamity Nolan in the Discord. And I'm Michael Betts. I think just Michael in the Discord. Very creative. Thanks for having me, guys.

Happy to be here. A little background is you are a principal in the company as well as the lead developer and story designer for Towersong. Yeah, that's correct. I... Quit my day job in 2022. Yeah, I guess that's right. To make video games, quickly decided I didn't want to be a solo dev, as popular as that can be in the indie scene. I didn't want to do that. I didn't trust myself to make good decisions. So I then formed the studio with a

Longtime buddy of mine. Actually, we met each other through, really became good friends. We met each other at board game nights, became really good friends playing Pathfinder. I was the... the DM and he was, he was my gunslinger. Um, Which I think taught us both a lot about game design. And so I knew he was a good person to bring on board when I decided to do this thing. Now that Tower Song is out, do you want to give the two-minute overview to sell a couple copies?

I'd love to sell at least a couple. Yeah. Yeah. So Tower Song is a 2D JRPG. The focus is on deliberate, crafted, and challenging battles over repeated random grinds. You can choose from one of four different... pre-made player characters to be your voice or avatar for the game. Each of those four characters have You know, each of the classes in the game, you know, very unique class. Really kind of inspired a lot by Dungeons & Dragons kind of class design.

So the same story will play out, but with each character, which is the four different characters you pick, you know, you get slightly different, uh, cut scenes, all the dialogues different for each ones. And of course the, how you play is different for each. by far the most popular pick, it seems. for good reason, is the witch Tally and her familiar Gigi. I love this because Gigi is based on our cat, Gigi. who sadly we lost November 2022, basically right after I started making the game.

So at that point, he actually already had a cameo in the game. There's a little cat you could walk up and talk to. And I said, no, he has to be a character. He has to be a party member. He's got his own abilities and spells. He needs to be in this game. And then we actually put the game into early access. on that anniversary in 2023. So when you first run the game, hit a new game, you'll see GG's face there forever.

That's great. Yeah, we both played Tower Song in the last couple of weeks. We did a little game club. Ryan and I made sure we picked different characters and kind of compared the notes. a good time and i guess that was the the basic one because i picked the the witch and cat that's the right answer you gotta sir gg's never the wrong answer it's true i made a mistake putting him into the game and you know it's really really bad for the other three really yeah it's so funny don't start

just prior to me and so i was like i think i'm gonna pick the the witch that has the cat and he's like i already did that one like you got you gotta you gotta pivot really i should have given everyone a cat you know give give the fighter like a little gerbil or something everyone should have a little pet with them so we can feel like they're yeah lessons learned for your next game

I'll do that in the sequel. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So who did you end up picking, Ryan? So I went with the mech slash Technolance. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Quick programming update, the music in the interstitials comes from Tower Song, and the composer is Will Aylshire. what made you quit your job in 2022 i would say You have to have multiple things that have to be in place for you to make a kind of crazy decision like that.

I definitely had a good support instructions in place with my wife, then fiance. Uh, I had the savings that I had from selling, um, a house that I wisely bought in like 2013 before the market blew up. Then COVID happened. Everything was worth two or three times more. And I'm like, now it's time to sell and collect a bunch of money. So I kind of had, I had the money, had the support of my wife.

I have been, I would say, in the game development community since... freshman year, sophomore year of high school. Like, you know, so many of us, you know, playing around with different tools. I actually got my start, the first thing I ever did. Well, actually, you know, my first thing of doing game development was in... probably first grade with logo writer. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that, but

It's really basic scripting language, and you can draw stuff on the screen with a turtle. That was kind of the thing they put in. It's like teaching kids at a program. It's like, hey, make the turtle move over here. Now you've drawn a triangle. And I remember I made like a little adventure game that my teacher couldn't finish for my final project. So, I mean, I've loved games since I met them. So I've always been, you know, any chance I got, I've been playing around with them.

So anyway, I actually went in 2004 for two years. I went to DigiPen up in Seattle. to do video game programming. decided that I kind of hated programming and left the school, but I always wanted to go back to that as a career. I mean, that had been my idea to be a career from the beginning.

always in the back of my mind and someday i'm gonna go back i'm gonna be i'm gonna go into game development somewhere so the stars were kind of right uh did the incantations and the summoning and and decided to quit my job and uh and give it go You actually went to DigiPen. Sorry. I know for me growing up, that was sort of like the only... game program around with DigiPen. And I've actually never met someone who went there, so that's interesting to hear.

Actually, the game director on our follow-up game that we're publishing is a DigiPen alumni. He actually graduated, and that's how we met. Yeah, so if you ever get to meet him, that'll be two people. There you go. Can you tell us a little bit more about your game studio? Where did the name Omega Entertainment come from? How many people were you located? Just what's your story there?

This is a really silly story. The name came from, so I used this name, Omega Entertainment, as my website in 2001 to publish my StarCraft maps, and then later my RPG Maker game. And the reason it was called Omega Entertainment with an I, in case anyone's trying to Google me, just go to oi.games. They're trying to go there. Anyway.

is I took an AutoCAD class in like junior year and I decided to make like while I was in a class I'm gonna make a logo from my website and I made it I was able to make a donut and I was able to make a little like i lowercase i and I was like okay I'll make a name out of this uh omega entertainment because that's how 16 year olds you know make creative branding decisions and so i when i came back to this at the time when i started making tower song i really

Although I took the game design seriously, I didn't take the business seriously. And I was like, you know, let's just reference that old school thing. That'll be fun. That'll be cute. Of course, not thinking like, what if I actually want this to be a business that people can Google or anything?

I was like, well, I'll reuse old stuff and I'll get an old school looking logo and I'll try to, I just want, I want it to feel kind of retro. I'm making an RPG maker game, which is what Tower Song is. Let's just, let's just lean into it. I felt like the right, right decision. So I was living in Seattle at the time, and I now live in Vancouver, Washington, which is right across the river from Portland, Oregon.

partner is from Colorado. I don't want to get to how specific all these people want me to get, but he's from Colorado, which is where I'm originally from. And he's our, I would say, our lead systems designer. And he was a...

He helped me with the design on Tower Song. We didn't really have a lead designer on Tower Song, but he was a big part of that, especially the class design. I think Ryan was mentioning that he likes the mech character as Owen. That was Nate's baby. That was such a great idea. That's his name, Nate. And then Ishan joined.

about halfway through development. He's from the Seattle area as well as our programmer. I think I actually met him through the wonderful Seattle Indies community, which any of our Pacific Northwest game indie people probably know of. If not, you should look it up. And then kind of now the team has grown. So Ishin, his partner is an artist named Annie. So I was like, great, you come with an artist. So we kind of brought her into the team.

And then Nate's friend, Chris, who is kind of a marketing guru. We brought him on to help us with marketing, but then also kind of get him going into game design as well. I'd say we have five staff right now. It's been fun. We also have some artists. I would say maybe our extended family. We've got the composer, Will A.L. Shire, who did the soundtrack for Tower Song that you've hopefully all been enjoying.

and uh you know we had we had a pixel artist as well um i will just say he goes by matt i'll butcher his polish name if i try to pronounce it um But he, and he also is, and we have the other team that we're working with. They're not particularly proud of the studio. I won't get too far in the weeds on that, but. You've got a lot of close connections here that you've brought everyone in and you're all making games together. That's great.

Yeah, I think I felt, you know, especially, you know, we were a self-funded startup and we are a self-funded startup. Everybody's working with their spare time and their spare dollars. It was really important to me from the beginning that we can feel like a family, that we feel like we're in this together, that we're not just trying to make a buck off each other because we also didn't figure we would make a buck.

And I always said to the beginning, you know, I wanted to start as I meant to go on, meaning let's treat each other now the way we would treat each other if we had a million dollars and everybody was doing this full time. So it's been important to. And I've told people, you know, first, we are humans making games before we are a company producing products. So, you know, people need time off or we've got conflicts or, you know, we feel like we want to crunch.

you know we're all crunching a little bit working in our spare time but um There were points at which some of us were more full-time, and, you know, it's just... Let's make decisions that work for us as people, not whether or not it's necessarily the smartest choice for a business or the product, whatever that means. And I think when you do that, you end up getting... good products um anyway because you treat your people right and and they're all on board and you know So...

And we've kind of gone for a little bit of a co-op model as well. So now, so I initially had like a kind of business myself brought in Nate Montgomery as the... as a kind of second business owner and now you know the artist annie she's now also a co-owner so now we have three owners i and we invited ishan he wanted nothing to do with it it's just that way it's like no i don't want to deal with the money stuff leave me out of it i just want to

do my code and and i was like okay well then annie annie represents the two of you so i'll consider a co-op that way but That's important to us, too. You know, obviously, we don't have the money. We don't have staff. We're not in a position to not lay off people. But just seeing how that has gone the last really couple of years.

You know, I just want to put us in a position where everybody has a stake, you know, and if we do have to sell out and then all get fired and everybody gets paid for that, right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, you have a structure where everyone has a voice. How do you, as a company, decide what kind of games to make? How do you make decisions?

And this is why it's important. It's a tight-knit studio. We all basically have to come to the decision together. That's obviously would be impossible if there was 100 of us, but there's five of us. And really only three of us who care about the business side of things. Like I said, Ishan, you know, I don't care. Leave me alone. Just tell me which game I'm working on. I'll work on it. Okay. That's like for our second project.

you know, after Tara's song, you know, Annie and Ishan were saying, were telling me, you know, we're going to keep making games. I'm like, well, then let's do it together. And Nate also had a game idea, and I didn't really have a game idea. So we kind of just put a couple game ideas out there, and we just kind of looked at it like, what are we in the mood to work on? Because if we don't feel like working on it, why force it? Especially because we're still trying to kickstart this.

And then also there's an element of like, do we feel like there is a successful business strategy here? Do we think we could sell this game? We actually talked about making a mobile game next.

but realized that... I mean, something that we'd be excited about and that wouldn't be gross and all that, but we also realized we don't know how to sell a mobile game yet, so maybe we should take some time to figure that out before we go on board to... making a mobile game we kind of understand how to sell a game on steam like tower song so let's do another one of those first to see if we can get any better at that and then we can talk about a mobile game that could be fun but

So there's an element of just, because everybody has a stake, it's, well, what does the business want? Obviously, everybody wants the business to succeed. And then everybody's... tied to it so i think uh worked and as far as like how what that works to pick the second project for the third project will that work again i don't know but probably um i i think with with major decisions i mean general with everything we've kind of just

And I think the model will be just kind of her project, who's making the calls on this thing. So now I'm acting as a producer. So I'm making calls about timeline, scope, schedule. But we have a game director for our next game, which is Annie. And so she's going to make calls about what's right for that game. But then we just let everybody talk, let everybody have a voice.

And generally, I think when you have, I think the most important thing is when you just, everybody has the same intention. We all want to make the best game we can. You don't get into a ton of fights anyway. I think what we've had is like really good debates and discussions about what the game should look like, including with Tower Song. And I think ultimately just inviting that debate and then...

If you have good conversation, healthy, productive conversation and debate, I have my thought is eventually you come to the right answer rather than just going with Mike's answer or Nate's answer or Ishan's answer. What's actually the right answer? Because if the answer that I come up with can't stand the scrutiny of my team members, how is it really the right call?

So I, we haven't had any like major, like, what are we going to do? This is a total disagreement, total, like, you know, break a vision and maybe, maybe ask me that question again after we've gotten through that. But so far we've been able to just kind of, everybody's on the same page and we want the same thing. There's plenty of debate about what's the right design choice.

You never get away from that. I don't believe in the auteur model, really, for game development. I think that's a mistake, especially for smaller teams like this. There's so much... Talent and ingenuity across the team. Why would I ever say you are the only one who gets to make this decision? It's all your call. And they're just limited to one brain. That just doesn't make sense to me.

Even if it's a talented brain. So you have talked a little bit about your design process here, your development process. And I know you mentioned earlier that you did early access for Tower Song. Can you talk a little bit about... your entire, you know, from beginning to end process for making a game. Are there any sort of guiding principles that you use to make sure you arrive at, you know, the product you want?

There's the answer that I have now for like a second project and then probably the answer of like what happened with Tower Song, which is very different answers, right? I would say that going into Tower Song, probably, I mean, my number one of my, I'm not going to say my number one. Who talks like that? One of my goals was...

I want to do everything wrong so I can do it again better. So I'm going to go list a game for sale on Steam and I'm going to get everything wrong. And then I'm going to figure it out from there. I'm going to make these assigned decisions. I'm going to execute this way. And I'm not going to worry if it's the right thing. Like our friend over there at Dragoon Effect, it might be terrible, but that's okay. I think that's actually a really great mantra for creative work. Because if you stop and say,

What's the perfect way forward? You will never finish anything. You'll probably barely start anything. And I think my superpower, if I have any when it comes to game development, is that I'm always willing to just keep moving forward ahead even if it's maybe not the right answer. And I think that is the...

One of the biggest reasons a tower song is shift today as we're having this conversation, because I just like, no, we're just going to keep moving forward, even though it's wrong or we have a better idea. We also have to keep moving forward.

So I think... what i would say i learned about how to do all this stuff and but saying always to say if how i would have answered you two years ago it would be very different and probably honestly would have it have been like well i'm not sure but i'm gonna try some things and see what see what works For your first time around, I think that would be my advice to anybody. Just try it. Just go for something. If you have an idea for a process.

try it. And if it works, keep doing it. And if it doesn't work, change it, you know, continuous improvement. And so I think And there's lots of nuance to the question that you asked. I think there's a question of how to get work done as a team. For that, we followed a very stereotypical kind of agile Scrum process, which is very advantageous. And we really tried to hold to that even when real life...

interrupted or people couldn't do stuff. Just, okay, well, let's still have our sprint planning. Let's still come back and say, what work did we get done? And that set of like many milestones and many goals and being able to come back and review the work, I think helps people on task, keep people focused and helped me kind of understand. from kind of a project management perspective, like where we're at and which direction we are moving towards. And I think...

In terms of going from the start of the game to early access to shipping, why I probably won't do early access again would be the lesson I learned. Certainly not for a game like Tower Song. But really, I mean, going back to this as a game, this was a studio for people, not for products. We went to early access because...

we were kind of running out of money and we weren't sure if we were going to continue working on the game. We knew that Ishan was going to have to go back looking for a day job and I was going to soon have to go back to a day job. And we said, well, obviously we want to finish this, but we don't know.

We don't know when that'll happen. And if we all both get day jobs tomorrow, and that's kind of the end of it, or it takes much longer, we want there to be something on the resume that everybody can say, I shipped this game, I put it in early access. And when we put Tower Song in early access...

It was there. The whole campaign was there. Two of the four characters were there. We felt like it was a complete experience that we were proud of. And so we put it out there. And so as a business decision, it wasn't wise. But as a people first decision, it was absolutely the right call at the time. and then ultimately that became true of

Putting 1.0 out there in June, too, is the same thing. Going into early access gave us the motivation to keep working, even though we were getting day jobs. And somehow I came up with... with some other part-time gigs and kept the money to keep going and but the same thing of like well let's we we still like 1.0 okay may okay finally june we're shipping we're not going to ship in july because we can work on this game for the year

But we want to be able to say we shipped the game. And that's been an incredible experience having done that too. I still don't know if I answered that question. You answered a lot of it, thank you. You answered some further questions I had as well, so that was great. You brought up something that I, uh... I think it's pretty interesting, which is you've sort of outlined two different types of goals and it's like one is the business and the other is personal and

It seemed like Tower Song achieved both for you. But how do you set personal goals? How do you measure those? Do you set them as a studio? Do you set them individually? Are they tied together? question. I went into it with my goals and I I think I was just rolling in the Dark Tower, just drawing my hand a card, just drawing my team to me based on those values. When going into it, I knew that I wanted to ship a game no matter what, whether it was successful or not. I knew that.

I want it to be fun. I want it to... i wanted to ship a game before like more important than being financially successful was just having a finished product out there and i figured that would open the doors to do everything else and do it smarter, better. So there's also an element of shipping as fast as possible because I know I'm not going to get it right. What do I know? I've never launched a game before.

How do I know? I mean, I put out projects in high school and stuff like that, but never just commercial, full release. This is an actual thing. We went through the whole experience. We did ads. We did all that stuff. I had those goals of, I want these experiences. I want to learn these lessons.

Every time I would sit down and talk with someone and say, hey, do you want to come on board? Here's what we're trying to do. It was very easy for me to then elucidate to these people who either were or would soon become my friends. Here's where I'm at. Here's what my goals are. Here's what I'm trying to do. And... I think it just came from that. If you're going to start something by yourself and you're going to collect a team, know what you want to accomplish.

And then I think if you can, if you can explain that to people, you will attract the right person. And if you hold to that value set, this is what I'm looking for, no matter what, you know, like we're here to ship games. We're here to make mistakes. We're here to, you know. like really really do it and do it correctly it's going to be terrible but we're going to do it anyway um

But if you can tell that to people, people are only going to sign up for that if that's what they want. So I think also just being fully upfront and blunt with everybody there to talk to. Like, here's what we're doing. I don't know where we're going. I don't know, but this is what we're trying to do. And also, this is how we're going to do it. We have this process. This is how we make these decisions. And I think for me, finishing was such a huge...

If there was one number one thing to me, I probably would say we are going to finish whatever it is we start. I think that's, even if it's bad, I think that's delivering is so much more valuable than...

Even delivering something bad is so much more valuable than just not delivering anything. Because, you know, we always tell ourselves like, you know, not selling a game will always make us zero dollars you know we can sell a terrible game and maybe take ten dollars but that's ten more dollars than not selling a game at all so we have to sell a game you know one of the things um sort of getting ready for this was i went back and i read your blog posts for

Oh yeah, Tower Song. So that was interesting that you had sort of an arc in those, right? Which probably paralleled your arc in actual development. One of the things I think in your early ones that you made clear was How you picked Twine and the Scaled Agile, and that focused you, but at the same time, that also helped you conceptualize the product, or in this case, the game itself. Is that still something you are using today or is that a one and done?

By the time we shipped the game, we had gone away from Twine only because it was actually really hard to collaborate with multiple writers. So I ended up pulling that Twine script over into a big... big google doc and eventually multiple google docs because i learned that if you have a 300 page google doc script it actually is really terrible on the browser um especially if you need to edit the whole thing it's a lot to put in memory at once

So I, but I think at the time, and maybe this is the right answer. And in terms of like agile, we're still doing agile, but we're kind of tweaking and we're moving away from that model a little bit. It's just not really working for us anymore. But we're still following some of the same principles that we follow. And I guess I would, you know, kind of, I think an interesting maybe way to answer that would be that. Whatever helps you right now.

is worth doing. Whether or not you stick with it forever or it becomes like a thing, like we're always doing it this way. In fact, I would be suspicious of anything that a team was doing. Yeah, we've been doing it this way with this tool in this manner. for five years. Really? You haven't found any better way to do it? You haven't been able to improve on it at all? There probably are examples, of course. I'm sure you can find one.

But I think it's more valuable to say, okay, is this helping? How can I do this better? And I was having to send these flat HTML for Twine. I'd have to do my edits and send an HTML file to the next person I was going to write. They'd have to load it. do their edits, send it back to me. I have to do diffs, like comparison to figure out what they changed. And I was like, okay.

This isn't working anymore. When it was just me writing it, yeah, it was great. It was very easy to visualize, conceptualize. And so I think for that, it had value because I was able to kind of conceptualize. the game narrative and figure out how this was all going to piece together. I think if I had just been doing a Google Doc, it would have been a nightmare. I graduated, you know, or the needs changed.

So how to manage a game script today, probably some version of both, maybe use Twine or something like that to conceptualize maybe the overall arc, but I probably wouldn't just use it to write the whole script like I did before. But I think also the lesson I learned there was if you don't have somebody who can just write a big lesson from Tower Song, which is why.

If you don't have somebody who can just be going over the script for an RPG, writing is so important, and the quality of that writing is so important. That's a big pillar of that game. That writing has to be great.

even today you know like there's a lot i have a i have some regret about you know well there'll be lines or some scenes in tower song like that didn't land the way i wanted to or that scene could have been punchier or maybe we could have expanded on this character or that character a little more and i

I wish I'd had kind of a full-time writer, a full-time part-time, you know, but a dedicated writer who could just kind of sit with these problems and iterate on it the way that we iterated on the game design and the class balance and stuff like that. That's not really what you asked. yeah it's just it's always evolving um our tool set kind of kind of you know uh always evolves and i'm a big fan of jira

as a way to organize work and visualize work. So I don't know if I'll ever migrate off that tool, but as far as how we use it... It's a constant progress. And my team probably hates me sometimes. Like, oh, he's changing the process again. I'm like, we can do this better. This is not working for us. Let's change this. In fact, as a team, we do.

fairly regular retros where we kind of ask, like, from a process perspective, what's working? What do we need to change? Is how we're doing this work actually working for us? Or do we need to change something? And a lot of times I get feedback from the team that's like, this is confusing or this is slowing us down or this isn't working and we'll change.

I mean, I would argue that you were doing agile as intended. The constant evolution of your processes are what it's all about. You know, retrospectives are. buy my money the most impactful thing you can do in a developmental process? Just how do you get better? move into talking a little bit more deeply about Tower Song since we're there. Can you...

talk a little bit about what the inspiration was for this game. The inspiration was pretty direct in that I was initially attempting to remake the RPG Maker game that I did in high school. which itself was sort of a self-insert isekai, which wasn't a term back then, or at least not in middle America where I was. You know, but it was, and so this is 2001. RPG Maker 2000 had been fan translated, I believe. I don't think it had actually been released in America.

And so all of my friends in the StarCraft map making, campaign making community were starting to play with this tool called RPG Maker. I thought that was great. And for whatever reason, the thing that people did was they made a little RPG that had everyone from, you know, the message board. They had a little avatar in there that would sort of represent, you know.

some sort of visualization of who that person really was and their personality, which might be drawn from their avatar that they were using. You know, if somebody was walking around, they always had like an orc as their avatar. They'd show up in a game inevitably as an orc, that kind of thing.

people were making a bunch of chapter ones of these games and i said no i'm gonna finish one so i started working on this didn't tell anyone i was working on it because i knew if i told anyone that would take all the excitement away and i stopped working on it uh and i didn't tell anyone until

I was almost done. And then I actually talked to a friend and I said, Hey, uh, making this thing, I'm like 80% done, but I need help. And then he came on and he actually helped me. Um, so even from early on, I knew I couldn't trust myself to do things alone, but, um, So coming back to this, you know, I'm going to redo Omega Entertainment. I'm going to get back into the game design thing. And I thought, well, let's just do an RPG maker. We'll do it quick.

just to get my head in a space of game design and like art and all that And I said, okay, well, maybe a fun thing to do will be just to remake that game. using legal assets. I was a kid back then. A lot of asset rips and stuff. That game would not be legal to release today. Many different companies would be able to sue me.

So that was kind of the initial part of it. But then, you know, I didn't want to just remake it. So I took the basis of that game and then just kind of reimagined it from a more, I don't know, from a... you know somebody in his late teens to somebody in his late 30s okay what kind of game would i like now what i'm interested in playing what kind of story would intrigue me and i was able to find through some of the characters um

I found a story that kind of spoke to me personally that I thought would be interesting. And I thought if I could... If this story speaks to me, I can kind of get behind that inspiration. That inspiration will help me breathe life into these characters in this world. And so it kind of all came from that. How'd you come up with the plots and the main theme? Trying to come up with a plot in the main theme. Plot is actually fairly similar to that 2001 RPG Maker game.

I don't want to spoil it. So, you know, some of the specifics of what got carried over. But that original game, there is a similar arc. So enough to say that in this game, you go through a kind of a forest, you go to... this soul tower. And then you come back and you go to a desert area and you kind of explore that. And that was actually also the first.

two acts of that old rpg maker game you go through this forest level you climb up a tower uh and then you go into the forest and then there's actually in that game there's actually like five towers that you go through So I think as I was looking at how far can I go in the time that I'm giving myself to make this game, that other game was actually a little bit longer. There was a lot more to it, but it would take...

much longer to make all that in a much higher standard. It would have taken me five years to do that whole scope of the original game. But I saw this like, okay, I keep putting towers in this old game. Something about a tower must have been interesting to me. It's a cool dungeon, I guess, rather than just like a castle. It's a tower. So I said, okay, maybe that's...

Maybe there's something to these towers. Maybe I'll make it, you know, it's like a two tower situation. I don't know what's going on here. What was my younger self doing? And then I think from there also, there's a session of me trying to figure out what to name the game. I was just shooting out ideas at the team and trying to see what they reacted to. And somehow we landed on a tower song.

And that name itself, which fit the world that we had kind of built at that point, itself then became kind of inspiration for what happened. Well, what if the tower song itself was diegetic? What if the towers sung to each other? What does that mean? I think that gets to some of my world building. my approach is to world building, which is just set up some interesting fantasy rules and then ask how that would affect the world. So we said, okay, there's towers and they have a tower song.

how would people what would different cultures react to that how would they feel about that what what would their perspectives on it be And that allowed us to kind of create the region of Kadam and the desert and how they view the fire tower that lives over there. And then other people in the northern area, in the forest area, view that tower and what that meant. And I think...

The theme of the game, eventually, you know, I think now, going back to how I do things now versus how I did them then, now, for our second project, we've already established at the beginning, before the game was even fully playable.

What is the theme? One line, what is it we're trying to tell players with a game? And I think that is such a... that's such a good opening because now and it's such and we have one and it's such a strong thematic statement we can kind of everything can kind of follow after that and i think the game design and i think this game is gonna it's gonna show that our sophomore effort is gonna be much much cleaner and more deep because of that.

With Tower Song, I didn't really kind of come into that theme until a little bit later where I started thinking about these towers and the nature of the world and how these characters relate to each other. The thing I think I started out with is that it's about all these epic world things going on with towers and what all that means, that there are these characters.

these Mennonites that are relating to each other and they've had this falling out and these friendships that have come together and split apart and I think that That spoke to me originally. Can I tell the story about... These characters, especially Solace and Kieran, two of the party members, who are best friends and what happened to drive them apart. And now they're kind of split apart. And why is that? Now they're kind of reuniting. And how is that going to go?

And it, you know, isn't going to go any differently kind of thing. And I think that spoke to me in some of the, some of the friendships that I had had and lost over the years. And I. I think that, and then as the game developed, we kind of landed on some other more interesting themes too, just as a result of like the world building that we were doing. We just sort of stumbled in, oh, well, this is interesting. This is probably something we should focus on too.

What is something you would like players to take away from the game? I think, you know, from a story perspective, it's funny, because if I'm doing like a post-mortem on Tower Song now, I see all the ways, and it's probably inevitable when you make a game, right? You're like, I should have done a better job of doing this, but... I think what I would have wanted players to walk away from Tower Song was...

Feeling like there is nuance to every relationship and friendship, that there's two sides to every conflict, and they're both wrong and they're both right. There's not like black and white with things. Everybody has a good reason for doing things.

And you have four characters that you can play as. Each of those characters has very different motivations and opinions about what's going on in the plot. And that was really important to us, which also created a lot of work. But we wanted to express that to say... It's not just picking a character class, you're also picking, like, a mood and an opinion and a perspective. And it's four different perspectives on everything that's going on. You know, Tali's a little more...

She might come off as self-absorbed in some ways, but she's really just very loyal to Solace and to her friends. And when anything that's trying to interrupt that or make problems with that, she has no time for it. where then you have meet who is very focused on, he's like the fighter character. He's very focused on, I mean, he's, he's just like X cop. He's basically an X. cop from, like, you know like a fascist state and he's trying to redeem himself and so he's asking a lot of questions about

What are we doing? We're getting involved. We're interfering in all this. Is this really the right thing to be doing? So he has kind of this, he's a little bit aggressive, but I think he also has a lot of regret and he's bringing a lot of that. He's very introspective and very questioning. He brings that to the game. You have Porphyry, the barbarian fighter.

who has been deeply scarred and traumatized by these towers that she had. The tower that she grew up in and around eventually collapsed and fell, and it led to this thing called the Breach, where all these demons basically destroyed her homeland. So she's coming into this perspective of trying to prevent another breach and trying to redeem her people and what was lost there. And then we have a zone and he's just a more of a curious kind of maybe the most innocent of all of them. He's just

wants to learn, wants to get out there and just see what's going on. It takes everything at face value. And so you just get, and that allowed the script to kind of breathe and every, and we ended up writing the scenes off in Fordham versions because like, well, that's not how Porphyry would react to this the way that Tally would react. They would both react to this same event very differently. And then the character should then react to those reactions, you know, more naturally too.

And I think eventually we came to this interplay with Solace and her sister, too, and then Solace and Kieran and how these characters relate to each other.

And I think all those one-on-one relationships, I'd want players to walk away thinking about the different ways of how you can view the same story, maybe from a different perspective and have a very different conclusion, even though... the same thing you got the same information literally the same the plot's not different it's the same plot and you can have the characters at the end have very different conclusions well how could that be well it's because of where they started wasn't the same

I think maybe from a gameplay perspective, I'd want players to walk away feeling like they had a really... I think that their time was rewarded, that they had to really think about their strategy. They got to just really push themselves to the limit. Maybe they played on hard mode too. Even normal mode can be challenging, but that they were able to figure out clever mechanics and feel rewarded for coming up with good strategies and good party dynamics.

So what was the impetus for having four different characters? You choose one. because I don't know how to tell myself no and just say this is what the four players should be, what the four-person party should be. I knew that I wanted the game's scope to be about, let's say, 10 hours long. And I just had all these ideas for characters and classes that I wanted to express. and so i said i have a prototype and the prototype was maybe which you can play on hio actually if you really want to um

And it's, I don't know, an hour, an hour and a half long. And all these characters are in there. And it kind of went through the prototype. You know, I felt like all these class designs. There was something there. There was something interesting there. I wanted to have a game with all these different characters in them, but I knew that I could stuff nine characters into a 10-hour story and have it.

really work. You just wouldn't get time enough with everybody. Interestingly, as the game goes on, the party kind of like each chapter of the game the party does end up split you get very little time with just the same four people even once you have like the full party in the ad there's really only like one part of the game where that's actually true um because i just like i don't know i want to change things up but um, it left us some fun, some fun things, but yeah, really it was just, I have,

I have these ideas for these characters. Most of them are, let's see, all four of them are like that original. They're based on real people. you know some of it's just i have a good idea like i want a barbarian also i want like a wizard um But I don't want just a wizard, so what am I going to do there? Now Gigi has to be a playable character, so what am I going to do with that?

I think one of the first decisions we did make about this game after the prototype was, okay, I'm going to have four selectable characters. That way I can play around with all these tools and have fun making this, but I don't have to make a game that's 30 hours long.

But that turned out to be just as much development time. It probably would take me just as long because having to remake the same 10-hour campaign with four different characters was just as hard. I don't know what I was like, you live and you learn. Knowing what I know now, I would have said, no, just make a 30-hour game and just put them all in there. It's fine. It'll take you just as long. Don't worry about it.

I really enjoyed all of the different battle mechanics. So getting to choose the characters and figure out the different tactics based on that. A lot of fun. Where did you get inspiration for all of the different orthogonal battle styles? Was there, you know, a lot that you had to cut out or how did that process go?

I like that term orthogonal. I'm going to steal that from Mark. And if you don't mind orthogonal battle style, I will give credit to most of that class design from to Nate Montgomery, who who designed most of those classes. And I believe. His answer would be along the lines of, you know, we were all really inspired by like Dungeons and Dragons. And he also plays a lot of... In fact, actually, we met playing the World of Warcraft TCG.

which is like Magic the Gathering, but Warcraft. And it got canceled when Hearthstone came out, but we played it religiously up until then. And I think that if you're... Looking at how the mechanics interplay, it's knowing that I think if we were to remake Tower Song, it would either be a card-based battler game or like a...

or like a Dungeons and Dragons kind of turn-based like party game, I think you'd see exactly where we were coming from, where our headspace was at with that. There's a lot of like, you know, so many states on this character, like, you know, counters on the card and then you play this other card and it has that interplay.

so probably actually like games like magic the gathering you know tcg games uh and i would say and i think the dungeons and dragons from the aspect of like you really inhabiting the character and feeling like when i'm playing this character i feel like

a berserker. Everything is around that. I want to feel that power fantasy that you get from those more... from those kind of games more so than I think some of the traditional JRPGs and the Final Fantasies where the class designs are maybe not as different in terms of mechanics.

Um, whereas like dungeons and dragons like wildly different like you know you might like there's no like like this guy he has to write his spells down in a day this guy prays for spells this guy like you still kind of get spells but it's like wildly different these people don't even have spells like it's just You can have very different kind of mechanics in between classes in D&D. And I think that we were kind of inspired by that, too.

One of the things you said in the blogs is that turn-based battles are difficult. And it's interesting you chose that for your first game. And then you also discussed sort of how to make that fun. And it made me pause and think like, yeah, I played a million JRPGs and a lot of them had turn base. And like three came off the top of my head where I was like, oh, the battles are so funny. But for the rest, it was like incidental or they were fine.

you know so what what made you choose that route if you're going to make a 10 hour rpg that's interesting for those 10 hours and feels like it's worth the money that have to be interesting 10 hours i can't you can't like i can't give you repeatable grinding battles that are boring. You just repeat for, you know, there can be no filler. Everything has to be, every moment of that 10 hours has to feel interesting. So there's just, I think for the, for the size of the team that we had.

trying to make an RPG with a small team in a short period of time. I don't think we could have done it any other way without the game just feeling incomplete. So I really... not to disparage some of those random battles or the grinding mechanics and JRPGs. Cause sometimes like that just is the mechanic and they, when used well, it just serves a larger, larger game. But I just, you.

You can't do it in a short game. I just don't think the game would work. You'd feel like there wasn't any content. I have a couple notes on specific things that were in the game. Sure. The red vision cones. Oh, yeah. I give Tim his Metal Gear Solid shoutout here. These are a few of my favorite things. When the vamp bites, when pains be sting, when I'm feeling sad, I simply remember my Metal Gear things and then I don't feel...

So bad Shortcut paths backwards like Dark Souls. I found a way to reference Dark Souls by the way. Oh good. Yeah, you know every episode.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, so for Bloodborne, I played Bloodborne, I think the year it came out. It just changed me forever, I think, in terms of game design and sensibilities. I think that's the most interesting about those Souls-like games is that... and something that I can feel, you know, like starting out bloodborne and just getting just getting massacred by the first thing i found you know for like 30 minutes and then

By the end of the game, how I would eventually come to bosses or enemies that I would one shot, you know, and like, oh, like they changed my brain over the course of that game. I mean, and it's still the case. And I think that level design. uh, was so interesting. And, and just the feeling of like, you open a door and you're somewhere you recognize, you're like, oh, okay. I, I, it's just, that's such a cool moment. Um,

I think there was a little bit of that for sure. Still driving me that DNA when I got to there. Yeah, no, that's funny. You talk about the Red Vision cones. I don't think I was specifically thinking about Metal Gear. But I think it became a way to, and we actually, there's points of development where there weren't any. There were points where some enemies had them, but others didn't. And I think we eventually just decided on, we didn't want players up to guess.

If they were going to start an encounter really just became you. Because we didn't have random encounters, right? So you see little sprites on the map, you start the battle. We wanted players to know exactly when that would happen. We didn't want it to be a surprise. Even in some cases where it's unavoidable, there's some places where if you're in a little corridor, they're just looking up there, you can't avoid the vision cone.

And it became more of a, okay, well, this is telling you this battle will start right here. This tile light. So save your game, change your equipment if you need to. okay, now go ahead and do the game. We didn't want players ever frustrated or surprised or feeling like, oh, I wasn't ready for this. I didn't mean to do this.

Even with the bosses, every time you're about to start an encounter, it's like, are you sure you want to go forward? A cool draft of air comes down the hallway, spooky, like, yeah, let's do it. Every time, of course, it's forecasting a boss, but I always hate that in games where... uh i miss stuff you know i go too far and now i can't go back and even though you can go back like i wasn't ready my party wasn't ready

um i want to change my equipment or i want to save my game like nope now you're in a boss fight and then you lost and then now your save was back here and you know that that just kind of I think our... programmer ishan had used the phrase like he didn't want people to have to do their taxes and he hates doing his taxes like okay every fight gotta use potions on every character get all their health back up does anyone need ether no okay i need to change this equipment let's change that okay

okay, I've done my taxes. Now I can continue playing the game. He's like, I don't want to have to pay my taxes. Let's just get past all that stuff. So let's just pull as much of this stuff out as we can. Again, all in service of making all 10 hours of the game feel worth it. I want to specifically point out there's a boss battle. I'll just sort of vaguely describe it. You're fighting a pair of enemies, and at the end of each turn, their health is reset to whoever has the most. Yeah.

And I was like, oh my god, have I not seen this mechanic in a game before? This is brilliant. Where did that come from? There has to be somewhere else, but that's the case. You know, enemy design is interesting because the way that we ended up on enemy mechanics was... There are so many different ways to come about it.

And it's funny, I was telling one of my other game directors, I won't name names, but they were trying to figure out, because I have a couple that I work with, so they were trying to figure out, like, okay, should we do the mods? let's figure out all the mechanics and then we'll do the then we'll draw it or i can't remember it might have been either way around and i said i you know just do whatever way it doesn't matter don't worry about it

Because there were times where I would tell the artist, hey, I want a monster for this dungeon. I don't know, whatever you want. And then they come up with some monster. And I'm like, that's cool. And I'm like, okay, so it does this. So then I try to tell a story. I try to explain who that monster is with the mechanics that it does. But there are other times where I would have a mechanic in mind, like, okay, I want this kind of setup.

There's a big boss fight about midway through the game where you have to fight a bunch of characters at once and a bunch of bosses at once. I really wanted to evoke, okay, this is a big rumble. What are the right mechanics to express that so that you feel... like you're in a big fight with a bunch of different things um i don't remember specifically how i landed on this mechanic with with this later boss of like having to burn them down at the same time but there there was a

one of those values of one of my little niggles with some boss fights in RPGs. You've got a boss with a big health bar, and you always get to a point sometimes, and a lot of the times, where eventually you've solved it like you've you've got okay i do a cure like you've got some like you just repeat your

It's like your damage rotation. The boss can never kill you. Maybe you've killed the adds. Maybe there was some other problem that it had. You solved it, and now you just got to will down that giant health bar and then get to the end. Now we're just testing your patience. And I noticed, probably by accident, I think it was probably the first major boss in the game that we did, which is the Dark Knight guy. And he was in the prototype.

Actually, that's technically not true, but there was a boss in his position. So he was one of the first bosses that we had, and I noticed at one point that he, as I was doing the fight, I noticed that I felt tense because every turn he could almost kill me. And it felt that way up until I defeated him. I was like, oh, this is the feeling I want for every boss. I want every boss fight to feel like I'm one or two turns away from this thing, all thing turning south on me.

all going to shit and so every boss had to have something you know and there are obviously bosses and there's ways of solving each boss fight where you can trivialize it but i also want players to be able to do that if they're clever but that was sort of an important mechanic that on a lot of the fights would kind of feel tense the whole time especially for these bigger boss battles

how to do that in turn-based game yeah i had to come up with some something and i think i probably with those with those two in particular i was just like well what do we do here like okay let's let's do something like this like a like a

like a rebalance mechanic there's a couple other fights you fight like two boss characters it's like how do we make each one kind of feel interesting or then how do you make it feel interesting when one's defeated right because that would be the other thing well it's two boss characters okay i killed one now it's easy well okay so what do we do instead so

So you did go through early access with this. Was there feedback that you got from players that you were able to incorporate that was helpful? Or was this like, because you mentioned you weren't going to do it in future games. So I wonder, it couldn't have been all sunshine and rainbows. uh players were great um we didn't have any negative feedback i think we did get a lot of the i uh we did put a lot of stuff that were like player ideas into the game um I'm trying to think of some examples.

A great example is each of the four characters has an environment thing that they can do, like Porphyry can knock down boulders, Gigi can run into tunnels. Well, that all came from at GeekGirlCon. This little kid being like, oh, I wish I could send Gigi to this little hole. I was like, that would be cute. I guess I have to figure that out. It ended up being a good idea for the whole game to do that. So now I distracted myself. What was your question?

The feedback garnered in early access? Oh, yeah, yeah. Feedback. I can't recall any specific feedback we got during early access that we changed. Probably largely because a lot of the game was sort of like already in place when the game happened. So there wasn't, it wasn't like here's chapter one. What do you want chapter two to look like?

But I think another reason we didn't get a lot of feedback, which ties directly into why we would be very careful about doing early access again, is that when you go into early access on Steam, and this is poor advice for anyone thinking about doing this right now, if you're trying to... If you're relying on Steam to organically generate any of your traffic and sales, when you launch a game into early access, they...

They consider it in some ways. In other ways, they don't. But there are some ways in which they consider that your launch. They give you a one-time visibility boost. At least that's the way it works right now. They change how this stuff works all the time. So we got a visibility boost after we went to early access and probably really like... we just weren't there yet and so the village like we got a boost and no one kind of bought into the game yet

And so I think there's another aspect of it, too, where we really just... So selling a game on Steam today... Kind of like how pre-orders used to drive everything before. Now, when you launch a game on Steam, you really have to have your wishlist count has to be really high. And the best case scenario for you as a developer is that going into...

Like the week before you launch, you have the highest number of wish lists on Steam like that week. And then Steam will feature you on a new and noteworthy or upcoming. There's like a top 10 list that they put out. that'll just be on that front page of steam they'll say hey here's these games have the most wish lists and they're coming out soon you want to be on that list because steam's going to show you to way more people you'll be on the front page And so...

I think in our heads, we figured we'll put the game in early access and then we'll do our marketing and then we do the launch, like then we'll like nail it. Well, the reality was we should have had our wishlist where we wanted them before we went into early access, not just 1.0. And although you do get more visibility as well, you get full launch visibility when you do one of those, it's also not the same. So I think from a marketing business perspective...

In terms of where you want your numbers to be at, when you're looking at it, if your wishlist numbers aren't where you want them to be, early access is no better for you than 1.0. You're going to have kind of the same sale.

splash and probably a little less because less people buy early access than 1.0 i think in general um ironically i don't i i i typically don't play early access games like oh my god you know that's not done yet i'll play it when it's done you know let me know when it's done and so so i think if we were redoing it over again or the next time we do a game. If everything was ready, like the full marketing package, we would treat early access as just the game.

And then I think we would treat early access as maybe a kind of like a live service type deal where full launch game is out, go play it. And then... But we're committing to implementing more features based on your feedback. That'll be free. And maybe this price point will be a little bit lower than the 1.0 might be.

rather than, hey, here's a sneak peek of the game and then we'll release it later and then we'll do our marking along the way. So that was the biggest lesson I think we learned is, you know. It's just we didn't realize how much that was our launch. Had we known that, I don't know if we would have gone early access, but I still don't regret it because it's still, you know, it was still good for team morale, I think, too, at the time.

upcoming games oh yeah sure we can talk about them a little bit one i can talk about more than the other yeah i was gonna say is um On Steam, you can get a demo for Clockwork Ambrosia. And then in some of the marketing for Tower Song, you mentioned a deck-building roguelike. Yeah, so for Omega Entertainment's next game that we're developing... Yeah, it's an unannounced game, but it is going to be a roguelike deck builder. And you can see some of the fun character art being put together for that.

So I think one of the lessons we learned, I mean, it sounds silly. When I was just a player, I was like, yeah, this stuff is so lame. But there is something to waiting until the right moment when you kind of have your stuff together.

okay here's our game here's announce it with and and so you know we're it's not a secret but yeah we don't have an official announcement or title or all that and that'll probably come together i you know probably here in the next six months or so we'll we'll announce that

But yeah, Clockwork Ambrosia was actually, I have done development work on. I actually first started working on it in 2013 with the game director back then. Eventually left, you know, for different, for just... life was too much i couldn't do it um but the game game kept on and it's it's a little bit uh you know i say so the game has been in development and they had he had a prototype the game director did in 2012.

And at first you might say, you've been making this game for 12 years, that's crazy, what's wrong? Like, well... like you know we decided to make a metroidvania of the size and scope of like hollow nights but with you know much smaller budget and pixel art and stuff like that so Um, so Corporate Ambrosia is a Metroidvania, but it's, it's more of a branch from Super Metroid than any of kind of the later Metroidvania games where something that happened in the Metroid series where you had, um,

So if you go from Metroid 2 to Super Metroid, the way that you could use your gun kind of changed. And I think in Metroid 2, you could... You can only ever have like one at a time. You had to go, you could swap between a beam weapon or the spacer beam.

But in Super Metroid, you could combine them. So then you could, you started with like the, actually, I don't remember the order, but you could get like a wave beam, then you could put ice on it. Then you could put the spacer on it. You could turn them off. they all kept adding so now your shot splits now it splits and freezes now it goes through walls and freezes and splits

And so the game director, he kind of took that idea and kind of built on that into just like the next level. So Clockwork Ambrosia is... pixel metroidvania starring this airship engineer named iris she's going to this mysterious island to search for her friend and she gets caught up in what seems to be some sort of robot rebellion uh and the core conceit of the game is that players

Let's see how I put this. So the quality of the game is that players build their weapons using a rule-based mod system, which is a lot like, I would say, kind of some of the mod systems or rule-based systems. You might see like a Magic the Gathering or something like that in terms of... So for example, you might have a pulse breaker and it shoots.

shots. You can have a charged shot and just a regular shot, which is like a shotlet. These are all subject to change. For example, you might get a mod that says, okay, every time you shoot a shotlet, shoot another shotlet also. So now when you fire that gun, it shoots two bullets at the same time. And then I'll say, okay, every, and then you put another mod on the same gun that says, okay, split every bullet you have. So now you're shooting four bullets.

And oh, by the way, your chart shot now can also do this. So now your charge shot splits. So it's all these rules that add on to each other. And there's, I think there's planning on eight different weapons in the game right now, you know, pending development and all that, but.

The idea is that as you go through this world, you're finding different weapons and different mods and the way you stack these mods on each other and each weapon can have six to eight different moths and they all stack on each other and the rules all apply to each other and can affect each other which leads to literally like tens of thousands or millions or whatever like combinations of weaponry like arsenal that you can have and they all kind of work and they all

work as the way you expect them to um you got like a missile launcher like hey you know after so long it'll like take a turn and go over here and then you can make it but if it hits the ground it also runs along the ground so then you can start to play with just create kind of kind of fun fun design so I'm really excited for that game. Um,

You know, I helped work on enemies and level and story way back in the day. And I stepped away and then coming back and some of that stuff that's continued. And the team has just done a really good job. just like breathing life through this world and the weapon mods and the environments. And it's just, and the art, I think it's just, it's just coming together really great. I'm really proud, really proud of the team.

and yeah i'm coming back and after tower song saying hey i i made all these mistakes shipping a game can i help you not make those same mistakes with you know like let me let me quote unquote publish your game which is not at all like the typical publisher models that you will have seen, but that's kind of the phrase we're using.

He said, okay, yeah, sure, let's do that. And so I've come back and I'm helping produce the game. And actually the whole Omega Entertainment studio is kind of cheering them on. you know, helping them at the game in different ways. But yeah, pretty fun stuff. The game will actually, so people in the Seattle area or people going to GeekRollCon will be able to actually play the game at that event there too. We'll have a little booth. There's a demo up now that I played.

Steam you can wishlist it. Go check it out. Talking to Nolan, one of the things we've been playing was Slay the Spire. and into the breed i was telling him at one point like i don't play roguelikes like those are the only two i've ever played and he almost immediately was like oh it's perfect enemy that's what lets you enjoy those battles more And I feel like Tower Song incorporated that. And almost with the red vision cones, there's this.

You don't feel cheated by the computer, in quotes. I'd like to get Nolan's thoughts on that since he was the brilliant one that came up with it. And then I want to sort of spin that to you and talk about... It's used in Tower Song and then potentially if you're going to use it or something similar in your deck builder. I think what I actually said first was it's because they're good ones. That's why you play them. It's not that you don't like. It's not that you dislike.

uh roguelites if they dislike bad roguelike but yeah i think that that is something that makes them very approachable is that they do have perfect enemy information and it allows you to Understand the systems. So it really helps you get into the game. Totally. I mean, I think my first real awakening to the power of roguelikes, which was, and it's not even the first roguelike I had, but just...

Just how far that language could go was when everybody was kind of obsessed with Spelunky for a hot minute. And that's a perfect example of what you're talking about, Nolan. The enemies react. Everything's based on a rule. The rule never changes. There's no exceptions to the rule. So every time you die... you know exactly like you could have predicted it. Now, you know, maybe, you know, where he went past the point of no return might be farther back than you'd like.

But you were, and you might be surprised, but you could always say, okay, because it happened because of that, I pushed my luck. Usually I knew what I was doing. And yeah, the same thing with Tower Song and going back to that making interesting turn-based battles. We didn't want to trick the player. It wouldn't work in a game that short either. It wouldn't add that much.

to, you know, like that's just not the kind of game we're building. Like you get, obviously you can make turn-based games where you're trying to track and separate player expectations, but... What we wanted was that if the player lost, it's because their strategy was wrong, not because they got tricked or didn't expect a thing. Now, of course, you have to practice and play things, but I didn't want it to be because...

You couldn't predict what the enemy was going to do. Like I never wanted to be an issue was very, very big on this with me too. And it should tell you something that he's like one of the lead designers on the next game, but he's like, you know, I don't want to lose because of the RA. I want to lose because my strategy was wrong and I wasn't thinking about it. And because, you know, because I'm pushing my luck when I shouldn't have been or not pushing my luck hard enough.

And I think that was something that we really tried to hold to. I never wanted you to win or lose a boss battle. Because, you know, RNG. Oh, phew, the boss didn't use that terrible move for three turns in a row. Therefore, I won.

I think with Tarasong inevitably, there's probably still some of that possible. So I won't say that we eliminated it, but it was something we tried to reduce as much as possible. So that's where that... enemy intent came from is and we really had to break rpg rpg maker was not interested in that at all did not know so we really had to and after issue i think really

kind of got into the game because he he wrote his own plugin for the for the engine and really kind of broke it and and also is like okay we're never doing rpg maker again we'll do anything we'll build our own we'll use unity we'll find somebody else's and license it but we're just rpg maker was too to make anything other than those kinds of games. But anyway, that's just really an aside about RPG Maker. I mean, RPG Maker is great, like, you know, but for certain things.

Anyway, so, yeah, so, like, Enemy Intent or... Or even enemy states, which I don't know if you guys noticed, and we did our best to advertise it, but sometimes enemies would set up preparation moves, and they would do something that now they're in preparation, which tells you next turn they will do this. Sometimes they'd mark a character.

So we really wanted it to be clear what was happening. And if you were, if you paid any attention at all and seriously want to know what the bosses were doing, you would, you would kind of be able to predict how, how fights were going to go. And on hard mode, that's, you know. which is where I prefer to play. Even now, I get spanked on the same boss. I'm like, okay, okay, my strategy, I need to try something else.

And I would say even with Clockwork Ambrosia, there's an element of that's still important because... like that is a game we don't want to be too difficult um we want players to just have a really like the joy of discovery and the delight of finding new things we don't want players to get hung up on like a crazy boss um

So, and it's a different, like how to properly advertise how things will work and behave in like a 2D platformer, very different language than a turn-based, but I think there's still that element of... of you know bosses telegraphing their attacks in a way or um But it's definitely different with a real-time, any kind of reflex-based. What perfect information looks like is a different thing there, but I think it's a good principle.

I think one other thing I have to thank you for in Tower Song is, so I have a younger child and sort of a... a young-ish child and in tower song You can hover over the enemies, at least with your mouse if you're on the computer, and it will tell you exactly the state.

what they're doing when i had to go change a diaper and come back it wasn't like i was lost and i didn't know who's who i had marked and who was marking me like you could literally walk away in the middle of battle and come back and know everything that was going on and so i really appreciate it

yeah i mean i mean some of us have kids you know that's just the reality we get 10 minutes to play and i want a tower song to have like i can go in do one battle i'm even leaving the middle of it pause it come back the game auto saved if i forgot to save um and i'll come back and keep going

and your party gets all of their health and items back after every battle, so you don't have to, you're raising your save and getting the next fight, oops, I forgot to do my taxes, and then my party is all at half health. Like, no, just pick it up, keep going, you know, put it down again. Works great on Steam Deck. Also, same reason, we want to have that good play. I'm glad that worked for you. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When you think about the studio, do you imagine yourself

serially working on a game after game, or are you trying to grow bigger, or in 10 years you want to be done? Like, what is your long-term thinking?

I think I would say our five-year plan would be that we're all employed by the studio and we're doing it full-time. I think that I will always have to be making games. There was the period between when I... I left school at DigiPen and then started doing game design again, which I would argue is when I started running my Pathfinder campaign as a DM, because that's your, it's, you know, it's a little bit, it's D&D is a game engine and you're building a game out of it.

or maybe a modding engine if you want to get technical. But I had to be a game designer to run that campaign for folks and reawaken to, oh, right, this thing that I love, that's so important to me. And so I think with that, I think as long as, and what I've told the team is as long as you guys like are, want to make a game, like we'll put it out.

we have kind of a rule or an agreement with a company where any uh you know if a company publishes it and funds it it can keep all keep the money but you own the ip so we're trying to do that i don't know like that um like an imprint style you know or like um So, you know, I own Tower Song, but our next game is owned by Annie and Ishan. They own that IP. So we get to publish it, you know, make money off of it. But if they want to go make a sequel later...

Okay, they can. I think we have some, you know, there's rules in there. So you can't just like trying to protect the company. But at the same time, it's like, you know, we don't want to own the work. We want the studio to be. at the very least, a vessel or a platform for

For all the people that we've collected here, if you guys have a game, you're putting it out, we will publish it. We'll put it out there. We'll do whatever marketing we have time for. Even if it's nothing, even if we just list it on our Steam store under our label, we'll put it out there. a little more traffic than it would get if you just put it on a random image I.O. page.

So with that in mind and knowing that I will always want to make some kind of game, it could end up being just a game for a silly little RPG maker games or whatever I can make in my spare time. It could be a vehicle for that. I think we will always be having games coming out now. Are they big commercial releases with all this stuff? That will depend on whether or not

we can eventually make profit off the games and fund a business. And that's going to determine whether or not you're seeing Omega Entertainment at a summer game show at some point. It'll all be driven based on that. We'll always be making games because we just love making games. And, you know, I think that's the only way we wouldn't be making games is if we all got jobs making games for somebody else and they would be publishing our games.

So that's kind of our intent. So we have in the next couple of years, we have Clockwork Ambrosia and then game number two. Right now, I would say probably 2026 should be a fair shot that we would be putting it out then. I don't think we want to be working on it for, again, like Tower Song. We don't mean working on it for three years. So, yeah, I'll put out a game for the next couple of years and kind of see it work out.

What's your relationship to games outside of game development? What do you like to play? How long have you been playing them? I mean, I've, you know, I've been playing games since my older brother showed me his Super Mario Brothers game. I was probably six or seven at the time.

I think, especially as a game developer, it's important to play as many games as you can, as many different games as you can. And I think one thing, not to jump ahead of your questions, but one thing that I really appreciate about Dev Game Club and... And I even have a friends group game club that we do for the same reason, because it...

Just being kind of forced through the structure of a game club to play. And I always play along and I won't listen to an episode if I haven't played the game yet. I'm always like usually a couple of games behind, but I will play the game and listen to the episode. And there's been some exceptions where, like Trespasser, just getting it to run would seem to be just as difficult as playing the game. If you got it to run,

So I opted to just watch somebody do a let's play, but I watched somebody play it with minimal commentary so I could kind of see what the game was. And then that's about as far as I'll go. But I think just being exposed to games like you just. It's just... I don't know. Video games are such a rich... activity to engage in, especially compared to books and movies, which I also love, but just the experience of a game and how it can engage.

all of your senses, your thinking, and your heart and your brain all at the same time. I don't know of any other medium that can do that. I'll always love games for it. And so I, you know, I have favorite genres. Like I love RPGs and strategy games probably are like my number ones, but I really, I... I play almost everything that I can, like if it seems good, or if it seems sometimes even just important, which Dev Game Club I think helps with that a lot. I'll play it, I'll try it.

which leads me to playing lots of weird games. I play through Rogue. I did a lot of... I'm not ashamed to save scum. whatever it takes but i will i got to the bottom of rogue and got all the way back out and you know probably took me five hours of safe scumming but i i played through that game for the show um

And it was an experience, I'll tell you what. But even when you say you've come your way through a game like that, you learn something about, like, what were they trying to do here and how well did it work? I think actually maybe even starting next year, we might try to do like a studio game club kind of thing. Maybe the games we'll play will be more specifically related, like deck builders and stuff like that. But like, let's get the team playing a game. Let's get our, let's get step away from.

like yeah maybe we'll take a couple sprints we won't work we'll just play some games together um to get ourselves into just different head spaces and figure out what works what doesn't work be inspired. Right now I'm actually playing Alan Wake. I'm going through the, like I said, I'm behind. So I'm playing Virgil and Alan Wake. I'm going through those episodes on the show. And then also listening to the Dragoon Effect version of it, which is really fun too.

And then my wife and I were playing Shifu for our friend's game club, which is a very different game. Very different experience. It's a non-gaming... What? I don't understand the question. No, probably the biggest time scene for me right now that is in games is our puppy that we got a couple months ago. She's a lot of fun.

I think she's too young for right now. I found out you don't want to take puppies on long runs when they're really young because they're... their body's still developing and can cause like longer term problems if they're, I think, I guess there's like their bones and their shoulder blades have to grow all the way until that's happened like too much.

Too much of a certain kind of physical activity like running can be bad for them, but I really like trail running and I'm really looking forward to when she's old enough and she'll go run with me. So that's probably a good second hobby. Tell us everything about your dog. What's her name? Likes, dislikes. What does she look like? Her name is Zelda. Yes, Zelda. Her full name is Zelda Hecate. And so my wife loves witches.

You can tell Tally, yes, Tally, my wife's name, Tally Gigi, yes, that's my wife and our cat. And I was like, you know, the Hecate is also a character in Zelda games, right? She's like, yeah, I do. We're like, okay, we'll do this name. Um, yeah, she's a little, she's a black five month old. Uh, she'll be five months old tomorrow, which is incredible. Um, she's a Labrador pit bull mix. Um, She loves, she'll do anything for a treat, anything for a bone. She loves, she's really smart.

she dislikes right now seems like she dislikes the dark i guess maybe i've been playing too much alan wick i don't know um But now that it's getting darker earlier and darker for later, she's not wanting to go on her little walks. She's like, no, I'm okay. We're good. I'll go back home now. So that's been kind of a cute discovery.

I think there's now an expectation with Gigi and Tower Song that Zelda should be in Clockwork Ambrosia. That's true. I could probably at least get a cameo. I'd pay the artist to make that sprite and the contractor. Probably actually she should probably show up in in the deck builder for sure, at least maybe with a card.

so what's funny the problem is when you do self-inserts of your pets but then you name your pets after characters it's like ah you're referencing zelda like no i'm referencing my dog and gg who in real life was named after kiki's cat from kiki's delivery service So people might think, oh, it's Kiki's liver service cat. I'm like, well, no, it's actually our cat. But yes, GG. Yeah, same GG. So what are some support mechanisms you have in place in life?

Definitely my wife. I think it's always been easy to, I mean, from the beginning, I knew that she was the one because it's just like, oh, she's... just the most validating supportive supportive person i've ever known um and i hopefully she feels the same way you know but we both try for that in in the marriage and i think that's that's what's got us this far um I think also the

um having those friends i mean like going back to the studio and forming that studio with my my friend like i chose somebody that i really trust and loved and because then kind of whatever it was, whether it was a difficult decision we were trying to make for the business or even though I was just stressed out about the game, there was somebody I could call and I could say, I don't know what to do.

Sometimes he didn't know either, but we could talk about it. I think video games are a good, one of the healthier coping mechanisms in moderation in terms of being able to let you really just think about and stress about.

something that has absolutely no stakes or consequences to it for a little while. I would insert trail running too, right? Yeah, for sure. Probably the... what I it is one of those those things when you're when you don't run or do an exercise like that and then people who talk about running and they talk about like the runner's high the euphoria and you're like yeah right come on and I've never had

I think the euphoria that people are experiencing, I wonder if that's not maybe just like dehydration or something, because I've never gotten that level of like, I'm in another state. My body is shutting down and going to survival mode because I've almost killed it running this marathon without drinking enough water.

I think being able to go out and I think I always want to be able to live where I can hit like a trail and go somewhere scenic, but just being out there, no distractions, no work, just. Out running, I do. It's always the first, up to the first 10 minutes of a trail run, I'm often like, I don't want to do this. Why am I here? What am I doing? This is stupid. And then I get about 10 minutes in, like, oh, I should head back. I'm like, do I really want to? Do I have to?

Yes, you do. You're not fit enough to keep going. I've made that mistake before. You go too far too fast. That's a good one. I mean, exercise is a good answer in terms of support mechanism, but am I doing it as often as I should? Absolutely not. I think when you're not able to do those harder but healthier things, I think pets and family and friends, very generic answer, but that they're the right people, investing in the right people.

which is a theme of Tower Song. Who is a good friend to have in this crazy world? Some suggestions for other media for people to check out, or books that you enjoy, or films, or music? oh non-game related let's see i like that you immediately went to game related yeah i know i mean it's kind of where i've been at and i think i think for the last for like five months around release the tower song i didn't do anything

And then after that, I was like, I need to play games again. And so I've been kind of forcing myself. And then we got a puppy, and that was also very distracting. So I've been forcing myself lately to play games again, which has been actually very healthy for me in a lot of ways. And so I think that's just where my head's at.

You know, things like, you know, if people are like, oh, what should I watch or what should I read? Well, you should watch Foundation on Apple TV. It is amazing, like high budget sci-fi. It's like they took it impossible to adapt. book series and made it so interesting and so compelling that i love i love hard sci-fi um like stuff set in space i don't know

I think that's just, and maybe on that, I'd also recommend people check out the Expanse series. These are all kind of old recommendations. I'm almost never watching anything new because I'm always behind. I'm always busy doing other things. those are probably some of the favorite things that I've done recently that stick out. well then let's uh talk about a game recommendation what should dev game club play do you want to drop tower song

Yeah, they should play Daurasong. I don't know. That's almost too scary to contemplate. I think Mirror's Edge would be a really interesting game for them to play. From what I can tell, it changed the way that platforming works in first-person shooters after that, even shooters. Mirror's Edge wasn't really... It changed, like... That game at the time was a revelation. It was like how it felt to move. You felt physically present in that space. I even turned off, and again, you can...

By default, it highlights the things in the world you can mantel on, but I turned it all off and found that the level design actually did lead you to a really nice parkour. I think there was one puzzle maybe where I had to turn on the hints to figure out where I was supposed to go.

I think that would be a fantastic game for me to play. Actually, it wouldn't be too new because I think it came out right after or before Dead Space, which they've also covered. So I think that'd be a good one. I think it informs a lot of the way... Like, when I look at, like, mantling and, like, modern games, I'm like, that came from Mirror's Edge. Like, they may not have played it, but they played a game that did play, like, somewhere along the line that DNA translated along.

How did you find the podcast? I think I wanted a Game Club podcast there. i think i first met and found one um i had mentioned this in the discord actually when they did beyond good and evil because the first game club podcast thing i ever did was i believe it was a one i think it was one of fm back in like i don't know i guess that was their late aughts they did a game a couple game club episodes i think they only did a few before one up kind of closed

and they did Beyond Good and Evil, which is where I played it with. And then they went on to do, I think, a few more with Rebel FM. and that might have been where i played it too so if somebody goes back like no it was rebel fm you might be right i don't remember actually i think i think we dug it up maybe it was rebel fm but

And maybe Young and Evil wasn't the first. So I had that experience. I'm like, it's really fun to play a game. Like, again, I like the excuse to, like, go play a game, have some sort of time. It's a new episode. Okay, I should do it soon. And so I think it was... i want to say it was probably i don't i think i'd heard about the show and maybe tried it a couple times like around 27 or 2018 probably just like googled game club podcasts and i think they came up

But when, uh, you know, pandemic happened, we're all in our house. I'm like, okay, I'm now I'm going to start this. And I, I went back to episode one, places some shock to, um, So, and I think that's where I really got into it and started following along and playing generally. I'm within like a year, I think, of their episodes now. And yeah, it's just really fun. I think playing along with the show has been really rewarding too. I guess the only downside to doing it is you can't email.

No, I mean, sometimes I'm caught up enough to email. But yeah, usually it would be like, hey, I'm playing this. I'm playing Alan Wake, which you played actually a while ago. Or I think I actually just because I had. I've missed it. I went back and played Eye of the Beholder last month.

Yeah, but yeah, I don't know, sometimes I'll go on the Discord and they'll be like, I have some thoughts about this game that some of you guys played a year ago, and usually people, you know, it's fun for people to remember, but... But it's okay. I mean, I think I'm not usually interacting with the show in that way. It's just very fun to listen. to these, you know, to, I don't know, titans of industry. Their perspective on the games that they play is so interesting.

especially because their history in the industry goes back often as far as some of these games. So being able to hear about, well, we weren't, you know, we weren't anywhere near this game, but we were working on this at the time where we knew some of these people, especially in a lot of the interviews that they pulled together.

I think it's a really interesting show. I mean, it's recommended listening to me. I recommend it to my team. Like, whether you guys play or not, you just listen to the show, listen to what they think about these games. I think. If anybody who's a fan of video games ever asked me for a podcast recommendation, I'm not just saying this because I'm on this interview, Dev Game Club, it would be my number one recommendation. I think it's the most rewarding.

video game-related podcasts that you can listen to. What's a pillar or takeaway from their series for you? Key takeaways. I think that... Even when the design sucks and, you know, of course, Trespasser is a classic example, but even when something, a decision is made and it sucks, I think... and like as a player like this is boring i hate this why is this in here i think from the show they're able to divine and a lot of a lot of times they're able to divine and they're probably

wrong or but they're probably like 10 to 20 correct on why did this they make the decision why is the game behaving this way why does it act like this why is you know i think that's interesting both when it works which is probably even more interesting like this

Maybe sometimes it's just, I don't know. They're both interesting, right? I think as game designers, we can get caught up on like, giving ourselves negative feedback by asking ourselves what about our games is actually working and is good, I think is a harder question to ask as a developer. So I think they will pinpoint what works about these games and why. People might look back at a Prince of Persia or a Deus Ex and say, why was this game so popular? Why did it change the industry?

Well, because it was great and people loved it. What was great about it? Why? And being able to dig into that. So I think a key takeaway for me would be that games are made in a variety of conditions that don't lead to optimal decisions in terms of game design, whether that's

for a variety of circumstances that could be budget, time-related, or just other design constraints. And I think this show is able to dig into that. And at least we get to theorize on how we got to where we ended up with this game and why that was good or bad. Sometimes when you're making a game and you're trying to get a commercial, you know, it's like, what are we going to do? What's the thing we can't do? We just have to stick with this bad decision that we made last year. Ah, geez.

Yeah, I have a counter question for you guys. Sure. Go for it. What has been... the most rewarding part about doing these community podcasts for you guys so far like why are you still doing them right what what's been rewarding about it for you each personally so i think that it's been super rewarding to get to know more about the people who are in this discourse.

It's, you know, you only get a certain, very limited slice of them. Usually you don't even know what they look like. You know, you can't get their sense of humor or how they talk and being able to... talk with people over Zoom is pretty great. The easy answer is, like, I don't know, it's just part of my personality. It's easy to talk to people, and I enjoy getting to know them. And I thought...

You have no tech skill set, so what could you bring to this that somebody might not have? And I've watched Nolan's stream enough to know that. his dry sense of humor would work well with my sort of talkiness. Having done a couple now, I think... you know, humanizing the people that we see on screen or, you know, hear when it's Ben or, you know, see when it's Nolan and K-On and Kyle and Lost Like We Yet. You haven't heard his yet, but that's in the can. Providing a fuller picture.

is always going to have or allow you to get more perspective of people, right? And so... I just think it leads to a better understanding of where people are coming from. Have you guys offered to or thought about interviewing Tim and or Brett as well? Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.

The interviews are always my favorite episodes of the podcast anyways. So I think that the sort of nuggets of wisdom that come out of... are so much more profound than just sort of reflecting on a game really you know talking with someone and getting their point of view on something and then You know, be like, oh, here's what I took from it. It's how meaning is.

Yeah, you hear it every time they introduce somebody and every time you guys have done it, a story is being told. You may not be able to put act one, act two, act three around it, but you're getting a sense of... story of what happened. I think some of those interviews have been very interesting in terms of how did this thing come about, even for people tangentially related. I mean, I think they interviewed the

I think his primary role was coming up with the branding for Arkham Asylum. That was a super interesting interview. The story behind it. That guy's story was whether it was you know even when he wasn't talking about batman like super interesting right um yeah i think you guys are on to something with i mean by taking that that interview you know bonus episode and saying let's make this whole thing i i think you guys have stumbled onto it

That's a good thing there. That's worthy of doing more of. Thank you. Their interviews are excellent for this. They have like... I wouldn't call it a hot take, but there's moments in these interviews to me that crystallize something about the game or an interesting aspect in somebody's life that informed it. And it's always funny to hear Brett and Tim interact. finding out that Diablo was turn-based until he decided to just turn the stop time down in between attacks. Like, that's insane. Or...

The one musician had a guitar of Van Halen. Julian Gallup finding out that Brett was sort of screwing himself by safe scumming because the game scaled with him, right? Like, there's all these, like, little moments in these interviews that I always find so funny. Do you have a favorite one or a moment for you that stands out? I don't know, they're all really interesting.

And something that I admit, this is a crazy practice for the, you know, I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but it's something I tried. And I've done this a couple times with different ones, but I did this for either Beholder or Aware. So I play the game up until... the episode then i'd load up the episode and then i'd load up like a let's play around that same content mute it and then just like watch the video and then just

Just listen to the podcast, not do chores, not drive to work, not do any other stuff that I'm always doing when I'm doing podcasts. I'm just going to absorb what they're saying, keep my brain, my stupid brain distracted with the muted let's play.

i think there's just really like you know they end up talking about D&D and how that works and how that actually doesn't translate that well to games, except for the one time I did with Baldur's Gate 3, but how hard that must have been, then you can appreciate how challenging that must have been for Larian Studios. So it's like.

So probably, I mean, probably my favorite one is always the last one that I listened to because I always just have a good time. So right now I'm like, ah, The Beholder series is great because that's the last one I listened to. And I can't believe, like when I first started playing I Have a Holder to go along with the show. For the first probably 30 minutes, I was like, I don't know about this. This is really, like, I gotta...

Okay, like, because it's so... you know that like you know the just that dungeon crawler very old school there's no like the interface is just like i think that first enemy like i'm gonna fight this enemy and you gotta like click on the weapon and click on the enemy like what what is this interface? At the time, of course, it was, you know, this is a 90% game on Metacritic in its time, right? Like, nowadays, of course. Um, but then, you know, I think one of the most surprising things about, um,

about the show and playing along with the show is like by the end of that though, even by the halfway point, I'm like, I'm having a good time with this game. Like I've sort of figured it out. I figured out how to engage with it. Shoram saves coming a little bit, although that game supports it more than others.

There was an automap tool that came with the Steam collection that I figured out that made the game. Obviously, that's not something you had. They don't use those tools. They were hand-drawing their maps, and I'm like, oh, you poor... You poor guys. So I find ways to make the game enjoyable enough, but then enough that I can start to engage with the mechanics that are there.

And I think just seeing like the different dungeon levels they did, I'm like, wow, they have lots of different biomes here. There's different enemy types. And they're really, they try to come up with interesting D&D rules to directly translate. And the fact that I ended up kind of having a good time with Eye of the Beholder.

where at the beginning i was like this might be another one of those let's play ones where i just watch it like i did with trespasser i don't know about And then by the end, I was like, okay, that was actually kind of fun. That's crazy to me. I can't believe that that happened. I think that's why I always tell anyone, play along with the show. You will be glad you did.

Break whatever rules you have to. They're like, we'll read the manual. We won't Google anything. I'm like, that's great for the show. I can't get down with that. But if you can play the game, I think you'll have a good time. Anything else you want to say before we wrap up? I think this is great that you guys are doing this. I think it's a great show. Like I said, a great show, great community. Again, it was flattered that you asked, but really grateful for the opportunity.

to come talk about my experience making Tower Song, which you can buy today on Steam. And I also appreciate you letting me, you know, do that. And I mentioned Clockwork Ambrosia, so I appreciate that. And yeah, I don't know, who knows, maybe this time next year we'll be talking about Clockwork Ambrosia for all of the interview. along with Tower Song, which you can buy on Steam.

Uh, can you want to drop, you know, all the information where people can find your studio or your itch, you know, your itch page and then I'll have Nolan do his. Uh, just go to oi.games and we've got all of our links, all of our socials. pages, HIO pages, that's all there. And if you want to hear more of me, you can follow me on Twitch at twitch.tv slash calamitynolan, and you can find my games at upatnight.games. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Discord Game Club Just Ready.

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. Goodbye.