Hey, Ben.
Hey Matt,
How you doing?
Great.
Good, good to hear. Um, so we'd started this podcast because we kind of realized that we had the same dreams as kids, and then something changed and you didn't go into the games industry. And I did, and then we have 10 odd years after that sort of met up and, you know, our careers have converged since, but I was interested in talking to you about what led you to want to be in the games industry? Uh, I know for me, it was just like, it was what I always did. Right. You know, you're a kid, that's what you want to make. You wanna make games, but I don't know if that's true of you. And so have you ever written your own game?
I, I have written some computer games. None of them are notable in any way. Um, I have made some board games that I have produced and sold, uh, which has its own sort of interesting aspects to it. It's not quite as techie, but maybe a little bit in some ways that you wouldn't expect.
I mean, I, yeah, no, that sounds very techie. I mean, there's a lot of things. Yeah. Right.
Okay. Like the mechanics of the game or a technology all to themselves, right. Like, you know, if you're doing like a side scroller game, like, you know, the, the, the way in which you jump and how you land and how much control you have over as you're floating through the air can sort of make a huge difference. And obviously
If you hold the jump key down longer do you jump higher even though that's irrational, and doesn't make any sense, but it's kind of needs to be there. How many pixels off the edge of the platform can you actually go before you start to fall? Those kinds of tweakables. Yeah.
And then obviously for like strategy games, you know, there's the whole, like mechanics of the economy, you know, some 4X space game where you're like, oh, you're trading iron for hydrogen and across the galaxy. And you know, the mechanics of that and the economics of that can be really nerdy too. Right.
I was going to say that's where you need a sort of degree in economics to be able to vaguely understand how everything fits together and not leave yourself open.
Right, right. Right. Because the worst thing in the world is you put your heart and soul into a game and then some nerd on the internet in like five hours is like, yeah. If you just trade hydrogen for iron, you can make an infinite amount of money and then win the game in three hours, right. Like that's just like, oh God, what have I done?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so did you actually, I mean, obviously we can talk about your board games and I'd love to hear about what the process is and that, but before we get there, you, what made you want to be, what made you want to make games?
Well, I mean, I played a lot. I played a lot of video games as a kid. I played video games on my Commodore 64, which I enjoyed a lot, played a lot of Defender. That was a fantastic thing. Uh, I had a Genesis, a Sega Genesis system. I played a lot of games on that. Uh, eventually I got into PCs and played, you know, hero's quest and space quest and a bunch of other games in that, that era that, that, uh, I really liked a lot. Um, we were just talking to you today about, well, uh, earlier today, I think about how, um, I'm super jealous of my oldest child who can just pull out her debit card and go on to steam and buy any game at any time, whenever she wants, whenever they want and instantly get gratification from that. And when I was that age, I had to take a trip down to the mall and go into, you know, Babbage's, uh, software shop where they sold software in boxes, on floppy disks. And I still, I still have this memory to this day of that store and going in, and I don't remember what game I was buying, but I went in and sitting on the counter at Babbage's was a demo disc for Wolfenstein 3d. And it had like an in game image of the game. And my initial reaction was it can't possibly be that cool.
This has going to be a mock-up.
There's no way that is actually what the game looks like. There's no way.
Roundabout that time, like, there was so many liberties with the, with the covers of games, there would be these ridiculous mock-ups and you would like you to give so disappointed when you got home and you just got like a black and white like blocky thing. And yeah. So, but yeah,
So I didn't take the disc. Like I was like, I didn't find out about Wolfenstein until weeks and weeks and weeks later, when all my friends were talking about it, I was like, wait, that's real?
Oh, you missed it.
I missed it. And I had to go back to the mall. It was terrible.
Your, uh your inner cynic prevented you from enjoying weeks of.
I was like, there's no way that it's that cool
Of shooting Nazis, which is one of the main attractions of Wolfenstein 3D. Yes, yes. Yeah. Amongst the technical brilliance of it. So it was really, it was a question of you being an avid game player, and then wanting to go into the, um, the games industry to, to make games. Right. Because that's what makes sense. Right. You know, if you're going to do any kind of tech job, it's certainly, as a kid is more glamorous to want to make games than it is to, you know, have a dream to be writing a database. I don't think there are many, many, 15 year olds that are sat there going, like, I, yeah. I just got a passion, a passion for SQL.
The ACID properties really speak to me as a human being.
That's not to say that those people don't exist and I'm glad that there are people like that that find it so exciting. I mean, one can only wonder what, um, oh, what's the chap's name, Aphyr. The person who takes apart the databases at the lowest possible level. He's a very interesting person in so many dimensions, and definitely not safe for work Twitter account for those who are thinking of following, following him. But, um, but very interesting none the less, but yes. And obviously people who find that stuff so interesting that they will do it, but, but games, I think I have that much more of a universal kid appeal for certain.
Yeah. Yeah. That was, and we kind of talked earlier about, like, when I got into college, I was more into AI and, you know, I really like, I did some graphic stuff, but it was more AI for me, but yeah, that was kind of my, that was kinda my art. Do, do you have like that moment where you're like, this is what I want to do when you sort of realize it's like, this was the moment.
No, I think I, I kept hanging on to the idea that I was going to get a PhD in physics and do like research in physics. That was my life. That was what my plan was. I loved games and I love making games. So I made a number of games, some of which I believe still survive. Um, the, um, not very, nothing, very good either. Right. Nothing worth, really talking about, although I'm sure I will, because that's, I mean, I can't help myself, but, um, that was always the hobby thing that I was doing. I never really thought it was a sensible thing to do. When I finished school, I went to school. I was in like high school to Americans and went to university, which is college to you.
We call it university sometimes too.
Uh, I know, I know, go on. It just confuses me when Americans say school and they mean university.
Oh well yeah, we definitely do that.
But, you know, I picked physics because that was what I thought was my, my passion. But I ended up spending my entire time in the computer lab, writing multi-user dungeons and doing some silly things, you know, w with that, and then ultimately got a job in the games industry. Not because I wanted necessarily to go into the games industry. Exactly. But because I was chatting on IRC and about having to get a job and somebody who worked in, have you ever thought about getting a job here? I'm like, no, I don't think I ever really thought that this was a serious thing that I could do.
Is this something adults do?
I mean, I've yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, yeah. For, for at least five years after I got a, um, a job and I'd got published games and I was doing okay. Um, my mother would still say to me, when are you going to get a real job?
And, you know, to an extent, I think I, I, I, uh, I felt that myself was like, yeah, well, I get paid to do this. It seems too good, I mean, not very much, admittedly, I didn't get paid very much at all for a long time, but, um, but that was the games industry at the back back then, certainly in north London. So, yeah, I mean, I had written a few games because that was what you did. Those are the most interesting tech things to do. Um, around that time in the UK, at least the market was, there were a lot of black market floppy disks going round that you could get games with. But, um, there also a number of magazines that you could buy from the news agent and they would have type in games. And so you would sit for many hours and then you were typing a somewhat decent game and some of them were pretty good actually.
And that's mostly where I learned the tricks, right. Was, was debugging other people's code. Not necessarily it was a problem, their problem, but because I typed it in wrong.
Or like they printed it wrong.
and look at where you went wrong, or they printed it wrong. Right. They were actually pretty good about that. That wasn't such a big deal, but the first programs professionally published, um, that I had professionally, you know, my first professional programming work was writing type-in programs for these magazines. Like they didn't know that, you know, me and my mate, Richard and I were like 13 and 14 at the time, uh, sending in stuff. And it was like, you know, 10 pounds here, five pounds here, 50 pounds for the, you know, like the, the star one. And that's a lot of money when you are, when you are 14 or 15. And towards the end, we got a deal to do a multi-part type in game for one of the, um, um, uh, main publishers, acorn user.
But, um, it was right at the end of the lifetime of the computer that was writing on. And so they, they actually dropped support for that computer before we completed it. So we have most of it written still down somewhere. And, uh, it was, it was a lot of fun, but yeah, it's, I don't know why games were the draw. I think it was that tech challenge, you know, the same reason that, that, uh, all the hacking groups wrote demos, like, well, what's the most impressive thing. Well, okay. You can compute pi to a hundred decimal places. That's not very exciting, but if I can make a cool thing happen on the screen. Right, right. That's interesting. And so you want to show off, you write something with cool, you know, how many more stars can I get in my star field? How many more sprites can I get on the screen at once? And so that was definitely what appealed to me. Um,
Did you read 2,600 magazine as a kid?
I did not. No. No, that
Was, are you familiar with it? Do you know what it is? Is
This, it's more of a hacking magazine, there was an alt 2,600 later on usenet, which was, you know, 2,600 Hertz being the, the frequency at which the phone system used as its kind of like escape character.
Ah, yeah. Yeah. It wasn't, it that, I feel like, I feel like there was a tone where it was like for payphones where, when you, like, everything was in increments of nickels. And so when you dropped in a, I'm probably botching, this, this is literally like 30 years ago, but like you would drop in a quarter and it would, you get five of these beeps. Right. And so you could, you could build something that just made that tone and play it into a telephone. And each beep was a nickel. Right. So if you wanted to make
And so you could get free phone calls, basically.
Yeah. And I, I had this memory that's where it came from, but I'm probably making that up.
It could be that I know there were different other tones. There were the ones that I remember with the freaking tones, which were, um, once you, you could get like a switchboard to put the phone down, the line was still open and essentially it was dead waiting for you to put the phone down. But as far as the exchange was concerned, like the telephone exchange was concerned. Um, it was an empty line. And then as long as you knew the magic code to the exchange used itself to like communicate lines, you could like dial out long distance and say, and it was billed to either the person who just put the phone down or it was not billed at all. It got lost inside the cracks. And again, I'm also probably butchering this, but these were simpler times where literally the frequency of a tone down a line was the only communication channel that was available to you. And then, you know, there's no cryptographic signature on that.
There's no private key involved here. There's nothing like that. Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, you know, what was it captain crunch? The, that the hacker was so named because he found that the whistle that you got out of a box of captain crunch cereal happened to be that 2,600 Hertz. And so that was it. You just got your Captain Crunch and then off you go, whatever you were doing with it, but how we get into this?
Well, the reason I bring it up is cause you're talking about like the typing games and magazines.
Oh, 2600 magazine!
and they had similar things in 2,600, they had type in, it was, it was the first memory that I have. I have this memory, this is troll stroll down memory lane for me, this podcast tonight. Um, I remember getting the magazine and I remember being super fascinated by everything that was going on. And I remember seeing these programs in the back and I had used basic and I had used Pascal at the time, but I had never used C. And I was like, what is this language? Right. And then a friend of mine started talking about, he had gotten a license for the Borland turbo C compiler. And I'm like, oh, is that the same language from the 2,600? And he was like, yeah, why do you think I got it? And that was, I have that memory of like, that's that was when I first learned that C was a programming language. And I was probably, oh, I don't know. I was probably around the age of my oldest child right now, right around 13, 14. Or so.
That's really quite something. And also shows how much older I am than you, which is not much older, but significantly older than
Or just more into C, right?
Right. Like 14, I was programming arm assembly because we couldn't afford the compilers. And you know, I don't know that I don't, my memory was just before going to university. So 17, 18, um, I was becoming aware that there was, C, cause of the magazine again was publishing it, but from like looking through it, I had dismissed it as, just as crappy macro assembler. And I mean, that's not actually the worst. Um, that's not the worst thing I could say about, you know, it's not the worst characterization of C is that it's a macro assembler, cause that's actually it's strength. Right. You look back and you're like, yeah, because you can reason as you're writing down the C code, at least with the 30 year old now C programmers, sorry, C compilers at the time you were writing out stuff that could pretty much map line by line to a set of instructions. There was nothing else, more sophisticated going on. And the language didn't allow you to do many more sophisticated things. And that was absolutely fine. It was just a great way of getting almost portable assembly. Um, certainly, you know, that's what you're doing when you're manipulating strings and Unix calls and things like that for writing Unix. That makes it makes sense. Although I think we've discussed before, it's like the worst language to be doing any kind of string processing in. But, um,
Yeah. So the shop that you worked for was called Argonaut, is that right?
Oh, so when my first job was all going up games, yes. I'm going to games north London. And so I started there in 1996, um, in between my final, my, my life, my penultimate, my final year at university, I did the interview and they said, yeah, come work for us now. And I'm like, ah, I haven't actually finished my degree. And they're like, do you have, do you could start now. And I'm like, ah, I think my parents would kill me if I didn't finish my degree. Although, you know, it has had literally no effect on my life, so I don't regret it, but it's, it's, I have not really used very much of my knowledge of quantum mechanics in my day job. It turns out, um, nor can I remember most of it. But yeah, Argonaut games. Um, I started out actually as a play tester because they didn't know what to do with me.
For the PlayStation game Croc. So, you know, we talk about testing a lot and I think I may have even mentioned this before in the podcast about, you know, the VHS recorder being the most important thing, you know, that was one of the things I was doing was just, you know, eight or nine hours a day playing very buggy, PlayStation, one Croc, um, and having it videoed. And if there was a problem I could call over the, the, the people say, Hey, this is what happened. They're like, no, you need to rewind the tape and go look, see, see, I'm not making it up. And they're like, oh, oops. Yeah. And they'd go off and change something. Um, and then latterly, I worked on the, the, the PC port of Croc. And so I got to actually write a thing. They let me write the front end to that, which was, which was kind of them.
And then I got a huge break. Actually. I was, I was a big bigging myself up enough that, um, somebody took a punt on me right in the engine, like the 3d engine for a new game, for a Dreamcast title. This is pre dreamcast being even announced before it was even called Dreamcast. It was just called Kamui back in the day. But, uh, um, uh, one of the producers Argonaut was like, we need somebody to write a new engine and it's going to be for a new console. So we can't use anything that's already there. We just need someone who, who we reckon can do it. And I was like, Hey, I'll do it. And they were like, you sure? I'm like, absolutely. You know, got my fingers crossed behind my back, you know? Yeah. There should be, I've done this before.
Um, that was, I looked back and the, that producer, Nick Clark, taking a punt on a, an unproven pretty much unproven programmer was, uh, was, uh, was pivotal really. That was what got me really going in the, in the industry. And, uh, that was a lot of fun. I think I've said before the, the, the Dreamcast is my favorite console to have worked on just really nicely put together. Um, just the right lowish level, like access to the hardware. Um, we were a, they called it a one and a half party. So normally they're a first party title or a third-party title. Right. You know, like if you're a first party title, then you're actually just working as if you are Sega or Sony or whatever. And then you're, uh, you're a developer, but you're like white label. Like I forget what color label it would be.
But like the label that says like no one will ever know that they contracted somebody to do this, it's going to be a Sony game or a Sega game.
Published by Nintendo or Sony.
Exactly. And yeah, maybe there's just a tiny credit somewhere. And a third party obviously is, you know, the you're a separate company altogether, your Psygnosis, or were bought by Sony. So that's confusing. That's a terrible example. Um, you know, you're Rockstar and you're like, yeah, we just make the game. And then we're going to make it for whichever platform. And, but in this instance, they wanted to be sort of somewhere in between. So we had really good access to the tech people at, uh, at Sega. And I'm still Facebook friends with a half dozen of them, which is great fun to sort of see what's happened to the, the sort of diaspora of, uh, of, of Sega employees.
But it meant that we had some great inroads into the, uh, the tech side of things. And that meant, you know, I could ask any question and a lot of it was still over in Japan and the European people didn't necessarily know as low level the stuff that was going on inside the system, but it was fairly straightforward. And, um, yeah, it was just, it was just a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. I learned a whole ton of things and I'm so lucky that I was someone who took that gamble on me.
So what games did you make after that?
Gosh, now, now I have to think. Uh, so after that, we, we had this idea, there were a bunch of us. So towards the end of, um, red dog, which was the Dreamcast title, which was, uh, uh, sort of first, not first, but third person tank shooting game,
Are there YouTube videos of these games that I can go look at?
There are. There are.
Oh, well that's an exercise for later.
Yeah. If you go look for Red Dog: Superior Firepower, was it was it's terrible, um, tagline it's it actually plays, okay. We've got it on the Dreamcast. Um, you know, obviously our listener can't see this, but I'm gesturing behind me to the Dreamcast on the floor and the kids have played it and it's, it, it holds up, okay, it's not earth shattering, but it was, it was good at the time. And yeah, I despair of some of the things we took out. Um, but nonetheless, I'm, I'm, I'm really proud of it. And, you know, the engine was mine, there was, there were three of us doing the programming. So I wrote the engine and I wrote all the 3d studio plugins, all the map nonsense. And then there was, uh, like the lead programmer who also did like the AI and the Strat programming language, which was, you know, like a separate language that we could give snippets of to the designers and the level layout folks so that they could actually script what was going to go on without having to actually write C.
And it was mostly C with a little bit of C plus plus, um, and some, assembly, actually quite a reasonable amount of assembly for the triangle rasterizing type stuff for the triangle submitting stuff. And then we had another person who did, uh, the collision and the physics, you know, collision is actually really difficult, right. There's one thing you get hardware support for like drawing triangles. That's what the system's designed to do, but like, you know, does the sphere of this tire intersect with any of the thousands and thousands of, of, of triangles? That's a tough thing to do. Yeah. And so, so Sav, uh, Savvis, um, did a fantastic job with that, you know, nowadays that's outsourced, so both the engine gets outsourced usually in games and the,
Like Unity or, uh,
Yeah. Um, unreal, that kind of stuff. And then even towards the end of my time in the games industry, havoc was name of the system, which was a physics and collision system. And there, you know, there's a lot of smarts, you know, you mentioned Wolfenstein, part of the rendering system that made Wolfenstein super, super amazing could also be used for collision detection, which was clever. And the same was true of both doom and quake as they went on down that, you know, that was a big problem, is like, if you've got AIs running around and you've got people shooting all the way, you really want to have decent line of sight calculation that doesn't take forever, that's accurate so that you can actually hide behind a barrel and then they can't see you, that kind of stuff. So it's a really important part of the game.
As well as the more obvious if I shoot and it hits a wall. I can see where the bullet hole is in the right place. It's not like three inches up into right. Which you know, is obviously a problem. Um, yeah. So at the end of Red Dog, we then, um, we decided, um, there's a bunch of us who are a little bit disaffected with stuff, but we had our own game idea. And so we were a couple of like very subterfuge meetings around a friend's house where we've kind of fleshed out an idea. And the idea was for a top-down or sort of three quarters down view, kind of like, oh gosh, what was the name of those strategy? Turn by turn strategy games like alien attack type things on the PC, around the time.
Like X-COM?
Yes. Thank you. Oh, I'm so glad you can remember that.
So yeah, there was X-COM and a whole bunch of things, so sort of like that, but imagine. Yeah, no, but we were trying to make it so that it was sort of partly real-time and partly turn-based. And so the idea was, you know, you were like some squad about to like bust into a building. And so you could sort of queue up the next few moves and then like pull the trigger and have your four or five teammates all jumping through the window at the same time. And then don't do some, some level of autonomous attack as well as you being able to like, do a more real time, like. So a bit of a, more like a Command and Conquor type, real time aspect, but with the other, um, uh, X-COM-y feel. So that was the idea. And we mocked out some, some, um, some graphics using the Red Dog engine on the Dreamcast, which was a lot of fun because once you take the game out and you've only just got the rendering engine, you can, you've got a lot more time budget to spend on really pretty things.
So I remember us having a very polished floor where we just literally inverted the geometry and drew again underneath it with a transparent floor instead. And it looked like it was a beautifully, shiny reflective thing, which was, which was very pleasant. And it ran at 60 frames a second instead of the terrible 30 frames, a second, that Red Dog ran at and it was great. And, um, we basically got the go-ahead to start investigating. That was going to be, that game was gonna be called Kleaners with a K, because you apparently liked some contract killer cleaner, you know, like Leon, that thing was out around about this time. It was very much that thought. And to this day, um, the, even the, the sequel to the game that came out of Kleaners, was still in a directory called Kleaners because it's hard to rename software.
That's so funny.
I w I mean, yeah, it's possible that there's some amount of that source code still exists somewhere that I have access to. So I speak from recent recollection. There's some good, there's some good gems in that code base. The company folded, as far as I'm aware, um, nobody really owns that anymore. Um, obviously I can't publish it, but it would be really interesting. So it's such a time capsule of all these things that happened back then. Yeah.
You seen a game like that before that mixed the sort of like tactical turn-based stuff and the live stuff.
Um, I don't, I don't remember that we had, or did, and certainly nothing springs to mind now,
Because there are games like that, like, um, Divinity: Original Sin has that mechanic in it. Um, I think there's another one that I played that has that mechanic in it. And I wonder if the lineage of that, you know, you say like you asked the designers of that game, like, where'd you get the idea to do this? They'd be like, oh, it was this game. And you asked those designers to just get the idea to do this. I wonder if that goes all the way back.
Right. I mean, it didn't come back. So the game changed a lot for us. That was our idea. And in like so many things, the tale grows in the telling, and this is as the telling was very different because, uh, we did work on it for awhile. And then, um, uh, oh, I can't remember who had the, the person who had the IP of the SWAT games, the special weapons and tactics, uh, approached us and said, can you do us a SWAT game for X-Box? And we're like, well, we have a Dreamcast engine running a sort of vaguely the same type of game. And they wanted it to be different anyway, because of, because X-Box would, it would be their first console attempt at a SWAT, a franchise game. And so somebody three or four rungs up in the, in the company went, oh yeah, we can definitely do that with the Kleaners engine.
And so, you know, very quickly Kleaners got pushed to one side, then it became SWAT.
Yeah. Got it.
And it's, it very quickly became a first person. We kept the team mechanic and, um, obviously moved to Xbox as well, which is another great console for what it's worth. There was a lot of good things going on in particular, the tooling was amazing. Microsoft did a great, great job of, um, putting together a tool suite and really understanding that developers will developers are lazy. And if you give them really good tools, they, they do a lot of good things with them. The, the equivalent, I mean, eventually we had to port it to PS2 as well. So I have a lot of experience of taking a very, in my opinion, obviously my very biased opinion, a very capable high-tech X-Box rendering engine, which had dynamic lighting, which had bump mapping, which had depth of field, which had like light blurring.
And so like, you know, you'll be blinded by flash bang, grenades would blind you and you couldn't see, we'd like actually re sampled the screen. And we used it as like a virtual Iris. So if you happen to look up at the sun, which was actually brighter than the screen could go, we would, we would notice that and start dialing back, like the gamma correction and the tables until eventually the sun was like bright and then everything else was effectively, looked black. And then if you looked away from it, everything was pitch black until it redid the other way. So there's all these cool effects. And I said, can you make this work in the PS two? We're like, no, no. PS2 is amazing. What it has is fill rate in spades. It's the ability to put pixels on the screen was unparalleled. It could really write fast to memory.
Um, I, my understanding actually is that the, some of the units that could do like the per pixel operations were in the Ram cells, or very close to the Ram cells, which let them do these clever things, like, you know, fill the screen really fast and like blend with what was already there, but it meant you were extremely limited in what you could do, because it was like, that was the functionality that the hardware had. And there was nothing else, whereas this or the X-Box, we had like eight instructions that could run per pixel. And we could do a limited amount of maths in that. And that's how we were able to do bump mapping and some of the other crazy effects that we had going. And we also had verdict shaders, which would allow us to do like a few hundred, uh, assembly instructions worth of processing on each vertex.
And the PlayStation two has effectively in a general purpose CPU for that vertex processing, but it was really awkward to use you forever, like dealing with like, why didn't this work? All the DMA hadn't quite finished before the next thing needed to happen. And so you've a lot of embedded like plate passing of memory around and being very, very careful plus the fact that there was a different CPU from the main CPU, which meant that you were cross compiling for it. If you were going to try and write any kind of C code, but because it was so limited, you usually just ended up writing in assembly directly. Yeah. And if you were writing directly in assembly, it had no architectural hazards. So if you did add the equivalent of add, register one to register two and saw the result in register three, and then you said, okay, now app store register three somewhere else.
It would let you do that. But the thing is the result for register three wasn't ready yet. So you would just store whatever the previous result of register three was, there was, it was fully pipelined and it had all these levels pipelines. So our primary IDE for writing, um, uh, VU code as they were called was, was, was Excel. And we would write the instructions in Excel. And then we would use color coding to sort of show when register three would become ready and therefore you could use it. And of course, the real way of getting the speed out of it was to abuse that and go well, okay. I actually need the old version of the thing of register three. And so if I do that the cycle before it completes, I get the old version and on the next cycle,
Pipelining by hand?
By hand, yeah. Um, Sony eventually developed a tool that allowed you to write normal code, and it would do some of that stuff for you, but, you know, just those were the fun years.
So we were able to do with some interesting trickery, we're able to, most of what the SWAT X-Box engine did, not all of it. We were never able to get the dynamic lighting going, but where my, my co engine writer on that, uh, Nick Hemmings, who I later ran the C++ tools company with, which I think we've talked a little bit about before, uh, he and I were able to work out most of the things. And in particular, our lighting system was very amenable to be ported to the PS2. So we were very, very lucky and it was just a fluke, one of those things like, oh, that's cool. So anyway, so SWAT was the next game I worked on. And in fact, during that process, we, we made a general purpose game engine, which was used in a couple of other titles.
Oh, cool.
Um, so I've got a bunch of credits in games that I don't ever remember them being around, but, uh, it was, uh, yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun, but as I say, all came out of someone taking a punt on, on me. And so I'm forever thankful. And the, the sad thing is, um, there were, there are a number of reasons. Um, why, um, so Nick ended up leaving Argonaut under a bit of a cloud. I don't know that he was cut out for the job that he had and it just, it came up against him. And eventually I think he may have decided to go whatever, and I've never been able to, you know, and it took me years afterwards to realize, you know, retrospectively how lucky I had been, because he was like, yeah, sure, go on, Matt, you give it a go.
Right. And, you know, it was, it was definitely a career page, turning moments where it could've gone either way. And, um, and so I'm very grateful to him, but he's vanished off the face of the earth. And now, you know, about every two or three years old, it's going to be generic name, unfortunately. And he seemed to have left the industry. So I couldn't, I've not been able to find him. So if by some miracle he's listening to this podcast, thank you, Nick. You, you really did send me on the right path in the, in the games industry. And I think as a result of the confidence I picked up from that, it snowballed onto where I am now. So, so yeah, so X-Box, uh, PS2. And then, um, there were some other bits and pieces. I'm forgetting a few things in between there.
I, I know, but, uh, the last game I worked on was actually one I worked on after I had left Argonaut after Argonaut had folded, and Nick and I had set up profactor are our C++, consultancy and tooling company. We still love games so much that we were still making them in our spare time. And we made a little, um, X-Box live, um, community edition thing, uh, which meant we had to write the whole thing in C sharp, because we weren't able to get a, a, um, a dev kit from Microsoft. And they kind of released this, Hey, you know, as an experiment, if you write it in C sharp and you'd use these, these, uh, facilities, you can like upload it unsigned onto a con, you know, you put this, you download this game. There's not really a game.
It just interprets C-sharp. And it's, it was, it was a good thing, but, you know, we try to use it to get far enough down the line to actually get a publisher interested. And, um, so I had to put my business hat on then, which was really interesting interacting with the publishers and spending all the time on the telephone, trying to sell things to people and then hearing what the rates were. And they were like, yeah, yeah, we were quite interested in your game. These are just standard terms. And you look at them, you're like, it's 75% you. Twenty-five percent us. You're going to give us an advance of like 50 grand, a hundred grand. You know, that I forget, right. It's a long time, but you'd give me that amount. And then effectively you recoup your costs first out of the revenue of the game. And then after that, we get 25% of the remaining amount. This is, this is the worst loan I have ever been offered. Uh, why would I even need you? What are you doing for us? Oh, but you know, we at, we advertise your game. We put, we put it on the store for you. And like, no, no, you're doing nothing, right. This is, this is the beginning of the, the, the sort of app store revolution.
Yes. This is, this is why these things were created this because of publishers doing that.
But now of course, Apple and the like are in that position of like, well, we take this amount and you're like, what do you do exactly? You host my file on your download server
They're not taking 75% anymore though.
No, that's true. But it's still more than more than the very little it needs to be. You know, I think probably the, the, the, the exemplars of people who have worked out the exact right amount to take is the credit card companies who, you know, just about sit at the bottom end, trying to scrape as much as they can out of the stores. Admittedly, not, not the, not me. And it's like, you know, bounces around about 5% ish, and that's just low enough that people grumble about it, but it's not actually well, right. Maybe it would be a different world if it was zero. I don't know. That's not the question.
They hit the efficient frontier of how much you can take before someone really cares.
Yeah. Maybe so. Yeah. All right. So I've talked a lot for the last 20 odd minutes, maybe more than that, which, you know, I know is kind of your MO poked me with a, with a thing that you said I can just wind Matt up.
We do that to each other all the time. That's what makes this podcast work.
I want to hear about your board game, or do you want to do that another, another one?
Uh, I can, I could talk about that.
Let's talk about it, I'd like to hear it.
You know, it's, it's, there's not a ton to tell, so I don't think this is going to take up too much, too much time, but basically, um, I love, first of all, I love in addition to video games, I love board games. Um, I really like co-op board games. Um, that's sort of my favorite thing is, you know, like games where you can get together with a group of people and sort of share the same objective. And so
I don't know that I've ever played a co-operative board game.
Oh, really?
I mean, we, uh,
Not even Pandemic? That was sort of like on brand for the last couple of years.
Yeah, no, no, not that, no. I know you brought one in once and I think I'll hold it around the edge of our drinks evening, um, where you explained it, but I don't think I've sat down to do it. And it sounds like a great family thing because, you know, there's the one child that you have that wants to win, and then gets very disappointed when they don't and then the other child doesn't care at all. And then it will be nice to say, well, how, if we all care about it together, maybe we'll get somewhere. But so yeah. You like cooperative games.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, great for, for friends and, you know, beer and pretzels too. Like if there there's lots of, um, ways in which those games can be super fun, but I, I love, uh, uh, strategy games. I love cooperative games. And so I made a, uh, a game called Earth Is Dead. And the premise of this game was that, uh, Earth had been destroyed by a giant meteor. And in the years leading up to it, humanity had sort of rallied to build some sort of colony ships to send off to another world. And had.
The A ark, the B ark.
Exactly.
Except for real.
Yep. Uh, and had, um, developed this faster than light jump drive to propel them to this new world. Uh, but the problem was is that in humanity's haste, the jump drive didn't actually work. And it, and it basically took you to a random location in space.
And so the way this game worked is you, each of the players would play a captain of one of these ships. And your goal was to basically jump around to various random parts of the universe and collect enough data to where you could fix the navigation system and the jump drive and go to where you're actually trying to do, go where you, so you could set up your colony, right.
Oh, interesting.
And it was a, it was sort of like a dice pool mechanic game. So you would, you would have officers on your ships, um, that when you jumped to a new location, you're like, okay, where are we? You'd draw a card. It would give you some location. And the cool thing is, is that, uh, these were real locations in space. Like all of this stuff is like, you know, um, I want to say open source, but.
Various named stars and things, you know, alpha Centauri or, yeah.
But it's like, there's all this material, uh, and like pictures and public domain. I'm sorry.
Oh, I see that kind of, right.
Yeah. These are all public domain pictures. You know, the, the, I have been created by NASA or other, other things. And so, you know, I, I took the, I took the art from, from that, and I took the actual places from that. And then, and, you know, there's some crazy things in the universe. It's like, here's a planet this entirely made of molten lead and it rains lead on this planet. Right. And like, you know, that sort of crazy stuff, right. A magnetar that's like the magnetic fields are so strong that if you got within a thousand kilometers of it, the atoms in your body would literally be ripped apart. Right. Like that kind of stuff. Um, so, you know, it made for sort of interesting things.
And so the, the basic turn in this game would be, you would jump to a new location. Everybody on the ships would, uh, kind of scramble to figure out what the heck was going on. They would make various skill checks. You'd try to collect some data. Maybe you succeeded, maybe you didn't, and then you jumped again. Right. And when you collected enough, you could finally jump to the, the final location and win the game. Um, and designing this game. I read this book (The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, by Jesee Schell), I read this really great book by this guy that designed like rides at Disneyland. And he talked about sort of like the emotional experiences that you go through when you're playing a game. And it's sort of, it's a little bit like that you get with like a story, like a, like a narrative.
Wow. Like the arc of the hero.
Right, right. Yeah. Um, but he talked, he talked a lot about like, you know, how you have to like a little bit sort of like that sort of, you know, that hero's journey where you, like, you need to give people abilities and you let them use those abilities and have successes. Um, but then increase the challenges so that the old abilities don't work anymore and they need to adapt. And then you sort of, you know, build it up to this, this, this climax and, you know, there's lots of details in this book that I'm, I'm not doing it justice by describing it right now, but, but one of the, one of the, like this guy that wrote this book, um, his views and Sid Meier's views on games is kind of what entirely shaped my view of games and game design, where Sid Meier, um, uh, obviously prolific, uh, just an amazing game designer.
Um, you know, uh, and him had very different views on it, but I really liked his take on it. Where, where he said that like the purpose of a game is to elicit an emotional response, right? Like you're trying to make people feel scared or happy or sad, just like a movie, just like a book. And so when you're designing the game, you can never lose sight of that. And I, and I, and I went, and as I worked on this game, that was always, my struggle is I would get enamored with the statistics. I would like be figuring out like the dice rolls and trying to figure out, like, how do I balance this out so that
The programmer in your couldn't help, like coming out and the mathematician and like, how's this going to help
Exactly. Like, I was like, how do I balance this game and make sure that it all works. And then every once in, while you have to stop and be like, is this fun? Is this actually fun? Or am I just creating a math problem for someone to solve? And I'd be like, no, this is
You, and I know people for whom that would be the perfect game, you know, we should probably talk about it. It's true. But yeah, if you're trying to, to, to, to, to apply what you've learned from this book, then yeah. You're trying to elicit an emotional response. You're trying to say, this is where you despair, you're like, we're surely we're going to die now because X has just happened. You're like, ah, but if you want people to go on that journey, that roller coaster ride.
Exactly. Exactly. And, and the cool thing about co-op games is that if you do it right, everyone's feeling that together. Right. So you have a group of people that are simultaneously like, oh man, we're screwed. This is, this is going to be bad. Right. Yeah. Um, and then, you know, they overcome it and then it's, oh my God, we made it right. So it's all that, all that kind of thing. But that was always, that was always my, my struggle with this. And, and from that experience, and I think you and I have kind of talked about this, but if I was ever going to go back into game design, I think the way that I would do it, even if I was going to do board games, which I love board games and would definitely do that. But the way that I would do it is that I would build a, let's just call it digital version of the game first.
It might be like just a straight up video game version of it, maybe for like a mobile device. It might also just be like a very bare bones sort of just simulation of the game that you could click around with. But the getting the, the, mehanics and the playtesting right, um, in that would be so much easier than having to like print out cards, which is what I did. Like, I had like Google docs with like all the card layouts on one page, and I would print them all out at, uh, on a color printer. And then I would cut them all up and slide them into sleeves. And then I had like a deck of fake cards that I would use, and I would gather whatever remaining friends could tolerate this process and say, Hey guys, you wanna play another round of, uh, Earth is Dead. And they'd be like, all right, fine.
I'd imagine that's a real problem. Yeah. It's fun the first five times maybe. And then it's like, okay, day 27. Playtesting.
Playtesting. Yes. Especially because the early versions aren't that good. So you're just, you're, you're really, you're really punishing them by doing this. Um, and so like having that feedback cycle where you can playtest and like, are, am I creating these emotional situations? Am I creating the, sort of like the sense of, of dread am I creating this, this like sense of victory? It's a really hard thing to, to, to, to get right. And to sort of measure. And so you only have so many cracks at this. And so what I would do if I were to do this over again, is I would separate those two processes entirely. I would have a simulation of the game, some sort of digital version where I work on all the mechanics, I make sure everything's balanced. And then I go and I play test it. And I see if it's fun. And if it's not, then I can go back and tweak the rules only in the dimension of fun-ness and have the system there to tell me whether or not I need to increase the happy quotient here. This is, this is not good. Um,
But that sounds like, you know, yeah. Developing it entirely in like a mock form in a web browser or whatever, say you can play it with your pals and not even necessarily have to be in the same room kind of thing, but surely these kind of kits exist, right. There must be like generic rule engine based stuff where you can prototype.
Yeah. Yeah, there, there are. And I think you can actually borrow a lot. There are a lot of generic tabletop systems that you can get. Um, and if I were to design a game today, I would look really hard at one of those to be like, I'm just going to take this basically rules engine for, for this tabletop game. And I'm going to adapt it to whatever my game is to make sure that I have like game mechanics that like, kind of make sense and are coherent with each other. Um, but, but, uh, uh, a mutual friend of ours, Lyle has a great description of sort of some of these aspects and how they come together. Right. You have the, the rules of the game, and then you have the sort of style of the game and the way that Lyle describes this to me, and I'm sure he got this from someone else. I don't know who is, it's the crunch and the fluff. So look a game like chess is all crunch. There's no fluff. It's just mechanics rules. You follow the rules of the game. You play the game, right. There are other games like, have you ever played the game exploding kittens?
I have, yes. It's almost all fluff. Because it's all about the stupid cats.
Almost all fluff. The art is cool on the ideas are cool, but like the actual mechanics of the game...
I've just discovered that we've got the NSFW pack out by accident. That's all what the game's about for them.
Which you can have games that, that are all one or the other, right. Like chess is all crunch. And, you know, uh, exploding kittens is 90% fluff, but really great games find ways to combine these things symbiotically. And one of my litmus tests for this is if you look at the, the art of a game or the style of a board or the design of a character, and you can intuit just from looking at it, what the rules probably are. That's when you've really meshed the synergy between those two things. Because now they're like informing each other, um, when the flunch crunch and the fluff sort of like balance out and you're like, I bet that ranger can shoot an arrow. What do I need to do? It's like, oh, yes. On page three, it says that the ranger can shoot an arrow. Who would you like to shoot it at? That sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that was sort of my experience with that. And, and, and is that
The only game that you you've made or have you done more than that?
So I made some calculator games in school, uh, on my Ti-85. Uh, I made, uh, I made a bunch of demos in college when I was applying, uh, to companies.
Oh for, to companies. You're like hey here's my, like my...
My little demo and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. I made those kinds of things, but I don't know that I've ever really made any sort of like video games that are worth.
But, uh, is your, is your board game still in print?
It is! Well, it is. So it's it's I published it talking, speaking of publishers. Yeah.
Yeah how does that even work? I mean, how do you go from, like, I have an idea and some, a Google docs with pictures to here's my laminated joyous thing without renting out yourself. And,
Uh, so if you go to EarthIsDead.com. You can, you can buy it the way it works is it's, um, it's a, it's a publisher called The Game Crafter that does single print games. So when you buy a game, they will print it up and they will mail it out. That means it
What like on demand printing?
That means it is much more expensive than a traditional board game.
Wow.
So my game is, is it's not that complicated. There's, there's a couple of decks of cards. There's I don't know, maybe 24 very small dice.
Dear listener, Ben is gesturing like a, sort of like a six inch by four inch cube-ish, not cube.
Yeah. It's like, maybe it's like maybe six inches by eight inches by two inch box. Right. And so if you were to buy a game like that in a typical game store, you might expect to pay like 20 bucks, right? Yeah. If you, if you buy Earth Is Dead, I think it's like 35. Rightk.
I see. And that's mostly because of the, on demand, cost of quite reasonably, whatever. I only can only guess at how they magically print something like that on demand, which seems very bespoke. Right. Very, very bespoke. I mean, I am amazed enough when I order some of the more obscure books that I order and they are on demand printed and it's, you know, looking at the back cover, it's like printed three days ago and I'm like, what? Oh yeah, this is, they made this whole book for me just then that's crazy. And you can do it with a board game. Did you have to conform to particular sizes? Did you have to compromise your design for that? Or did they adapt?
Absolutely. You have to conform and not only do you have to conform, but there are many, many, many different choices and they all have different price points. And that greatly informed the design of the game where you're just like, oh, I have this rule mechanic. Then I'm going to need these pieces. And those pieces cost 78 cents each and I would need 12 of them. And that would increase the cost of the game by this. So maybe I can do this mechanic and that whole permutation of like the rules and the parts and the infinite array of parts of The Game Crafter would offer you and how much they cost. And, and all of that was all part of the calculus of figuring out the design of the game.
That's. How interesting that that's so similar to like your day job, where you were saying this trade off. And we really great if we had this and you're like, yeah, but it's like a six week build. How much do I really need that thing? Just maybe we wouldn't limp on a bit longer with just cat and rsync rather than building our own like process or whatever. I mean it does seem that way.
Yeah, no, it's absolutely. That absolutely that.
Yeah. That's so cool though. I, I don't think I realized quite how smart these, these, uh, these on demand things could be. You could actually make an on demand board game.
And this was like four or five years ago when I did this. So it's probably even cooler these days.
Right. If you were to go back to it now, could you put, you know, maybe even savings and changes and whatever that sounds really cool. But did you find any bugs? How did you test this? You know, obviously you did play testing, which is more like acceptance testing. Right. But did you actually have like tests? I mean, what, what, what could you test?
One of the things that I did very intentionally is make sure that you could play it with one player because then I could play, test it for myself. And I didn't have to inflict it on all my friends all the time that made a big difference.
All the time. You could wait until it was like, yeah. And it got like a good 70% of the way there before. So that was kind of your unit test.
Yes, exactly, the unit test was.
Before you ran the more expensive tests that, that would actually be more.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
We can make any episode about testing then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would, I would, you know, change, change the spreadsheets that updated all of the cards automatically in Google docs. I printed it all out and then I would, and then I would go and I would print out the cards and I would, you know, I would sit down and I would play three or four games by myself to just make sure that the mechanic that I thought was good was good. And I would, I would arrange different scenarios and be like, well, what if this player had this card and this and this, how would that all work? And then once I was pretty happy with the result, I would usually I would bring it to work and I would be like, Hey, he wants to play Earth is Dead over lunch. And I would get a few people that would be like, yeah, you know, Ben, that's.
Begrudgingly, oh all right. That's better than my real job.
That's when you find out who your real friends are and when they're playing the half-finished game that, you know, isn't quite all that fun yet. And they're just like, yeah, it's cool. We'll play.
Dodgily printed out into like plastic laminated card type things. That's cool. Now, the more that we think about this, and this is the worst thing to be doing live on the podcast is to be solutioning all these kinds of things. But I am now interested in how a rule engine based system could work for like developing board games where you could set up scenarios, saved them and just keep restoring the state of the game to like, Hey, let's go back to when, you know, like check point here and then we're going to play it through as if this happened. And then we're going to come back and see how it would have worked, but panned out if we'd have gone another way. And then writing tests and say, can you, exhaustedly try all things and make sure this doesn't happen.
Even to the point where, you know, if, if it, if the options are relatively limited and there's not like a lot of interperson banter, you know, like I'm thinking like Monopoly is the classic example where, you know, like the rules of are one thing, but nobody plays by the rules. Cause there was like, no, no, no, wait a second. What if I, can you tell her, you sell me that for this, in all the horse trading that goes on the side, that's difficult to do, but if it's a rule system, you could say point like the Alpha Go kind of like AI system, and say play it until you're really good at it. And then you can say, okay, now I'm going to play a game. It's like, oh my God, all it ever does is play this card over and over and over and over again, because it's discovered that that is the way you solve the game. Right. This must be, I have to fix the game now because the AI just does this.
It just, it just broke it and yeah. And bringing this full circle, like this was sort of like my, my dream of like maybe one day when I ride off into the sunset and I get to, you know, make board games and retire,
When your cryptocurrency goes high enough cryptocurrency risk. We talked about the other week.
Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Uh, then I can finally, you know, achieve my dream of going into game design or going into games and doing AI. It'll just be for writing the AI's that play the board games that I design to try to figure out if there are broken optimal strategies and how to simulate various scenarios. So that I don't have to inflict that pain on my friends when I'm still designing the game.
So you can still go to the pub with your friends and still be a game designer. Like that's amazing. Well, that sounds brilliant. Where do I sign up for your, your, uh, AI company?
I'll let you know, I'll let you know.
Cool. Well, that seems like a good place to, uh, to finish up. This has been super fun. Um, I had no idea about the, the depths of, uh, the things that you could do in, in board game design. And I like nothing more than pontificating about, uh, the, the good old days of, of game, my game development career. So this has been beautiful.
Wonderful, wonderful times, my friend.
Okay, well until next time.