This past Sunday, for the first time since before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to share a panel with attendees of PAX East!

In an age of HD remasters, demakes buck the trend by reimagining a modern game for a more primitive console. Ever wanted to play Silent Hill 2 on the NES, Disco Elysium on Game Boy, or Portal on N64? Now you can! But how much of a game’s core gameplay is dependent on technology? What features are important to preserve, and how do you adapt the rest? Is it really the same game — and do the original copyright owners think so? We’ll chat with four demake devs about their projects, inspirations, and challenges, exploring how they balance modern innovation, technical constraints, and retro nostalgia.

Featuring:

• Ken Gagne (he/him/his) [Editor, Juiced.GS]
• James Lambert (he/him/his) [Developer, Portal 64] 
• Jasper Byrne (he/him/his) [Designer, Superflat Games] 
• Colin Brannan (he/him/his) [Developer, Disco Elysium: Game Boy Edition]
• Animal Planet (they/them) [Developer, PicoWars]

The audio from this panel is presented as a bonus episode of the otherwise defunct IndieSider podcast. Stream it below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, or RadioPublic, and click past the jump for a written transcript.

Ken Gagne: Welcome to the last day of PAX East 2024. Thank you for waking up before the crack of noon to join us for Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-Bit. My name is Ken Gagne, pronouns he/him. Very excited to be sharing with you a panel of amazing developers today. A little bit of introduction and information before we get started. First, I want to start with a blank slide, land acknowledgment saying that we are residing on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusetts people whose name was appropriated by this Commonwealth. We pay respect to the Massachusetts elders post and present. We acknowledge the truth of violence perpetuated in the name of this country and make a commitment to uncovering the truth.

So this panel is about Demakes Decoded: From HD to 8-bit. And first, how many people here have no idea what a demake is? We got one person, two, three, four, five. Excellent. So for those five people, let’s establish what a demake is. A demake is not Resident Evil 4. That would be a remake. We’ve had some amazing, wonderful, very enjoyable and highly received and acclaimed remakes in the last few years. Resident Evil 4, Super Mario RPG, that weird game by Square that nobody thought would ever come back. And of course, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. So those are all remakes.

A remake is re-imagining an older game for a newer system. It’s not just applying a new coat of graphics like The Last Of Us. It’s such a technological leap that they are actually almost going back to the drawing board and making a new game inspired by the original game. A demake, what we’re talking about today, is just the opposite. It’s re-imagining a newer game for an older system going backwards in time. And we have four developers here today who I’m about to introduce.

So first, who remembers Portal? Yeah. Portal came out in 2007, 17 years ago, for Windows and Xbox 360. 11 years before that the Nintendo 64 came out, and James here has ported it, has ported Portal to the N64. And this is what it looks like.

James, say hello!

James Lambert: Hi, I’m James Lambert. Yeah, and I ported Portal to the N64. And I guess I just repeat what he said. It took me about two years to get to this point. And then the YouTube channel, if you want to check it out, you can see kind of the progress in the videos. And unfortunately you can’t get the ROM for me right now because Valve told me to take it down. But I’m sure if you searched online, you would be able to find it somewhere, but not just from me.

Ken Gagne: Yeah, it’s like the Streisand Effect. The more you remove it, the more visible it becomes.

James Lambert: Of course, yeah.

Ken Gagne: Where are you coming in from for the panel?

James Lambert: Yeah, I’m from Utah. That’s it.

Ken Gagne: Well, thank you for coming all this way.

James Lambert: And nobody else is.

Ken Gagne: Another game that is actually going in both directions right now, a remake is coming for Silent Hill 2, which was originally released for the PlayStation 2 in September of 2001, where, speaking of James, James Sunderland is trying to find his dead wife, who he mysteriously received a letter from. And even more mysteriously, the game has been ported to the 8-bit Nintendo called Soundless Mountain 2. And the master of that thesaurus would be Jasper Byrne here. Hello, Jasper.

Jasper Byrne: Hi there. Yeah, I made this one in 2008, so it’s quite a long time ago now. But it was originally for a competition for demakes run by The Independent Game Source, or TIGSource. It was a forum where a lot of indies used to post back in those days. And to my surprise, actually won the competition. And so that actually ended up getting it noticed a little bit by, I guess, journalists and stuff. And ended up leading onto me doing another game like Lone Survivor, which was sort of using what I’d learned from this if you like. So another 2D survival horror game basically. So yeah, it only goes up to the apartment section, but I did always want to finish it.

Ken Gagne: But all these demakes are fully playable. These aren’t just tech demos, which is pretty awesome. You can actually just download them and play them. The next panelist we have is somebody who was inspired by Disco Elysium, which is a noir-style game that came out for Windows originally in October 15th 2019. And it just seems a natural candidate of course, to port to the original Game Boy. So we have Disco Elysium: The Game Boy Edition by Colin Brannan.

Colin Brannan: Hello everybody. Yeah, it was like a pandemic project for me four years ago really. I was just trying to figure out something to work on in my spare time. I hadn’t done anything creative in a few months. And there’s a really neat tool out there called GB Studio, which I totally recommend to anyone for making Game Boy games like this. And so this is actually completely without code. I’m an artist, not a programmer or an engineer. So yeah, there’s some really cool stuff you can do with such a small tool and then they even let you export an actual ROM. So people have been playing it on actual Game Boy hardware as well, which is super cool to see for me.

Ken Gagne: Wow. Is this your first project like this?

Colin Brannan: I’ve done other small game stuff before, but this is the first thing that really got any traction or had anyone talking about it. Yeah, my first demake, yes.

Ken Gagne: Awesome. That’s really cool.

And last but not least, another game that’s also been remade, Advance Wars, originally came out for the Game Boy Advance on the same day as Silent Hill 2, September 10th, 2001, remade for the Switch in 2023, and re-remade, this is the original up there, or rather the Switch version. This is a tactical game of sorts. And it was remade by Animal Planet at the end there for the PICO-8, which is what exactly?

Animal Planet: So it’s a fantasy console, as in it takes the idea of older consoles and makes it run on modern hardware. It’s all fake. No, but it introduces fictional constraints. Is there anything else to that video or is it just the-

Ken Gagne: Sorry.

Animal Planet: There we go. There’s the game. Yeah, so the PICO-8 takes ideas of making games for older consoles. You’ve got constraints, but all these constraints in this example are kind of artificial. It’s got an artificial palette, token limit, things like that. It creates interesting constraints for making the game. And originally I’ve been kind of making this game for over a decade since I started programming because I was enamored with how artificial intelligence works for games like StarCraft and the old Advance Wars games. And I wanted to get into that and see how that really works. So it was an off-and-on project for very long, and I restarted it many times. And eventually I was like, “I’m making it so.”

Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you.

And then that brings us back to me. I am not a developer or an artist. I am an editor of a magazine called Juiced.GS. It’s currently in its 29th year of publication. It’s print only, not a PDF. And it’s a magazine all about the Apple II computer. Who remembers the Apple II? Yeah, you probably remember it because you grew up playing Oregon Trail in school, or maybe other games like Wizardry. Wizardry, the Apple II version of Wizardry is actually on the show floor at the Atari booth. It’s amazing. I’m not kidding. You can go play it.

And the Apple II originally came out in 1977, and it has been the home to many amazing demakes in the last few years, like The Secret of Monkey Island, Out of This World, also known as Another World, Myst. And these are all playable by the way, Kerbal Space Program, and Portal. And those were all actually made by the same demake artist. And he recently submitted Portal to an online competition. And when you fill out the form, they asked, “What is the name of your game?” And so he said, “My game is called Don’t Tell Valve.”

And we did a cover story a few years ago all about demakes for the Apple II. I have some copies here I’ll be giving out later if you want to read that. And so these are our panelists and we’re here today to talk about the demakes that have been created, that we’ve outlined. And I want to start with an open question to any panelist who would like to answer, and that question is but why? Why demakes? Why? Anybody, why?

Colin Brannan: I think with, Animal Planet, you mentioned constraints earlier with your response, and I think that’s what it was for me is that when you’re working with a modern engine like a Unity or an Unreal, you can do anything really. When you’re working with older hardware, you have those constraints and that makes your project scope much smaller and you have to really get more creative and make more interesting choices. And also, your project, you can’t go forever on something. You’re like, “Okay, I can only do so much.” And it helps you keep your own … Your projects finish. There’s only so much you can do with them, which was important for me at least.

James Lambert: And along with that, with working within the constraints, I agree with everything with there, but also it’s kind of fun to try to push, at least in the N64 case, push the limits a little beyond what you think could have been done, see what those limits actually are. And that, I really enjoy working within those constraints and trying to push beyond what you thought was possible.

Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I guess I’d just add to that, they also … Because I think some of those things apply to just making a game for an older system, but maybe also that it is trying to figure out how an existing game could work in a different visual presentation or something like that. So how do you solve the problems that were in 3D in 2D or whatever it is, or through a very limited palette or whatever it is. Maybe that’s an aspect of it that interested me, I would say.

Ken Gagne: And one of the nice things about these platforms that have constraints is nowadays if you want to go to … When I was a kid, you could grow up and go into computers. But nowadays, you’re going into graphics or networking or AI or all these other disciplines because computers are so big. You can’t grok the entire computer. With an older machine, you can be the designer, and the level creator, and the programmer, and the sound designer, and you can do everything as just one person like we used to do 40 years ago. So it’s nice. Show me somebody who did a one-man game or one-person game for PlayStation 5. That’s not as likely as it was for the PICO-8 or the Apple II. How do you choose … I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jasper Byrne: No, I was just going to maybe also say it’s also interesting to look at the way mechanics have evolved and game design has evolved, and apply those things to an older system and see what it would be like if you like, sort of thing.

Colin Brannan: Yeah, that was a big thing for me as well. Because I work in UI and I really want to see UI has developed so much over the past decade, especially since the RPG-ification of everything. And it’s so complicated now and you have so few inputs on an old Game Boy. And I was like, “Well, how do I take these systems and mechanics from a modern RPG and try and crunch them down into this little machine?” You got six buttons total plus start and select. How can that work?

Ken Gagne: Yeah. And Colin, I actually want to hear from you about the next question, which is how do you choose which platform to demake on to? Because you took a PS4 game. You could have easily remade it for PS2 or PS1 or N64. What made you look at Disco Elysium like, “Oh, that’s going to be an awesome 8-bit black and white game.”

Colin Brannan: Well, it was the other way. Because I found the tool I used, GB Studio, first. And then I was thinking about this seems cool, I want to make a UI heavy game for the Game Boy. And so I had the platform first and I started thinking about games I’ve been playing recently that I really enjoyed and that had maybe interesting systems or really contemporary ideas for characters and leveling up and stuff. And I was like, “Okay, well, let’s take that and apply it to that platform.” So it was actually the other way around for me.

Ken Gagne: I see. Okay. And I also want to hear from you, James, because you chose the N64 for Portal, which of the demakes on here, is the most technologically recent platform. But I want to point out that the N64 came out in September of 1996, which is closer in time to the moon landing than it is to today. So yes, it’s a newer system, but not by much. So why the N64?

James Lambert: Actually a lot of the same reason. I had started working on N64 homebrew games because it’s a console I grew up on and it makes me feel old hearing that moon landing thing.

Ken Gagne: Mission accomplished.

James Lambert: It’s the console I grew up on. And so it kind of inspired me to learn to make games in the first place. And so when I recently discovered, recently being before the pandemic, discovered people are figuring out how to make games for the N64, I learned the tooling, did a few game jams, and then I was just kind of tinkering with the variety of different ideas I had. And I thought, “I wonder if it’d be possible to do the Portal effect, where you can render through a portal and go through it.” So I thought, “Let’s just try it.” And I got it working and I’m like, “How far can I take this?” And just kind of took off with it.

Ken Gagne: Amazing. And similarly, how do you choose the game? Like Animal Planet, you did Advance Wars, which every time I play Advance Wars I’m like, “Oh, they remade Desert Commander from the 8-bit Nintendo.” Thank you, thank you. So the mechanics of Advance Wars seem like relatively mathematically simple, and I’m saying that as not a developer. Is that something that influenced your decision of demake that game?

Animal Planet: I would say that that was a benefit of demaking that game because fans fortunately have Wiki’d all the aspects of combat, so I didn’t have to spend weeks balancing that game. I just plugged in the numbers and there you go.

Colin Brannan: Advance Wars, it is prescriptive, right? Like you know the same action or action will always have the same outcome. Like the AI always reacts the same way, right?

Animal Planet: Yeah, there’s a little bit of randomness, especially in combat. And in this game, there is no randomness in the PicoWars. So there’s no randomness. I fudged it a little bit, changed things a little bit, made it simpler mathematically. But ultimately, yeah. It wasn’t a reason to get into it, but it was helpful.

Ken Gagne: And so when you’re demaking these games, there has to be some sort of a sacrifice because it’s not going to be the same game when you’re done. So for example, Silent Hill 2, it’s this psychological horror game that has a pervasive sense of the unnatural. It’s not just an LJN licensed platformer for the 8-bit Nintendo like Back To The Future or something. So Jasper, when you were taking Silent Hill 2, was that an integral aspect of Silent Hill 2 that you had to capture when making it into an 8-bit Nintendo game?

Jasper Byrne: I suppose I compromised it a little bit because technically it’s not actually a Nintendo ROM. It is a PC piece of software, Soundless Mountain. So I use that to my advantage to kind of add things that couldn’t be done necessarily like transparent fog, which obviously you couldn’t do on an NES. And the sound, I didn’t go with pure chip tunes. I went with sort of more distorted real sounds, almost as if they were coming out of a Street Fighter II cabinet, the way they were crunchy and 8-bit, that kind of thing.

So it was more trying to add a bit more realism there in the audio, I suppose, to make up for lack of detail in the visuals or something. But yeah, in effect, I cheated really with it because I didn’t stick to the exact. I think it would’ve been difficult to do it purest on the NES because I think part of what makes this work or made people like it was the audio, which is quite similar to actually Silent Hill 2, but just a little bit dirtier sort of thing.

Ken Gagne: Interesting.

Jasper Byrne: So I think with this game, maybe it’s kind of a different case to probably the others on the panel, because it’s not actually for an old system. My choice of why to make it for the NES was because I hadn’t grown up with the NES and it was always exotic to me. And I used to see a lot of pixel artists draw stuff in the NES palette and I found it really attractive. But I sort of knew nothing about it, so I kind of wanted to make what I imagined an NES game would be like, if you like, having not really grown up with it.

Ken Gagne: Yeah, because survival horror was really a term coined in the PS1 era when Silent Hill and Resident Evil came out. But it could be retroactively applied to some older games like Haunted House for the Atari 2600 and I think was it called Dear Home?

Jasper Byrne: Sweet Home.

Ken Gagne: Sweet Home, thank you, for the 8-bit Nintendo. So this whole genre didn’t really exist predominantly in that era, and it’s fascinating to see what it-

Jasper Byrne: Yeah, that fascinated me about it actually.

Ken Gagne: Now what about Disco Elysium, Colin? So I confess, I haven’t played that game. I know it was at one point banned in Australia.

Colin Brannan: I hadn’t heard about that.

Ken Gagne: Yeah, apparently just the rampant drug use.

Colin Brannan: Yeah, there’s a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Ken Gagne: Yeah. So when you looked at Disco Elysium, what was it you said, “I need to keep this but I can ditch this.”

Colin Brannan: Okay, so there’s a character in Disco Elysium named Kuno, which anyone knows. Kuno is not in my game. Kuno is a 13-year-old, who’s the worst person you’ve ever met, just shouting slurs all the time and stuff. And I said, “You know what? I’ve already tried to contract my scope a bit. I’m sorry to all the Kuno fans out there, but I don’t want to deal with this.” And then I got a bunch of messages when I put it out and people were like, “Where’s Kuno? Why isn’t Kuno here?” And I was like, “Sorry, I just didn’t want to deal with it.”

But there’s other stuff. The drug use is kind of fun and that also. I was interested in the stats, how they work and the drug use in the game is all about adjusting your stats. So it’s like, okay, so I have to put some of that in. It was just making clever little cuts in different places.

And also another big one was there’s a lot of text in Disco Elysium. And when you’re playing real Disco Elysium, you’ve got maybe a third of the screen is one big text scroll. On the Game Boy version, I have two lines, sometimes three max of 18 characters, not 18 words, 18 characters. So a big thing I didn’t realize when I started is I actually had to rewrite a good portion of the script of the game so that would fit in nice little chunks that were easily parsable without having to skip through too many different text boxes.

Ken Gagne: I’m sorry, remind me, is this the entire game you ported into?

Colin Brannan: No, it’s the first, I don’t know how long, it depends on how you play a game. But playing this takes maybe about 40 minutes or so. Which is longer, I planned for 15 minutes and then you start working, you start putting little things in there. And then luckily, because it’s on the Game Boy, I’m a little bit contracted to what I can do, it’s like you start putting stuff in and go, “Oh god, I’ve made a 40-minute thing here.” But yeah, it’s the first. It’s up to the point where you solve a couple of the mysteries a little bit earlier if you get lucky with some of the rolls.

Ken Gagne: Are there any ways in which you think your version of this game is better than the original?

Colin Brannan: No, not really. I am pulling so much from them. It’s entirely derivative I think in a lot of ways, which is fine. I don’t think that’s a judge against me, but I’m taking what they’re doing, going, “This is really cool. What if it looked like this instead?” I don’t think better is really a scale that does much work for talking about comparing the two.

Ken Gagne: Okay, that’s fair. What about you, James? With Portal 64, obviously the portal mechanic is core to the game and we saw that demoed in the video and some of the graphic fidelity might be a little more pixelated. What other changes did you have to accept?

James Lambert: Yeah, so with that one, the fidelity had to be dropped. There’s not as much detail in many of the levels. I don’t have the nice baked ambient inclusion textures on the walls. But I did try to use Portal, the original Portal, as close of a template as I could have managed for like, “Okay, when do I need to add details to certain places?” I think this footage is a little old that you’re seeing here, but like the little light indicators that indicate which buttons are connected to which parts of the puzzle, I ended up adding that later.

But I tried to get the important pieces in first. Obviously the portal gun, that’s important to be able to render portals through. But then as I got that and then I said, “Okay, now I have the core done, let’s just start adding details as I can and just keep iterating on that.” And trying to push that as far as I could. I’m trying to think what the biggest thing that I didn’t get to that I was hoping I could. I know being able to render multiple Portals deep in recursions, so you see through a portal, through a portal, through a portal. Well, in an early demo I could go quite deep, but it was because there’s very little rendering. But later on, I kind of had to stick with just two layers deep and I couldn’t use some of the tricks they used for pushing that further.

Colin Brannan: So I have a quick question about that. So the portals are still really impressive when I see them in game. It’s just really cool tech. Did you use the same tricks they use in actual Portal or did you have to come up with your own ways to make it work on the N64?

James Lambert: I don’t know how much I matched with what they did. I had a cater to what N64 could do. So I think it is a little different. I kind of use tricks with partitioning the Z-buffer. And I don’t know how much detail I go into here. So I think I had to use some tricks that are a little bit different there. But I guess one way to think about the portal rendering, everybody knows that N64 can do split screen. So it’s just split screen rendering, but within the same area, if you think about it that way. That’s kind of the way to think about it.

Ken Gagne: That’s amazing. I had no idea. One of the other key elements of Portal, the original, is GLaDOS. And a lot of that comes across in the amazing voice acting. How were you able to preserve that, if at all?

James Lambert: Yeah, so just with that, I just took the game bundle. Portal has what they call VPK files. All of the data for the game is in it. So I just made it so when you were building the ROM for Portal, you said this is where I have that installed on my system. And I was able to extract the sound files, lower the sound quality, compress it to the N64’s audio format, and then bundle it in it directly. So I didn’t have to include any of their assets in my project in order for it to build. It just grabbed it from theirs and changed the quality down to include it.

Ken Gagne: Let me see here. So when you’re porting a game to an older system, a lot of older games we grew up with were awesome partly because we didn’t know any better. And then we’ve had a lot of quality of life improvements. Like try playing the original Final Fantasy and stocking up on 99 potions. It takes a long time. Or trying to figure out which sword is better, this one or that one. And you have to equip them to find out and maybe go into battle and see how much damage they do. So we’ve had a lot of just the general user interface of games has improved. The way you navigate through the world has improved.

When you go back in time and demake these games, how do you avoid those paper cuts that existed back then? Or do you embrace them and just say, “This is what it would like if this game existed back then. Yeah, it would suck. Thank goodness it didn’t.” Jasper.

Jasper Byrne: I think in the case of Silent Hill 2, I couldn’t honestly find much that had dated. I think it really stands up very well even today. So I just went as hard as I could on trying to recreate every aspect, like how the menu looks, the noise when you use the menu, up and down. All of those little details, I just tried to steal verbatim. It depends on the game I suppose, but for me, I think that one really has held up well.

In going to 2D, it gets rid of the question of tank controls and things like that that you’d have in a survival horror back then. Actually Silent Hill 2, I think it had, well, it does have the more modern type of controls anyway, which was kind of different from Resident Evil at that time, I suppose. At least up until, well, the prior one had been Resident Evil 3, I guess. But even the original Silent Hill I think has a camera, the modern controller movement, not the tank controls, if you like.

So in that sense, it hadn’t really dated. Had it been a 3D game and doing a PS1, well, I guess you’d have to do a PS0 demake of Resident Evil 1 or whatever and it was in 3D. In that hypothetical situation, I guess you might update it to not have tank controls or something like that. But then-

Ken Gagne: You just inspired my PAX East 2025 panel, In Defense of Tank Controls.

Jasper Byrne: I love them.

Colin Brannan: I have to say, the tank control sickos are out there.

Jasper Byrne: I’m just saying, yeah, a demake artist might choose to do that. But I personally love it.

Ken Gagne: Same, same. Thank you. Did you see that somebody, I guess this is kind of a demake, they modified the original Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo to have tank controls? It’s fixed camera angles, and as you go around the course, the angle changes to different static points. Another demake, somebody ported Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultrahand to Ocarina of Time. All right, just a brief aside there. Sorry.

So Animal Planet, what about when you were porting Advance Wars? Are there some modern quality of life improvements to game design and UI that you were able to bring back to PicoWars?

Animal Planet: Yeah, I think a lot of it was really nice user interface that the Advance Wars game had. They took a strategy game where you’re controlling tens of units at least and they put it on a handheld console that had just gotten color, so there’s a lot of UI aspects to that. I guess I really had fun … It’s a weird thing, but it was a real challenge to make the arrow. So when you select a unit, you are now commanding it where to walk. And getting that arrow to look nice and to be connected in this limited system where I couldn’t really. Well, when it’s a 16 by 16 grid for every little character, I don’t know, it made it difficult to make it even at every point. Play it, see it. It loops around pretty nicely I think. That would be the user interface aspect that I enjoyed working on.

And I don’t know if I made it any cleaner though. Like Jasper was saying, they had some good people in that game. It was more about simplifying what they already have and making it clean and fun and in a new style. And I think the PICO-8 fantasy console also really shined in that regard. It made everything look really fruity, just very colorful and vibrant and almost tropical. PicoWars feels like Advance Wars on a tropical island.

Ken Gagne: As a magazine editor, I was taught that an article isn’t done when you have nothing left to add, the article is done when you have nothing left to remove. So when you say you simplified Advance Wars, did you take away some things that weren’t really needed in the original and just get rid of the cruft?

Animal Planet: Yeah, there’s a lot removed. It would’ve been really not possible to include as much as is in that game because, well, speaking of the constraints of the PICO-8, you only have a certain amount of code you can put for every single cartridge they call them. And there are really hacky ways, there’s my game again, there are really hacky ways to make it so that you can have multiple cartridges, but all the state of the game is erased every time you switch a cartridge. So I had to write serialization code, so store it in memory and then reload it. And of course, this would all be unnecessary if it was written in Godot or something or Unity, like a modern game engine.

So things that had to be stripped. There are no naval units, there are no air units. Commander superpowers are unfortunately just really couldn’t be fit in if the artificial intelligence is there too. But commanders do have their own quirks and stuff, like there is a long-range specialist. And coming up with a few new special abilities for commanders that aren’t in the original game was a lot of fun. So there’s some new stuff there for sure.

Ken Gagne: I think it’s especially bold that you chose to demake a Nintendo game because they are quite litigious. There have been a lot of Zelda and Metroid games that have been taken down over the years. And I’m curious, I’ll save you for last, are the developers of the original games aware of your creations? Some people actually seek out the original creators’ opinions because they’re like, “This is an homage to what you’ve done. You’ve inspired me and I want you to know that.” And sometimes the response to that is not great. So have any of you, save you for last, gotten responses from the original developers or are you aware that they’re aware of it?

Colin Brannan: So I was really fortunate actually. They sought me out. I don’t know where they saw it, but I think it was when I posted the first build of it to a GB Studio Discord to get some hints on stuff from people, about a week later, someone from ZA/UM, the studio that makes Disco Elysium, their marketing team sent me an email and was like, “Hey, we’re putting together a second anniversary press release in three months and we want to put a bunch of fan work into it.” And they said, “We really like your project. We approve it.” Yeah, sorry to everyone else. It was very strange.

But now I’ve got their stamp of approval, which means everything needs to be a little bit more by the book. And also I was like, “Oh, a lot more people are going to see this now.” So I am not a musician. I had no music in the project at that time, and I had to reach out to someone and go, “Hey, I need some sound in this that’s not just the worst bleeps and bloops you’ve ever heard. Can you go in and remake the soundtrack?” But the soundtrack is licensed music from another band. So then we had to go to the marketing and the marketing was like, “Yeah, we need to check with the band that they’re okay with us putting this thing out.” And it became a whole different kind of headache. But everyone was okay with it as long as we weren’t making any money in the end.

Ken Gagne: So when you say you have their seal of approval, are they tweeting about your game or otherwise acknowledging it publicly?

Colin Brannan: They did. Yeah, they’ve tweeted a couple of times and stuff, and I think it was originally an email to news outlets and stuff. I remember when they first sent it out, they must’ve done a marketing release or something with a bunch of different fan projects for the two-year anniversary, and I think some poor IGN intern, it must’ve been a slow day and they needed to make 30 minutes of content because they uploaded the first 30 minutes of Disco Elysium Game Boy onto IGN’s main YouTube account. I was like, “Y’all know, this is just a fan thing? This isn’t real. You played basically the whole game.” But okay, sure.

Ken Gagne: That is amazing. There is a particular game on the show floor this weekend that looks very much like a Konami game. And I was in line to play it, and the two people in line ahead of me were talking and one person said, “How is this not a copyright violation?” And the other person said, “Probably because Konami doesn’t care about their IP anymore.” So Jasper.

Jasper Byrne: I literally saw that advertised outside the front, that game that you’re talking about. And it was literally on the poster outside. And at distance, I thought it was a Konami game. And then I saw it closer and I was like, “Okay.” It really is very close, isn’t it?

Ken Gagne: Is Konami aware of Soundless Mountain 2? Because you made this game 16 years ago, right?

Jasper Byrne: I did send it through their official channel and never heard back. But I also sent it to Masahiro Ito who did the art. And he said, “That looks really interesting and I’m going to play it.” And I never heard back from him. So I don’t know quite honestly whether he checked it out or not, but I liked the idea that he did.

Ken Gagne: It’s fascinating that you took the initiative of reaching out to Konami. That’s kind of like playing a game. Let’s poke the bear and see if it wakes up and if it doesn’t run away.

Jasper Byrne: Well, I guess because it was entered into the bootleg demakes competition, and so we had to change the name to make it look like it was a knockoff cart that was just skating around copyright anyway. So all the characters have changed name. He’s Jake, he’s not James.

Ken Gagne: Completely different.

Jasper Byrne: Every line of dialogue is slightly changed, all these sort of things. There’s not one line of dialogue that’s taken verbatim. All the character names have changed. It’s called Soundless Mountain, obviously, that sort of thing. So I just try to be very careful about that and not do anything that could be … So I guess it counts as parody, does it? I don’t know, honestly.

Ken Gagne: And parody is legally protected free speech.

Jasper Byrne: Right. Yeah, so technically I think I might have a leg to stand on should they ever try and care about their IP anymore.

Ken Gagne: Maybe you could claim that this is what they’re remaking this year when it comes out for PS5.

Jasper Byrne: Yeah, they might come after me now, I don’t know.

Ken Gagne: We’re jumping all the way from the 8-Bit Nintendo to the PS5.

Jasper Byrne: Maybe I should try sending it to Ito-San again and see if he has played it.

Ken Gagne: I think they should buy this off, put it in as an Easter egg. So James Sunderland is walking around Silent Hill, he finds a dilapidated arcade console. He starts playing it and it’s Soundless Mountain 2.

Jasper Byrne: I’m not going to lie, that would be my dream.

Ken Gagne: If you could play Outrun in Shenmue, why not play Soundless Mountain 2 in Silent Hill 2?

Colin Brannan: There’s that bit in Metal Gear Solid 4 where Snake has a dream and he’s back in Metal Gear Solid 1.

Jasper Byrne: Or Day of the Tentacle where you can play Maniac Mansion on a computer in Day of the Tentacle. I love that.

Ken Gagne: There’s a Call of Duty game where you can play Zork. And Pitfall for the Super Nintendo had Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Come on, the opportunity is there, the precedent is there. You could be rolling in it. Come on.

All right. So James, I understand that you took your game, that is inspired by a game by Valve, and you uploaded it to Steam, which is run by Valve. How’d that work out for you?

James Lambert: Well, it didn’t actually make it to Steam. It was just a GitHub. I did do it where I just distributed a patch where you didn’t download the ROM for me, you had to go grab a file from your Steam installation to generate the patch. Turns out that is actually against the terms of service of Steam. But anyway.

So in terms of getting permission, so sometime in December, somebody from Valve reached out to me. He had worked on the original Portal and he was just telling me they thought Portal was pretty cool. And by the way, the portal paradox where if you drop a piston over a cube and you ask the question is does it shoot out or does it just stop and then fall, the guy who wrote the original physics for Portal says that it shoots out. So just if there’s any question there.

But anyway, so I got in contact with them. He loved it. The legal team less so. So had some back and forth with them and it took a while to get this figured out. So clearly there are people at Valve who wanted to see this project continue. But ultimately, because I was using libultra, which is Nintendo’s proprietary library for the N64, they’re like, “We don’t want to touch that.” So they had a can of it.

And I think even outside of that, I asked if I could use an open source one like libdragon, and they weren’t really on board because I could lose control over the distribution of a ROM. Because I wasn’t distributing on Steam. And I know a lot of people were taking my ROM and just putting it on their phone emulator so they could play Portal on their phone. And I feel like Valve kind of saw that and thought, “We don’t want to lose control over and not be able to monitor the distribution of this game.” So I think for those reasons, they wanted the project to end.

Jasper Byrne: I think if anything, there’s an element of it sounds to me like your game was actually too accurate and too close to the original game.

James Lambert: Possibly.

Ken Gagne: So it sounds like Valve didn’t want to touch the Nintendo library you were using. But as long as you’re distributing it on your own, can they really tell you to stop making Portal 64?

James Lambert: I’m no lawyer, so-

Ken Gagne: None of us are. None of us are.

James Lambert: I figured I’d rather just avoid the liability. I don’t know, maybe I could lawyer up and figure out what I could do legally and see where I can actually finish this within a legal sense, but I don’t know if I want to take that leap.

Ken Gagne: So in all seriousness, where do you go from here? Because you literally worked on this game on and off for years and if somebody just put a kibosh to it, I wouldn’t just move on to the next project. I would go into a deep funk and be like, “What’s the point of anything?” So where do you go from here?

James Lambert: Yeah. Well, I was using that project as an opportunity to grow my YouTube channel. And I also was learning a lot about developing for the console. I was building out physics engines and other assets, and so I’m just taking a lot of the learning and some of the code and porting over to a new game project that I’ve started on. So it’s still pretty early because I’m now using libdragon so I had to rebuild a lot of the core engine that I was using. But I just started on a new project and I’m hoping that I can use some of the momentum from that to carry over into a new project.

Ken Gagne: And will this also be a demake or be an original IP?

James Lambert: This is an original IP because I don’t want to get slapped again.

Ken Gagne: Sure. So this has been a professional development opportunity for you. What about for the rest of you? Why do you do demakes? Like Colin, you said that this was just a pandemic project for you. So is it just for fun and by day you’re a marine biologist or something?

Colin Brannan: Well, no. So at the time I was working on it, it was a hobby thing and then also a portfolio piece. But I wasn’t a game developer, I was a mechanic actually. And then later, not immediately after, but a little bit later, I actually did get a game development job afterwards. And I was like, “Oh yeah, because it’s a cool part of my portfolio.” And it was when I got hired, it was one of the most recent things I did. So I’m sure the people who hired me saw it. But then before coming here, I was talking to my boss about it and he’s like, “Oh, have you done those before?” I was like, “You hired me.” But yeah, it was another thing.

And it was also anytime I’ve worked, tried to start up a project … And personally for me, scope creep is just so real. So it was a good way to try and keep things in check and have a small project that I could easily finish and put out there.

Ken Gagne: Cool. What about you, Jasper? I know that this game, as we said, was made 16 years ago and you’ve made a lot of other games since then.

Jasper Byrne: Yeah. Why do I make remakes? Well, as I said, it was for the competition, so it wasn’t something I’d ever really considered up until that point. To be honest, I’d never even heard the word used until, Derek, you ran that competition for The Independent Game Source. Yeah, he’d obviously thought about it quite deeply before even coming up with that idea. But I don’t know what there was around at that time, 2008. I can’t really think of any. It is possible that, Derek, you invented it in some ways or invented the concept. But I remember him saying that it was based on the idea of you’d find these clone cartridges and consoles in China or whatever that would have a version of something that was nearly Street Fighter, but not. And so that’s why it was called the sort of bootleg demake thing.

So that interested me. It was just a sort of a funny concept in a way. Trying to imagine what one of these games where it was a kind of knocked-together clone of Street Fighter II or whatever would be like, maybe for a lesser system as well. Because I think that was true of it. So games would come out on later systems and then they would make it for the NES or whatever, like Street Fighter II for the NES or something like that. So that part of it interested me. It was funny in a way just to kind of picture what they’d be like because I hadn’t actually played them.

Ken Gagne: Yeah. What about you, Animal Planet? Why are you doing this? Well, we started off with that, so what I’m asking is what are you getting out of it now?

Animal Planet: Well, now that it’s over, it’s nice to see people play it. Advance Wars diehard fans that are just seeking anything on the internet that can keep filling that hole in their heart for Advance Wars. But what got me into it originally was it’s such a passion project. And the first question you were asking was what makes a good game a candidate for a demake. And I think any game, any kind of passion project is for it to be a passion project. And it was just something that I was thinking about when I was sleeping. I was thinking about when I was eating, waking, outside, running, whatever. So I think I’m actually missing that in my current project, which is why I haven’t been able to work on it. I can’t get a storyline down for it. With Advance Wars, it was like I love this game.

And I made a new story. There’s a prequel for it. So it was so exciting to get back into the war and do that. With this game, it’s like what happens? Really only what’s driving me is I’m having fun making the art, I’m having fun exploring the game engine and doing algorithms. But there’s something not gluing it together. And I think that there’s a passion part missing. So I think it’s really important to have that, find something that really makes your heart beat. Even if it’s, it’s a demake, ideally I’d be working on my own IP and my own story and be like, “This is me.” But I think that that’s where my heart was, and I think a lot of it creates a lot of value for people and a lot of people really enjoy that.

Ken Gagne: Awesome. It’s kind of like fanfiction from a software development perspective.

Jasper Byrne: Yeah, it seems to me like everybody’s coming from a place of loving these games, particular games that we’ve demade, a great deal. It’s just almost like paying homage to the games that really inspire us. I guess

Ken Gagne: Before I go to questions for the audience, I want to point out that there’s a huge demake community. This is a small sample of the demakes that are out there. Are there any demakes that inspire any of you or that you give a shout-out to that aren’t your own?

Colin Brannan: Bloodborne PSX is incredible.

Animal Planet: Same.

Ken Gagne: Yeah, Bloodborne for the PlayStation 1. So that is a thing. Yeah, anybody else?

Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I’m sure all of us love that one. It is quite incredible what she achieved with that game. Because she recreated the entire game.

Colin Brannan: Yeah, it was like, “Wait, it keeps going.” It keeps going.

Jasper Byrne: Boss fights and everything, and it’s quite an incredible project. Really inspiring actually. Yeah, I don’t know about too many others. I had obviously heard of a couple of the others on the panel.

But I guess thinking another aspect I suppose is the game, growing up with a home computer systems like the Sinclair Spectrum, we always had terrible arcade conversions that were much worse than the NES games and things like that. So in a sense, I kind of grew up with demakes, if you like, of arcade games. Because they were terrible. Again, like Street Fighter II on the Spectrum, which does exist.

Ken Gagne: You’re not being fair to the work you have done because there’s a difference between a demake and a crappy port.

Jasper Byrne: Right. Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully.

Ken Gagne: I want to switch to questions and see if this microphone is going to work for me because now this is the opportunity for you to not line up. You can stay in the comfort of your seats and raise a hand if you have a question. And I see, all right, let’s start right here. I saw your hand go up first. And by the way, a question is a short declarative statement that ends with a question mark.

Audience member: So James, you in particular mentioned having to use Nintendo related code and stuff like that. For the rest of you, did you have to research your target systems like development software or anything like that?

Colin Brannan: Sorry, I keep saying them, GB Studio is great. Check it out. It’s awesome. Their guidelines and everything are all, it’s like, “Hey, here’s what you can do. You can only have X amount of sprites in one scene or X amount of characters.” And they’re always very low numbers. So it was part of the software that I was using was giving me those restrictions and whatnot.

Ken Gagne: Cool.

Jasper Byrne: Yeah for me, it wasn’t anything beyond just the palette and the color palette really. How many colors does the NES have and what are they? That was all I really looked into technically. I didn’t try and follow the sound specifications or anything like that.

Ken Gagne: What we need is an N64 studio app. Just drag and drop. Boom, done. Here, have a copy of my magazine. And on the back there’s Steam code for a random game. Any other questions? Let’s go back here. Hi there.

Audience member: Do you think there’s any overlap between I guess the motivation for the stuff that comes out of the demo scene and demakes?

Colin Brannan: Demo scene being the music video tech that people make, right? Or the video game demo scene?

Audience member: No, the basically music video tech.

Colin Brannan: Yeah, okay.

Audience member: Obsolete systems. Video on a 2600 or whatever.

Colin Brannan: I think a lot of us we’re all coming, like we were saying about coming from a place of fandom of an original project, where demo scene seems much more interested in the tech engineering aspect of it. I’m not super involved in that though. I don’t know.

James Lambert: Me personally, I can’t really speak to that. I don’t have that overlap, I guess.

Animal Planet: I think other than sharing the same target as in older consoles, restricted consoles and spaces, I don’t see a ton of overlap.

Ken Gagne: Yeah, there is some overlap. The person who did the Apple II demakes I mentioned has also entered the demo scene. And right here in Boston, there used to be an event called Demo Party that you could go to every year and people just show off these amazing self-running demos. It’s like 16kb and it runs for two minutes of audio video on PC and it’s ridiculous. Yeah, and there are also some great, don’t stand in front of a speaker, some great Atari demos. Let’s hear from you.

Audience member: Hi. You mentioned Street Fighter II on the NES. How can you tell the difference today between demakes made today and demakes that were made on the black market in China and Russia, like Somari the Adventurer or Super Mario World on the NES, those games that you would often find on multicarts or Soulja Boy consoles, kind of stuff that YouTuber Rerez talked about?

Jasper Byrne: Well, obviously the motivation is the main difference because those people that were bootlegging those cartridges, they were just trying to somehow trick you into buying what you thought was a better game. Whereas I guess people like us who are doing this sort of thing are trying to do probably the best job that we can within the limitations if you like.

Colin Brannan: I also don’t want to be totally dismissive of it though because some of them at times you play those and they’re like, “This is actually all right.” And now I’m thinking what if someone remade the most bootleg thing you could find? Get a team together, spend a lot of time at it.

Jasper Byrne: Bootleg remakes. Yeah, that would be good.

Ken Gagne: So what, like Cheetahmen 64 or something? Sure. Let’s go right here.

Audience member: So has there been any game or console that you’ve been very passionate about wanting to demake onto, but it wasn’t really feasible, the challenge just being too great? You’ve mentioned the difficulties with porting to your specific consoles already, so I was just curious.

James Lambert: Yeah, actually, I really like the idea of trying to get an open-world sized game running on the N64. But then I consider, okay, but then I have to make an open-world amount of content. And that’s really the bottleneck. I’d love to try the tech, but unfortunately one person just can’t generate a lot of content. And you’re much better off I think targeting something that you can make a small slice of that feels complete rather than trying to go really broad.

Colin Brannan: I think it’s a Sid Meier quote or something about wanting to make a game that took entirely inside one apartment block or something. This idea of making a very open-world, but at a very tiny scale and just doing a lot of work still, but packing it all into the tiniest amount of physical digital space rather than a big expansive field or whatnot.

Ken Gagne: Cool. Let’s see, I saw a hand from you sir, with the New York, is that a Yankees hat in Boston?

Audience member: I’m sorry. I’m from Canada.

Ken Gagne: What part of Canada?

Audience member: Calgary.

Ken Gagne: That’s not Toronto.

Colin Brannan: No, sorry. Don’t give him it. No, no.

Audience member: So I wanted to ask, obviously this stuff comes from a love of these games. You wouldn’t make this stuff otherwise. But is there anything about it that it’s a little bit like seeing how the sausage gets made? Is there anything that’s you go back to these games and you kind of see through them a little bit. Does it ruin anything for you or is it just a positive thing overall?

Animal Planet: For me, no. It was such an incredible positive experience and being able to see the just tunnel vision-esque incredible amount of work that people have done to break down Advance Wars and have all the facts about the characters, but also just the battle statistics and all of that. That’s kind of why I got into creating this, to see how that really worked. And it was very fulfilling. No magic lost there.

James Lambert: No, same. I think I kind of noticed the little details they added the game and why they did things. You’re like, “Oh, that makes sense.” They’re little subtle things that they’ve added that you just wouldn’t notice without diving deep into it.

Jasper Byrne: It made me just love it even more. And I spent a lot of time just analyzing the pauses, how long fade-outs would take, how long you would spend traversing each room, and just looking at all of these timings and things. I feel like I learned so much about editing and timing and kind of pacing of a game just through just analyzing the videos. And luckily with Silent Hill 2, there were a bunch of documentaries as well that were made at the time that were really good that came out with the Director’s Cut. So just rewatching all that stuff just made me even more inspired and love it even more, quite honestly.

Colin Brannan: It’s like the thing I was attracted to was mechanics and systems. So I was already really thinking about how they were working. And then if you really like the music in a game, you can do a cover of it. If you really like the characters, you can do fan art. And it’s like I really love these mechanics and systems and it’s fan art of mechanics and gameplay in a lot of ways.

Ken Gagne: If you like a game soundtrack, go to OCRemix.org. They have a lot of great remixes of games. If you like reading about the games you’re playing and you want a more of an academic breakdown, go to Boss Fight Books, many of which are quite good, especially Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Let’s go right over here because you know what Desert Commander is.

Audience member: Yes, unfortunately I’ve been playing games that long. Actually, my question was for Jasper. I wanted to ask why Silent Hill 2? There’s a lot of horror games out for PlayStation 1. Could have done Resident Evil, you could have done Fatal Frame, you could have done Galerians, you could have done Countdown Vampires.

Jasper Byrne: That’s a good shout.

Audience member: Probably would’ve been better. But yeah, why Silent Hill 2?

Jasper Byrne: I love Galerians. Yeah, I love Fatal Frame as well. It’s because I guess I personally just have a large interest film and it was very influenced by film, obviously, and outside of the game world. So I liked a lot of the source material I think that they used to kind of research that game, like the movie Jacob’s Ladder or whatever. And so it just connected with me very strongly on that cinematic level. And I guess my dad was a screenwriter and we used to watch movies together, two a day or something. So it was really just that love of film that I felt within that game. It’s probably one reason I also love Kojima’s games or whatever.

Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you. I think that is the end of our questions, unfortunately, although we’ll be hanging out outside the hall at the end. In the last minute, I just want to go down the line. We do have our social media accounts up there, but I want to give you the opportunity to verbally plug your title, where people can find it. All your games are available online for free. Well, they were.

James Lambert: Allegedly.

Ken Gagne: So just going down the line here, where can people find you?

James Lambert: Yeah, I just have a YouTube channel, James Lambert. That’s all.

Jasper Byrne: Yeah, I have a Twitter, Jasperbyrne. It’s up there. And also Instagram is Jaspersonic because I make music as well, and it’s more the music side I put on there, Insta and TikTok and what have you. So JasperSonic or Jasperbyrne on Twitter.

Colin Brannan: Don’t find me. It’s fine. You don’t have to. You can send me an email or go to csbrannon.itch.io to check out Disco Elysium for Game Boy. But I’m okay. Come say hi.

Animal Planet: You can find PicoWars on itch.io/picowars or my Twitter, X thingy is listed there, Lambdanaut. I don’t post there too often, but yeah, some game dev stuff goes up there.

Ken Gagne: Awesome. Thank you all so much for coming to Demakes Decoded. Enjoy the rest of PAX.

The tenth annual PAX East was held last month, and I was honored to host two panels of brilliant speakers. One, “The Art of Craft: Inspiring Game Creations”, can be seen and heard on the Polygamer podcast. The other was “The Return of Couch Play”, looking at offline multiplayer as an alternative to online games such as Fortnite, PUBG, and Tetris 99.

Steam, PS+, and Xbox Live make it easier than ever to get matched online — yet gamers are increasingly rediscovering the appeal of local, offline play. What are the unique challenges and opportunities of taking a game offline? How do you design a game for competitive or cooperative gameplay on the same screen? We’ll look at how to innovate this ancient tradition and design a game that makes the most of couch play.

Featuring:

• Ken Gagne [Digital Content Developer, Gamebits]
• Tanya X. Short [Creative Director, Kitfox Games]
• Christoffer Holmgård [Director, Die Gute Fabrik]
• Danny Silvers [CEO, Lantana Games]
• Zachary Johnson [Code / Design, Space Mace LLC]
• Tommy Sunders [Art / Design, Space Mace LLC]

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Spoke, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, or RadioPublic.

Owlboy is a 2D adventure-platformer — a Metroidvania — developed by D-Pad Studio and recently released for Windows. Otus, the main character, is the titular hero with the power of flight, but without the power of speech. Can he and his friends come together to save his besieged floating hometown? And can an indie game that’s been in development for nine years achieve success?

This week, I speak with Owlboy’s composer and sound designer, Jonathan Geer, whose sweeping symphonic soundtrack is a beautiful complement to the game. I asked him how he chose to pair a modern orchestra with the game’s pixel art; why he used real musicians instead of virtual ones; how his degree in film scoring from Berklee prepared him to score games, and the differences between the two media; what it’s like to write a soundtrack for a game over the course of a decade; the game’s ultimate reception at PAX West 2016; and what to look forward to from Geer’s next game: Heart Forth, Alicia.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Thanks to Sabriel Mastin for providing the video introduction and gameplay for this week’s episode!

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Jonathan Geer
  • Bandcamp
  • Twitter
• Owlboy is a masterful tale of transcending disability (Brent Ables for Killscreen)
• Berklee College of Music minor in video game scoring
• Heart Forth, Alicia

Beholder puts you in charge of an apartment building in a totalitarian state. As a public servant, you are tasked to spy on your tenants and report any suspicious activities or ideological subversions to the authorities… whatever the consequences. Will you do what’s best for your family? Or will you risk your life to save others?

Beholder is developed by Warm Lamp Games and published by Alawar Entertainment, both based in Siberia, Russia. This geography gives the team a unique perspective on what qualifies as a totalitarian state. Is the game set in East Germany? Or, given what Edward Snowden has revealed about the NSA, could the game be about the United States? On October 18, 2016, I spoke with Evgeny Kapustin at Alawar Entertainment about the game’s development and the commentary it provokes about morality, patriotism, and escapism.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Beholder
  • Steam
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Kickstarter
• This War of Mine on IndieSider
• Papers, Please
• The Lives of Others (2006)

Note: This video is based on a free demo version of Beholder; the full game wasn’t released until Nov. 9.

Pankapu is a family-friendly episodic platformer. The land of Omnia is being invaded by Nightmares, so Iketomi, the god of dreams, creates Pankapu, an avatar charged with bringing hope back to the realm. Only by discovering the three Aegis — Bravery, Ardor, and Faith — will Pankapu master the abilities needed to access all of the land and save his friends.

Pankapu is the first game to be featured on IndieSider to have been accepted to the Square Enix Collective, a program that provides indie game developers with feedback and marketing assistance. After graduating from this program, developer Too Kind Studio then launched a successful Kickstarter campaign.

In this podcast interview, studio co-founder Jimmy Kalhart discusses how Pankapu changed as a result of these crowdsourcing opportunities; how his team’s background in MMORPG development lent itself to creating a 2D platformer; why the game is wrapped in the context of a story a father tells his child, and whether modern games need narrative; and whether Pankapu will be a launch title for the Nintendo NX console in 2017.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Pankapu
  • Steam
  • Kickstarter
  • Square Enix Collective
• Interview: Dreams, nightmares, and Lakota culture intertwine in Pankapu

Disclosure: a review copy of this game was provided to me by the publisher.

Four Sided Fantasy is a puzzle-platformer for Steam and PlayStation 4. As with most platformers, the screen scrolls side-to-side and up-and-down — but with the push of a button, players can toggle the scrolling and make the screen wrap, where one side connects to the opposite side. Using this power, players can navigate puzzles and access new areas through the game’s many seasons.

In this interview, I speak with lead designer Logan Fieth, founder of Ludo Land and graduate of DigiPen, about Four Sided Fantasy: the unusual gameplay mechanics that predate Logan; how narrative works in a game without language; how various aesthetic artifacts contribute to this being “a game about the screen”; the use of gender and gender identity as a storytelling device; the relinquishment of creative control in exchange for Kickstarter funding; and pairing with Serenity Forge to publish the game on consoles.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Four Sided Fantasy
  • Steam
  • Kickstarter
  • Facebook
• Logan Fieth on Twitter
• Serenity Forge
• IndieSider #22: Luna’s Wandering Stars
• Seattle Indies
• VVVVVV
• The Fourth Wall
• Perspective

Disclaimer: a review copy of this game was provided to me by the publisher.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a visual gamebook — a cross between choose your own adventure and tactical RPG. As your adventure in this classic dungeon crawler, you’ll be presented with paths and choices. The character you choose determines your narrative as you encounter orcs, goblins, dwarves, dragons, and more.

In this interview, I speak with Tin Man Games creative director Neil Rennison and technical artist Ed Blanch about adapting Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s original 1982 gamebook; how a gamebook differs from both Choose Your Own Adventure and traditional RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons; how they used Kickstarter to fund an entirely new visual game engine; what their future plans are for this engine, including Deathtrap Dungeon; and advice for surviving in Firetop Mountain.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Tin Man Games
  • Steam
  • iOS
  • Kickstarter
• The original gamebook on Amazon.com
• ZX Spectrum version of the game
• PlayStation 3 version of the game
• Other World Miniatures
• Deathtrap Dungeon for PSX

Disclaimer: a review copy of this game was provided to me by the publisher.

Lifeless Planet is a narrative puzzle-platformer for Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. A astronaut has been sent to what’s supposed to be a verdant, unpopulated world — but his arrival reveals a barren wasteland populated by Cold War-era Russians. How did they get here, and what happened to the lush planet NASA had detected?

In this episode, I speak with David Board of developer Stage 2 Studios about the game’s evolution from its Kickstarter in 2011 to its PS4 release in 2016; the updated graphics engine; how movies such as The Martian, Gravity, and Interstellar have affected public perception of space exploration; manned vs. robotic exploration; and science fiction.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Lifeless Planet on:
  • Steam
  • Sony PlayStation 4
  • Microsoft Xbox One
  • Twitter
  • Kickstarter
• Hayden Waugh’s interview with Lifeless Planet’s David Board
• What a big Kickstarter success looked like – before Double Fine came along
• Luna’s Wandering Stars by Serenity Forge on IndieSider
• Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott’s Road to the Stars

Disclosure: a review copy of this game was provided to me by the publisher.

Stage of Development is a video documentary series featuring the human stories of Chicago’s indie game developers. Produced by Russ Pitts of Flying Saucer Media, Stage of Development goes behind the scenes with Bit Bash, Young Horses (Octodad: Dadliest Catch), William Chyr (Manifold Garden), Culture Shock Games (We Are Chicago), and The Men Who Wear Many Hats (Organ Trail: Director’s Cut; Max Gentlemen). The video series is currently seeking $42,891 in funding on Kickstarter by Sep 3, 2016.

Since Stage of Development shares a common subject and passion with IndieSider, I backed the Kickstarter and invited Russ on the show to discuss how he narrowed his project from a chronicle of video game luminaries around the globe to indie game developers in Chicago; what he learned from the project’s first failed Kickstarter in August 2015; what will happen to his original project’s footage of John Romero and family; and what other cities he hopes to expand Stage of Development to next. The interview was recorded between shoots while Russ was on location in Chicago.

Download the audio edition of this podcast from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Stage of Development by Flying Saucer Media
• Stage of Development: Indie City Edition by Russ Pitts on Kickstarter
• 2015 Kickstarter (canceled)
• Footage of the Romero Family
• Russ Pitts of Take This on Polygamer #7
• Desert Bus for Hope: The Documentary on Kickstarter
• John Romero as KansasFest 2012’s keynote speaker

Chime Sharp is a 2016 sequel to the 2010 puzzle game Chime. In this puzzle game, players rotate and place pentomino blocks onto an open grid, trying to form perfect quadrangles (squares and rectangles). As the the timer counts down, a beatline moves across the level, clearing completed quads and triggering musical tones that complement the techno soundtrack.

I spoke with designer Ste Curran about what rough edges he filed away from the original Chime to create Chime Sharp; how he chose the soundtrack for the sequel; why the game had two crowdfunding campaigns on two different platforms; and his many other interests, including video game karaoke.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Chime Sharp
• Designer Ste Curran
• Developer Twistplay
• Publisher Chilled Mouse
• Original publisher Zoë Mode
• Chime Sharp on Kickstarter
• Chime Sharp on Indiegogo
• Agency Consulting w/Leigh Alexander
• One Life Left radio show
• Marioke — video game karaoke

Full disclosure: I backed this game on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Update (May 29, 2019): This game is now available for Nintendo Switch!

Perchang is an iOS puzzle game that’s been described as a cross between Lemmings, Marble Madness, and Lunar Lander. Manipulate moving parts in each level’s Rube Goldberg machine to get the marbles into their goals. Color-coded flippers, fans, magnets, and more are at your disposal — but all the red parts are activated together, as are all the blue parts. Group the parts by assigning the right colors to solve each puzzle.

Perchang is the debut title from Perchang, a two-person studio consisting of Ben Murch of Rodeo Games and Pete Akehurst of Popcorn Entertainment. In this interview, we spoke about what brought these two developers together; how Perchang’s 3D levels and puzzles were conceived and modeled; what prompted the two developers to create a game so different from their previous titles; the lame duck status of the Nintendo Wii U; and the future of augmented reality gaming.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Perchang on iOS
• On Twitter:
  • Perchang
  • Ben Murch
  • Pete Akehurst
• Touch Arcade
• castAR — augmented reality by Jeri Ellsworth

Disclosure: a review copy of this game was provided to me by the publisher.

Lumo is an isometric puzzle-platformer in the style of Solstice, Equinox, or Head Over Heels. With modern design sensibilities, a fantastic design aesthetic, uncomplicated controls, a quirky sense of humor, and plenty of secrets and allusions, Lumo is a fun and original revival of a genre that’s lain fallow for nearly a decade. It’s the debut game from Triple Eh?, founded by Gareth Noyce, a veteran of such triple-AAA titles as Crackdown, Black Hawk Down, and Fable 2.

In this interview, Ken and Gareth chat about the advantages and challenges of working within an isometric perspective; the classic games that inspired Lumo’s design; how to market a game that has few, if any, contemporaries; and how Triple Eh? nearly pursued either an Advance Wars-type tactics game, or an isometric game with a time-travel mechanic; instead of Lumo. Finally, we geek out over our favorite old computers, including the ZX Spectrum, Apple II, and Amstrad CPC.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Lumo director’s commentary
• Lumo on Steam
• Gareth Noyce on Twitter
• Other interviews with Gareth Noyce of Triple Eh?
  • By James Batchelor for Develop
  • By Sam Sharp for Xbox One UK
  • By Paul Semel for paulsemel.com

Disclosure: a review copy of this game was provided to me by the publisher.

CRYPTARK is a 2D sci-fi roguelike twin-stick shooter in which players pilot mechs charged with salvaging alien technology from derelict spaceships. Technological defenses remain active on these procedurally generated abandoned hulks, and players must shut them down and shoot the core if they hope to escape with enough artifacts to sell and fund their continuing expeditions. CRYPTARK is available from Alientrap for PS4 and Steam (Mac, Windows & Linux).

In this interview, I speak with Alientrap creative director Jesse McGibney about this game’s artistic departure from Alientrap’s previous game, Apotheon, which was based on Greek mythology and pottery. We also chat about CRYPTARK’s two-player co-op mode and the lack of online play; how the game fared in early demos at PAX East 2016; the challenges of creating a game with procedurally generated levels; and the CRYPTARK’s time in Steam Early Access — a first for Alientrap — and the one-week delay between its Steam release and its arrival on PlayStation.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• CRYPTARK by Alientrap
• Apotheon
• Gamasutra – Game Design Deep Dive: Visualizing Cryptark’s 2D sci-fi world
• CRYPTARK soundtrack by by Ryan Roth & Ryan Henwood
• “A richly strategic shmup” — Marsh Davies of Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is the final episode of IndieSider. My thanks to everyone who listened!

Life Goes On: Done to Death is a 2D puzzle-platformer for Steam and PlayStation 4. Each level holds a chalice protected by traps, spikes, switches, levers, and relays. Crossing these obstacles will require the ultimate sacrifice — but your death will not be in vain: each character’s corpse remains behind, serving as a foothold or trigger for the next hero.

This interview with Erik Johnson of Infinite Monkeys Entertainment, we discuss how the Done to Death expansion updates the game from its original 2014 release; the experience of working with Sony for the game’s 2016 console debut; how Life Goes On began as a gamejam and what other classic games inspired or are similar to it; what’s up with Jeff, the troll who eats knights; and whether we’ll see a two-player co-op mode in a future version of the game.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Life Goes On: Done to Death
  • Steam
  • Twitter
• Erik Johnson on Twitter
• Similar games:
  • Karoshi Suicide Salaryman
  • SeppuKuties
  • The Lost Vikings
• Other interviews with Erik Johnson:
  • Patrick Hickey Jr. of Examiner
  • Alluvial Sin of Indie Dev Talk

Kathy Rain is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Clifftop Games and published by Raw Fury Games for Steam, Humble & GOG on May 5, 2016. After decades away, college sophomore and social outcast Kathy Rain returns to her hometown to solve the mystery surrounding her grandfather’s mysterious death. Her investigation will uncover a conspiracy that stretches back decades and involves the community’s most powerful citizens. Featuring voice acting produced by Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games and classic pixel art, this game will bring players back to the golden age of adventure games.

In this interview, Clifftop Games founder Joel Staaf Hästö, who previously worked on Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, discusses why he chose the point-and-click genre in which to craft his latest narrative; how Kathy Rain’s mature themes are not in fact apart from the genre’s history, which includes Day of the Tentacle and Space Quest; the challenges and opportunities of working in the Adventure Game Studio; why a developer from 2016 Stockholm would create a game set in 1995 America; and what the future holds for Kathy.

Watch the video above, stream the audio edition below, or download it from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Epistory: Typing Chronicles is a narrative adventure through an origami world plagued by an insectile infestation. Help the protagonist and her three-tailed fox defeat their foes by typing increasingly complex words. As the world is purged of this corruption, new areas literally unfold before your eyes, as a voiceover narration unveils the story.

This interview with Fishing Cactus’ game designer David Bailly and programmer Thibaut Hanson examines Epistory’s inspirations, such as Zelda, Bastion, and Typing of the Dead; how the unusual gameplay mechanic and narrative style play off each other; whether or not the game is a typing tutor in the edutainment genre; and the challenges of producing such a literary game in seven languages.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Gravity Goose is a 2D puzzle platformer available for free for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. The defining mechanic is the player’s ability to manipulate gravity, which manifests itself by making gravity stronger or weaker, rotating the entire level, and more. Use these tools to guide your avian avatar through a deadly maze of pits and traps!

In this interview, Eddie Rossiter of Duck Duck Games discusses Gravity Goose’s unusual development history, leading to its official debut well past v1.0; how the gravity mechanic has been implemented in other games, and what makes Gravity Goose unique; the greatest challenge of being responsible for every aspect of a game’s creation; Gravity Goose’s pending Kickstarter; and why our hero is a goose.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

The Flame in the Flood is the debut game from The Molasses Flood, an indie studio composed of six alumni of Irrational Games. This procedurally generated survival game sends a young woman and her dog down a river, scrounging for resources they can craft into tools and supplies they need to stay alive. Death can come from drowning, snakebites, exhaustion, being mauled by a bear, starvation, and more. If Scout and Aesop can guide their raft through the rapids and find the right ports to dock at, they may just survive another night.

The Molasses Flood animator and biz dev Gwen Frey joins the IndieSider podcast this week to talk about the classic computer and Atari games of the 1980s that inspired the gameplay, and the films and experiences that informed the setting; the challenge of running a Kickstarter that raised more than a quarter-million dollars; how Gwen animated quadrupeds that she may never have seen in real life, such as boars and wolves; how the art inspires players to remain hopeful in a post-societal world; and the resources she wish she could’ve brought with her from Irrational.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• The Flame in the Flood from The Molasses Flood
  • Steam
  • GOG.com
  • Humble Store
  • Xbox One
• Gwen Frey’s GDC 2016 talk schedule
• The Flame in the Flood on Kickstarter
• The Flame in the Flood on SteamSpy
• “Without A Net: BioShock Vets Face Life After Irrational With The Flame in the Flood” by Game Informer‘s Matt Helgeson (Oct 7, 2014)
• “The Flame In The Flood Is Like Oregon Trail, Except Mean” by Kotaku‘s Nathan Grayson (Sep 24, 2015)
• Inspirations:
  • Oregon Trail
  • Toobin’
  • Don’t Starve
  • FTL (Faster Than Light)
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Beasts of the Southern Wild
• BostonFIG Talks
• Gwen Frey animating snakes and boars
• Disney’s Tomorrowland with George Clooney
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
• The Molasses Flood blog
• The Flame in the Flood on Metacritic
• Gwen Frey on Twitter as @direGoldfish

Full disclosure: I backed The Flame in the Flood on Kickstarter.

Plangman is a game that combines Hangman with a puzzle-platformer: avoid enemies and jump over pits to reach the letters you need to solve each level’s puzzle! Judicious use of bombs, jetpacks, and other accessories will help you get past impossible obstacles and enemies. The monochromatic aesthetic and synthesized soundtrack pay homage to the Apple II, the first computer of Plangman developer Ehren von Lehe.

In this interview, Ken and Ehren determine whether Plangman’s hero was inspired by Microsoft’s Olympic decathlete or by Captain Goodnight; how the game evolved across nearly seven years of development; how playtesting helped von Lehe realize that games are no longer as hard as they were in his youth; why the developer offers a walkthrough of his own game; and why the game was released on itch.io instead of Steam.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Plangman by Ehren von Lehe
• “15 Free Indie Games You Should Check Out” by Javy Gwaltney for Game Informer
• Captain Goodnight by Brøderbund
• GET LAMP, Jason Scott’s documentary about text adventures
• KansasFest, an annual Apple II convention
• The Plangman soundtrack on Bandcamp and SoundCloud

Ellipsis for iOS is a top-down action game in the style of Geometry Wars and Crystal Quest. Collect all the nuclei from a level while avoiding obstacles and enemies intent on your destruction! The bright neon colors, intuitive interface, and complete lack of text or HUD makes for an intense, concentrated gameplay experience.

Ellipsis is the first game from Salmi Games, represented in this week’s podcast by founder Yacine Salmi. We discuss how the game’s name represents all that was omitted during the design process; the difference in difficulty between being “hard” and “fair”; how the game’s controls might work on tvOS, and how in-app purchases (IAPs) might be implemented in a way that wouldn’t drive players away; the studio’s effective Facebook marketing leading up to the game’s release; and how creating Ellipsis might’ve been a different experience at the studio members’ former workplaces of Sony, Electronic Arts, and Havok.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Full disclosure: a review copy of this game was supplied to me by the developer.

Momoka is a 2.5D adventure platformer for iOS and tvOS. Imagine the exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Cave Story, combined with the mechanics of Super Mario Galaxy. That’s Momoka, a non-linear, open-world action game set across a series of planetoids and outer space.

In this week’s podcast, I chat with Benjamin Withers and Duncan Steele, who compose the entirety of Momoka developer Felwig Games. We discuss how the game evolved over its three-year development cycle, from a Mac game called Star Life featuring 2D graphics and an alien avatar to a tvOS game called Momoka featuring 2.5D graphics and a female protagonist. We ponder whether the game is being played more on iOS or tvOS, and what challenges and opportunities presented themselves as being one of the first developers for Apple TV. Also, Momoka will never feature in-app purchases (IAPs) — an overlooked revenue stream, or a choice of preserving the game’s integrity? Find out on IndieSider!

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Felwig Games on Twitter and Facebook
• Star Life’s inspirations
• A micro-documentary of game development in commit time

Full disclosure: a review copy of this game was supplied to me by the developer.

Lumino City is a point-and-click adventure game released for Steam in 2014 and iOS/tvOS in 2015. It features a charming story, intricate puzzles, and an accessible interface — but its most subtle feature is also its most astonishing: the entire world of Lumino City was hand-crafted as a physical set.

In this interview, Luke Whittaker of State of Play Games discusses why they chose this route over 3D modeling and animation; the year of design and building that culminated in a single day of filming; documenting the process and history of the game’s design; what’s happened to the set, now that the game is available; the relationship between the protagonist and her grandfather; and being one of the first game developers for the new, fourth-generation Apple TV.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Lumino City on the App Store (iOS/tvOS) and Steam (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• Luke Whittaker of State of Play Games
• Lume
• The NeverhoOd
• Interview: Katherine Bidwell on the models of Lumino City

Full disclosure: a review copy of this game was supplied to me by the developer.

Girls Like Robots was one of Popcannibal’s first games when it was released in 2012. Metacritic ranked it the 13th best iOS game of that year, ensuring the game’s long life. Now it sees its first console release with a Wii U version, giving a new audience of gamers the opportunity to participate in this seating arrangement simulator. Place girls next to robots on the playing grid, but don’t put them too near the nerds — even if it makes the nerds happy! The quirky sense of humor and unusual yet fitting folk music soundtrack make for an engaging game.

In this interview, developer Ziba Scott discusses revisiting a game three years after its original release; the trials of being one of the first games to pass through Steam Greenlight; the decision to collaborate with an outside publisher for the Wii U edition; and the family connections that led to the game’s soundtrack.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Girls Like Robots
• Flash version by Adult Swim
• Luigi Guatieri, illustrator
• IndieSider #5: The Counting Kingdom, featuring Luigi’s art
• 25 Best iPhone and iPad Games of 2012
• Will Brierly’s Vivian Clark
• Peacemeal String Band (which played Ziba’s wedding)
• Previous profile of Ziba Scott by Ken Gagne for Computerworld

Old Man’s Journey is a 90-minute puzzle through the hero’s memories. After receiving a letter, he sets out on a journey across rolling landscapes that the player can reshape, allowing the old man to leap from foreground to background, making his way across obstacles. At the end of each level, he reminiscences about his past, unraveling a tale of love, hope, and regret. Old Man’s Journey by Clemens Scott and Felix Bohatsch of Broken Rules is available for iOS, Android, and Steam.

In this podcast interview, I chat with creative director Clemens Scott about how two young developers felt qualified to tell and old man’s story; whether the game should make us feel bold or hesitant to make life-changing decisions; how the gameplay could be a metaphor for the narrative; and if a game’s marketability influences its game design.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Old Man’s Journey by Broken Rules
  • Broken Rules on Twitter
  • Clemens Scott on Twitter
• Old Man’s Journey wins Apple Design Award 2017
• GDC Vault – Happy Inside the Box: The Art of Old Man’s Journey

A review copy of this game was provided by the developer for the purpose of this interview.

Before he created Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake, John Romero released Dangerous Dave, a series of platformers for the Apple II and MS-DOS computers. One game in that series, Dangerous Dave in the Deserted Pirate’s Hideout, is now available for iOS, featuring both the original version and a remastered edition. The updated version includes an original soundtrack by Dren McDonald, a prolific video game composer who also provided the score for Gathering Sky, featured on IndieSider #28.

In this interview, Dren discusses how he invented the “chipbilly” genre for Dangerous Dave; the artificial constraints he placed on himself to create the soundtrack; the technology and skills a composer needs to work in the gaming industry; and his future collaborations with the Romero family.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Dangerous Dave in the Deserted Pirate’s Hideout for iOS
• Dren McDonald of Nerdtracks on Twitter and Bandcamp
• Gunman Taco Truck
• Russ Pitts’ Stage of Development preview of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite’s Gunman Taco Truck
• The String Arcade

Full disclosure: I backed the Kickstarter for String Arcade and received a free download code for the Dangerous Dave soundtrack.

Emily Is Away is a narrative game framed as a series of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations. The main character and Emily are high school friends whose relationship evolves as they go their separate ways in college but stay in touch online. As you guide these online interactions, the decisions you make will determine where you go to school, who your friends are, and who Emily is to you, all while revisiting the emotions and experiences of your own youth.

In this interview, developer Kyle Seeley discusses how much of the game is autobiographical; how he created not only the interface, but also the experience, of using AIM; the tools he used to plot the story’s branching paths; the game’s reception at BostonFIG and IndieCade; and what he hopes players will get out of this game.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Emily Is Away by Kyle Seeley
• GameLoop
• Boston Festival of Indie Games (BostonFIG)
• IndieCade — International Festival of Independent Games
• ELIZA, a natural language-processing psychotherapist simulator
• Façade, a one-act interactive drama
• IndieSider #21: Dyscourse by Owlchemy Labs

Mushroom 11 is a post-apocalyptic platform-puzzler. In a world without humans, a rogue mushroom must navigate dangerous obstacles and organisms. Players guide the fungus by “erasing” it, shifting its center of gravity, and splitting it in half.

In this interview, co-designers Itay Keren and Julia Keren-Detar of Untame Games talk about why they chose a dark, futuristic setting for the mycological Mushroom 11; the subtle nature of the game’s narrative and its possible interpretations; how Mushroom 11 evolved from its original form as a 2012 game jam entry, and how the Indie Fund helped it along the way; and what mycologist Paul Stamets thinks of the game.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Mushroom 11 on Steam
• On Twitter:
  • Untame Games
  • Julia Keren-Detar
  • Itay Keren
• Fluidity for WiiWare
• The Ooze for Sega Genesis
• Mushroom 11 prototype from NYU Game Jam 2012
• Artist Simon Kono
• The Future Sound Of London
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
• Indie Fund
• TED talk by Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

Full disclosure: this game was provided to IndieSider by the developer.

Super Happy Fun Block is a 2D puzzle-platformer for iOS. Ball’s monochromatic world is being invaded by colorful blocks — but he can make them disappear with a swipe to the left or right. Control the blocks to solve puzzles, rescue stars, and restore the world.

In this interview, Molten Tomato developer Ethan Benanav discusses what he learned working at Zynga that he brought to his indie game studio; the 2D engines he used to create Super Happy Fun Block; the dangers and elegance of writing code without source control; and making his game more accessible.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Super Happy Fun Block by Ethan Benanav
• Cocos2d and Box2D
• Chase Bethea, music production & sound design
• Leo’s Fortune
• emily is away

Full disclosure: this game was provided to IndieSider by the developer.

Master Spy is a cinematic stealth platformer and developer TURBOGUN’s debut title. As Master Spy, you use your stealth suit and super jump to infiltrate 2D mazes and evade traps that include motion sensors, pressure plates, and tigers. The pixel art, retro soundtrack, and dramatic cutscenes are reminiscent of Ninja Gaiden, Golgo 13, and Impossible Mission. Master Spy is available for $9.99 for Mac, PC, and Linux via Steam.

In this interview, developer Kris Truitt and artist John Coxworth discuss collaborating on a game while being halfway around the world from each other; the game’s 8-bit inspirations; designing a game that teaches the player how to play, without using a tutorial; how the game evolved in its two years in development; and what’s next for TURBOGUN.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• TURBOGUN‘s The Carrousel game
• Impossible Mission for Commodore 64 (playable online!)
• melonJS game engine
• Master Spy teaser trailer from Dec 1, 2013
• Dec 1, 2013
• André Allen Anjos (aka Remix Artist Collective), musician for Master Spy

Full disclosure: the developers provided me with a Steam code for this game.

PAC-MAN 256 is a free-to-play mobile game for iOS and Android from Hipster Whale, creator of Crossy Road, and 3 Sprockets, creator of Fight the Dragon. Guide Pac-Man through an endless maze while a glitch screen creeps up from the bottom of the maze, threatening to send you to the great bit bucket in the sky. Eat dots to unlock power-ups, collect coins to upgrade the power-ups and spend money to purchase unlimited credits with which to play the game — you’ll need them!

In this week’s episode, Seon Rozenblum returns to IndieSider, having previously appeared in February 2015 to discuss Fight the Dragon. How did 3 Sprockets go from working on their original original IP to one of the most famous characters in video game history? By what definition can Pac-Man be considered an “indie” game? And how does one exploit the free-to-play model while still giving players a great experience? Rozenblum discusses all this and more.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. The Let’s Play video is available separately:

In Gathering Sky, players guide a flock of birds through the air. Hawks and storms abound, but the game is primarily one of tranquility — there are no scores, objectives, or deaths. The terrain above and below changes across the five levels in synchronicity with a string orchestral soundtrack by Dren McDonald and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, complementing the peaceful experience.

I spoke with John Austin and Matt Blair, developers at A Stranger Gravity, about why they made such a nonviolent game as their debut title; how they modeled the birds in the game; how the collaboration with McDonald arose, and the role that music plays in the game; what the “right” way to play is; and their choice to release simultaneously on PC, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Gathering Sky on Steam
• Gathering Sky on Offworld, Destructoid & PC Gamer
• Dren McDonald and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music
• Boids algorithm

Full disclosure: the developers provided me with a Steam code for this game; they were in the audience of my PAX East 2014 panel on sexism; and I backed Dren McDonald’s Kickstarter.

High Strangeness is a top-down action-adventure game in the style of Secret of Mana. With the ability to switch between 8-bit and 16-bit graphics, players explore two versions of a mysterious world on their quest to save both from a mysterious threat. A chiptune soundtrack completes the retro feel of this collaboration from Barnyard Intelligence Games, Crystal Labs, and Midnight City.

In this interview, lead developer Ben Shostak discusses the game’s inspirations and influences, from Paper Mario to Indiana Jones; how High Strangeness came to be the first Kickstarter-backed video game ever, and whether that platform is still viable for indies, six years later; and whether the game sold better on Wii U or Steam, and why.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• High Strangeness, courtesy:
  • Crystal Labs
  • Barnyard Intelligence Games
  • Midnight City
• High Strangeness on:
  • Steam
  • Wii U
  • Kickstarter — ran 20 May 2009 – 18 Aug 2009 (89 days), asked for $1,500, raised $1,559 from 36 backers
  • Twitter
• Ben Shostak on Twitter
• Telefuture Records
• High Strangeness OSV on Bandcamp
• High Strangeness EP on Bandcamp
  

A review copy of this game was provided to IndieSider by its developer.

Leadlight Gamma is a text adventure, or work of interactive fiction. Inspired by such media as Silent Hill and Black Swan, Leadlight Gamma is a survival horror game in which you play as Belinda, a teenage girl who awakens to find herself in a dark parallel of her own high school. Spiders and zombies abound, and her former classmates want her dead. Can you guide her through the puzzles and combat of this text-only adventure?

Leadlight Gamma is a port of an Apple II game Leadlight, released in 2010. Developer Wade Clarke has ported Leadlight from Eamon to Inform and released it as a commercial product via the itch.io platform. In this interview, Clarke discusses the changes that modern technology allowed him to make to the gameplay and presentation, his decision to make an originally freeware game into a commercial release, how Leadlight Gamme fits into his vision for newly formed Heiress Software, and why anyone would create a text-based adventure game in the year 2015.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Leadlight Gamma on itch.io
• Wade Clarke of Heiress Software
• Wade’s interview in Juiced.GS
• Juiced.GS Concentrate Interactive Fiction PDF
• Leadlight for the Apple II
• Inform
• XYZZY Awards
• Leadlight Gamma review by Steven Watson for Adventure Gamers
• Hadean Lands on Kickstarter
• Andrew Plotkin’s Glulx
• Choice of Games

Adventures of Pip is an adventure-platformer starring Pip, a single pixel in a 32-bit world. By defeating enemies and absorbing their pixels, Pip can evolve into greater forms, bringing him closer in line with the 32-bit enemies he encounters. Developed by Tic Toc Games, Adventures of Pip features a soundtrack by Jake “virt” Kaufman and is available for Windows and Mac via Steam and for the Wii U.

In this interview, guest host Sabriel Mastin talks with developers Shereef Morse and Jeff Luke about the game’s first, failed Kickstarter and its second, successful Kickstarter; whether the level design inspired the hero’s abilities, or vice versa; the value of player feedback at events such as PAX; and much more!

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Kona from Parabole is a first-person exploration game set in the cold northern reaches of Canada in the 1970s. A private investigator has been hired to investigate some petty crimes but soon stumbles into a larger mystery hidden in the supernatural cold. What secrets lie within in this chilly interactive tale?

In this week’s IndieSider, I speak with Jean-François Fiset, community manager for Parabole. We discuss how Kona evolved from a snowmobile simulator to an episodic adventure to its current form; why mystery games seem to be set before the advent of cell phones; how one builds community around an adventure game; the use of the term “walking simulator” as a pejorative; whether Firewatch‘s success influenced Kona’s development; how to communicate a delay to one’s Kickstarter backers; and how to survive working at the same company as your brother.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Kona is available for Steam, GOG, PS4 & Xbox One. A review copy was provided for the purpose of this interview.

Puzzledrome is a puzzle game that challenges you to create perfectly symmetrical palindromes out of shape- and color-based tiles. Arrange 101 different levels so they’re reflected both vertically and horizontally! This game was released for iOS on May 28, 2015, and is coming this summer to Android, Windows Phone, Mac, and PC.

Puzzledrome is primarily the work of one man, Brian Dutton, who transitioned from being an audio programmer to a full-fledged game developer. In this interview, he discusses where he learned the necessary skills to make that leap; the many games he had to make before he got to this one; the how he expanded Puzzledrome’s audience in terms of accessibility and internationalization; the value of making personal appearances at conventions and conferences; and more!

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Puzzledrome, available at:
  • Apple iOS
  • Amazon
  • Android Google Play
• Asinine Games & Puzzledrome on Twitter
• Audio Design for Video Games at the Berklee College of Music
• Flapping Bard
• Intellectual Property & Entrepreneurship Clinic at Suffolk University
• Cloud Breaker
• “Bob” — Weird Al’s palindrome song

Catlateral Damage is a first-person cat simulator in which players exercise a cat’s most prized skill: knocking stuff onto the floor. Procedurally generated houses, log cabins, grocery stores, and museums give you the opportunity to break dishes, televisions, fruit stands, dinosaur skeletons, and more.

In this interview with developer Chris Chung, we discuss the game’s origin in the 7DFPS game jam; getting funded on Kickstarter; collaborating with Fire Hose Games through their indie accelerator program; what it was like to be featured by YouTube gamer PewDiePie; and future support for OUYA and Oculus Rift.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Catlateral Damage on Steam
• Catlateral Damage on Kickstarter
• 7DFPS gamejam
• PewDiePie plays Catlateral Damage
• My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up At 3AM Every Day
• OUYA Free the Games Fund

Luna’s Wandering Stars is a physics-based planetary puzzler from developer Serenity Forge. Players are challenged to manipulate trajectories, gravity wells, orbital thrusters, and more to collect golden asteroids while avoiding collisions with our solar system’s nine eight planets. This game is available for PC and Mac via Steam.

In this interview, Serenity Forge founder Zhenghua Yang (Z) discusses how Luna’s Wandering Stars fulfills his company’s mission to change players’ lives by challenging how they think; the obstacles to porting the game to mobile or Wii U, and how the company’s future games will overcome those barriers; how contracting for outside firms has given Serenity Forge unique opportunities to change the world; and what the indie gaming scene in Boulder, Colorado, is like.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Luna’s Wandering Stars on Steam
• Serenity Forge
  • game portfolio
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
• SpaceChem
• Luna’s Wandering Stars on Kickstarter
• Yacht Club’s Shovel Knight cost & sales breakdown
• Kerbal Space Program
• Tangential learning
• Daniel Floyd’s video “Video Games and Learning”
• Fight the Dragon
• Alpha Colony on Kickstarter
• Zhenghua Yang on Twitter

Dyscourse is a choose-your-own-adventure game that puts you in control of Rita, the leader of a group of plane crash survivors on a desert island. At every turn, you must choose: who will stay in the group and who must go? Will you look for food, water, or shelter? Do you await rescue, or make your own? Each choice branches the story, determining who will live and die.

In this interview, developer Graeme Borland discusses how Dyscourse evolved from an action game to a narrative-based title as a result of Kickstarter feedback; the custom tools Owlchemy developed to build this game in Unity; why “choice” is such a popular gameplay mechanic; and how even the developers don’t know how many different endings Dyscourse has.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Dyscourse by Owlchemy Labs
• Dyscourse on Steam and Kickstarter
• Graeme Borland on Twitter
• Chat Mapper
• Knights of the Dinner Table
• Lost
• Scholastic Microzine Twistaplot

Thanks to Jenna Hoffstein, Michael Carriere, and Gaming Media.

Sunless Sea by Failbetter Games is the sequel to Fallen London, a browser-based text adventure. In Sunless Sea, you captain a steamship in the subterranean realm of the Underzee, charting unknown waters and exploring distant ports. Bring back news and goods from new lands to London and be rewarded handsomely — by which you can stave off hunger, cannibalism, mutiny, and eldritch waters lurking in dark waters just a bit longer.

In this interview, writer Chris Gardiner and developer Liam Welton, discuss how they built upon the world founded in Fallen London, bringing graphics and real-time combat to the Underzee; how Kickstarter crowdfunding and Steam’s Early Access gave them unique opportunities; and the challenges and opportunities unique to building their own world compared to playing in sandbox when developing games for third parties, such as BioWare’s Dragon Age or Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Sunless Sea by Failbetter Games
• On Twitter:
  • Failbetter Games
  • Sunless Sea
  • Liam Welton, programmer & UI developer
  • Chris Gardiner, senior writer
• Sunless Sea wiki
• Fallen London
• Dragon Age: The Last Court
• Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus

Shelter 2 is a survival game in which you play as a wild lynx, feeding and caring for your cubs as they grow in the wilderness into adulthood. Hunt prey without falling prey to wolves or the elements. In this interview, Might and Delight CEO Anders Westin discusses how the game establishes an emotional connection between the players and the cubs, addresses the divide between journalistic reviews and gamer reviews, and answers the question: If you could be any animal, what would you be?

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Shelter 2 was released on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam on March 9, 2015 for $14.99. Other resources mentioned in this interview:

• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Philip Wythe (contributed the question about emotional connection)
• Goat Simulator
• Bear Simulator
• Ashe Dryden loves animals

The Boston Festival of Indie Games, or BostonFIG, is an annual celebration of the Northeast’s indie gaming scene. Developers from Boston and beyond come to showcase their latest games and works-in-progress, be they for computers, consoles, mobile, or cardboard. Guest speakers from Robin Hunicke and Leigh Alexander to Brian O’Halloran and Jason Scott have headlined the festival, with musical interludes by the Videri String Quartet.

In this interview, Fiona Cherbak, co-founder of the annual Boston Festival of Indie Games (BostonFIG), talks about how and why she started the event, its evolution, and how Boston’s indie scene compares to Austin’s and Seattle’s.

Download the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

This interview is excerpted from a larger discussion of hiring and retaining women in the games industry; the full episode is available from the Polygamer podcast.

To Be or Not To Be is a choose-your-own-path book by Ryan North, adapted from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and further adapted to interactive fiction by Tin Man Games, developer of numerous gamebooks. Choose to play as Hamlet, his father the king, or Ophelia. Make choices never before available to the Prince of Denmark. You may avenge your father’s murder — explore outer space — or become the Incredible Hulk!

In this interview, Ben Kosmina and Kamina Vincent of Tin Man Games explore whether the book is aimed at Shakespeare enthusiasts or critics; the challenges in adapting a dead tree book into a digital interactive work; what assets from the book’s Kickstarter project were able to be repurposed for the game; the challenge of pricing a game at what it’s actually worth; and how mobile gaming and crowdfunding have created a viable market for once-dead genres.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

(Hat tip to Jenna Hoffstein)

Fight the Dragon is a hack ‘n slash RPG for Steam from Melbourne-based developer 3 Sprockets. Its titular red dragon has a million hit points and takes persistent damage, allowing players to slowly whittle away at him as they level up. But more significant, Fight the Dragon features a complete Adventure Construction Kit (ACK), encouraging user-generated content. Already hundreds of custom levels, each taking 10–15 minutes to complete, can be explored.

In this interview, director and lead developer Seon Rozenblum addresses how the game has evolved from its Early Access release in March 2014 to its v1.0 release in December of that year. How did he know players would provide enough custom content to support the game? How has 3 Sprockets incentivized or gamified this process? And with so many great games coming from overseas, are Americans losing the indie arms race?

IndieSider host Ken Gagne is joined in this episode by Lorien Green, whom Ken previously interviewed on the Polygamer podcast. A hardcore gamer and experienced documentarian, Lorien’s insights prove invaluable when discussing the nature and context of Fight the Dragon.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Cubot is a puzzle game with a calming, minimalist aesthetic and a difficulty level that quickly ramps up. Released originally for Android, then for iOS, and finally for Mac, PC, and Linux via Steam, it has earned consistently positive reviews across all platforms.

Cubot is the work of one developer, Nicolas Pierre-Loti-Viaud. In this interview, he describes how he chose the presentation style, the challenges he’s faced in porting the game to multiple systems, and how the game has evolved over time and what we can look forward to in his future games.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

This interview is conducted through Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe. Transcripts of the interview in both English and French can be found below the video.

Ken: I was drawn to this game by the soothing music in the trailer. Even puzzle games often have very fast-paced music! Why did you choose such calm music?

Nicolas: Dès le début, je souhaitais une musique calme et reposante pour le jeu, ceci dans le but de ne pas distraire le joueur durant sa réflexion. Le trailer étant là pour présenter le jeu, il se devait donc d?avoir la même musique.

Antoine: From the start, I wanted a calm and relaxing music for the game, this from the perspective to not disturb the player during his reflection. The trailer aiming to present the game, it therefore had to have the same music.

Ken: Did you do all the music, art, and programming yourself?

Nicolas: Cubot étant un “petit” jeu, j’ai presque pu tout faire tout seul. Cependant, n’ayant aucune connaissance musicale, la musique et une partie du sound design ne sont pas de moi. En fait, la musique est une piste libre droit sur laquelle je suis tombée par hasard, mais c’était exactement ce que je souhaitais pour l’ambiance sonore, c?était donc parfait.

Antoine: Given that Cubot is “small” game, I have been almost able to do everything alone. However, since I have no musical knowledge, the music and a part of sound design are not from me. In fact, the music is a Creative Commons track found on the web by chance and it was exactly what I wanted for the sound ambience, so it was perfect.

Ken:How did you test the puzzles to make sure they weren’t too hard? Did you have testers playing the game for you?

Nicolas: Je ne sais pas, il n’y a pas de recette miracle. Dans un premier temps, j’ai créé pas mal de niveaux, j’ai essayé de les classer par ordre de difficulté. Par la suite, j’ai fait essayer le jeu à des amis, ça m’a permis de voir ce qui fonctionnait et ce qui ne fonctionnait pas. Du coup j’ai fait des ajustements, pour essayer d’avoir la meilleur courbe de progression possible. Les derniers tests que j’ai réalisés ont été faits lors de salons, où beaucoup de joueurs ont pu tester le jeu, ce qui m’a permis d’avoir énormément de retours.

Antoine: I don’t know, there is no magic solution. As a first step, I created a lot of levels, I tried to rank them in order of difficulty. Thereafter, I proposed to my friends to test the game, this allowed me to see the strengths and weaknesses of the game. So I made adjustments to try to have the best progression curve possible. The last tests I made were done at shows, where many players were able to test the game, which allowed me to have a lot of feedback.

Ken: What games most influenced or inspired you? The game most similar to Cubot that I can think of is Intelligent Qube for PSOne, or maybe The Nightmare Cooperative for Steam.

Nicolas: C’est marrant car je ne connais pas ces deux jeux, je vais me renseigner dessus. Il y a principalement 3 jeux qui m’ont inspiré. Bloxorz, un jeu en flash dans lequel il faut amener un parallélépipède vers un point d’arrivée. Devil Dice, un jeu PSOne où l’on contrôle un petit diable qui doit débarrasser le plateau de jeu en faisant correspondre les chiffres de la face supérieur des dés adjacents. Et finalement, la série Portal principalement pour l’esthétique épurée.

Antoine: It’s funny but I didn’t know these games, I will find out about them. There are mainly three games that inspired me. Bloxorz, a flash game where you have to move a parallelepiped to an arrival point. Devil Dice, a PSOne game, where the player controls a small devil which must clear the gameboard by matching the numbers on the upper side on adjacent dice. And last, the Portal series mainly for uncluttered aesthetics.

Ken: Your previous games were only for Windows Phone and Android. Was this your first game for Mac and iOS? What was the most challenging part of writing for those systems?

Nicolas: Ce n’est pas plus ou moins difficile de développer pour tel ou tel système. Ce qui est le plus dur, c’est de réussir à reproduire sur les différents systèmes/matériels la même expérience de jeu, j’espère avoir réussi.

En fait, pour parler un peu plus technique, les différentes versions du jeu partagent à 80-85% le même code. Les seules différences sont dues aux possibilités offertes par chaque système, par exemple l’ajout de l’achat in-app sur la version Android, pour proposer une démo du jeu. Ou l’ajout des achèvements dans la version Steam.

Antoine: It’s not more or less difficult to develop for a system rather than another. The hardest task, it’s to succeed to reproduce the same game experience on each systems/devices, I hope to have succeeded.

In fact, to talk a bit more about the technical part, the different versions of the game share 80-85% of the same code. The differences are due to the possibilities offered by each system, for example the addition of in-app purchase on the Android version, to propose a demo of the game. Or the addition of achievements in the Steam version.

Ken: How has the game changed each time you have brought it to a new system? – The game came out first for iOS last August. What feedback did you get from the iOS version that you worked into the Steam version?

Nicolas: Le jeu n?a pas vraiment changé à chaque fois qu?il a été porté sur un nouveau système. Avec les possibilités offertes par les plateformes de vente comme le Play Store, iStore, Steam, ? j?ai pu prendre en compte les retours des joueurs ?instantanément?. Ceci m?a permis de corriger des problèmes de level design ou des bugs. Bien sur, ces corrections ont été répercutées sur les nouveaux portages. La première version sortie sur Android n?a plus rien à voir avec la première version sortie sur Steam.

Antoine: The game didn?t really change each time it has been brought on a new system. With the possibilities offered by sales platform like Play Store, iStore, Steam, ? I was able to take into account the player feedback “instantly”. This allowed me to correct level design problems or bugs. Of course, these corrections have been passed on new portages. The first version released on Android Is completely different than the first version released on Steam.

Ken: The Steam version of the game sells for $1.99, which seems pretty cheap for a desktop game! How did you settle on that price?

Nicolas: Oui, ce n’est pas très cher pour un jeu PC, mais j’ai voulu un prix proche de celui de la version mobile. Ce qui est intéressant à noter, c’est que sur mobile, certaines personnes trouvent le jeu plutôt cher alors que c’est le même …

Antoine: Yes, it’s pretty cheap for a desktop game, but I have wanted a price close to that of the mobile version. Interestingly, about the mobile version, some people consider the game rather expensive while it’s the same …

Ken: What plans do you have for future versions? How about a level editor?

Nicolas: Le principal problème avec l’ajout d’un éditeur de niveaux, c’est que je n’avais pas prévu de le faire dès le début et cela demanderait de modifier beaucoup de chose au niveau du moteur du jeu. Et si je commence à modifier le moteur, j’aurais aussi envie de modifier les menus, car il y a certaines choses qui me gênent, mais aussi les assets graphiques, d’ajouter de nouveaux concepts de game design, … et finalement, le jeu ne ressemblerait plus vraiment à celui actuel. Je pense donc que toutes ces améliorations/modifications/ajouts, je les ferai dans un “nouveau” jeu. Mais rien n’est sur.

Antoine: The main problem with addition a level editor, it’s that I hadn’t planned to do from the beginning and it would take to change a lot of things at the game engine. And if I start to change the game engine, I would also like to modify the menus, because there are some things that hinder me, but also the graphic assets, adding new game design concepts, … in the end, the game would not be the same as the current one. I think that all these enhancements/modifications/additions will be added in a “new” game. But nothing is certain.

Future Unfolding is a top-down exploration game set in a pastoral world. Without direction or tutorial and with very little written text, the game invites players to go whichever direction they wish as they discover secrets in the woods, make friends and foes of the fauna, and solve puzzles. A rustic palette, rich mythology, and soothing soundtrack complete the ensemble.

In this week’s IndieSider, I speak with Andreas Zecher, one-third of the development team Spaces of Play. We discuss the poem from which the game draws its name; the benefits of developing their own game engine over using Unity; the melding of procedural generation and hand-crafted design; the ways in which Future Unfolding is inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Journey; and how sales of their previous game, Spirits, informed the release strategy for Future Unfolding.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition below or from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Future Unfolding by Spaces of Play
• Development blog
• Andreas Zecher on Twitter
• Thimbleweed Park
• Polygamer #48: Gillian Smith on procedural generation
• Let’s Play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Never Alone is a puzzle-platformer for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows. It is a collaboration between E-Line Media and Upper One Games to adapt the culture and oral history of the Iñupiaq community. Up to two players play as a young girl named Nuna and an arctic fox to overcome numerous arctic obstacles while exploring the stories of Robert Cleveland and unlocking videos that share this people’s traditions.

Lead game designer Grant Roberts shares the access his team had to the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, what other entries in the “world game” genre were an inspiration, how else the cultural insight videos could’ve been integrated into the gameplay, and what other heritages might be adapted into future games.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) by E-Line Media
• Grant Roberts’ portfolio of shipped titles
• Katrina Filippidis interviews Grant Roberts and Dima Veryovka
• Grant Roberts interview on Never Alone’s official website

Happy New Year’s Eve! So many indie games were released in 2014, no one person could’ve played them all. So for this audio-only special episode of IndieSider, I’ve recruited Matt Conn of GaymerX, Sabriel Mastin of Indie Haven, and Emma Clarkson of BostonFIG to a roundtable discussion where we share our picks for Indie Game of the Year in three categories: mobile, desktop, and console. Along the way, Matt and Emma debate the merits of Gabriel Knight 3, Emma and Ken reminisce about working at GameStop, Matt and Sabriel do their best Boston accent imitations, and we make New Year’s resolutions to play the games we wanted to play in 2014 but never got around to.

Listen to the show below, or download the MP3 from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Games mentioned in this episode:

• Matt Conn
  • Twitter
  • GX (formerly GaymerX)
  • Read Only Memories 2064 by Midboss Games
• Sabriel Mastin
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Indie Haven
• Emma Clarkson
  • Twitter
  • BostonFIG

• Sabriel
  • Revolution 60
• Emma
  • Threes
  • Monument Valley
• Matt
  • Thomas Was Alone
  • Papers Please
• Ken
  • Framed

• Matt
  • Curtain
  • Runners-up
    • Jazzpunk
    • Fragments of Him
• Emma
  • Banished
  • The Banner Saga
  • Moebius
  • Runners-up
    • Five Nights at Freddy’s
    • The Last Door
• Ken
  • Shadowgate
  • Runners-up
    • This War of Mine
    • Super Win the Game
    • The Counting Kingdom
    • A Bird Story
• Sabriel
  • Rollers of the Realm
  • Runners-up
    • Five Nights at Freddy’s
    • Always Sometimes Monsters

• Sabriel
  • Aqua Kitty ? Milk Mine Defender
• Matt
  • DUCK GAME
  • Runners-up
    • D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die
    • Super Time Force
    • TowerFall Ascension
    • The Jackbox Party Pack
• Ken
  • Shovel Knight

• Matt
  • Sentris
  • Neverending Nightmares
  • Child of Light
  • Valiant Hearts
• Sabriel
  • Divinity: Original Sin
• Emma
  • Never Alone
• Ken
  • Crawl

Featured image courtesy David Luders.

Framed is an interactive graphic novel from Loveshack Entertainment. Rearrange the panels of this noir-style comic book to change the order in which the action occurs. Will the spy run headlong into the police — or will he slip down a hallway, evading detection? You the player decide with panels you can drag-and-drop, rotate, and reuse.

In this interview, Framed designer and composer Adrian Moore discusses the influences that led to this unprecedented game, the role narrative plays, the different genres and game mechanics the team experimented with, and how the mobile indie market harkens back to the earlier days of his career, developing Populous at Bullfrog.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Framed for iOS
• Adrian Moore of Loveshack Entertainment
• Susan Arendt recommends Framed
• Framed is Hideo Kojima’s Game of the Year
• Comix Zone for Sega Genesis
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
  
• “Listening to Framed soundtrack while programming. Feeling like a code detective!“

In traditional war games, players assume the role of a soldier, fighting the bad guys and saving the day. But in reality, not everyone affected by war is a soldier. In This War of Mine, 11 bit studios simulates the experience of being a civilian in a war-torn country. By day, you make decisions about how to manage your meager resources to take care of your team; at night, you send your best runner to scavenge for supplies — and hope she makes it back.

In this interview, senior writer Pawel Miechowski explains how his studio created This War of Mine, the research that went into making the game authentic, what lines they decided they could and could not cross, and what the developers hope players get from the experience.

Watch the video above, or download the audio edition from Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• This War of Mine by 11 bit studios
• 11 bit studios partners with War Child
• a-ha’s “Take Me On” music video
• Other survival games:
  • Papers, Please
  • Don’t Starve
  • Rust
  • Gods Will Be Watching