Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. I'm ready. Okay, yeah, good afternoon everyone and welcome back to the afternoon session of the Expanded Animation Symposium. As in the first part we will have some exciting talks. This session will focus on the topic games, both from a practical and a theoretical perspective. We will start with a talk by Jesper Juhl from Denmark, who is a video games researcher and an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. He is the author of several books on video games. His most recent book is Handmade Pixels on Independent Video Games, which I highly recommend you to read. In this talk, he will present his thoughts about the challenges of personal video game design in a time of digital sameness. So let's watch his presentation. Welcome, my name is Jesper Juul, I'm a video game theorist at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. So thanks for inviting me here to Ars Electronica, the expanded animation symposium. So the title of this talk is actually a rather long one. It's called Global Independent Material Authenticity, the challenges of this talk is actually a rather long one. It's called Global Independent Immaterial Authenticity, the Challenges of Personal Video Game Design in a Time of Digital Sameness. And let me explain what I mean by that. You know that thing, right? There's probably never a good time to have a pandemic, right? But I think this one hit at a particular cultural moment, a moment where we were all celebrating like the local the particular the unique the handcrafted we we were actually kind of celebrating scarcity in a sense right so like this a small batch gin which has a handwritten number on it or it seems handwritten anyway so it seems just before the pandemic we were at a moment where we were hitting kind of peak farmers market peak local food peak small shops and then we got to a moment where all of that suddenly seemed problematic right so we've been trying to get rid of distance we've been trying to get rid of the mass produced and suddenly distance and mass production felt attractive once again so definitely i think there's been a push here towards mass production, towards distance, and towards the immaterial once again, right? And so what I'd like to share here is some lessons I think we can learn from independent video games, especially what I call independent video games and experimental video games, because this is a kind of cultural form which has actually kind of been through this, like for 20 years have been grappling with this issue of like how do you make something that feels authentic when what you're doing is actually immaterial and digital. So let me share some lessons about that. So to explain a bit where I'm coming from. So what I'm basically interested in is this expression of meaning in video games. Given that the prejudice against video games always was that they were meaningless or that they didn't matter, how is it that we find video games meaningful? My first book dealt with this issue of how can not only the stories of a game be meaningful, but also the rule systems or the programming. How can that actually feel meaningful to us as players? Then I wrote about the joy and the meaning of small games like match-three games and so on. Then I wrote a book about failure, the meaning of failure in video games, or this question of why we play video games even though they make us unhappy a lot of the time. My most recent book, Handmade Pixels, is then a history of independent video games. And this is focused on why and how we find the idea of independence and the idea of the experience of experimental games meaningful in different ways. So, let me talk a bit about that and let me tell you some lessons which I think we can pick up from independent video games. I wrote some of this, it should be said, at my local independent coffee shop in Copenhagen. And once I asked the owner slash barista if he ever considered adding new locations to his coffee shop. And what he said was simply, I hate chains. So independent games are really something that arrived at a moment where such ideas of the local and the small scale were prevalent. And so it also shows us a bit about what the history of the word independence is. It's not just that it may be that we call them independent games, but this does not guarantee that they're similar to other things we call independent, such as music, which I'll get to. But to think of some examples, right? So here's a game where an old lady is staggering through a graveyard. Here's a game where a main character undergoes hormone replacement therapy. Here's a game where two rabbits quip existentially about burning up in lava. Here's a game where this game actually looks like an old school share adventure game, but you must wait hours in real time to take in an art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the one with Marina Abramovich. And so these are kind of independent and experimental games. I wrote this book and I started doing this kind of research project because I realized I'd become kind of addicted to the rush of finding a new game that kind of flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about video games. And I also realized while kind of working on this project and looking at this history that it wasn't really that I had any one kind of favorite independent video game that I could point to but more that I got this experience playing these games that every new game produced a new way of being in the world of looking at the world and so what I came to savor or enjoy from independent video games is really this experience of kind of getting back to square one of once again realizing that video games can be something different than i'm used to right or that i thought i knew but what are independent or indie video games um so the way i've gone about it and i'll talk a bit about to talk a bit about that is that i tried to look at the history of the winners of the various independent game festivals around the world or at least three one three of them right i looked at the history of kind of visual styles i looked at this kind of what i call authenticity strategies right and so the title handmade pixels of the book really concerns this idea that though independent video games Thank you. So independent video games are collections of bits, even though they can be reproduced, but also to previous independent games, right? So there's this kind of churn where games which were once seen as like the new, interesting, authentic thing become associated rather with the mainstream and then new independent games can come along and claim that they are truly independent and so on but the word independent is kind of weird right so I independent games independent in the same way the musical cinema can be And so lots of discussion has been made trying to compare independent games to, say, cinema or to punk music, and these ideas of rejecting the status quo or using DIY tools and so on, right? But I also think it's important to note that independent games kind of appeared at a different point in time. So the ideas that went into independent games were different than the ones that went into music or cinema called independent. So there's no guarantee that independent games would be similar to independent music or film, but it's certainly that people use the word independent to suggest a similarity. It should also be noted that even in cinema, people obviously don't agree about what independent means. Janet Steiger, for example, points to the breakdown of the studio system in the 1940s as this moment in time where independent cinema came into being. More recently, movie makers like Jim Jarmusch were called independent for things like Stranger Than Paradise and Black and White and so on. And then like in the late 90s and early 2000s, movies like Juno and Stranger Than Fiction were called independent and kind of quirky, right? But then I think what we might actually forget at this point is that how universal these kind of signals of authenticity really have become, the signal of the local. So even Starbucks, which I think probably might rank as the most kind of anonymous global corporation you can imagine, right, still sells these Nespresso coffee, single-use coffee capsules. And they are then promoted on this claim of being single origin. So even like a big clumping like this actually uses these signals of authenticity and of the local. And so the problem always, in a way, as I said, was that video games kind of really weren't accepted kind of culturally. They weren't kind of seen as meaningful in some sense and i think there were a few reasons for this right so one is that much like cinema in the beginning i think many people thought of video games being kind of too technical a product right wasn't made by kind of too many people another problem was that players often don't look like traditional kind of art patrons they don't necessarily look like someone who's in the cinema they don't like someone who's in a gallery right and then finally often i think people have been critical of video games because in a way it's been seen as kind of too rational and activity you spend too much time thinking in a sense or solving solving problems for them to kind of neatly fit into kind of our ideas of kind of culture. And then I think what we can see is like some of the ways that kind of independent games kind of worked around that. As I said, nobody can really agrees about what independent games are, what that means, right? But if you go back and look at the various claims people have been making for independent games, one thing that really stands out is this focus on authenticity. I'll claim that most of the time when people make manifesto-like claims for the value of independent games, they will have some variation of authenticity. So Dan Cook says, indie games let you be a fan who is cheering on someone authentic and deserving, that you're speaking from the heart, that you have this kind of personal connection, that you have the opposite of something glossy, that you have been able to kind of follow an individual creator and to see how their style changes over time. We can also see that it's kind of expected that independent game developers will have some kind of memorable story about their humble and sympathetic beginnings. Flambia promote themselves with this story, that it was founded in 2010, they dropped out of university, they lived on noodles for a while, and so on. And so I think this is also pretty common as someone who teaches video game design. It's pretty common for students these days to prefer the idea of having their own studio, working in a small studio, to the idea of working in a large company, right? So definitely there's this kind of focus on being smart, of being a kind of personal part of something small rather than being kind of anonymous part of the big machine right but what is authenticity so usually actually authenticity is kind of the absence of something bad so you could be authentic if you're not selling out if you're not on original if you're not being controlled by money if you're not superficial right so Lionel Trilling has this argument, he says, authenticity is actually kind of a polemical concept, right? It deals aggressively with received and habitual opinion, right? So, it reacts to what was already there, right? And Charles Lindholm similarly says that authenticity has more spiritual claims to make. It's not just this is better, but that this exists on a different plane in a different way. This leads to this problem that Julia Straub calls the paradox of authenticity. I was also talking about this book project in Finland a while back, and then I noticed there were these certificates for the authentic Finnish sauna experience. And I think it was pretty clear that saunas are obviously important in Finland, but that any time if you were going to a sauna that had this certificate of being authentic Finnish sauna experience, that would definitely feel less authentic than if that certificate wasn't there, right? Julia Straub calls this the paradox of authenticity, because the more time you spend saying that something is authentic, the less authentic it seems, right? All right. But just to kind of narrow down what I mean by independent games here. So it's probably the general idea of independent music or cinema, but then just filtered through like early 2000 ideas of the local, the authentic, the analog, like vinyl. Returning to older forms, reacting against mass production, against brands, arguing for more kind of direct connection to the creator. And then also I think generally what you might call a general kind of anti-modernism, right? A kind of rejection of mass production, rejection of big companies, rejection of a lot of contemporary things in a way, and often they're kind of going back in time in different ways, as we'll see. But the first question obviously is like, is independent game development really new? Like, wasn't there a home computer revolution in the early 90s where people would make wild original games and distribute them on kind of floppies or tapes and so on, on their home computers at the time? Well, so we can take an example like this game called Deus Ex Magna from 1984, which in a way, if it hadn't already existed, you would definitely be able to submit it to an independent game festival today, right? It has this kind of high culture reference. It refers to Shakespeare. It has pixelated graphics. It's very existential. It talks about the seven ages of man based on Shakespeare. But the interesting thing was that when this was promoted, it wasn't really promoted as an alternative or as a kind of underground or any kind of game or any kind of cultural work like that. It was promoted as a harbinger of a future mainstream. any kind of game or any kind of cultural work like that. It was promoted as a harbinger of a future mainstream. It was like the first in an era of new experiences. So the idea of this being alternative, of being independent, wasn't really there, right? So the Kravtsov made it talked about this idea that when it came out that the assumption just was that by the mid-1980s all cutting-edge computer games would be like interactive movies. And so, is Deus Ex Magna an independent game? Well, it is experimental. It was made by a small team on a small budget, but it just wasn't promoted as an alternative to a mainstream that wasn't part of the conception at the time um and also i think you could we can look at during the say like the 1990s there was a whole era of cd wrongs which usually were not called games right but we at least you can we i think we'd say today are kind of part of that same tradition in some way, right? And so if we take a product or a work like Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel, this was actually kind of promoted as not as a kind of game, but more as a kind of multimedia experience, or something that was kind of slightly kind of parallel to games. And so this is a quote from the box. Like a review says, creatively it should do for CD-ROMs what the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper did for rock and roll, which I think is a good kind of good quote, right? Also for the weirdness of how history passes since then, right? But I think it's just kind of interesting to see that what we now see as a kind of interesting kind of game related experimental form at that time was seen as kind of parallel or almost existing in a separate space right it wasn't seen as an independent or experimental game it was seen as something entirely different all right so that's kind of confusing and so i think what we can do is make it a little clear by distinguishing between different types of independence so i adopted this from gf king's american independent cinema and so he talks about three types of independence so something can be independent in terms of its industrial location so typically um this this might mean that it's made on it's not kind of beholden to a large corporation's money, for example. It can be aesthetically independent, so it might look different for a game, like play differently or give a different kind of experience. And finally, it might be culturally independent in its relation to the broad social, cultural, political, ideological landscape, which is where we find games or works that are trying to make a larger cultural, political, ideological landscape, which is where we find kind of games or kind of works that are trying to make a larger kind of cultural or political point, right? And so I think it's just important to like, let's just pin those three kinds of independence. And so around 1998, the computer game industry was doing pretty well. And this is where we started getting these calls for independent game festivals. Like, so Alex Dunn, a game developer, calls for a Sundance Festival of video games. And around 1999, the Independent Game Festival kind of was launched. And the idea here was to kind of promote independent games in the same way they were promoting independent cinema, or the way they felt that people were promoting independent cinema at Sundance. So the focus here was not on things that were kind of wildly experimental but really on smaller teams which would go to the festival in the hope of picking up distribution, kind of becoming picked up by a larger publisher. So here like the first year like 1999 it was kind of interesting if you go back and look at the game that won Fire and Darkness. This was a real-time strategy game, but if you look at it today, there's really nothing that kind of suggests that it was kind of independent or kind of different from the mainstream. And so that actually took a few years, right? It's only by like 2005, we start seeing what we might call the first wave of independent games. This is why we started seeing games which are made by one or two people, often going back to the 1980s, often going back to say like the platform games, like in Gish or kind of Blueberry Garden, often going back to the kind of pixelated, like in Fez, and so on. And so the interesting thing, one of the interesting things here is that if we take kind of three different games of that era, they actually have very different visual styles. But what do they actually have in common? So when you think about it, what's in common between these three games here, VVV and Yet It Moves and Crayon Physics, is that one references 1980s pixelated games, one references torn paper, and one references this kind of children's crayon drawings. So what they share is what I call like a representation of a representation, right? So these are games where you use your modern computer to emulate an older computer or to emulate the handcraft or the material. You're also using your modern computer to emulate something that feels much less technological. One way to think about this very briefly is to think about this in relation to say the arts and crafts movement, right? That in the 19th century, there was also a kind of movement against mass production. People like John Ruskin and William Morris felt that mass production was leading to a loss of quality, not just in the products, but in life as such. And they wanted to go back to what they called craftsmanship emphasizing the local the particular the unique the democratic better works in general and also his it was a kind of a unity of morals and political uh ideas and of aesthetics right one famous example of this is william morris and philip webb Webb's Red House from 1860, where architects will tell you that it kind of borrows from medieval architecture in these kind of very steep roofs and the kind of prominent chimneys, right? And so why would you do that? And so what happens here is basically that they felt that, or they believed that in medieval times, the kind of way of working in a guild was just kind of a superior practice compared to modern industrial production. And therefore, they were trying to emulate the kind of architectural styles from that time, which they felt were better. And so again, this is what I call like this idea of the anti-modernism that's present here, but also which is, I think, kind of recurs in independent games, this idea that perhaps there was a better time in video games, perhaps like the 1980s and so on. Perhaps there was a time where things were less kind of anonymous, less mass produced. And this idea that if you kind of borrow the styles or the genres from that time, then in a way by osmosis, you're also kind of referring perhaps to a better kind of political arrangement and so on. And I think perhaps this in video games, in independent games, this really comes kind of really clear from 2012 on. You start having much more in terms of games that have an explicit political message. So for example this is Unmanned, a political game by MOLI Industry about being a drone pilot for the US Army. And so this also not only in a way does something interesting in video game form, but also tries to make the argument that video games are in some ways complicit with the kind of military-industrial complex, right? And so not to discuss every single game here, but we have a few kind of, a lot of examples from festival winners who do some variation of this, right? So Oikospiel, book one is also about a kind of unionization in some way, though it's very kind of surreal. Curtain is also about kind of problematic relationships and so on. And so, I think we can think of this in a way, both by looking at these games, I think I've shown you something about how the history of independent games played out, and how developers tried to think about how they could take a kind of immaterial digital form like video games and make it into something kind of that meant something more and so i think we can both think of this as something we can look at how this happened historically but we can also look at this as strategies right so the strategy of financial independence is to promote a game as being personal how it's made made made by passion and also where you promote a game as being personal, how it's made by passion, and also where you promote the game to some extent on the story of its creation, for example. Aesthetic independence is often about trying to come up with new themes, having games that deal with different kinds of issues, games with new visual styles that you haven't seen in video games before, and also games with new kinds of playing. The Graveyard I mentioned is a game where you basically just walk to the graveyard and you sit down and you think back about your life. The whole genre of walking simulators is really about trying to get rid of the challenge that we tended to find were essential in video games, but it turns out you can actually do without them. And so one way to think about why the particular new themes, why the particular new ways of playing that we find in independent games. There's an interesting article by Bruce Shelley, who made Rise of Nations and other games, which gives these guidelines for developing successful games. And it's interesting when you go over it one by one, you can see every single piece of advice that he gives is actually something that has been rejected by various independent games, right? So he will say you have to set production values high and I said like here we have lots of visual styles which are really meant to signal small budgets and so on and so forth. And this is also of course why you think that independent games are often about kind of rejecting the kind of status quo or the kind of the status quo or or they kind of learned or even perhaps kind of taught conventions for what a successful video game should be that you can actually do something else right and then i finally got to this kind of cultural independence which is often i think about kind of new creators and also about new players often about kind of political themes often about kind of new games of working like people making studios where where they're kind of transparent about kind of pay transparent about about kind of not wanting to kind of institute crunch and so on right and kind of to sum this up right so this is really um i talked about this first in a kind of historical sense uh but i think we can also think of this as strategies, right? And not just for games, but for anything you make, anything you make digitally, how can you actually promote it in different ways? How can you make something that kind of feels independent or feels kind of interesting? So, what next? Well, as I said, independent video games appeared at a time of global availability due to the internet, for example, right? And so, that both kind of enabled digital games and independent games to be distributed, but it also caused this kind of glut of global sameness. And so, which I think we kind of saw again with the pandemic, right? Everybody was stuck at home. And so we kind of, we had very little in terms of kind of local interaction. And I think what we could see with independent games is really a big push for trying to deal with that. How do you make something that feels personal and important and political, for example, when you can only do it in immaterial form and in digital ways? And one of the ways this was done was obviously by dressing up a game or boring earlier styles or boring earlier kind of visual references. And so, as I said, like the first game here on the right, the first game that won an independent game festival, Fire and Darkness, when this came out out it kind of looked like your regular kind of modern or then modern a big budget game and then when i first started doing this project i was showing this to people everybody agreed that it looked kind of terrible to use a subjective term right but the last kind of couple of years when i showed it to people a lot of people have been kind of thinking it would be kind of interesting wouldn't it to do a game like this with this kind of blocky 3D from around a bit more than 20 years ago. So in fashion, there's something called the 20-year rule. There's this idea that anything that looks, say, like anything that's 10 years old looks kind of really dated. But when things become 20 years old, you can kind of start going back to them again and so for example like this game on left kind of paratopic refers to probably like playstation 1 era kind of games like if you made paratopic 10 years ago it would have looked kind of terrible and cheap and now the distance to the original playstation 1 is so large that if you do this, it's very clear that this is a deliberate choice. And this is not just a technical limitation, but a kind of creative decision that we read as being kind of expressive. So we always have this kind of 20 year window kind of going back in time. And I think we see this kind of constantly going on, right? That people were referring to the Super Nintendos and now they're referring to kind of newer games and newer platforms, right? And so that's it. So I think that to me is that I think the pandemic in a way came to heads with a lot of kind of current trends, the trends towards the local, the trends towards the handmade, the trends towards the handmade, the trends towards kind of direct personal connection. And it kind of forced us back in our rooms and it forced us to sit in front of our screens. And I think what we can do here is to look at how independent games actually handle this situation, this question of like how can you actually make something that feels authentic? How can you make something that feels personal, even though it is being distributed only as kind of global immaterial bits? And I think that's just an important lesson to be had here. So thanks a lot for listening and thanks for spending your time here. Thank you. Yeah, welcome back. Thanks, Jasper Tull, for this exciting talk, for your interesting insights. And we will now move on to the Q&A session, where we'll cover questions from the audience. And I'll start with a question that deals with the future. So you mentioned the 20-year rule and I would like to ask you how you see the indie game landscape in 20 years. So do you have any thoughts about that, how the indie game landscape will evolve? So will we be confronted with the same landscape, or how do you see this movement? I mean, so I think one of the things I was writing about was this notice that there's a tendency for independent games to reject earlier independent games, so that whenever people try to make new independent games, they're rejecting earlier independent games as the status quo. And so you can say one way that works is just that, that whenever you have a style, for example, just think of it in this kind of retro sense, that if you have a kind of old genre, an old style, that's kind of becoming popular, then after a while that kind of feels like stale and like the status quo, and people are kind of keen on trying something new, right? So I think it's more like a process, right? It's not something that ever gets finished. You never get to like the final independent game in the same way you never get to the final kind of video game. It's just kind of, that's kind of what culture is, right? It never stops, it never ceases, it never becomes kind of fixed. But I think as kind of creators, what we can do is just to kind of think about what kind of feels meaningful at a given time. Like if you're going back in time, what aspects of the past are actually worthwhile and which are not, and which aspects of the past that might have been seen as kind of commercial and slick can you actually reinterpret and so on, right? So I think it's just that there's no solution it's just that we're we're stuck in this and that kind of relative freedom to kind of interpret what has been happening and to kind of make new things thank you um another question um how do you see the current developments in the field of deep learning that seem um maybe this time is over-saturating the thing a little bit, but it might threaten the aspect of craftsmanship? So where you have these systems that create this kind of handmade or simulate these handmade experiences, they create models, also levels, and so forth. How do you see these developments in the context of craftsmanship. Yeah, I think that's super interesting. And I think that's one thing you could kind of criticize both say independent and experimental games for and perhaps the kind of cultural environment recently is to have a bit kind of too romantic a notion of art, right? So perhaps there's been a bit of a too much of a kind of focus on say like the idea of the suffering artists or that people in a way have to suffer to be worthwhile in a sense, right? So I think we want perhaps to have a situation where people can say live a sustainable kind of career as kind of experimental artists, for example, right? And so I think the thing with machine learning is that you're saying that this is clearly the opposite, right, this is clearly a kind of machine that in a way kind of feels anonymous and feels kind of detached, right? And I think in some sense that might be actually needed, that we might actually need a bit of a correction to kind of our romantic ideas of art, right? Of course, I think perhaps hopefully, I think we can kind of our romantic ideas of art, right? Of course, I think perhaps hopefully, I think we can kind of retain the feeling or the knowledge that even if you are doing projects with machine learning, it's still fundamentally based on kind of human choices. I do hope to see kind of more experimental art and experimental games too that just try to be slightly less romantic. And I think something like machine learning could be a way of dealing with that. Yeah, something that is related to this kind of romanticism. Can you say that authenticity itself has this rather positive connotation? So it's something that is something that we need to strive for or um how do you see this term in general yeah yeah so so i mean so this is why i'm a researcher right i'm kind of then i look at authenticity and look at how it's been used and and what what the kind of history of that is um so i think perhaps it's just a bit of something that's kind of bit back and forth, right, that I mean you also said say like in the late 1970s you had a kind of reaction to the kind of the personal and the authentic and to take a kind of German example for example it might be something like Kraftwerk or kind of other similar bands were actually kind of into this idea of making things that were actually kind of slightly kind of depersonalized and that in a way and you might say like early post-modernism if you will um it's also perhaps this feeling that's a kind of freedom in in kind of doing something that's kind of slightly depersonal right and i think that there's long con there's a long discussion about what how that relates to the to the kind of kind of political in a sense but i think clearly at this time i think how that relates to the kind of political, in a sense. But I think clearly at this time, I think we tend to celebrate the kind of authentic kind of mostly. And we're so used to having kind of anonymous products or kind of apps that are downloaded a billion times that it seems we're constantly craving this thing that's kind of unique or personal, right? And the point, in a way, for me to do the research and to talk about it here was just to look at, at the ways I think we're doing various kinds of strategies for making something that kind of feels authentic in the way we're thinking about it now, like this idea of the connection we might have to the creator in a way we kind of didn't have or don't have if we're just using kind of Facebook or Instagram, right? Another question that is related to this term of authenticity, because I find it quite funny that so to say triple A game companies also set up their in-house indie game development studios, which I think is quite contrary. So the first time you have these kind of huge companies that focus on these, yeah, as you mentioned, these huge budgets with huge development teams. And on the other hand, you have these kind of small companies that are embedded within this huge companies. How do you see this kind of situation? Is it just economic motivation to have these kind of studios to to discover other markets or how do you see this kind of development well i mean i think clearly one thing that happened was that that things like kind of game jams and and and just the the success of a lot of kind of yeah english studios just in a way i think pointed past for the larger industry to to problems in in the way the ways of working right so there's that realization that that you could actually you could if you also perhaps let people a little loose and give people some creative freedom it might create kind of better outcomes even for like a very kind of big big company and so i think that's one one part of it it's it that some of these kind of working methods are kind of pretty successful in a creative sense. Another part of it is also just perhaps to soften the image of a kind of large kind of development company, right? To make it sound just like more and more kind of pleasurable to players, right? This as something that just makes products and more as someone who is kind of creative and listens and so on. And I think perhaps also it might even kind of be a recruiting thing. So I think I mentioned in the talk, like most students that I meet these days, definitely they want to be in a small studio, right? They don't want to be kind of part of like a Ubisoft or like a big company, right? So I think it's, of course, all of these things are also things that can be used just as PR, basically. Like in the way I was putting to the Starbucks, these Nespresso capsules, which are like single origin. So of course, if you have something like authenticity that everybody seems to love at a given time, obviously a big company is going to try to use it to promote themselves. So that's kind of super that everybody seems to love at a given time obviously a big company is going to try to use it right to promote themselves that's how it works cool yeah thanks for the answer so very interesting um answers that you um gave to the audience okay um yeah i think we will now move to the next speaker. Once again, Chespa Jewel, many thanks and many thanks for your interesting insights. And yeah, we will go on with the next talk. Thanks a lot. Thank you. See you. Bye-bye. Okay, so how do we get now to the... Hello everybody and welcome to this talk about crowd-based game development in pandemic times and indie perspective. My name is Philomena Schwab, I'm the co-founder of StrayFont Studio, a board member of the Swiss Game Developers Association and the co-founder of the Swiss Game Hub, which is the first co-working space slash incubator for games in Switzerland. And today we're going to have an interesting talk about a lot of things. So there's indie development, there's crowdfunding, there is the effect of the pandemic on the gaming industry. And that's actually where we're gonna start. So let me read this to you. During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of US residents turned to video games to fill the time. 55% of people picked up video games out of boredom, to escape the real world or to socialize. So I gathered some different graphs that can illustrate just how big the impact on the gaming industry has been in the past two years. So we can see here this is daily active users for HD gaming which basically means consoles or PC and mobile gaming and both have a high increase in percentage in daily active users. This means, could mean either people played more or also just a lot of new people came into the games industry and played games for the first time. We can see that a lot of mobile game apps were installed compared to before. We can here see microtransactions have gone up a lot, so in-game purchases basically if you the game is free and you buy like an upgrade for your character or you skip a timer and so on. Then we have ad revenue that's also mostly like free games and then also again to skip something you watch an ad or to get additional rewards you watch an ad and you can see that this has also gone up by about 60 percent and with all these developments I am not surprised that mobile games are the platform that have seen the biggest increase in terms of revenue but console games have also done fairly well. PC is pretty yeah also good but not as much as the others are. Then we can here see it's not just more gamers and spending more time also like patterns have changed of how people are playing. So these graphs address on whether people play during the week or on the weekend and you can see here that it's really starting to intertwine when people are playing because they can just sneak in a little game session because they're not at work right. Here you also have some graphs on when restrictive measurements happened or were announced in which country and the immediate effect that you can see on how many video games have been consumed. And one thing that I found interesting is that apps and games addressed to commuting time, so commuter apps, games with very short play sessions have decreased in usage since you're not on the bus anymore, right? But mid and hardcore apps have increased a lot. That just means you have time for longer play sessions, essentially. And probably the biggest impact are social networking apps and social gaming traffic. So everything that has a multiplayer or maybe is an MMO, RPG or just has social features in general that lets you connect with people has seen a huge increase which makes sense right since we tried to connect with other people while we had to stay at home. So if you ask me my conclusion on who the winner in the gaming industry is in terms of growth and revenue, it's mobile games mostly, especially if they're free to play so you don't have to pay at the start, if they're ad based and especially if they have social components or are multiplayer. So those are the big winners in this case and now we're gonna take a look at a studio at the smaller studio our studio which is called strafe on where a 10 people indie team based in zurich switzerland just took a new team picture this week and just for context we are an indie studio so here you can see some different kinds of game studios that there are. For example AAA studios, those are the ones, the really big ones that make the huge blockbuster games. Indie games are usually smaller. It's very hard, there's a lot of different definitions on what is indie and what isn't. Usually smaller teams that are independent of a bigger entity. We also have one foot in educational games, not because we make software and sell it to schools, but just because our games have quite an educational aspect to them. And for example, we also have free versions for some of our games that schools can use. So we're kind of in that sector also. We focus mostly on desktop games. We also made some console ports now finally for our first game. And we just also released our first mobile game, which is Premium Doh. Yeah, you can see here we are a premium studio. So when you want to play our games games you pay once and then you have the whole game and you can play it. That is mostly because we like to play these kinds of games and they most align with our ethical model of how monetization should be done. Then some more facts. We are self-publishing our games so we don't have an outside publishing partner. We do it ourselves. We make mostly simulation games with a focus on procedural worlds so procedural generated words worlds that means basically that every time you play the game it's a bit different because the computer generates the levels and so on based on certain rules which gives your game some more replayability value. And we mostly make single player games, though sometimes they have indirect multiplayer features, but mostly single player. So we have made two games so far. The first one is called Niche, a genetic survival game, which is basically a simulation of population genetics. You are in charge of your own pack of animals and each animal has its own genetic code, which you can see at the bottom. And then when you mate with other animals, then your offspring is a mix of these genes and it's quite realistic genetics. So you can sometimes be quite surprised what is coming out there. Here you can see a tribe in the snow and here you can see a very good example of procedural generation. So those islands and how they are shaped and which objects are placed where is based on procedural generation. Then our second game is called Nimbatus the Space Run Constructor. This was originally my business partner's hobby project as Niche was originally my bachelor thesis and then we teamed up and made both games together and had some other people join the team as well. Nimbatus is also a simulation game where you build your own drones out of hundreds of different parts and then you send them off on missions drones out of hundreds of different parts and then you send them off on missions and try to beat different objectives. And you can also program your drone so you don't actually have to steer it yourself which teaches you a bit of programming. And our latest project that I will be using a lot in this talk for examples on how we actually developed our games and how it has changed in the past months is the Wandering Village. The Wandering Village is a city building game where you build a city on the back of a giant wandering creature that we named Ombu. So let's start from the beginning of this project. So the original idea first came up in 2018. At that time we were still working on Nimbatus, getting everything ready for... I think we just launched into early access so we were updating the game a lot and we only spent about one day a week or so working on the wandering village. So it happened like this. Me and my business partner, we were at an exhibition, at an art exhibition, and we saw a very beautiful concept art of a city on the back of a giant creature. And we looked at each other and we're like, I've always wanted to make a game like this. I've also always wanted to make a game like this. So we were very excited that we obviously had found our next game idea and we pitched it to our artists and the rest of our team. And they were super excited and basically jumped right into starting to doodle all kinds of different creatures. What should we build on? Should it be made out of flesh? Should it be made out of earth? What kind of shape should it have? What technical limitations do we have with the terrain? So we made it pretty easy for ourselves in that regard and just decided that basically the back of the animal will be mostly flat. So you will not have perspective problems, which I will talk about also in a bit. Different body parts of the animal, what does it look like and then after some iteration we came up with this sketch that we really liked and that we named Onbu which means piggyback ride in Japanese and then we made the first 3D model of it and it looked like that and we were kinda okay let's let's keep going with this one then at the same time as we were doodling or soon after that we wanted to try and get the government grant for our next upcoming project so in 2019 we had to put together a prototype for this government grant that was my job so it looked like this. So no, none of our artists were involved in this. It was just a very simple little prototype where you were on the back of this animal and you had to feed it and interact with it. But it already had like most of the parts that were in the end actually in the game. And at the same time our artists were figuring out the character design and our animator Markus really really wanted to go with 2D animation for the project because he's a huge Studio Ghibli fan and has been waiting for his chance to finally make 2D animated artwork. So he made all kinds of doodles until he came up with a design that he liked and these are some of the early animation tests. And at the same time Steffi, our art lead, had to figure out how the game actually looks and how it feels and what kind of colors there are, what kind of world, what kind of plants grow there, what animals do you encounter there. So this first process of making a game is always very fun, right? Because everything is on the table, you just doodle, whatever comes to mind. These are some first sketches for buildings that we pretty much, many of them are similar now. Here are some of the later doodles of how it looked in a first version of the game. And here you can see it placed on the 3D model of the animal. So then it was 2020 already, time flies when you're making prototypes and are early in pre-production for a game, and we decided to make a Kickstarter campaign. So we had to put together everything that we've worked on so far and make a trailer for the game which looked like this. So what we basically wanted is players to see that oh cute this is has like farming aspects it's a city building game you build up buildings, but the twist is you're actually doing all of that on the back of a giant wandering creature. And then also like the whole symbiosis topic was a part of the Kickstarter page. Here you can see as Onbu wanders through these different biomes, which each have their own unique challenges. And then we also wanted to show one of the main threats in the game which is basically those toxic pollen that have poisoned the ground and now they're also starting to grow on the back of your animal and you need to do your best to decontaminate it and protect your animal from those but also from other parasites and help to maintain its health and so on so yeah that was the first really put together visual trailer that we made for the crowdfunding campaign and we were lucky it actually managed to raise quite a bit which made which made Onbu happy I wrote a very detailed article about how we approached the Kickstarter. If you're interested in that you can see the website down here. This also wasn't our first Kickstarter but it was our first Kickstarter where we didn't have a playable demo. So we were quite nervous. We basically just had the trailer and some cool images to pitch. But it worked out quite well. We had quite a bit of press and we also for the first time tried out like running ads for a crowdfunding campaign, which worked pretty nicely. Usually we also did crowdfunding campaigns for our previous games and we heavily relied usually on our demo and contacting youtubers and twitch streamers to play the game for a first impression look. So yeah it was nerve-wracking to go in without something playable but we were very happy to see that that it worked out and I think one of the reasons that was the case is because of our community-based development approach or crowd-based, depending on how you want to name it. We basically managed to build up quite a community around our games that played our previous two games and stuck around for the third one now. So here are some examples of this. for the third one now. So here are some examples of this. So we have a forum where we regularly post about what we're doing, like development updates, dev diaries, what is going on in the studio and in our lives and little prototypes that we make and so on. And in there, we also have a section where people can make their own suggestions. So here you can post your feature requests for the next update for Niche or whatever game we're currently working on and then other people can leave little comments on how they like the idea, what else they would add, what they would change and upvote. And then we look at the 20 or 30 most uploaded features and consider it basically for the next update of the game. It's a lot of fun to work with your community in this way. Here you can see some examples of different concept arts that they have made us and many of their ideas that they send us have actually made their way into the game in one way or another. So here you have like different genetics that they want to see added or like different enemy types or different prey types and so on and so on. And we don't only involve the community like in giving us feedback. We also involve them, for example, in game localization or as QA support. So if we have a new build for the game, we give it out and people just try it out and they really help us to find all the bugs. And as you saw in the Kickstarter example, but here's another one. This is probably my favorite example of our community-based approach when it comes to marketing. That was actually when our first game niche was done with Early Access. So usually we release our games in an early version, which is called Early Access, and then we work on it for a year or so together with the community, as I just showed you. And then we have the full launch. And in this case, the early access release was actually, it was okay, especially since at the time we were still a smaller studio, right? But we were growing a little bit and we felt that we're not really sure if we can break even with the game or if the game can be profitable so that we can make the next one. So we asked our players to please, please, if we don't manage to ship 50,000 units, which was what we needed to break even, we can unfortunately no longer update the game since we probably have to start doing work for higher projects or even have to stop developing games fully. And so they put a lot of effort into it and reached out to their favorite press sites, Twitch streamers, YouTubers. They told their friends. They made social media posts for us. So they just basically helped us a lot to spread the word about the upcoming launch and you can here clearly see the difference of us how much reach we have on our own and how much reach we got thanks to the community so luckily the game turned out profitable because of them yeah i quickly talked about it already this is also what we call stepped development and i think it's a very good approach as an indie studio or as any studio if you want to keep your risk low because if we just wanted to or if we just try to basically work on a game for three years in our studio and not show it to anybody and then we release it and it flops, then yeah, we have probably used up all our saved cash. So that is very risky. So we try to reduce the risk by first having an idea that we maybe iterate on a couple months as a side project. Then we see with a crowdfunding campaign whether or not we can actually, yeah, interest somebody in the game, market the game and get people, find people that are actually interested in buying the game, like as a kind of a pre-order, right? And then with the Kickstarter money and some additional funds we make a minimal viable early access version of the game and release that. And from then on the game basically has to finance its further development. And then we can just work on it as long as it's fun and as long as it's profitable for us. So, yeah, this is what it usually looks like working in our studio. It's very easy, we just fit all in one room, right? We're only ten people, we can easily communicate. You can just walk over and look what everybody is working on. We hang up our artworks on the wall so everybody gets inspired by it. You can ask questions. Hey, how about you do it like this with your current animation that you're working on? And yeah, since the pandemic hit, this has changed to this, right? So now we just interact with Discord, which seems to be the tool that most game developers are using. Every morning we have a stand-up call at 10 a.m. where we just quickly discuss what everybody is going to do in the next day and what they have done yesterday and if they need help with anything or if we do meetings but it's also quite useful since you document everything so when we just had like when we talk then it's not written down anywhere so maybe sometimes you forget something and here with the discord you can just look it up and it's cool to scroll through and see all the development processes that get documented automatically that way. So it kind of has pros and cons, right? Of course, you have more like misunderstanding and communication issues than if you just work together in person. Before we were just like we had had a loose to-do list of things, then since we talked all the time, we could just, I'm grabbing this task, I'm grabbing this task. So we had to organize this a bit more and switch to a scrum-based model. So now we have sprints. They depend on what kind of thing we're working on currently. on what kind of thing we're working on currently. So right now we have a five-week sprint because we have to finish a prototype for another government application to see if we can get additional support for that. Sometimes it's three weeks. So it's the smaller cycles and there we basically just always decide on what should be done and what has the highest priority in the next three weeks. So everybody is on the same track and we didn't have anything like this before covid started right so this is kind of new for us now but maybe we're also going to keep it after we're back in the office yeah one thing that i really really miss are events because we used to go to a lot of events with our games. We use them not only for playtesting, which is of course great to get feedback and like really quickly iterate. So if we go to something like a Gamescom, we usually have like five new builds of the game or 10 new builds of the game every day or every few hours the programmers fix something, put it on the computer again, we test it and we iterate very quickly. So that is very useful. We also use it for target group analysis to figure out who the people are that actually are most interested, who stands there, looks at the poster and comes to the booth. Tells you a lot about how you should target your game later when you put it in stores. My business partner and me even met at a local game event. So without this, our studio wouldn't even be existing. So it's kind of a big part of our culture. It also helps a lot with like, since we don't have outside deadlines from publishers or something, these events also help us to get a new playable thing ready since we want to show the best version that we can at the event, right? Now we have digital events. They're also pretty cool. They have the pros and cons. So for example, that a lot of people who usually can't go to these events can access them, right? I participated in more events this year than ever before but it wasn't it's really not really the same right when I come home from an on-site event I usually have made a new friend or two that I stay in touch with and with digital events hasn't happened to me so far hopefully it it was better for you but yeah then talking about sales I talked about the winners of the pandemic before. For us, we haven't really seen much impact on our sales because of the pandemic, maybe a little bit, but you can also see that we're probably mostly the opposite of the typical winner of the pandemic. We are not mobile, we are desktop, we're not free to play or ad-based. Our games cost, so they're premium. We are not a multiplayer social focused game or game studio. We do single player games, so it's pretty much the opposite of what I think would work in this time. So yeah, while it has been going pretty okay at the studio, our whole game hub co-working space is a completely different story maybe for another day. But long story short, it's not a good idea to open a co-working space at the start of a pandemic. We basically opened it two years ago and it was open for a couple months and since then we had to pay the rent ourselves. Luckily it wasn't that expensive so it survived but yeah I can absolutely see how other businesses were so much more affected by everything that happened and I'm really hoping they can recover from it. Speaking of recovering of course when you talk about pandemic, you also have the impact of it has on your employees, on your colleagues, right? So we had some people in the team that were totally fine with moving to home office. It also depends a lot on who you're living with, right? So if you live like with your family or with your spouse or with cool roommates then you have somebody to interact with and if you live all by yourself and you're basically isolated from many things that you usually do it gets kind of lonely and then you really want to go to work but you can't so it had a very different effect on each member of our studio and some of us are still slowly recovering from it now that we are currently allowed to go back to the office I hope it stays that way keeps us saner so yeah I said already we got pretty much okay through the pandemic so far both in terms of sales they were okay and also our productivity thanks to all the new approaches that we took but they of course needed some adaption allowed us to keep productive maybe we lost especially in the first few months we were a bit slower and there are some things that are more difficult now and some things that are easier now but all in all if it was really necessary we could probably continue to work like this. So now let's have a little bit of a positive outlook before this talk is over. I want to mention some of the positive effects that the pandemic actually had, aside from everything else that we know didn't work out so well. The World Health Organization, for the first time, I think, made a positive comments about games. So for the first time, it's not just like games are addictive and dangerous, but they actually said that multiplayer games can really help us to connect with other people. And it's healthy to play multiplayer games with other people while you can't go anywhere. Right. to play multiplayer games with other people while you can't go anywhere, right? So I was really happy that just this image of games I think has improved a little bit during the pandemic. Also a lot of new people have started gaming so it's becoming more and more mainstream and accepted. Then you have a lot more remote job opportunities since everybody seemed to have realized, hey, it's actually okay if we work from different places. So especially for countries that don't have an established games industry, this really opens up a lot of opportunities. And then I talked about this earlier already, access to events, especially for people who couldn't usually afford them. But I've also heard, especially from smaller developers developers that the lack of physical presence where you can't really interact with a publisher or with an investor and like have this base of trust established makes it harder to get deals as a studio that has already made two games for us we didn't really feel this too much but I can definitely see that for up-and-coming studios, for new studios it was harder to get deals and to have this kind of trust. Then we have hopefully potential for hybrid events for the future since all the events now adapted to digital. Maybe they will continue to run like in hybrid format where you can be on site if you can afford it and you're close by. But you can also attend digitally. So this would be, in my opinion, the best of both worlds. So I hope there will be lots of hybrid events in the future. And there was a lot more flexibility with home office. So, for example, with parents, this is a really good development or just also for mental health. For me personally I really like it if I can make home office for a day or two and now we're really adapted to it and we'll probably just keep doing it and I think a lot of companies have seen this is the case for them as well. So yeah, not everything was bad. Hopefully, it will get better from here on. Thanks so much for your attention and I hope I could give you a bit of an insight. Bye. Thanks, Philomena, for her talk. Before we continue, I want to give you some information regarding the Q&A session. Unfortunately, Philomena cannot join the Q&A session, so we will have another live discussion. However, Jogi Neufeld from Suprotron and my colleague Jeremiah Diephaus interviewed her to get some deeper insights on the subject. So without further ado, start the interview. Thank you, Philomena, for being able to join us as part of the Expanded Animation Symposium. As we know, you're busy on Saturday representing a panel for the Swiss Game Developer Association. And so we decided to pre-record a brief interview to be able to at least ask some questions about your experience as an indie developer and the pandemic in specific. And you talked a little bit about, you talk this idea that you're using the community to develop your games and how you can involve them a little bit in the process. Could you tell me a little bit about your studio's approach to engagement so that they're more actively involved in the development of the game so I would say we basically first you have the awareness stage right where you have your social media channels where you bring people in usually then we post on Twitter and Facebook and Imgur and whatever else and invite people to the Discord and there we like start discussing with them. But then if they want to get really really deep into how the game is made and actually help make decisions they have to head over to our forums, make an account there because that is where we have our community votings where you can basically suggest ideas and then vote for your favorites and then whenever we have an update we look at the 20 or so most voted ideas and then you're really part of the core community right because once you're in the forum you get to know people and chat with each other and it's easier for us to reach us to reach you again than if you're just following on twitter do you have any specific advice? I know a few Austrian studios, for example, that often will upload maybe a couple of different character designs or spaceship designs, and then they have the community sort of vote on which one they prefer. And what you often see in the results is 50% like model A and 50% like model B. And you have the engagement, but you don't really have any any basis for a decision is there any way that you can sort of structure that engagement so that people feel they have a sense of agency that they're really contributing but at the same time so that it's yeah it's something that you can also use it's worth your time and not just marketing I mean if it's just 50 50 then in that case I will just let our studio decide what they like better because obviously or maybe offer like a third choice like hey you said you really like this because of that and this because of that so we made the new thing that is this do you prefer this over the last two ones that we showed you or sometimes there's also just really a clear favorite of what people like best um but yeah we don't just let them vote on like select a b c d but they can really like make a whole suggestion of everything that they want in the game like with pictures and with text and so on and then whether or not other people upload it shows us whether it's worth our time to look at it and investigate if it's possible. So I think it both you you both get engagement a bit of marketing out of it but also like really cool suggestions for the games. Some of them we would have never thought of ourselves but they were some were like really good ideas that were really easy to implement and we wouldn't have thought of them ourselves just the second part to the the first question is but how does that continue after the game has been released and people have purchased it um as you know gamers are the best advertisers to other gamers um so how do you keep that engagement active yeah Yeah, as long as you keep releasing updates, you can do that. Niche hasn't been updated in quite a while now, and we still try to keep everybody engaged. We were like doing the console ports, so all of our time went into that, and that's not entertaining for players at all, right? So before we knew we would go into this phase, we added a mode where you can have your own sandbox settings. I think even better would be having your game moddable. Then your players can keep themselves entertained for a long time. That is something that we're hoping to do for the next game, but it's a lot of effort. And before you know that a game is successful successful it's like you put a lot of effort into your modding and then the game doesn't sell that's a lot of wasted time that you have there. But yeah we at least like this time we programmed it in a way that we could potentially add modding which isn't the case with Niche at all we would need to refactor the whole game. But we did the second best thing that we could do is basically just allowing people to change the game mechanics in a variety of ways so how long your animals live how much food you get at the start turn off and on enemies and all kinds of different things and then people started to create their own challenges and you can also like exchange make a challenge and exchange the save file and then people can play your challenge so that is keeping them entertained for now can i take over maybe with a more basic questions to start off with. How much time, how time consuming is your community management altogether? Do you have a dedicated person who is your community manager? Or does everybody wear many hats? How do you manage or structure that within your team? So far, it has been mostly me some of my team members also sometimes jump into the discord and post some things that they're working on but like making sure that everybody is nice to each other has been my job up until now and now we just finally hired somebody to help me because um it's not so much work but it's a lot of responsibility it feels it's also important that you have like some moderators if possible in especially because a lot of our players are American right so I'm sleeping and they might be arguing and I'm not around so it's really helpful if somebody from an American time zone also checks from time to time but we really didn't have so many things happening so it has been a quite peaceful nice community so the work amount wasn't so much maybe like half an hour a day or something okay okay, okay. Okay, you answered my next question already regarding your own forum and not only on only a Discord server. Next specific question, how did you approach streamers and YouTubers? Any kind of success formula you can share i think we do the same as many developers do we just basically look at who played similar games and then contact them like with a customized entry sentence hey i saw you played this game wouldn't you want to play our game we maybe took it a step further because we built our own YouTube and Twitch tool. That's just like, if I have to look on YouTube for people who played a similar game and I have to go through the list, it takes me a long time. And now with the tool, it just basically gives me a list and I can start looking for emails, contacting them. So that makes it faster. And the tool also keeps track of everybody who played our own games so i think that's one of the most important things um to just reach out to them say thank you maybe offer a few giveaway keys if they want to do a follow-up video or just like as a thank you gift and then contacting them again for updates and for your next game so this is um i don't know maybe like three or five thousand somewhere in that ballpark people uh play their games so we have like a good backlog of people we can reach out to again when something new is coming out you sell the tool no it's actually not that complicated so if you're super interested uh you can drop me a mail and i can maybe share the source code with you and then you can just implement it yourself cool um okay next specific question um when it comes to kickstart and crowdfunding um you mentioned in the talk that you used it basically as a test and marketing tool but then again i i know from many people that it's very time consuming to prepare and and and do the whole whole thing and you know then also follow the community build i mean you had the community already and you had your backlog you had you had your successful games with uh with the community already and with a new kickstarter you can you can rely on the things you built before but what is your advice on a like a student project or the hobbyist with no like big names or portfolio um is is a kickstarter basically worth it if you use it only as a test tool or what's your advice on that so maybe for our newest kickstarter we had 14 percent of our backers were like backers from previous projects. So you can see it's still a lot of new people. And for the second Kickstarter, it was 7%. So we just still had to do the lion's share of work. Also, because the first and the second project had very different target audiences. So the overlap was kind of small. I wrote detailed articles about all our free campaigns. They are on strafonstudio.com slash insights. If you want to read them, like breakdown of how many followers we had and what exactly we did when. Yes, I think especially for a student project, it can be very helpful because when you release your game on any platform steam console mobile it really comes down to like your launch day and how much you manage to convince the algorithm to show your game to more people so of course there's always the chance that you're like among us right That it picks up after launch because of some big streamers or other miracles that are happening. But usually your launch is your best chance to be successful and you don't want to screw up that very short window that you have. You want to be sure that you can market the game as effectively as possible. And the crowdfunding campaign is like a test run because you have a whole month time to try and see how you can actually market your game and how to pitch it and so on. Yeah, so I always recommend doing Kickstarters. Also, if they fail, it's not a big deal. You can just relaunch it. It's hard to relaunch your game once it's out on the platform, right? But how do you make that transition then from one platform to another i mean it's quite clear with with pc games um and kickstarter other type of crowdfunding campaigns how you can basically reach that audience but uh you guys have now also released some games for for consoles as well um can you tell us a little bit about that transition i think nowadays it's not so hard anymore to release your game on consoles. They used to be way more restrictive. Of course, if you want to be like one of the first people to get a dev kit for the new generation, then you already need to have a name. But once the generation, so the new PlayStation, the new Xbox have become a bit more established, so maybe as is happening now in the next few months it should be easy enough to get a dev kit if you have in mind if you released a game before pretty safe but also like as a new studio i've seen many new studios receiving dev kits but then of course that doesn't mean that the platform is going to market you in any way. So you will have just as much of a battle of getting visibility on consoles as on other platforms. Yeah, when it comes to visibility, let's talk a bit about digital and physical and hybrid events. Do you have any advice on how to pick online events where did you go and what were the experiences and what would you never do again so essentially i think this comes from experience so i just over the past four years i tried to observe for example when i release a steam, which events tend to get Steam featuring because those give you a lot of wish lists currently. So that is one of my main motivators to attend a local or a digital event. Because if you get a good spot in the featuring, it will cover your booth costs right away. PAX is usually good for this. Things like Gamescom, sometimes GDC, Tokyo Game Show, there's a huge list. If you want to have it, you can just drop me an email and I can show you what I have gathered in the past months and years. There's also like some events such as Ludonaracon that are specialized on specific features or genres of games where you can try to participate in. Of course, things like E3, if you can get into some huge stream, that's also usually very effective. And yeah, in terms of on-site events, I think they're very useful for playtesting. So especially if you're still in development, when we go to Gamescom at the Indie Arena booth locally, then we have some people at the booth, and our programmers are busy making the next build based on the feedback and on the bugs that we found. And then we iterate through five or ten builds usually during such an event so it's really good to just observe people chat with them what they like what they don't like and also to make friends with all the developers that's something I've not done now in this since COVID started I haven't made a single new friend at an online conference and because you don't have the beer drinking and the hanging out i mean you have some people that you stay in touch with but it's for me it has been like mostly business related now that it's online events and yeah it's cool to have friends all over the world if you go to different conferences and visit and maybe you can crash on their couch next time and so on i can see your next talk is going to be entitled beer-driven game development. It's an important part of the process. You mentioned playtesting a little bit and you also mentioned procedural generation in your talk and on the one hand that's very an interesting field for smaller studios because you don't have to do tons and tons of asset creation and level design. On the other hand you have issues maybe with playability and balancing and such how does your studio approach that i don't even know we just try our best and um we basically have our players and our kickstarter backers that are helping as our huge qa team but like we're still finding bugs now years after the game is coming out because it's so hard to play test and there's so many scenarios that can happen but also like we really like emergent storytelling in our game so you can just different things can happen and your own stories can come out of it and that's probably the main reason why we do it oh maybe one additional point to the events. I also think it has gotten a bit harder for like, it has gotten easier for small studios all around the world to attend an event, right? Because it's all digital. So they don't have to pay the travel costs and booths are usually also cheaper. But like meeting people and the whole level of trust that you need if you're a new team, for example, with an an investor with a publisher seems to kind of have made it more difficult for at least some smaller studios that i know to find deals so i hope i actually hope we can do hybrid events in the future so what's your ideal setting of a hybrid event? What setting? What's your ideal setting of a hybrid event? So yeah it should be like booths and being able to go there and meet people locally but maybe also like a set amount of online booths or that you can at least participate in the meet to match also like digitally because for me to match i don't really see a reason why you can't also do it digitally we're unfortunately we're running out of time for um the the pre-recorded uh question answer session um so i'm going to stop recording uh thank you again for participation we'll stay on a little bit afterwards and maybe ask a couple more questions. Thanks again and best of luck on your new releases. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Yeah, thanks for this interesting interview. We are now at the end of this session and we will now have a break until 3.30 p.m. And at 3.30 p.m. we will have an... The next session will be an art and industry session within tagma so see you soon bye Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. you you you you Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.