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Join Date: 26th Feb, 2008 Posts: 2,001

The Jick Show summary: July 21, 2016 episode Link to show MP3

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It's a Very Special All-West of Loathing Episode, with special guests Victor and Wes. {Now no longer played at 200% normal speed.}



Victor introduces himself: He's from Minnesota and met Jick and HotStuff at IndieCade in L.A. a few years ago. He was interested in making indie games with others after making them himself for a while. He's doing the Unity coding in the game, mostly using C#. This is his second major Unity project, but he's started a bunch more.



Wes: He met Jick and HotStuff through Roy around the time of Word Realms and worked on that. J: You know what was good about that game? The animation. Wes is now doing the animation for WoL.



Riff is writing and designing content and puzzles. R: I wrote some really gross stuff today! J: There's a lot of gross stuff and dark stuff. HS: The dark stuff is for the kids. (Future Goths of America) HotStuff is producing and doing some puzzle design, publicity management, etc. Stuff that nobody else is at all excited to do. Jick does a little of this and a little of that, and the art, which is the big bottleneck.



Q: Talk about the variety of turtles in the game. Also, character customization.

A: In terms of appearance, you can put on different hats. But none of them are turtles. There are no turtles at this point. There are different classes than KOL. HS: Are you saying that the presence of turtles is dependent on the presence of Turtle Tamers? J: Yes. Thus, there are cows and snakes because of cow punchers and snake oilers. But because there are no classes that fight humans, there are no humans, just cows and snakes. We're working on a "rat particle," which is an animated rat that just runs across the screen. Maybe we could do a turtle particle, which would be very slow.



Q: What's up with the Steam Greenlight.

A: There's not much to talk about. We put it up, and it was approved in 9 days. We were excited about how fast it happened, until we found out we were part of the biggest Greenlight approval that Steam ever did in a single day -- something like 400 games. It doesn't take much of a community to get a game approved, and we have a great community.



Q: Co-op?

A: We're not going to do any. V: You can have two people use the same computer or tablet... HS: One person can do the conversation responses and one move around. J: If we had controller support, we could add all the controllers' input at once, so you can play cooperatively or competitively depending on your communication skills. HS: Twitch plays West of Loathing. V: We could actually do that. It wouldn't be that hard (to make it possible.) J: I think we're going to be able to have controller support. V: I can say that it is really fun to play with a joystick -- I tried it out on an arcade cabinet. HS: You'd do conversation selection with the buttons, though. J: We'll need some concept of highlighting something, like for inventory. W: Can't we just do what Skyrim did? J: You mean rely on the modding community to make it tolerable?



Q: Crossover bonus for people who play all your games?

A: Well, not *all* of the games. One of the games you can't purchase, so that would be a real dick move. We're going to reserve 3/4 of the content in West of Loathing for only the people who played Masterswords, so good luck, schoolchildren from L.A. HS: There are 10s of thousands of kids around the country who play it. It's popular. J: Before it folded, the



HS: Are we going to have a any special content? We already had the West of Loathing challenge path in KOL. I can imagine... R: Having a KOL challenge path in West of Loathing? HS: Some sort of bonsues for people who play both games. V: It's easy to build in content that is only accessible if you know about KOL from playing it. J: I can imagine giving people who buy West of Loathing an item in KOL item. We have their Steam i.d.s and we can give them a redeem code. It's more complicated to make access to special content or DLC in West of Loathing for people who play KOL -- those codes will just get shared around and it becomes non-exclusive. V: It's West of Loathing that would have to unique-ify them. J: We're not planning on running servers for West of Loathing, so we can't do any authentication that's not Steam.



Q: How replayable is it? KOL-style replayable or Skyrim-style replayable?

A: I would say Skyrim-style. You can play all the way through without seeing anywhere near all that there is. HS: In Skyrim, you can see most of it in a single playthough. I'm not sure that will be true in West of Loathing. J: There will be chunks that won't be there, depending on which horse you buy and which partner you take with you. One of those has significant content, some of the others just lead to flavor or whether things are easier or harder. I wouldn't feel bad for putting in achievements for beating it with each of the horses and beating it with each partner. (Dead horse jokes.) It's weird when people ask "how long is it." The part that I anticipated would be 15 minutes takes people 45 minutes to an hour. If you're just playing along for kicks -- it depends on how easy we want to make the easy way to finish quests, and that will just bear out in playtesting. There are things I want to incentivize with achievements -- like "beat the game without sleeping."



Q: Will there be an arrow pointing west on the KOL main map showing where you can purchase it?

A: Yeah, why not?



Q: Ranged weapons. What is combat like?

A: It's really coming together. It more or less is what I wanted it to be. I think it's fun. People get it and seem to enjoy it by and large in the demo. As you get deeper into the game, it's a more complicated version. There were a lot of people at IndieCade that said it didn't need or shouldn't have combat. V: It feels more justified now that it's more developed. I feel like those people have a point from their perspective -- it could be just an adventure game if that's how you want to play... HS: We could have an option to auto-resolve fights. J: I don't know how we'd approach that. V: I would think you would just watch the fight happen without doing anything. J: I figured that would be a thing you wouldn't want me to ask you to do. We could just give every character an AI that would just run the combat at a million-x speed, like Bravely Default. There, you could set all kinds of scripts and just blast through a million combats. I am still committed to making every combat avoidable if you're trying to avoid it. The weird thing is that there's a horse you can pick that lets you run away from wandering monsters at no charge if you want to do that. And if you focus on speech skills, you can also do that. V: That's satisfying to people who have a legitimate problem with combats. J: The question of how do we communicate that to people who don't want to fight things even once to figure out that you should have spent ... like, it should have a "let this guy beat the crap out of you" option in all of the early wandering monsters. W: What about Snake Gulch? J: You're not going to be able to go everywhere if you decide not to fight. And there will be stuff you won't see if you decide to kill a guy instead of talking to him. We're starting to set up a lot of decision points that set flags about whether you killed this guy or loosed this monster on the world. And it will be nice to go back and check if you let some guy go, you won't be able to do something because he destroyed the entire area. W: I think everyone will enjoy the combat system. V: Wes has created some great animation for it, and now it feels more justified to me. J: To me, the reason I want it to have combat is so that it can have some stuff that is systemic and have rewards that can support that. I want pants +1 to be different from pants +2. It justifies the existence of a tremendous amount of stuff in support of it that is flavorful.



But to answer the question about ranged weapons. People familiar with KOL's system will know that we are frequently frustrated with decisions that I made early on. There are 3 stats in KOL, but only 2 of them matter for combat. In West of Loathing, you only care about this if you're trying to dig into territory you're not ready for or trying the hard mode we're thinking about. Melee attacks are your muscle against their muscle, spell attacks are your mysticality against their mysticality, guns are your moxie against their moxie. Not everyone can cast spells, so there's still a weird dump stat in mysticality, but that's also your defense against enemy spellcasters so there's still a reason to use it. I like this a lot better to have all the stats be more or less equally important but on different axes.



Q: Will you have Steam badges, trading cards, achievements, etc.?

A: As I understand it, adding Steam trading cards is literally just handing them some static art assets, so that's easy. Riff, do you still get them and sell them? R: I don't sell them. You can grind them up to make more packs of them, so I do that. HS: Wait, what? (Steam trading cards nerdery)



Q: Price point?

A: We're still thinking about the price. We haven't finalized anything. $10 or $15 maybe. HS: We don't know. J: I can imagine *eventually* a pay-what-you-want as part of a bundle or something? Temporarily. HS: Maybe. J: We haven't done this in 13 or 14 years, so we're playing the long game. We want to avoid de-valuing the back catalog. This is a niche thing. We shouldn't count on a burst of mainstream attention for it, so we don't want to do the same things you do when you sell a million copies of a game.



Q: (by Jick) What is everyone's favorite part of making the game?

HS: I enjoy the fact that I get to play it and because I'm not making the vast majority of the content, I get to experience and laugh at it. I fall off my chair at some of it. There is just a lot of really, really good humor in this game. It's worth enabling easy mode to just let people see it.



R: I like that there's a wide variety of stuff for me to write -- a lot of different characters that I'm trying to give distinctive voices. Over here, there's some funny stuff, and over here there's some horror stuff, and even a little bit of gross stuff. J: All three kinds of literature.



W: I like when I do an animation with particle effects and it works right. J: The last thing turned out to be a bug in Unity, so you just had to trick Unity into not screwing up. W: That's my least favorite part. J: If you attach a particle emitter to the top of a prefab, it will position it where the prefab spawns and never move it. It's nobody's fault, except Unity's.



V: I like a lot of it. I like seeing all the new content. My favorite part is that there are a lot of little programmy systems, like the different particle effects and the title screen and character creation works. They're fun to write and interesting to have in the game. There are some hilarious animations for moving around, and I don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about stick-feel or how fast you turn around or stuff that's important in other games.



J: I like being able to-- and this is a testament to Victor's skill and patience and consistency in making things work the way we half-assed describe them to you, and to what we've learned from working on Masterswords (and Word Realms, but we didn't know how to put that content in that way then), the ability to draw a thing and get it into a real video game without anybody else having to do anything. I can paste it up in KOL, but that's just a webpage. This feels like the thing I dreamed about doing as a kid --"I wish I could just put something here and shoot at it." R: The tools we have are super-smooth. I can cobble a scene together with just the editor and some nonsense lines and it appears immediately.



HS: Have we described our process chain? We have a back-end web interface where we create the scene objects. J: We do that because we already have that infrastructure thanks to CDMoyer. His involvement in KOL is less now because he was so good at making tools for us. But in West of Loathing, making content is similar for KOL, but we have to position things in a scene and the scripting language is similar to KOL but crazily more complex and robust. I did not expect to use the same scripting language for in-combat and out-of-combat, but we do and it has to be aware of time and could be running on multiple objects and interacting at the same time. It's good to work on.



Q: Did you consider a different art style? Or did you want to make it appeal to KOL fans?

A: This is what we set out to make. Doing a thing in a shared universe but a different gameplay style is what this game was supposed to be. HS: Having showed it to a bunch of people who aren't familiar with KOL, the stick figures really resonate with people. The Scott McCloud thing: the more generic something looks, the more identifiale it can become. J: The more detail you put on a guy, the more likely someone will look at it and say "that guy's an asshole." HS: The animations are really good and it's *cute* and amusing. J: You don't expect it to move as well as it does, which is a neat surprise. HS: It is a distinct visual style, which is hard to do these days. J: I find that the trick is to have no artistic skill. The art style for KOL -- I had done some scratch art for a card game and Roy said that I should make a real thing with it because it was cool looking. A *lot* of people liked it, so there is something inherently appealing about it besides this webpage that, even in 2003, looked really old. I've gotten a lot better at expressing recognizable objects in this style. The one thing that I wish is that I could hire someone to do more of it, and it's possible that I could, but I can't shake the feeling that it would be wrong in some way. HS: You could have someone do a follow-up game. J: I would rather draw the art for the next game on a whiteboard and have someone else do the detail work. HS: It would be funny if it wasn't someone local and you'd mail them huge whiteboards.



Q: Inventory interface? Different from KOLs? Also, interface? I hardly know her!

A: HS: It's more like a standard RPG interface. J: It's a lot like a console RPG. I promised HotStuff that I wouldn't do anything that would prevent us from being able to port it to iPads. We're still not really sure what our launch strategy is for that, due to pricing and the technical burden of not doing that is less than the technical burden of doing it. HS: And just doing it for an iPhone is a lot more work. J: The inventory UI could use some work. HS: All the UI could be ... "jucier"? Things that "feel" really good, people respond better to. J: There's a part of me that wants to put that off until more of the content is in place and the systems are finalized because I don't want to polish the UI and have a system go away. Once you put stuff behind a toggle for advanced RPG players, it can be a little more messy. HS: We would still have the character screen, but it would be different? J: It would have a bunch of things missing, making it a lot less cluttered and intimidating -- just lists of "here's your stats."



Q: Facebook page?

A: If anything, we'd just re-skin the KOL page and it will just be Asymmetric. HS: Why would you jinx the name like that? I'm not sure how that all works. I wouldn't want to make a whole new presence for it.



Q: Will West of Loathing see any influence from KOL's moons?

A: No, because it is never nighttime in this game. HS: You go to sleep and ostensibly night happens while you sleep, but outside, it is never dark. It's amazing that if you play the whole game without sleeping, it's all in one day. J: Maybe night passes while you're underground, but you just don't know it. There are plenty of video games where whether it's day or night depends on where you are. HS: You could just reverse the colors. J: "Hey everybody, welcome to our Fido Dido game. A Sprite promotional game from 1990." As a thought experiment Victor, how would you make it nighttime? Make everything blue and change the skybox? V: Change the color of the sky, and you have to carry a lantern around because it's dark. Or just make things have a long shadow. You could fake it and still make it look pretty good. I could make it look like you're in a cave when you're outside. J: When you're in a cave, you can't see very far into the distance. If you're outside at night, you'd still want the parallax of the background and stars and stuff.



Q: I'd like to see a gameplay video.

A: There isn't going to be a straight-up demo, but we're thinking of doing some playable teasers. Maybe you're walking through the same hallway over and over again. And it's always daytime.



Q: Cheat codes?

A: Why? I don't think so. We could leave in some bugged stuff.



Q: Release date? Preorder? Feelies pack? Soundtrack?

A: We've been kicking around the idea of a preorder so that we could get the benefit -- more money -- from people who wanted to buy into a higher tier and get a skeleton named after you or something. We're not final about what we want to do about that, and if it happens, it will just be a couple of weeks before the game comes out. That will force us to limit the scope of what happens in those tiers, which inherently makes them less interesting. HS: You could still sell early access. J: We have to get it out early next year. There's no choice. If we're looking at middle of December and can't make that deadline, we start cutting. Because this thing is just fucking sprawling. HS: We joked about it being Skyrim with beans and big hats, and now it's like ... oops.



Q: How many overall areas will there be? New areas over time?

A: If it sells well, I can imagine -- and I've left space and have a theme in mind -- for a DLC pack we could sell. R: That seems like a way we could go if we run out of time -- any content that gets cut can be put in a later pack. J: Not a pack that we would sell. If it was legitimately, we... we don't want to do the thing that forum assholes accuse people of doing... HS: You should prioritize finishing the main quest line. J: Yeah, but there's not much of that. I hit a self-imposed goal of making all the areas that will exist as just big, empty rooms at least. Once you leave the starting area, there will be 8 regions and each of them in terms of mechanical complexity and size is probably 1.5 times the size of Boring Springs (the starting area). HS: So if it takes 45 minutes to do Boring Springs, that's... an 8-hour game. J: if you do everything, but you're not going to be able to, because you'll lock yourself out of stuff. V: Are you intending to do more of that locking out, so you have to go back and make different choices? Because in Boring Springs right now, you can do a predominance of the content in one playthough. HS: There is an optimization to Boring Springs... V: But you have to play through it multiple times to discovery it. J: And an achievement for finishing the prologue with the maximum amount of meat, so you have to figure out the whole optimization puzzle. And it's not even a puzzle, it's just a thing that changes what you have depending on what order you do things in. I don't like it when you, without telling the player, dramatically lop off things they could have done later because of something they did. V: If you refuse to help a person instead of helping them, you lose half the content. Well, either way. HS: We're doing a pretty significant binary thing that most people are going to end up with one version of. I really like that, obviously, but we are sort of doing it without telling the player about it. J: Has anyone gotten out of the prologue by doing it *that* way? HS: No. Not a single person. J: That is great! V: How? J: We don't want to say.



Q: How is this similar to the old Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory game?

A: There are different outcomes depending on different approaches, different ways to achieve the same end depending on your stats and your horse and your partner and stuff. HS: Imagine Quest for Glory in a big open world. It's pretty similar. J: I think in terms of the number of rooms you can run around in, it will be slightly bigger? HS: Quest for Glory? A lot bigger than that. J: Maybe. There's a lot of empty space in Quest for Glory where all you do is fight monsters. That kind of happens in between spaces in West of Loathing.



Q: Romance options?

A: Absolutely not. There is almost nothing I dislike as much as a romance minigame in an RPG. V: So in Fallout 4, you didn't court any of your partners? J: No. The only one worth taking is a robot. I like my romance partners to have an entire face. It's one thing I'm pretty inflexible on.



Q: Is there an end boss? Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Bill?

A: HS: That's pretty good. J: We've got to do something with that. There are multiple antagonists. But not one who takes away all your powers at the start and you spend the game hunting him down. There are lots of ways to finish the main quest and thus, different things you could consider to be the end boss. It is very important to me that you can beat the game -- if you know what you're doing -- that you can beat it without fighting anything. If you make certain choices that make you combat-based, you may not be able to do it without fighting. Combat can just be a fun minigame you play between stuff. HS: It's a little puzzle-y, a little tactical. J: Unlike KOL, there are certainly places where you are definitely killing a person, but none of those things are combat. You can kill a snake and skin it, but when you're killing bad guys instead of arresting them, it is because you have chosen a particular approach to that problem that will make fun of you for being mean. HS: And it can make fun of you for being nice. J: Yeah. The way we've approached it so far is like Dishonored, where it says "That probably turned out worse for him than if you just murdered him." It does make fun of you in that goody-two-shoes is naive approach.



Q: Mods through Steamworks?

A: My goal is that all of the data for the game is in a bunch of text files. I don't know if that will be true in the packaged executable, but that would make it mod-able by anyone with a text editor. V: That is very possible. That's how Riff is working entirely. He just has a development copy that he loads into Unity. We can do it in that way or have a minor piece of tooling for a user, to make sure they're not messing things up. J: So some way from the title screen to load in data packs and not let them overwrite important things? HS: This sounds like a great thing to do... after launch. J: Right now, I don't want to waste any calories making it possible for people to load in their own art assets. V: It would have to work roughly the same way it works now, which is that it doesn't work. In some games, when you make mods, that's how it works. You make image files and model files and loading those is a little slower and a little more junky than the polished art assets because you didn't build them in the special game format. In this, we would have that effect, but it wouldn't be extreme, given how simple the art assets are. You wouldn't have animation, of course. But you could make your own snake to skin. J: But we don't have a skinnable snake model. If you could get your own images loaded in, you could make your own goblin whose body is a ... toilet. If not, you could use the toilet art that I made to make a toilet goblin.



Q: How much time goes into programming a game like this?

A: (Laughter) J: About 20 hours a week? V: I'm not working full-time on West of Loathing. I have similar contracts here and there. If you've watched the intervals between games that get put out, it's not because they were doing nothing in there, they spent the time making the next game. I am the only engine programmer on this project, and I'll be able to handle all the stuff on this. If it were a big 3D game, I'd need a lot more support. HS: About 18 months of your time on this when we're done? V: About that. At half-time. HS: And another year of developing back-end tools. J: And we're wildly variable on the amount of time we spend on KOL vs. West of Loathing. And that's why it's hard to say "what is the budget" and "how many do we need to sell?" The nice thing is that this engine is wicked flexible and we could make another game with almost no intervention from Victor. Which is sad. V: I would show up and just be doing things. HS: There are so many things we could add -- one-off minigames. There's never a point when we don't need... J: I mean if we had to. V: Or if you just want to build more content, when it's time to make more DLC. J: Yeah, the engine isn't a bunch of cowboy-specific stuff in it. HS: We don't have to recoup all of our costs here, because there can always be another game. And we can point people towards KOL, too. V: But you have to have analytics to tell you where people came from? HS: We're terrible at that. J: It would have been helpful for all the years we're doing this. ---------------------------------------------------It's a Very Special All-West of Loathing Episode, with special guests Victor and Wes. {Now no longer played at 200% normal speed.}Victor introduces himself: He's from Minnesota and met Jick and HotStuff at IndieCade in L.A. a few years ago. He was interested in making indie games with others after making them himself for a while. He's doing the Unity coding in the game, mostly using C#. This is his second major Unity project, but he's started a bunch more.Wes: He met Jick and HotStuff through Roy around the time of Word Realms and worked on that. J: You know what was good about that game? The animation. Wes is now doing the animation for WoL.Riff is writing and designing content and puzzles. R: I wrote some really gross stuff today! J: There's a lot of gross stuff and dark stuff. HS: The dark stuff is for the kids. (Future Goths of America) HotStuff is producing and doing some puzzle design, publicity management, etc. Stuff that nobody else is at all excited to do. Jick does a little of this and a little of that, and the art, which is the big bottleneck.Q: Talk about the variety of turtles in the game. Also, character customization.A: In terms of appearance, you can put on different hats. But none of them are turtles. There are no turtles at this point. There are different classes than KOL. HS: Are you saying that the presence of turtles is dependent on the presence of Turtle Tamers? J: Yes. Thus, there are cows and snakes because of cow punchers and snake oilers. But because there are no classes that fight humans, there are no humans, just cows and snakes. We're working on a "rat particle," which is an animated rat that just runs across the screen. Maybe we could do a turtle particle, which would be very slow.Q: What's up with the Steam Greenlight.A: There's not much to talk about. We put it up, and it was approved in 9 days. We were excited about how fast it happened, until we found out we were part of the biggest Greenlight approval that Steam ever did in a single day -- something like 400 games. It doesn't take much of a community to get a game approved, and we have a great community.Q: Co-op?A: We're not going to do any. V: You can have two people use the same computer or tablet... HS: One person can do the conversation responses and one move around. J: If we had controller support, we could add all the controllers' input at once, so you can play cooperatively or competitively depending on your communication skills. HS: Twitch plays West of Loathing. V: We could actually do that. It wouldn't be that hard (to make it possible.) J: I think we're going to be able to have controller support. V: I can say that it is really fun to play with a joystick -- I tried it out on an arcade cabinet. HS: You'd do conversation selection with the buttons, though. J: We'll need some concept of highlighting something, like for inventory. W: Can't we just do what Skyrim did? J: You mean rely on the modding community to make it tolerable?Q: Crossover bonus for people who play all your games?A: Well, not *all* of the games. One of the games you can't purchase, so that would be a real dick move. We're going to reserve 3/4 of the content in West of Loathing for only the people who played Masterswords, so good luck, schoolchildren from L.A. HS: There are 10s of thousands of kids around the country who play it. It's popular. J: Before it folded, the Amplify curriculum got circulated to several school districts that already had iPads. It wasn't a total waste of money for them. HS: In theory, it will someday have a commercial release. That date has been pushed back so many times it's not even funny. J: If Amplify folds, is there anything that... stops... us from... dropping it... out a window? HS: Probably a lawsuit. (Who owns Amplify)HS: Are we going to have a any special content? We already had the West of Loathing challenge path in KOL. I can imagine... R: Having a KOL challenge path in West of Loathing? HS: Some sort of bonsues for people who play both games. V: It's easy to build in content that is only accessible if you know about KOL from playing it. J: I can imagine giving people who buy West of Loathing an item in KOL item. We have their Steam i.d.s and we can give them a redeem code. It's more complicated to make access to special content or DLC in West of Loathing for people who play KOL -- those codes will just get shared around and it becomes non-exclusive. V: It's West of Loathing that would have to unique-ify them. J: We're not planning on running servers for West of Loathing, so we can't do any authentication that's not Steam.Q: How replayable is it? KOL-style replayable or Skyrim-style replayable?A: I would say Skyrim-style. You can play all the way through without seeing anywhere near all that there is. HS: In Skyrim, you can see most of it in a single playthough. I'm not sure that will be true in West of Loathing. J: There will be chunks that won't be there, depending on which horse you buy and which partner you take with you. One of those has significant content, some of the others just lead to flavor or whether things are easier or harder. I wouldn't feel bad for putting in achievements for beating it with each of the horses and beating it with each partner. (Dead horse jokes.) It's weird when people ask "how long is it." The part that I anticipated would be 15 minutes takes people 45 minutes to an hour. If you're just playing along for kicks -- it depends on how easy we want to make the easy way to finish quests, and that will just bear out in playtesting. There are things I want to incentivize with achievements -- like "beat the game without sleeping."Q: Will there be an arrow pointing west on the KOL main map showing where you can purchase it?A: Yeah, why not?Q: Ranged weapons. What is combat like?A: It's really coming together. It more or less is what I wanted it to be. I think it's fun. People get it and seem to enjoy it by and large in the demo. As you get deeper into the game, it's a more complicated version. There were a lot of people at IndieCade that said it didn't need or shouldn't have combat. V: It feels more justified now that it's more developed. I feel like those people have a point from their perspective -- it could be just an adventure game if that's how you want to play... HS: We could have an option to auto-resolve fights. J: I don't know how we'd approach that. V: I would think you would just watch the fight happen without doing anything. J: I figured that would be a thing you wouldn't want me to ask you to do. We could just give every character an AI that would just run the combat at a million-x speed, like Bravely Default. There, you could set all kinds of scripts and just blast through a million combats. I am still committed to making every combat avoidable if you're trying to avoid it. The weird thing is that there's a horse you can pick that lets you run away from wandering monsters at no charge if you want to do that. And if you focus on speech skills, you can also do that. V: That's satisfying to people who have a legitimate problem with combats. J: The question of how do we communicate that to people who don't want to fight things even once to figure out that you should have spent ... like, it should have a "let this guy beat the crap out of you" option in all of the early wandering monsters. W: What about Snake Gulch? J: You're not going to be able to go everywhere if you decide not to fight. And there will be stuff you won't see if you decide to kill a guy instead of talking to him. We're starting to set up a lot of decision points that set flags about whether you killed this guy or loosed this monster on the world. And it will be nice to go back and check if you let some guy go, you won't be able to do something because he destroyed the entire area. W: I think everyone will enjoy the combat system. V: Wes has created some great animation for it, and now it feels more justified to me. J: To me, the reason I want it to have combat is so that it can have some stuff that is systemic and have rewards that can support that. I want pants +1 to be different from pants +2. It justifies the existence of a tremendous amount of stuff in support of it that is flavorful.But to answer the question about ranged weapons. People familiar with KOL's system will know that we are frequently frustrated with decisions that I made early on. There are 3 stats in KOL, but only 2 of them matter for combat. In West of Loathing, you only care about this if you're trying to dig into territory you're not ready for or trying the hard mode we're thinking about. Melee attacks are your muscle against their muscle, spell attacks are your mysticality against their mysticality, guns are your moxie against their moxie. Not everyone can cast spells, so there's still a weird dump stat in mysticality, but that's also your defense against enemy spellcasters so there's still a reason to use it. I like this a lot better to have all the stats be more or less equally important but on different axes.Q: Will you have Steam badges, trading cards, achievements, etc.?A: As I understand it, adding Steam trading cards is literally just handing them some static art assets, so that's easy. Riff, do you still get them and sell them? R: I don't sell them. You can grind them up to make more packs of them, so I do that. HS: Wait, what? (Steam trading cards nerdery)Q: Price point?A: We're still thinking about the price. We haven't finalized anything. $10 or $15 maybe. HS: We don't know. J: I can imagine *eventually* a pay-what-you-want as part of a bundle or something? Temporarily. HS: Maybe. J: We haven't done this in 13 or 14 years, so we're playing the long game. We want to avoid de-valuing the back catalog. This is a niche thing. We shouldn't count on a burst of mainstream attention for it, so we don't want to do the same things you do when you sell a million copies of a game.Q: (by Jick) What is everyone's favorite part of making the game?HS: I enjoy the fact that I get to play it and because I'm not making the vast majority of the content, I get to experience and laugh at it. I fall off my chair at some of it. There is just a lot of really, really good humor in this game. It's worth enabling easy mode to just let people see it.R: I like that there's a wide variety of stuff for me to write -- a lot of different characters that I'm trying to give distinctive voices. Over here, there's some funny stuff, and over here there's some horror stuff, and even a little bit of gross stuff. J: All three kinds of literature.W: I like when I do an animation with particle effects and it works right. J: The last thing turned out to be a bug in Unity, so you just had to trick Unity into not screwing up. W: That's my least favorite part. J: If you attach a particle emitter to the top of a prefab, it will position it where the prefab spawns and never move it. It's nobody's fault, except Unity's.V: I like a lot of it. I like seeing all the new content. My favorite part is that there are a lot of little programmy systems, like the different particle effects and the title screen and character creation works. They're fun to write and interesting to have in the game. There are some hilarious animations for moving around, and I don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about stick-feel or how fast you turn around or stuff that's important in other games.J: I like being able to-- and this is a testament to Victor's skill and patience and consistency in making things work the way we half-assed describe them to you, and to what we've learned from working on Masterswords (and Word Realms, but we didn't know how to put that content in that way then), the ability to draw a thing and get it into a real video game without anybody else having to do anything. I can paste it up in KOL, but that's just a webpage. This feels like the thing I dreamed about doing as a kid --"I wish I could just put something here and shoot at it." R: The tools we have are super-smooth. I can cobble a scene together with just the editor and some nonsense lines and it appears immediately.HS: Have we described our process chain? We have a back-end web interface where we create the scene objects. J: We do that because we already have that infrastructure thanks to CDMoyer. His involvement in KOL is less now because he was so good at making tools for us. But in West of Loathing, making content is similar for KOL, but we have to position things in a scene and the scripting language is similar to KOL but crazily more complex and robust. I did not expect to use the same scripting language for in-combat and out-of-combat, but we do and it has to be aware of time and could be running on multiple objects and interacting at the same time. It's good to work on.Q: Did you consider a different art style? Or did you want to make it appeal to KOL fans?A: This is what we set out to make. Doing a thing in a shared universe but a different gameplay style is what this game was supposed to be. HS: Having showed it to a bunch of people who aren't familiar with KOL, the stick figures really resonate with people. The Scott McCloud thing: the more generic something looks, the more identifiale it can become. J: The more detail you put on a guy, the more likely someone will look at it and say "that guy's an asshole." HS: The animations are really good and it's *cute* and amusing. J: You don't expect it to move as well as it does, which is a neat surprise. HS: It is a distinct visual style, which is hard to do these days. J: I find that the trick is to have no artistic skill. The art style for KOL -- I had done some scratch art for a card game and Roy said that I should make a real thing with it because it was cool looking. A *lot* of people liked it, so there is something inherently appealing about it besides this webpage that, even in 2003, looked really old. I've gotten a lot better at expressing recognizable objects in this style. The one thing that I wish is that I could hire someone to do more of it, and it's possible that I could, but I can't shake the feeling that it would be wrong in some way. HS: You could have someone do a follow-up game. J: I would rather draw the art for the next game on a whiteboard and have someone else do the detail work. HS: It would be funny if it wasn't someone local and you'd mail them huge whiteboards.Q: Inventory interface? Different from KOLs? Also, interface? I hardly know her!A: HS: It's more like a standard RPG interface. J: It's a lot like a console RPG. I promised HotStuff that I wouldn't do anything that would prevent us from being able to port it to iPads. We're still not really sure what our launch strategy is for that, due to pricing and the technical burden of not doing that is less than the technical burden of doing it. HS: And just doing it for an iPhone is a lot more work. J: The inventory UI could use some work. HS: All the UI could be ... "jucier"? Things that "feel" really good, people respond better to. J: There's a part of me that wants to put that off until more of the content is in place and the systems are finalized because I don't want to polish the UI and have a system go away. Once you put stuff behind a toggle for advanced RPG players, it can be a little more messy. HS: We would still have the character screen, but it would be different? J: It would have a bunch of things missing, making it a lot less cluttered and intimidating -- just lists of "here's your stats."Q: Facebook page?A: If anything, we'd just re-skin the KOL page and it will just be Asymmetric. HS: Why would you jinx the name like that? I'm not sure how that all works. I wouldn't want to make a whole new presence for it.Q: Will West of Loathing see any influence from KOL's moons?A: No, because it is never nighttime in this game. HS: You go to sleep and ostensibly night happens while you sleep, but outside, it is never dark. It's amazing that if you play the whole game without sleeping, it's all in one day. J: Maybe night passes while you're underground, but you just don't know it. There are plenty of video games where whether it's day or night depends on where you are. HS: You could just reverse the colors. J: "Hey everybody, welcome to our Fido Dido game. A Sprite promotional game from 1990." As a thought experiment Victor, how would you make it nighttime? Make everything blue and change the skybox? V: Change the color of the sky, and you have to carry a lantern around because it's dark. Or just make things have a long shadow. You could fake it and still make it look pretty good. I could make it look like you're in a cave when you're outside. J: When you're in a cave, you can't see very far into the distance. If you're outside at night, you'd still want the parallax of the background and stars and stuff.Q: I'd like to see a gameplay video.A: There isn't going to be a straight-up demo, but we're thinking of doing some playable teasers. Maybe you're walking through the same hallway over and over again. And it's always daytime.Q: Cheat codes?A: Why? I don't think so. We could leave in some bugged stuff.Q: Release date? Preorder? Feelies pack? Soundtrack?A: We've been kicking around the idea of a preorder so that we could get the benefit -- more money -- from people who wanted to buy into a higher tier and get a skeleton named after you or something. We're not final about what we want to do about that, and if it happens, it will just be a couple of weeks before the game comes out. That will force us to limit the scope of what happens in those tiers, which inherently makes them less interesting. HS: You could still sell early access. J: We have to get it out early next year. There's no choice. If we're looking at middle of December and can't make that deadline, we start cutting. Because this thing is just fucking sprawling. HS: We joked about it being Skyrim with beans and big hats, and now it's like ... oops.Q: How many overall areas will there be? New areas over time?A: If it sells well, I can imagine -- and I've left space and have a theme in mind -- for a DLC pack we could sell. R: That seems like a way we could go if we run out of time -- any content that gets cut can be put in a later pack. J: Not a pack that we would sell. If it was legitimately, we... we don't want to do the thing that forum assholes accuse people of doing... HS: You should prioritize finishing the main quest line. J: Yeah, but there's not much of that. I hit a self-imposed goal of making all the areas that will exist as just big, empty rooms at least. Once you leave the starting area, there will be 8 regions and each of them in terms of mechanical complexity and size is probably 1.5 times the size of Boring Springs (the starting area). HS: So if it takes 45 minutes to do Boring Springs, that's... an 8-hour game. J: if you do everything, but you're not going to be able to, because you'll lock yourself out of stuff. V: Are you intending to do more of that locking out, so you have to go back and make different choices? Because in Boring Springs right now, you can do a predominance of the content in one playthough. HS: There is an optimization to Boring Springs... V: But you have to play through it multiple times to discovery it. J: And an achievement for finishing the prologue with the maximum amount of meat, so you have to figure out the whole optimization puzzle. And it's not even a puzzle, it's just a thing that changes what you have depending on what order you do things in. I don't like it when you, without telling the player, dramatically lop off things they could have done later because of something they did. V: If you refuse to help a person instead of helping them, you lose half the content. Well, either way. HS: We're doing a pretty significant binary thing that most people are going to end up with one version of. I really like that, obviously, but we are sort of doing it without telling the player about it. J: Has anyone gotten out of the prologue by doing it *that* way? HS: No. Not a single person. J: That is great! V: How? J: We don't want to say.Q: How is this similar to the old Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory game?A: There are different outcomes depending on different approaches, different ways to achieve the same end depending on your stats and your horse and your partner and stuff. HS: Imagine Quest for Glory in a big open world. It's pretty similar. J: I think in terms of the number of rooms you can run around in, it will be slightly bigger? HS: Quest for Glory? A lot bigger than that. J: Maybe. There's a lot of empty space in Quest for Glory where all you do is fight monsters. That kind of happens in between spaces in West of Loathing.Q: Romance options?A: Absolutely not. There is almost nothing I dislike as much as a romance minigame in an RPG. V: So in Fallout 4, you didn't court any of your partners? J: No. The only one worth taking is a robot. I like my romance partners to have an entire face. It's one thing I'm pretty inflexible on.Q: Is there an end boss? Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Bill?A: HS: That's pretty good. J: We've got to do something with that. There are multiple antagonists. But not one who takes away all your powers at the start and you spend the game hunting him down. There are lots of ways to finish the main quest and thus, different things you could consider to be the end boss. It is very important to me that you can beat the game -- if you know what you're doing -- that you can beat it without fighting anything. If you make certain choices that make you combat-based, you may not be able to do it without fighting. Combat can just be a fun minigame you play between stuff. HS: It's a little puzzle-y, a little tactical. J: Unlike KOL, there are certainly places where you are definitely killing a person, but none of those things are combat. You can kill a snake and skin it, but when you're killing bad guys instead of arresting them, it is because you have chosen a particular approach to that problem that will make fun of you for being mean. HS: And it can make fun of you for being nice. J: Yeah. The way we've approached it so far is like Dishonored, where it says "That probably turned out worse for him than if you just murdered him." It does make fun of you in that goody-two-shoes is naive approach.Q: Mods through Steamworks?A: My goal is that all of the data for the game is in a bunch of text files. I don't know if that will be true in the packaged executable, but that would make it mod-able by anyone with a text editor. V: That is very possible. That's how Riff is working entirely. He just has a development copy that he loads into Unity. We can do it in that way or have a minor piece of tooling for a user, to make sure they're not messing things up. J: So some way from the title screen to load in data packs and not let them overwrite important things? HS: This sounds like a great thing to do... after launch. J: Right now, I don't want to waste any calories making it possible for people to load in their own art assets. V: It would have to work roughly the same way it works now, which is that it doesn't work. In some games, when you make mods, that's how it works. You make image files and model files and loading those is a little slower and a little more junky than the polished art assets because you didn't build them in the special game format. In this, we would have that effect, but it wouldn't be extreme, given how simple the art assets are. You wouldn't have animation, of course. But you could make your own snake to skin. J: But we don't have a skinnable snake model. If you could get your own images loaded in, you could make your own goblin whose body is a ... toilet. If not, you could use the toilet art that I made to make a toilet goblin.Q: How much time goes into programming a game like this?A: (Laughter) J: About 20 hours a week? V: I'm not working full-time on West of Loathing. I have similar contracts here and there. If you've watched the intervals between games that get put out, it's not because they were doing nothing in there, they spent the time making the next game. I am the only engine programmer on this project, and I'll be able to handle all the stuff on this. If it were a big 3D game, I'd need a lot more support. HS: About 18 months of your time on this when we're done? V: About that. At half-time. HS: And another year of developing back-end tools. J: And we're wildly variable on the amount of time we spend on KOL vs. West of Loathing. And that's why it's hard to say "what is the budget" and "how many do we need to sell?" The nice thing is that this engine is wicked flexible and we could make another game with almost no intervention from Victor. Which is sad. V: I would show up and just be doing things. HS: There are so many things we could add -- one-off minigames. There's never a point when we don't need... J: I mean if we had to. V: Or if you just want to build more content, when it's time to make more DLC. J: Yeah, the engine isn't a bunch of cowboy-specific stuff in it. HS: We don't have to recoup all of our costs here, because there can always be another game. And we can point people towards KOL, too. V: But you have to have analytics to tell you where people came from? HS: We're terrible at that. J: It would have been helpful for all the years we're doing this.

__________________ Last edited by schlurp; Thu, Jul 21st, 2016 at 11:05 PM .