Probably Designed: Conversation with Brian Long and Dan DiIorio

Playful Work

— 32 min read

This week's episode is a continuation of our conversation with Dan DiIorio of Luck Be A Landlord and Maze Mice, and Brian Long, dev and designer of Ballionaire. Our conversation kicks off from my, at this point, repeated take about roguelike deck builders and board games, and leads us somewhere in the zone of the vibe-y-ness of PUBG.

Harry: One thing I think is interesting, and this has come up in the couple conversations I've had, is there's this space of what we call roguelike deck builders. And my take is that, in a lot of ways, these games feel to me a lot like single-player board games.

And so a lot of the mechanics are really, it's just a lot like a board game in a lot of ways. One thing that's interesting about both Ballionaire, and I guess we could probably talk a bit about Maze Mice in this space, is that there is this crossover into kind of more real-time, more video game-y sort of mechanics that aren't just purely turn-based, board game mechanics. And I think that is a different space slightly than just a pure roguelike deck builder. But I would be curious to hear what the two of you think about that. Because that, to me, that feels like that connects to some of the challenge or the complexity that you see, Brian, because there's just a different dimension that you have to add in. It's not just a closed, fixed interaction between the triggers. There's like, they're just bouncing all over the place, right? Like, there's these unforeseen interactions that come from this real-time physics engine.

Brian: Yeah, I think the first thing that comes to mind, I guess on that topic, was the kinetic part of the game was actually kind of like a design constraint almost, or like challenge I gave myself. Like I mentioned, you know, I was just much more greatly into board games or board game-like video games.

And I don't mean digital adaptations, I really don't care for those, but I mean games that clearly had kind of like board game DNA in them, whether it was intentional or not. And so, you know, Ballionaire was born out of a game jam from the Eggplant Discord, you know, the Eggplant running the UFO 50 podcast right now.

And so because it was born out of a game jam, I had a thematic prompt, which was "Loving Monday." So that was like perfect for me. That's why Ballionaire kind of has a seven-day payment schedule, because it was meant to model days of the week, just purely due to the theme of the game jam. The name of the theme. But I just to kind of, to break myself out of like the, I don't know, just board game-ification of all my thoughts, I just, I decided to pretty randomly force myself to make a game that had motion in it. And there was just a thought process that ultimately led to, you know, this Plinko style of gameplay. Didn't start there, but it ended up there. But that was something I challenged myself with basically just to see if something different would shake out of my head because I tended to go towards primarily like too complicated, just very kind of static, like a board game can be static in the sense it just sits there until you do something. So that was a challenge I gave myself. And I, you know, luckily it worked out. In terms of considering the dimension of kinetics, you know, that honestly it was just kind of like a fun zone for me.

I definitely designed much more in the interactions as printed on the triggers, if you will, like the kind of a very deliberate design space.

Harry: Like when actually something hits something, the specified interaction, right?

Brian: Yeah, I mean, like, there's not a lot of design in the game that's like if the ball travels to the right or, you know, if the ball goes back to the top. The kineticism is more of effect than a condition, I guess? An output versus an input. I mean, we could talk about input and output randomness for sure.

I mean, Ballionaire is very heavy in the output randomness for better or worse. Yeah, so I don't know if I have a ton to say there. It was sort of like, it's just fun to see the stuff move.

In the early prototypes of Ballionaire, the ones back when it had just the Twemoji graphics, and you can see this gameplay still on YouTube, there were some triggers that were like, "if blah is bonked after blah." And there was obviously always a question of like, oh, is it immediately bonked or like, ever bonked after it? And also, it's absolutely impossible to perceive the sequential relationship when there's multiple balls going and what if like the things bonked by different ball, you know?

And...

Dan: Don't feed them after midnight.

Brian: Yeah, exactly. And so the design solution to this that came to me was the idea of carryable. So instead of saying, "blah is bonked after blah," and then the player having to just sort of like track this invisible state in their head while they're watching chaos unfold, that concept turned into there's a trigger that gives you a thing you carry.

So, you know you've met the criteria. You've bonked a thing and then there's another trigger that says, you know, "if you're carrying this thing, then blah happens." And that was effectively a way to encode this relationship of sequentially without making the player like track sequentially in their head.

Because carrying something from point A to point B is easier than saying like, "I hit A and then eventually I hit B," if that makes sense?

Harry: It's like a UX affordance.

Brian: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, plus it looked silly and you know, that was just a happy accident that I put no cap on carrying. And so you just end up with these like massive like conga lines that's even in the, in one trailer.

So, yeah.

Dan: The thing I was thinking a lot regarding the board game video game thing is, especially with what you were just describing with the carry effect was, like, I used to play a lot of Magic: The Gathering and I just kind of hate playing in paper. Or on tabletop, just because there's so much to keep track of and in digital, it just does everything for you.

And it makes me think about like, what's a good example? If I were playing a physical version of Luck Be A Landlord, like out of cards, it would be a nightmare because I would have to keep track of so many things and like randomize so many things myself and shuffle so many times and put counters on things and take counters off of things or shuffle them, et cetera.

With video games and digital, it just does that for you. And a lot of it is sort of like player, I don't know what I would call it, but like...

Harry: Like convenience or...

Dan: Yeah. But like it's something the player gets to enjoy, but they don't have to actually keep track of. Like in your carry effect? I think it's definitely cleaner with it carrying something.

And it does create that, you know, that cool visual. And I think the visual's really important because then the player's like, "Oh, I have this thing." But if it was then like, you bonk it and then it's like, "Okay, press A to carry the thing." That would just be terrible, you know?

Brian: Hmm.

Harry: I think that's an interesting part of the design space for these roguelike deck builders. Not only is it more of a single-player board game, but then there's also this design space where the complexity would be too complicated for the player to manage.

Like, you get into these super grindy Euro-style board games, right? And you've got so many tokens on the board and some people just kind of love that. But there gets to be a point where any reasonable player is like, "It took us 45 minutes to set up for this hour round of this board game."

And of course, digital solves that for you. The computer just does it, which I think opens up a whole lot of design space. It also adds the opportunity for your complexity to not have as much cost as it would otherwise potentially.

But I don't know if how that plays in or if that's actually an important thing to talk about.

Dan: Yeah, the one point I want to make sure I get in is that I think a lot about why is it a video game for my design? Could it be a book, could it be a movie, sort of thing. Like you look at, I don't know, The Last of Us and a lot of people just watch the show and it's like, it could have been a show.

It's also a video game. But there's lots of games that don't really need to be games or video games, and I think that's a big missed opportunity of like, we have all this digital space to play around in where we can do all sorts of different things. Or like the physicality of rolling a dice, for example, can be different depending on if you're digitally rolling a dice.

Harry: That's so much better in real life, right? To me that feels like one of the draws of Ballionaire, right? Is that you've replicated that physicality of a die roll in a way that's really rewarding in the digital space.

And so it's like the way that the die is like just, and kind of just bounces off that six and onto the three. You kind of get that feeling in Ballionaire, which is a different kind of video game programming. It's a different kind of video game, but it's also a very rewarding quality of the media.

Dan: And at the same time, if you had to put every single physical permutation in Ballionaire on a die, the die would be impossible to roll. You know, like it has to be a video game.

Brian: I definitely have a very strong, like a hyper, orthodox view on this notion of video game versus board game. And I really like the way you put it, Dan, of like, you know, what kind of form should this be? There are a lot of games that should just have been a movie. And I say this as a person that doesn't enjoy narrative in games. You know, like, why are you forcing me to participate in this? It could have just been a movie.

But I want to talk about analog versus digital. Kind of going back to my earlier comment about how, like, I don't like digital adaptations of board games, even if they're well implemented, say Dune Imperium or something. I really feel like every specific game has its correct format or medium. And just because you can do whatever analog board game doesn't mean that it should. I think you can even see there are certain kinds of games that have like a long history here.

For example, I would say that the origins of war gaming, and I'm thinking like seventies and eighties. You know, war simulation games, hex, chits, stacks, that kind of stuff. They were simplified.

You know, you really had to do this by hand, because the computer just simply couldn't handle the level of complexity and the scale of the simulation that you're running for the Battle of the Bulge or whatever. But over time, you know, computers become more than capable of handling that. Yet, for whatever reason this format of the game persists, a box with the map inside of it that you unfold and it takes up, you need like three folding tables to fit the map and special tweezers to pick up the... you know, I get that people like that.

But I do think that there's a correct format for that because you might find the act of moving those things around and having physicality enjoyable. But the affordances for it are far greater on a computer. But then at the same time, you see these really, really clever minifications of war games, and I'm thinking maybe like Valor is like World War, Blitzkrieg.

And that's great as a board game because it's very compact, it's very discrete. I could easily imagine someone making a video game of that sort of thing, but what's gained by going into the digital medium? Other than the fact that like you can, I don't know, dip in and out of it quickly, whatever.

But there's sort of a joy in just kind of having the world laid out in front of you in a tiny piece of paper with a die and the physicality comes with that. So, I don't know, people are free to do what they want, but just for me personally, I feel like whenever I see a game, there absolutely is a question of is this in the right medium?

And it typically, to me, feels bad to play a game that's in the wrong medium.

Harry: So there's this aspect of ritual as well. Sometimes people really get into the ritual of unfolding the map and pushing the two tables together and ordering the pizzas and, you know, kind of this whole thing, which might be part of the experience for folks.

I was going to say that I'm at the opposite end as Dan is, I think with regard to Magic because I love paper Magic, and I'm middling on digital Magic. So I love the ritual of sitting at a table with eight players and tearing the packs open and doing the draft and like knowing that the card pool's there.

And I'm going to sit in the same room and play with folks. Like there's something about that that makes that the right format for me. And it could be, it could just be player preference in some cases, and it's great then that we have the affordance for different folks.

Brian: One thing that it made me think of was kind of the scale of numbers in games, and actually I'm curious, Dan. Something I prefer, I guess in games is these very discrete, kind of chunky changes. I mean, to put it concretely, like roguelites do tend to have more of the style of, you know, something is 1.1x more or gain, you know, these percentages.

So the scale of numbers in games is interesting, and I think a recent example that demonstrates this is, and I haven't played it, but something that I understand about the board game-ified Slay the Spire is that one of the main changes in it, besides the fact that it's co-op, is the scale of the numbers changed.

Presumably to make them more manageable and more pithy. And I feel like I would say that Luck Be A Landlord operates on small numbers. Obviously they scale up, but the initial rent is very low. The initial symbols, you know, are giving you a couple coins or a couple dollars or whatever.

I found that space like extremely difficult to work in. And I think small numbers is like notoriously hard to design for. I think that's like a meme or something like that. And so I immediately had to kind of go to these blown out base numbers in Ballionaire just to have, I don't know, breathing room for lack of a better word.

So I'm, yeah, I'm actually kind of curious. You know, obviously small numbers work much better in board games and just in terms of the level of effort required to comprehend them and manage them physically on the table. But I do kind of see Luck Be A Landlord as a... it's small number based, even if the scores grow high. Kind of curious if you agree with that classification even, first of all, and how you found designing in that space where like one trigger could be 2x the value of the other one, but 2x means plus one in that case.

Dan: Hmm. The small numbers was definitely intentional. A lot of that is from Magic: The Gathering compared to, say, another game I played like Yu-Gi-Oh where it's like, "Oh, I have a thousand attack points." I think some, in some instances it'll be like, multiples of 50 are about as small as you go, with some exceptions, but like at that point it's kind of like, why are we not just doing multiples of five?

It just feels silly to me. I think, with Maze Mice, actually, I remember I at one point had to multiply a bunch of numbers by 10. One of the effects, it just made sense to be a 0.5 damage sort of thing, but I didn't want to have decimals because that just gets kind of confusing.

I eventually had ended up doing that a little bit anyway, but for the most part it was like, what if everything just did 10 damage and this thing did five instead of everything doing one and this thing doing 0.5. That's one of the main reasons I try to stick to small numbers. I try to avoid decimals unless there are multipliers, in which case, even then, for a long time I was trying to get away from "this gives 1.5 times something," that just kind of feels kind of weird to me.

For a long time, a lot of the items in prototyping gave I think like 30% more, which rounds up to most things that give three, giving one more anyway, or something like that. There was some instance where I'm like, I should just make this give one more instead of giving 30% more. Because that's basically what it does anyway.

And it just reads so much better. Yeah, it just, it was a matter of does it make sense? And it kind of adds to the feeling of, I'm gaining a lot of little things, but they all add up, which is definitely a feeling that I wanted to go with.

There are definitely some things that aren't technically, mathematically accurate that are in the game. Like if a number goes negative, I don't multiply it just because that would suck because it's like, "Oh, I'm a negative three and I'll go, no, it gives 10 times more. Oh God, I'm negative thirty," you know? And another thing is I apply multipliers after adding.

Brian: Mm.

Dan: Which is not, you know, order of operations, but just feels so much better if you do it that way. So there's a lot of things like that which are definitely intentional. Just sometimes trial and error of like, this feels better.

I actually think I have an easier time designing with small numbers because they're easier for me to wrap my head around. Like if something gives one or two coins, like there's no thought of well, should it give 1.4? Like no one really, it's easier to just eliminate a lot of options of, like, it shouldn't give 1.4, it's one or two.

If it's between 10 and 20, there's 14. It's not an unreasonable thing to think about, but 1.4 is. So for me it's like just eliminate possibilities. It gives one or two, not one, or 1.1 or 1.2, et cetera.

Brian: Hmm.

Harry: And then it ends up being kind of a design constraint.

Dan: Definitely.

Harry: If going from one to two causes a problem mechanically, then you look at fixing the mechanic rather than changing the...

Dan: Yeah.

Yeah. Or just, you know, if going to one to two causes a problem, maybe everything else needs to change. I mean, it's definitely a Dota mindset of like, don't nerf something above everything else, which I do try to live by. I don't always adhere to it, unfortunately, but I do love the concept of, you know, make things weak at first.

If something is supposed to be at a balanced level of six or like give six coins, and you start out having it give four, players respond much better to it being changed to six than if you started at eight and you have to change it to six.

So really what I'm trying to say is I try to start small and then buff rather than start big and then nerf, just because players respond a lot better to that. And oftentimes I just, I'm at the right level anyway, even though I thought I was small. So it's like, oh, okay, maybe it just stays there.

Brian: I feel like Luck Be A Landlord executes the first rent payment so well, like the drama of the first payment. Maybe, you know, I don't know where my skill level is at with the game. I know that I find essences hard to use, so I know that I'm not like a high level, high skill level player.

I think I've hit that kind of like maybe intermediate skill level ceiling. But I find that I can still lose on the first rent occasionally, and I can really feel the drama of choosing, pay me now, pay me later symbols. I feel like the small numbers of that has to play into it.

I know for Ballionaire it's a bit different because I can't even guarantee that I'm going to hit a symbol on the way down the board, so it feels a little sloppier in Ballionaire. I really love the feeling of the first rent still being dramatic and really like, due to the player's own agency and what symbols did they choose?

Were they just too aggressive in like longer term payoff or, you know, I love that I can still lose the first rent and kind of know why too in Luck Be A Landlord and not be mad about it. And I do think small numbers plays into that.

Dan: Yeah I've seen players start the game and say, "Oh, I don't need any of these. I'll skip." And then they very quickly learn like, "Oh, I need to take something early on."

Maybe there could be a little more guidance there, but I think if someone's willing to learn it, they'll figure out like, okay, I need to take something.

Harry: Do you still lose the first rent sometimes, Dan?

Dan: Sometimes, I mean, if I'm getting greedy and I take some zero or negative one symbols. Yeah, that can happen. I've seen players in my Discord though, with insane win streaks. So like on the first floor, which I guess the first rent payment is kind of the same on floor one to floor twenty, because you don't have any items and there's not much of a change.

But yeah, there are players with like, gotten 777 wins and gotten the 777 win streak.

Brian: Oh my gosh.

Dan: There's some, some people are crazy, but you know, if you build it, they'll break it.

Harry: That's so wild.

Dan: And like, I think it's good that players can get such high win rates on the first floor. Floors being the difficulty levels for those who don't know. And on the 20th floor, which is usually where I play and balance, win rates are a lot lower. Like the best players, usually only like some of the best players I've seen achieve maybe like a 40 to 50% win rate. Which could be, I could probably tweak that to be higher.

But I think it's fine? Because I think the different tiers of difficulty mean players, if they want to, they'll just stop at a certain floor or play on floor one. And there's no aspect of like, "Oh, I'm cheating, I'm playing easy." I think a lot of players hate changing their difficulty levels to make them easier.

Which I think is maybe a little silly, but I, I'm probably, whatever gamer brain is in there, like I'm, I am there too of like, "Oh, I'm on the hardest difficulty. Let me just, let me just see if I can beat this. I don't feel good. No, I'll just have an easier time if I go down like one tier." But I think the solution of oh, you unlock this difficulty, you can play it if you want and if it's too hard, just keep playing.

I think that is probably an okay solution.

Harry: I think there's something interesting there and it has to do with high variance games, right? So, I feel like I misquote the statistic, but I remember reading, or maybe I misremember reading, that the difference in like win rates in Magic, for instance, for like very high level players like pro tour players ends up being like 65%? Like the really, really best players have like a 60, 65% win rate. And a bad player might have like a 45% win rate, but so that means that there's a huge amount of variance. So you're the best player, you're playing the best deck, you're still losing more than a third of the time, which is actually, I think really interesting.

And it's part of the drama that chance brings into the game. The drama that just drawing bad or just running bad kind of brings into this game. I think both of these games play into that. Probably Maze Mice less so, but you can just get like, probably like a just a bad spawn and just lose, right?

Dan: You can, but there's enough warning that I think players, if they are just avoiding things, can avoid things. I kind of wanted Maze Mice to be a little less luck based, at least in terms of do you win or not? Yeah, maybe made it a little too easy. I'm not really sure.

Harry: Do you see these players that are just like super highly skilled at Maze Mice and just...

Dan: Um, how do I put this? Maybe see the opposite where players, no offense to them at all, are making not optimal choices, but still can win. Which is I think maybe okay? I'm not sure. Luck Be A Landlord's a lot harder to make poor choices and still win at least once the difficulties get a little higher.

Floor one, you can get kind of lucky and squeak by, even if you are adding a symbol every spin, for example. It was a hard thing to teach players, you should probably skip sometimes. Because a lot of players like taking things every choice. I know I do in Slay the Spire a lot of the time. But yeah, Maze Mice is kind of a different beast. I don't know. It was a very different place to design in. I say it was because it's basically ready for 1.0. But it's like if in Luck Be A Landlord, you could just move left to not hit the landlord. Like, that's just, it's just very, it's such a different thing of like, "Hey, if you press this arrow key differently, you don't have to pay rent this time. You might have to pay it later," but it's a very different design space that honestly, I think I had a more trouble wrapping my head around because it was, it is not as much of a game I think I enjoy playing as Luck Be A Landlord. I still like it, but I definitely enjoy playing it less, which is something I'm going to definitely have to figure out for the next game. But for now, I made something I'm happy with, but I can still see some cracks around it.

Harry: Is that because it's more like, adrenaline-y or more like real time-y?

Dan: Yeah, the time only moving when you move. It was definitely something that came later. Maybe it was because I didn't enjoy just the franticness of it.

And that's good for me to learn too, from my design spaces I probably will want to stay in. But even just the having to move around is a lot of input compared to Luck Be A Landlord where you're just clicking. You know, you click spin, you add something, or don't, you click spin, you add something, you don't.

Like, every turn of pressing a different arrow key is way more inputs, like if we're talking just buttons in Maze Mice, than a whole Luck Be A Landlord run just because of how many turns you have to make. And that I kind of got away from that with the next, the second maze, which is just kind of left turns only, or right turns only.

Which players somewhat didn't like. I kind of wanted to be a brain-off sort of thing, but I don't know. It's weird. It's probably far away from what I was trying to do. I don't know. I'll definitely have a postmortem on it, but it's still a little fresh in my mind. So still forming the thoughts there.

Brian: I feel like roguelikes and roguelites both have different blends of skill testing and power fantasies. I guess I do feel like survivor-likes are more in the power fantasy realm and the skill testing in the sense that there's... I guess when the game ships, there is a static kind of like best answer, right?

Like, this build will do the most DPS and protect against, you know, have the most regen and I'm talking about this stuff in the abstract now, just sort of in the realm survivor-likes. In the act of play, the skill expression is in discovering the builds that are optimal in that way, I suppose.

And the power fantasy is the inevitable poll creep, both inevitable in one run because you get more stuff, inevitable in the meta progressions that tend to exist because you're just constantly gifted enhancements. I guess I feel like survivor-likes tend to be heavy on the power fantasy side.

And just in terms of the balance, lower on the skill expression side. And I feel like a lot of roguelikes tend to be, you know, heavier on the skill expression than the power fantasy. So I don't know. Do you think that like Luck Be A Landlord versus Maze Mice reflects those two kinds of balances?

I'm curious.

Dan: I honestly hadn't really thought about that. Kind of just for Maze Mice I knew I wanted to do a survivor-like that is in a maze. I don't know. I kind of just, maybe it's a little formulaic, but different enough that players might get turned off a little bit or like the actual movement in, say Vampire Survivors is eight-way directional movement and you can kind of just move around.

It doesn't really matter where you go, you just pick stuff up. Maybe the sharp corners of Maze Mice are a little too much. Like I can go usually two directions, depending on which way, if I'm going forward or backward. And then if there's a turn, I can make another direction. You can't just kind of move the stick around and just see what happens.

So I don't know, maybe there's a little something to that.

Brian: In Maze Mice for me personally I felt like the gameplay, maybe there's just kind of two levels to it. When you first play it, it is kind of moment to moment, am I going left or right? But over time, really what I'm doing is discovering, at least in the case of the scenarios I've played through, discovering these like larger patterns of like, "Oh, I can get this beam weapon and then this guy will kind of chase me and I can go faster than him and keep like looping in a circle and curate like a little kill vortex."

And so, like these moment to moment decisions were just their own process of discovery of the larger pattern in the sense that like the moment to moment drafts in a roguelike, or a deck builder or what have you, a blank builder, are discovering the larger patterns of the builds and the archetypes, that sort of thing.

So there's kind of two levels of mastery almost, or two levels of expression. One is, it's a process of discovery, I guess, like small decisions turn into discovery of like larger overall patterns that becomes then that higher level conceptual play. I guess it's not a question, it's like how I encountered the maze running part of the game. The motion part of Maze Mice.

Harry: It's interesting because as a player, the Vampire Survivors thing, I don't really enjoy. I actually do enjoy having that other kind of skill expression. You know, it feels like I'm being tricked that my joystick works or something. Does it matter that much?

I get pickups. I don't know if it does matter that much but I feel more engaged with something where I'm actually doing this different kind of active skill expression, like navigating the maze or you know, getting a bit of Ms. Pac-Man in with my Vampire Survivors as well.

It's probably just like a player preference thing because some players really just want to be in the system building power fantasy. And some players really enjoy the moment to moment, right?

Brian: I actually do believe it does matter, and the reason for that is going way back, talking about the brain tickles earlier. One of these brain tickles I've identified is, these all have kind of simple names and it's cleaning. And I think the idea is that there's something extremely satisfying about just like cleaning stuff and I mean, not like organizing room per se, but just like having a bunch of stuff and like wiping it off.

And I really think Vampire Survivors, like one of the core brain tickles of it is that act of like cleaning the screen. I think it's really similar, like a game like Leaf Blower Revolution. You're blowing the leaf off the screen. I think that if you just stood still and monsters came to you in Vampire Survivors, it wouldn't feel like cleaning.

I don't know what it would feel like, but it wouldn't feel like cleaning. I feel like the act that you have to go, you have to go pick up the gems you've dropped, you've got to move around to get into the more satisfying, thicker waves of monsters. You know, assuming you're powered to feed them, you're effectively cleaning that space.

And there's just something like deep in our brains about, you know, wiping a space down, basically. I think even Pac-Man itself is like an expression of that. You're like cleaning the, cleaning that one dot in the corner drives me crazy, you know? And then, I suppose there's something similar, maybe not to the same degree as Pac-Man or Vampire Survivors.

There might be a cleaning aspect to Maze Mice as well, given it's kind of like Pac-Man-esque vibes. But yeah, I think that's kind of a brain tickle that I think exists that you see in games. And so I do, I do think it's actually important to be able to move around in Vampire Survivors.

Not that there aren't games, like, so Heretic's Fork is like basically a Vampire Survivors where you don't move. It's really fun, but when I play it, I do find myself kind of feeling like I want to like move my gun and like, go get out there and, like, vacuum basically. And the, you know, PowerWash Simulator, stuff like that.

There's lots of expressions of this across genres even. Just the act of cleaning. So that's my, that's my 2 cents.

Harry: Interesting. I guess my intuition or just maybe just my misreading of it is I feel like I should be dodging or I should be, you know, maneuvering or when I have the little character on the screen that I'm empowered to move around. It's either dodging or exploring that's where my brain goes.

And so, I think that's a really interesting take and I'll take it to my next run on Vampire Survivors. Is that I'm cleaning.

Brian: Yeah.

Harry: I'm wiping, I'm wiping the field clean.

Brian: It's a clean 'em up. And that's a genre we...

Harry: Clean 'em up. Clump up or whatever.

We call it clump. Do either of you have hot topics that you're interested in kind of digging into?

Brian: You know, one thing that came to mind, it's a question to Dan is kind of like, you know, our games did take different approaches in terms of EA versus non-EA. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that at all, just in general. I could ask a more specific question, which would basically be in the form of like: what was it like to develop this game in EA? A game that's so micro, I guess, each piece of content being so small, right? It's not like, "Oh, there's a whole new character in Elden Ring." It's like, "Yeah, I added a toaster."

You know? It's like I just found that like very difficult to manage, like building in the open, when Ballionaire was a prototype and so I didn't do EA and blah, blah, blah. But you know, obviously Luck Be A Landlord did EA.

Dan: Yeah. I think, in terms of Steam early access, I wouldn't do it again. Mainly just it's maybe a little too out in the open and it probably eats into sales, I think from a financial standpoint, it's probably just not the right move these days, just because of how Steam floats games.

Harry: Has that changed?

Dan: I think it's always been a little bit of a hard thing to do. Launching game early access and then having people still want to pay attention to it, especially if initial reviews are kind of lackluster. Which didn't happen with Luck Be A Landlord, but it could very easily happen.

I think I still am interested in developing games alongside a community. I would probably use playtesting more than a Steam early access if I were to do it again. But one thing was Luck Be A Landlord launched into early access because I had to get it out there. I would've liked maybe a little more time, but I needed to put something out into the world.

Both from an artistic and financial standpoint. But you know, with Maze Mice, it's only going to be in early access for about two months. And in retrospect, there are a few things that definitely the community has helped me tweak and I've been able to figure out. But they're not things that are super, what's the word? Like the game still would be fine if I just launched it in 1.0 where it is in 1.0. There are things the players definitely would've caught, but I think it's not significant enough that Steam early access really makes sense. Like I don't want to be like, how do I put this?

A lot of my design is, "Hey, just trust you're a good designer and just make something." Like, I try really not to worry about like, is this good? If I worry too much about, am I doing the right thing, I'll never make anything. It's like, I think there's like an old story or something. I'm not sure if it's a true story or whatever, but like a pottery teacher says to their class, half of you are going to spend the whole semester making one pot and make it perfect.

The other half are going to make 20 pots and just do whatever. And after that you know, then they have a final and whoever did the 20 pots make these crazy cool things and whoever made the one pot are like, "Oh, I can make another thing, but it took me so long just make this one thing that I don't really know what to do."

So it's definitely a concept of just make something. Just, if you're a photographer, take a picture. If you're an artist, paint a painting. You know, you'll cut your teeth on it, you'll figure stuff out. So I think early access and having the precedent of, you know, will players like this is scary.

And probably just, you know, making something is, for lack of a better term, just something that needs to be done. If you're going to make, I mean, it's not stupid, but like, you need to make something to make something. But you know, sitting around thinking about how to make something isn't making something, you know what I mean?

Brian: Absolutely.

Dan: I mean, it's part of it, but you know.

Brian: Yeah, I think on EA like something I was worried about for Ballionaire was the very real experience of dopamine exhaustion. I found, you know, when I played the game myself after like 30, 45 minutes, like I would just be physically exhausted, I think from just so much happening on the screen.

I don't know if that's an uncommon experience or not, but also, yeah, I think I was just really worried about people... The downside, I suppose to these games that I think are like just distillations of a game loop. In terms of like, make a choice, watch the outcome, make a choice, watch the outcome.

I think that like, you can kind of like burn through them faster than a game where you're forced to travel for 30 minutes and then have a boss fight you, you know, do, and a quick load a bunch of times to get through. I think in some way I feel like these kind of more compact games are just pithier.

And so you can kind of, I don't know, get wary of them faster. And so like, I was just really worried about just exhausting a player base by going through EA and you know, especially relative to like, sort of magnitudes of changes that would be coming, which was just sort of like incremental content.

Because knowing like the development plan for Ballionaire, it wasn't going to be like, "Well we're introducing this character class then that character class." I mean, there's boards, but ultimately it was a pretty linear kind of like content march.

So, yeah, I guess I was just kind of worried about like burning people out through EA.

But I don't know, I suspect Luck Be A Landlord's similar to Ballionaire with respect to the tightness of its gameplay loop and that kind of thing, and the dopamine and all that. But it seems like, you know, EA did well for Luck Be A Landlord from what I can tell, looking externally and didn't burn people out.

I know it didn't burn me out, you know, personally. That's interesting. So. Yeah, that's kind of why I avoided it. It wasn't really for any other reason than that of just sort of like, I didn't want to lose players before I finished the game, if that makes sense.

Dan: Yeah. And I think there's enough players that wait on early access these days that are just like, "Oh, that looks interesting on wishlist, but I'm going to wait until it's done." That, like, I wouldn't be super worried about that aspect. I do still think it's the right move not to do early access on Steam.

I definitely think playtesting is smart, but just the way Steam algorithm floats games now, it just like, it sucks to talk about the financials, but like, you know, you don't really get a second launch because you won't be in popular upcoming because you can't set your release date a second time. So you set it the first time, then it launches and it's an early access, so it's not as popular, so you don't get enough of a boost.

So, I don't know, it's hard, but games are hard.

Brian: Yeah, selling them is definitely...

Dan: Yeah.

Brian: Just prayer for rain situation.

Dan: Oh, I remember something I wanted to say though. The whole like traveling 30 minutes to go fight a boss, I think respecting players' time, and don't get me wrong, traveling 30 minutes to fight a boss can be fun. It can be atmospheric and relaxing, but I think a lot of players, especially these days, especially for like a mobile game or like a game in the roguelike deck builder genre, are kind of just like, just let me do something.

Just let me hit a button, have something happen. You know, and Luck Be A Landlord, you're there. It does something. Ballionaire. You're there, you drop, put a peg down, things fall. Great. I was playing, I got Keep Driving on sale recently.

I'm not sure if you've played that. And I just could not get into it.

No offense to anyone, you know, worked on it, but like, it just wasn't for me. It was just like, this is really cool atmospherically. I don't really know what I'm doing. And I didn't really know what kind of gameplay it was going to be. And it kind of similar feeling to me of like, I can't place this into a genre in my mind.

And not in a good way of like, this is so unique. It's just like, I don't really know what I'm doing. You know? I don't really want to have the energy to learn this either.

Brian: I do find myself constantly kind of like searching out games for atmosphere, and I literally just did buy Keep Driving, I think like last week and I've just started to crack into it and so far I've not yet had, you know, the atmosphere-ification that I was hoping for, but in general, I mean, it's no slight to the game because in general that is like entirely elusive to me.

In games in terms of that, by atmosphere, I'm interpreting it as like an ambient atmosphere. I mean, obviously every game has an atmosphere or vibe, but like, I meant that kind of like, hmm, feeling the place that you're in, I suppose. I feel like one of the, strangely enough, one of the places I did find it was in PUBG.

I tend to play like a very like passive style of like hiding out to the...

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I just hide in a bathtub.

Brian: Yeah, well what I like to do is just get in a vehicle and just vibe, just drive around and especially playing like doubles with a friend. It's just like a road trip game. Like half the game is you're in the car just talking and then like, "Oh crap, I just got headshot."

You know? So. That's like one of the most vibe-y games I've ever found, honestly. Or atmosphere games I've ever found. And I've even searched for that same thing in other like extraction type whatever, survival and just DayZ sort of, although it's just such a brutal game. It's so unforgiving, you know?

Dan: Yeah. It sounds to me like you're playing PUBG as DayZ.

Brian: Basically. Yeah. PUBG is like a DayZ where I last longer, I guess.

Dan: Yeah.

Brian: And I think going back to your earlier comment, it's like, atmosphere is so much more accessible in movies or even music. I do listen to like a lot of like ambient, you know, sort of type music and that transports me to a place much more than video games tend to.

Dan: Like I, when I play games, I almost always have some sort of podcast or video going just, I don't know, it's an ADHD thing, but like, so people say, "Oh, this is a good podcast game." And I'm like, "Oh, that's every game." You know, like, so for me, like being atmospheric, like, "Oh wow, this speech is so beautiful. I'm watching the waves go," or whatever.

Sometimes that can happen. I'll like pause when I'm listening to like, okay, this is very pretty. But half the time it's like I'm just, I need so much going at once to keep me, you know...

Brian: Yeah. Well that's interesting. I mean, I, it's as you mentioned that realizing that like, when I'm saying atmosphere what I really mean is like just focusing, it's actually creating focus on the sort of like lack of stimulation and usually that is repellent to me. I just want the decisions like smashing into my face, but some games that just are able to evoke just focus without stimulating me, and that's just like very hard to do.

Dan: Yeah.

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