Gaming hosts Josh, Ryan and AceofShame are back with an INCREDIBLE episode. We sit down with the lead developer and Co-Founder of Odd Bug Studios to chat the recent release of their hit game Tales of Iron 2. Ever wondered what goes into the making of a video game? How about the pressure and thrill of a game release? Want to know what games the people who make games play? We get the inside scoop on it ALL. It’s an episode like no other, filled with an inside look at indie gaming, game development and video game chat from the Video Gamers Podcast! Check out Tails of Iron 2 here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2473480/Tails_of_Iron_2_Whiskers_of_Winter/ Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Ol’ Jake, Disratory and Gaius Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Tales of Iron 2 about?
Hello, fellow gamers, and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Tales of Iron 2 is a gritty, dark, fun, and challenging game with a beautiful art style. But how did these rat heroes and frog villains come to be? As gamers, we often wonder... Who thought of this? And today we're going to find out about that and a whole lot more about the game. But first, some introductions are in order.
I am your host, Josh. And joining me, he may have big ears and he's hairy, but he's no rat. It's Ryan. Always with the ears, man. Always with the, at least he didn't call me Dumbo. I actually looked this up. There is a Dumbo rat. I was looking up different species of rats before the show and, and literally there's a Dumbo rat.
And then I went, I don't think anybody is going to know what I'm referencing there. So I just went with the classic.
Give me a sword. Give me a sword. I'm ready to go.
Oh, man. And joining us, he's the guy that set the world record for most mentions of Tales of Iron 2 over a span of six months.
It's Ace of Shame. You know, I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should have got an advertisement cut at some point. Yeah. It's like, write me in, write me in. Oh, yeah. I mean, I got people going in left and right at one point.
Hey, I know you got John to pick this game up, and then John fell in love with it. So that's at least one extra sale right there for Ace. And joining us, he's the man who helped found Oddbug Studios, the splinter to our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the one, the only, Jack Bennett!
Hey guys, thanks for having me. It's fun to be here.
Thank you so much for joining us, Jack. So for everybody that is listening, Jack is one of the co-founders of Oddbug Studios, the fine men and women that brought us Tales of Iron and Tales of Iron 2. Tales of Iron 2 just released in the last week or so, and we are going to be diving into all things related to that. So Jack, thank you so much for giving your time to join us today.
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Chapter 2: What was the release experience like for the developers?
I mean, from the time it was announced to, you know, up to the release and then after the release, playing it and things like that. So it's like, you know, gamers absolutely will tell people when something is great. But what we also tend to do is tell people when we don't like something.
And so you mentioned kind of that preview period where you send the game out to people and say, hey, play the game. And then there's a review embargo usually. And then people get to kind of start saying, well, here's what I think about the game. What is that like for you guys? I mean, you can't please everybody. And so you're going to see the good reviews that you go...
yeah we did it man like this is great people are loving this but like how do you handle the negative reviews at the same time yeah i mean it's it's whenever you create anything whether it's games or music or film whatever there's gonna be probably get reviews on the podcast as well there's always going to be yeah there's always going to be someone that doesn't like something about something like yeah like you say you're never going to please everyone but as developers we're
that negative feedback is actually quite useful to us because we can see what maybe we can patch in and fix at a later date or things that people haven't enjoyed that we can move away from in other games going forward. So although the negative reviews on the day are like a knife in the heart and they're not enjoyable to read, they're actually very useful.
So once the emotion's gone out of it and you come back to it in a couple of weeks' time and you read through it, it's good to get that that feedback and because positive reviews are great to hear, obviously like they, but most of the time we, we, we get so many of the positive reviews. We know what the good stuff is. It's getting the negative reviews.
And like, again, negative reviews can sometimes be a load of swear words and nothing that you actually get useful, but negative reviews that actually explain what they didn't like and what they, you know, what they found hard or difficult or different. That's really useful to us as developers.
We get a look at that. As a podcast, like you said, we get reviews. The positive reviews make you feel good about what you're doing, but sometimes that constructive criticism, I'll call it, is how you get better. Like you said, if somebody's just trashing it, okay, maybe it's not for you at that point. But yeah, I do think that there's definitely some feedback that goes along with that.
Yeah.
Well, where are souls like? So we kind of expect quite a lot of that rage-induced negative. I can see myself in that situation being like, this is broken. They've done this deliberately. It's so unfair. You know, like just when you're hitting your head against that wall. So I understand where that point comes from. But going...
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Chapter 3: How do developers handle game reviews?
a good portion of it goes to bug fixing like no matter how hard we test a game there's five of us and i think the qa team is probably another that's 10 people playing a 15 to 20 hour game literally day one there was a bug that people were getting that we'd never seen before that opened an end game crypt within like two hours of the game started oh no no way
So like literally bugs coming out that you're with all of the best intentions we've tried to find. They just happen because once you go from 10 people playing it to thousands of people playing it, it's just the law of averages. You know, you're eventually going to get something that we've never seen.
So yeah, a good portion of it goes to bug fixing just to like stabilize it and make sure we're not, because again, like we've briefly touched on steam is driven by reviews, right? So like, if you're not in that very positive state, you're disappearing into the annals of steam, disappeared, gone. So you want to be in that 80% and above.
So you want to fix those bugs as quick as possible to keep that very positive review.
So that's actually something really interesting. And I don't think I didn't realize this anyway. And obviously, you know, review scores matter. But is there actually like a threshold where you go, hey, as long as we're over this number, we're good? I mean, obviously, everybody wants to be in the, you know, that 97% overwhelmingly positive kind of thing.
But that's a fantastic like thought there is 80% kind of that as long as we're above this, like we're good. But if we're under that, oh, no. Steve shoots you down.
Yeah, I mean, like, there's backwards, there's, like, you know, it's not a perfect science, but as long as you're in that mostly positive, which I think is 80% of stuff, then that is kind of what keeps you popping up for people and keeps you in the algorithm spaces. There's 8 out of 10s galore on Steam. If you're not an 8 out of 10, then you're something else, you know, you're not there, so...
you're better off you aim for the stars you know so yeah going back to that point we fix those bugs to try and keep that good percentage then other things are like quality of life so people for example Tales of Iron 2 people were saying they would like to scale the subtitles because sometimes in different languages
the subtitles were slightly too big or covered areas that they didn't want it to cover so you know we can add in quality of life things like that um a big percentage of it goes to you know pr stuff like you say like talking um to podcasts journalists whatever and i mean i say that lightly but there's five of us on the team so me being here it's like it's a fifth of the team just gone i imagine on a triple a game it's like yeah there's nothing but in reality it's different and then
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Chapter 4: What challenges do indie developers face?
Oh, I love tower defense.
Have you guys played it? Have you seen it? No, but now you've got me interested. It's published by Royal Fury. You build a little village side on, and you have to venture out to bring villagers back to become towers and that sort of thing, and then every night you get attacked.
so you're like trying to build out your village whilst you're getting attacked it's super simple but it's like that game i can jump into and play like 30 minutes and get my hit and you know i'm done yeah i mean like carrying on down that line i like i like hades as well like i've been playing yes as well yeah because another game still i've not beaten it but and i've played it a lot and i've just never beaten that final fight i don't know what it is
I get to Hades, like, I've been there like three times now, and every time he just wipes the floor with me, I'm like, I know I'm going to do it someday, but I might be empty.
I'm Elden Lord, I've beaten Melenia, and I can't beat Hades, man.
I don't know what's going on. Yeah. So I'd say they were like the, the Indies I keep coming back to because they give me that, you know, that hit of game when I'm, when I finished work and I can just play and go to bed and I've done, I've got my little, little hit out of it. But in like in the AAA space, I'd say God of War has probably been like, yeah. Yeah.
Is it something about us bald bearded men that relate to Kratos? God of War is one of my favorite games of all time.
Yeah, if you can see back there, he's got the Blades of Chaos right behind him.
Yeah, I'd say like we've got a war. It was like I played the originals back in the day, you know, PlayStation 2 and that. But this just felt like that moment.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of a lead game designer?
Like we literally all came out of university and just started a studio. So we've never had any like industry experience, you know? I love that. I love it. So I would say my role specifically is like, I'm the person that sews everything together. Like we have, we have one person making the environments. We have one person doing the characters and getting the combat work.
And so then I come along and I've written this story and I make the quest and I make the levels and I've plopped the artwork in here and I put their character in here and I get that all working. And then we have Dan then comes through and does like the balance pass on top of that. So I would say I'm the person that sews it together, but that's an abstract way of saying it.
So like, um, the easiest way to explain what, like my day to day is like, you know what, like a flow chart, you know, like you come in yes or no, this option, this option. That's what I look at. Like,
20 hours a day basically is that and like if I tried to explain if somebody had to come in and do my job it would be like right here's the layers of the onion that is this game because the way that Tales of Iron works is like Every encounter is an encounter graph. So there's a graph saying this guy turns on and does this attack. And then once you killed him, this happens.
Once you kill him, this happens. Quest complete. Encounter complete. Then above that, there is a quest graph that says once this encounter is completed, this encounter should turn on. Then you pick up this item and blah, blah, blah, blah. Once that's done, this quest is complete.
And then above that, there is a game graph that says once this quest is complete, these things turn on and these things turn off. and then there's another quest here, another quest here, and then once that's done, that's game complete. And then for Tales of I2, there was another graph on top of that that said, when this monster's been defeated, it will appear in this part of the world.
So there was like four layers of depth to this. I mean, I don't... I share at my screen and I can take you. I'd love to see this.
I have a feeling it's going to look like the world's biggest bush.
My brain is melting already.
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Chapter 6: What are Jack's favorite games and influences?
Okay, so listeners, it's like a highway of almost like text bars that look like circuit boards of a computer. It's just flowing stacked on stacked on stacked. Wait, green square.
Green square's got to be something good. Yeah, that's collected items, yeah. I knew it.
i know loot when i see it so that that is like just the the one graph but then each of these is an individual graph like that oh my goodness that is a quest and then on top of that i mean my pc might not open this right now whilst trying to stream it as well because
Even when I'm not streaming, this graph is a laggy monstrosity because this is the graph that's on top of all that that says each green square here is a quest, basically. So this is the graph on top of that that sets up.
How do you keep this organized? I feel like I would get so twisted up in knots and then be like, wait, where does this green line go again?
So when I started game development, I had hair down past my bum. so take from that what you want to oh wow oh man that's impressive man whilst I'm sharing my screen something that you might find interesting this is not my role but it's a
interesting way that i think we develop games that not a lot of people do develop games in that way it's because our games are all like 2d right they're all side scrolling right and then they have that intense like parallax of moving assets and that sort of thing um so the way that works is every single asset in the game is actually an individual piece an individual asset that's placed in the zed
So for the listeners, we're getting a look at a 2D screen right now that is being zoomed in and rotated to actually show you the layers of depth. Even though it's 2D, it's like you have the foreground, the background, and you can place items and things like that from anywhere in the foreground all the way to the background. So it's 2D, but it's not 2D.
It's really 3D. It's like a shadow box where you can see. I was going to say pop-up book. Yeah, there's all the layers behind it that stack up and then create that level. That is so awesome to see. Jack, this is great.
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Chapter 7: What upcoming games are the developers excited about?
This is, this is literally like, imagine if somebody took seven layers, you know, and then, and then, you know, you put them together and you look at them from one angle and they look like they're 2d, but there's actually seven layers there. And then you can actually put assets and things, you know, between any of those layers. So this is awesome, man. Cause I've never seen this.
I always just thought 2d game. And we see this a lot more nowadays, right? Where you're seeing these kind of 2D games that have depth to them at the same time. And personally, I love that style because I think it really enhances that 2D aspect. But it's really cool to kind of get that glimpse, you know, like we said, behind the curtain.
I had no idea that this is what a game looked like, you know, for somebody that's actually working on it, which is awesome.
So this would be more part of my job is I've built all of these... When you look at what I do, it's a lot less interesting to see. That's what I see most of the time, is that. A door.
There's just a picture of a door right there.
That's what I see most of the time. But then I hook all these levels up and you set characters in them and that sort of thing. Because something we do that is, again, I don't know if every player does this, but we actually animate within Unity. A lot of studios will probably animate outside of Unity, but We rig everything and animate within the software.
For example, this is Arlo, the main character, and here with him we can do whatever we want to with moving him around and stuff. Everything is in this actual...
that is awesome. Wow. That is so neat. Yeah. So he's got the main character here and he's kind of making them dance and do a jig right now. But, uh, that, that's so interesting to see how that, once that character is created, then you can do all the effects, you know, this way.
Yeah. Well, I mean like, it's the same thing with him, right? Like we, we, we have to crush it down a little bit, but he is all like individual, uh, separate pieces that are like 2d assets that we've squished down let me see if this is really cool this is awesome you can see what he is underneath you know oh yeah yeah okay
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