Winning as a Game Developer with Matt Roszak! 👾 =============================================== by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm Matt Roszak (https://twitter.com/KupoGames) shares a durable indie game mindset built on practical tools, controlled scope, and finishing what he starts. He talks about animation roots, Flash-era workflows, market changes, character writing, and the business side of making games, all with a clear preference for sustainable habits over dramatic reinvention. Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU A conversation with Matt Roszak | 46m ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION Matt Roszak discusses game development with the calm confidence of someone who has stayed productive across multiple platform shifts. His roots in animation, Newgrounds, and the Epic Battle Fantasy series give the interview a strong maker energy from the start. One of the most interesting parts is how little patience he has for trend-driven tool anxiety. He still values Flash-related workflows not because he is trapped in the past, but because he understands exactly what those tools help him do well. That distinction matters. In his hands, familiar tools are not a crutch. They are part of a reliable production system that keeps ideas moving toward finished games. The interview also gives a realistic view of how much tougher the market has become. Matt points out that early web-game ecosystems could reward relatively small projects, while modern players have far more choice and far higher expectations. His answer is not to chase maximal scope. It is to stay sharp about where the real value is: stronger characters, enjoyable combat, readable presentation, and a project size that can actually be completed. That same restraint shapes the way he talks about story. He does not need sprawling lore for a game to work. If the tone is fun, the writing is clean, and the play experience holds together, simpler narratives can do the job just fine. What really stands out, though, is the sustainability of his approach. Matt seems far more interested in finishing good work than in performing ambition. He talks openly about risk, controllable scope, financial independence, and the importance of only starting projects he can realistically ship. That may sound modest, but it is a serious competitive advantage in a field full of abandoned ideas and overextended teams. The conversation lands as a useful lesson for creative work well beyond games: know what you are good at, keep your workflow dependable, and build in ways that let you keep going for a long time. WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT - Reliable workflows can matter more than constantly replacing every tool in the stack. - The modern game market rewards polish and finish far more than it used to. - Manageable scope is one of the strongest forms of creative freedom. - Simple stories can work when characters, tone, and moment-to-moment play are strong. - Finishing is a real competitive advantage for solo and indie developers. JUMP TO A TOPIC - 0:00 - From animation to games: Matt introduces his background in animation, Newgrounds, and the long-running Epic Battle Fantasy series. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=0s) - 5:00 - Why old tools still earn their place: He explains what Flash-related workflows still do well and why familiarity can be a production advantage. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=300s) - 14:00 - A harder market now: The conversation turns to how audience expectations and competition have raised the bar for games. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=840s) - 23:00 - Characters over overcomplication: Matt talks about story, RPG influences, and keeping narrative light enough to support the gameplay. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1380s) - 31:00 - Creative independence and motivation: He reflects on money, audience, and why the reasons for making a game shape how sustainable the work feels. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1860s) - 36:00 - Scope you can actually finish: This section covers risk management, controllable scope, and his rule of only starting projects he can ship. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2160s) - 44:00 - Staying in the craft: Matt closes with the games he enjoys and what it takes to keep making work over the long haul. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2640s) TO LEARN MORE - Matt's Twitter: https://twitter.com/KupoGames - Matt's Website: https://kupogames.com/ TRANSCRIPT The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors. 0:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=0s) Hi everybody today I get to chat with Matt Roszak a prolific game developer who has created the hugely popular epic battle fantasy series of games we dive into how he creates his games his approach for marketing them in a very crowded ecosystem and a whole lot more so even if you aren't a game developer Matt shares a lot of good wisdom that we can apply to our respective disciplines let's get started hi Matt great to chat with you before I get too far into it can you please introduce yourself. 0:31 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=31s) Hi, I'm Matt Roszak known online as Kupo Games I've been making Flash games for a very long time almost 20 years well I started out animating for Newgrounds so I've been doing animations a bit longer than than games but yeah pretty much been doing the same kind of work for a long time now and the environments changed quite a lot I used to make games for Newgrounds and Kongregate and once Flash in browsers started being phased out I moved on to making games for Steam and more recently I've started dabbling with mobile development so I have a game on iOS and Android now as well and I'm I'm best known for the Epic Battle Fantasy games which are turn-based RPGs. 1:18 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=78s) Yeah, I've played some of your Epic Battle Fantasy games years ago and I played a little bit of them, like recently, just like watching videos of it. It was a lot of fun, and the amount of detail you put into it- you definitely want to get into it a little bit- is quite impressive, and so that's some of the first thing that maybe, of course, came up, which is you started building it in Flash. How are we building it now? Because, at least on your website—and from what you've talked about over the past several years—you're still using a lot of the Flash code and just compiling it to more modern targets. 1:46 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=106s) It's pretty much still all done in Flash. The Steam version runs in Adobe AIR, which is just a fancy Flash Player. It's pretty much the same thing, but it adds a few application features. The mobile version is also Adobe AIR, but on mobile it's more optimized. The Flash files are converted to native code on iOS and on Android they're not—I think they're not native—but they still run a lot faster than they do on PC. So, yeah, on Steam it's just the normal Flash Player, pretty much, but on mobile it's something a bit more modern and a bit faster. 2:32 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=152s) Are you using Flash itself, or using another? 2:35 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=155s) Animate, which is what they replaced. I'm using the old version of Animate, 2015, so it's still called Flash. 2:42 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=162s) Yeah, I remember you mentioned that you're using 2015. Is there a reason why you haven't moved to a newer version, or is it really just that there's nothing the new versions provide? 2:52 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=172s) They might even slow you down because they can't really compile to Flash. There was an obscure reason. It's because I wanted to use the. Oh, it's really stupid. It's hard to explain, right? Adobe had this stupid limitation in Adobe AIR where you couldn't use the stage quality settings that the browser version of Flash had. You couldn't go to low and medium quality, so I had to get do these really stupid workarounds to get that working. So I don't use the in the Steam version of the game, I don't use the web version of Flash. I do use the web version of Flash Player and I basically make a web page in Adobe AIR and I use the web version instead of the version of Flash Player that comes with Adobe AIR. And I had to use the old version of the authoring tools to get that working. It's really stupid. But after, after complaining on Twitter and having a my story go viral, I actually got a reply from Adobe and they showed me a hack of how to get the old version of Adobe AIR running in the newer versions of Animate. But, I tried it. It worked, but I never. I never bothered to use the new version after that. But since, since Flash Player has been taken over by Harman, which is a Samsung company, they- they fixed the problem with the stage quality in like half an hour. Like as soon as someone pointed out to them that this was an issue, they like just fixed it right away and it's not an issue anymore. But, like you know, this was a problem for like 10 years with Adobe AIR on desktop and they never addressed it until a new company took over. So that's that's quite frustrating. But it also means that Flash is being being taken care of now for the first time in a long time. 4:51 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=291s) Yeah, I think the fact that you're still able to use Flash and compile it down to targets that are relevant today—like mobile and desktop—is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people. Many people are like, yeah, Flash is no longer around, there's no point in using ActionScript or the stage and drawing movie clips and all these things, which is one of the many reasons why I wanted to chat with you, because you're one of the more popular game developers who's still using Flash for a lot of your work. 5:20 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=320s) Quite a few people who wanted to keep using it. It just wasn't me seeing their needs and maybe some of them will start looking at it seriously again because, I know a lot of developers who still use Flash for like graphics and stuff and they just load it into a different custom engine they made. Like Edmund McMillen still does all of his art in Flash. I think Tom Fulp from Newgrounds says he still does his prototyping in Flash and then rewrites it in C or whatever later. And, yeah, the Juicy Beast guys who made Burrito Bison, I think they still do all of their graphics in Flash. So a lot of people are still trying to use it to some extent. It's just like some of the tools mostly kind of like performance isn't very good, so they have to rebuild that themselves. But I feel like if the Flash was maintained better and it performed better to Modern standards, I think a lot of people would still be using it today, and maybe some of the new projects are coming up now, like ruffle, will kind of make it more viable again. 6:27 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=387s) Yeah, I agree. You know, that's always a thing where, like, there's this hope that Adobe will invest more into it and not have the community in third parties from The Gap here. Because I use Flash for a very long time- well beyond its expiration date in some cases, before I switch over to sketch, and then now I'm using Figma from my artwork because I really enjoyed Flash's destructive editing. You can draw a shape, it can range like a subsection of it, change the color on it, all without having to do any of the various Union tools. And it's like: all the more formal things the more proper design tool needed Flash never cared about. They're like: yeah, we're gonna do it this way, which was perfect for a certain set of like kind of visuals you wanted to create, and then they slowly took those away over the years and then animate has it much more. It's much more like illustrator in style of like how fun and things work, which, again, is not what I care about. And I still use Dreamweaver even today for all the content I create, and so for me I'm always like, I look at the updates that these apps are getting and I always, in the back of mine, go I wonder how long Adobe will keep maintaining some of these apps before it's going to be hidden and no longer available, because when that happens, it's going to be a huge Interruption to my workflow, because that's been the way I've been doing things for decades now and it works. No one actually ever sees the output of the performance button. Another stuff is relevant because their work for me is high or not high, it's familiar, but high. But the end user benefits from it because they don't care how it's made, they want something that works. It's fine, and all these little things. 7:53 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=473s) Yeah, and I would say that, even though it has a lot of kind of disadvantage now, Flash still does some things uniquely well, like, you know you don't have to worry about, like the resolution of your game assets and, I'd say, depending on the kind of game you're making, but if you're making a fairly simple game that you want to have on multiple platforms, I think Flash is still a pretty good way of doing it, because, putting my games on mobile was actually quite straightforward. The hard part was jumping through all the Hoops required, like, trying to get ads and app purchases and stuff working and, you know, taking all the boxes like this collects so and so data of the user or whatever. All of that stuff took the most work. Actually, making the games run on mobile is pretty straightforward. 8:48 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=528s) Yeah, I know that's very cool and you're you're pretty much the only developer correct it's not like you have a team of people you're just you developing and building the games. 8:57 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=537s) Yeah, it's just me I have help with translations and music. 9:01 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=541s) Yeah, and do you think that because you're using Flash you're able to scale and have yourself basically do all these things more easily as opposed to if you had to use something like Unity or any other more complicated engines where you need to have delegate a lot of the work between people because. 9:19 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=559s) I think so; it probably helps. I haven't tried Unity, but well, I mean, I see plenty of people complaining about it on Twitter about how every time there's an update everything changes. And I mean, for the most part, all my Flash stuff still works like 10, 15 years later and I can use all my old files. And yeah, I recently republished some of my old games on Steam. Some of them are still in ActionScript 2 and I just load them into Adobe AIR with ActionScript 3 and Steam achievements work, the Steam overlay works, like all the Steam features work, and it's just really old ActionScript 2 games, and they still work okay. The hard part was the authoring tools not supporting ActionScript 2 anymore. I had to pirate some of the old versions of the tools to make changes to those games. 10:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=610s) But other than that how do you interview I'm curious though how do you integrate with Steam achievements using like ActionScript 2 because there's no concept of that back when ActionScript 2 was still around. 10:23 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=623s) So I make like a launcher in Adobe AIR which is written in ActionScript three and I use either local connection methods or I think there were some other ones but you can communicate between action scripts three and two because like two swf files can connect to each other and yeah and that works really effectively because there's yeah people have made tools for all the Steam features in ActionScript three and I can just you know communicate communicate between the two languages quite easily. 10:58 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=658s) That is impressive. You know, I kind of bet. Typically there are probably 10 people in the world who probably know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. 11:04 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=664s) I've explained it to quite a few people. Like, whenever someone's trying to Port their Flash games to Steam, I have to kind of explain it. But I think I made quite a detailed Forum thread. I don't know where it was, but like when you Google how to do this stuff, I think my reply is the one that comes out and I lay out all the steps and it's not really that complicated, it's just kind of obscure because not many people are doing it. 11:32 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=692s) Yeah, it's like one of those languages that people spoke back in the day but it's been under you so no one really knows how to speak that language anymore you can see like bits and pieces of like Stone tablet lying around of like all action one or two code but no one really knows exactly how to combine it so it's actually quite quite novel that you're able to figure these things out and still share it. 11:53 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=713s) Yeah there's a lot of little tricks you need to learn like for example the Steam overlay only works if like the your graphics card is working or else it freezes and if Flash doesn't have any animations running it apparently doesn't do anything with the graphics card so you have to make sure you always have like something animated in Flash or the Steam overlay will just freeze so you just have like a little hidden animation somewhere in the corner or something so it's just little tricks like that you have to be aware of to get things running but like once you know about it's pretty easy. 12:30 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=750s) This is like textbook tribal knowledge you know that only those who've been diving deep into this and have a historical context you know all about what's going on there have you ever thought about rewriting your games into something besides Flash you know especially when you're thinking about like you know you've been doing it for 20 years it's about the next 20 years will you still be using the class-based approach or we pick something that's more entertained I hope that. 12:55 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=775s) Ruffle does everything that I need because so far it's basically Flash but it runs faster which which would be ideal that's what I want I mean it's not finished yet but it's made a lot of progress and it's doing pretty well so I hope I can just make Flash games that run in Ruffle but yeah we'll we'll see how far they take it looks like it works pretty well on PC but I don't know how good their mobile support is so far but I did test on my iPhone a little bit and it seems to run reasonably well so that's my hope I hope I can just basically keep doing the same thing because I would rather not retrain. 13:36 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=816s) Yeah no the rewriting something purely for the sake of rewriting it is never never fun so that's actually you know gives me hope that some of the Flash stuff will continue on for you know next generation of developers and types of games and things like that so let's go back to a little bit more at the beginning what got you started into game development. 13:55 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=835s) Well, I started doing animations, and animation is a lot of work. It takes you a long time to get anything done. So, making a video game is a lot faster because you can recycle the same animations over and over again and then, like, your five minutes of animation can become like a game with one hour's worth of content with just a bit of extra work. So I feel like making games was immediately much more appealing than making animations, because it's so much more like time-effective and just kind of more fun as well. So that's kind of how I started getting into that. I felt like it made animation more interesting and it was also more cost-effective. And, when I started, I just didn't know how to program, so that's the only thing that really kept me back. But I did software engineering at university, so I learned Java and C and everything else there. So, it was pretty easy to just turn that into ActionScript afterwards. 15:05 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=905s) Really cool and when you think about how much game development has changed over the years, what do you think it's been the biggest change in terms of, like, how people build games today, which is how you started back, you know, 20 years ago. I. 15:18 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=918s) Think standards are a lot higher now because when I started, if you could make pretty much anything in Flash, you could make quite a lot of money. Like you know, like Flash games when I started were pretty simple, right, and websites were giving out thousands of dollars to for developers to make simple games for them. So I think if you just had a little bit bit of kind of skills in that department, you could get a decent job, like regardless of where you lived or how old you were, it didn't really matter, as long as you could, you know, send some files to some website. You know they'll be happy with that. So, I think that's a lot harder to do today. 16:01 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=961s) No that sounds that's true what were the Epic Battle Fantasy games the first ones you created were the other games you created before you went deep down that path. 16:10 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=970s) They were the first ones that were that had like sponsorships that I started like making decent money from because Armor Games contacted me and like hey they are they will not sponsorship money so and so and I was like quite surprised because I didn't realize these I didn't realize that that's how money was made at the time I thought it was mostly just advertisements but yeah I made a few games before then but they were like really simple they were kind of more like interactive movies or slide shows it was just like you know the animation plays and you press a button at a certain time and a different animation plays instead and that was basically it but they were still kind of fun despite that. 16:54 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1014s) That. I remember this is probably when, like early 2000s, late 1990s like mid-2000s is when I started. I think 2004, I think, was the first time I got a front-page feature on Newgrounds with animation. That was the golden era of browser-based games, because I think MSN was creating games. I think Adobe or Macromedia at the time had a place called, I want to say, Shockzone or like Shockwave had, like games gallery. We could play like water balloon drop and like things like that. There were so many little games that you could just try out and play. That seems to have shifted a lot nowadays. You still have those game galleries, but now they're all behind app stores to a certain extent. Yeah, how do you do distribution of your games today? 17:50 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1070s) Let's see. On PC, I just use Steam and I also use itch. Io, but it's pretty small and not that important. I just did it because it's really easy to upload your games there. It doesn't take very much time, but yeah, it's mainly Steam and for a long time it was mainly Steam and just Windows. I don't do Mac or Linux, but I don't have to support Linux because Linux users have mostly found ways to run Windows games anyway and I think Mac is not really worth the trouble of supporting. It's quite a small market. And on mobile, I just upload to the app stores and hope for the best. I hope the algorithms are nice to me and on Android they have been kind. I've got a decent amount of downloads from who knows where. I didn't do any marketing or anything, it just came out of nowhere. 19:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1140s) So you mentioned you didn't do any marketing how do people find your games it's just through word of mouth it's through historical having known that you've been creating this really great game series for me. 19:10 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1150s) Yeah, it's mostly from people who used to play them for free online I don't I don't remember the exact numbers but I think some of the games have like 10 or 20 million plays online well like congregates well no one's visiting Kongregate anymore but my games had a lot of views there and I think a lot of people are just like recognizing the name and the graphics when they see it in the store and they come back to check it out and the thing is like most of the kids who play there are adults now who have actual money to spend which helps so like all the fans who played my games like 10 years ago can actually pay for the newer ones which is quite nice. 19:54 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1194s) It's funny because what you're saying is very similar to like what some of the Kingdom Rush creators have said a while ago, like they had a similar story where they created their Tower Defense games and Italian Flash running free in the browser. And this is something very similar is that you don't. Decades later, people are still. You know it's popular today because people knew about the game from back then, but now they also have the means to purchase both- you know, the game itself, but also any in-app purchases that might be coming up. That's actually a pretty, you know, fun way of just thinking about marketing and distribution. It's just doing things for a long time is one successful approach. 20:25 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1225s) That's part of it. And then the other part is, once you get kind of to a reasonable level of success, the platforms start being a bit nicer to you. Like, Steam gives me some privileges that I think a lot of other developers don't have. Like, when Epic Battle Fantasy 5 was being released, valve gave me the option to send out coupons to everyone who bought the previous game. So, like, a lot of people were just notified that, hey, this guy released the new game and, I don't think they do that anymore. But even at the time I think only a few people got to use that feature. So that was pretty nice that they let me do that, because I think that helped a lot. I think it made the launch day kind of very effective. No, that's a. It's always good when the platforms give you professional treatment because of great work. You've done the path, because it's a competitive space, not, like you mentioned earlier, it's a lot of people are building games and the quality and things have to be almost a certain level- unrealistic level, you know- for one person sometimes to be able to break through the noise and the Clutter of existing products. 21:36 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1296s) Yeah, so the top of the art style a bit you know it's because it's very unique in how it is presented what was your inspiration behind creating your games in the style that they are in it's very kind of Flash style. 21:49 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1309s) I think any Flash games that use vector art end up looking quite similar in a way, and I think my style was mainly based on copying kind of other Flash artists at the time. There's this guy called NCH 85 who made like animations of like cats fighting robots and other things, and I started off like imitating his style a little bit and it kind of got more complicated and smoother over time. I think what was also really big back then was the whole pixel art. Isometric kind of style. In Flash. You definitely took the more vector approach for it. Was there any? Was there any rationale? Reason behind that? No, it's just what I was familiar with and it seemed to work okay. Yeah, I like pixel art but I feel like it's quite a lot of work. It takes more time than vector art. So that's probably it. 22:49 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1369s) Yeah, so one of the things I always fun about game developers and people create games is that they also enjoy playing games as well were you big into RPGs if you turn based RPGs and that's what inspired you to create your current ones if so what's your some of your favorite games you played. 23:05 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1385s) Well, like when I was a teenager, I think the Final Fantasy games were my favorite. I think I spent more time on them than anything else, and also I was quite interested in GameFAQs and reading about how all the mechanics worked, like how you can kind of cheese the games and break the mechanics by doing stuff that wasn't intended, and well, there was a lot of kind of weird quirks and bugs in those games as well. So, yeah, I played a lot of Final Fantasy and I try to think about how I could improve on the mechanics, because the games are fun, but the gameplay in a lot of them is pretty basic. It's just like level up your characters, replace your old weapons with new weapons, and that's it right. There's not really that much strategy involved in the older Final Fantasy games, unless you're doing some kind of high-level like cheesy tricks to beat the super-bosses or whatever. But for the most part, I felt like I wanted to keep the parts that I liked about those games and replace the parts that I didn't like, and well, the most obvious example was random battles, which I think were—well, I guess people accepted them at the time, but no one really liked random battles, so I had to get rid of that. The interesting part also is. 24:30 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1470s) That definitely game mechanics but also the story as well so how do you come up with your story lines. 24:37 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1477s) Oh, my stories aren't very good. I do the Nintendo thing where I make the gameplay first and then I kind of put in whatever story fits—whatever I can come up with that ties all of the features together. Is what I go with. Although my overall stories aren't very good, I feel like the characters are quite fun. I try to write characters that are kind of believable and imperfect, yeah, and I think the characters appeal to people quite a lot. I've worked hard, especially in my more recent games, to stick to writing believable characters and making them stay in character and not doing anything unexpected. So yeah, okay, I would sum it up like that: I feel like I have good characters, but the overall plot is pretty shallow. It's like Zelda, right, it's just good guys have to go kill the bad guys. The details don't really matter that much. 25:42 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1542s) Yeah, I. I do think you're a little underselling yourself here, because I do think the stories are very entertaining, you know, even- and Zelda is entertaining in that level it hits that very Primal self of like good versus evil. Yeah, it's. 25:53 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1553s) Like an excuse to do some some cool fights. You know, like, you know, you have to find the Ultimate Weapon and do some fight some big bad guy with your shiny new weapon or whatever, and that's that's really the point of the story. You know you have a fair more characters and how do you come up with your ideas? Like, what is your process like? Do you have like a notepad, just like jot ideas down randomly when it comes to you and then you put it all together like, walk me through how like you approach a new story, new game, new character? Oh, it's been a very long time since I've started working on a new game. Well, I think, oof, how long has it been? Epic battle fantasy five, I think, came out in 2018 and I started working on it in 2015, so I think that's the last time I made a new character and, the new character was very lazy. I just took an existing character which was a cat, and I made him animated a bit better, but yeah, generally I just try to fill in gaps that, that haven't been filled in. I try to make all the characters distinct. So any new character has to has to look different, has to use a different weapon, they have to have a different personality and they have to be kind of fun interacting with all the other characters as well. So, yeah, yeah, I would have. Everything would have to be a bit different and their interactions with other characters would have to be unique. For, for me to make that character. 27:30 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1650s) And when you're talking about creating characters even you know back then how do you make the narrative like how do you think about the end to end fully from the very beginning or do you kind of just like develop it as it goes on it's like you have like one producer scene or one particular part of the game you're focusing on and you're like let me see what I can do with this character at this point and then figure out what the end game is going to be or do you kind of have the beginning and the end figured out the character's Arc and then you fill in the gaps you know in between it yeah. 27:57 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1677s) Yeah, I would do all the gameplay first so I would know like what all the bosses and the areas in the game are and then I would kind of fill in the gaps with the story and make up excuses for why the characters have to go to each area and you know why they have to fight the final boss so like all the gameplay comes first I do all the weapons all the areas all the enemies all the abilities do all that first and then I kind of write the story based on how the characters would react to all of the stuff that's happening. 28:30 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1710s) Yeah, so shifting gears a little bit. You're very active on many social media channels. Yeah, very popular YouTube channel. You're very active on Twitter. You have a DeviantArt. You know. You have all these things. How do you balance your time between creating games and working on your? You know, whatever the next thing you might be working on versus also making sure you keep your existing fans engaged and happy? It's Tricky now because a lot of my social media platforms- they used to be quite popular- are kind of fading away at this point. Like deviantarts, not not a really high priority for me anymore, not that many people use it. Facebook used to be quite big, but I'm getting less and less engagement there and it's kind of funny. 29:11 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1751s) Though, because I have- I'm- five times more followers on Facebook than on Twitter, but I'm getting more engagement on Twitter, which just shows you, kind of like, how many old Legacy accounts I have on Facebook that don't really interact with anything. So, I yeah, I'm not really prioritizing social media that much anymore now that I think I'm a bit more established. I think the most important marketing tool is the platforms, and if I make a Steam post on one of my games, I think way more people will read that than will read my social media. I think, I think my latest Steam post where I announced my new game got like a thousand thumbs up or whatever, which is way more than I would get on Twitter or Facebook, and the people there I also know are way more invested. If you see, these are the people that are using Steam. They're more likely to actually buy the games. So, yeah, I try to post everywhere, but I think I prioritize Steam my website, because it's good to have a platform that I control, and I use Twitter mainly so that I have good connections to other developers. It's a good place to chat with my colleagues and see what other people are working on. So, yeah, I would say those are the three most important ones. 30:33 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1833s) Yeah, because you can't, of course the games. It's very Visual. And have you ever thought about like using those tools that post the same visual, like multiple places, like Instagram, for example? Like have the same content be repurposed for twitch- not twitch, sorry, wow, I'm kind of TikTok. For example, have you thought about like those kind of areas where you can just, you know, be able to not put in any extra effort, but the content itself will just be repurposed in all those platforms by you to a tool? 31:02 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1862s) They all have really annoying restrictions that I mean you have to kind of modify your contents a bit. Like, I think on Instagram everything has to be a square right. We tried Instagram for a while but it didn't really take off, so we gave up on it after like a month or two. And I- I don't know anything about TikTok, I don't really I use YouTube because it's a fun place for me to put, like trailers and, you know, a few kind of early previews of my games. Oops, excellently, started playing a video there. But yeah, I use YouTube because it's a nice way of kind of showing off things in a video format and, I guess YouTube's important as well. So I know quite a lot of people follow me on YouTube and like nowhere else somehow. So a lot of people are kind of not really reading what I'm working on. They just see my videos every few months and they're like what I didn't know? This guy was making a new game, like you know. Maybe you shouldn't follow me only on YouTube then, but yeah, it's useful for for a lot of things. But TikTok, I don't know. I mean, I just don't have the energy to start on a new, new video platform. 32:13 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1933s) You know the. The interesting thing, though, is that you have a very- I think I mentioned before you're- a very distinctive style when it comes to your games, but when you look at your thumbnails on YouTube, for example, as well, they also are very high quality, very distinctive as well. Are you the designer behind all of those as well, or do you like easy? Yeah? 32:30 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1950s) I enjoy making clickbaity YouTube thumbnails because they actually work. You know it would be- it's a bit silly, but my videos get way more views when I have a really catchy thumbnail and that's it's pretty stupid that that's what it comes down to, but it is what it is. So I always try to make them catchy and, we'll see what I can get away with as well. Apparently you can get away with pretty much anything. I thought, oh, if I make a thumbnail that doesn't really have anything to do with the video, maybe I'll get into trouble- but not really- and nothing bad happens. So I think I think you know YouTube is just kind of an experiment in testing the limits of what ridiculous things you can get away with. 33:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=1999s) Which is always interesting you know when you watch like the videos from like MrBeast for example where he talks about the importance of a good thumbnail and like how much he iterates on somebody's content it is funny but psychologically like every thumbnail you create on YouTube I want to click it because I'm like what is going on here like what is a snow thing they're like what are those four things going after like you know this color of the curiosity is like when it really drives so there's definitely a certain level of understanding you have of marketing and what works on these platforms that I think plays a big role in what you're doing as well. 33:51 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2031s) Well, I like numbers, right? So one of my posts gets lots of engagements. I'm like, yeah, I'll do more of that, and when no one engages, I do less of that. So, yeah, I tried to be funny, I try to make catchy thumbnails, I try to post funny gameplay videos or or anything else that people like. When I post something that maybe is important to me but people don't care about, I feel like, yeah, well, I guess I won't post too much of that. So, yeah, I think the platforms, over time, dictate what I post, gotchas, what else? Your behavior is partially influenced to a certain extent. Yeah, what makes sense for each platform and the evolving rule ended. I think YouTube's a bit easier. I can play around on YouTube more because I don't use YouTube only for marketing. I just use it for kind of my personal blogs and stuff as well. So I sometimes just do YouTube for fun and sometimes it works out, but a lot of times my videos don't get much attention. But I feel like I can express myself a bit better when I'm not doing it for financial reasons. 35:09 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2109s) Yeah, which often seems to be like the best way to like both have fun and also reach an audience that's more genuine than trying to actually actively sell or try to do something that that genre. So, in terms of how you've been able to be successful, you know, all these years, what do you think are your number one, your number one trait that makes you successful? 35:31 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2131s) Let's see, I don't take any big risks. I make sure I start projects I can actually finish. So, unless I am killed, there's nothing that can stop me from finishing a project because I don't. I don't have, like I don't have- limited funds, I don't hire anyone to do the work for me, I don't- I'm not going to get into legal trouble from my ex-employer because I don't have one. So I don't think there's very much that can stop me from finishing a project. So that's one. And yeah, I commit to finishing pretty much anything I Stars, for the most part like, unless it's like a really early prototype, but anything I put more than a few weeks of work into, I'm pretty committed to finishing it. So those help and, in terms of long-term success, I think always also making more or less kind of similar games that are easily identifiable helps a lot, because people kind of recognize my characters and the art style, whereas if every project was different, I maybe wouldn't have as many people playing each game one after another. So I think having a kind of recognizable brand helps as well. 36:53 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2213s) How long does it take to walk with your typical day? Let's say you're building a game. What does your typical day look like like? How many hours do you spend actually coding and designing, versus just just taking a break and just? 37:03 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2223s) Relaxing. It's completely random. I can work between zero and 12 hours a day. It just depends on how I feel and how much energy I have. Programming can exhaust me pretty quickly if it's not going well. If I'm trying to fix bugs and nothing's going well, I could spend hours not making any progress or just give up for the day. But easier things like data entry—giving stats to weapons and items, writing achievement descriptions—that stuff doesn't tire me out. I can do that all day and all week. Drawing is generally quite easy for me as well. That doesn't really tire me out because there's not much that can go wrong. So it depends on what I'm working on and how engaging it is. 37:58 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2278s) And you pair that with the freedom you have of not being tied to like having to employ people or be responsible for like another employer. I think that kind of gives you that, that flexibility to pick and choose and not be creatively. 38:10 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2290s) Constrained. I guess, yeah, I don't, I don't have a schedule I have to stick to, I don't have to rush anything and yeah, I mean, I don't, I can, I can take as long as I want. There's there's no, there's no pressure. 38:24 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2304s) So the Hot Topic these days is artificial intelligence and being able to use that to generate code generate visuals now you're generating audio and video and things like that both do quite two-part question I guess what are your thoughts on you know using them for game development and do you ever feel a certain level of worry that there's going to be a flood of games they're going to be copycats where someone has put very little effort to create a game that basically matches your style because this requires to be trained the look and feel and style up your games. 38:57 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2337s) I would consider using it if I could show it how I want work to be done and it could basically replace me and do things very closely to how I would do them, then I think that could be quite helpful. What I wouldn't want is for me to kind of work around the capabilities of the AI and be like this is what it's good at. So I'm going to do a project based on using the tools that are working well, right, I still want to be the director and decide how things are done, rather than letting the AI's capabilities lead the way, if you know what I mean. So, like, if I can basically replace my own work- and it still feels like my own work and it's not compromised in any way- I think it could be quite handy, quite useful, but it depends. I'm not sure how it's gonna go. I'm not going to try to make any predictions because it's super early. I think things change very fast. But as for tons of low-quality games being made, I think that's always happening. Anyway, if you look at the app stores and Steam, there's a lot. So I think that's more of an issue for the platforms to filter out the low-quality stuff, and I think Steam's been doing an okay job. Like people complain that Steam has a lot of garbage games on it, but the normal user doesn't see any of them unless they go looking for them, right? For the most part, if you open up Steam, you only see the best-selling things, the highest-rated things. The games that are recommended specifically for you, based on what you've played, and all the recommendations are fairly well rated anyway. So I think Steam's done a pretty good job with that. I think on the app stores, on mobile it's a bit harder to find high quality games, but it's up to them to fix that. It's not really something I can worry about. 41:02 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2462s) Yeah, and you mentioned this briefly earlier what is the top you know they feel like typical marketing style activities the typical way people find your games is through Steam it's through the app stores but how much of a role does your website and your blogs and your just your personality online play and driving people to play your games. 41:21 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2481s) It's hard to say. My website was useful for beta testing when Flash still worked online, so I basically had all my games available for free on my website before they were published on Steam when I was still fixing things. So it was very useful for beta testing. But now, my website isn't so useful. It doesn't have as much traffic as it used to, but every once in a while there's still something that I can only do on my website, like host a game made in Ruffle or something. So it's still useful for that kind of thing. Discord is also very useful for beta testing. It's a good place to quickly contact people and get feedback and do community competitions and stuff like that. So, Discord is pretty handy for engagement. In terms of like marketing and reaching new users, I've not been very good at that. I think that mostly comes from the platforms just recommending the game to new people because, I mean, they see that it's got a high rating. They all have very good reviews, by the way. So I mean, if my games have a 98 positive-review score on Steam and it's recommended to someone, they might have a pretty good chance of trying that game out, and even if they don't like it, that's fine, because Steam has a very good refund policy, so they don't have to risk very much. And on mobile, my games are free to play, so you don't have to pay up front, so you can try it out for a few hours before you buy anything. So I think in both cases, new players just see the game recommended by the platform and have a convenient way to try it out without any risk, and that's probably the way I find the most new users. I don't think my social media marketing really contributes that much. 43:26 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2606s) Yeah, it gets interesting here because the answer varies depending on what you're building. Whether it's a consumer app or a game or something for the business market, it's always different. 43:36 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2616s) I have noticed that when one of my tweets goes viral I might have a little a bump in sales. But I mean that's hard to do reliably, obviously I don't. I like, if I had a hundred thousand followers on Twitter instead of 10 000, maybe it would make some difference to my sales overall, but I mean there's not very many developers that have that many followers right, so it's not. You know, a publisher might get on any right, but most developers- I think aren't- are not going to get a big following just from doing social media. 44:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2650s) Yeah, it's a full-time job in its own to get, you know, commanded social media and to do all of that all the time consistently. So you know, it's just like you know a few. Last question here: what's your favorite video game of all time? 44:27 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2667s) Oh, I don't know. I don't know of all time, but the one I've probably been playing the longest is Age of Empires 2. I think I've played over a thousand hours during the COVID lockdowns, and I also used to play it as a kid, so probably that. I wouldn't say it's the most fun, but it's the most long-lasting. There's tons of stuff to do and it's fun to play with your friends, so I don't think I'll ever completely get bored of it. I also really like the Smash Bros. Games. I like horror games. I've been playing the Resident Evil remakes, and Beat Saber is fun. I've been trying out VR stuff—Half-Life: Alyx, yeah, there's some examples. I used to like Final Fantasy a lot, but not recently. I haven't been able to play any turn-based RPGs lately. I don't think they've aged very well for me. I just don't find them that exciting anymore. 45:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2731s) Ironic because you create basically a turn-based RP is actually highly entertaining. 45:37 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2737s) Yeah, I think mine is better than a lot of the AAA ones. 45:40 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2740s) Well, Matt, thanks for taking the time to chat with me about game development and all the fun stuff you're doing. Your games are exciting, so I'm looking forward to seeing all the cool stuff you keep releasing for the next 20, 30, 40.. 45:51 - Matt Roszak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJxPUooSfnU&t=2751s) However long you want to do this. Thank you very much. It was nice chatting with you. Browse all Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm