hi everybody today I get to chat with Matt roshak 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 hi I'm Matt roshak uh known online as kupo games I've been making Flash games for uh a very long time almost 20 years well I started out animating uh for new grounds so I've been doing animations a bit longer than uh than games but uh uh 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 new grounds and congregate and uh once Flash in browsers uh started being phased out I moved on to making games for Steam and more recently I've started dabbling with uh 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

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 have you talked about it over the past several years you're still using a lot of the flash code and just compiling it to targets that are more modern it's uh

it's pretty much still all done in Flash uh 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 uh the mobile version is also uh Adobe Air but on uh on mobile it's more optimized like I know uh the flash files are like converted to like native uh code on iOS and uh on Android they're not I think they're not native but they're still they still run a lot faster than they do on PC so uh yeah on Steam it's just the normal Flash Player pretty much Bond on mobile it's something a bit a bit more modern a bit faster

are using flash itself or are using

animate which is like they replace I'm using the old version of anime uh 2015 so it's still called Flash

yeah I remember you mentioned that that you're using 2015 is there a reason why you haven't Moodle to a newer version or is it really just that there's nothing that the new versions provide especially

they might even slow you down because they can't really compile to flash there was an obscure uh reason uh 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 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 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 uh I had to use the old version of the authoring tools to get that working it's really stupid but uh after uh after complaining on Twitter and and having a my story go viral I actually got a reply from Adobe and they they showed me a hack of how to get the old version of Adobe Air uh running in the newer versions of animes but uh I I tried it it worked but I never I never bothered to use the new version after that but uh since uh since uh flash player has been taken over by uh Harmon 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

yeah I think that you're able to still use Flash I'm still able to compile down to targets that are still relevant today like mobile and desktop and in all these surfaces I think that's going to be a big surprise to a lot of people because many people are like yeah flash is no longer around there's no point in using actionscript or the stage and like drawing movie clips and all these things which is one of the many reasons why I want to chat with you because you're one of the you know more popular game developers who's still using flash for a lot of your work I think there's there's

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 uh 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 McMillan still does all of his art in Flash I think Tom fultz from Newgrounds says he still does his prototyping in Flash and then rewrites it in C or whatever later and uh yeah the juicy beasts uh 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

yeah I agree you know that's always a thing where like there's this hope that adobe will invest more into it and 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 Slash'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

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 uh you know you don't have to worry about like the resolution of your game assets and uh I 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 uh putting my games on mobile was actually quite straightforward the hard part was jumping through all the Hoops required like uh trying to get ads and app purchases and stuff working and you know taking all the boxes like this 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

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 yeah it's just me I have help with translations and music

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 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 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 action script too and I just load them into Adobe Air with action script 3 and you know steam achievements work the steam overlay works like all the steam features work and it's just you know really old action script two games and they still work okay the hard part was the authoring

tools not supporting action script too anymore I had to you know pirate some of the old versions of the tools to to make changes to those games

but other than that how do you interview I'm curious though how do you integrate with theme achievements using like action script 2 because there's no concept of that back when Action Group 2

was still around so I make like a launcher in Adobe Air which is written in action script three and I use uh either uh local connection methods or uh I think there were some other ones but you can communicate between uh action scripts uh three and two because like two uh swf files can connect to each other and uh yeah and that works really effectively because there's uh yeah people have made tools for uh all the steam features in action script three and I can just you know communicate communicate between the two languages quite easily

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

I've explained it to quite a few people uh 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 uh 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 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

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 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 uh 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 it's pretty easy

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 uh ruffle does everything that I need because so far it's 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 uh but it's made a lot of progress and it's it's doing pretty well so I I hope I can just make flash games that run in ruffle uh but yeah we'll we'll see how far they take it uh 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 I would rather

not retrain

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

uh well I started doing animations and animation is a lot of work uh it takes you a long time to get anything done so uh 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 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 uh when I started I just didn't know

how to program so that's the only thing that really kept me back but I went to uh I did uh software engineering at University so I learned uh Java and NC and and everything else there so uh it was pretty easy to just turn that into action script afterwards

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

think standards are a lot higher now because when I started uh if you could make pretty much anything in Flash you could make quite a lot of money uh like you know like flash games when I started were pretty simple right and uh and websites were giving out thousands of dollars to for developers to make simple games for them so I 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 uh I think that's a lot harder to do today

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 they were the first ones that were uh that had like sponsorships that I started like making decent money from because uh Armor Games contacted me and like hey they are they will not sponsorship money so and so and uh 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 uh yeah I made a few games before then but they were like really simple they were uh kind of more like uh 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

you know that I remember you know this is probably when like early 2000s late 1990s [Music] um uh like middle middle 2000s is when I started I think uh 2004 I think was the first time I got uh friends page feature on Newgrounds with uh animation yeah I was like those were like the Golden Era of like browser-based games because I think you're like MSN was creating games I think Adobe or macromedia at the time had a place called I want to say shock zone or like Shockwave had like you know games Gallery we could play like water balloon drop and like things like that there was just so many little games that you could just try out and play that seems to have shifted a lot nowadays you

know 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

uh hold on let's see uh well I uh on on PC I just use Steam and uh I also have uh H dot IO but it it it's pretty small it's not that important I I just did it because it's really easy to upload your games there it doesn't take very much time uh but yeah it's mainly Steam and for a long time it was mainly Steam and just windows I I don't do Mac or Linux but I don't really have to do I don't have to support Linux because they mostly found ways to run Windows games anyway and uh Mac is like I think not really worth the trouble of supporting it's quite a small Market and uh on mobile I just you know just

upload to the app stores and uh and hope for the best I hope the algorithms are nice to me and on Android they have been a little bit of got a decent amount of downloads from who knows where I I didn't do any marketing or anything it just came out of nowhere

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 yeah it's mostly from uh people who used to play them for free online I don't I don't remember the exact numbers but I think uh some of the games have like 10 or 20 million plays online uh well like congregates uh well no one's visiting congregate 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 uh 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

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

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 uh steam gives me some privileges that I think a lot of other developers don't have like uh when Epic Battle Fantasy 5 was being released uh uh valve gave me the option to 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 uh 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 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 the noise and the Clutter of existing products

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 I think a lot of flash games have a any flash games that use Vector Arts I think end up looking quite similar in a way and I think my style was mainly based on copying kind of other flash artists at a time uh there's this guy called NCH 85 who made like uh animations of like cats fighting robots and other things and uh I kind of started off like imitating his style a little bit and it kind of got more complicated and smoother over time I think there's always really big back then was the whole pixel art you know isometric kind of style in Flash you definitely took the more Vector approach for it was there any you know was there

any rationale you know reason behind that no it's just what I was familiar with and it seemed to work okay uh yeah I like pixel art but I feel like it's it's quite a lot of work it takes more time than Vector ours so that's probably is

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 well like when I was a teenager I I think the Final Fantasy games were my favorite I think I spent more time on them uh than anything else and also I was uh I was quite interested in uh game FAQs 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 uh 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 like cheesy tricks to beat the super bosses or whatever but for the most part I just 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 you know the interesting part also is

that definitely game mechanics but also the story as well so how do you come up

with your story lines oh my stories my stories aren't very good I I do the Nintendo thing where I uh I make the gameplay first and then I kind of put in whatever story fits like uh whatever whatever I can come up with that ties all of the features together is is what I go with but uh despite my uh my overall stories aren't very good but I feel like the characters are quite fun I I try to write characters that are kind of believable and like not perfect uh yeah and I think I think people I think that the characters appeal to people quite a lot I've tried to I've worked hard especially in my more recent games to kind of stick to uh

to like writing just you know believable characters and making them you know stay in character and not doing anything unexpected so uh yeah okay I I would sum it up like that I 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

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

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 uh oof how long has it been

uh 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 uh the new character was very lazy I just took an existing character which was a cat and I made him animated a bit better uh but yeah generally I just try to fill in uh gaps that uh that haven't been filled in I try to make all the characters distinct so any new character has to uh 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 uh for me to make that character

no that's a 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 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

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 deviant art 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 uh 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

though because I have uh 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 uh I uh 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 uh marketing tool is the platforms and if I make a a steam post on one of my games I think way more people will read that than will read my social media I think uh 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 uh yeah I try to post everywhere but I think I prioritize uh 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 and see what other people are working on so yeah I would say those are the three most important ones

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 um wow I'm kind of tick tock 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

they all have really annoying restrictions that I mean you have to kind of modify your contents a bit uh like I think on Instagram everything has to be a square right uh 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 uh and I I don't know anything about tech talk I don't really uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh yeah it's useful for for a lot of things but uh Tick Tock I I don't know I mean I I just don't have the energy to start on a new new video platform

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

I enjoy making clickbaity YouTube thumbnails because they actually work you know it would be uh it's a bit silly but my uh my videos get way more views when I have a really catchy thumbnail and that's uh 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 uh 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

which is always interesting you know when you watch like the the videos from like Mr Beast 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 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 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 now 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 whatever anything 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 uh yeah I think the the platforms kind of 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 I think YouTube's a bit easier I can play around on YouTube more because I don't really just I don't use YouTube only for marketing I just use it for kind of my my personal blogs and stuff as well so I you know I sometimes just do YouTube for fun and it's uh sometimes it works out but a lot of times my videos don't get much attention but I I feel like I can express myself a bit better when I'm not doing it for financial reasons

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

uh let's see I uh 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 uh so I don't think there's very much that can stop me from finishing a project uh uh so that's one and uh 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 uh so those help and uh 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

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

relaxing it's completely random I can work between zero and like 12 hours a day uh yeah it just depends on my how I feel how much energy I have uh there's some things like like 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 you know I could spend hours not making any progress or just giving up for the day but some like easier things like data entry like you know giving stats to weapons and stuff and items and writing like achievement descriptions I think stuff like that that's a bit easier it doesn't Tire me out I can do that all day without getting tired I can do that all week uh

drawing generally is quite easy for me as well that doesn't really Tire me out because there's not really that much that can go wrong so it kind of depends on on what I'm working on and like how engaging it is

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

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 uh 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

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 um the look and feel and style up your games I would be uh I would consider using it for uh if I could have 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 I 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 gonna I'm gonna do a project based on using the tools that are are working well right I don't want to like I I want to still 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 it's not compromised in any way I I think it could be quite handy quite useful and uh but you know it depends I'm not sure how it's gonna go I'm not I'm not gonna try to make any

predictions because it's it's super early I think things change very fast but uh as for I mean as for tons of low quality games being made I think uh 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 the platforms to 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 they go looking for them right like uh for the most part if you open up steam you only see the best selling things the highest rated things the games that I recommended

specifically for you based on what you've played and all the recommendations are are fairly well rated anyway so I 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 and it's up to them to fix that it's not it's not really something I can worry about

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

uh it's hard to say my website was useful for uh for like beta testing when flash still worked online so I always had uh I mean I basically had all my games available for free on my website before they were published on Steam when I was still uh fixing things so it was very useful for beta testing but now 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 uh Discord is also very useful for beta testing it's a good place to quickly contact people and get

feedback and like do like uh Community competitions and stuff like that so uh discord's pretty handy in engagement uh uh in terms of like marketing and reaching new users that's uh I've not I've not been very good at that I think that mostly comes from uh from the platforms just recommending the game to new people because uh I mean they look at it it's got high rating they all have very good reviews by the way so I mean I mean if my games have a 98 positive review score on Steam and it's recommended to someone they can 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 they don't have to risk very much and uh 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 in both cases new players just you know see the game recommended by the platform and have a have a convenient way to try it out without any risk and that's that's probably the way I find the most new users I don't I don't think my uh my social media marketing really contributes that much

yeah no it gets interestingly here because the answer varies depending on what you're building whether it be a consumer app or a game or something for the business Market it's always

I have noticed that when one of my tweets goes viral I might have a little a bump in sales but uh 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 uh most developers I think aren't are not going to get a big following just from doing social media

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

of all time oh I don't know uh I don't know of all time but the one I've probably been playing the longest is Age of Empires 2. uh I think I've played over a thousand hours over uh over the covid lockdowns and I also used to play it as a kid so probably that I wouldn't say it's like the most fun but it's the most kind of long lasting it it lasts 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 but uh I also really like the Smash Brothers games uh I like horror games I've been playing the Resident Evil remakes and uh oh beat saber is fine I've been

trying out VR stuff Half-Life Alex uh yeah there's some examples I used to like Final Fantasy A lot but not recently I I haven't been able to play any turn based RPGs lately I don't I don't think they've aged very well for me I I I just don't find them that exciting anymore

ironic because you create basically a turn-based RP is actually highly

entertaining yeah I think mine is better than a lot of the AAA ones

well Matt thanks for the time to chat with me about game development all the fun stuff you're doing your games are exciting so looking forward to seeing all the cool stuff you keep releasing for the next 20 30 40 however much long

you want to do this thank you very much it was nice chatting with you