 Before we get into this video, I just want to remind you folks that Revenblade is in very early pre-test phase and you can test it yourself. It only happens on Wednesdays, the multiplayer edition. If you want to download the offline client, you can do so on their Discord, linked in the video description below as well as in a pinned YouTube comment. What's up everybody, I'm TheMangoose. You are awesome. And today I am sitting down with Sharpie, who is the, well he's one of the members, one of the developers of Revenblade, but he specializes in character design, sound design, lore, and he's also an assassin one trick. How you doing Sharpie? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Mangoose. And so what we're going to be talking about today, something I wasn't aware of until Sharpie brought it up to me, was that Revenblade started as a mobile game and they decided to move it over to PC. So can you elaborate on that Sharpie, why the switch from mobile to PC? Well there is a lot that went into that process. But the main thing that we really struggled with finding is an issue that's very common with a lot of mobile games is the fact that a mobile game inherently has a very strong casual feel to it. There are very, very few games that successfully pull off a competitive I want to say feel on mobile. And we really wanted to have a bit more of a competitive feel to the game. We didn't want it to have a super casual ambiance. We struggled for a long time trying to get it to work and eventually we started toying around with the idea of switching it over to PC and we made that switch it instantly. Plus a few other changes, it really quickly transitioned to a lot more of a serious game and a lot more of a game feel that we really wanted. I think that's what a lot of, at least my audience is looking for, is a more competitive game. I totally agree that mobile games all seem very casual, even the ones that have like a competitive scene. Most people, like I play mobile legends, which is like a mobile MOBA, but I play it very casually. Like I play it in the truck when I don't care if I disconnect from the game. You know what I mean? Like that's the kind of thing I would care a lot if I had disconnected from a game of Revenblade. I would feel that I was letting my team down. It is, you guys have developed quite the competitive game there. Yeah, we're pretty happy with how it's transitioned. For example, when we first started off, our first game actually wasn't Revenblade. We had another game we called it Hyperbounce and it's one of those really simple kind of time-wasting mobile apps where you just make a ball. You draw a line across the screen and whatever angle you line that the ball keeps bouncing upwards and you have to avoid obstacles and kind of climb as high as you can. Our first initial idea was to make really casual kind of time-waster app games and make a ton of them and hope one of them takes off. But we pretty quickly got tired of that kind of feel and especially when we started designing Revenblade, which was based on another game which I can get into if you'd like, that we designed, we decided that we wanted to shift away from the casual games and go a lot more into the competitive feel. Yeah, why don't you elaborate on the other mobile game you were talking about because you did send me some footage of that. So the other mobile game that we were developing initially, well it was basically Revenblade, but it was top-down. It did not have different attacks. It was more of like a, I would call it a mobile version of League of Legends, more or less, where you have abilities, cooldowns, mana, or mana, depending on how you pronounce it. And it had a lot more of a feel like that, even though the gameplay itself was not around capturing turrets, there were no minions. It was more about there are four bases on the map and you have to capture and hold all four of them at the same time. That's kind of how the gameplay originally was designed to be. And that was based off of a Minecraft mochison I had made many years ago back before even high school, which we built, which had, I believe, over 200,000 different users on it and it was very successful. I think it was in the top 20 servers at the time. And where it had the same gameplay, there was different classes of characters, different abilities that each one could do. And it was all about capturing and holding all the bases at the same time. And so we decided we wanted to rebuild it again, but not on a Minecraft platform, but on our own platform. And so the initial gameplay on the mobile version was almost identical to that. So it sounds like you guys have a lot more experience with game development than I thought you did. And I shouldn't be surprised because it really shows the map, the heroes, just the entire game, Revenblade, is designed really well and really promotes competitive gameplay. I've just been very impressed. I when I was told about this, I was told about this from some of the team members over at Project Stamina. And, you know, they showed me the game and I was like, oh, well, that might be a fun little game. I might I might try that out. And I am I'll tell you right now, I am absolutely hooked. Like every day I'm like, fuck, is it Wednesday yet? Can I can I play Revenblade yet? Yeah, for sure. I feel the same way. I look forward to Wednesday every single week so I can style on you some more with Assassin. But anyways, yeah, we've been we've been designing games for a long time. We started in Blender way back. I want to say I started in fifth grade and Mokazon started in third grade. We started and so my little bit of backstory. My dad is a programmer and he started teaching us how to code. I started coding for the first time in Cubasic. It's an obsolete language at this point, but I started coding in third grade. And I programmed my first. It was a text based game, whereas a text based mystery game where you had to solve mysteries and escape the castle. And I had that finished by the time I was in fifth grade. And from there, we transitioned into into Blender and started using Blender a lot, joined active Blender communities, started making content for other people's games, designing mini games on our own, entering contests, making games. We've been doing this for a very long time. And it's something that we just we've always had a passion for and never really took too seriously beyond more of a hobby until more recently. And so far it's been nothing but a thrill ride, a lot of learning, but definitely a great experience. And I have learned a lot from particularly the more serious side of it as well. And business management and, you know, the intricacies that really go into designing a full game since we don't have a team of hundreds of people, but it's been worth it the whole time. And I encourage anybody else out there, by the way, if you have an interest in it, step out and learn because my brother and I, besides the base of programming with 3D modeling, animating and all that sound design, writing music, entirely self taught. So go out there and learn and try and there's nothing you can go wrong with by failing because failure is just another step towards success. So that's a nice sentiment. Sounds like you guys were kind of we're kind of born into the creation process of it. However, you're really having to get your to learn on the fly as far as marketing and adapting to that, right? Oh, I have no experience in college for architecture. I have zero classes in business, zero classes and marketing. It's been very much learning and experimenting, watching YouTube videos on seeing what other people's mistakes that they've made because you can learn a lot from YouTube and just kind of figuring out what works best. And so, yeah, it's been an awful lot of learning on the fly, figuring out, making a lot of mistakes. But ultimately, as each week goes forward, we feel we get more closer and closer to a final good solution that we can present to. I think that's that's another good reason for you guys to switch over from the mobile market. You and I discuss this offline a little bit, but it seems like as far as mobile games go, the companies that have a lot of money just spam the advertisements like like Raid Shadow Legends or whatever. And it really pushes much better games under the radar. It's kind of a monopoly based on how much money the company has initially, as opposed to how good the game is. I agree. We we did some with our hyperbounce game. We ran some ads on Instagram and we found that the turnover rate was low. And the only way to really have a successful ad campaign is if you don't spend tens of thousands of dollars, if not more into advertising your game to get it to a point where it's large enough for the growth will be natural. And what that basically means is unless you get extremely lucky, for example, Flappy Bird, you really have no chance of finding success. There is really good. Reason path game successful on the mobile platforms that the library, the content library is so oversaturated that it's impossible to stand out. And so the only way to do to stand out is if you have an awful lot of money to back yourself up and force your way to the top. So what's your plans for standing out on PC? Because it seems like I don't think it's as bad as far as computer programs go. I think there's right now there's more than ever a call for these indie games that are that focus on actual gameplay and mechanics over, you know, the high triple A graphics and all that crap. But what what's your sort of strategy to deal with that to get yourselves out there? Well, coming from somebody who plays a lot of League of Legend, the thing that frustrates me a lot about about League is that it's so difficult to reach out to the the creators. And when you spot a problem, I spotted a bug a year ago, a graphics bug with one of the characters. And that graphics bug still exists, even though I've reported it to them four times. And when you see it quite a bit where the community will have a sentiment that this needs to change and it won't change for a long time or the change will go in the other direction or change will be made at the care that the players, the player base doesn't want. I know Fortnite struggles with the same thing or there have been people saying, oh, this just ruins the game. It just ruins the game. And so one of the ways we really want to stand out is by being really active and listening to our audience. And if they make a suggestion, we agree with implemented as soon as possible. If they make a statement that we disagree with, still respond to it and explain why we aren't making that development choice so that they could understand that we've at least heard them out. We've thought about it and here's the solution we've come to. And that is one way we really want to stand out by having, like I said, having a way that actually players can reach out to the medallion slate and expect and know that they will get a reply. And another way we really want to stand out is by having a game that is actually fun. And I know that that's that's that sounds funny, but the way I've been the problem I've been having with so many games is that they become League of Legends has this problem quite a bit. Is that because they become so focused on creating the games good for for professional play and making each each character seem more and more intriguing that they experience two things they experience. They distance their player base because it's balanced from professional play and they experience a thing called power creep where each character gets more and more powerful as you create them so they can seem interesting to the point where it begins to destroy the game. And when that happens, like they are they become like in Fortnite. They have the problem where certain guns are just useless and you spend the whole time trying to find a specific one or in League of Legends, it's all based on the meta and you have to find the right character that fits perfectly. If you don't, you're wasting your time and the game just begins to feel annoying and it doesn't seem like I can't remember the last time I really I played a multiplayer game and said and got to the end of it and said, wow, whether I won or I lost, that was fun. And so we really are trying to make a game that whether you win or you lose has centered around having a lot of fun. And a lot of things that we've been we've realized add to that is that is this aspect of micro wins within a loss where even if you lose the game, you had a lot of moments that felt like wins. You had a lot of moments that were still fun. With Fortnite, for example, if you fall behind early, you spend the last year time running around trying to stay alive as long as you can until you die. You feel like you're losing the whole time with League of Legends, if you dart or get a lead early on and the next 20 minutes is just you losing slowly, you losing and losing and losing. Overwatch has the same problem. So many of these games just feel like you're either and the win is secured and it's just 20 minutes of closing it out, which isn't fun, or 20 minutes of closing out on the losing end, which also isn't fun. And so that is another way we really want to try to stand out is by having a game that is genuinely fun. I will say that your performance in Revenblade seems to be directly tied to your skill with whatever hero that you're playing as opposed to what fucking item build or what you were able to pick up, which I really do appreciate. And like you said, even when you lose, it's a lot of fun a lot of times. Great example that highlight I had where you and I were square and off when I was on the mage and you were, of course, on the assassin. Indeed. Yeah, like you ended up out playing me and you got the kill, but damn, it was close and it felt good. Like I felt that I had been outplayed right there. I didn't feel like you just had been fed or that you had better items than me or had access to something that I didn't. That was just strictly skill level right there. Yep, yep. It wasn't an ally getting me fed. It wasn't some cheesy strategy that just hasn't been patched out yet. It wasn't a better item build. It wasn't better scaling. One thing I really hate in games is those players who, those players who play characters who can just sit back and do nothing and will win the game simply because the game clock hits a certain point. And so yeah, like that's what we really want to have a feel of is even when you lose, you know that there was nothing, there was nothing about it that was unfair. It had nothing to do with numbers. It had nothing to do with balance. It had nothing to do with items, nothing. It was simply, he outplayed me. And if I had played at this way instead, I would have outplayed him. If I had put my heavy a little bit over to the right, I would have killed him. If I had not missed these auto attacks, I would have killed him. You know, if I had jumped this way instead of that way, maybe I would have gotten the trade. That sort of feel, that's what, and that I think adds so much more fun to the game because you're never removing fun from the game. And that's what brings people back to is thinking about that, thinking I could have reacted this way in that situation. And then you hope that that situation repeats itself in games to come and that you can adjust and learn from your mistakes and become a better player. I know I've certainly, I will say this right now, as much as I kind of give a sharpie shit, he is definitely much better at the game than I am. However, I will say that from the first day, like I've done three play tests now, from the first play test to the third play test, I've gotten exponentially better because of that, of seeing situations that I could have reacted to differently and then applying that in the future and learning. So this game is definitely very skill based and I really like that. Yeah, that's exactly what we're going for. We wanted the game to be very easy to pick up, very easy to understand and very easy to progress in your skill at, but at the same time have a very high skill cap, which is a very hard balance to find. And it took us at least a year to find the right spot for that, for each character. We wanted each character as well to feel like it was strong against some, but weak against others. It was strong in some situations and weak in others. For example, the assassin, tremendous one against one, terrible one against five. The mage, not very good, 1v1, but relative to one against five. One against five, the mage can do tremendous damage. So that is the feel we wanted to have is each character kind of has a situational feel whether better or worse and finding that balance so that we don't have to find different ways to make each character feel unique. Instead of making each character feel unique based on how they look or each kit, we make them feel unique based on how they're used. I think you guys do a very good job of that, at least so far. Yeah, and I hope so. Like I said, we put a lot of time into it. If you mind, I'll elaborate a little bit on that. Like I said, when the game originally started, it was going to be abilities-based where you have three abilities, a basic attack, and we debated on a novel a little bit about an ultimate, you could call it. And we very quickly kind of shied away from that because it felt too much League of Legends, smite, overwatch type feel. And we wanted to steer away from that a little bit. There's so many clones of those already, and it's pretty saturated. We wanted to have something a little more unique. And we felt like the first way, the first step for that was the characters. And so we made a lot of transitions and shifts on how the characters work. And I wanted to say we changed the assassin three or four different times before we even got close to where we were at. The warrior has had, the warrior used to be able to throw daggers and pull them back to himself. The assassin used to be able to sit up and hover in the air and spin his katanas around him and do like an AOE spin damage type deal. The archer used to have a wide spread shot, heavy explosive attack, and used to be able to dive roll. And there were just so many different shifts and adjustments we made to make each character feel just right and to make each character feel unique and to make each character feel like it had its own place and that every single character, even though they had a niche, that each one of them had the opportunity to outplay and a disadvantage. Like the assassin counters the archer, but if the archer uses her trap and her invisibility and dash is just right, she can still kill the assassin. The assassin is countered by the warrior and the tank simply because of how much crowd control they have, but if the assassin can time his block just right and uses dashes to avoid everything, he can still kill them all. And so we wanted each character to feel like it had strengths and weaknesses, yet through individual outplay and through playing your character perfectly, each one of those weaknesses won't matter. And it took us a long time to find balance for that. And that seems to be a thematic way that you guys approach things. It's just, it's simple things and it's stuff that I think you can see in games like from years ago, but it's something that people have gotten away from is just basic game decisions to make the game fun. I did a video on you guys' map. You guys' map is just subtle genius. Like the way it's designed is perfect for competitive play. I really like that about your overall approach here. It seems like it's old school. It's old school, back to basics, just make a fun fucking game. Yeah, we were very much inspired by the Street Fighter type games where, yes, there are some characters that are a little bit better into others, but that doesn't matter if you're better at that character than the other person. And where it's just, it's really old school, really down to it, really gritty, almost arcade feel where you know that it's not about button mashing. It's all about how good are you at the game? And if you're good enough at the game, you will win. You will win more than you will lose every single time. And that's exactly, that pretty much sums it up. Yeah, we wanted to have, we wanted to take it old school a little bit with our design approach. I'm gonna take a hard shift here. Let's talk about sound design. That's one thing I've realized. I cover all kinds of games that are currently in development. One thing I've realized is that sound engineering is so much more important than I ever imagined it to be. And by the way, were you gonna send the sound file over to play under this? Oh, of course, yes. Okay, so, and if you can hear in the background, that is music composed by Sharpie. So that's the music you can expect to hear in Revenblade if you do decide to pick it up and play it. And you guys have added a lot of sound effects, I know, especially to the mage, but I really like you guys' sound effects. I think there's more that needs to be done, but you know, that's a process. This isn't, this game isn't in alpha. It is in very early pre-test stage, but what you guys have done is really good. Yeah, I have very little experience. I've written a lot of music. I've done a lot of music performing, but I had very little experience with Foley. It's called Foley, it's making sound effects. And I did a lot of research onto it, but there wasn't much. It seems to be a very niche feel that not a lot of information is out there. There's a lot of generic, here's how you make this sound, here's how you make that sound. But to make more, for example, how do you make the sound of a water type giant explosion? What would that sound like? Or take the healer, take that connection that you can make between yourself and another player. Whenever you heal your character, whenever you heal the person you're tethered to, what does that sound like? It's particularly difficult for sounds that don't exist in the real world. With the tank, when he slams to the ground, that's a very real to earth sound because it's a slam. You take some rocks, you take some clothes, you take some heavy objects and you mesh and mix it all together and you're good to go. So with the archer, for example, you can take an old piano bench and you can lean back and it slowly in that creek makes up for the sound of a bow being stretched and you take two dowel rods and slide them along each other and the sound goes... And it goes up for the sound of the arrow sliding along and you take some string and you pull it tight and you rub it against a piece of wood slided to get that kind of string tensioning sound. And these are things that you can get in the real world and it's all about adding them up together correctly and then figuring out how to combination it correctly. And so those are the easy ones, but the hard ones are the ones that don't exist in the real world and it takes a lot of creativity, a lot of thinking, a lot of experimenting to try to figure out how to do it right. And I'm very thankful for a lot of people in the field. I've been very fortunate to contact people from different professional sound designers from different studios and talk to them for hours on end and get a lot of advice and ideas and some of them have even actually sent me raw sound files that are completely broken apart with like labeled how they made each sound and how they edited them so that I can see and learn a lot from it. It's been really, really great to learn from them as well into experiments and to improve my craft at sound design. And I think sometimes you want to shy a little bit away from being overly realistic. For example, like you don't want to actually just go take a katana and cut aside a beef or something and use that sound for the assassin because that would just gross people out. Definitely not. There are a lot of sounds that we associate with objects that really aren't real at all. For example, when people handle a gun, for example in the movies, you hear a lot of those kind of metal clinkety clunkety as they're moving the gun around, right? When in reality, if you've ever handled like an AR-15 or an AK-47 or something, they're quiet. There's no moving parts in there. They make no sound. And that's one example. Or when you walk, you actually make a lot less noise than portrayed in game and movie. And sometimes that stands out when the walking or the footsteps are a little too loud. But so I definitely agree with the assassin, I actually used no katanas at all. I used a crowbar and a butcher knife to make this. So I took the butcher knife and I slid it across the crowbar and whacked the end of it at the hook to make that ching sound. Nice. And I dangled the crowbar from my string so that it would ring. So there's no katanas involved. That's awesome, man. That's really interesting. Yeah, so a real katana is, because I went to a hardware store and I found a katana. I found two of them and they actually have a very dull sound. It's a very, it's almost like a machete kind of sound of a kind of like a dull, thwacking sound. And so if I had put that into the game, it would be realistic, yes, but it wouldn't be believable to a player. So there is that fine line you have to tread between reality and believability and find out what is actually gonna work best. So, yeah. That's really interesting. I'm kind of cracking up over here, thinking of you doing mad audio engineering scientist stuff in your garage or something. Yep, I set up some mattresses and a bunch of blankets into a rectangle in my basement and put a microphone in there and off I went. That's awesome, that is awesome. But yeah, I mean the sound effects are really good. So hats off to you, good sir. I'm keeping them pumping away. So healers next. Right, well I think we've been talking quite a bit on this subject. We actually ended up going into some tangents that I wasn't expecting, but I'm glad we went there. But I'm gonna go ahead and start wrapping this up. I just, if there's anything you wanna say to people, possible players of the game or people that are currently playing the game, just, you know, floor is yours. To people who haven't tried the game yet, I encourage you to try it once. Even if you're not the type of person who likes to try beta games or early development games, this one is actually quite a bit further along in development than most games. As someone who has done game development for kind of indie game development for most of my life since I was in fourth, fifth grade, I can tell you that most game projects fail. And I'd say a game that reaches this stage is the 1% of the 1%. And so I would encourage you to say, hey, it's try it out. And we will definitely have for early stage rewards planned to give to each one of you. So even if you just stop by one time and get your name registered, that's free rewards for you that will in-game content and stuff like that will be exclusive to you guys. And to anybody else who has already been playing and is testing the game and is loving it or hating it, I hope not, but to anybody else who was playing the game, we've got a lot more stuff coming. We've got new maps. Maps that'll make you experience the, experience revenue late in different ways and experience different ways of play styles that will greatly differ from the map we have currently. We have a snow map in the way, a jungle map and a desert map coming. We have a few more characters that include a desert themed spearman. We have a rogue-like character who's on his way. And we have a sniper in the works as well. So a lot that's coming, a lot of exciting content. We have the launchers almost ready. So we're getting pretty close to releasing a lot of cool new stuff. And stay tuned because I might be dropping some, some information about the story of Revenblade because these people aren't fighting for nothing. So stay tuned for that as well. Awesome. I love me some lore. So you heard it guys. Thank you so much Sharpie for sitting down and talking with me today. I really do encourage you out there to just give this game a try. Like I put the title of my last video was like, it's free, why not? You know, it's such a fun game. Once you try it, you'll truly understand. But for now, this is the Mangoos signing off. You guys have a good one. Mango.