 The PAX Gaming Convention is here and Freedom Games is attending. It is live right now, July 15th to the 18th 2021. And as you can see in the schedule, Freedom Games is an exhibitor just like we were at E3. What's this Freedom Family? Sands of Aura. This is a souls-like action RPG game. It may remind you of the outlaw. It's a dungeon crawler. And this is one that I'm personally super excited to play. Sands of Aura. Wishlist now on Steam. The links are down there in the description below. Powerverse. Created on your own spaceship. Does this remind you of another kind of game? Rovers of Minecraft, guys. It's pretty cool. Ah, here we go. Skyfleet. Build your city in the sky. Defend against invaders. And collect resources. It should be a fun game. We announced some new games that we are publishing like Years of Shadows. Let me show you some gameplay. There are 20 games that we have signed so far, Freedom Family. And I want to give you a taste of all of them by playing the full one hour presentation that we live streamed on PAX East. It was actually live streamed twice. And I, in case you missed it, you can watch it right now. And again, click all the links down there in the description below to check out our games, wishlist them, and eventually buy them when they launch. Roll it! I decided, you know what? I've dabbled in indie games. I'm gonna give this one last shot. Let's just make a game. It felt like jumping into the deep end. I realized that making games was like a real thing that you can do. It's just so, that's the word is liberating. We owned this project. We just want to make a fun game. You have an idea of what the vision of it looks like, but then it actually coming out the other side looking like that, it's pretty rare. Afterburner Studios is composed of primarily just three of us. I co-founded the studio with two of my friends, Robert Taylor and Paul Svoboda. We had all worked at a company that did not end up turning out like any of us had hoped. So coming out of that experience, the three of us felt kind of burned out with game developments. You know, we had worked at AAA Studios beforehand and we wanted to do something that felt a little bit more authentic to who we were and what we liked and something that we could collaborate together to keep that working relationship going. I am more primarily a designer. Paul is more primarily an artist and Rob is primarily an engineer. Having the kind of the core pillars of game design already there and having experience allowed us to work a lot more quickly and collaborate a lot more easily and it's really exciting to be able to see a process from start to finish, which is one of those things you don't get to do a lot in AAA. The Dreamscaper is an action roguelite where players take on the role of Cassidy and they get to live her life. There's a strong focus on the waking dreaming gameplay cycle. So at night you dungeon crawl through Cassidy's dreams. You find her memories. They help empower her in order to take on the nightmares that she faces and then during the day you kind of explore this city that she has just moved to meet new people, upgrade relationships, try to figure out her place in the world and in doing so that makes her more capable of developing the tools to take on these dreams. This game is really kind of a melting pot of all the influences we have had that we haven't expressed yet making other games. This is really the first time we've been able to pour so much of ourselves into the development of a game and because of that there's influences from all over. So there's kind of the dungeon layout and setup. There's a melee combat system and then you have a mixture of high fantasy elements grounded in reality because these are in someone's dreams so it's pulling from the real world. So we're kind of picking and choosing and bringing stuff together that's an amalgam of what the three of us are interested in and what we really click with. And this beautiful music by Dale North plus Paul's art kind of bring it to this diametrically opposed place but that works. Relaxing action roguelite. That was something that we really wanted to do when we were making the game was put our own kind of modern spin on the genre. I think I'm most proud of us being able to look at this game and know that we're hitting our own quality bar especially for our first game. The Wandering Bend my wife is doing my lovely camera work you can tell it's super fancy. This is all baby clutter you can see. Can you tell that we're having a baby? We're having a baby. This is where we work obviously this year lots of people work from home but we've been doing it since before it was cool and yeah let's go let's go to my office here. Airborne Kingdom is already on the monitor you can tell I'm actually working. I've gotten into racing that's like a little racing wheel. I played a little ukulele. It feels like the worst MTV crib fit. This is where the magic happens. The four of us who started the studio we all used to work together in in AAA. I left to go start making indie games so we took that opportunity to kind of use our old friend group and our old expertise to start up the Wandering Bend and it was the first time that all of us felt complete creative control over something that was really big. That was fun it was a challenge it was also scary at the beginning. On a AAA team you have technical artists and a dozen animators and a whole bunch of people doing back-end engine work and a lot of marketing you know coming up with the right way to pitch something and a lot of concepting time and all that stuff and so I think the biggest challenge for us was trying to learn new skills and new parts of the game development process without ever doing it before. You think you know everything and then at some point you go oh wait we didn't know how to do that part well I guess we got to figure it out but I wouldn't trade it away I think it's the creativity and creative Airborne Kingdom is the Sky City Builder so you're building your own unique sky city among the clouds and you get to fly it across a really diverse and open and randomized landscape. What I think is really cool about it is that we've kind of combined genres here a bit it's a little bit subtle until you get to play it but it's a city builder meets like an open RPG type of game because you can really move your kingdom to wherever you want to on this landscape and you interact with other kingdoms and they give you quests and you find hidden items throughout the world and so what starts off feeling like a little bit of a city builder kind of morphs into this cool blending of genres and I really think that's something different that I haven't seen before and we've gotten a lot of positive response on it so it's really cool. This is more of like kind of a chill experience there's there's a lot of management and a lot of busy work in there that throughout the game kind of puts you in this cool flow state along with the music along with the art and we're hoping that that lets people kind of appreciate the world and the story more people just vibe with it you know. So we're all remote and we're actually all in different time zones now so Fred our programmer kind of jumped back and forth from Montreal to Peru that was his consistent movement. I did a lot of my work out of Denver, Zaks out of Seattle Anemesh actually came to visit California and then kind of got stuck there for the pandemic and he now lives permanently back in India. What's important to all of us is experiencing different cultures and having different perspectives from different places is really cool and I think our game kind of touches on that right our game is all about the fact that different cultures and building on cultures together can make something bigger than each individual piece combined it kind of you know multiplies itself if you just kind of can learn to work together and connect with different cultures. From the art side we took a lot of influence from like tiny little music boxes and papercraft and things like that so it's about pulling influences from many different places that hopefully create something that people haven't really seen in games before. I think we created a world that you can really get lost in and you can you can lose a lot of time just kind of exploring it and and being mellow and relaxing with it and at the same time I think there are a lot of really cool themes kind of hidden underneath if you really dig into the story and into the world that we've created so I hope people just can you know relax into the game itself and and move through it at their own pace while exploring the different themes we kind of clicked in there. Really trying to get something to the gamer as in we try to make a game how we want the game to be. Day one was just me fiddling around with some engines and after a year or so it was over my head and I had too many ideas and I started looking around for friends so that's when I found Marcel he worked at Lowes supermarket same with me he wasn't in my regular front group but both of us were very into the retro games these were our favorites and I remember just talking about those games around the job on occasion and that's how it all started. We didn't really envision it this big from the beginning because we started to raise our own bar and eventually started putting in money and a lot of our time into the development. Through the time we ended up with different monster designers different skill designers different web designers UI designers and it was us Marcel and me keeping the division in line and guiding all of the employees to create a consistent art style. We tried to combine a lot of different elements from different games and give it a unique touch through time we really saw the need to differentiate and also come with new ideas new concepts new mechanics and a completely different storyline we tried to look at every decision ever made and just we think do we want to do some similar do we want to do a completely different form on a set in a free touristic world and it's really going to take you through a lot of emotions you're going to meet a lot of characters a lot of interesting kormann designs. We introduced a lot of new mechanics bigger bosses which have multiple phases of extreme extreme power which really require a new kind of strategy compared to other monster than games. Our kormann have a mechanical potential which makes them appear in three different collectible colorizations. It's a whole new experience in the monster technique genre and a shout out to our community they helped us translate the demo they helped us get out the word the demo has been played over a million times I think that's because of the mindset we're making this game and we try to think how would a gamer go for this and what would he like I think that's the reason why we resonate with community that much it's just great to get a community like that they helped us make kormann what it is I had lived in Kyoto for a while where I had gone to a cat cafe and it was such a surreal experience for me at the time when I was handed a business card a cat's business card or a cat called Niko so I we were making management games right that's what our experience was so I thought like this seems like such a cool idea for a management game so we sat down and we prototyped cat cafe manager it's a foggy Thursday here in the Netherlands and it is a normal work day for us here at roost games and for me that usually starts with making my morning coffee roost games is a four-person dutch like little indie studio that we formed a little over a year ago all of us live in the same town here in the Netherlands it's a town called Utrecht medieval little town it's really beautiful I could literally get on my bike and bike to any of them we have board game nights together it's why I have this big pile of board games behind me and we play video games together and we just hang out a lot as well not these days but we used to just get a little work done in the morning then go out into town on my bike meet two of my co-workers for lunch I'm really looking forward to that because it's been a while it's been a strange year like starting a studio in 2020 was a weird experience because me and Rithra got to working together like in person for only a little bit before we had to go into lockdown and from that point on it was a lot of figuring out like how do we do this a thing that we found after a couple of months working is that we would just not be talking about cat cafe manager like we'd be talking about the work we were doing but not about like the game itself and how it made us feel our hopes and wishes for the game where we saw it moving so we started doing this thing like at least once every month where we just talk about the game game talk and that's been super valuable to us all right so I'm now biking to go hang out with Rithra and call me for a little bit eat a sandwich maybe talk about the game maybe not we'll see oh if it isn't Rithra good morning I don't know there's like a thing about the team that is very important to us which is that we are effectively a co-op previously like working for studios we we always felt that you know there's a lot of camaraderie that comes through making games and we we would really like to see that be reflected in the way that we treat everybody that works at roost games we make sure that everybody essentially receives an equal financial cut of whatever we do and we feel like that sort of allows people to bring themselves into the process and into the into the game so much more and like really add their own sort of passion so that's been like super freeing for me and I think for everybody else at roost games I'm actually quite happy with how we've been able to put everything that we find important pretty sensually in the game when you're petting a cat I don't know what it is like endorphins that are being released like the the good feeling that you get from that that we kind of wanted to put in the game you know something inherently relaxing about taking care of this adorable animal that is both at your whims and incredibly like defined of of you every cat that we have in the game is like a unique cat with their own personality so we're always looking for you know people that have cats like if I'm visiting someone that has a cat I'm like okay what what kind of a cat is this actually I don't think any of our team members have cats so maybe that is the reason that we're making a cat cafe manager game it's very much a game about building your own little space and then filling it with the kind of like the kind of furniture that you like and the people that you like as well and the cats most importantly that you that you like we live in a time that's like pretty stressful and out of control in a lot of ways so for us it's very important that you sort of get a cozy feeling when you get introduced to the game you will always want a little bit of challenge and tension but we're looking for like a good equilibrium between chill and challenging finding the the right kinds of furniture that you like and adopting stray cats and caring for them naming them and sort of figuring out what their personality is you can sort of always keep making progress designing your cafe and adopting more cats and making friends also just making the cat cafe of your dreams a really rural town so is tainer the other lead developer on the game we both grew up together in the same 500 population Arkansas town the two of us the two lead devs we live together we're partners so we've been together for since middle school I guess yeah I am definitely one of those people who played games all growing up and both of us were really passionate about it he was one of the first people I ever met that actually wanted to have these interesting conversations about the design of games and stuff like that we went to college here also in Arkansas and you know we tried out some projects and actually um to the rescue started is our one of our sort of undergrad like hey let's see if we can actually make a game just as a hobby thing let's try it out that's sort of how the project started to the rescue is where you play as somebody working in a dog shelter and taking on all the responsibilities that entails but also getting to know all of the unique dogs so that you can take care of them and find the right homes for them having that moment of the dog that it's not very cute it's old and you've been trying to get it adopted forever but then that one person comes it's the right person takes them away like that moment I want to be the most memorable thing for people when they play the game we thought it was a cool idea because we hadn't seen one before you know a game like this and yeah we just felt like it was a lot of potential and we were really surprised no one else was doing it and we just felt like if we were going to pick a project this is one that felt really marketable and might help us get on our feet and stand out a little bit especially not having the big community to sort of help uplift us there's no companies right there's no video game companies in Little Rock or the state of Arkansas so we decided to just jump off the deep end and be like hey let's try and just be the first Little Rock games is just five people and this project within Little Rock games is just Tanner and I delegating tasks to each other and also giving feedback to each other and also being in a relationship with each other and yeah so having really that that and sort of inherent support structure has been really important from my perspective oh my special guest star appeared people love dogs so much but this is also about raising awareness right it's both of those things we heard a lot of positive feedback just just to the core concept right yeah it is sort of escapism getting to do this without having to face the realities yourself but we're also not pretending those realities aren't there is in the game you know there's diseases that can appear in the shelter it's dirty and adopters only want the cutest puppies and they don't want the old dogs and and we do feature euthanasia as an element in the game it's completely optional but it's there so essentially I just want people to walk away with more knowledge about the things for representing and I feel like there's a lot of room in sim management games to explore the real world in more nuanced ways so it is important for us to find that balance of wanting people to be able to experience this dog management but also not being able to completely ignore the fact that real people have to do these jobs it's resonated with a lot more people than we expected it to and we've gotten a lot of people that work in real shelters that are like I'm glad that you're doing this because a lot of people don't realize how hard the work is and how thankless it is so 20 of every dollar that the Litter Rock Games makes from this game is going to be going to the Pet Finder Foundation the game is about being hopeful that you can improve your community in some small way I first started getting into games probably about seven or eight years old I was always kind of like tinkering around with game engines they never really went anywhere until about maybe 15 or 16 where I started putting games on the web so like flash games and things like that I then started a degree in game development and then I've just been kind of putting out little mobile games here and there just really simple tap based games but it wasn't challenging and it come a point where I wanted to stretch myself a little bit with the games I was creating I always liked the idea of really silly deaths characters getting blown to bits in like a cartoon-y way the thing with most games is when you die it's usually an area of frustration but when you can see your character's head just flying off and blood's going everywhere it's like you just got nothing but humour there so I come up with the idea of having like a ninja warrior slash total white pal death competition and that was slowly so the last flash game I made was in like 2014 and there's still people speedrunning to this day so I got chatting to those guys about sort of what features they think are really important for speedrunning I thought well if you guys are still enjoying you know what I made six seven eight years ago then I might as well tailor as as many features as I can towards these guys too one of the pillars of slaughter league in itself is that it's it's built the same design philosophies as I've taken to a flash game we want to be what we know and be the best at that for me the thing with slaughter league where it kind of breaks expectation it's the amount of content that's going to be there from your sort of standard small little platform indie game you might get a single player mode or you might get multiplayer racing or you might sometimes get a stage builder it's it's even more rare but you'll never get all three and one we're kind of offering the level of content as a triple-a developer but with an indie game we've been working a lot on the stage builder side of things and what that's going to let players do is not just build stages but build game modes basically make other games within slaughter league players can kind of build their own collectibles and build their own puzzle maps or build their own races zombie maps whatever it might be we want to give them as many tools as possible to achieve as many different creations as possible essentially so that's something I'm hugely excited about it as a developer to think there might be you know some of the younger audience don't quite understand programming they don't quite understand 3D model but they can build a level and be proud of that and send that to the friends share that with the world we're kind of hoping the creatives have an outlet the thing is we're making games there's so many moving parts to it you've got you know like say the 3D art you've got the the menus the things that you don't really consider this was my first 3d game the mobile games before this were all 2D based and that that was a skill set I never had some of the code I built early on was the kind of stuff you'd have for a blog josh the back end guy he was he just laughed he was like this as soon as you launch this will just fall apart I was like oh no it worked fine for like 10 of us you know there's like 10 of us playing it's it was enough to sustain that but if it was to get a big launch with this old code it would just set on fire I started it with just one laptop it's pretty much you built the whole thing on a laptop yeah well it's to be fair the good thing is about building on a laptop is if I can get it to run really really well on this I know for a fact it's going to run really well on you know people's absolute beast I was actually working two jobs at the same time as developing the game retail during the start of the pandemic which was pretty wild and also teaching at the local university too for game development I feel guilty not working on the game I have all these fantastic ideas while I was there you know I'll be on the checkout just thinking about slowly and about time I get home I'm just like do I have to then speaking to freedom we ended up deciding that it'll be best if I work full-time on the game the first month or so at least I was having dreams about having to go back to work I was having dreams that ah I've got a shift soon what am I doing I work I was like no you're gonna be back for you know it's great having the freedom to just be able to focus all of my mind onto the game it's just gonna make it so much better as a product than it would have been because it's got love put into it now it's got time and it's undivided attention I think is like the main thing this game it sounds corny but it's changed my life in that way whereas no other game had before I was still working the two jobs while building the mobile games while building the flash games or whatever it might have been whereas this game has just flipped my life to where I want it to be to finally be able to do this as a job is just insane I love it this is definitely like a good just relax chill to even play bugs lab and stupid stuff kind of game dark dd is what happens when you take the character customization levels of an rpg and put it into a high strategy chess like gameplay style each character has access to nine different classes with branching weapon trees with huge customization within the equipment the entire focus is laid on you get to choose what your characters are good at and what they're bad at it is very much a combination of genres I was pretty laid back in college I did just fine but I worked on dark deity I didn't work on my own work none of us have ever worked on games at all there's one member of the team that's worked on like a couple student projects but really this is our first real game that we're working on for the majority of development and worked on it in the dorm and we would sort of just sit in the dorm room just like you know type of working away I learned how to code I sat in my room and for 16 hours a day for like a whole week I just didn't leave my room didn't eat didn't do anything we're very tight knit that's what's so fun about making dark deities that we are friends the team is five friends so like when we're on work calls we're hanging out it's not like oh man I have a meeting at eight and we sometimes we meet till like midnight you know how to we all have very very different sensibilities and opinions on the team we like to be open about disagreeing and trying to find like the best solution that everyone can agree on and we sort of argue healthily argue most of the time there's a certain level of of maturity that it takes to be able to you know talk to a friend and say hey I disagree with this and it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with you know the impact on the game or you know the quality of the thing and the fact that we have a full team that can really respect that is huge an attitude that we've had that I think we all feel happy that we've stuck with is that we've been sort of uncompromising on trying to make everyone happy it's been a it's been really hard to stick to our guns and say you know take a mechanic that we think makes the game better but not everyone's going to like it really committing to doing that and making the best game we can and knowing that there's going to be some people that might like it less for that even if it you know results in a better game you can't please everybody and in knowing that we're not going to please everybody we're not compromising on any mechanics and watering them down it's an art form that the industry is sort of losing that that way of artfully telling you know you have to do this another time where you can't do this and it's it's it's a bit of a push and pull finding that sweet spot in the progression where it's accessible but we're not letting you just do anything you want with no you know consequences or no real meat to your actions you should have to choose a path at some point you can play this thing so many times and have the gameplay feel different you know there's going to be a lot of character bonds you don't see in two three four playthroughs maybe and depending on if you're trying to see them all having it built to not only be replayed but for you to really find out more about the world and and figure out more about the game play as you play more is pretty exciting to talk about just how much the scoping has changed it's almost indescribable we would have been happy with a thousand people seeing it when we first started like that would have been the biggest success ever this is our first game we want to keep making games and if if the quality of this is you know our very first effort and we've learned a lot through it and you know the the next one's obviously going to come with a much higher level of expertise this is it's grassroots I think we're all I mean we're all excited it's terrifying but it's really exciting because you know where we're at we're all 23 two of us haven't graduated college yet I mean to to ship a game of this quality is pretty exciting maybe I should raise my raise consequences this would make for a fine take I've always thought that I would be good at making video games my mom just sent me a picture of a drawing I did when I was like eight titled my own game basically a Mario level that I had drawn up myself grown up with games I always loved them I really wanted to make my own studio and I realized that's like not really super realistic it was kind of like wanting to be you know a football star I was diagnosed with Asperger's autism as a child and I basically kind of just told myself now there's no way I could be in management you know it's a social disorder where you have difficulty analyzing social situations so I kind of just assumed that because of that quote unquote disadvantage that I had I couldn't do it that I couldn't compete with other people in part because of a label and I mean the label was helpful it helped me recognize the the problem and how to overcome it but I needed to understand that it wasn't the end all via through therapy as a child and then continuing through college my own efforts on my own to finish my own development and learning I overcame it many things you can overcome oh with enough effort it'll take a lot of time and a lot of effort it took me 28 years that was when I decided you know I've dabbled in indie games I'm going to give this one last shot before I'm 40 I was like it has to get done that's the most important thing what's most satisfying and makes me happiest is that now I'm doing my dream doing something I thought I couldn't do we just want to make a fun game and we want people to look at it and think that that looks fun and all through this process I had two kids I'm proud to say that my oldest son who is now four finally beat the first two levels of the original Kirby yes the other cool thing about this is I've been able to actually involve my wife my wife has actually written three novels and so I was like you know what why don't you write for our game we have a worldwide team we have people in like 10 countries I think US Canada Brazil Portugal England Scotland Germany Italy Russia and Singapore what brings me a lot more satisfaction and maybe this is because I've had kids is seeing everything just come together into this some that is greater than something I could have possibly made by myself finding all the right talented people to bring their ideas and their creativity and vision into the project which is not something I necessarily even thought of going into it through this process I've really learned how valuable people are there's 20 people on the team I'm just one of them the 3d artists the 2d artists the programmers all of them have been invaluable it would not be here today if it wasn't for them and I'm hoping to convey some of that through the game's narrative you have to have growth and you have to have progress so for us loneliness drives you to push forward in the game and it also helps highlight the value of connection friendships and interpersonal dynamics and it's something that I I thought became fairly prescient with the onset of the COVID lockdowns people kind of underestimated the idea of loneliness when they were actually faced with it when they were actually isolated from each other a lot of people seem to realize oh wait we can't just pull up in our houses and feel fulfilled if I was to say there was any kind of a goal with one lonely outpost that I'm hoping for people to get out of it that's greater than just a fun game it's maybe being able to reflect a little bit on what community means to them when I feel bad and when I have bad times like I always go to games to disconnect and relax I was really glad for having games that made me feel that way and I want to be able to give at least one person the same opportunity I had with with our game how the game started is actually through university we did the project as kind of like our last year project we started at six people and just we like each other we real world work together and we had fun that always created a good dynamic for us to work together and so yeah it was just friends doing the game together basically the the main concept is you run a cloud maker you need to treat them you need to be with them make them feel better and go out into the world you need to explore you need to gather different items you need to cook meals it feels good to let yourself get lost a little bit in that world so that's definitely an exploration factor that it's also important we knew we wanted to create a game that was fun but also relaxing again had kind of like a safe space having something that is positive and that gives you reassurance and so from those two ideas we started to look to games that we liked and we started to create something similar to those games it's relaxing and it gives people a place to disconnect character customization is something that it's really important to me because you can create a character however you want it the game makes a hard work of never asking you for your general identity or limiting you in any way in that sense and so that's something that it's important to me and that I was proud of you know making making work because if you want to create a safe space that you want everyone to feel good you need to be able to create a character that that doesn't put that pressure of gender on you you know want to make you feel better with this game want you to feel good in the game developer from Indonesia and the game industry in Indonesia is still relatively new and at the time when I started there was only a web forum and the thing about Indonesia is that game dev is not a main career people usually want to be a doctor or architect it's something that's absurd for our previous generation I spent a lot of time in that forum and eventually found some friends talk a lot about video games and then just interact with each other and then just one day we decided to make a simple shooter game and then we just keep making games and the chart is an action RPG about restoring fallen civilization you play as a bell-wielding character that goes into dungeon to retrieve souls of missing villagers and also rebuilding the town throughout the game we basically love retro games especially 16-bit and 32-bit era I think that was the era when we still had the excitement of a child but also old enough to appreciate the game design so we want to recreate that kind of experience to modern players so it's like a retro experience but with modern feel we put a lot of care into designing different enemy patterns different obstacles and also different kind of puzzles that you will encounter every level has a unique gimmick and you can also knock enemies to jars, destructible objects the thing that I really happy about under chart is the combat design and also the enemy design just seeing the characters move and interact with each other is really rewarding to me I think it's mostly about the old school game that we miss the style so we put a lot of care in the development working with my family my family business doing business management and I got to the point where you know it I can't I can't do this office work because this isn't what I want to do with my life or it just didn't feel you know fulfilling enough so I took a step back from that went back to school and and decided to you know pursue game development and give that a shot and give that a try actually that's how my team was formed too we all went to same school and we all worked together on the student project it was fun to make and it was great learning experience but it wasn't really a game that we wanted to make so we moved on and really sat down and really focused in on the game we want to create which we got to where we are today with Sands of Aura. Sands of Aura is an open world action RPG and it's set in this decaying world we call Talon Hell and Talon Hell is riddled with you know sand and dust due to an ancient spell that turned everything into an entropic ruin while the players are playing this game they are given full control to fully customize the way they want to play with a variety of fighting styles and and literally thousands of weapon combinations to tackle on different enemies and bosses encountered throughout the world the thing I'm most proud of that our team created was this weapon creation system we don't care if the item that you end up creating is completely broken and it breaks like every single boss fight we have like we want the players to be able to find that and and have fun with that and and I think that's something that you know it's kind of missing in all different types of games you want to be able to create these you know really janky or broken builds or even just try something completely different that you're you haven't really seen in games or even just blow our mind as developers away like we have never thought that somebody can do this with our creation system I think everybody that's played real games want and feel like they can design a game like they play a game like I can do this right but then once you actually jump into it and you learn all about the intricate parts of the the programming the art the animations the cinematics the ui user experience all these different elements to make a game like you don't think about it you know when you're just playing it but when you're making it you have to understand how all these pieces work to create something like amazing that players enjoy and that was the challenge oh what the best thing about my team is that we push each other really hard like every time somebody comes out with a new art concept or a new animation for something we're actively critiquing it and just pushing you try to do better and better you know we we want to do the best that we can so that we as a group can do really well and continue living this dream of just making video games nine years of shadow is a metroidvania so it's this action adventure exploration game you get to explore a big setting and you get power-ups that allow you to move and fight in different and interesting ways although it's all sort of an excuse to tell this very important story that comes out of depression and overcoming it I've always been into creative arts and narrative when I was in film school I I was actually creating this script as a homework assignment and it was a very sad story I wasn't I didn't realize I was writing about myself at the time it's about depression and very emotional deep stuff we created this company which is called Halberd Studios that creates animation and films advertisement things like that and when we had a bit of money saved we said like okay advertisement is okay but we actually want to do like creative stuff right so what should we do and I had that story from 2013 and so I said you know what like let's let's do something with this I'm also a very big video game fan and we had animators and we had artists and we knew a bit about that pipeline and so it wasn't a plan but we managed to transform our everyday job into let's make something that we are proud of and that is ours you know music plays a big role back in the day when I was really really down feeling down like I remember Castlevania being one of the soundtracks that uplifted me the most like it made me feel a lot better listening to that soundtrack and it was funny because when I met the composer Michiru Yamane I told her that story and she's actually composing part of the soundtrack because of it the composer from Metal Gear is also doing a track and Manami Matsumai the composer from Mega Man is also doing a track so music is very important for me and for the game we try to include as much as possible in the gameplay and the mechanics and so that's I think one of the highlights we have this musical saying with the bosses so boss fights are musical and we try to implement that as deep as possible so you can almost hear what the boss is doing their rhythms their attacks and stuff like that the music will be something to look out for there's also this analogy with light so as a DP I used to excel a bit more in terms of the visual part of it visual language became such an interesting thing for me there's some elements of respect to that you know light is such an interesting character to the story the essential element in a Metroidvania is to explore you need to make exploring interesting you know making these elemental armors for the main character was such a big part of it you get to move and fight in different ways fire earth and water are three different ways of moving towards the castle and in a Metroidvania it makes a lot of sense because you tend to visit the same place more than once and so if that place now you can move differently through those rooms and then it becomes you know more interesting and so that strategy of changing your your suit on the fly is just something that I think it's fun you can expect weird stuff to happen in the game it's just not your traditional Metroidvania I gained that's about mental health problems that is a very important message that's why this project exists for this message a cinematographer wrote a script and then it became a company and the company ended up doing video games so it's just a mess of a story but that's I think that's that's life it took us a long time to get here we put a lot of hard work into it chipping games brings tough times but we've also seen like success together success for us is defined as being able to continue to do this because we really love it we want to be what we know and be the best at that making something that people enjoy freedom and join the freedom family so we can all grow together you get many perks like position music you 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