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Building an Indie Hit in Godot with Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon
00:42:22
Cassette Beasts is a turn-based monster-battling RPG that lets players record creatures onto cassette tapes and transform into them during battle. The game was an indie hit, and is also one of the most successful games built with the open source Godot ...
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- [00:01]
Narrator
Cassette Beasts is a turn based monster battling RPG that lets players record creatures onto cassette tapes and transform into them during battle. The game was an indie hit and is also one of the most successful games built with the open source Godot engine. Jay Bayliss and Tom Coxon are the creators of Cassette Beasts at Bitten Studio. They join the show with Joe Nash to talk about the development of their game. Joe Nash is a developer, educator and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
- [00:57]
Joe Nash
Jay and Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.
- [01:00]
Jay Bayliss
Hey, thanks for having us.
- [01:01]
Tom Coxon
Hi Joe, thanks for having us.
- [01:03]
Joe Nash
So, to kick off, we've mentioned your creators of the game Cassette Beasts and you are an indie outfit of two folks. So I think it'll be useful to start with covering your areas of concern and what you both do on the studio. Jay, do you want to kick off?
- [01:13]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, sure. So we're a small team. We're actually three full time members now. We were two for the majority of the development of Cassette Beasts. I am not a technical man. I do art and writing and narrative things and words and animation and all that. So I tend to handle the visual side of things.
- [01:33]
Tom Coxon
And I'm Tom. I tend to do the programming and take the lead on game design. But obviously as a small team our roles overlap quite often.
- [01:42]
Joe Nash
Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine that any small company is. Imagine if you've noticed a problem or find a thing. Congratulations. It's now your thing to fix situation going on between the team. Right. So how did you two start working together? So what was the genesis of Bitten Studio? What was your first collaboration?
- [01:58]
Jay Bayliss
So Tom and I both worked at a game developer and Tom was working on a game called Lenna's Inception, which was kind of like a side passion project. And at some point I kind of jumped in and was like, hey, do you want some art from this? This looks really cool. It looks fun. And it kind of grew from there, would you say? That's right, Tom?
- [02:14]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, that was a part time project for a long time and then in late 2019 we took that full time. We released it in 2020 while we were starting work on Cassette Beasts.
- [02:24]
Joe Nash
Awesome. So actually just briefly I guess on tech on that, Tom. So Cassette Beasts, as we'll talk about, is kind of a notable and standout title in the go Universe as being a big commercial hit on the Godot engine. And one of the earlier ones was Lennon's Inception already. Had you already started playing with Godot on that point or was that a different stack?
- [02:41]
Tom Coxon
I played with a bunch of engines over the years. Lena's Inception was actually a completely custom engine written in Java. So I made all my mistakes in that game and learned to do better for the next one. I think making a custom engine, some people enjoy it, obviously, but it was a mistake for us. It's really dragged the game out for years on end.
- [03:02]
Joe Nash
Right. Yeah. No, I think that's very normal for a game that starts as a side project, from what I've heard. And good to exorcise those demons early, as you say, get the temptation to build out of your system. Cool. Yeah. Let's dive into Cassette Beasts. So folks unfamiliar. Jay, can you briefly describe Cassette Beasts for us?
- [03:19]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, Cassette Beasts, it's a monster collecting or I guess it's more accurate to say monster recording RPG in the kind of spirit of games like Pokemon. But there's lots of things mixed in there. You know, it's got some kind of Zelda y open world elements. Yeah. And it's kind of this weird game about transforming into monsters using cassette players and.
- [03:41]
Joe Nash
Yeah, perfect. And what led you to create a game in this genre? Did you set out to create a game in the monster collecting genre? Or was it just that that became the best genre to represent the ideas you wanted to capture, if that makes sense.
- [03:53]
Jay Bayliss
So, I mean, as Tom said, you know, we went full time in 2019 and starting a game studio isn't just like an artistic venture. It's a commercial and like, it's a venture in terms of like, okay, how do we make a business? So we had a lot of discussion and we sat down for a long time and we kind of discussed what's the intersection between what we're passionate about and also from the business side of things, what markets might be underserved, what genres maybe aren't being explored enough. And we had a bunch of ideas for games. We didn't jump immediately to Cassette Beasts, but one thing we kept coming back to was this idea of like, I think it's best way to frame it is like, no one is afraid of making an FPS game because Call of Duty is so big, but everyone is afraid to make games about collecting monsters because Pokemon is so big. It was not necessarily a case of like clone this game. You know, people use games like Clones or Pokemon. Like, it's more like this is genre space in gaming that is really, really popular. Pokemon is the most popular media entity on the planet, and no one's really making games to explore, like, different things you can do in that space. And I think if you've played Cassette Beasts, you'll know. Actually, it does its own things in a lot of different ways. But it kind of comes back to this core element of, like, people. There was, like, a really cool aspect of the core of that, you know, finding creatures and beasts and being able to kind of convert those encounters into part of your arsenal, and then what kind of space can we explore with that? So we kind of ended up coming back to this idea and being like, okay, what can our thing be? How can we make it kind of its own thing? How can we get stand out? And a big thing was like, okay, if we're looking at Pokemon, but you're looking at Digimon as well. These games often go for this idea of being almost like fantastical pet simulators. So we were like, well, if took this genre but didn't try and compete in that pet sim space and took it in a very different direction. One thing I think we found when we were playing around on developing Leonard's Inception is we really liked working on characters and kind of developing characters. So there was this idea of, like, what can we do to emphasize character development in this genre space? And how do we make that intersect with the kind of thing we're talking about with collecting monsters and stuff? And we came on this idea of, like, well, okay, you can transform into the monsters. That means that you and the characters are center stage. You know, it's not pets. It's not a theoretical pet sim. The focus can stay on those characters and those humans, and you can bond with them and that. It's kind of all snowballed from there. You know, I think once we kind of landed on that, it all kind of fell into place in a lot of ways.
- [06:33]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, there were several other genres that we were considering, but Cassette Beast came together so quickly and it was so strong that it seemed silly to do anything else.
- [06:41]
Joe Nash
Nice. Awesome. Yeah, that's fascinating. Especially the point about how people talk about FPS and Call of Duty versus Pokemon in this genre is really, really interesting. And, yeah, I really like that. I think, actually you expressed this in another interview. But your approach of Cassette Beasts and that, you know, you becoming the collectible is like, also just. You spoke about how it got around some of, like, the trickier aspects of the genre in the past about, you know, just like, capturing Animals and making them like fight for you and stuff, which I think is a really important aspect and obviously is one of the enduring sources of memes for Pokemon, that weird like sordid history of it. So I think your take on it is really cool, clever and the RPG elements are really fantastic. So you spoke a lot there about how you approached entering this space of a really representative standout in Pokemon and like how you differentiate yourself from it in terms of the narrative and I guess the genre elements, the leading with the RPG and the relationships. One of the things that I'm really interested in as well is how you've played with the systems. Because you know, on the surface, if you're just first time looking at cassette pieces, like, okay, there are monsters, there are types, there's turn based battles, but you've taken what feels like you've kept enough of those systems that players of Pokemon and Digimon recognize what's going on, but then you've like one upped a lot of them in a lot of ways and it's pushed on those barriers. Can you talk about some of the systems in the game and how you play with those concepts? So one of the things I've got in mind here is the interactions between types. Like I think was it the Glass shards Debuff example is one that I think is really interesting as like a type thing. I think also there's a similar one with like, is it with Fire and Water as well? Does something similar. That's kind of where I'm thinking, obviously Fusions as well. But we'll come to Fusions in a second.
- [08:10]
Tom Coxon
Well, Jay and I were fans of Pokemon from a very young age and when we started working on Cassette Beasts, we already had 20 years worth of ideas built up to use.
- [08:21]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, I mean when you think about the elemental systems in games like Pokemon, they're meant to be kind of. It's an introduction RPG for younger players. It's meant to be kind of like a one step system of, you know, if your opponent is water, then you use electric. It's kind of like a one step strategy that's easy enough for kids to remember. And then the strategy kind of plays out in that way. If you remember this intersection of elements, then it's pretty straightforward and you win the game. That's just you have to do the correct one on your list. But you know, we were very much coming at this from a point of view of we might have an older audience, you know, an audience who's much more familiar with other RPGs as well. And how do you take that core iconography of elements, you know, fire, poison, lightning. And how do you put a spin on it that adds a layer of extra tactical complexity to keep things interesting and keep you feeling like you're learning new things. Obviously, as much as we like Pokemon, we didn't actually approach this game from point of view of starting with something that exists already and manipulating it from there and changing the design from there. We started from the base scratch, a blank slate of we've got these points of iconography. What interesting stuff can we do with that? And I think I remember talking to you, Tom, about games like Original Sin 2 and Genshin Impact that have these interesting, like, oh, if you place the surface down, then you can set fire to that surface. And there's other games in the whole world of RPGs that do cool stuff with elements. And I was like, how can we bleed into those ideas and see what we can do in the turn based combat space? And I think it kind of evolved from that exploration.
- [09:52]
Joe Nash
Awesome. So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of a similar thing. One of the really interesting features, which draws a lot of baffled Reddit threads, which I absolutely love, is your monster Fusion system. So the idea that you've got these two partners on the screen in all the battles and they can combine to make one monster for a short period. As far as I've at least seen in my limited exposure, this works between every monster and you have tens of thousands of combinations. And any monster can combine with any other monster, which from an asset perspective is an absolute nightmare. So I imagine there's some degree of procedural generation going on in the system, is that correct?
- [10:24]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, yeah, that's right. We get some people ask us if the game uses AI to create these Fusions, but it's a lot simpler than that, actually. They're basically just paper dolls. Jay makes body parts for each of the Fusions, one set of body parts for each species in the game. And then the system takes some parts from one species and some parts from another species and combines them to make the Fusion. What you get is a system where the output grows quadratically in relation to the amount of assets that we have to create, which is a pretty efficient way for us to generate content as a small indie team.
- [10:59]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, I mean, early on, going back to before, when I was talking about the inception of Cassette Beasts, there was this idea of like, well, we need to have a usp. You need to have something that no one else in this space will do or beat Us to or you know, the big competitors can't do for whatever reason. And this idea of fusion is very ingrained in kind of like monster design fan culture and Pokemon fan culture, Digimon fan culture, Persona. You know, the idea of like you could put these two guys together and they can fusion dance and make a brand new monster. Tom and I had worked with procedural systems. Lena's Inception is an extended experiment with procedural systems. And we both find it very interesting to kind of explore and use projects to explore new ways to use procedural generation in interesting ways. And that was the kind of point in the game where we used procedural generation here. And then this paper doll system was advantageous to us because the pixel art presentation of the game made that viable. If we had gone for a higher fidelity 3D art approach, I don't know how viable it would have been. But I think our approach of the particular kind of art style and fidelity of our assets we were using just kind of lent itself well to being able to do it. It does mean you get a lot of horrible looking fusion monsters, but I consider that a feature, not a book.
- [12:19]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that seems natural, right? Like that would happen. I mean, we've all seen, you guys are from the uk, you know what's going on with dogs over there at the moment. This is realistic, a realistic system to me. Awesome. So, yeah, I guess to get into the engine stuff. So Tom, you mentioned you had, you know, for Lem's inception, you started playing a bunch of engines and obviously for cassette Beasts, you did settle on Godot. Was it Godot 3.4 at the time?
- [12:41]
Tom Coxon
I'm trying to remember what the time we started. I think it was Godot 3.1, but we've ended up on 3.5.
- [12:47]
Joe Nash
Cool. Awesome. What led you to choose Godot after that experimentation phase?
- [12:51]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, so early on in cassette based development, we were experimenting with a few different engines. Unreal and Godot were the big ones. But I quickly grew to like Godot a lot more than Unreal. Godot is so straightforward and so simple in its concepts that I was able to learn how to use it in the amount of time it took to build Unreal engine from source. So that's a big point in its favorite. But there's a lot we could actually say here about what Godot does. Great. Obviously Godot is very straightforward to extend the engine because the editor that you use to create the games is basically a Godot game itself. So all the skills and all the concepts you learn working on games, you can also use to Extend the engine and the editor. GDScript is probably one of my favorite features in the engine. I know a lot of C developers like to turn up their nose at it, but C was not designed for game development. Like, it's built on top of garbage collection, which can cause pauses to happen at random points in the game's runtime. If your game is running at 60 frames per second, then you've got 16 milliseconds in each frame to do everything. And if a garbage collection pause comes along and takes 100 milliseconds, it's a big pause. It's a big issue. So game developers tend to jump through a lot of hoops when they're using C, like object pooling, things like that, to avoid allocations during a frame in the hopes to avoid a garbage collection pause. But I think if parts of your language are that hazardous that you have to avoid them, maybe you need to accept that it's a language itself is garbage and Nido collection.
- [14:18]
Joe Nash
Very well put. I think that's also a really interesting point because I know that I saw a lot of that when Godot got very popular in the wake of the Unity disaster a couple of years ago. Obviously a lot of people moving from Unity were talking about C and how good it is in Unity, not recognizing how much Unity had invested in tackling these language problems for their specific engine, and that that's not just free work available to every other engine that uses it. So that's a very well made point. So I'm sure you've got more points of why you chose Godot, but you mentioned something that I just want to come to briefly, because it's something that you've spoken about in the past, I think is really interesting. So in your Godot Showcase entry, you spoke about, part of your early explanation was seeing how you could build plugins and tools for Godot, and as you said that you kind of get for free just by learning to use Godot. But it's like one of my favorite features of the engine is like you can just throw this tag at the top of a script and now it's an engine script, which is really, really cool. What kind of plugins and tooling have you built for or did you build for Godot in those early stages? And like, what kind of internal tooling have you grown around the game as you've gone?
- [15:14]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, there are a lot of little tools that we've built. Probably the most important one we have is for localization support. So Godot has localization support built in. But in my opinion, localization is not just a checkbox that you can tick. You need to think like really hard about to what extent you're going to support it. We've worked on games in the past and found that for really good translations, what you need is for your translation teams to know the full context in which the string is going to be used. So they need to know things like who is speaking, if it's dialogue, what their gender is, what else is going to be on the screen. At the same time, they need to know the explanations for jokes, because jokes in the English language are not always obvious to non native English speakers. So one of the things I did quite early on was build a custom CSV format for our translation files that allows us to associate a comment with every single string at the moment in time, we add it into the game and then an input plugin to support that. And it was a lot of work. But the translation team have repeatedly praised us for this, for including so much detail of all the strings. And I think it shows because players have also praised the game for the quality of its translations.
- [16:21]
Joe Nash
That's awesome. Very cool. Yeah, I guess.
- [16:22]
Jay Bayliss
Very important.
- [16:23]
Joe Nash
And just the nature of the genre, aside, just from the RPG elements and the text and the dialogue, you've got all the movesets and the combat, and I imagine all that kind of stuff is a nightmare for localization.
- [16:31]
Jay Bayliss
A lot of puns, like a good third of the strings in the game are puns. And we've had to kind of like write notes where we explain like this. I'm trying to think of example, like, this monster is gin and tonic. This monster is called gin and tonic because it's like the drink gin and tonic, but then gin is like genie.
- [16:47]
Joe Nash
It's a deeply British game. And I hadn't thought about that from a localization perspective before.
- [16:51]
Jay Bayliss
And I think we were very much in this mindset of like, be liberal with translating these things into different jokes for different regions, which apparently is quite tough, to be fair. We've had the feedback that it was quite challenging on that front, but I think it goes the extra mile.
- [17:06]
Joe Nash
Yeah, fantastic. I mean, this feels like we could just pause and think about it for ages. But, like, have you had. So, you know, you've got that you mentioned Tom. The cultural context around jokes is important. I know in some localizations they just don't even try to translate it. They just find like a local humor equivalent and translate it into, like they localize the culture, not just the language. Have you had any examples Where a name has had to full on change to something different because it just doesn't work outside of in that language. Or has it been more or less faithful?
- [17:32]
Jay Bayliss
I mean, every single monster has more or less an entirely different name for every single language.
- [17:37]
Joe Nash
Cool.
- [17:37]
Jay Bayliss
And it's really fun. I mean, I don't like, I don't really speak other languages, but I know enough where you can kind of scroll through and see like Southpaw, who is a wolf, who is a boxer is called like loupunch in like French. And in French it means like wolf and then punch. So they've done wordplay that I can like recognize enough and I can be like, oh, that's maybe better than my original name actually. And like it's very fun and kind of rewarding to see that it's interesting. I'll write dialogue and then I'll see other writers. Essentially translators and localizers are writers in their own sense and put their own spin on things. And it's interesting to me to imagine that there's a whole version of Cassette Beasts or multiple versions of the whole script that I will never appreciate because I don't speak those languages. I know there's a few examples of like local cultural terminology and stuff that you adapted for characters that only works in that language versus our really British one.
- [18:33]
Narrator
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- [19:13]
Joe Nash
Era where replayability of RPGs is such that people already replay them many times. Different endings. Now I'm just imagining the culture of replaying for different languages to get all of the localized puns truly cursed and time consuming territory. So to come back to the engine aspect. So when you were talking about learning Godot there, you said something which I think was very revealing, which is you learnt Godot in the time it took to build Unreal from source, which is interesting because you mentioned building Godot from Source and modifying Godot in your Godot showcase. And I approaching one of the strengths of Godot being that it's fully open source. You can get in and patch things that weren't working for you. Can you talk about some of the areas that you ran into, roadblocks with Godot, and what kind of things you were getting into the guts and fixing yourself?
- [19:55]
Tom Coxon
Yeah. So being able to modify Godot's source code is probably one of its biggest strengths. And the roadblocks that we ran into that led us to have to modify the engine are not unique to Godot either. They basically boil down to performance and bugs. So to speak about performance a little bit, every software engineer has heard Donald Knuth's quote, the premature optimization is the root of all evil.
- [20:19]
Jay Bayliss
Right.
- [20:19]
Tom Coxon
That's because until you've built the thing and profiled it, you don't know where the hotspots are going to be. And any optimization you do before you know where those are can just be making things worse. Well, I think that you can make the argument that any optimization of a game engine is premature optimization because every game has its hotspots in different places. So engine developers do a lot of work to make sure that their optimizations are good for most cases. But every game at some point is going to hit some kind of pathological case where performance gets really bad. We ran into a few of those. Godot has this grid map node for placing meshes on a three dimensional grid, a bit like a tile map, but in 3D. And the grid map node has an optimization to improve Draw Core performance in most cases. But because of the way we'd carved our map up into smaller chunks, that optimization was just making Draw core performance a lot worse. So one of the modifications I made to Godot to support our game was just to disable the optimization. We got a big boost out of that. Of course, that kind of change doesn't generalize to other games, so we can't contribute that change back. It would just make things worse for other people.
- [21:32]
Joe Nash
That's really interesting because you said there's a lot of things you do which are probably specific to you, but that is one where. And we'll come back to this a bit because I want to talk to Jay. You mentioned grid maps, I think on Mastodon at some point in your asset pipeline. So we'll come back to this topic and how you're using them. But that is one where I can imagine another game building worlds similar to yours. They're building a Zelda S world and using 3D things. Imagine them running into it and it's so difficult because your approach that probably is really useful for someone, but you can't just slam into the core engine. You can't make like a UI for it. Like, have you interacted with the Godot team or any contributors around any of the changes you've made and like, spoken to them about whether they should be included? Or is this like calls you've made based on how niche your stuff is?
- [22:16]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, so I mentioned sometimes you run into bugs. Updates can introduce new bugs and we try to work around them where we can because forking the engine is quite expensive in terms of maintaining it. You have to keep it up to date with every update in future. But sometimes if you can't work around an engine bug, you need to be able to either patch it yourself and fix it or apply a fix from someone else's development branch. Right. In the past, we have, in a few cases, fixed the bug ourselves and contributed the change back to the engine. It's very easy to make the case that that helps everyone.
- [22:46]
Joe Nash
Yeah, absolutely. Just this whole process is so fascinating, you having your own forklift engine with all these different feature changes and then also juggling bugs and patches and other developers doing similar things to their games. Is there a back channel in some way, like folks who are running on the Godot engine? You said merging in a bug fix from someone else's branch. What's the discoverability there, I guess, is what I'm asking. Like, how are you finding other people using the engine and their patches and their bug fixes? Or is it just keeping an eye on the repo and the forks?
- [23:11]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, I keep a close eye on the issue Tracker on the GitHub repo for Godot. Most of the time when we come across a bug, somebody else has already created a PR for it and they've got their own development branch that we can pull. There have been a few cases when people have contacted me over Twitter or Mastodon and asked me how we did something and I'll quite happily just send them a patch.
- [23:29]
Joe Nash
That's very cool. It's like an aspect of game development. I mean, you know, we've heard from other game devs on the show who are still maintaining games years into the future on an old version of Unity and them having to deal with kind of similar issues. But I think the open source nature of Godot and how actively it's in development and the different things it's being used for makes this particular problem really interesting. On that note, so you're still on 3.5 and you've been actively developing the game through Godot, making what was a fairly major transition to 4.0 and now beyond. How have you found? Well, I mean, I guess the fact is, open source and development is still concluding on 3.5 completely removes these problems, but you're finding it still easy to work with 3.5. Have you felt any chafing at all not being on the latest versions?
- [24:09]
Tom Coxon
3.5 is still quite stable. Yeah, it's remarkably stable for a project that is just supported by a community.
- [24:16]
Jay Bayliss
Awesome.
- [24:16]
Joe Nash
It's a great deal. So we mentioned grid maps. So, Jay, to jump over to you. So you've spoken quite a bit about your asset pipeline, which is really cool because it's a very hot topic in Godot land at the moment with Blender building a game right now specifically to work on refining the asset pipelines and the process of getting assets into the game. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached asset creation and getting it into the game in the engine for Cassette Beasts?
- [24:41]
Jay Bayliss
Sure. So I guess the background of this is that I come from a background of pixel art and animation. I had very little 3D experience. I've never worked on a 3D game before. Cassette Beasts. It is useful to clarify that Cassette beasts is a 3D game. You have these pixel art characters projected on billboards in a 3D environment and 3D rendering. So there's a lot to kind of learn. And early on, when Tom was showing me Godot and its features, and there's this feature called Grid Map, which essentially, as Tom stated, you know, you place down things like a tile map, but in 3D. And this was a nice onboarding opportunity for me for 3D because, you know, I understand tile maps and I can create this grass tile and then a ramp tile, and I just have to move, add another axis to this. Their pipeline for Cassette Beasts for the longest time was terrible. I was using this piece of software called Cubicle, which is essentially like a voxel editor, where you can kind of essentially build 3D pixel art. Because again, I'm coming at things very much. I'm a pixel artist. And then I'd export those. And sometimes I have to export to Blender and then figure out how Blender works. Very early on, I didn't fundamentally understand how UV mapping works on a basic level. And I think the transition of the pipeline of my 3D work got better over time. Early game assets versus assets. Later on we kind of had like a DLC update called Peer of the Unknown, which is kind of Like a premium dlc. And the kind of way I've laid out, like, textures and things is very nice compared to early on, where eventually I just moved away entirely from using Cubicle. And then I got comfortable enough with Blender. But this idea of we create these little modules, these tiles, and then put it into kind of like a tile palette that you can then place down. And it was pretty straightforward, if not inefficient or very inefficient at the time kind of way of handling terrain. So when you see a big flat plane of grass, rather than that being one flat plane, that's like 80 different meshes that are identical, placed next to each other, perfectly aligned. I think the grid map and the kind of pixel art approach to characters was a really uniquely good opportunity for me to kind of off board from my kind of 2D game mindset into 3D. And it just so happened to work really well with this game that was visually reminiscent of, you know, like game boy advance RPGs, you know, that use those tile systems and use that blocky look to them. And it just so happened to fit the genre that we're working with. So it was kind of like, very useful for me. It was very useful confluence of what we were going for in terms of the commercial product. And also what I needed to know and what I could start knowing and what I could learn from there. I can say now, happily, I do know how to UV edit a 3D model, which is, you know, we're all learning.
- [27:30]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, as a learning experience, it sounds very valuable. But it's also just really cool that they have this 3D analog of 2D tools, because I feel like that's frequently a frustration from folks entering game dev who learn through 2D, is that, like, a lot of the 2D engines feel very manageable and intuitive and usable. And then you go to 3D and suddenly it's like, oh, my God, I need to know calculus. Right? It's just like a real jump.
- [27:52]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah. I think the grid map system is very particular. I don't think it would work with most kind of 3D games, but it just happened to be that what we were working with was very ideal for it. And then there's even, like, optimizations there where I was thinking very 2D mindset of very small individual tiles. As I said, a plane of grass can be 80 different meshes for no reason. But, like, if I was now starting again, I would probably use, like, larger tiles that have more detail in those individual chunks and then kind of make it a bit larger and you know, these are the things that you learn as you go.
- [28:25]
Joe Nash
Awesome. So before we move on to I guess some of the evolution of the game, just kind of a final thing on in Godot land. So, because that's been out for a while, I don't know if you're thinking of moving on to next title yet, but is Godot an engine you're going to stick with in future or are you going back to exploring your options and thinking about it? Tom, any thoughts?
- [28:43]
Tom Coxon
Yeah, we're continuing to use Godot. Since the release of Cassette Piece, I've been working on a few plugins for Godot4. I've contributed terrain 3D which is oh perfect. A 3D height map based terrain manipulation plugin for Godot. And I'm working on some internal tooling for like cutscenes and localization.
- [29:01]
Joe Nash
Perfect. That's awesome. Yeah, terrain 3D is very cool. It's definitely a really exciting project. Awesome to hear you're contributing to it. That's fantastic.
- [29:09]
Jay Bayliss
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- [29:15]
Joe Nash
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- [29:41]
Joe Nash
So before we get into asking a big question about what is in the future, let's talk about the trail for Accept Beasts. I'm glad you mentioned your commercial considerations at the beginning, Jake, because I think this is really fascinating. With indie studios who have smash hits, the decision of like hey, do we keep pumping out content or when do we move on? Right, And I think that's something that I'm interested with Cassette Beasts. Like you've released a lot of dlc, you mentioned some, you've released some free updates like the growth gauntlet, etc. Were those always planned or did that come about as a reaction to the success?
- [30:09]
Jay Bayliss
So to an extent we knew that some level of post support keeps the ball rolling. It keeps, you know, to get very commercial, keeps the title evergreen. And also because of our pipeline, I mean we talked a lot about Godot. But I think one thing that needs to be emphasized is that the ease of Godot and the Ease of the tooling allows us to make like this is like an RPG with full quest lines and like a big world map and 140 something monsters and like dozens of bosses and that like we can make that with what was predominantly two full time developers purely because the tooling was so good and because we didn't go too overboard with the kind of graphical fidelity, we picked something that was very much in our lane and we knew that this kind of like, okay, we can create content pretty fast. It would be beneficial to, you know, support the game to a certain extent. I think there was an early on thought of okay, how long we would support that would depend on how well it's done. And we had ideas for like, I think the Gauntlet Train was an early on idea from Tom of like, well, if the game has enough legs we'll eventually get around to doing this, but it's not guaranteed. And things like the peer of the unknown DLC was very much a case of okay, we need to maybe have an experiment in premium DLC as a company. That would be useful experience. So to an extent we knew there would be some support. There definitely wouldn't have been this much support post release and we're still working on content as well. We haven't wrapped up on that front. There's more cassette beast to come. But I don't think we would have gone this far if we didn't have the kind of support enthusiasm from kind of the community for sure.
- [31:44]
Joe Nash
Cool. Yeah. So I mean, I guess that leads me to the other question of like, for some games the support goes on forever. Say Evergreen, like how do you balance the temptation to keep doing it versus like moving on to the new title? When the call gets too strong, it's time to go. Like, what do you two thinking about that?
- [31:58]
Tom Coxon
It's not zero sum.
- [31:59]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah.
- [32:00]
Tom Coxon
So yeah, the way we see it, everything we do that the community appreciates and likes helps launch whatever we end up doing next.
- [32:06]
Joe Nash
Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. It must be especially having such a. I think having a title like Sebi's under your belt. It must be exciting to know you've got that community in that player base there. Anticipating and scary. I also imagine knowing you've got that community with you now onto your next journey. Must be very exciting.
- [32:23]
Jay Bayliss
Oh definitely, definitely.
- [32:24]
Joe Nash
So one area and you've ported loads of consoles and we've spoken on the show with devs in the past about how what a nightmare that is and I know it's all kind of trickiness with NDAs and versions talking about it. But one of the things we recently spoke to Brian Buckley with Caves of Cuds about is porting to mobile, because I was aware of more games porting to mobile recently, Balatra obviously being a big one. When he spoke about Caves of Cards going to mobile, I was like, that is UI insanity. And I had a similar feeling realizing that Cassette Beasts had landed on mobile. So I wanted to chat to you about how that came about. And I guess my first question is, what were the challenges for adapting the game, if any, to the small screen, to the touchscreen medium?
- [33:00]
Tom Coxon
I think that the UI is definitely the biggest technical and design issue that mobile ports face. You can pretty easily make a UI that works for both PC and console because the input methods is similar, the feedback methods are similar, the player is sitting a similar distance from a similar size screen. But you have to throw all that out the window when it comes to mobile. It's completely different. Beast and honestly, Jay and I pretty much out of our comfort zone with mobile.
- [33:24]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a mobile gamer. I don't know what people want out of mobile games. I'd expect. I think Tom and I both, I think one of our advantages is that we're very plugged into kind of what people want in games and what people find interesting in games. But that all goes out the window when it comes to mobile. I don't want people's standards or expectations off or anything. And that's where, you know, our publisher, Raw Fury, and their kind of porting partners have been really useful to step in and help us out. The ones essentially doing the port work. We can obviously give feedback, but to an extent, there's a lot of questions where it's. The answer is I don't know what players expect. I don't play things on my phone.
- [33:59]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that's really interesting. So I guess I want to dig into this technically as well, but I guess just while we're talking about player expectation, one of the things that. It was actually Balatro that got me thinking about this originally. It's really interesting is the pricing. Again, we're very commercial this episode, but the pricing is really what's going on with ports to mobile. Pricing was really fascinating. I think the Balatro is straight up a quarter of the price of its desktop edition, although it's more or less feature complete. And I feel like that's very true for Cassette Beasts as well. There's quite a drop in price, you think? You mentioned on the FAQ that there is some multiplayer is missing and this kind of thing. But how do you think about pricing for mobile? Is that just a reality of the market and what it will take or is it based on feature parity?
- [34:38]
Jay Bayliss
These are things where a publisher really stepped in and they have their thoughts and basically came to us and be like, we think based on our experience in the mobile space, this is the right price. It's ultimately a case of what is expected from that market. If everyone is doing it, maybe that means there's a reason for it. I almost have this in my head. It's like, well, the phone screen is smaller and a TV is bigger. So a TV is more games. So if it's on your tv, it's bigger, bigger game, so that's worth more money. I don't know what the philosophy is, but ultimately there just is a culture of games on mobile being cheaper. And maybe there's also a trade off of, okay, it won't have the as fully featured, they won't have the highest end, games won't be able to run on mobile. And with that again, it's very much just we defer to people who have more experience. Because I have no idea. I'm just so untethered to the world of mobile games. For sure.
- [35:31]
Tom Coxon
I have a theory that it's a result of the market forces that Apple and Google have unintentionally created by the design of the stores. They surface everything that's free or free to play or less than a dollar and anything that's premium has a real tough time competing with that.
- [35:45]
Joe Nash
Right.
- [35:45]
Tom Coxon
So what you tend to see is premium games at a discount that are basically ports of games that have already broken even because nothing else can break even.
- [35:54]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that's very interesting. I do also think, yeah, the psychology of small screen versus big screen probably definitely plays into. It's interesting as well because you know, like again, going back to the definition of the monster catching genre and Pokemon being standout, a lot of people's nostalgia, you know, you spoke about adult gamers and people who've experienced genre before. Obviously so many people's experience of that genre was through Game boys and Game Boy colors and small screens. Have you seen like, is that in any way influencing the success of your game on mobile? Are you seeing like players driven to the small screen for like nostalgia reasons at all?
- [36:23]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, I mean a lot of the stuff that we see tends to be existing players and being like, oh, I've been feeling like another run of this, let's get it on mobile. So it's hard to know what the experience is for a new player. It's interesting, isn't it? It's also interesting when you bring up the comparison to like I was thinking this recently with a comparison with, you know, handheld games. I think about this with like DS games used to cost £30, which is more than what we sell Cassette Beasts for. But in my head Cassette Beasts is like a DS game scale. But when it was on a DS there was something that felt very premium about that that made it feel more justifiable being a slightly higher price point than we even considering inflation have indie games today.
- [37:05]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that just makes me think like to bring on your point Tom, about whether like just Nintendo combining their like premium console and their handheld line into one in the Switch, whether that was inevitable because the mobile market has taken the bottom out of like the handheld space and so they needed to move their handheld games into a premium console level to continue charging the prices for it. Anyway, this is going way out of scope onto, you know, I know you said that obviously a lot of this stuff happens with porting houses nowadays, but were you aware of any technical challenges in taking the game to the mobile platforms? Did you have to input on anything, any, you know, constraints that to be dealt with or any changes to the engine, that kind of thing?
- [37:40]
Jay Bayliss
It's very evident that porting to mobile is not necessarily the one click solution. Especially when you kind of see people talking about porting when it comes to hobbyist spaces. You know, reading comments on people talking about porting from Unity and Godot. Because porting to Nintendo Switch, you have the benchmark for what a Nintendo Switch's capability is. But iPhone is not iPhone, as it turns out. There's like a million iPhones. I wasn't aware of how many iPhones there were and they all have different specs. And this all becomes very challenging. And even more so for Android, you're not dealing with an audience that is super technically capable. So I mean if you've got an older PC and you could buy a game on Steam and it doesn't run, there's kind of an understanding there that it's your device is too weak. But I don't think there's a culture of like, because again mobile games tend to be lower fidelity, they tend to be a bit simpler games. I don't know if there's a culture of like this game is too good for my phone. There's an understanding of everything runs on my phone, it's a phone. So I think there's definitely like A cultural difference between the two audiences, which makes it kind of challenging to kind of figure out what people expect and how they will react to kind of technical limitations.
- [38:53]
Joe Nash
That's very interesting. That feels like that would be an iOS and Android divide. Like I feel like Android people would be cognizant of the phone in the.
- [39:01]
Jay Bayliss
It's almost like theory crafting, trying to figure out what the reaction is going to be and what people think about their own hardware.
- [39:07]
Joe Nash
Fascinating. Cool. Well, as we get towards the end of our time, just a couple of last questions. So one of the things that's really fun, I guess about monster catching games and in the modern era with Twitch streaming is the various weird challenges that have popped up. Nuzlocke being quite famous and I know there are Nuzlocke runs for cassette pieces now. Ironman is the new thing for Pokemon. Are you aware of any challenge rule sets being played in Cassette Piece? Do you have favorite rules for any of them?
- [39:35]
Jay Bayliss
Yeah, we actually have custom game modes that Tom implemented which is once you've beaten the game, you can essentially launch a new game and you can change all sorts of traits throughout the game. We have like randomizing modes. We've got what the equivalent of a Nuzlocke would be where once your monster tape breaks, it's permanently broken. And the randomizer modes, you can kind of change movesets of monsters and also the elements and also where they spawn in the game. So you can have like very, very variable experience. I find it more fun playing through a randomized run than playing through like the vanilla game mode. Because then one of the features in Cassette Beasts is that certain monsters, when you record them you get world abilities, the, you know, travers abilities, like a Metroidvania. But then with randomizers the starting area can give you like the end game wall climb ability. And suddenly the whole game changes, which is really exciting and really fun to play through. I've seen videos of players playing through self imposed challenges and then kind of doing battle reports of how their adventure went with those. It's very fun. I think the nature of the kind of elemental interactions as well makes these different versions of the game even more chaotic. Because then suddenly you've got a monster that's ordinarily fire type, but now it's poison type. And how does that affect the chemistry and how you think about the chemistry? Also there are static encounters against certain boss characters, but if their tapes are now different, then the status effects that those static boss encounters are inflicting will be different. And then suddenly you might find a boss encounter much more challenging and much easier based on how this has played out. So it's kind of an anticipation of, well, what's going to happen be screwed around with now when I run through the game a second time.
- [41:13]
Joe Nash
Awesome. Yeah, I haven't got that far into the game yet to know about those modes. That's awesome. I love the again, just your point of like entering the genre means you get to play with those things and make them first class parts of the game, which is very cool. So yeah, I guess that always leaves me with the worst question whenever I talk to any game dev. What's next for your studio and your endeavors?
- [41:32]
Jay Bayliss
Well, I don't know what time this is going to be releasing. There may or may not be news at some point in time about what we're working on. We've got some cool stuff in the pipeline for cassette piece. Beyond that, who can say, you know, I think we know what we'll eventually be moving on to, but we're not public with that kind of stuff and we're happy to take our time with things if needs be.
- [41:50]
Joe Nash
Perfect.
- [41:51]
Jay Bayliss
Hopefully that wasn't too corporate an answer.
- [41:54]
Joe Nash
No, no, that's very fair. A very fair answer to my needlessly trying to bait people into revealing information questions. But yeah, Jay and Tom, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today and chatting about your wonderful game and yeah, thank you so much.
- [42:07]
Jay Bayliss
Thanks for asking.