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Noatak: Calling a project done. It's never done really, but like calling it done and putting it out there. That's the hardest part because you could work on something forever. but the hardest part is actually completing the process and getting the thing done.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Welcome to the summoning hour. Today I'm joined by Noah Talk Post and Riley Sykes of Gllama Games. They took a two-button game about a salmon from an unusual prototype to a commercial steam release. We are unpacking what shipping Upstream taught them about scope, collaboration, accessibility, marketing, and building the second time around. Welcome guys.
Noatak: Hi.
Riley Sikes: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Yeah, no problem. before, like you guys obviously I played Upstream, I played your new game, Mines of Mana, which I really want to get into that, but we're gonna start with Upstream first. I w I'm curious though, a little bit of how you guys got together and decided Upstream was it. So let's let's start maybe a little before Upstream, how you know each other, and then we can talk about that first playable version.
Noatak: Yeah, we've, when did we meet? Dude, I don't know. First grade probably,
Riley Sikes: I don't know. Like first grade? Second grade?
Noatak: yeah, something like that. Yeah, we've been going to school together since elementary, all through elementary, middle and high school and stayed in touch through college. And then I think I had an interest in making video games and wanted to do some game jams and at some point just kind of roped Riley into it. And I think that's how we started making our first things, if I remember right.
Riley Sikes: Some game jam and like Unity some was it the rhythm game?
Noatak: Yeah, we... yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We did a rhythm game in Unity. was our first project together, I think, yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Okay, now now I'm thinking two button game and prior to that was rhythm game and that first decision to do an indie game was way out of sc way bigger in scope and you wanted more and more and more, but then you cut down how do you go from rhythm game to Upstream?
Noatak: They actually very, the two games are pretty connected actually. The rhythm game, what's that? I was gonna say the
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: really? Okay. Maybe maybe Okay, go go ahead. Go ahead. I'll
Noatak: rhythm game was for a fishing themed game jam that we did. And we essentially, I think it was basically like a guitar hero clone,
Riley Sikes: Mm-hmm.
Noatak: but we called it jig. because all of the music in the rhythm game were folk songs, jigs specifically, the type of folk song called a jig. And the gimmick in the game is that you were like jigging a fishing pole, like you're fishing. And one of the fish you could catch was a salmon and the sprite that Riley made for that game. is the same one that we used in Upstream. We didn't change it. We just went.
Riley Sikes: We
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: That is that's great.
Riley Sikes: added a little bit of detail to it, but it's the same sprite.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: That's smart game development reuse. Wait,
Noatak: Yeah.
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: fantastic. Way to go. Well, that's winning right there. it makes my producer heart happy to hear the people thinking like that. So take us back to that first playable version of Upstream. When did this stop being an experiment and become a game you believed you could ship?
Riley Sikes: Might have been the it might have been the moment we got I think the first time we had the like this is something moment was when we got the two button controls down. Would would you agree with that? Like
Noatak: Yeah.
Riley Sikes: like once we 'cause we really spent a lot of time working on we were like we want a game with two buttons and so we really We spent a lot of time kind of just playing around with controls and seeing what felt good and we eventually got the kind of like what would be the core like turn left, turn right, quappy feel. We got that down and was like, like we could really build off of this. and it went from there.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: I I have to say when I picked when you showed me Upstream when we met the first time and I picked it up and the controls just clicked f immediately for me. I'm like, no, this is a game I could sink into because the controls are simple enough, but I started getting stuck on some of those gaps and jumps, and I'm just thinking flashbacks to Echo the Dolphin and just thinking, this is going to be both so rewarding to get because it feels great when you're swimming and it feels so frustrated when you hit that one wall of just like, too short, falling down a hole and you go back up again. It was well balanced, but the controls I I think I can I can see that moment of when the two button really set in because it it hits the player the first time so cleanly. And it was a great experience to have that first reaction to it. I don't ex exactly consider myself a salmon or a a fishing game type person. So to be like, I'm excited to control this fish because it felt so clean, that that was a good moment for sure.
Noatak: It's interesting, like, feel it, because I feel that way too about the game. I really, I'm, one of the things I'm most proud of about it is that it's really, I find it really satisfying to play still. Like I really enjoy it. And it didn't always like feel that way. Even from the moment where we like, we had this sort of initial moment of like, this is something really cool. We could build something on this. Like, let's commit to this bit. We built a playtest for the game that we and we built this like huge playtest environment and ran a steam playtest pretty early in development. I don't know, maybe halfway through development. And got a lot of incredible feedback from it. was so, so good. And a lot of the feedback resulted in when we, when we finally, you know, sifted through all the feedback and decided what changes we
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needed to make. One of the things that ended up happening as a result was basically rewriting the entire character controller from scratch. It fundamentally, it did the same thing, but it's something we, I don't remember exactly what we even changed about the physics of it, but something we did something that
Riley Sikes: Mm-hmm.
Noatak: changed the way that it felt so drastically and dramatically that going back and I've played, I've played the play test a couple of times since then it's like,
Riley Sikes: Rough.
Noatak: my god, why did we think this was, why did we think this felt good at any point? Like it's crazy. yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: It's one of those things that you don't know what you don't know until it like hits you right in the face. That's awesome. and just thinking That there was that that feedback to community who were already playing on Steam. What was I like? I've seen the Steam backend, and I'm like, this was for a product that was already developed and it wasn't my first time seeing Steam, but seeing a full project behind, like it was a little overwhelming. What was that experience like for you guys? Because going from a Unity game jam to shipping on Steam and looking at that back end, handling all the SKUs, the localization, all that.
Noatak: Steamworks is a lot.
Riley Sikes: It's a bit daunting.
Noatak: I think I did most of the Steamworks stuff in terms of like setting things up and managing the store page and all
Riley Sikes: Mm-hmm.
Noatak: that kind of stuff. But Riley was kind of our main, at least in terms of the games that you did all the localization, the whole localization system so that the game would be fully translated.
Riley Sikes: Hm. Yeah, Godot has a really good system for that. where it you like all the text in the game, like it's all basically a variable and Godot lets you like import a basically a C S V file.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: So two friends becoming a shipping team, how does Gllama Games form and what did each of you believe you were signing up for? Because like Noah talk, you were you roped Riley in and you're like, Hey, we should do this, but then how do you convince to be like, hey, we should take this salmon spray and make it into another game and be like, we're gonna do this for real this time? And just kind of buy buy into that like you guys had your own lives going on at that time but I mean going through college, reconnecting, redoing stuff, like and being so close as friends that that trying to say, hey, we're both still going to go in the same direction even after school, where how do you how do you formalize that? How'd you guys really buy into this vision of Gllama Games?
Noatak: I think it was kind of informal.
Riley Sikes: It was a bit informal at the start. and then I think it just ended up being really good timing. Like I was between jobs for a bit. we ended up having a like the opportunity was there. like we started working on other projects, and then we're like, this isn't this
is too much or this wasn't right and then landed on Upstream. I was like, This is really this is fun, like we should We should just take it all the way. Like let's let's make the next Stardew Valley, you know?
Noatak: I think we really wanted to make something and make it real, I guess, in our minds. And when we made that, we had our first sort of real project that we attempted together that wasn't a game jam that we're like, OK, this is going to be our video game that we make, and it's going to be a real video game. And we very quickly realized, that's not something that we're capable of really doing right now. Started Upstream we started with this like premise of what is the simplest possible game we can make like simplest possible we're like, okay, well We can start with one button right like we
Riley Sikes: Floppy bird.
Noatak: like flappy bird flappy bird to one button game and it's I One button games are great for learning to do game development Like I've done a ton of them when I was learning Godot or in unity for the first time And so we're like, that one button feels a little too simple. Like it feels like a really like a learning project. But what if we took it just a tiny step further so we don't increase the scope too much, but let's just increase it to two buttons now instead of just one. And how much more can we get from a two button game? And that was where it kind of started. And it was with the intention of like, we want to complete this game. want to do something that is within our capabilities of completing to a level of polish that for us feels adequate or professional in our minds at least.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Yeah, and there's so many traps that you could have fallen into with I mean scope creep, you you mentioned it previously, and like being able to go, this is our game. We're not going this way, because there's so many other traps of what a professional game looks like or a triple A game is, and that's what we all play a lot of commercially, and we might play some smaller indie titles that come across Steam, but our libraries are probably by far and large full of triple A games. Games that do these incredible executions on some ideas or everyone's got monetization now, so there's a lot of pressure to be like, we should have a store too, because everyone's buying stuff. Noatak you you mentioned how you wanted to see what kind of mileage you got out of going to a two button game. What was that scale of difference for you guys as you're designing Upstream to go from one button to two buttons? How did you get the mileage that you were expecting?
Riley Sikes: Yes? I think so.
Noatak: Yeah, mean, Upstream was never a one button game itself, right? Like we never had any sort of versions of it that used just one button. I mean, but I feel like we got a lot out of two buttons because for most of its development, it really was only two buttons. Technically, there's a third one now, talk about scope creep, three buttons.
Riley Sikes: It's optional. It's optional. Yeah, two point five. Round down. I think yeah, I think we got a lot of it and like the game is a it's like a two D platformer and so the core of the game is the controls. And so we were able to pretty quickly once we got that down, the whole game pretty much like the vertical slice was there and we were just adding on to it. I guess it was just add more level and polish the game. Which is I think exactly what we kinda wanted, is something that we could really develop that core quickly, nail that down, and then like add the supporting elements around it. That makes sense.
Noatak: Yeah, it worked out really well with kind of our release timeline with that because our demo, our final vertical slice was what became our demo that we put onto
Riley Sikes: Mm-hmm.
Noatak: Steam. And basically we just took the demo and finished the level. And that was the game. The demo was, the demo is basically feature complete version of the game. It's just a third of the level that the whole game is essentially. And so... I mean, there was a ton of performance work that we did in that time too. We like
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: optimized the heck out of it, but feature wise, the demo has everything that the full game has, which was kind of our goal.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Nice. And thinking There's something in there that I wanted to ask about. I'm losing it, but I'll I'll c see if I can come back to it. Being that you guys are obviously tight, long history together, and you it it seems like Upstream just kind of fell into your lap, and you're like, okay, one one pillar, we're using we're reusing the salmon. Second pillar, we want two buttons. How do we make this work and how do we make a game out of this? Was there a point in time where you guys disagreed and how did you resolve it?
Noatak: Did we have any big things that we conflicted over? I'm sure there was.
Riley Sikes: There there was I mean it wasn't a big disagreement, but I I do remember at one point when we were I think this was post playtest, we got like a comment about so for context, like the whole game is basically water bodies which have a surface on them. It's like a simulated surface with s basically springs on it. And Someone left a comment that like, the water is either like unrealistic or it looks bad. And so we kinda w I think I don't remember what it was, but I think for a while we had very like rhythmic sine waves and then we im I think Noah, you might have impl implemented like a more randomized one. And we we we
Noatak: Yeah.
Riley Sikes: like I might be having who who had what wrong, but we We definitely disagreed on that and I think we made like a social media post with a poll
Noatak: Yeah.
Riley Sikes: to the to decide.
Noatak: And I, I'm, it's to be honest, I barely remember this too, but I kind of think we ended up just doing both. Like, because I think there was one of the water versions had just sine waves and one of them was kind of random waves.
And then I think we got the feedback that the random one was better, but then we just
Riley Sikes: I think that's what it was.
Noatak: put the random waves on top of the sine wave and like average them. And we thought that looked best and just went with that. But I.
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: There you
Noatak: I think that's where it ended up, but I can't remember exactly. I forgot about that. That was funny.
Riley Sikes: Yeah, got got good player feedback. Went with that.
Noatak: Yeah, that was because yeah, it was a thing that we couldn't figure out which one Yeah, I don't remember whose Version of it was whose but we both kind of had our one of like this one looks better and this one looks better And so we're like, well, let's just put it up on YouTube and do a poll and see which what people say
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: I mean, when in doubt, find a mediator and I mean, go for volume, why not? Like
Noatak: Yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: I mean the the X community and the Godot community on Blue Sky, they all seem very active and very supportive and it still surprises me how knowledgeable players are about games across the spectrum and they have so many valid opinions about things. So I mean Do what you got and when you're like, we're kinda torn, don't know what to do, go for like ask ask the c ask the question. Like that seems like a really valid strategy.
Noatak: Also good engagement bait too, actually.
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: Like I vaguely remember that it got more engagement than most of our posts did around that time. It's a good way to get people to engage with
Riley Sikes: People love to voice their opinion.
Noatak: your work, yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: tell me more about what you guys are doing now, You obviously have history with Upstream. You showed me Mines of Mana last time a couple months ago at a Seattle Indies event. How's that been going? Where are you guys going? What's on your on the forefront of your mind? Have you figured out how you want to work on some of those dungeon mechanics? Like maybe actually I know what this game is. No one else has seen it. So maybe give like the elevator pitch of what you're working.
Noatak: Mines of Mana is a... It's a twist on Minesweeper, essentially. The simplest way to describe it is it's a Minesweeper game, but it's dressed up like it's a roguelike dungeon crawler. Like a really retro arcade-themed roguelike dungeon crawler. It's actually changed quite a bit since you probably last played it. I can't remember exactly when you did, but you mentioned there being roguelike elements and like enemies. The game doesn't have any of that. It is very much a minesweeper game. It's about playing minesweeper just from a different perspective than you normally do. yeah, I don't know. Riley's had a good pitch
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Yeah, I think the the
Noatak: for it.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Yeah, that's it it resonated with me and I could see it in my head. I I'm still thinking about like minesweeper, how do you how do you do this? Because I remember the challenge you guys were contemplating with some me and another person who tried it was how much do you balance around the dungeon aspect and how much do you balance around minesweeper? It sounds like you're going more that minesweeper route and taking a twist, heavier twist on Mind Minesweeper than going the dungeon route. how's that lining up with you guys?
Riley Sikes: Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely it. I think we felt like we almost had two different games in one and they were kind of conflicting. Like we we've we wanted to scale the roguelike elements more, like the R and G drops and the weapons and the enemies. But then the mind sweep of it all, like we couldn't figure out how to scale that with the rest of the game. So instead of blowing up our s scope and just going crazy with everything we stripped it down to what we wanted it to be from the start, which was a minesweeper, but with a bit of a skin on it and more score focused, because traditional minesweeper is is very objective based. Like you're trying to clear the map. This game is like it's about score and it's about it's it's about speed too. There's a speed element of it. so yeah, I think that's a good summary of it.
Noatak: Yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: That's where you guys are at. And I I'm excited to see the next iteration of it because it already made sense to me where you guys were at with that. How much of it is a roguelike, how much of it is minesweeper. And it was because it's it has that foundation in Minesweeper. So I'm really curious about this new direction. What was it? Was it just the scaling that kind of said we want to focus on the mind sweeper? Or was it just because that's where the idea initially started that you're like we we narrowed in on this for a reason. Yeah.
Noatak: think it was a little bit of both. The initial pitch for this game was like a prototype that I made during my spring break this year. I had some time off and I was like, I had this idea for a Minesweeper game where instead of looking at a whole board, you're a guy walking around a Minesweeper board. And I had that idea for a while and I had some free time in April. And I was like, I'm just gonna take two days. and take some open source temp assets and throw this together. I want to see if this is playable in my head at all. And that was kind of where we started from, was that initial prototype. And then we have these ideas of like, okay, so it's a mind super game, because you're a guy walking around, it looks like a dungeon crawler. So there should be enemies and there should be weapons. And if there are those things, this could be a really cool roguelike. And so let's add all these things to it. And when we started putting all those things in, I never super felt that like those things were super out of our scope. Like I think we, we definitely could have made that game if we wanted to. I don't think that it would have not
by any means was it an impossible task for us. But when we play tested it for the first time which I think is where you played it. We got a lot of feedback that was Either I really love the mines we were part of this or I really love the rogue like part of this or Probably the most important feedback we got was that this feels like two different games fighting for an identity like fighting to see who's the real video game here and Our goal initially was to try and meld those ideas. And so when we were trying to figure out how to focus them better, instead of... doing the rogue-like, would have, I think focusing more on that would have required adding more to the game over time, adding more mechanics, adding more systems. Deciding to focus in on Minesweeper actually required that we take out a lot of stuff and just focus in on the Minesweeper mechanic and the few systems that are present in a Minesweeper game.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Now that you've pulled away from the roguelike element and you're focusing on the minesweeper, have you figured out if the minesweeper scaling is still as much of a problem to solve? Have you solved it? Or are you thinking that scale is no longer really a core question that needs to be answered?
Riley Sikes: think the the current like scope of the game is now like appropriate for the Minesweeper mini game in pretty much how it's normally played. which I think feels really good actually. and just like It's on the on the rogue removing the rogue like rogueliteness of it all. We definitely do still want to make like a proper roguelite at some point with systems and all sorts of like game breaking things to find. but it just felt like this was better off as a a minesweeper game. and it I I think boiling it down to just like score and speed feels really good. Like we we had a couple people and we did the second playtest. playing it in this new version and I think the the feedback was a lot better. Like it was a lot more focused. and there were a couple of people that got really into it and like picked it up s I was I was impressed how fast some people picked it up and were just able to like cruise through it. it was really cool to watch.
Noatak: think adding the score in actually really sort of gave us a way to scale Minesweeper because the score wasn't there initially, right? And so... And we were struggling with finding a way to scale Minesweeper. But if we made every action in the game essentially worth some amount of points, and now you have a goal of some point threshold to meet, now you can just scale that threshold and try and get as many points as possible. And there are ways that you can play the game better or worse to get less or more points. If you if you plan out your route better, you'll get more points because of the way you play. And so it makes it so that every level that you get to, while the point threshold that you need to get to the next level goes up, and if you're not playing, if you're not getting good enough at the pot in the minesweeper puzzle, you won't be able to reach that next threshold. And so while each level does get harder in the sense that like there's more mines or bombs or whatever. I think the point system is really what allowed us to scale the game properly.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: And I mean that just thinking old school early games, this sounds very much like you've taken a model of Tetris and you level up, it gets faster, but you get to the levels from different s score thresholds. I like the execution of play the game well, get good, and hit those score thresholds so that you can get to that next level. And now you've done something to Minesweeper that hasn't really been done before. Or at least it I'm not aware of like a Minesweeper 2025 kind of thing where they all extreme like Pac-Man fever or anything like that.
Noatak: Yeah, I mean, we tried
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: So
Noatak: a few things. There are a couple actually of like rogue lady, like Minesweeper attempts that people have done. Yeah, there
Riley Sikes: There are some cool ones.
Noatak: are some really cool ones out there and we should have tried some of them a lot earlier than we did, I think. But eventually we got around to be like, we're not the first people to have this idea. I'm sure there's others out there. So we went and found a couple and played them. And so we tried a couple of ideas. Like there was one... One really good one on itch.io actually, I think it actually might be like the most popular game on itch with the tag Minesweeper. It's called, it's like Dragon Sweeper or, I don't remember, something like that. It's got Dragon in the name. And the way they, there isn't a game about like a character walking around, but the Minesweeper puzzle is, how did it work? It was like, you have to add up numbers somehow.
Riley Sikes: It's Yeah, it's it's like the b instead of bombs, it's like enemies and you have like a legend of like what each enemy how much damage they do to you. And it's kind of about optimizing how much damage you're taking and it's like you need certain amounts of health to kill enemies, but you only get more health when you kill weaker enemies, so you have to like kill everything in the right order. It's almost like you've
Noatak: Yeah.
Riley Sikes: you to like do things in the correct order and there's a bit of luck to it as these games have, which were super creative.
Noatak: It was really fun. So we tried that for a while with, because we were thinking about scaling Minesweeper and our game has health points, we thought maybe the bombs can be worth a different amount of damage. And so the numbers that you see on the board, instead of being the number of bombs is the amount of damage that is kind of around you at the time. Cause that was basically what the numbers represented in this other version that we played as well. And it was fun, but it wasn't as quite as smooth for us. it just, it took, it takes a lot more thought to think
through some of those, those, those puzzles. And because our game is from the perspective of a character on the Minesweeper board, you don't see the whole board the whole time. So it, it became a little bit too much to have going on at once.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: I think that that mental strain on the player is important to consider. But Coming from your guys' history of Upstream, I could see why you would want something that's a little more sit down and play, almost more like a Sudoku puzzle.
Noatak: Well, and the nice thing about Minesweeper, for the most part, think, you should, as long as you really know the rules and you're being careful, you should never lose. I mean, there are some Minesweeper
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: puzzles where like you get down to the last two or whatever, and you have to make a guess out of which one it is or something like that. But for the most part, as long as you're being careful, you never make a mistake. But, that's the thing is you want to go faster and you get excited because you're doing well and you've got a good streak going and then you do make a mistake. And so it's cool in that way and that like if you really, really take it easy, technically you could beat the game without ever hitting a bomb, I think pretty easily.
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: You'd have to go really slow and be really careful, of course. But yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: think yeah imp that pressure to go faster is going to be that thing that players get most frustrated with because it's going to be themselves that they get most frustrated with and that I made a mistake. I got too eager. I went too fast. But then they're gonna just want to keep gassing it because they're like high score, high score, high score. So it might be a really, really fun speed running event to try. Do you plan on doing like any multiplayer elements like leaderboards or any Yeah.
Riley Sikes: We're working on some like leaderboard stuff, integrating with the Steam leaderboard and maybe some like local leaderboard. But yeah, that's always fun. That Upstream got really into that. And with with speed. Upstream became like a speed game pretty fast.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: I remember you guys mentioning that. Did ha have you tried leaning into that or was that something that you were kind of cognizant of as you were going into Mines of Mana? Just being like, players took kind of this arbitrary, like simple game and said, speed, this is a thing. Did you kind of compensate for that as you're going, or have you thought about that?
Noatak: Not so much with Mines of Mana. I mean, I guess recently a little bit when we added the timer in pretty recently. So that wasn't initially part of the game. And it wasn't also initially part of the game with Upstream either. The whole speed element of it actually wasn't something we were really cognizant of. mean, we kind of were aware that Upstream was very inspired by Getting Over It. And of course, Getting Over It has a huge speedrunning community with it. because we knew that our control scheme was pretty evocative of that kind of game that I'm sure there would be, we were sure there would be some people who were into speedrunning it. We actually, this is a dumb story. for a while we were streaming development on Upstream. There was probably a four to six month period where we were streaming almost every day for three to four hours a day while we worked on the game. There was one guy who was almost like a regular in our streams. He came in, you know, a couple times a week to say hello. And one day he was very adamant that our game needed a leaderboard. It had to have a leaderboard. Otherwise he specifically would not buy it. And no one else who wanted speed running or was focused on speed would buy it if it didn't have a built-in leaderboard. And at the time I was really resistant to that idea. Personally, I was very, and I got a little standoffish about it. Cause I was sort of like, who are you to tell us that it has to have a leaderboard? also like, don't know at the time, I didn't know what that entailed. Like I was like, well,
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: if we do a leaderboard, then we have to host that data somewhere. And like, that means we have to pay for like an AWS server or something. I don't want to do that. Like that's, that's too much effort. trying to keep the game small, small scope, like, I want to pay for an AWS server forever for this. Like I want this. to be cheap and easy and simple. I don't think it's necessary for us to like have, we can have a timer and that's fine, but we don't need a leaderboard. And then after stream that day, I don't know if it was you or I was like, don't we just look at Steam and maybe Steam has a leaderboard thing for us. And it out it does and it's pretty easy to use. Like took a little bit of work to get it set up, but not that much. And then he never came to our stream again. So he never, he never found out.
Riley Sikes: Yeah. As far as we know.
Noatak: As far as we know. Yeah. At least he never, he never said as much.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Now the the the idea of hitting the speed running community or finding this kind of theme that it kinda comes into into Mines of Manmana now. It was something that was asked for by a community member and seemed like easy enough and it became a bit of a thing with the Upstream. Is there room for Gayama games? I'm still I'm wow, I'm shocked. You told me how to say it, and I'm still tripping over myself.
Noatak: Gllama Games. Gllama. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Gllama there we go. Gllama Games Is there an idea about where you're taking your studio Or are you guys just having fun being creative with whatever comes, or is there like speed running portfolio coming kind of thing? Does that interest you, or are you guys just open to being inspired and creative?
Riley Sikes: For a while we were like fish themed games. but we're obviously breaking that now.
Noatak: Yeah. Yeah.
Riley
Sikes: I think we we we definitely have a lot of discussions about like what people are playing and what's doing well. and we de we look at that and we consume a lot of content about other people who talk about that kind of stuff. and I think that's important to consider, but for the most part we're like what games sound fun to make and would be fun to play and would be fun to like watch people experience that like we create. I I think that's kinda what drives me.
Noatak: Yeah, I think it's very much there. So far, at least there is not a strong unifying vision between our projects. It's kind of
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: I mean, the we had. I mean, thinking about the timeline Upstream released in March of last year and we only started Mines of Mana in April of this year. And so that's a whole year, basically, where we We're working on other games that
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: we just didn't get far enough or at some point while working on these other games, we decided, nah, this isn't it. Like this isn't working. luckily, neither of us are in a position where this is our full-time gig. And so it's something that we're doing
Riley Sikes: Yeah, that's a big thing.
Noatak: for artistic fulfillment, right? We're doing this for creative enjoyment. And so at some point, although throughout, think we had, I don't know, two or three other projects in that year that we worked on that we, for one reason or another, decided we weren't going to continue working on, before we landed on this minds of mana thing. And I think the, honestly, I think the biggest thing about why we've stuck with minds of mana and why we've committed to finishing it is it is, it's by far the smallest scope game we've, we've started since Upstream.
Riley Sikes: Probably smaller than Upstream. Yeah.
Noatak: It probably is smaller than Upstream actually, yeah you're right.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Is there a definitive end to it or is this just like in scope of features and kind of concept?
Noatak: There is an end, right? I think there's a final level. Yeah, it does end.
Riley Sikes: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think the goal something that I I like to think about this game is that I could imagine it like being on an arcade machine. Like you could walk into a retro like arcade and this would be on a thing with buttons and you could like literally play it. It looks like that. It has like a local leaderboard where people put in their like what three letters with a number. so keep it keeping it small scope for that. really appeals to me.
Noatak: Yeah, there's a pretty strong, like, retro styled vision for it that we have that both visually and mechanically is keeping it pretty simple. Cause I think for the original, when I made the original, like playtest demo thing of it, I really want, I bought at the time, I had just bought one of those like, Android based Game Boy SP handhelds that are like styled after a Game Boy, but they have a couple extra buttons and stuff so you can play other emulated stuff. I was like, I want to make a game that looks like it was supposed to be played on this. And so we're like,
Riley Sikes: Ha ha ha.
Noatak: okay, we have only this many buttons to work with and it has to look like it belongs on this kind of device. So that's been a pretty guiding concept for it.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Yeah, I I I w really like that in in the framework of scope control, being like, this is a vision of the art, this is a vision of the form factor and the era that it lives in, but you're still taking all the ideas and concepts that you've learned from all of your experience and Upstream even and going back and saying it fits here. I could keep asking about Upstream. I could keep asking about like your processes or anything. What's something that you want other indies to know or to shout out to students like how how is this kind of fulfilling? Getting a game out, working on a second one, being with a friend and just kind of taking it at your approach as opposed to being like it has to be a commercial success, it has to be the best, or it has to be a whole unique idea, what kind of advice other than keeping it small and in scope w what where do you where do you preach from on on that kind of topic?
Noatak: I feel very strongly and this ties into keeping it small a little bit still, but cause it's my favorite thing to recommend to people. but it's to just make something like, know that's, that's silly advice, but it really is for me, the thing that I found the most motivating and And how I started was like, I want to do these game jam things. I like just have to sit down and learn to make something. And it has to be small because right now I don't know what to do and I don't know how to do it. And so keeping it small is the only way that something will get done. and being able to just make something from beginning to end has kind of been the guiding point of like, okay, we're doing some game jams and we're just making something. And then at some point we decided, okay, we want to do a bigger thing. We want to make something that is a real whole video game and do the whole process and release it and market it and do it all. We want to make the thing. But to do that, we needed to make it smaller than we originally know. set out with something too big and realized, we messed that up. Like that wasn't, it wasn't the right path. and so for us, at least for me, the, the kind of, I don't know if motivation is right word, but the, the like urge to just make something is something that I find really motivating.
Riley Sikes: Yeah. I think there's definitely like a creative drive. like it feels really good to make something and be able to look back and see the iterative process. Like when when we did that play test at the time we were like, Yeah, this is fun. And it's it's still on Steam, like we can go pull it up. And when I see the like pixel art in there, it's like jarring. It's like a jump scare. Like But It's like wow, like
like that first level I redid that like four times maybe. It's really cool to be like I stuck with it. Like this this is like something I can be proud of. Like that's really something that I think is super driving for me. and then similar thing is like find someone to do it with. Like motivation wise, I don't know if I would have gotten a whole project out by myself. Like I feel like the the idea of the solo dev is very like alluring. Like pe peop people want to do that. But just finding like a friend to do it with is it makes the world difference. Like we have our little Discord server and have a repo together and we have a little Trello board. We just like work together on stuff, talk through stuff, have chats. Like it it helps so much with motivation.
Noatak: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's, it's kind of nice actually too with a two person team because I sort of feel like you get, and I think this would probably be to going up to like maybe a team of three or four max. I don't know. I don't know for sure, but my guess is it would be, but you get all of the benefits of being a solo dev and all of the benefits of working on a team in that like as a solo dev you get to work on every part of the game you get to touch every aspect of the game we get to do that too we do all of everything we share all of the work but also you get the benefit of being on a team you don't have to do everything and there
Riley Sikes: Yeah.
Noatak: is another person to help you and to take the load off sometimes and so It really is, I think, kind of the best of both worlds in that sense.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Awesome. What a there's a lot For anyone to listen to unpack with this, there's so much lesson learned and so much value in what you guys have said based off of your experience with just one game and some game jam under your belt so far and all the prototyping in between. I'm really excited about Mines Mana. And we got to tell people go play Upstream on Steam. Absolutely. Where else on your Discord?
Noatak: Yes.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Where else can people get in contact with you guys? communicate, follow along with what Yeah.
Noatak: Let's see. I mean, Discord's a pretty sure way to get ahold of us. We have... We kind of did a bit of a social media purge a little while ago because we didn't like being on all of the platforms at the same time. we are on YouTube and we'll all of our
Riley Sikes: Well YouTube.
Noatak: YouTube is where all of our trailers and our devlog type stuff kind of goes. And we actually do have we have some other YouTube videos that are sort of informational. We have some like game dev tutorial type stuff and also some like analysis of Steam Next Fest numbers if anybody's interested in that kind of thing. And then we also are on blue sky as well. If you're looking for like a Twitter like platform, we'll we're on blue sky. tick tock to I guess we have a tick tock and video stuff will go up there as well.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: Sweet. Well, Noah Talk, Riley, thank you for joining me and talking about your journey of getting together and getting Upstream out and how you're working and collaborating on your next title, Mines of Mana. I'm still very excited about that. I'll probably see you at another Seattle Indies event and I hope you bring it along with you. As I said, you can find Upstream on Steam and follow Gllama Games, nailed it, through the links
Riley Sikes: Ha ha.
Noatak: Yeah.
Joe "Rakaul" Belousek: in the description. This has been the Summoning Hour an Everything [Game Development] podcast. I hope you all enjoyed and we will catch you all next time. Thanks again, guys, and thanks for listening.
Riley Sikes: For having us.
Noatak: Thank you.