From Kingdom to Cloud Gardens

Hey, how’s it going?

Yeah. Good.

Absolutely. It’s two, almost three years ago since I was in Berlin for the last time and also in Saftladen. Happy to be back.

Yeah and I started my previous game Cloud Gardens back in Saftladen and I just finished it right before I came here again. So it’s full circle.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think when we did the Kickstarter, it was kind of on the cusp of where you had to take it more seriously and be slightly professional about your campaign, whereas before it was in my perception, if you have something cool, you make a movie about it, you put it on Kickstarter and people will like it.

But of course it takes more marketing. And I think we kind of underestimated that. We also had hugely unrealistic stretch goals. I’m actually really glad that the Kickstarter didn’t make it because we would have to deliver on so many things for so little budget, like you mentioned, 8000 Euros for two developers, you cannot work for a long time.

I think so, because we were not quite clear on where exactly it was going to be. Kingdom was of course, this game where you’re a guy on a horse riding around or a queen on a horse riding around throwing coins and then stuff can happen. And that’s also how we always approach the design, work out, where else can you ride? Where can you throw gold coins at and what’s going to happen? So I think we initially thought of some things and later, we replaced them by other things, but the Kickstarter was also actually the Kickstarter for an iPhone port of the flash game.

And I think that also didn’t really work for us. And it also made us realize that maybe there’s not so much demand for just an iPhone port of that flash game or an iOS port, and maybe we should be able to making a PC game. So that was also actually really good to notice that. And the thing with Kickstarter, you cannot even deliver the game on iOS as a Kickstarter reward.

You have no way to distribute games for free, a paid game for free on iOS, at least not back then. So that made it a hard sell where it’s like back our game, but you don’t get the game. You have to buy it.

Like all the way from the flash version all the way back? So. Yeah. So maybe two to three years on the flash version, just like messing around as a side project, but like two hours a week, just because I found it fun to learn pixel art, adding some stuff to this world and at some point I said, okay, let’s release it. Then after that, I think. Two or three years to build the first PC game out of it. And this Kickstarter was about halfway through that process where we decided to pivot and say, okay, you know what, it’s not going to be an iOS port of the flash game. It’s really going to be a full PC game.

And that’s also where the publisher came in.

After the flash game Just because a lot of people played the flash game and it also got some review, I think, on indiegames.com or something that I was like, oh, people like this game, maybe it can be something.

And then I worked on it about half, half of my time. I also worked on some other stuff on the side. Yeah together with Marco. Of course he proposed let’s do an iPhone port. Maybe we can make some money. I thought, okay, let’s do it. Maybe we can make some money.

It’s interesting. I learned a lot about, how you should factor in skillsets into making a game. And what role you are pushed into if your skill sets overlap in a certain way. So in this case for the flash game, I did both the art and the programming, and I liked that a lot. Then when Marco came on board, he’s really a developer.

So that automatically pushed me more to art production and him more towards developing. And then I did notice that I missed also writing code. So that was interesting.

Yeah. That I realized I also liked this. I like doing both. If I do only one of the two, then I don’t like it as much. So I do like the balance of having a little bit of both.

I think it came from learning pixel art. I just did tutorials and I made little animation. And then I put these animations together in a world. That’s why I think the game also feels like that. There’s not really a grand scheme of design. It’s just kind of loosely coupled things that can happen and a little simulation, like an RTS and then stuff happens.

So it really came from that, drawing the pixel art, drawing some enemy guys or some friendly guys. Maybe they can shoot each other. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s, that’s crazy. I think though, you end up unknowingly discovering some rules and then you stick with them. So like in this case: we had this one interaction of throwing a coin, which was funny for the flash prototype, but then later you think, okay, what if we just really stick to it? Make that kind of a rule, you can only throw coins at things. And then everything has to flow from that. And then you, you do have a design.

You didn’t think of it beforehand, but once you kind of stick to it, it leads to fun constraints.

Yeah. That’s also what we thought. Of course, as you grow up as a game developer, you also realize why you do need a game design document sometimes, and you cannot do everything organically because sometimes you just need to think ahead a little bit further, or you get stuck into dead ends, but for kingdom it worked out good.

It’s a little bit weird because there is Kingdom New Lands, which is what I consider the definitive 1.0 version. But then some players really liked the original PC game release which I would rather nuke and never see again, because it’s full of bugs, but Raw Fury kind of recognized this - Raw Fury is the publisher - kind of recognized this demand for this original version. So they exist side by side. And then after that, after new lands I said, okay, I want to work on some other stuff, because especially if this becomes a franchise, I think it could take up a lot of time.

So Raw Fury has worked on the sequels since new lands and I think those are - it was first an expansion called Dead Lands and there is now a sequel called Two Crowns .

The hand-off was pretty sudden, I feel maybe I could have done more to help them, but they also didn’t reach out so much, maybe also, because I said that, you know, I wanted to move on and they didn’t want to absorb more of my time. Maybe I could have helped out more. But yeah there is a new team working on it.

And I think, I wrote some documents like, this is how the game works. This is how the code works. This is where you can find things. And they kind of just picked up on it. They had some experience also because they did porting before. I guess that’s a good introduction to a project. If you ported it, then you kind of know how it works and then you can start building on it.

And that’s what they’ve been doing .

It was not too hard for me because after four or five years, I was kind of done with it and I felt like there are more exciting things to make from a blank canvas then if you have to somehow implement them into this little pixel world with Knights and some kind of fantasy world. And also because the world gets more and more established, it feels like you have less freedom because it’s like you’re writing this lore of how the world works and you cannot suddenly add certain things anymore because then it doesn’t fit.

It’s kind of filling out the details slowly and then limiting the freedom that you have maybe.

I don’t know about that, but I can 100% empathize with what you say about when you’re in the thick of a project you want to experiment. And you’re like, ”Oh my God, I wish I had this freedom to like, just do whatever” and then when you’re experimenting and doing whatever you can also sometimes wish for I wish I was just producing, knew exactly what I was working on and have this really focused mode where you’re working towards a release and after Kingdom it took a while to also come up with something. I thought it would go faster. I thought, I’m done with this now.

I I’ll have another prototype in a month. I’ll have another game out in six months. That was really on my mind. But it does somehow take longer to hit on something that’s good. I’m not even sure I did that now because I’ve now just released cloud gardens and it took awhile to get there. And it never really quite felt the same way where it was so obvious that this was going to be the game and it all went smoothly and came automatically.

Let me ask you first. Do you like that? Does it work for you to, go back into maintenance mode?

Yeah, yeah. 100%. I can see that. I think that’s an interesting strategy. I haven’t tried it. Of course, at some point I was done with it and I was happy to be completely doing something else, but I can see how it’s nice to have this kind of maintenance. I would just worry for myself that I would get sucked into it all the time.

I’m not so good at switching tasks. Sometimes you just need to work on one thing, whether you make progress or not. Just struggle, struggle, struggle. And then maybe you have something good sometimes.

Right.

Since you mentioned how many things did you try? The answer is definitely not enough.

I tend to dive into one thing quite deeply immediately, regardless of thinking where can it lead or will this be successful? I hope to not repeat this mistake. I always remember that in high school, when you had to make a drawing for art class, that they was always telling you, make four different sketches of the same subject.

And it’s true that you never decide to work with the first sketch, even though you think, oh my God, I know exactly what I’m going to make for a sketch. And then, so I hope myself to force myself in a similar way to try more things. I think after Kingdom, I pretty much got stuck on one concept immediately, which was this MMO game with plants.

And then later I thought it’s such a shame to throw away all that work that I thought, can I not just take the plants and make a game out of the plants? Just so it’s not wasted time, which then still took two years of time investment. So you can think , okay, what would have been the real more efficient solution?

So do you think it’s unattainable writing super small prototypes to see if something works?

Probably that’s a good point. There are probably some types of game that need some more work to show that they’re good and others that are very obviously nice in a small prototype, but maybe then you gravitate towards a certain type of game that lets itself be prototyped .

Yeah, I think that kind of on the surface of it, maybe it’s games where a strong point is a lot of complexity or a very deep gameplay. Of course, they are hard to prototype quickly and games that would kind of rely on a gimmick or concept are more easy to maybe prototype quickly. For me personally, I would like to make more concepty games exactly because of this, because it will be easier to make something quickly that you rely heavily on the concept or maybe a gimmick and then see if people like it and then move on.

Yes or no, but purely because I do want to restrict the time that I work on one concept.

Yeah. Crazily enough. It does pay off like that.

Sometimes, you know, games do work. You can work for five years without knowing anything. You know, at the end, it’s like, oh, it works. That’s crazy that it works at all.

Uhmm Its tower defense game would say, I mean, that’s the joy that I get out of it as well. Not being able to do anything yourself, but you were watching like your troops do some stuff for you. Like they’re fighting for you and you have to just manage them. So I think the joy of a tower defense game is for me the joy also of a combating kingdom.

Of course, there’s other stuff going on. And it’s also very much about the aesthetics and looking at the scene, but there’s a reasonable guess that if you enjoy that feeling of a tower defense game, that you also might enjoy Kingdom

I feel so dumb because I am that guy who has a pitch for this is a game where you can do anything. That was pretty much. I thought I didn’t, I thought the pitch was better, but now looking back at it, it was kind of that, like, this is an MMO and everybody’s in the world and you can do anything you want.

I just was fascinated and I’m still fascinated by, let’s say you have a persistent online world, you know, things where people can leave their mark and it just stays there. And you’re not too worried about. You know, what’s the TTP or are people going to troll or whatever, because the stakes are not that high.

You know, you’re not, you don’t have some character with crazy items. And if you get killed, you lose 10 years of your life. You know, just kind of seeing what happens if you let people build things collaboratively in a world and it stays for the next person to see, but it was a little bit too ambitious.

Also technology wise. It’s not something that I think you can build as one person, not in that form, at least not as 3d multiplayer game. So I decided to let it go, which I think was good, but I’m still fascinated by these concepts.

I’ll say it. I mean, I don’t know what the rating is of your podcast. So TTP is the time to penis, how long it takes in a game before somebody trolls or builds a penis at which I think at which point some publishers have to pull the plug because they cannot justify that. I would like to make a game where you just kind of willfully ignore that fact until you are confronted with it.

And then maybe you also have to pull the plug, but you’ll will have had fun until then. Yeah.

Yeah. Probably a year. It was also hard because I was at the same time trying to make a non-violence game. I wanted to see can I make a game where you don’t just rely on shooting stuff. So I could never really figure out what the gameplay was at the same time. I could never really figure out the technology.

If you’re working parallel, exploring gameplay and technology, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Yeah. So I was using Spatial OS and I think, their pitch was great. It’s like we have an API and you can make these persistent online games pretty easily. And I think that was also for the most part true, but the API was developing pretty rapidly. So I had to keep up with their technology and I had to learn, I thought you didn’t need to know how a multiplayer game works, but you still do need to know how to do network programming and I also was learning that at the same time and network programming is pretty challenging. So I would not make the mistake of underestimating such a thing again.

Yeah, true. I was walking around in this world by myself a lot, just assuming that everybody would see the same world.

We did a play test with about 30 people once, which was actually quite hilarious, which makes me still think that it would be fun. It was just 30 people building random stuff on top of each other, jumping off towers towards another tower. Stuff collapsing with physics. It was already so much fun.

That I feel you don’t always get from a more boxed-in experience where what you can do is fairly limited. But then after that the whole battle grounds hype happened. So then everything that was multiplayer is now Battle Royal.

I was stuck in terms of game design. I didn’t know how to make this a fun game without shooting stuff or each other. Technologically, I had to do a couple of rewrites that was getting tedious.

There was a small conflict between Spatial OS and Unity, which made me just feel a little bit scared. Okay. I’m building a lot on this technology. What if they pull the rug and that all of came together and made me say, okay, I have to put this down.

Because I put some work into the simulation of this world. And part of that work was a plant simulation, a small plant simulation that would run in this online world. I thought, well, if I just take two months now and just wrap up this plant simulation and just make a little game out of just the plants. At least I’ll have something to show for my time.

And that was two years ago. And those two years actually, I spent on making that game. I was also, again, wildly optimistic about how long that would take,

Yeah. But then, but that’s true.

It probably took me about two weeks to write the plant simulation that I salvaged. And it took me two years to build a game out of it. Also the code of the plant simulation is pretty much unchanged. That shows that sometimes if you have something while it is the most important part of the game, it’s not the biggest part of the work in the game.

If that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. I wish I could work on a game where you don’t care so much and it’s maybe a little bit dinky. Maybe you have to press alt+f4 to get out of the game, but there’s a fun concept and people are down for that, but I guess that’s every developer’s dream.

I was pretty stressed out. I think just being confronted with the fact that you’re going to have to let it go. It does feel in some way as failure because you think, okay, I’m going to make this and it’s going to be cool. So I think at that point I was pretty stressed out about it. I don’t know how I felt after.

I think I quickly kind of latched onto the salvaging thing, like, okay. But at least I’m going to salvage something and it won’t be for. And then you can set your mind to okay, then it’s good. You know, it’s not really giving up. And because of that, I also had a clear goal suddenly because the goal was okay, I just have to turn this plant simulation into something and that’s it.

And then you make peace with it. And then that’s what. I think it was most stuff in the phase leading up to it where I kind of already realized it was not manageable, but I didn’t want to give into it.

The symptoms could very well be the same. Yeah. That’s true.

Yeah, but maybe also relief and room for something else.

The core was this plant simulation, which basically you put down a seed and then some plant grows out of it, according to some simple rules and the plants can stick to surfaces or they can just grow like a tree. And the goal was okay, how can I make a game out of this?

Just with that plant simulation. And what I came up with in the end is you have some scenery in front of you and you have to cover it completely with plants. So you have to place the seeds in the right places. From the plants you can harvest more seeds and then you have to place those again in the right places.

And then you overgrow the scene. That’s kind of the simple pitch, but it’s very subconscious. It’s not a very thinky game. You can just sit down and play it in a very chill way, almost on autopilot. And there is there’s good sound and it looks good. And it’s very meditative.

So yeah, we were really on two tracks because their game Cloud Gardens does have a campaign mode where you can finish the game.

There’s more than a hundred levels that you can finish, but then there’s also a sandbox where you can do whatever you want. And we kind of always built those two in parallel. But now, like you said, there is more of these types of games coming where it’s, you know, more of an experience or a sandbox.

So in retrospect, I’m thinking we should have just gone all the way and just built a really nice sandbox, maybe with different roads to explore, but nevertheless, just sandbox. Something like the success of Townscaper shows you that can be done, and people like it. If you are convinced of the concept, you really just go for it.

In general I think game design is not my strongest skill.

So as soon as I have to come up with mechanics, I’m like, oh, how do you even come up with, you know, loops and mechanics and that kind of stuff. And Kingdom is also in that sense, more iterative just ad-hoc things added to the game and Cloud Garden is a little bit the same in the sense that we just added more scenery and more plants and came up with some rules, but there’s no really strong thought out game loop.

I will say right off the bat that I would definitely like to work with a publisher again.

I’ve learned my lesson. So to say, because it is a lot of work, actually releasing a game, especially coming up to release as a developer, of course, you’re busy with bugs. I don’t know what kind of like last features you want to implement. And that is actually the moment where the publisher can jump in and do help you out with all this stuff.

QA localization setting up the store pages. That’s actually a lot of work I found out. Cloud Gardens was meant to be smaller. So I thought it wouldn’t be that much work, but in the end it was quite a bit of work. So yeah, I do. I do actually think that it would be nice to work with a publisher again. The smaller your team the more it makes sense even.

I mean also answering emails, you know, like requests from streamers, other kinds of requests, also requests from over other publishers. It’s a lot of stuff to do for a small team, I think. Yeah. But doing it the first time with a publisher, I didn’t quite realize that yet.

It was all magic. Like, oh, this team page is up. Nice

I got to see how the sausage is made yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s 100%. As you say, when you have a publisher, you can think, well, if they think this game is going to make money, apparently the game is going to make money and also they have a stake in it, so they are going to help you or help the game to make money. Whereas if you do it by yourself, there is that there is that doubt. They do certain things to push it, to actually, you know, get, get something out of it. .

Yeah. That is true. And it’s also reassuring that you’re not burning through funds, you know, I guess I’m saying it’s fun to work with on someone else’s money.

I think a lot of small surprises in the sense of that this, all this stuff is a lot of work and also that publishers are quite good at it. They have good channels to market. They know how to make trailers. Obviously that’s their craft. I would say one of the things that I learned with Clouds Gardens is that, it’s also fine to trust someone else.

Even if you share a part of your revenue with them, that makes total sense because they, more than make up for it. And you want to focus on building the game also mentally it can be nice to have this separation, you focus on the creative process and the publisher focuses on the commercial process.

And that I think is a nice balance. Whereas if you have to do both at the same time, it gets in the way sometimes.

That’s definitely, that’s definitely true. I think when you work with a publisher, but it’s also what you want. You want them to deal with all these contacts so that you can focus on building a game.

And when you work with a publisher, they do have these contacts. I could leverage some reputation I think. Not entirely because Cloud Gardens was a pretty vague concept. If I had said, oh, I’m building another pixel art RTS. I think it would have been easier than if I have what I have, what I did with Clouds Gardens.

So yeah, I did. It was easier to talk to steam. Of course. Apple is super hard to talk to in any case, like even with Kingdom, it was, I think it’s hard to talk to apple. So that was less successful. And other than that, I really did everything or we did everything ourselves. So we didn’t really use our contacts for a lot.

It could have done more. I guess.

So the core team was four. There was Amos Roddy who did the music and sound for Kingdom who also did music for Cloud Gardens. And there was Elijah Cauley who did the level design and then Tom Kitchen who did 3d art.

They were freelance yeah, but we have a freelance agreement. Yeah, I think especially being a small company, it seems less risky that way. Also they were very flexible, but I constantly underestimated how long the game would still take.

So I approached Eli the first time I said, Hey, do you want to help me with some level design for three months that also took a year and a half. So I’m happy that they were that flexible where I thought I would need them for a couple months. I needed them quite a bit longer in the end, but I think they all enjoyed working on it.

So I’m happy that they did.

Yeah, there is. I think if you make a sandbox game, there is always this share of players who just go nuts and build things that you could never imagine. And it’s, it’s amazing when you see that and you feel a little bit bad because you’re like they had to build this in a game with tools that are less than perfect, but they still just did it.

And it’s just amazing. Reception is good. Is has a good rating on steam. Commercially it’s a very niche game. So I think the player base is very small. But I’m happy creatively with what we did. I think mostly.

I really want to, before I dive into something, come up with some way to trick myself to have to trick myself to do that, to, to have multiple prototypes or to work on things for a shorter time. So I’m really going to sit down and think, okay, what are my personal flaws? Why do I get drawn into one project and wake up five years later and see how I can force myself to have a different workflow?

I think that’s that’s number one, because I noted once I start prototyping, I will be so charmed by the first thing that I get sucked in and then regret it that I did that. I, again, didn’t listen to my own advice.

Yeah. I would like to do that, but I don’t know how I can force myself. It’s hard to force yourself because who is gonna, you know, what’s the penalty. If you don’t, if you don’t listen.

Okay. I will make a three games a day. No, I’m scared to say one a month because it’s scary. Yeah. But it would be so good. I think also for your skills as a game designer to really grapple with new concepts. And not spend too much time, you know, just programming.

So I think that would be so useful.

But do you not think it’s crazy that you can make a game in one month, but you can also make a game in five years and what is in between?

But so you are saying that in those cases, the game did actually improve over time and at one month would not have been enough. To show the concept to, to sell it to someone.

That’s reassuring.

And yeah, because the risk is also bigger. I often think, you know, after one month, the game wouldn’t have been as successful as it is now. After one month, would you be able to earn, I mean, it’s a very capitalist mindset, but after one month, would you be able to earn the cost of one month of month of game building?

Could you convince a couple hundred people on the internet to buy it?

So that’s true. There is a that’s so there’s noio games. And then there’s a mountain emoji because my last name is Van den Berg, which is a mountain.

Well it’s because in Holland, at least they allow all the characters to form like a Unicode character. So it’s not the actual emoji. Unfortunately it’s just a written out Unicode’s code point for the mountain emoji.

When it would be the actual emoji,

And then somebody hopefully Googles it and then they see the mountain emoji and then maybe they get it.

Yeah. Maybe I should quickly register company names with all the different emojis so that I can sell them. It’s also a business, the new URL business yeah.

Thank you. It was fun.