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After discussing the industry and sharing tips for smaller studios for years with us, we for a change got to catch up with the indie ambassador about his next own game, a "tactical reverse bullet hell". Of course, we then moved on to touch on publishers supporting innovation, risk/benefit, and creativity.
"Hi, Gamereactor friends, this is the Madeira Games Summit, and they're wrapping up the event.
Before they turn the lights off, I wanted to catch up with you, Rami, because, you know, last time we met, I think it was DevGAMM as well, but in Gdansk, and we couldn't talk your games."
"We always talk games, but this time around we can talk your games and the industry topics that you've been discussing here.
So, first and foremost, what did Australia do?
Australia Did It, that's also the title of the game, it's a little turn-based strategy game about trains trying to traverse the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."
"And the Atlantic Ocean has completely evaporated, and Australia Did It.
Australia is the culprit here, all right.
And the genre you define it as reverse tactical bullet hell.
What does that even mean?
And how did it come up? Both two questions."
"Yeah, so I think that was very much an experiment of trying to capture what the game is.
The game is weird, and this is one of the things that made me very excited to work on the game together with publisher Mystic Forge, is that they said we want to do a strategy game, but we don't want it to be just another strategy game."
"We want to try something new, and that's why they were interested in working with me, because my history is not in strategy games.
I love playing strategy games.
I grew up playing StarCraft and WarCraft and Total Annihilation and Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, so I have a very deep fondness for the genre."
"Also turn-based strategy games, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, like all of those.
I think they're a huge part of my early diet as a game developer.
But when I was thinking about making one, I think the things I realized is I don't love base building."
"And it doesn't mean that I don't like tech trees.
I do like tech trees, but I don't like that they're basically just sort of like time gates to getting to interesting things.
So I thought, what if instead of that we use merging?
And I found merging such a fascinating mechanic."
"You know, take a bit of A, take a bit of B, merge it together, get something better.
So in Australia Did It you merge your units to become better and better and to take each other's powers and traits, and there's thousands and thousands of combinations you can build."
"So I found that fascinating.
The second part is I don't like that in strategy games, sometimes you can lose in the first few minutes, and you don't know it, because the game has to play out before you can watch the replay."
"So I wanted to make a game that would punish you a little bit earlier.
And so Australia Did It, at the end of each level, and each level was about 7 to 10 turns of gameplay.
There's a little action sequence where the train traverses the ocean and the units that you are bringing with you, up to 6 units, in real time shoot real-time enemies."
"And so that's a little bit of bullet hell, a little bit of a reverse bullet hell.
You are the bullet hell.
And so it has a lot of tower defense, it has a lot of turn-based strategy, and it has a little bit of reverse bullet hell gameplay."
"And that all comes together through the merging mechanic.
Does that concept lend itself to multiplayer as well?
I've looked at it, but I don't think it's within scope of the game that we're building.
I think this game that we're building is this very small, interesting experiment."
"And obviously we're going to see what the market thinks of it, what players think of it.
We've done a number of very successful playtests.
People have been having a lot of fun trying to build their own favorite unit."
"I'm still building my favorite units because there's so many of them.
Every time we do little balance switches, I keep going like, wait, wait, wait, what if the Stormcaster, which creates chain attacks, what if you merge that with a rocket launcher that adds splash to every damage?
And now suddenly you have electricity that creates explosions."
"That's great.
And so I'm having a lot of fun figuring those things out, even now, a year and a bit into development.
And speaking about scale, you said a year about into development."
"What's the status of the project?
And what can you tell me about the team building the game?
Oh, the team is phenomenal.
So the game has been developed in multiple phases."
"At the start, it was mostly me.
There was Max Caulkins in the United States and Cristina Castpixel, the pixel artist.
She's an incredible art director who's done all of the visuals for the game."
"We worked together with Aesthetician Labs, which is a company out in the United States, and with Jack Gutmann, who's a VFX artist in Austria.
And then currently we're… Nobody in Australia."
"Nobody in Australia, no, no.
Currently we're sort of in the polish phase with a team that is exceptionally good at sort of like wrapping up games.
And so Dreams Uncorporated in Colombia is running sort of like the wrap-up, bug fixing, and like getting the game ready."
"And we've worked with a number of others.
There's been Federico Bellucci in Italy.
We've worked with two sound designers from Austria.
It's just been a phenomenal team of genuinely just a wish list of people, people I've always wanted to work with, and having the opportunity to work on something so unlike anything else has been really fun because you really challenge people to come up with solutions for problems that nobody has ever solved before."
"So that's been really fun.
And when you announced the game, I think it was September, in the press release you said something like the industry has been reluctant to sort of support innovation from indie studios."
"And this is something that we've discussed in the past.
So what can you tell me about this specific aspect and what you've been seeing around as of late, also the support you got from this publisher to this innovation?
I think that's one of the big things."
"We are here in Madeira, DevGAMM, and obviously we've been discussing a lot of topics with a lot of luminaries and brilliant people from the industry.
I think one of the topics that keeps coming up over and over is that same thing, is risk."
"Like what is the purpose of all of this if we're not making new things?
And when we talk about this, I think it's really easy to forget that in all the numbers and the commerce and all the data and all the marketing and all that, at the heart of it, all the games that are super successful right now are very stubborn games, right?
Like we have a super French RPG, we have poker roguelike, we have climbing mountains poorly with your friends, we have all these games that nobody could have market-researched these."
"They're just bets, right?
And that doesn't mean, I think, that publishers or investors need to take risky bets.
That's actually how we ended up in this mess."
"What I think they need to do is they need to understand that no individual game is a good investment, right, for an investor.
Like they could just put money in a bank account and probably get more on the interest than most games will earn them."
"But that if you go and carry it across 10 games and you start spreading that risk, there's a real opportunity in games to make money.
And I think publishers and investors have gotten too focused on the single game."
"They're not focusing on their portfolio, they're not focusing on the larger reach of games.
And that's what's putting us in this situation because every indie currently is making something that they can playtest very early on on TikTok or something like that."
"Because if you don't have that, publishers are not going to fund it.
And maybe I'm old-fashioned, but my belief is that the point of a publisher is to help you take those risks.
And then if it's successful, they get a lot of the benefits."
"But right now, the situation is they get a lot of the benefits, but the developer is taking most of the risk.
And to me, that doesn't make sense.
Perhaps you just answered my final question, which was the question we were thrown last night at the dinner, which was in five years' time, which was the one thing that you would have fixed this week in gaming."
"So the final thing we did here near Madeiras, we did some work groups.
So we got people together to talk about different topics.
Here in this room."
"So in this very room, there was a discussion about discoverability, there was a discussion about funding, there was a discussion about people, like how do we retain good people in the industry."
"And the discussion that I led was about creativity.
How do we make sure that we are creating games with conviction?
Not because, yes, that'll work, or because the market, or because any of that."
"Because making games takes a long time, and we've seen lots of high-profile examples of studios just copying what's successful, and then nobody wants it.
So how do you make games from a point of conviction?
And how do you sort of like merge that with the reality of everybody being kind of risk averse?
So I think for me, the sort of big takeaway from the event is we need to figure out how we create an environment in which conviction is celebrated without recreating some of the old toxic structures of this person is a genius, you can never question them."
"Like how do you create that balance of as a team, we're going to stand behind this idea because it is us.
We feel that this idea is interesting, not because it'll sell well, not because it is good, not because of the note, just because it interests us."
"And if we build this, we think we will create something interesting.
I think as long as we start pointing at that, like making a thing that is true and genuine and sincere, that we get excited about, that will make better games than if we're trying to figure out what the audience would be excited about because the audience is ever shifting."
"It's always changing.
And the things that are cool now are not going to be cool in two years, right?
That's not going to be how it is."
"There's going to be 20 games that are trying to copy Vampire Survivors every day and Bellatro every day.
And every now and then, one of them is good."
"But all the ones that are good feel like they started from, I like the structure of Balatro, but I don't like Balatro.
I want to create something different than Balatro.
I think that's very different from going like, Balatro was successful."
"How do we copy Balatro?
So I think for me, that was the big question that I tried to answer with my table.
It was like, how do we create games from conviction?
And how do we help create a system around us financially, humanely, and with the proper ways of reaching the audience where we create things because we are excited about them?
And then our excitement as game developers, as people who love games, who live games, who breathe games, how do we make sure that other people then get that?
And that's how you get Clair Obscur."
"That's how you get Peak.
It's how you get Balatro.
None of those games for people sitting down and going, the market research says X, Y, Z."
"Those are people sitting down and going like, little dude falling off a mountain.
That's hilarious.
It's a beautiful piece of insight."
"And it's, after all, how it all started, I think.
So yeah, I think this is the perfect way to wrap this interview and this event.
As always, thank you so much for your time."
