Where's the remote? Is the remote over there?
What the Hell?
Are you fucking kidding me?
I have plenty of information...
It's not here.
I know on our launch day,
Where is it?
which is our biggest sales day,
What the fuck is that!?!
that we're not even featured anywhere.
I know on our launch day, at this point,
We're going to do worse than all of them.
Part of it,
is about not trying to be...
professional.
Like a lot of people come in to indie games,
trying to be like a big company.
What those companies do,
is create highly polished things
that serve as large of an audience as possible.
The way that you do that
is by filing off all the bumps on something.
If there's a sharp corner,
you make sure it's not going to hurt anybody,
if they bump into it or whatever.
That creation of this highly glossy, commercial product,
is the opposite of making something personal.
I am determined to make video games,
and I make video games because I can.
I'm very, very good at programing.
I can still basically make something that expresses myself,
like a movie or something that I wrote.
I can make that as a video game.
And I have the full ability to do that.
Things that are personal have flaws.
They have vulnerabilities.
To me, games are the ultimate art form.
It's just the ultimate medium.
It's the sum total of every expressive medium of all times
made interactive.
How is that not...
It's awesome!
I want to be part of it.
I want to have a say in what becomes of video games.
If you don't see a vulnerability in somebody,
You're probably not relating with them
on a very personal level.
So it's the same with a game design.
My whole career has been me, trying to find new ways
to communicate with people.
Because, I desperately want to communicate with people.
But I don't want the messy interaction of having to
make friends and talk to people.
Because I probably don't like them.
You know, when you make games, and you put stuff up online.
And people like your stuff or if they don't like your stuff.
Either way,
they're going to give you some kind of feedback in someway.
And you have like this conversation.
It's why a writer writes I guess.
Because they can.
That's the most effective way to express themselves.
And a video game is
the most effective way I can express myself.
Making it was about
let me take my deepest flaws and vulnerabilities,
and put them in the game,
and let's see what happens.
The generation that indie game developers are coming from,
and I'm part of this generation also,
we're the first generation that grew up with video games,
but not as an active purchasing choice.
Since I was part of that generation
that grow up with it,
I feel an ownership of it.
Games are mine.
For anyone that grew up basically
after 1975, 1980 or so,
we were the first generation
to grow up with our parents giving us games.
And for us to grow up with games...
as a natural, and relevant part of our everyday existence.
This is not a weird kid activity for me.
This is not like some strange nerdy pastime.
This has been a part of my life.
There's been a tendency
over the past couple decades in mainstream games
to make everything bigger and more realistic.
Just a kind of like 'amp up' everything.
Big games have other goals.
They want to entertain you.
They want to get 10 million people playing at the same time.
But indie games...it's like frequently one person who says:
I want a game to be like this.
I want a game to be about this special thing.
Independent games are any game that a small team...
or individual creator worked on to their own vision.
Something that they felt like making, coding and finishing.
The one major thing that made this possible,
is the rise of digital distribution.
It used to be that retailers had a lot of power...
over every game creation company,
because that was the only avenue available to sell games.
So nobody was willing to start distributing games digitally,
because WalMart would get upset at them,
and take their products off the shelf,
and nothing would happen.
But Valve changed that,
when they came out with Steam.
They had no loyalties to retail.
So they just did it.
After that everyone else said:
'Well, we have to compete with them.'
And there was kinda this whole flood of,
XBox Live Arcade...
Playstation network...
and WiiWare followed suit with that.
I think 2008 was the first year that indie games
started to do really well.
Audiosurf came out on Steam.
Then it was Castle Crashers
and Braid and World of Goo.
Osmos did really well in 2009, 2010.
Then Limbo came out and kinda blew the records.
And Minecraft came out as well,
Actually, it came out much earlier,
but then it really built up and
blew those records away.
And when we're talking about 'really well'
we're talking about millions of dollars in revenue.
So for teams of 200,
millions of dollars doesn't really count very much.
But for a team of 2, 3, 4 people...
that's really significant money.
Hey everybody, welcome to 'Elder Speak',
the official podcast of ElderGeek.com.
With me I've always got Gavin from the news,
and special guests:
I've got Edmund and Tommy from 'Team Meat'
who are making 'Super Meat Boy'.
So, with us today is Team Meat...
Team Meat...
Everybody in the indie scene
is raving about this...
Meat Boy's Coming! Meat Boy's Coming!
Super Meat Boy's coming! It was all over the place.
This is our biggest interview ever isn't it?
If you've been living under a rock for the last few months...
Most anticipated releases this fall...
It is looking amazing! I can not wait to see the finish product...
I think we both talked about approaching Super Meat Boy in a way
we are like...our goal was to make a game
that our 13 year-old selves would be super huge fan boys of her.
I know for a fact that 13 year-old Edmund
would hear about Meat Boy right now,
he'd be following us on Twitter.
He'd be that annoying kid that was like...
- Hey, send me a build! - Yeah, I'm following you.
My name is 'Super Meat Boy Fan Boy'
I've registered it, I haven't even played the game yet.
- Can you get me a demo!?! Come on!!! -Just shut up.
I'd totally be that. Because this game is very me.
And I think Tommy would say the same.
Yeah, I want it to be one of those games that kids would
go crazy for on the school yard...
and passionately argue that 'this game is better than this game'
This is my room...where I grew up...
as a child.
Yeah, this is my room forever this has been my room.
I have a bunch of posters from 'Nintendo Power'
way back in the day.
Yeah, this room is my childhood.
And that's basically what Super Meat Boy is.
It's my and Edmund's childhood,
but put into game form by seemingly adult males.
Super Meat Boy is an upcoming PC and console game
based on a Flash game.
This incredibly hard Flash game that was super super popular.
It's a game that looks like it's gonna be traditional in a way.
It's about 'Platforming' and it's about this very well known thing.
But it's got a real distinct art style
and it's got a kind of very quirky point of view.
Super Meat Boy is a retro sort of platformer,
where you play as a boy with no skin,
who's just meat, basically.
He's trying to rescue his girlfriend, who is made of bandages.
from an evil doctor, that's a fetus in a jar,
wearing a top hat and a monocle, dressed in a tuxedo.
During my whole development years,
going through middle school and everything,
it was all 'Mega Man',
'Mario' and 'Metroid'
older, very very difficult games.
All of these games like...
Every one of these games on this wall...
'F Zero' was hard ...
'Mega Man' was very difficult.
'Spy Hunter' was stupidly difficult.
In Super Meat Boy,
we get to do whatever we want.
We don't have a publisher. We don't have investors.
We don't answer to anybody.
And a lot of that is shown in the game.
We get away with a lot of stuff.
We can have Dr. Fetus shoot somebody a bird.
Because he only has 3 fingers.
So it's not technically his middle finger.
We can put in any sort of humor or parody that we want.
We have parodies of 'Street Fighter' and 'Castlevania'...
'Mega Man' intros and 'Bubble Bobble'.
A lot of people want to know:
Is this game going to be substantial?
Or is it gonna be all the quirk and character?
A lot of people are thinking that it's going to be
sort of along the same lines of Castle Crashers
In 2008, 'Castle Crashers' and 'Braid'
were the 2 games that really made people look at go:
'Oh, I can download games on my Xbox.'
People are expecting this game
to be the next big thing on XBLA.
As long as it comes out and does something ...
Even if it made me $ 20,000 over the next 2 years or something,
That would be enough to make the next game,
just based on what I'm living off right now.
And I'd have to do that, because...
I'm not going to go work at EA or Epic.
That sounds horrible. That sounds like hell to me.
So, if it comes out and people don't like it,
and people just trash it and hate it,
and it has a Metacritic score of, like, 20,
and everyone thinks its awful,
it doesn't make a difference because
even though it's a game that people are supposed to buy,
it's not a game that I made 'for people'.
I made it for myself.
Ed and I made it as a reflection of ourselves.
And we tried to make it as fun and as accessible as possible.
Whatever.
If people want to buy 'Modern Warfare'
or 'Halo Reach', that's fine,
because I think those games are shit.
If that's what people want,
then they don't want my games that I make.
Because I don't make shit games.
If you follow Indie Games,
even remotely,
'FEZ' is probably one of the projects
that you've been hearing about for a while.
It's been several years in development.
FEZ will be memorable
either for it's impending release,
or for never coming out.
And the winner of the IGF Art Award is...
FEZ!
So FEZ wins an award at the IGF...
It was hardly finished when it won the award.
It won on the back of very small tech demo.
In the clear blue sky,
an awards ceremony...
I think within a week,
I saw it on every major gaming outlet online.
My name is Phil. I'm an independent game developer.
It's mostly about this little 2D guy who lives in a 2D world.
And then one day realizes that the world is actually 3D.
All of a sudden, Phil, who is making this game on his own
with a grant from the Canadian government,
is some Indie Gaming Rock-star.
This is fucking awesome.
Phil is trying to walk around in a Cubist painting with Fez.
That's what FEZ is.
Your character is walking around a cubist painting.
2D sprite characters in a 3D rotating world.
At any one point, you're only seeing one side of the world.
And everybody is clamoring.
They just want to see the game.
'When do we get the game...'
'When can we play the game...'
There's been so much speculation
about when, where, how...
if ever this game is going to come out.
I'm working on it.
As hard as I can. All the time.
"What's taking so long"
"What the fuck are you doing Phil?"
I'm doing the best I can here!
I don't hear people bitch about fucking Valve taking-
Well, no, did you bitch about
Valve is taking forever for Episode 3.
But not as much as FEZ!!
And there's hundreds of people there!
ICO took five years to make;
Red Dead Redemption: A thousand people. Five years.
GTA4: A thousand people. Five years.
Nobody bitches about that.
A thousand people!!
There's two of us here
"It's taking too long"
FUCK OFF!
Jesus fucking Christ!
It really gets to me.
I guess, that's the price you pay for being indie.
And being the one guy that people know is making the game.
You open yourself to these kinds of personal attacks.
That I wasn't...
That's not something I was counting on,
when I was dreaming about being independent.
not this Army of Assholes online...
to, not ruin my life, but to make it that more ...
hard to enjoy.
It's a complicated game also.
It was ridiculously over ambitious
for my first indie game.
It's a classic mistake.
And we didn't realize we were making it.
We thought it was going to take a year.
We thought it was going to be a simple game.
And it became a completely different game a number of times.
C'est un truc, c'est que zoom avant sur le cube il fait.
C'est des genres de cubes, quelque chose en ce genre-là, qui zoom avant.
Après qu'il m'a engagé tellement approche de son face,
que ça devient un genre de play.
C'est pas... Prime Time of Your Life.
Oui, c'est Prime Time of Your Life, qui finit avec le...
My name is Renaud.
I've been programming FEZ since the very beginning,
like three years ago.
Day to day, it's just coding stuff.
Complementing features, fixing bugs.
That's what I do.
There's a lot of personal pressure
just to finish what you've been working on for so long.
And then there's a lot of people
that counts on it as being really awesome,
and really much bigger than we've ever shown.
Because, every time we show something,
we say: 'oh that's nothing'.
'that's just a small part'
'you'll see how much better it gets'
The personal pressure is bigger to me
than the outside world pressure.
Like I really need to get this done.
It's a learning experience.
I've made games before.
But I've never produced an entire game from A to Z,
for commercial release on a real platform,
with Microsoft. I've never done that before.
It's terrifying.
It's really really really scary.
Especially when you lose funding, or something like that.
There's just no safety network there.
There's nothing to fall back on.
There's always a threat
of the whole thing just falling apart any day now.
It was very difficult to make the game.
But in some ways, it was less difficult
than what I had been doing in my life up til then.
Having a lot of big ideas about what I wanted to do in games.
And not ever finishing anything
that really had the impact that I wanted it to have.
I think as one ages and establishes a pattern of that.
It becomes a little bit demoralizing.
You start to look at things and say:
"Maybe I'm never going to do these things with my life
"that I thought I would."
Then one day, I said:
I'm going to make something that I actually finish .
And that became 'Braid'.
It took three years, but I finished it.
One of the biggest breakout games would have to be Braid.
Braid is an really interesting game because
I was surprised it was as successful as it is.
It was a big hit for the independent community
as one that generate a lot of money for Jonathan Blow.
It's a very odd setting
and a lot of people aren't quite sure what it means.
Nobody had played a game that was like Braid
that did what Braid did with time before.
Really what made Braid work is that
the 'Time Changing' mechanic, the 'Rewind' mechanic.
Obviously, from a gameplay perspective was a lot of fun.
But it also had this metaphorical relevance as well.
It's telling this strange, out of order story, and it's a love story.
And it's not something you normally see in a game.
It's about this little preppy boy.
He always looks like a preppy to me.
Who has lost something and is working through these memories
that change as he keeps playing.
The fictional world and the game world mechanic
those two work hand-in-hand very very well.
So Braid came out of the confluence of a couple of different ideas.
I was on a mailing list with some friends.
And one of my friend, he was looking at
'Prince of Persia: Sands of Time'
which was a game that came out in the early 2000s.
And it had this ability to 'rewind'.
But it was limited. You had a certain number of charges
that you can use.
When you ran out of those,
then if you got killed, you couldn't rewind anymore.
You had to reload the game,
which was this painful process.
So one of my friends said:
Why not do it like a VCR,
where you can rewind anytime you want?
But nobody in that discussion actually tried it.
So I said: Okay, I'm feeling inspired.
Let me start this idea for this game I've been kicking around.
And I spent about a week working on it
and I had a prototype.
That is really kind of amazing.
If you look at the prototype, and the final game,
a lot of the ideas from the final game
were actually in that prototype that we are done in the first week.
So I had the first three of the worlds.
I mean not fully built out worlds.
But the game mechanics were there.
For rewinding and
rewinding with things that are immune to rewind.
And for time and space being tied together.
So that time changes as you move.
I had a number of puzzles that showed at worlds,
Probably half of them are in the final game,
in recognizable form.
It was very low effort, on my part,
to do something very interesting within the system.
And I was like: 'Wow'
It started as process of experimentation,
but then it quickly became a process of discovery.
It's like if you are sitting on top of a gold mine,
but you don't even have to dig.
You just scoop some dirt and there's a little chunk of gold.
Then you scoop some more dirt...
The most laborious part of the process is
actually picking up these heavy chunks of gold and moving them.
So that was an amazing design experience.
Most of the time, he's back in North Carolina, as it has.
Working remotely. And I'm here working from my computer.
The way this game has developed has been very different
from other games I've worked on.
We bounce ideas off each other.
Not just gameplay ideas,
but more jokes. Jokes that get out of control,
and push their way into the game.
It says: 'Code. Code. Code. Durrrrr!'
My Adams's Apple is not that big! Stop!
Yeah look, look.
What if I put a knife in it.
Look at that. It's totally injected all the way in.
See the needle? And then a hammer hits the needle in deeper.
My whole life has been about trying to find where boundaries are.
And see how far I can push them before I get in trouble.
That's what I'm doing now.
That's what's exciting to me.
I just felel like if I'm not doing that, I'm bored.
And if I'm bored, I'm not being creative.
I make games that center around my life.
The things that I like,
the things that I think, say and do.
I make games to express myself, I guess.
It's hard for me to talk about Santa Cruz
because I never lived anywhere else.
It's just 'normal'.
I grew up here.
My mom was obsessed with the beach.
It was always her dream to live in Santa Cruz.
So, that's where she forced us to live. I don't know.
I grew up here. It was like a skate and surf town.
I never got into either.
I stayed in the house, played video games and drew.
Monsters.
I only drew monsters.
I drew weird shit.
There's a drawing of a kid, with a demon inside of him,
scratching to get out.
In third grade, my teacher recommended that I be evaluated.
Psychologically evaluated,
because she thought I was mentally disturbed.
My mom said:
'No, he's just an artist. He like's to draw.'
And she said:
'That's not art. That's a cry for help.'
I basically grew up all with my grandma.
I didn't get along with my step dad,
so when there was a problem, I would stay with my Grandma.
Or we would all stay with my Grandma.
My Grandma was always extremely supportive.
To the point of being very annoying to my mom and my sister.
To her, I was the Golden Boy that could do anything.
She made me feel like I could do anything.
When she said: 'You're going to be a success',
it wasn't like she was just saying it.
It was like, a fact.
Like, that was going to happen. That was that.
Aether was based around my niece.
She reminded me of me,
because she didn't like playing with other kids.
She liked to do things by herself. And explore by herself.
She was very imaginative. And she really liked monsters.
That whole thing brought me back to when I was little.
And I thought: how cool would it be to make a game
that could put other people
inside my mind when I was 5, 6, 7?
And that was 'Aether'.
So this kid gets on the back of a monster.
And the monster goes around in space.
And he gets explores all these other planets,
because he can't connect to anybody on earth.
So he goes to find friends.
But all these other planets are inhabited
with these kind of weird or sad or nervous creatures.
And he goes and tries to solve their problems.
He solves the problems but they don't become happy.
And he keeps going around all these different planets.
But each time he solves a problem, the Earth gets smaller.
And then when he comes back to Earth,
it's so small that when he touches it it breaks.
And he's lost in space.
It was about the idea of...
It's really cool to be a creative kid.
And it's cool to do all that stuff.
But there's dangers of isolating,
and becoming obsessed with things.
And having phobias.
Each of those planets was a phobia of mine when I was little.
And when I was little, before bed, I would obsess about these things.
Because I thought I'd be able to fix them.
But in the end, I would just make them worse.
They wouldn't be fixed.
But I'd be so obsessed with them
the next day I'd have stomach aches and need to go home.
A lot of the imagery in stuff that I pulled from,
I'm still very very very happy with.
To me it speaks perfectly of how I felt when I was little.
When I play that game,
that's exactly how I remember it feeling.
Still very happy with it.
Shortly after that, my grandma passed away.
And she had a box of my drawings that she saved,
when I was little.
That's when I found this picture
that I had drawn of me in space. Floating.
And it says ...
This is Edmund floating in space. And my friend too is space...
Or something like that.
'Space is my friend. And my friend too is me.'
I should break that out.
It was validating to find that box.
And see those things and be like: Wow.
This is just like the game.
I have a very precise story of the exact moment where it started.
I was four.
It was Christmas, 1988.
And for Christmas I got a Nintendo Entertainment System
with 'Mario', 'Zelda'
and 'Tetris'.
Which is perfect. The 'Trifecta' of video games.
To this day, you can't really get a better three games together.
It was clear at that moment
that this is what I wanted to do with my life.
I've known what I want to do with my life since I was four.
There was never any doubt about it. I wanted to make games.
What that entailed wasn't always clear.
You're four and you want to make games...
It just seems like: 'Oh, you come up with ideas'
'and then you have a game. It's awesome.'
There she is.
What a beauty.
So this is the game me and my Dad made back in 1993.
Based on art I would make in 'Kid Pix'.
He would take that,
and turn it into these simple 'Find the Object' games.
So I would come back from school every now and then,
and there will be these new levels added to the game
based on stuff I made in the days before.
At first, they were just these
really simple 'Where's Waldo' ask things.
Where's the letter 'V'?
Oh, there it is.
It's so completely abstract.
Because it's all my art. And it made no sense.
OH! 'Cyber Vision'
This is the best one.
This is a piece of software...
"Software".
That I made for myself. It's the stupidest thing.
It's just patterns that I designed.
And I made it invert the colors.
Really really quickly to give them a flicker.
You pick your pattern and the number of flashes you want.
And then you're supposed to do is to stick your face in it,
and stare at it.
Like so...
for a long time.
And I swear to God, you start to see stuff.
Oh my God.
What was wrong with me?!?
This is still awesome!
So, the way that am I approaching design
in this case, is really kind of experiential.
I'm thinking about when the player comes on the screen,
what's gonna be happening?
Not quite in the same way
that you think of it in a movie, but sort of.
You have to put your mind in the viewpoint of the player,
thinking about what's going to happening.
There's an excitement about ideas unfolding
that I try to put into the game.
It's a stream of communication between designer and player.
And the design of a level like this, is sort of a dialogue,
or at least a monologue,
where it's like: 'Hey! Check this out...'
'Did you realize'
'you're gonna have a problem coming up that ladder?'
'Isn't it weird, but cool,'
'that you can have so such of a problem,'
'just because this ladder was a bit to the left?'
'If it was over here or here,'
'you wouldn't have that problem.'
That is the interesting part, the important part.
It's not important that it's a tricky puzzle
that takes some thinking to solve.
That's a little cool,
but any puzzle game can give you puzzles
that you have to think about and tricky to solve.
But what any particular game can give you is details.
Interesting insights into particular situations.
And I think when a game realizes that,
seizing that way of doing things,
and runs with it,
it can do some really special things.
I'm very visual as a person.
I like pretty things. I like aesthetics.
A big part of FEZ is the aesthetic.
Like that kind of pleasant, blue sky, green grass, fresh air,
obviously, there's no air coming out of the game.
This is how art works in the game.
I make these little strips for the four sides
that you see in the game
and the top and bottom of every cube.
And Renaud made a Photoshop script that crops them
one at a time and saves them numerically,
and I can feed them to the game.
And the game pick these textures wraps them around a cube,
and projects the art on each side.
You can see the different sides of the texture strip.
I can then take the cube and carve in details.
You can barely see it in the game.
You only really feel it in the rotation.
I use the 'Tetris' pattern a lot.
It's kind of a pain.
Because I actually need to go in there and paint it.
And like reorient the tiles by hand.
So, here, I don't like this big straight line.
It's kind of awkward.
I'm going to make it a 'T' shape.
I spend a lot of time doing this.
I build these elaborate structures.
And eventually, I spend an afternoon going over everything.
I guess I've been staring at it for too long,
because I obsess over the tiniest details.
One thing that happened is
I never did pixel art before FEZ.
So I had to learn.
You do that for three years,
then by the end of the three years
you're a lot better than you used to be.
And all the art you made three years ago
isn't as good as what you're producing right now.
And there's a divide.
So I had to retouch a lot of old stuff.
I do everything three times.
Takes me three and a half years to make a video game.
Level design.
So, the basic formula of level design go,
when you start out, you want to teach the player how to play.
You need to Make sure they understand every mechanic of the game.
So every level in the first chapter
needs that have some example
forcing the player to do something in order to beat the level
that they will need further in the game.
So there is a level, I think it's level three,
there's just a gap.
The only way to get over that gap
is to hold on 'run' and 'jump'
You can't get it any other way.
You can't just keep jumping around.
You won't jump far enough.
And that's to makes sure that the player understands
that in order to get over far gaps,
you need to press and hold the 'run' button
and 'jump'. Across it.
It's simple. It sounds like a 'no-brainer'.
But it's something that usually in games
it would just say: 'Hold run to jump far'.
Most people would just skip the text and forget.
Now, just in case somebody didn't play that level,
a couple levels later,
I reiterate and I give them another section of a level
that requires them to run and jump,
to make sure they know how to do it.
Because it's important.
All these mechanics are very important
Each level in the chapter is another level that pushes that
like, there's a level where
you need to continuously jump up one wall,
because there is no other wall to jump to.
That's me teaching the player that:
'You can do this'.
Everybody in the world will see a problem and want to solve it.
If you see something that were just a wall,
and you don't realize that you can keep jumping at the wall.
You're going to try it right away.
I want you try it yourself, you've taught yourself.
Not only do you feel smart
like you figure out something yourself,
you also now, for sure,
know how to do that from then on in the game.
So, all these levels of introduction go,
that you go through everything,
and once you've basically cleared out all the things
you can do with Meat Boy,
then you start introduce new mechanics.
With Meat Boy, it's not like Mario,
where lots of Mario games introduce mechanics
in forms of 'suits',
that change Mario's properties.
That's something I wanted to avoid.
I wanted to make it really pure.
Meat Boy never gets better or gets a 'power up'
but it's the levels that change the mechanics.
So right away, you introduce 'Saws'.
And there are usually static saws, they just spin in place.
You have to avoid static saws.
Then later, those same saws
that you know how they kill you
and you know they're around.
Those same saws will start moving back and forth.
So you got moving saws.
And then, even later than that,
you'll get these saws that are on these little spinners
that act like Windmills.
And they go around in a circle.
Now it's the same saw that you jumped over a million times before,
but it's coming at you in a different way.
And that's just expanding on the basic mechanic
and making it different and more enjoyable each time.
As a designer, you want to explore each mechanic
and make sure that it can be ennjoyed
at least 3 or 4 different ways.
If it's only got one use
that you can only have one use out of it,
then there it's pointless.
Because you need to be able to 'juice it'
You gotta figure out new ways to use it.
It's become a bit of a reflection of me over time.
It certainly wasn't the intention at first.
I started noticing a few things
that kind of reflect my experience of working on the game.
It's a game about games.
And the world is very much a computer world.
It's a world within a computer.
There's a lot of computer logic to it.
Every now and then, the universe becomes unstable,
and has to defragment itself and reboot.
That's the goal of the game.
In FEZ,
you're putting these pieces of the universe back together,
to try and make it stable again.
I basically always feel like
the entire world is falling apart around me these days.
Here's a quick recap of the last two years or so
of what's been happening.
So, we moved into our first office.
We had our telephone, grand.
That was great. Everything was coming along.
Then my Dad was diagnosed with leukemia.
We were told he had a 50-50 chance of dying
like any weeks.
He was a test subject to this new treatment.
There's like, 'Well, you're going to die anyway,'
'but you might want to give this crazy treatment a shot.'
'You might live.'
So he lived.
Shortly after that, my parents divorced, which is never fun.
I had to move my dad into a new apartment.
Shortly after that, my girlfriend left me,
about a year ago.
Some time after that,
there started being a lot of tension between me
and the guy who owned the other half of the company.
Eventually, he left. He left the company,
and that was a big blow.
Because all of a sudden
I had to take care of every single aspect of the company.
Almost immediately after that, we lost our funding.
And now we're here. We don't have any money.
I'm overworked and over-stressed about the business.
I'm on the line. Me.
Like my name, my career.
If this fails,
I'm done.
I don't think I'll work in games again.
And it's not just a game.
I'm so closely attached to it.
It's me. It's my ego, my perception of myself.
Is at risk.
This is my identity, it's FEZ.
I'm guy making FEZ.
That's about it.
If that doesn't work out, well then...
What would happen to you personally
if you couldn't finish the game?
I would kill myself.
I'm dead, I will kill myself.
That's my incentive to finish it,
is then I get to not kill myself.
I guess a typical day for me, at this point in development is,
Usually, I wake up around 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon.
Because I've gone to bed like
9 or 10 or 11 the night-- the morning before.
I check emails.
There're usually something there
from either one of the 'localization' people,
or Kevin, our Microsoft guy, asking for this.
Or any number of Microsoft specific people,
just asking for different things.
I make my breakfast. Which consists of a microwaved sandwich.
It's pretty good.
I take insulin for that.
And then, I just work on
whatever's on the list.
I have a couple of lists, it's mainly like...
I retire a list when I spill food on it, usually.
And these are actually surprisingly clean.
And this one was like...
This was a big one.
This was 'code complete'.
But you can see the grease stains.
Where you can see through it.
That's when I retired that one.
Me and Ed are handling a lot of stuff for two people.
But we're right there at the end, so...
We just sort of do it.
We're both very very tired
but at the same time we're tired
not so much from work,
but from not being able to sleep, because of thinking about work.
I'm like in a fucking concentration camp.
Like, I'm not allowed out and I'm stuck.
I have to work until it's done.
And if it doesn't get done,
I'm fucked.
No pressure.
If you can't get the work done,
then the past two years are basically worth nothing.
No pressure.
We got a call from Kevin saying
We're going to do this thing called: 'The Game Feast',
an Xbox promotion.
And he said: If you want to get in,
you have to have the game done in a month.
We're like: 'whoa',
because we weren't anywhere close to being ready at all.
He's like: 'Do you think it's possible?'
And Tommy said: 'Yeah well, we shoot for it.'
'And if we miss it, we miss it. And if not, whatever.'
And he's like: 'Well, if you miss it,'
'we can't launch until February.'
Tommy doesn't have any money.
We're running out of money.
It's just like: We have to do this now.
We have to do this.
There were at least five times,
a good five time where I totally broke down.
And I just didn't want to do it anymore.
I couldn't escape in any way.
So I would just go into the bathtub, and we have a bathtub shower,
And I'd just turn on the hot water.
And I'd lay down on my back, and wait until the water went cold.
That was all I had.
That was all I had to try to relax myself,
and not worry about anything.
I was actually really worried that either Tommy or I would die
in the process of making this.
And Tommy even talked about it too like,
as long as he could finish this game,
he would be okay with dying,
because at least he finished the game.
It was fucking weird.
You fucking go crazy when you're like this.
That's why I obviously grew this mustache.
It is the 'Reclusive Cowboy'.
I need everybody to know how crazy I feel on the outside.
Edmund and I talk all the time, about everything.
We're best friends.
But we were talking about if the game does well,
he was reading some quotes about success.
It was something like...
The hardest part of success is
finding people that will be happy for you,
or something like that.
I'm gonna have three people, I know for sure,
that are gonna be happy for me.
Forever, my parents have been supportive of
whatever I wanted to do.
They've done, everything they could
to just absolutely make sure
that I'm alright.
They've seen some hard times,
with the economy and stuff like that,
just kinda going down the tubes
after our last president messed everything up.
They were four years from paying off this house.
This house,
My dad built this house.
My mom and my dad basically built the house.
It was completed right before I was born.
And they were four years from paying it off
and had to re-finance it.
I'm hoping if a lot of people buy the game,
I can slap a bow on the top of the roof for Christmas,
and say: 'Here you go!'
'This is what you get for being awesome parents my entire life.'
So Meat Boy is a boy made of meat. But he is not...
Like when designing him, it wasn't a thought of
he's made of steak or whatever else.
It was more: 'Hey, he doesn't have skin.'
He's a boy without skin. That's why they call him Meat Boy.
So he's exposed to the elements.
Maybe he's always in pain,
but he just deals with it.
But he has to be very careful with everything,
because anything can kill him.
The smallest little thing - like salt, or whatever,
could totally destroy him.
I wanted to have his girlfriend be more than a love interest.
And I wanted to play up the idea that he needs her,
like that she's what completes him,
not just emotionally, but physically as well.
And that's why she's 'Bandage Girl'.
She's kind of the outer shell over Meat Boy,
that protects him.
And that's why he needs her,
he needs her back.
Not only because he loves her, but because
that's what completes him.
The Seumas McNally Grand Prize
in the open category
Goes to Chronic Logic for 'Gish'!
Thank you everybody.
Okay, I'd like to take this opportunity to
propose to my girlfriend, Danielle.
Okay, Okay, I have to do it.
Co'mon guys, I have to actually say it.
Danielle.
Will you marry me?
People probably don't know that he's an amazing husband.
That's huge.
He does all this stuff and he's still an amazing partner.
The development process was long. A lot of work.
It was hard to adapt our relationship,
to go from spending 24/7 together,
eating meals together, leaving the house,
to not doing that at all.
I heard a lot of this:
'I only see your back.'
It was like: 'I know we're in the same room together,'
'but I only see your back.'
We're never sitting and looking at each other.
Quite a few times, I had to ask her: 'Are you happy here?'
'Is this worth it?'
'Because I worry that this is just horribly boring for you'
'And that this might be something you regret getting into as well.'
This is the lady I like.
Not th- This is a Cat.
This website. I think I'm going to go with this breeder.
I've wanted one of these since I was in elementary school.
Just asked for it. When the game's done.
And we move to a house if I could get a cat.
And he said 'yes'.
And this is my dream cat. It's like having a baby.
Except better.
We can't have another cat in this fucking house.
Oh, it'd be some warm. Oooh my God!
That's the thing, it's winter...
Available, available!
Winter's coming.
This one belongs to Jennifer and Robert.
They're probably way happier than us.
Right at this moment.
Because they have the cat.
I sacrificed having a life.
It's kind of weird.
I don't ...
I don't go out.
I don't really socialize.
I can't really spend any money.
Because I don't have any money right now.
So I can't go out...
If I were to go on a date or something,
I have no car to pick them up in.
I have no way to buy meals or anything really.
I mean, I can purchase my own meals, but..
It's just the things you sacrifice are...
All the things I've sacrificed just been...
social.
You kind of have to give up something
to have something great in a way.
I'm depressed now
because I'm on the brink of something amazingly huge.
It's a different kind of depression.
It's not a 'stuck' depression.
It's a 'Holy Shit' depression. It's an 'unknown' depression.
Which is kind of weird. But, it'll fade.
Because once it's out. It's out.
And that's it.
I'm really curious to see what the basic reaction is.
Because, the only people I've show the game so far
were people close to me, like friends and family.
Feedback so far has been good.
But I don't know if I can trust that feedback.
I don't know if my friends
would tell me if FEZ sucked.
Knowing that I've spent most of my adult life on it.
Because, I don't know what I think of it anymore
for staring at it so long.
I can't tell -- I really can't tell if it's good or not.
Sometimes I manage to convince myself
that it's good and it's like
you did a good job for this pretty game.
But then I have a flash of lucidity.
'But you can't trust yourself on this!'
All you've been doing for 4 years is look at this.
Like, this close.
You can't see anything else.
You don't even see the mistakes anymore.
I'm looking forward to that kind of brutal honesty.
That we're going to get from the average gamer.
We're here for PAX.
So PAX stands for Penny Arcade Expo.
It's not for developers. It's for gamers.
They're expecting like 65,000 people.
We're going to be showing off FEZ playable demo,
for the first time ever since IGF 2008.
Which was the unveiling of the game
we haven't shown it since in four years.
So I'm a little bit nervous.
But this is kind of like the big blow out.
The confirmation that:
Yes. FEZ is real. It's exists.
It's going to come out,
and you'll be able to buy it one day,
and you can actually play it today.
Hopefully interest will build up again untill really...
Because I feel that over the years,
people have stopped caring. 'Cause it's been so long.
They may need to be reminded that we exist.
And for the first time, I've feel like:
This is FEZ. This is the game I wanted to make.
There's a mood here, that I've achieved.
It's not done yet, we can't ship it yet.
But it's really starting to feel like a game
that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It remains to be seen if the game's going to be good,
if it's gonna work on every level.
But I'm pretty damn happy with it today.
None of this happens.
We don't get to actually show the game at PAX.
Or do anything about it.
For extremely complicated legal reasons.
My former business partner with whom I started the Polytron,
left the company about six months ago.
And ever since we've been in a nasty divorce.
And if everything isn't settled,
We can't do anything.
We can't show it.
We can't be at PAX, and show the game,
and release our new trailer and things like that.
Just a final signature.
This last signature, to close the deal, 100% percent.
So, at the moment
we drove all the way here. We printed these banners.
We designed this booth.
I made a demo just for it.
There's still a chance that
I'm just going to stay in my hotel room the whole time,
and not be able to do any of this.
It's pretty stressful.
It feels like waiting.
Everything feels longer.
It feels like I'm about to throw up.
It's stage fright.
I have a hard time sleeping.
I can't think of anything else.
It's constantly running through my head.
And it's such a big deal, it's such a big show,
there are gonna be so many people.
I'm not in a head space right now,
where I want to be exposing myself,
and being a public figure, and talking to people.
I'm so in my own little world.
Just working on FEZ. Trying to finish it.
I don't do anything else.
Every other aspect of my life is suffering.
Because I'm just trying to finish this fucking game.
Because right now, it could go either way.
It could be a nightmare... I don't know.
They got this game right? This shit called 'Braid'
Watch this shit!
It's about this little guy in a suit
It look like Mario in the future.
And he's just walking around, jumping on shit
But the funny part is: You can do this, watch this...
On release day,
you start seeing reactions of people on the Internet.
And for me, it was a very addictive thing.
Because here I've spent several years
working on this thing in isolation for the most part.
And then suddenly it gets out. And a lot of people,
like tens of thousands of people play it in the first few days.
You see that all over the Internet.
And, for me, that was a very negative experience.
When Braid was coming out,
people would talk about it online.
And this was around the birth
of serious video game blog commentary
Lots of people on blog writing actually pretty good stuff
about what they were playing, what they thought of it.
Every time you mentioned his name,
he would show up in your comments almost instantly.
Like his Google Alerts... I don't even think he uses Google Alerts.
I think he has something better than 'Google Alerts'.
So he'd pop up and comment and reply to things,
or correct people on things.
And became kind of famous for it.
Penny Arcade even cracked about it.
I found that there was this perception of me on the Internet,
that was running away, very quickly
from who I think I am,
And that was kind of disturbing.
And there didn't seem to be much that I could do about that.
So that was actually a pretty negative experience.
I was actually seriously depressed
for probably 3-4 months after Braid came out.
When you work a long time on something really intricate like that,
there's a hope that
people are going to understand the things that you did.
And that you'll have some line of communication
with your audience.
And actually, some of the most demoralizing things
were actually positive reviews of the game.
The game would come out
and people would say 'Oh, this game's great!'
'9 out of 10!'
'10 out of 10!'
And they'd say what's good about the game.
And in many cases it would be
just a very surface understanding of the game.
That didn't even see
what I thought was most special about it.
Not that many people understood.
And that was a little bit heartbreaking, in a way.
I visualized I was going to have some kind of connection
with people through this game.
And they think it's great, but the connection isn't there.
Because, they're kind of living in a different world still.
So they think it's great for some of the reasons I do, but...
but not for other...
They're not seeing the most important thing.
Today is Monday. And that's the 'Embargo' Date.
Do you know what an 'Embargo' is?
'Cause I didn't. And I got in trouble for not knowing.
An Embargo I guess is: You set a date
when press can review your game.
So, 12 o'clock rolls around.
And I start refreshing 'Twitter mentions'.
You can search who's talking about Super Meat Boy.
And reviews just start popping out.
So, I just start grabbing quotes and posting them.
So we got: 'A great experience 4 out of 5'
'Super Meat Boy revels in driving you crazy,'
'but you end up crazy in love.'
'... 9 out of 10', Eurogamer.
'Brutal and hilarious, 5 out of 5'. Console Arcade.
'I've never felt so challenged and rewarded'
'in all my years playing with meat.'
I don't know who that is. But I posted it.
All these reviews keep coming up.
And every single time, I'm thinking...
I'm waiting for the really bad one.
I'm waiting for the lowest review
like some one has to hate it.
'Super Meat Boy can stand confidently'
'next to Mario and the rest of the platforming elite.'
'It's the best game on XBLA'.
'This game is wonderful: 10 out of 10, very addicting.'
'It's a love letter to everything great about video games.'
'This is nothing short of greatness.'
'How could you not pick this game up?'
'Buy it now! ' '5 out of 5!'
They just kept coming and kept coming.
I did not expect this. At all.
I honestly did not expect these reviews.
'Get this game now!' '10 out of 10.''
'4.5 out of 5' '9 out of 10',
'9.5 out of 10.'
It's weird to be launching the same time as 'Fallout'...
and be getting reviews that are almost better.
Like, that's weird.
Especially since it's a game I'm going to be buying.
It's pretty fucking awesome.
I don't know if you guys realize how frustrating it is.
I don't think you understand what's weird about it.
I don't care...
I really don't care what any of the reviews say.
It's just weird that they're there.
Positive or negative.
It doesn't matter that we get nines and tens
and all that stuff, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, but, I've been weird all my life about stuff.
It's kind of weird to have people say:
'Hey, you're going to be rich. You can buy me a car...'
You know, just joking kind of stuff.
But they're not joking.
I mean, they're joking about me buying them a car.
At least I hope they are.
Because I'm totally not gonna buy anybody a car.
Except my parents, if they want one.
But, to hear that ...
To hear that everything that I've dreamed about
for years and years and years
is going to basically come true, in like two days,
and has already started to, is very odd.
I cry at the idea of crying about it.
'Cause that's weird.
I cried when we submitted the game to certification.
I cried because it was like...
It was like the equivalent of sending your kid off to school.
And we just had to wait.
We worked on it so hard.
We were non-stop for, like, two months,
doing ungodly amounts of work.
And then we send it off to certification. And its like:
'OK, we'll let you know in two weeks.'
It's like: 'Aarrghh!'
Is it going to pass? Is it not going to pass?
Am I going to have to fix this?
And then when I would play the game. And I would see bugs.
And then I'd panic and I'd email our producer.
And I'd go:
'Oh God! It does...' That one of the things.
It's like: 'Oh God! It doesn't show PEGI ratings'
'if it's run in European regions.'
'Is that going to be a problem? Because it shows ESRB.'
And they're like: 'Oh no, it's fine'
And it's like: 'Oh? Okay then.'
I can't shake the idea that...
even though they're good reviews,
that we'll still fail.
Is that weird?
Is that weird to feel that way?
Because it feels normal to me.
And I know it feels normal to Tommy.
But, there's still a part of me that says:
'Even though we have the highest rated game'
'in the past two years on Xbox Live...'
'that we're still going to fail.'
Tommy, Do you feel the same way?
There's still a part of me that worries we can fail at this point.
And even though...
Yeah, it is there.
It's there. It's a real thing.
The only way I could see it failing is if like...
the first 1,000 people or whatever that downloaded it,
they hit the game save error, all of them,
and they just bashed the shit out of the game.
Yeah... those are different worries definitely for you.
I know that, yeah, people might lose their save.
But they'll still gonna enjoy the game and keep playing
and we're going to fix it.
So this is contacts to 578 people.
I'll do that.
Then I'll update the website. Update my blog.
Update my Facebook, and call it a night.
What are you going to do Tommy?
Really?
Yeah... what, what did you say?
Um, nothing.
This morning when I got up,
I got an email from Renaud saying that
my ex-associate was on his way to PAX,
to help some other game he's working on.
He still hasn't signed.
He's going to be on the road most of the day,
and then he's going to be at the show.
And, I'm having a panic-attack about this.
I feel like i'm going to cry, throw up and pass out all at once.
My breathing is weird.
I'm going to lose my shit.
I'm going to kill him,
I'm going to fucking murder that guy.
And, it's going to get everybody in trouble.
We're going to get kicked out of PAX,
or some kind of horrible disaster like that.
I can even begin to figure out how I'm going to hande this.
If he doesn't sign, we can't do the show.
He can, he's going to do his own show,
prevent me from doing mine.
It starts today. The show is tomorrow morning.
We have one day to set everything up.
And, it's still not signed.
And, he's coming. He's gonna be there
and he's gonna come around and check out the game.
And, I'm going to cold-blood fucking murder him.
I'm gonna...
Fuck that guy! Seriously!
Have to set-up for the show, while not even knowing,
like building a booth at the show, without even knowing.
We going to have to fucking disassemble it.
We going to have to take apart the FEZ kiosk.
And, put it away.
Build it up. Tear it down.
Why? Why is he doing this?
What's the point of this?
It just doesn't make any sense.
He should just fuck off. Let me finish the game,
not interfere in any way
because he stands to gain so much from this.
If he just lets me to do my work,
he's going to be a millionaire for nothing.
He won't have done anything.
He will be fucking millionaire because of me.
And, somehow he's trying to fucking sabatoge that.
He's trying to ruin that.
Or just playing mind games?
What is he stupid or cruel or both?
It's too much.
There's too much at stake.
I feel like this is just going to end horribly
for everybody involved.
Where's the remote? Is the remote over there?
What the Hell?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Where is it?
It's not here.
What the fuck is that!?!
This is fucking bullshit.
We are nothing.
We are nothing to them.
We're being fucked.
They don't care. They so don't care.
We have no....
we have no placement on the marketplace,
which is the entire point of doing the sale
and doing this stupid promotion,
and, fucking killing myself to get this game out in time.
We'd get a spot on the front of Xbox,
like all the other shitty games do.
Pretty fucking important.
It's like going to the store,
and having to ask if they have game in the back,
because they don't have it on the shelf.
You know, how often do people do that.
I'm not going to look at sales.
Nah, I'm not going to look at sales.
There's no point in looking at sales
because there's no way of me gaging how it's doing
within the first couple hours.
There's no point in me even downloading it
and checking the leaderboards.
It just would freak me out and make me all OCD,
I'd just constantly refresh it.
I'll just wait for Microsoft to call.
That's how you do it.
First day is very very important,
because it sort of... It sets.
It's like a pace car.
If you sell 20-30 thousand copies in the first day,
well, then you can expect to sort of staircase down.
Now that we're going to start very low,
it's going to be the same graph
but just at much smaller scale.
and there's just nothing we can do about it.
Because the day's half over,
we'll get half of what we had.
If we have to get on Twitter,
and tell people how to find the game to buy it.
That's awful.
Especially since, it's not like
'go to marketplace and we're right there.'
No, we have say a five-step systems of events,
series of commands to actually buy the game.
And that's awful. That's dumb.
There's nothing we can do except blame Microsoft,
and then, never ever work with them again.
It's so dumb.
I don't want to do games anymore I don't think.
I'll work on cars.
I don't want to work on cars.
I don't want to do anything.
Can I be a bum?
It's Friday. It's the first day of PAX.
It's 7:20 in the morning, right now.
The show opens at 9.
Still no signature.
It's scary.
I really don't like it.
Everyone is telling me just do it.
And everything is set-up.
And, it's not like I'm just going to say no
and stay in my hotel room.
I'm going to tag along
and go to the convention center with everybody
and do the show.
Yeah, I guess I'm pretty nervous.
Well, it's the first time we've shown the game
since we first showed it.
Pre-success before you ever released
is not a guarantee that the world will be there for you.
And, the worry I certainly have for FEZ is that
by the time that game ever comes out,
we will have moved on to some other thing.
I'm hoping that it kind of has a Phoenix rising moment.
Like oh yeah, FEZ is back.
That people will take us a bit more seriously and
not treat like some vaporware joke.
Establish that
everything is real.
Doors are opening in like 5 mins.
There's a million people outside.
I did post the trailer about an hour ago.
It's starting to spread already.
This is real. This is happening now.
It's out in the open.
It's really a nerve-wrecking experience
to look at somebody play my unfinished game.
Because it's not done.
Somebody will get stuck somewhere,
or there's a part they don't get or they don't like.
So you said 'this gonna sucks'. Yeah, but it's not done.
I'll fix it later.
Yeah, it feels like too...
too personal.
It's too close.
Yeah, we'll see what happens.
I think that's a bug.
I think you're stuck now.
Give me one moment.
Yeah, I don't know what that was,
but he's suppose to keep talking
- and then something happens. - Gotcha.
- If you don't mind starting over. - No no, it's all good.
First player.
Game breaking bug right away, right away.
Ah, God damn it, it's completely broken.
That's not good.
Ah, I need to restart this thing.
Keys, keys.
Keys, keys, keys, keys, keys.
There's a game breaking right away.
Right away. You can't play it.
The game keeps crashing all the time.
It's completely unstable.
There are game breaking bugs, right at the beginning.
Damn it!
Even like the 'Start New Game' that starts a bug out game
that doesn't work.
I need to restart the computer like practically everytime
somebody's stuck.
It's a disaster. It's a complete fucking disaster.
What happened? Where were you at?
Ah nothing. Just start new game.
And, it just stayed in the sky.
One moment.
Everytime it crashes it feels like a personal failure.
Like a deep personal failure.
I need to actually kill the game and restart it.
Like I should apologize, 'Sorry I wasted your time,'
'you can start again, if you want'.
We made too many changes last night.
And, now we have an unstable build on our hands.
Someone just sent me sales stats,
and we're at 9500 copies.
So, 500 hundred more sales and we hit 10,
which is considered a success
for first day and it's 2pm.
There's a chance we can get between 15-20 thousand sales today,
which will be a huge, huge success.
Not record-breaking but still really amazing.
In the past 10 hours,
Super Meat Boy has grossed
more than I've made in the past 6 years combined.
That's a bit interesting.
I don't know, it's just surreal...
I wish Tommy was here. I wish Tommy was here.
Things are going okay.
The game has alot of game-breaking bugs and crashes so far,
and I need to constantly restart, quit the game and start it again.
But, people are really enjoying it.
A lot of people are playing for 15-20 minutes.
This is really, really a very good play-test session so far.
I wanted to create a nice place, a pleasant place to be in.
I want people to feel a sense of openness and adventure,
but in a really simple, almost child-like way.
I really want to people to just enter that world
and enjoy their time in it.
That's what the game is.
It's a nice place to spend time in.
I'm trying to recreate that experience
of playing games as a kid,
before the Internet existed
and hearing these kind of urban legends, like
Hey, I hear if you
go stand in the corner for 5 seconds and press down,
and then, you jump two times and it warps you somewhere.
Like what I started gaming Yeah.
That's kinda what the game is about.
So nice to see new Fez.
This is bascially FEZ 4 at this point.
We've scrapped 3 games.
- Really? - Kind of, yeah.
But I think we got it.
- I love that fucking art. - Thank you.
Ken just introduced me to Tycho from Penny Arcade...
who was very, very much into the game.
That is sick.
Really, as soon as you see the side of the drum kit,
like when you see that pixel art...
You assume, it's pixel art.
This is a powerful figure in the game industry.
He fucking runs this entire gigantic show!
I like this part. Where it's like: Whooooooop
Now, it's pixel art.
Fuck yes.
I was really happy to meet the dude,
and that he liked my game and me so much.
I just got a ping back from Destructoid
who posted about the trailer.
And, only for the post from Destructoid, that one post,
already got 11 thousands 'Likes' on Facebook
and 209 retweets.
Wait, that's in 2 hours.
In 2 hours.
But yeah, people enjoy FEZ.
Almost universally it seems.
How does that feel?
Feels pretty good.
What game is this?
Super Fuck Fuck.
This seems like a hardest part.
What are you supposed to do?
Seeing people play the game is crazy.
The reviews and stuff we're getting is really neat,
but seeing people play and hearing the reactions
is so much more beyond that.
It's just so genuine and heartfelt.
You can hear it their voice that they enjoy it.
And, that makes me feel so good.
If you had one thing to say to the dude that designed this level?
Fuck you.
Why did you hit the spike?
You're going to feel satisfaction
or a profound sense of loss
when you finally complete this.
Fucking hell, Dude.
How are you feeling are you all right?
Tommy?
Okay, email from Jon.
Braid sold 10k the first day.
Oh, cool.
We're closing in on 15k very soon.
That's pretty awesome.
Hey Tommy, remember that game Braid?
Yeah.
I think we might get 20k. I think we might.
That means that on the first day that
we might sell double what one of the most successful
indie games of all-time has sold.
We're really going one thousand people an hour.
It's crazy. You should be very happy about this Tommy.
Yeah, Tommy.
I am happy. I'm also very tired.
Very, very tired.
That's fucking crazy.
15 thousand copies, Tommy. 15 thousand?
Oh, Tommy, if you want to get even more happy,
go to Youtube, search Super Meat Boy,
look at most recent.
There's one guy that just posted his 'unwrapping'.
He wanted to have an unwrapping of the game.
So, he went out and bought points.
It shows him getting the points, redeeming the points,
putting it into the game, downloading the game.
Then, it's just him reacting to playing the game.
Fuck you! Fuck you!
Oh my God, oh my God! Ah!
Love this shirt. Oh so awesome. Yes.
Regardless of how the game did,
I would think that I'd like to always remember
that I'm proud of it.
And, I think it's awesome that
I can look at of video of the game
and still see magic in it.
Even though, I spent all that time looking at it,
as a buggy piece of software that I had to fix.
I think it's still awesome that
when I looked at that
Giant Bomb video and it hit the 'Glitch level'...
that that was the coolest thing I've ever seen.
What's going on?
Dude, we got really awesome fan art.
we got really awesome fan art.
This is a really good drawing.
That's crazy though. I used to draw shit. I used to draw Mario.
I used to draw Mario obsessively.
Oh mt God, this is so crazy.
It's an extraordinary platformer
that makes you work for every inch you gain.
It all begins with the controls.
It's apparent that
the controls are just an extension of your thoughts.
This is an amazingly well designed game
because it seamlessly avoids the frustration of dying
by shielding you from your own aggravation.
You can spend as much time as you want,
getting lost in this incredible world.
But, the rush of winning,
it what defines this excellent game.
Video reviews, man.
What are you doing?
What are you doing over there?
I just... to see somebody like really get it.
You look at it, and think it's effortless.
Like you just made a game
but you really put everything into it.
But you knew what you were doing.
It's not easy. Not everybody could do that.
Well, I think people get it. It's just so crazy.
It's nice to hear that people get it,
and I don't have to tell them.
Yeah, that was an awesome, an awesome review.
What a fucking crazy year.
Starting to feel worth it.
A little.
Starting to feel worth it.
You want to be liked. You want to be appreciated.
You want people to approve of your work.
It's just that you know,
you work on a project so long in semi-secrecy.
You can't really show it.
You can get that much, or any feedback really.
You just want to any little morsel of appreciation.
Well, I do, anyway.
It's like when people
oh, I don't care what people think about this and that.
It's like I care what people think.
I wish I didn't. But, I do.
It's kinda silly.
I'm a little bit annoyed about how much I care that stuff.
Yeah, I wish I didn't care that much.
It is like I need any kind of love and feedback that I can get.
Last night, Destructoid posted about it.
And, they have the little 'Retweet' and 'Like' thing.
Its said we had 200 something Retweets
and 11 thousand Likes on Facebook.
Oh my god, 11 thousand likes!
And, that really kind of gave me a huge boost.
And, then later I went back to the hotel and checked it again,
And, realized that is was a fluke
and actually we had zero 'Likes'.
Why do I care so much about this?
How many likes I get on a stupid website?
Why do I let these things affect me at all?
But, they do.
Like I do want to have a fucking million views on my trailer.
I want everybody to be talking about the game.
It can get to you.
Because it's like...
they tell you what you want to hear basically,
well, not what you want to hear, but...
You know, sometimes I think the game sucks, and I suck....
and that it's not going to work.
Then, this one guy comes along,
yeah this game's stupid.
Nothing happens in it.
And, I'm like, oh Fuck you're right.
Nothing happens in FEZ.
I don't feel like...
as relieved and happy about things as I wished I was gonna.
I'm still worried that I might end up making a shitty game.
That's going to be remembered as shitty game,
that was in development for too long,
and end up dissapointing everybody.
I have news for you, too.
Hopefully, it will take a bit of the edge off.
Hit me.
We had a meeting.
We sat down. We talked about all the grievances, all the issues.
We agreed, we shook on it and we came to an understanding....
And, he's going to sign and it's all going to be taken care of.
Wonderful.
Yeah? Alright man.
It isn't signed, yet.
But, it's huge weight lifted off my shoulders.
Like I can breath easier.
I'm getting a definitive Knytt Stories vibe.
Yes!
A bit of Cave Story.
No!
No Cave Story is what I meant say.
Why does he wear a little Fez hat?
Because that's where he get his 3D power from.
Because the Fez is a cube.
Well, that's it really. That's my logic for that.
Did I see the entirity of the mechanic?
Basically, you don't get anymore more powers than that.
There's no boss fights, or penalties for dying.
So, it's meant to be played slowly and carefully
like enjoy the world.
Absolutely. It's stop and smell the flowers kind of game.
When I explained to people what the game was about
and how it was slow and passive and relaxing,
a lot of people understood what I was going for with that.
People enjoyed what we showed them,
which is just the beginning of game
that we've been polishing like crazy for really long time.
The game is still not done.
It's still not a cohesive whole.
I still have a lot of work to do.
So I can't just like, take it all to the bank, right now.
I can't just like
Oh yeah, I did great job. FEZ is fantastic.
I need to still be afraid of failure, I think.
The game came out.
It was highly praised in the press.
We got interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
It got the second highest 'Metacritic' score
of all time on Xbox Live.
And we sold 22,000 copies of the game.
I feel like, I actually,
for the first time in my whole career,
I successfully did something that
a majority of people liked.
It wasn't an alienating experience.
I'm notorious for making games that tend to alienate.
Or not everybody completely understands.
And to make something that seems to have
complete universal praise.
I can't help but think that
I finally made something
good.
Like, I know there's a kid out there,
who stayed up all night long,
for the game to come out.
And didn't go to school the next day,
because he was so into playing it,
and that even far exceeds my experiences when I was younger.
And to think that I could make something that could
have an impact on this kid, even creatively into thinking:
Hey, I know two guys made this.
Maybe I can make something too?
It's just cool.
It's really cool.
It feels really really good.
Part of it,
is about not trying to be...
professional.
Like a lot of people come in to indie games,
trying to be like a big company.
What those companies do,
is create highly polished things
that serve as large of an audience as possible.
The way that you do that
is by filing off all the bumps on something.
If there's a sharp corner,
you make sure it's not going to hurt anybody.
If they bump into it or whatever.
That creation of this highly glossy, commercial product,
is the opposite of making something personal.
Things that are personal have flaws.
They have vulnerabilities.
If you don't see a vulnerability in somebody,
You're probably not relating with them
on a very personal level.
So it's the same with a game design.
Making it was about...
Let me take my deepest flaws and vulnerabilities,
and put them in the game,
and let's see what happens.
《Trust》 Jim Guthrie