This Sunday went by without even a sniff of a discussion, but that's not to say we didn't do one. Just, it was a bit delayed. We spoke to the Insane Mind Games development team that is head up by the notorious, Marmite-like, DDProductions83.
Darren has put together a talented and passionate team of modders from around Nexus Mods (including our own TerrorFox1234) to create a game from scratch, using an engine they hadn't used before, and the result that has come out of it all is 'Breaking Wheel', a game that lives up to the developers name - Insane...
We recorded an interview with the team the other night, which you can listen to below, or can read the edited (to make certain parts clearer) interview below. The choice is yours.
The game is now available on Steam through 'Early Access' and I wish the team great success.
Links to their Discord, Website and various other pages can be found at the bottom of the interview.
BlindJudge:
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Sunday discussion with the Insane Mind Games Development Team. I have to admit this is the second attempt at this interview as the first was several weeks ago and things have changed a little bit. The team was successfully 'Greenlit', and the game is now available through 'Early Access'. At the end of this interview, I implore you all to go and check it out.
To begin with, let's introduce the team and their roles within Insane Mind Games.
Darren:
I might as well take that one first. My name is Darren; I am the lead idiot in charge, and I make everyone's life a living, flipping hell.
Auja:
Okay so my name is Auja, I am a sound designer and a composer in the game. I work with Darren and also with Jim (TerrorFox123)
BigBizkit:
All right so, on the Nexus I go by BigBizkit. The people on the Nexus probably know me best from my most popular Skyrim mod ‘Pirates of Skyrim’. I also did the quest mods ‘Become a Skooma Drug Lord’, ‘Witch Doctor’, and I made one of the realms on the mod ‘Molag Bal's Inferno’.
On this project, I do many things, level designing and blueprinting, game mechanics, I did the NPCs, and on top of that I direct the workflow for the audio guys, set the priorities, work with them and make sure that all of the sounds are implemented into the game.
Darren:
His resume is huge.
Darth:
Yeah hi, I am Darth, and I am doing ... Wait, what the fuck am I doing? I am doing menu design; I am doing all the C++ and all of the more programming related things and some basic game mechanics and that kind of stuff.
etienneh99:
I am Etienne, and I am the only 3D artist at Insane Mind Games. I create all the skins and some of the other assets needed for levels. I also do some of the blueprints and scripting for the skins but not much.
gandr1318:
Hey, I am Justin, and I do pretty much anything I can to let everyone else just focus on the game, so it is wildly different from day to day. So sometimes it is Twitter, Facebook, all the social media stuff, checking any forms people submitted on the site, checking our website's forums, monitoring the Discord, checking Indiegogo. Other general things just to raise the awareness and get the game out.
Ryan:
So I am Ryan, my primary job is levels. I make levels, design levels, draw levels, look at Darren's levels to make sure they look nice. Just generally anything aesthetically related.
I am also currently working on making the main menu and, by the by, me and Darren are also working on a promotional Skyrim quest mod that will be a Christmas themed quest mod that will, surprisingly, come out before Christmas.
TerrorFox:
I am TerrorFox, and I work with Auja on the audio. I primarily do the mixing and editing where she kind of creates the sounds, records them and does some of that stuff. I essentially make sure that it's all equalised and levelled to the point where it’s the final sound that will be in the game.
BlindJudge:
Awesome. So, the development team is called Insane Mind Games. I have an idea where that's come from but can you just expand and let us know who came up with that and why?
Darren:
It's a Terry Pratchett reference for the logo has five exclamation mark points as well, and if you do not know that then just read some Terry Pratchett
BlindJudge:
Everyone on the Nexus probably already knows Darren, but Darren openly admits to having quite a non-personable personality and some people would rather be dragged across skateboard grip tape than deal with him, how are you all finding it?
Ryan:
Well, I guess you could say it is like working for Darth Vader. He is excellent at what he does, and he is a really good leader and helps us all learn together and make a great product, sometimes he is just on the dark side of the Force and can be a bit unstomachable to other people.
He is a good guy with really good intentions deep down inside, and I think with him at the helm we are making a great product and everyone is getting something superb out of it.
TerrorFox:
I don't have to talk to Darren much, so that is nice.
BigBizkit:
Yeah not anymore, now that I coordinate the soundtrack.
Right, if you only read what he says, he occasionally comes across as vituperative and even hostile at times, but when you speak to him in voice, you learn that he is just a regular dick head. It's nothing serious. He's harmless, just likes to be a bit edgy. It's not always easy with him, but if everybody in this world were nice guys, it would be very boring. So, handling Darren is sometimes a bit of a task, but it's manageable, he is not that bad.
Darren:
Well, thanks. You know what, you guys make me sound not terrible.
BlindJudge:
Darren, what about the switch side? How is it working with other people?
Darren:
I don't know. It's been fun. The Germans (in the team) always make it sound like every little problem is World War III, which is hilarious when they argue with each other. It may be a little thing, and they both think each other is being super serious.
Darth:
Be glad there's a big ocean between us.
Darren:
I don't know; it's been interesting. Obviously, the people that I would attract to work with me are self-motivators as well. I'm terrible at actually beating motivation into somebody. I don't want to have to ride somebody to get them to do their work. I mean, we're all in this together, we're either all going to make money together, or we're all going to fail together. It's a team project. We've had our head-butting, everybody's got different opinions on things and I obviously am very opinionated.
I think discourse and diversity breeds a better team and gameplay as well, so it's been fun. I mean, we saw that with 'Molag Bal's Inferno' too. Everybody (working on the mod) had their slice of the pie, and they were allowed to do with their slice of the pie what they wanted, even having final say in it! In this one, nobody has final say, even myself.
It just makes for a better product, in the end, if just one person did it, then you'd never see the flaws and we all can point out each other's flaws. Which we do, mercilessly. So I think it is kind of fun.
BlindJudge:
How are you organising the work, are you using Trello boards? How are you dishing out the work?
Darren:
Oh God, it was terrible at first. I'm still going to state that I will never do it this way again, but I think it was the right way to do it. It was just, smash our faces into it! Now we've got a Kanboard up and we've got a workflow going. But the first five months was literally like we were just modding and trying to work together, you know? It lent for speedier learning because all of us were trying to learn the engine.
I think it was better to be creative and learn as we smashed our heads into it, but never again, not now we've learnt the engine. We will have a workflow; we will have boards and charts and pipelines set up from now on for any other game we do.
BlindJudge:
Talking about the engine, before we get into (talking about) the game, what engine did you choose? Most of you worked on Bethesda games beforehand in the Creation Kit, so the shift must be quite interesting?
Darren:
We're working in Unreal Engine 4, and Ryan has now been the only one to go back into the Gamebryo Engine for Skyrim for an extended period, how is that treating you, Ryan?
Ryan:
It is really interesting. You can pretty much imagine the Creation Kit is your 'Barbie bike' with its training wheels still on it; it's a great piece of kit that you get with your game. It does a great job; it has tonnes of excellent free assets. It's simple in good and bad ways.
The Unreal Engine is just a whole new world. This is your BMX with your brand spanking new features everywhere. It can do anything you can imagine and a lot more.
I like the Creation Kit; it's a good introduction (to modding), but the Unreal Engine is just worlds better and worlds different.
It does have a bit of a learning curve. Not too much if you're experienced with the Creation Kit, and you have a good workflow, but I enjoy the Unreal Engine. I think it's a great step-up. You can get very nice lighting going; you can get very nice effects going. You can do very diverse scripting, blueprinting, enemy set-up. You don't need just to work off the things that the Creation Kit has.
They're both nice applications. The Creation Kit is a nice lead into being able to use the Unreal Engine.
BigBizkit:
I think the Creation Kit is very accessible. It's very easy to get into it. The entry barrier is lower, but so is the ceiling of limitations so to speak.
What I find very nice about Unreal is that the barrier between your idea and the realisation of said idea is a lot lower because there are fewer limitations.
I came up with a tank, for instance, put it together in a blueprint, did the animation blueprinting, coding work and it just works. It's that easy to do once you get the hang of it, but if you don't have any experience modding or doing any coding work whatsoever, Unreal is probably a bit overbearing at first.
That's not to say the Creation Kit doesn't have it's good points as well. After all, without the Creation Kit, getting us into modding we wouldn't be in this position right now.
Ryan:
Plus additionally. I thought it would be a good comparison seeing as how I'm doing higher national in games development at college; we use Unity. When you use Unity, it's a very bare-bones initial engine and any features you need, have to be programmed in yourself. As a comparison the Unreal has this nice little feature where you take a mesh, you click one button, and it turns it into a destructible mesh, which when you hit it, it will break apart realistically. If you wanted to do that in something like Unity, then you'd either need to programme it yourself in C#, which is very time-consuming and extensive or pay $60 to someone who has already programmed it and put it on the asset store.
Darren:
I want to chime in on this one too, because the more and more I use Unreal, I (begin to) hate the Creation Kit for the sole purpose of the limitations. I like what Big said, the cap for your creativity in Unreal is logistically not there if you have the right team because they allow you to make modifications to the base engine and release your engine for the game. So there is nothing you can't do with it if you take the time and effort. What you can do with it in its base form is phenomenal.
I think I was fearful of getting into making my own game. What's the learning cap? What are we going to have to jump through? I think we just blew it out of the park! Whereas some people might see this as a simple game, you know, a side scroller. The things we've done in it are amazing in such a short period. The learning curve with Unreal is phenomenally easy. If you've got Google you can teach yourself everything there is to know about Unreal Engine. That's whats amazing, even if you use Google, you'll still be spending six and a half days trying to figure out how to make a follower in the Creation Kit, and I think that's where the difference in information is another big step. Unreal actively supplies information to everybody non-stop.
Modding is mostly guess work because there's no back-up from the actual creators and you don't have the source code. Like we did when we started modding, we were guessing. I mean we did that too with Unreal, but it quickly turned from guessing into "we know exactly what we're doing and can look for information and make X happen anytime we want". It's no longer an option of can we do this; it's how do we do this?
BlindJudge:
I just literally dipped my toe in the water when it comes to the Creation Kit, and I am finding it quite overwhelming at the moment trying to piece it all together. Who knows, in a couple of years down the line, I might be joining your team with the Unreal Engine.
Darren:
Dude, I'm going to beat you to the question probably, but early access is launching literally when this goes up on Nexus, so if you guys hear/read this, early access is out and there will be a link somewhere. Fully moddable! We're releasing the full source code, the full engine code.
It's a separate download. All you need to do to mod our game is download Unreal, download our files, go and mod the game.
We've put a lot of effort into making it so the vast majority of it is drag and drop and it will get people into seeing how easy Unreal is. I think the biggest difference for people coming from the Gamebryo or Unity is just the UI. I mean, the UI is set up different, it's a different engine, but it does everything that your other engines do and then some. I mean, no matter what you're coming from, Cry Engine, Unity, Gamebryo, RPG Maker, I don't know. I mean, a UI is a UI, they just set it up different.
We've tried to make it as simple as possible, but on that same note, it's as powerful as you want it to be because there are no limits. We're including everything, every bloody thing, to anybody who buys the game.
BlindJudge:
Okay, so that leads us to the question about the game, Breaking Wheel. It's going to be on Steam Early Access right now. Can you give us a quick rundown of what the game is and what we can expect from it?
Ryan:
What do you expect from Breaking Wheel? What started out as a simple side scrolling platform, evolved into a 3-D side scrolling platform where you can switch your dimensions, then from there it just kept expanding. We've managed to build some insane level mechanics in, thanks to Big. I'll let him explain all that. We've got some fantastic NPCs. We have levels where you're rolling around shooting desert eagle pistols. We have levels where you're rolling around a spider web and slaying spiders with a sword.
It's just, what started out as a simple, side-scrolling game has become incredibly diverse - it has multiple games built into a game. You have Tower Defence, you have pinball, you even have a very Tron-Esq style puzzle game. It's diverse, and I think you get a lot of value for money, with the different levels, the different bonus levels and replayability with the different modes.
We have kid mode, where you can play only normal levels, hardcore levels won't be available. You also won't be able to die, no matter how much damage you take.
We have the normal mode, where if you have accumulated coffee and coins you can get hit and only lose coffee and coins (Similar to Sonic and the gold rings). As soon as you get to zero coffee or coins, then you die.
We have hardcore, where one hit kills you. There's something there for everybody. You can also do speed runs if you want. Every level has a timer and a par time that you need to beat to get the maximum score.
We also have little unlockables; we have chickens hidden in every level. If you can pick up a chicken and take it to the end of a level without getting hit, you get a huge score bonus. If you do get hit with this chicken, then the chicken gets destroyed, and you'll need to replay the level.
We also offer a lot of replayability if you want to ace the time, coins, coffee and chicken on every level. Which with over 50 levels, and if you play our hardcore, you could be sitting at Breaking Wheel for years and still have tonnes of enjoyment with the various game playing mechanics.
Darren:
I'm going to cut in too because he missed the baseline of the mechanics. It started off as a wheel that collects coffee because we were making a joke about Elianora and her coffee addiction. We decided to add the mechanic that for every coffee you pick up the wheel gets a little more hyper. Coffee increases your max speed, your acceleration and your jump height which allows us to actually make diverse levels. We can make it so you can finish any normal levels with zero coffees, but we can hide stuff so if you don't have enough coffees you can't get to it, items can be put just out of reach because we control the mechanics.
The cool thing about it is it's kind of just how it evolved. I mean, another thing about it is the wheel has momentum. Watching people who played the alpha and stuff, it's one of the things I noticed the most is that people are not used to having that on a platformer. They're used to when they stop moving, their character stops moving. It's not a tonne of momentum, but it's just enough that it's more realistic. The faster you move, the more that momentum is going to come into play. It allows us to really shift the levels to make them harder the more coffees you get.
Nothing's out of reach, the entire premise of making this is because nothing was barred. If you want to do something, do it. Our creativity has made us way too fucking psychotic. Some of the levels are crazy, some of the levels you have boss fights … It's just nuts. I mean, we've got tonnes of customizable skins. Our skins are fully customizable with hue saturation, lightness, opacity maps. We've taken it to a direction that added a couple of months to the time needed to make the game, which is perfectly fine because it makes the game more awesome.
BigBizkit:
Right, let me just add one thing that sometimes people ask us, "What does the wheel do with coffee?" Justin put it very nicely. We just wanted to be a bit silly like the games we love. I mean, what does a plumber do with a tanooki suit? Turn into a statue of course. Yeah, that's why the wheel collects coffee. I make sure that none of my levels are like the other. We have boss fights, like Darren mentioned. Also, we have the bonus levels which are completely different, which break the formula, which aren't side-scrolling at all. Some of them for instance, we have a tower defence level. A level where you drop bombs on enemies, on waves of enemies to score points, etc.. If you want to experience something apart from the side-scrolling with all the traps, all the enemies, you know dual wielding desert eagles. If you ever get tired of that, play a bonus level. We've got that going content wise as well.
BlindJudge:
I played an early version of the game and there was a 'flappy bird' level. Is that still in there?
Darren:
Oh yeah.
BlindJudge:
Good.
Darren:
Now with better lighting. Anybody who played the demo without post processing on was probably blinded and went into an epileptic seizure. We have since fixed the lighting issues on everything.
BlindJudge:
You touched on the coffee, what about the chicken? Where did the chicken come from?
Darren:
You know what, people will know ...
... If they know any modders. It was a joke and that's part of her name. That's all we're going to say.
BlindJudge:
Oh, mystery.
Darren:
Yeah, they'll get it.
BlindJudge:
Locations are all over the place. It seems like you just had a lot of fun with this game. You haven't really followed a set path.... With Mario for instance, you get the hills and then you get the dungeons. In this, every level seems to be completely different. How did you come up with that? Why (did you do it this way)?
Darren:
Mostly it’s due to the fact we're using the Infinity Blade Asset pack from Epic, which is a free massive pack of just awesome assets that doesn't look like anybody's utilised in a good game. That's probably going to be mean to say to some people who have utilised it, but it doesn't look like there's any really good cohesive game made with it. I don't know why because it's an amazing set of assets... We've just gone from there. I don't even know how to describe it, I mean, I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and have to go jot down an idea or even start up a level. Like my ice climb. I wanted to make a stupid level where you had to jump from wall to wall.
I just wanted to make it really brutal, but also make normal levels as I didn't want people to get stuck on it. Just stuff like that. It's just kind of wake up, go crazy. It's kind of cool to diversify it as well. I'm bad at clutter, I've always been bad at clutter. It's tedious to me and I don't think I have a good design implement, but as far as making a level layout, I can do it really well and then Ryan can step in and clutter the living hell out of it and make my level look different than I had originally thought in my mind but better. Then I came back in with the lighting and change it up even more. It was a big step too for everybody because we're all modders. We work by ourselves. You know, "Fuck everybody else. This is our kingdom, we can do whatever the hell we want." that type of mindset. Then going into something for the commercial aspect where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so to speak. It really is.
BlindJudge:
You talked about the levels and that Ryan can clutter stuff up and I'm guessing you just pull assets from the Unreal store, to do that. What about the ...
Darren:
Well no, it's the Infinity Blade Asset pack, it's a tonne of assets for game expansions they never release. It's like three million dollars worth of assets that we get to use freely... Any assets we need that are extra, we have etienneh make. We don't pull anything because we're going to release everything. If we pay for content outside of ourselves, we cannot release it. We then turn into Bethesda, which is the reason they don't release all of they're access to the creation engine.
BlindJudge:
Okay, what about the sound? Do they have to be made or are they pulled from the asset pack?
Darren
Every sound is made from scratch in this. I think, except for the explosion sound. I think it came with an explosion sound that we'd been using pretty liberally.
BlindJudge:
Auja and Jim, they must hate you guys, because the levels are so different.
Darren:
You should have seen the workflow before Big got on it, Terror wanted to stab me repeatedly.
TerrorFox:
Yeah, it was pretty rough. It's not bad now that things are organised and I have someone on the Dev team to communicate with. Before it kind of felt like you guys were over there building the game and audio was kind of like stuck in this closet over here. It was just "make sounds and do whatever". It was "okay", but now that things are set up it's really not that bad. The variety in the levels, it's ... I mean ...
BlindJudge:
Surely every level has to have different sounds, which is going to be a pain.
TerrorFox:
Yeah, but it's not like it's hundreds or even a hundred sounds per level. There's some stuff that gets crossed over and usually when there's a new level, we're looking at most, I'd say 20 sounds, 20 new sounds average.
Darren:
That's the thing with Unreal, there's a lot of fluctuations you can do in the sounds too. You can blueprint sounds and make them change pitch, timing, everything.
TerrorFox:
Right.
Auja:
Yes.
TerrorFox:
As far as them churning out a whole bunch of hugely varied levels, it's really not that bad... I mean, if every level needed 100 sounds of it's own then that would be entirely overwhelming. It's pretty manageable right now.
TerrorFox:
We're catching up at a steady pace on the audio. We got a bit of a late start because of the organisation stuff. I'd say we're making pretty steady progress now, we're catching up to where everyone else is at.
BlindJudge:
Does Auja actually make the sounds herself and then pass them to you to equalise them?
TerrorFox:
She does primarily, yeah.
Auja:
I really did a lot of sounds outside. I did 40 sounds or so, at home. Yeah, mainly that and I helped to do some sound effect also.
BlindJudge:
What have been the actual biggest challenges that you've come across?
BigBizkit:
Well, apart from handling Darren, you know. I'd say for me personally, right now, is handling the volume of the work because I have a lot of stuff on my plate. We need to get 50 levels done, I'm trying to pump them out but keeping diversity, you know, keeping everything fresh. Also do, like I said, the coding work for all the events in my levels for the NPCs. I try to organise the sounds etc. and apart from that, whenever there is some text we need to write, for either Steam, Greenlight or the website, I occasionally do that. Handling a lot of responsibilities on the project is a big challenge, but it's a fantastic learning experience and I like doing it.
Darren:
I think the biggest thing is deadlines. We had a deadline for our Greenlight and that was chaos for the two weeks leading up to it and we have a deadline for early access, mostly for this interview too. It helps to glom onto it.
I think after early access, so after this interview airs, we're probably all going to be taking a little bit of a breather, because at that point it's when we get the game done and we'll just update it every five levels on early access for people.
BlindJudge:
Have you got a site which is detailing all of the development, the developer diaries?
gandr1318:
Oh yeah, we are trying to maintain a very active dev blog and give regular updates. There's general ones where we just kind of talk about the game, but then we're also doing individual ones with developers from their perspective.
BigBizkit:
Right and recently we started doing a few interviews of each of the team members so that people can get to know us a little bit better aside from our modding personas.
gandr1318:
Yeah, we have another team member, Sparks, who has been doing all of these interviews and getting them up and has pretty much taken over the dev blog. I'm actually kind of a little bit out of the loop on the Dev Blog because I've given that completely over.
Ryan:
Yeah, I'm the one that edits and makes sure that everything that goes up on the website is okay. Recently it's just been interviews getting to know the team members on a non-work basis. Like, what's your favourite game? How did you meet Darren? Just literally getting to know the people behind your game, making it more personal, showing that Insane Mind Games is not some kind of corporation with a community base, but rather just a game maker who has a community.
Darren:
I mean the Insane Mind Games' YouTube, I just do whatever I can stick up my butt. I try to do one a week, but it gets really weird at points when we're working on things and I forget, but I try to do a video showcasing and showing things happening in the game and they get erratic, but they're kind of fun. I just like freelancing them, you know, just boot it up and play with it.
gandr1318:
The initial idea was that I like what Discord are doing to actively update their community by doing these rapid succession dev blogs and we basically got that model going and we've been maintaining it pretty actively. There is a bunch to go through if anyone wants to read through the dev blogs and see the progression. Everything from level progression to etienneh doing some really good ones where he starts off with just a crude drawing or idea of what he wants to make into a skin and then just shows the skin every hour from conception to completion. Those are really good as well, those are my favourites.
Darren:
Anybody's welcome to join us on Discord too. It's up publicly on our website. We'll probably even put something of a blurb in the game for Early Access or at least on the Steam page because the easiest feedback is in real time if people want to hit us up. Emails and everything work too and we have our forum.
BlindJudge:
That's awesome. Yeah, we'll definitely share some of those on the Nexus as well. It's going to be hard to quantify, but how many hours do you reckon you all have invested into this?
BigBizkit:
Today, around 12. If that answers the question.
BlindJudge:
That's today, when did it start?
Darren:
July and people picked up for the next month, so it started July, end of June, something like that. There's a couple of us who's probably put in 1,000 plus easy on this. It's just a lot.
BlindJudge:
How'd you find it with the time differences between everybody?
Darren:
Slightly annoying and destructive to my overall health.
gandr1318:
Really, I think it's kind of interesting because we almost did a bit of a corporate model that Discovery or a lot of these big companies do, where you have people located in the US, people located in England and just different places, so pretty much 24 hours a day there's someone usually on Discord or someone working on the project. All we're missing is just a couple of Australians. Then we'll have the complete enterprise 24 hour, go, go, go pitch.
BlindJudge:
After this you're going to take a break or you're going to try to work on something else?
Darren:
It depends on what happens with this. If we sell decently, I'll throw money from the company back in and do modding contests. The overall goal is to make another game and finding some people who are fluent with Unreal through the modding scene would actually be amazing too. If we make enough money, go in-house and make another game. Definitely another game, it's the drive for all of us, I think, is creativity.
That's why we started being modders, that's why we do video games. It's an art form, no matter who wants to tell you it's not.
It's an artistic mindset that needs to do it, it's a need to create something and I'll keep doing it… Even if I have to make really stupid games with no 3D assets for the rest of my life, I'll keep making games. It's fun, it's great. It'll be nice to do the next one without any set timelines if we're successful with this one, or we do a good Kickstart or something. Hopefully not down the Star Citizen path where you're working for the next 24 years because you've got so much money that you can keep working forever. I like to finish products, I like to finish mods when I do them because it's a good feeling to get something done and actually create something.
gandr1318:
I feel like a lot of games, the bane of their existence is feature creep. In this one, just the absolute freedom of them being able to add whatever kind of stuff we wanted has actually not hurt the game, but added a lot to it. To the game and the timeline as well, but it's coming out really nice.
BlindJudge:
You touched on it earlier about the modding. When it goes live on early access, will the modding be available straight away?
Darren:
Yep, 100%. It's all loose files, there's no packing yet. I think Malt's looking at it, but I don't think we're going to be able to do it. If we can, that'd be great, but I think it's all just loose file overwrites and I believe TerrorFox was talking with whoever from NMM, so we can probably do a test with Nexus Mod Manager sometime early next week to make sure everything works with that as well, so it will just be straight integration and we'll even have day one mods up and tutorial videos showing you how to set up.
BlindJudge:
Are the tutorial videos stuff that you're doing, and going to share with us?
Darren:
Yeah, I'll be doing them. That's going to be my goal for the end of next week, just do tutorial videos. They're going to be included too, it's two separate downloads because we don't want to overload people's hard drives. We suffer from the same thing I think X-Com did where their modding package was like 40% bigger than their actual game because you had to download a full separate set to mod, as Unreal cooks the assets and they're not usable in the engine. It's a separate download if people want to mod it and inside of that will be a zip file including the video, so they don't even have to go to YouTube, there'll be an MP4 format of me showing them what to do step-by-step to set up. Once they're set up, freedom.
BlindJudge:
That's awesome, looking forward to trying it out. We can make our own wheels, I presume.
Darren:
Yeah, we have our own kind of plug-in metadata blueprints that Malt made that our code reads at runtime when you load up the levels. We'll have an example mod in the actual game itself and in the files, so you can actually look at it and see how it's set up. It's a blueprint where you basically just select your levels, the preview image and if you have a skin blueprint, you select it too. Then the code will read it and throw it in right with all of our stuff.
The modded levels show up in their own modded section. Anything else assets wise, besides levels and ... I mean, Unreal basically operates off levels and blueprints, but levels for the most part for when you're playing the game. That dynamic read/write there covers a level. Everything else you do, if you make a level and make your own folder structure inside of mod/your name, the game will automatically read that inside of our content folder. Once your level's plugged in you could have all original of your own content, use none of ours if you wanted to and it'll just flipping read it right on up.
BlindJudge:
That sounds awesome, going to definitely give it a try. With Steam are you please with how it's gone? Did you find it easy dealing with them?
Darren:
You don't deal with anybody, you deal with computers. I think somebody hand selects the Greenlight, but so far it's just been an automated process, so it's not too terrible. I'm not a fan of no UI command line tools to upload, so that tweaked me out a little bit, but so far not too terrible. I uploaded 20 gigs relatively fast, like two hours to them. Everything else there's documentation on up the ass, so it's just a matter of looking for it. You don't really have to deal with anything. Once we launch the game, I know they have speciality things and you can work with an advertiser, somebody works with Steam to help advertise your game, you know put it on front page randomly, etc. We'll see how that goes when we get to it.
BlindJudge:
What's the actual process?
Darren:
Pay 100 bucks, put it up on Greenlight, pimp yourself out to every YouTuber around the planet and go crying to get people to vote for you.
Ryan:
The good thing about Steam was that you could feel out how the community base would be and get good initial feedback from the community who watched your trailers, and maybe went and download the demo and stuff. It was a great initial feeler for the reception of Breaking Wheel.
Darren:
I think the cool thing about it too is, I was expecting a lot of hate in the asset flip department because that's a big thing! Indie games people hate asset flips. Generally, like Jim Sterling etc., they do a lot of videos where they show off the games where people just take assets and then literally that's all that's in their game. It's like 5% them, 95% the assets. I was fearing that because ours is, at it's core, all assets with 90% assets we didn't make.
I think the reception was good in that one that we didn't even ... I mean, one person pointed it out and then said that it was a really amazing use of the assets. Which we were trying to do them justice, make our own game just using assets. We could have done it with geometry pieces with a checkerboard pattern, but it's nice to actually have those assets in there which I think is a huge draw for modders especially because, not a lot of people are 3D designers. It's one of the harder things, I think, to get into because you have to have a specific creative flair to be able to do that.
BlindJudge:
It's on early access and what price range are we looking at?
Darren:
6.99
BlindJudge:
Dollars or pounds? Dollars I would presume.
Darren:
Yeah, I think it put it at £4.99. It auto did it, when I put it in for US, it converted it to every currency down the line, which was really cool. I just hit okay. It was like "Verify the currency", I'm like "no", I'm not going to be going Google Currency checker, I'm just going to assume that you guys are good with this." If somebody sees a currency that's not right up on there, just let me know and we can change it, but I didn't think of doing conversation in real time for 80 different currencies.
For anybody who likes the audio, Terrorfox and Auja are getting a smaller percent cut from the revenue share from the actual game than most of us are, that's more of a time issue of people who put in more. Them and Skinny Tech Voice, some of you might know, have done the music for the game and that will be available as an MP3 and Wave downloads for 99 cents. Any music they add into the game, all the way up until full release will keep getting added to that pack. If people like the music and they want to support them, they actually get a lion share of that revenue share from just their music. That's where we're hoping they make some of the money back that they're going to miss out on on the revenue share for the game itself.
BigBizkit:
Right, I just wanted to mention that in euros, I think it's €6.25, last I checked. If you look at it, what you get for it - you get 50 levels like we said, the bonus levels, you get a very diverse side scroller with a lot of action elements. It's really out of the box and I really cannot image anybody who wants a good, fun side scroller, who gets this game and thinks that this was too expensive for the content you're getting.
Basically, you get the support, us who came together via the Nexus community. We're all a bunch of modders, self-taught people, we picked out the creation kit, taught ourselves how to code, how to design games and then we came together, got Unreal, got into Unreal, learned the engine. We managed to make this amazing project, which has come very far now and is going into Early Access as we speak, basically. If you want to support us, this is, I think, a good way of doing it because you're really getting your monies worth and I think it's a very fun game. If you have some money over from Christmas and you like side scrollers, check us out.
BlindJudge:
Nice sales pitch there Big.
BigBizkit:
Yeah, thanks.
BlindJudge:
How about DLC, are you going to offer DLC or is it pay DLC. You said about the OST.
Darren:
Well, it depends on how well it goes. If we move 10-20 thousand copies. We'll definitely do a DLC with official levels, but even apart from that, we plan to have day one mods. We'll probably throw up stupid levels afterwards as mods. Likely you will see all of us doing something in the mod category to add things to it after release even if we don't do DLC. We're all modders, we all create ...
Any levels that we don't get to or don't finish off, we'll probably mod in. I can't see us dropping the hat right after it's over, even if we sell 50 copies, we'll probably still use it as a learning experience and throw up mods, you know.
BigBizkit:
You guys who are listening or reading this interview on the Nexus, you know how much mods can add in terms of content. How much fun and how much gameplay time you can really add by a mod. Us being modders, it was very important to us that this game would be moddable.
Darren:
I want to add to that too. Something that I was always thinking about. We've put a lot of stress into the initial start-up. The most annoying thing about modding Breaking Wheel is downloading a second pack, downloading the Unreal engine, registering it, because you know, Unreal requires you to actually have a log-in, then downloading Visual Studio. That is the most annoying things about modding Breaking Wheel.
We've tried to make it so simple. The biggest excuse you always see when people are asking for a mod is "I'm too dumb to mod. I don't know how to mod. I don't have the skill to mod." We've thrown that out the window. The next time I'm up visiting my sister, I will get my five-year-old niece to make a Breaking Wheel level and I will record it and that will just kill anybody who asks for a mod for Breaking Wheel, that they don't have the skills to make a level because it's that easy. The drag and drop, the snapping, that's all you've got to do. We've created templates for traps, we've got our level end, our blueprint set-up, the entire tutorial.
The only thing stopping you from making a mod is your personal will to do it and learn.
BlindJudge:
Yeah, I'm trying to learn to mod at the moment and I'm going to record a series so I'll let you know how that goes. Yes, is there anything else that you guys want to say to the people here at Nexus?
gandr1318:
Besides the fact that Nexus is the targeted platform for our mod community, it's going to be based off of Nexus. I guess that's about it.
Darren:
We are looking at consoles. If we make money to do it, because obviously releasing for Steam cost us $100 and then whatever else we've put into this. I mean it hasn't been terrible because we have a lot of free time and we're a bunch of losers, but the going to console and going to the app store thing, those take a little bit of work and some cash flow which is ... I mean, we plan to do it, but I don't think we'll hit Sony because I think theirs is pretty annoying to get into.
BlindJudge:
You just mentioned consoles, would the game be controller-friendly on the PC?
Darren:
Oh yeah, 100%. Early access ... It plays really great with a controller.
Ryan:
Yeah, I've only ever played it with a controller from day one since I've been playing it and it feels great.
Darren:
I don't think you get the same twitch control that you do with a keyboard, but I prefer playing with a controller by far.
BigBizkit:
Yeah, let me just add one more thing. Earlier Darren said that a lot of people say they don't know how to mod. Just think about it, all of us here on this project at one point in time didn't know how to mod. Then we started and we learnt. Eventually I, for instance, ended up making Pirates of Skyrim and I got to meet other mod authors, I got to connect and it is the reason why I'm now on this project, working on a commercial release on a real game that's definitely going to be released. We are in Early Access as we speak. A lot can come if you just do it. You know, if you just motivate yourself, if you just believe and spread your wings you can learn to fly.
gandr1318:
I'd like to add to that though. I really do think that getting involved with modding in a Nexus community is a direct gateway into getting involved with game development, because if you look at our project, then there's another group of modders with Druid Game Works that are doing Witanlore.
I think that it's going to become more of a trend. You're going to see more and more indie game companies, just coming out of clusters of modders who did mods together and then decided to do individual projects. To people who haven't even touched modding yet, who want to get into game development. I feel like the steps are now being laid and it is becoming a direct process. You get involved with modding, you get involved with community, you will find an avenue to actually work on a game.
BlindJudge:
What's the biggest record (score wise) that you guys have set (on the tutorial level)?
Darren:
Probably me, but I have no idea. It's my levels, the first one we ever made so I played it so many times, I can almost perfect it blindfolded.
BlindJudge:
I want to have that score and put it on the site. See if anyone can actually beat it.
Darren:
Twitch recognises it as a streaming thing now, you can type in Breaking Wheel and you'll find some ...
gandr1318:
Yeah.
Darren:
You'll find some terrible videos of my Australian friends playing it where I make fun of them relentlessly for sucking. It recognises that, so we'll probably definitely be streaming at some point. We'll be like, "Watch the Devs, make fun of them or beat their times", stuff like that because we suck at our own game. I play Big's levels and I want to cut my face off. I'm never going to play without God mode on, because I'm terrible at this crap. I think it's the best part about the game is that it's challenging but when you screw up, when you get killed, when you die, when you hit a trap ... The second time around, some of them we sneak in there, we make things that you're not going to see the first time you play a level, you explore it.
Once you start making the mistake again and again, it's your fault. A lot of things we see when people play it, they actually don't get mad at the game, they get mad at themselves for being bad at the game because it's relatively simple. We've gone away from relatively simple games and we play with aim assists on most games now with the progressive targeting. We think we're better because we're head-shotting people, no scope, but you're actually getting a slight help from the game engine because nobody's going to be doing that, right, with a controller or even a mouse and keyboard for the most part. I think we've dumb down games from a skill level a little bit with some of the stuff we do.
gandr1318:
Back to the scores thing. If you want, we can get you some scores set by the team and then we'd love to see any video of someone beating our internal high leader board.
BlindJudge:
Right, so to conclude I just want you to let us know where people can follow the game. Can you give us the web address and ...
Darren:
Insanemindgames.com
BlindJudge:
Awesome.
BigBizkit:
Let me just say that on the website, you find the Dev Blogs, like we mentioned before and I'm looking to get a site going where you can learn more about the game like in-depth descriptions of the mechanics of some of the traps and NPCs and maybe a little bit of tongue and cheek back story of the game.
gandr1318:
We actually really would like to push our Discord pretty heavily for people to come and hang out with us, because we do really enjoy talking to people as they play the game and just ...
BlindJudge:
The thing I really love about Discord is that you can join multiple Discord servers and have them all in your browser, all in the application at the same time. You can just flip between stuff.
Darren:
Yeah and if people ... If you're a YouTuber out there, with I don't know how many subscribers, we'll throw you a free copy and also mod authors. By the way, crap I forgot to mention that. Hopefully, we'll get Terrorfox to put something up on the mod author forum. Any mod author who wants a key, talk to Terrorfox and we'll get you a key for the game on Early Access. You can do with it what you want. You can bloody resell the one key we give you if you feel like it. You can use it for the game. I don't want any established mod author to have to pay for this, so we're handing them out to them for free.
BlindJudge:
Wow. That is generous, generous. Well, thanks ever so much.
Darren:
Generous, but it's also in our self-interest.
BlindJudge:
Yeah, it'd be brilliant if we have a load of mods appear on the site for this.
gandr1318:
And yours right? Your mod Judge, you're going to make?
BlindJudge:
Yeah, yeah. Damn right, damn right I will. I'll try and bang out a level. I think I've got the Unreal engine downloaded anyway because you need it for the new Unreal tournament, don't you?
Darren:
Yeah, but you have to download a previous version too. They're at 4 .13, our game works on 4.12. Unreal has a drop down box that lets you just select what engine you want to run.
BlindJudge:
Awesome, I'll go and grab that then. Well, thanks ever so much for talking and I wish you all the best with the game.
Darren:
Thank you.
TerrorFox:
Thanks.
Ryan:
Thanks.
Auja:
Thank you.
So there you have it, if you like what you've heard then go check out the game now on Early Access.
You can also follow the team at any of the links below:
IMG Discord: https://discord.gg/Q4VrbRJ
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/insanemindgames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/insanemindgame
17 comments
Comments locked
A moderator has closed this comment topic for the time beingCongratulations to the team. I wish you all success in this endeavor.
I'd wish we could focus on the positive of a group of Nexus modders coming together to make a game. I, for one, am proud of this.
Back then, I would not have thought that something like that could develop from me releasing my pirate mod and getting to know people in the community.
Before this whole game of due to one person working on the team, how about you think of all the work the others put in?
Cheers
That still doesn't excuse his terrible behavior towards PC and Console users, he treated us all like dirt, right from his very first mod release.
Hint: It wasn't because he was a nice guy
He fired the first shot at the entire community, PC and Console users alike.
Honestly it's like you're trying to defend his behaviour the same way the moderators here did before finally banning him permanently, whether he contributed or not is irrelevant, his behaviour was disgusting.